skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Uber isn't putting me out of business," Kim said, speaking hypothetically. "What Uber is making me do is retool -- and given the same rules, I'll beat them all day long."

I appreciate his spirit, but I don't think he's fully estimating what it would involve to beat Uber at its game. He'll have to hire more drivers, have lower prices and still be up against a huge network effect wall. He seems jazzed with Flywheel, but they could stop sending him business tomorrow.

One of my favorite parts about Uber is that it's in so many cities and has consistency (easy to see pricing, if there's a problem I know who to contact, etc). I'm never going to seek out DeSoto Cab Co on purpose.

Basically, if the rules tilt towards the Uber model there is no reason for Kim to exist. He's a middle man in a business that is going the opposite direction.
This.

The Scrapy tutorial is good if you just want to use scrapy to crawl a site and extract a bunch of information, one time.

If you want to do scraping as a small part of another Python project, then it can be easier just to use Scrapy's HtmlXPathSelector, which is more forgiving than a real XML parser.

import urllib2
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
from scrapy.http import TextResponse

url = 'http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/'
my_xpath = '//title/text()'

req = urllib2.Request(self.url, headers={'User-Agent' : "Mozilla or whatever"})
url_response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
body = url_response.read()
response = TextResponse(url = '', body = body, encoding = 'utf-8')
hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
result = hxs.select(my_xpath).extract()
I think you forget how bad it was with 2006 desktop. So many CSS hacks. We take our div layouts for granted but if you dared venture away from the standard table layouts of the early 2000s you were in for a lot of debugging for browser quirks.

Nowadays at least I code responsive layouts to target screen resolution, and its gotten leagues better. Sure there's a few quirks in separate browsers and things aren't necessarily ideal, but it sure beats the days of "I wish I could use xxxx CSS property but I can't because only 2% of my users would be able to render it".
Different git Push and Pull(fetch) URLs
Yep. I understand that, but part of having an open source project is that others may find open bugs and decide to fix them because they're also having the same issue. Closing legitimate bugs hides them from the world and also gives people the impression that it's not something to fix.

The performance issue was very likely one of the more major deciding factors. Managing users was so slow that it was painful to do small iterative development. Slow performance is definitely a bug.
There's a big difference between having to select between four different kinds of vulnerabilities when given a piece of that you're told is insecure, and identifying them in the wild. This is more putting the square peg in the square hole than it is measuring the angles and being able to accurately identify the shape.
Did you read that whole article, or just skim it?

The piece where I am assuming you got your numbers from...

"Federal grants and Pharmasset’s research outlays on Sovaldi totaled more than $14 million, but Gilead spent tens of millions more to shepherd the drug through clinical trials."

That is only a tiny fraction of the cost invested by Gilead on this drug. If you read the whole article you would see that Gilead took a big risk and paid $11B to purchase Pharmasset before this drug had been approved so they could bring it to market. Their total cost is well over that by now.

Now add to this the fact that when a pharmaceutical company makes a new "wonder drug", the other big pharma companies get right to work on make workable variants so they can get a piece of that pie.

Take a look at GILD on Yahoo Finance sometime and you will notice they are remarkably flat lately despite great profit margins, P/E, etc... This is because investors are worried long term. A variant product could destroy the profitability; now add to that the government wants to get involved and start regulating the prices on this thing. PFFH
I don't see why. Lawsuits are expensive, and as a plaintiff, you know you aren't guaranteed to win. So if you discover that your expected recovery (p of victory * the lesser of the expected damages or defendants' assets) is less than the cost of maintaining the suit, why wouldn't you drop it?

Think about the consequences of automatically categorizing such plaintiffs as "vexatious litigants." You would have a bunch of plaintiffs in court who didn't want to be there, wasting their own time, the defendant's time, and the court's time. It seems to me that nobody would benefit from that rule except lawyers. Though if the lawyer is charging a contingent fee, they don't win either. (Of course there is a separate question of how far into the case should a plaintiff be able to drop the suit without forfeiting his right to bring it again later, but there is already a set of pretty fair and commonsense rules about this in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and state procedural rules. http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_41)

Sure, in this case Personal Audio's attempts to drop the suit might (or might not) be just another symptom of their general sleaziness, but this sort of maneuver is very common in all litigation, both legitimate and sleazy.
I Can't Find Good Salespeople
How to make more money in stocks
Here's a simple but strong suicide chess engine in literally 162 lines of C.

http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2001/dgbeards.c
Inventories of war: soldiers' kit from 1066 to 2014
I just thought it was inspiring that we only get to live 3-4 billion seconds at most, seconds count.

Celebrating it also certainly beats celebrating birthdays :)
Most suggestions were given by Phoebe Buffay.
The United Arab Emirates at 310 seems like an outlier but if you search for areb drift on youtube you can get a hang of what is really going on.

I live in Brasil, which, unsurprisingly ranks pretty high as well. Bad roads and unsafe vehicles explain part of the problem; but what I think accounts for the gist of it is something I haven't seen commented here: people speed because they want to be faster than other people. The speed limit merely makes this easier by limiting risk averse or society minded people.

I stoped driving long distances a year ago because it was stressing me out and because a car here is too expensive (compared to bus for long distances and taxi for short ones).

What I noticed in myself and in drivers around me was that traffic was regarded as a competition. Being faster was better. If someone was faster than you you'd be passive-aggressive towards him/her (mostly him). Brasil ranks 2nd (to last) on this list because of the way we view cars: they are really expensive, even in an expensive country such as ours. They are regarded as a life milestone, one of the main goal in our lives. They become a way of posing yourself as superior to the masses. This results in a more competitive traffic. Closing people off, tailgating and speeding (50% more than the limit - above this you risk losing your license and get fined for about $500) are the bread and butter of a good sum of our drivers. Our national speed limit is 120kmph (75mph).

Why do most people speed slightly? Is it because of the time they will save? I bet most don't even look at their watches while doing so. For a fixed distance, the speed x time is a hyperbole, which means diminishing returns for greater speeds for distances greater than the value of your speed. I posit that the gain is not time, but a better position at an acceptable risk in a competitive game we call transit.
easy, give them a $1 million salary
When you get south of Houston into the Clear Lake region Houston living gets much cheaper - but you run the risk of everything being obliterated by a hurricane.

You have to remember that lot of inner Houston is funded by oil money, so people are willing and capable of spending quite a bit of money on housing/meals.
LiveScript 1.2.0 released
Ask HN: Suffering from incessent existential crisis. What should I do?
I am a 32 year old man, have been writing software professionally since I was 22 for startups, enterprise, the whole gamut.

I've been suffering from incessant existential crisis past couple of years but more has gotten more intense recently. Nothing interests me anymore. I've tried everything but I loose interest after a while.
I 've tried

- joining a biking team, volleyball league

- I wrote a moderately popular open source library on github

- Tried to learn swimming

- got a masters degree in math at a local community college.

- got a cat

- smoked pot

I have no interest in any of these and I contemplate suicide every single day. I have no interest in my girlfriend of 2 years(except when I want to have sex).
I am always one step away from busting into tears or anger.

Am I fucked?
PS: I am seeking medical attention and taking zoloft 50mg everyday.
Very nice article.

I wrote a lot of the flash object store for the Apple Newton, back in 1992. I've often wondered how many of the things we came up with were later patented by other companies.
I saw the complex right across the parking lot from a Qualcomm office and thought it was going to turn into a mobile headquarters, oh well.
Why do you think you need VS support. Care to expand? Just a preference or something else; I am just genuinely curious.
Those guys exist. But there are a whole host of reasons you'd want a force that could attack an enemy country's infrastructure remotely. As a chief example, it's far less inflammatory than boots on the ground.

Can you imagine the difference in reaction if we sent door-kickers on the ground to Natanz and smashed the Iranian centrifuges, rather than using Stuxnet?

The problem here is that there is a fundamental tension between hacking (or "advanced penetration testing" or "ethical hacking" or whatever) and the structure of the military.

The military relies upon rules and procedures to accomplish repeatable tasks at massive scale. Hacking is an individual or small collective endeavor that involves non-linear thinking and creative leaps.

Right now, they're trying to figure out how to work around that tension, and all we're seeing now are the early tests.
Umm... have other people been able to spot the vulnerability but been unable to answer due to the answers not making very much sense?

Vuln hunting has its own vocab now :-(
Mostly drinks: Gatorade, coke, bottled water, redbull, chocolate milk, corona, hefeweizen, lagunitas IPAs etc.

Then some chips, fruit snacks and granola bars...but those don't get touched much.
Typically Round Rock, or right between Austin and Round Rock on 35.
I understand the cause for concern. But I can not think of a single time i've had a virus that did not involve a fever, stomach problems, and or a headache.
Imagine what it's like to walk into your Podunk suburban bank every two weeks with a $50K+ check in your hands from a company with a .com in their name. Yeah, that was fun.

But Patrick's absolutely right re: checks. If cash flow is tight, my favorite trick is to FedEx a prepaid overnight envelope to your client. Ask them to place the check inside. This elimates the "check is in the mail" song and dance, and it's only marginally more expensive than a wire fee.
The biggest downside to this that I found is that you have to have a lot of trust in the creators of that ORM.

SUre, it will generate a query that gets you what you want - but will it use the right indices? Will use correct ordering for optimal results?

Generally (unless this has changed in more recent years) the answer is 'no'.
All ML is density estimation using a parametric probability distribution.

Some algorithm make the estimation easy and the distribution quite implicit, others make the distribution explicit but training is harder.
I'm a contracter at an internet company in Palo Alto. If i pulled this, there is a lot of paperwork that says.. profits go to parent company..... 100% of my time is to be on said project. I just assume Director of NSA would have the same line.
ManServants
What's wrong with his lawyers' getting paid? Sure, they may get paid a lot, but lawyering is actually quite hard, requires grueling hours in a frequently miserable office culture, and typically requires large amounts of educational debt (the average law school grad has debt in the mid $100,000s). Most of my friends are lawyers (and yes, I am too) and I can tell you that very few of them are living fun lives.

I'm not saying they deserve anyone's sympathy. Objectively speaking, of course, most lawyers are doing pretty well (though there's this: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/19/us/lawyer-suicides/). But I don't see how there's anything wrong with somebody paying their fees. They are earning them, after all.
How Much Money App Developers Are Making
You're right, I did add an extra nine (it was a bit hyperbolic), but I would still stand by saying that I get better healthcare in Uruguay than 95% or so of Americans.

The net worth for a one percenter in the United States is about 8 million dollars, or a salary of about 160.000 a year. To be a five percenter, you just need to earn about 80.000 a year, so yes, I definitely have better healthcare than someone making 80.000 in the U.S.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7257345

How do I believe I have better healthcare? Exactly in the opposite situations to check-ups - in situations where I need urgent medical services, or when there's an expensive or complicated condition requiring specialist services.

In the U.S., ambulance service is EXTREMELY limited and expensive (how the hell can it cost 20.000 dollars for a visit?), and you basically cannot have home visits by a doctor. I pay U$ 25 for ambulance services, and for an extra U$ 5 I get house visits by a doctor (as long as it's reasonable and I don't overuse the service).

Look at this stat:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_call

"In the early 1960s, house calls by doctors were 40% of doctor-patient meetings. By 1980, they were 0.6%."

compare to a freaking 76.6% in Uruguay

heck, it seems it's a disruption-ready area:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/31/health/doctor-house-call-a...

"The US has many of the best health facilities and doctors in the world. In fact the US healthcare system is first world"

Absolutely true. If I had a strange disease, or I wanted to be operated on by the absolute best doctors, I'd go to the United States.

It's the treatment for the "common man" which fails miserably.

I can get an appointment for any specialist within a week, and if it's a serious condition and I'm not picky, next-day or same-day (this is not true of most Uruguayans, I pay extra for that). Every Uruguayan can, and usually does, get at least once a year, same-day house doctor visits.

If I got one of these expensive conditions (say, the discussed cure for Hepatitis C), government will pay for my treatment (ok, there's lobbying, delays, sometimes bribes and other problems, but they will end up paying).

If I need a transplant, there's a national transplant service, same for prothesis, burns, cancer, etc.

Not a single Uruguayan has to file bankrupcy due to medical conditions (he can get destitute due to not working, which is a different problem).

So, Americans might be over-doctored in early health care, but they don't have access to some services which seem basic and essential, and are believed to be every man's right in my country.
It's a strange language and strange framework. Not in a good way, where after you've been using it awhile you start to appreciate it, but in a bad way, where the more you use it the more annoyed you get.

A few examples, working from slightly hazy memory…

You can't just say

foo.height = boo.height

You have to say something like

set the height of field "foo" to the height of field "boo"

Instead of

x = 5

You write

put 5 into x

And so on.

There's no advantage to the LiveCode language, except perhaps for small children; it's just stupidly verbose.

It's not object-oriented, you can't define classes and instantiate objects. (Some people have tried to hack together object-like facilities, but those are non-standard and cumbersome.)

Everything (i.e., most things) is either a field or a button. Do you have a listbox in your UI? You don't refer to it as a listbox — there's no control called listbox — you refer to it as "field 'listbox'" — a minor irritant, but when there are dozens of such minor irritants, it adds up.

I gather there are thousands of happy LiveCode developers, so obviously my opinion is not gospel, but I do not envy LiveCode developers at all.
I believe it's implied that the limit itself is unfair.
If American reservists are expected to become a more critical component/dependency for US full-time cyberwarfare defensive or offensive capabilities, would this lead in any way to more time asked of reserve forces at least until internal military specialists are considered to be on par with their civilian and reservist counterparts?

I'm curious if reservists deemed to have critical skills would be called upon to act beyond an amount comfortable for them, considering that they typically already have full-time day jobs as mentioned in the article.
For what kind of work? Many of the best forums are narrowly tailored to a specific industry.
I don't have any friends, am I excluded?
I demand a review of all his equipment to see if he was using Govt equipment and/or time to work on these ideas. If so, no patent awarded. VS commercial sector where patents go to court and end up in the hands of the parent company that provided the equipment.
Well this system would in theory bypass the White House countermeasures
I can't wait for the patent paperwork to come out. I see it just showing up in open-source security distros.
ECC explanation is also good.
Nowhere but by that point you will have had your computers confiscated for the investigation(have you ever seen the condition of stuff they return?) and almost certainly had to hire a lawyer. So you're down your hardware, money for a lawyer, as well as losing the product you bought and the bitcoin that you paid.
The [NYC] Health Department issued this statement on the Mount Sinai patient suspected of Ebola: "After consultation with CDC and Mount Sinai, the [NYC] Health Department has concluded that the patient is unlikely to have Ebola. Specimens are being tested for common causes of illness and to definitively exclude Ebola."

-- http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/home/home.shtml
One of the questions that I got had an option that said "No vulnerabilities". I think having that option for every question with some solid code will let you find vulnerabilities more accurately.
I think it's something that can be improved, yes. I'm not sure it's a bug, and I'm not sure it's really all that slow. We're talking about 0.5 seconds and maybe it could get down to 0.4? If you dig into the module I'm not sure what you would change. (Again, a fine discussion for ansible-devel probably? How would you solve it?)

In your case, managing a list of 80 users to be sure there or not, I might have suggested perhaps tagging that action and only running that every so often, but I do think that, in general, it wasn't a pressing thing for us.

There are going to be occasional tradeoffs to the way the task system does work (ability to be split declarative/imperative), but those are some of the prices to be had for the flexibility that can by (like "register:" versus the limitations of a server side compile up front).

I think I'm ok with that, all being said. It's how ansible came to be.

There are choices that you take building things one way versus another, and if we're down for time for a coffee and three spins around the office chair, or time for coffe and two spins around the office chair, it's still in statistical noise territory.

We have spent a lot of time optimizing the HECK out of the SSH transport, but no matter what, almost all deployments in any config tool, the majority of the time comes down to waiting on yum and apt. And yum and apt are brilliant and I love them, it's just where things lurk :)
Good for Adam. These patent trolls are reprehensible. It's hilarious that they want to pull out now that they stand a chance of losing.
Open core also has its set of issues. For most open core products I've used over time the community starts creating alternatives to the proprietary products and the upstream slows its acceptance of open code. The upstream will also tend to spend most of its time working on proprietary features.

Whether or not tower costs money, it's still a worry of being a single point of failure for autoscaling, which is part of why we avoided masters.
I LOVE the interface and a variety of operations, especially the grouping functionality! Thank you for making my life much easier.. I would love to see more of R operations such as "sample" or "rnorm" added in the later version.
Timer really put me off. I can solve these, I just need more time, having not used some of these languages in a while.

I'd rather the time counted up, losing points, instead of counting down until I'm told I fail.
After you answer a question, there should be an explanation of the right answer. I was able to guess through some that I had no idea what they actually were, and an explanation of why I did/didn't get it right will help a lot and actually help me identify vulnerable code.
I'm not sure if this a demonstration of the Socratic method or not.

In either case, it's a good example of the importance of having friends who will tell you hard truths, and the importance of listening to them.
I used to hear the term "cyber" when people didn't understand the internet. Now the only time I hear it is from the US military.
You seem to have approximately restated what I said. That's fine, but it's best to note that that's your intent...
Special Operations forces are given considerable leeway to customize weapons and adjust uniform standards to the situation. I think the "cyberwarriors" would/should argue that their machines are their weapons and so should have similar latitude.
>It's a creativity-driven field that moves quickly, evolves hourly, and requires intellectual agility.

That does describe what is expected of military members in combat operations, so it isn't like the military shouldn't be able to apply that philosophy to this area.

I would think the issue is that the "cyberwarfare" group is new and so is being run like an ordinary technical unit, which means procedures and process out the ears and limited flexibility. The military could easily free them of that and let the unit run itself like a special operations unit.
There is a non-creepy, non-awkward, inoffensive way to deliver "What's your story," and maybe one person in every 100 is capable of pulling it off. Not for the beginning small talker. This is, like, postgrad-level small talk, where you're being tongue-in-cheek about your small talk, and using playful small talk to call attention to itself.
But isn't it better to be weird than to be boring?

I'm just flat out socially retarded, and desperately lonely. Reading this, I felt a twinge of excitement at the suggestion that I might break out of the box with a little creativity. I kind of took it as saying, "don't be afraid to be weird".

I think my fear of revealing how crazy I am probably accounts for a good deal of what holds me back. The idea of it being okay to be weird, or at least, unexpectedly thoughtful and inquisitive, seems a rather hopeful one. (Sadly, I'm absolutely clueless as to whether that's actually the case.)
Right, his thinking sounds a lot like what we heard from 2000-2008 or so from the newspaper industry. There's always some new app they think might turn the tide to conveniently mention in interviews, but at the end of the day these taxi companies are all on their way to a different, lower station in the marketplace.
HTMLXPathSelector is just a very small wrapper around lxml, it doesn't add anything parsing wise. You might as well just use lxml directly if you don't already have scrapy as a dependency.

https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy/tree/master/scrapy/selector