skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on anecdotal evidence, I've found that almost none of my non-wealthy family and friends like driving. They all drive fairly average cars (Honda Civic, old minivan, etc) on fairly average commutes between home/work/school/etc.

For them, driving is just a means to an end. If there was something better that was cheaper and fulfilled their needs, I think they'd sell their cars in a heartbeat.

That being said, I do love driving, and you're gonna have to pry my car from my cold dead hands :).
Do you take hour long Uber rides? Because if most are 10-20 minute rides the distractions are not going to be helpful for productivity, so it may be hard to bill anything.
I completely agree with you. Coping with him and working pacifically would have been a totally admirable move by the LGTB mozilla community, showing that you can work side to side with people who strongly disagree with you. Specially when the LGTB comunnity themselves have been target of similar work discrimination for centuries.
I'm a little confused about the valuation point. People have been doing the math on taxicabs versus car ownership since... forever. Whole cities, like NYC, are organized around that tradeoff. How is this not already priced into Uber?
Would you rather have a treekiller or a mountain top destroyer (ebook)? I mean we can all play this game. I prefer reading paper myself.
Google doesn't want you to limit its ability to follow you around the internet
and what's the price difference with a normal taxi?
First it was react-app-controller which was deprecated in favor of react-router-component which is now being deprecated in favor of rrouter.

At least Andrey add his reasoning for the latest deprecation in rrouter's documentation. Although the page regarding server-side regarding in the rrouter docs is empty :(

According to the docs "RRouter was developed to replace react-router-component and fix design flaws introduced by it." Maybe I'm just unfamiliar with the npm community but is it typical to just rename projects once they introduce breaking changes?
When I lived in st. louis, I drove all second hand cars. I really actually loved the 1986 toyota truck I had. 22R carb engine. I knew how to fix everything on that truck. It was at 230k miles and the engine ran great until I accidentally killed it (fingered tightened the oil plug while draining some out, forgot to really tighten it down, it vibrated out on the highway, screeching noise, kaput).

That's kind of an aside; I just like old cars and working on them when I don't have to work on them.

Anyhow, the real part I was going to say is that I moved to Atlanta with my wife. She has to drive all over creation because she teaches ballet. We have a new hyundai accent which runs great, but my number one priority was to be close to work so I wouldn't need a car. I live about 1.5 miles from work. I walk to work a lot of days (not so much in the summer). This city sucks for having no car, but if you really plan around, you can. The biggest thing was being willing to live closer to work.

Obviously it's not that easy for people in tons of circumstances that aren't mine, but I wanted to throw my anecdote into the mix fwiw.

I used to commute exclusively by bike in oklahoma. I rode about five or six miles to work and five or six miles back. Had to structure where I looked to live around that as well.

Again, not saying this is viable for everyone, but if you approach it as a lifestyle, it can make a bit more tractable, depending on your context (I have no kids, which makes it a lot easier to)

I didn't do it for the outright savings so much as I hate commuting. I can't stand staring at the road, and eventually I run out of podcasts.
For those people who see this argument as inapplicable, you're right for many people today. Sam worries about UberX rates going up. The exact opposite will happen. They have steadily pushed prices down since inception. They've also started realigning the price more towards time and away from mileage and have much farther to go.

UberX will eventually charge prices more like $0.60 per minute plus $0.20 per mile.

A rough estimate based on the distribution of miles driven is that 30% of Americans should give up their cars under these numbers. Of course, many won't because owning a car isn't purely a financial decision and humans change slowly.

Discussions and imagination move much faster than reality but the world will catch up.

Technical note: The price per hour should be (time-related depreciation)/miles + hourly wage divided by the utilization rate. Mileage should be the sum of fuel costs per mile, maintenance cost per mile, and mileage based depreciation.

Running these numbers for a driver expecting $20 per hour (Average for a Taxi driver is ~$12) with 2/3 utilization and driving a Prius yields a pricing structure of ~$0.60 per minute and ~$0.20 per mile.
Because you mustn't compete with the incubator itself.
And if you're prone to motion sickness, like I am, then the value of that time you get back is approximately $0.
transform logic to sound? hmm interesting idea
To be fair: It seems like Sam wrote this in response to queries after he posted this tweet

"just did the math. it's now cheaper for me to get rid of my car and uber everywhere (gas, parking, maintianence, insurance, depreciation) ."

And then he posted the calculation on Twitter.
If the thing the beacon is attached to moves the co-ordinates would need to update and would not be of use because its just GPS. Static beacons are useful where GPS resolution isn't great (concrete canyons), in buildings/structures or an area where theres a high density of beacons that GPS can't resolve quickly or finely enough.

A beacon represents a thing and not a fixed location. A beacon on a vehicle would say "hi I'm vehicle ABC123…" rather than trying to find that vehicle by 2D geospatial resolve from a GPS fix referencing a known database of last locations of vehicles.
I surely hope this isn't true.
What is the 40 comment penalty?
I tried using Sublime text 3 for markdown but there was no significant syntax highlighting.
Uber definitely provides a significant improvement over taxis in pretty much every way. Day to day use of taxis in most jurisdictions is pretty much impossible because, if this is even possible, they are even less reliable than public transportation.

With a taxi, unless you're going from a dense main drag (of either people or taxi-needing people, ie. bars) you call for a cab and it may or may not come some time between now and 2 hours from now, depending on if the cab that's supposed to pick you up got flagged down for a better fare.

And then, in most places, the cabbie will tell you he can't take anything but cash. After some grumbling they might let you pay with a credit card, or they might make you take them to a cash machine.

With Uber you say you want a car and it tells you where the car that's coming is and how long it'll take to get to you. And then when you get there you pay by clicking a button.
So if they need some money, what is a better revenue model for them?

- charge some token amount of money to projects (harms the ecosystem, probably not a good idea)

- charge some amount for projects to host old versions, or for users to access old versions (same idea as the first, just less so)

- charge for access to source jars

- paid javadoc hosting

- rate-limiting for free users (the "file locker" model; particularly effective at convincing people sharing an office IP into paying up)

Any others?
It's the anti-flamewar detector, which kicks in when a thread has more than 40 comments, and there are more comments than upvotes.
"A 'controversial' story gets severely penalized after hitting 40 comments."

http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
Jarvis, An API Connecting Multiple Home Automation Systems Together Using Voice
> and instead could say things [...]

By all means say them, I think that would add something valuable to the debate.

I'm just bored by people who keep complaining that Scala is not Java (which won't change) or make ridiculous comparisons with C++ (because constructive criticism seems to be too much work these days). I think most people heard that stuff 5 years ago, and it's just a waste of time.

From my point of view, 80% of the comments are firmly focused on events in the past, not what can be learned from them for the future or what they would like to see in the next version.

----

So, given the announcement, which parts do you like, which parts do you consider unimportant and which parts are missing in your opinion?

Why do you think removing the arity limit is not interesting? What's your approach when interacting with databases, were tables with tons of columns seem to occur in practice?

What automatic refactorings would you like to see? Which impression do you have regarding ScalaIDE vs. the IntelliJ plugin?

If you had a few wishes about improving Scala in the future, what would they be and how would you implement them?
You're probably wrong as there are almost definitely humans involved in sifting through the various available programs and influencing which get inserted into playlists.
Single Responsibility Principle in Ruby
Ask HN: Local Bay Area Accountant Recommendation
Preferrably someone well versed in startups and can do personal taxes as well.
Agreed. Swell (apparently to be acquired by Apple) and Antenna Radio are delivering a similar experience but without the NPR limitation.
Online Tool for Young Bankers Raises $1M in Funding
I was going to say the same thing. I wouldn't even think about touching this gem. Multiple methods close to 200 lines long, all in a single file with no test suite. I shudder to think what the cyclomatic complexity of the 'api_comparison' method is. Have fun contributing to this project.
Then they would need to regulate the printing of guns, presumably
Another option: http://anten.na
I'll ask him and see if he's up for it.
Interesting, I didn't know about that penalty.

Should it factor the overall down-voting of comments as part of the equation?
As a counterpoint I bought a car for about $3000 4 years ago and have put a bit over 40k miles on it. Maintenance, insurance, registration, etc. have added up to about $7k (you don't need full coverage insurance on a $3k car). Fuel costs are about $10k (13 miles per gallon at about $3.30/gallon). Total cost of ownership is about $20k.

An uberX at $2.00/mile would have cost me $80k.

I could have bought 4 cars and driven them the same mileage for the price of uberX. I've been able to drive this car deep into the cascades, olympic peninsula, etc. for awesome camping trips--something uberX would never let me do. I also never worry about parking on the street because, hey it's a $3000 car who cares?

edit: Car is a '99 Jeep Cherokee if anyone cares, with over 180k miles on it now (and should easily go to 250k+ miles with regular maintenance).
Seems like the classic "relationship business" vs "transaction business". I would hypothesize that higher net worth individuals and more affluent neighborhoods will promote relationship style brokers.
The LA metropolitan area may not have as high a density as SF, NY, or Chicago, but that's primarily because it's several times the geographic size of those metropolitan areas and includes lots of uninhabited space. Many parts of LA are just as dense as similar areas of SF, NY, or Chicago.

Te type of customers who would use Uber in LA live in the high-density areas (generally K-town, Hollywood, West LA, and DTLA), and Uber does well in those areas. For anyone living in the low-medium density areas, i.e., the suburbs, Uber simply isn't economical.
There are other ways in which it needs to work.

For example, the further you travel, the more important cost per mile becomes in deciding car vs. Uber. As with every other own vs. rent discussion, the more you use something, the more compelling ownership is.
No worries, I get that a lot ;)
Expected future growth is priced in, the question is whether it has been mispriced.
I don't mind if they remove procedure syntax. It's annoying special syntax that confuses newcomers (I know it confused me!) for little gain.
Ask HN: Who's hiring data journalists?
Is it possible to create a list of publications that are looking to hire developer/journalists to create data-driven journalism?
Automation isn't competition; in fact, it is a factor which increases capital costs in the industry, spurs consolidation and monopolization.
That does sound pretty poor. However, if the app stores its data in /Documents and you have a lock on your phone (preferably complex passphrase / touch ID) then the app's data should be encrypted on your device.
nope, cpan is a fast changing target. You can make it easy on yourself by building your own perl (with perlbrew, super easy) and managing your cpan modules with cpanminus. The system perl is for the system, your perl is for you.
Actually YC companies get hit with this just as often as the rest.
LA has some fairly high density areas.

I lived in Santa Monica, which wasn't too high density, but I recall that taxi prices were absolutely outrageous. Hopefully Uber has caused those to drop some.
Ironsocket. They provide VPN (support OpenVPN, L2TP and PPTP), http/socks5 proxies all over the place and a DNS proxy - in the one package. Can't fault them.
Ideally, such an install should include updated and patched versions of all apps in the stack. However, many security holes are introduced by the code being run on the stack - for example, writing a web app that is vulnerable to SQL injection or cross site scripting(XSS). Since this code is written or added post download, its not possible to pentest it pre-download. So it is still up to the dev to sanitize user input, use parameterized queries, not run the database as root, etc.

So for apps requiring a high degree of security, a pre-release pentest is a good idea.

Please see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60174/how-can-i-prevent-... for more.
So you made a good point. If UberX can lower its cost to about $0.5/mile then it's way more competitive.

* Or UberX can be lucrative for people who doesn't need 10k miles per year.
I am guessing with Amazon, even though they run Java, they wouldn't do it out of the good of their hearts.
Exactly. Markdown, for me, is text, which you can read in the raw, and transform if you like.
> And yet, if there is an idiomatic Scala (and the lack of one is a huge problem with the ecosystem) it's that nobody uses function syntax for Unit return types. So in order to get rid of a class of bug that is minuscule compared to others you are going to require hundreds of thousands (millions?) of lines of code to be changed.

If there's an automated conversion tool, who cares?
> Literally everyone. Everyone needs to move around their city. The size of the market is the size of the total city scale transportation market...

Your approach to market sizing is eerily reminiscent of Ali G's[1]. Amusing, but not credible by any standard.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuOuxRD1Bc
Just read the part of the linked article relevant to the 40 comment penalty. My question is: assuming that this algorithm works in general, why would it need to be different for Show HN? What makes them different with respect to vote to comment ratios?
Converting Make to Shake
The Single Greatest Line of CSS
The Internet of things will ruin birthdays
According to that article, the 40 comment penalty is applied to all posts. Putting "Show HN" in your post probably didn't change that.

The algorithm for the front page favours newer things and attempts to generate traction for discussions. I'm speculating here but once something hits 40 comments, not only can it be deemed 'controversial' it could also just mean the article may be able to sustain itself better without more eyeballs, and the front page can 'move on' to other newer things.

Ultimately the Hackernews algorithm should prevent anyone using it as a cheap referral source. 40 comments should have given you some valuable feedback, which is what Hackernews is good for, primarily.
Yeah, my new projects from Android Studio Beta (released at I/O) use it as the default which was super confusing at first since I didn't see any release notes regarding it.
Google isn't the only company developing autonomous cars. Multiple car companies have own working prototypes. So it doesn't look like there's any monopolization of the technology itself. It seems likely that the capital cost of an autonomous car will be roughly comparable to the capital cost of a normal car.
I'm receptive to social science in all relevant areas, but I don't particularly trust it, especially on politically sensitive subjects. (After all, even ultra-precise, mostly apolitical subjects like physics and chemistry often have trouble with replication.) The untrustworthiness of empirical evidence in social science makes deduction especially important.

In the case of sex differences, we need only one empirical result to determine the null hypothesis: male and female members of H. sapiens have different reproductive incentives. The null hypothesis then follows from an application of simple logic. That I do find convenient.

This doesn't mean the null hypothesis is always correct, of course. For example, there is strong evidence that mean IQ for men and women is virtually the same, which suggests the null hypothesis in this case is wrong. Neither need the null hypothesis conform to a "sexist" narrative; e.g., credible studies in cognitive neuroscience show that women are better on average at multitasking and verbal fluency. But the entire mainstream is committed to marginalizing the null hypothesis whenever it contradicts the politically correct narrative, logic be damned.

You are evidently a supporter of the mainstream, which is why you deride my [use of mathematical notation](https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/493116213803757568) instead of addressing the content of my comment. My respect for your technical work is high, though, and I know you're smart and thoughtful. I suggest grappling with the strongest arguments of those you disagree with rather than resorting to such puerile snark.
Personally I think "generate healthy discussion" should be the goal of all HN threads, which is why I think comment-count penalties are unproductive. How do you tell the difference between "vigorous debate" and a "flame war"? If the algorithm utilized NLP to analyze the tenor of the discussion, that would be one thing, but upvotes vs. comment count is a troubling metric. I want to read threads where people are passionately discussing a topic with long back-and-forth debates. If that's a "flame war" then I'd like more flame wars, please.
Thanks. Particularly for spelling it out and not just linking elsewhere.
Haroopad is rather good on OSX. Give it a try.
Note the important secondary criterion: "there are more comments than upvotes."

The OP's article had 22 votes and 55 comments.
From the guidelines, "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com."
New fears about Ebola spread after plane scare
I did some back of the napkin math of my own and this is way of base. I don't live anywhere even close to somewhere that uber operates so it doesn't really matter but it made me think, "am I really spending that much on owning a car?" The per mile number is what got me so I came up with a number myself and I'm way closer to $0.50 per mile.

I have a Chevrolet cobalt that I bought 5 years ago for $6000. I will have this car until it dies so depreciation isn't really a factor. Instead I just divided $6000 by 5 years. I live in Canada and gas here is the equivalent of about $5.29 per gallon. It's been a good car and has only cost me about $2000 per year in maintenance (I do some minor stuff myself). Factor in registration, license, insurance and at 12000 miles per year at my measured fuel efficiency, I come in at a little less than $0.50 per mile.

If it was going to cost me $2 per mile I think I would have to just stay home.
In theory, Show HNs should drive more discussion.

Actually, the average amount of comments for each Show HN submission has always been below 10 comments: http://minimaxir.com/img/show-hn/show-hn-comments.png
The latter isn't used because it sounds cooler, it is literally rooted in the "kill" command on UNIX systems of old. The kill command is still used today, but can be used to send signals to running applications aside from "please exit immediately".

If you want to get really nitpicky, halt isn't as absolute and precise as kill. Halt can mean that the app's activity is simply paused, but its resources are still held and it can in the future be resumed from its original position. Kill very much and in no uncertain terms means to immediately terminate the execution of an application without further processing of the current task.

They really aren't interchangeable terms. If you are talking about interchangeability to an end-user who doesn't have such knowledge, I would argue even then some users may understand the different between not using an app and actually terminating it. Such as halting a video vs closing the window. If you are looking for analogies of proof of understanding, people say to "kill the engine" or other mechanical devices. So again, the term "kill" used in reference to terminating things isn't that weird.

The individual who was surprised to hear of killing an app could have been surprised for a variety of reasons, but not in such a way that I think "halt" should be used over kill.
"Halt" isn't strong enough. You aren't just making it pause wherever it happens to be, you are getting rid of it.
This does not make sense to me:

> BitcoinJS 1.0 Released!

...further down the page...

> Documentation: Soon!
Police placing anti-piracy warning ads on illegal sites
Previously Marked (http://marked2app.com), sometimes Vim, more often iA Writer because it blends markdown syntax with rudimentary formatting, and is well suited to editing text. (http://ia.net/blog/ia-writer-for-mac/)
A Woman Live Tweeted IBM Executives Discussing Why They Don't Hire Women
Flame wars don't necessarily mean low-quality comments, so tracking downvotes wouldn't be helpful.

Unless perhaps you incorporated a normalized measure of # downvotes vs. # upvotes in a thread.
Uber and Lyft Legalized in Milwaukee
I'm generally aware of much of this, but it suggests an interesting argument about economics, in general. Pay according to ability, "tent-pole" products (these exist in for-profit services and retail as well), etc.
they are very wary of any app that could be using digital currency to act as "in-app-currency" which undermines apple's in-app-purchases
Perhaps this time they didn't blatantly violate Apple's rules by including major functionality that was completely hidden until enabled on the server, and not turning that on until after review. Apple wants to review the app users are going to see.

Previous discussion from back when that happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7194085
On the other hand, quite often, if you live in the Bay Area or LA, it's also a complete disaster to drive... I also like to drive, but not in stop and go traffic on a freeway...
If I understand this correctly, maven based builds can contain dependencies on libraries hosted on remote servers. golang build system has (or had) something similar too. Witnessing this trend take hold is astonishing and horrifying in equal parts. Not just as a security problem (which is clearly obvious) but also a huge hole in software engineering practices.
How can anyone run a production build where parts of your build are being downloaded from untrusted third party sources in real time? How do you ensure repeatable, reliable builds? How do you debug production issues with limited knowledge of what version of various libraries are actually running in production?
Don't take php, try node.js!
I authenticated as authyo using two tabs. Super secure :)

It's a fun hack. Nicely done.