skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Defense of Price Gouging and Profiteering
But Uber does actually exist as a "cab company with excellent technological underpinnings."

You can request actual licensed taxis and licenced black hire cars through Uber.

But they are heavily regulated though. For example, at least in Australia, a taxi has to be a particular make/model/style of car, and a hire cars can only be cars more expensive than $60k AUD [1]. There's no room in the middle for a nice, normal car that's not too expensive that it jacks up fares.

I think Uber's biggest problem is not actually knowing or understanding what Uber is - I have friends say to be all the time 'Uber, isnt that illegal?', where it's only a very recent product of Uber (UberX) that's in a weird legal gray area. Ubers original, best and most popular (I presume) product, Uber Black - is just standard hire car service with a fancy app and payment system.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_Car_Tax
I also avoid triclosan but not because of what the article talks about. I think anti-bacterial fervor is exaggerated for marketing purposes. I haven't seen proof that triclosan will effectively prevent me from getting sick. And I'm not convinced that it won't lead to resistance. Nor has anyone looked at the environmental effects of flushing so much of it into waterways.
Uber has a rating system for passengers so I would have figured Lyft did too.
The Anatomy of a Rock Star Social Media Post
Why the activity wasn't flagged and the account killed is one thing; maybe it wasn't a common enough / known problem. It doesn't say drivers responded, though; it seems like the way it works is if you're recruiting for uber you simply book a lyft ride so you can get the driver's contact info and then call them up.
> Now it's just an incentive for lower population states to expand the federal government since they have disproportionate representation in directing who the expansion benefits.

Wouldn't they have the same incentive then?
Studies [0][1] suggest that high levels of home ownership increase friction in the labour market, and thereby increase unemployment.

Perhaps we should penalize home ownership?

[0] http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/working_papers/papers/qed_wp_1197...

[1] http://www.iut.nu/Literature/2013/HomeOwnership_Unemployment...
Amazon, ebooks, and George Orwell
Robin Williams dead in suspected suicide
The expo was pretty awful, as a presenter. After being up for >30 hours working on the project, having to stand up and pitch it for two hours was rough. It also meant not getting to go around and see everybody else's projects.

If they do this again, they should shorten the expo significantly and do it in stages, so that nobody has to stand and talk for two hours.
I don't know a lot about Square, but this article reads like a hit piece, wherein the author has an agenda to write a negative article about the company and to cherry-pick facts and bend descriptions to build the narrative.

All magazine-style writing is like this to some degree, but this one is just too extreme. It is basically junk writing.

Look, for example, at what Vinod Khosla says about the Starbucks deal, all of which is totally reasonable, but he is turned into some kind of guilty-person-in-detective-fiction with phrases like "he says defensively", which strengthen the desired narrative but have no relation to verifiable facts.
Warning, loud auto-playing video.
A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (The RAND Corporation)
They haven't actually posted the solutions yet, I believe.
So it's his own pet technique. How well supported is it by the rest of the scientific community?
"The City of Philadelphia is offering a new tax relief program for homeowners called the Homestead Exemption, which will reduce the taxable assessed value used for calculation of homeowners’ Real Estate Tax bills by $30,000 (exemption amount may be subject to change) starting in Tax Year 2014. A person must simply own their home and live in it as their primary residence."
ObamaCare Enrollment Is Shrinking, Top Insurers Say
Report Shows Silicon Valley Leading U.S. Economic Recovery
Lines 18 and 32 of the pseudo clearly show a "while(true)" which blocks... so how can this be called "non-blocking"? Isn't looping until we get lucky pretty much like a "spin lock"? And because the number of loops is not deterministic then surely starvation can occur? For example, if all the threads try to push or pull at the same time to the head or tail of the double linked list?
Your capitalization is incorrect. You wrote TB (terrabyte) when you meant Tb (terrabit). This equates to a 8x difference.
I'm not sure if saying Uber is run by assholes, esp. when each city has their own team that operates pretty independantly.

I know and have met with a few times the Uber team in my local city and they're quite nice and normal people - definitely not assholes.

There is however, a strong culture of 'hustle' (I've heard that exact word a couple times) within the company that I guess could encourage people looking the other way at this behaviour.
price discrimination is a potential solution: free for the little guy; or, royalty (per usage).

e.g. game engines being free til you hit significant volume.
Testing Planning and Risk Mitigation For iOS8
http://www.beyondblue.org.au/

There are people and organisations out there who can help you find a better way of overcoming depression.
I don't know if it has any hardcoded digits, but it's documented to compute pi using the Chudnovsky formula.

http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/SomeNotesOnIn...
Breaking the rules doesn't require you to knee-cap your competition - but it says a lot about the ethics of your business. I wouldn't entrust my safety to a company that's so flagrant about their ethics.
Show HN: Tool helps elderly determine costs of care and ways to pay
Is that based on anything other than complete speculation?
In most cases in mainland China, no tax is paid and cash is king. Only if you are a large, visible company doing business with other large, visible companies do you need to get formalistic. Even then, double or triple sets of accounts are normal.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I think immediate mode done right could be very liberating, but it requires some more work to get there.
I've been to a dozen large hackathons and they essentially all operate in this manner. I've been trying to come up with another way - the expo style has many shortcomings including those you listed. It's very hard to stand out in this format especially if your demo is not conducive to 10 seconds standing up at a table with 100db ambient volume. Makes the importance of designing a hackathon-friendly hack paramount.
Built this as a philanthropic/learning project for our small home health company. Have a lot of additional ideas to help families navigate the incredibly complex senior care market. Feedback welcome!
Honestly I wouldn't be upset if the truth was none and none. May as well be happening in the open.

edit: If I got these I'd be breeding it with all sorts of other close species; see what sticks.
Llama Calculus
> Yes, but these items are basically only flags in a DB under the power of Blizzard.

So is insurance.
Wonder how much of this is due to the recent lawsuit against google/apple.
> Uber and Lyft are in trouble because they wanted to be exit strategy profitable rather than simply profitable.

I think this gets at one of the key problems with the current psychology of startups. Everything is build around creating an illusion of rapid, exponential growth, even if that growth is unsustainable. In the long run the exit focused strategies of startups and VCs mean we are going to be left with a few monolithic tech companies striding among the burnt out corpses of energetic, innovative startups, left to die because they couldn't reasonably target a high value exit strategy.
"With an eight hour layover in the Flagship Lounge I was looking at nearly 36 hours of free wifi, unlimited champagne and coffee and very few distractions." and you decided to nerd out.... I'd do the same but what does that say about us :)
The reviews are great.
Agreed. There's lots of government sanctioned monopolies, or duopolies. Taxies are often one due to the sheer logistics required. Your city either has a taxi service, or doesn't. There's unfathomable liability not having a taxi service. Are you going to start paying designated drivers? Because it'll be the city on the line when there's no operating taxi service and drunk driving rates skyrocket and a judge is forced to punish people who had no practical way to get home.

Construction companies are the same, there's only one big company that does roadwork where I live. I got a driveway in, the job was given to a bunch of different contractors to do the sidewalk as they had to be city approved. It took 3 contractors 4 visits to do the prep for the sidewalk: they marked it twice, cut and removed it but did it to the wrong marks, framed it. We complained and complained and nothing happened. Finally the concrete company that does all the roadworks was the final contractor, I run out and explain it to them and the guys like "yeah no problem, happens all the time. We just bill the city for the extras." That was the day I stopped questioning why there was one big contractor, its because the little guys just can't coordinate it.

Uber will get squashed for the very reason it is disruptive. Until mileage and fees are all recorded and payment is through the app, there will be no possibility of this app surviving. No taxes and drivers with no liability insurance, no quality regulation, its a recipie for massive lawsuits, tax agencies alleging tax fraud and worse Uber will be targeted for aiding tax evasion.
I pay plenty of taxes. Heck, I pay the tax on my rent for a fapiao that gives me a tax benefit at work. The PRC is getting better about tax collection, though a lot of activity still goes on underground, especially those that are related to money laundering.
I was moving furniture last night. In the rain. Pissing down. Had one friend with me hauling stuff from van to doorstep. My 'neighbour', who I've never met, simply stood on his doorstep (our houses touch one another) and didn't even say 'hi', let alone ask if we needed a hand.

Was I pissed at this? I thought it was a little rude. But on reflection, I don't really care too much. In fact, I prefer it this way. I like choosing my friends and have a diverse cast of hand-picked co-conspirators in my life. So I enjoy that, today, I am no longer geographically obligated to make chit-chat to this uncouth guy next door.

This is what this article misses. It directly correlates the old archetype of a buzzing neighbourhood with the issue of loneliness and it's health impacts. It's a false pretense that the article was written on, and it conforms to the Luddite pandering to 'the good old days before computer' that at one point it actually mocks.

I'm sure if the guy next doors house was on fire, I'd help him out. But I can live with the idea of him not coming around to borrow a cup of flour.
It would mean diet drinks would be cheaper than non-diet drinks. They can still read the label.
This totally reminded me of the book Rainbow's End, where most things are essentially black boxes, made out of other black boxes. Turtles all the way down.
Every of Googles products can be replaced by a 90-95% as good product (Bing etc.). Android would be the biggest "loss" but as it is based on open source code a replacement would be there quickly.
At the accelerator I was in, this kind of behavior was encouraged. Not to this same degree of "unethical" but we had 'courses' on how to do this effectively. It's called being scrapy, right? (lulz)

And to answer your question, it's completely tolerated. Just look at the iOS store and the massive botnets that used to plague it. Every major company hired botnets to game the charts.

Welcome to the Valley.

Edit: sorry, they called this "growth hacking".
> Until mileage and fees are all recorded and payment is through the app, there will be no possibility of this app surviving.

This happens already? Here's my trip from last night http://i.imgur.com/JzseAq8.png

> No taxes and drivers with no liability insurance

Taxes have nothing to do with this - everyone still needs to report their regular income - Uber doesnt change this.

Also, the majority of fares on Uber are actually through Uber taxi, black or SUV. They are all licensed and already carry commercial insurance (as some of them accept fares outside of Uber). For the drivers that don't have their own commercial insurance (e.g. UberX), Uber covers them with their own insurance (which you can actually read yourself as it was leaked not too long ago).
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Warns on Bitcoins
Borland's Turbo C (and presumably Turbo Pascal) used WordStar keybindings too. Nowadays I use JOE (Joe's Own Editor) which is a programmer's text editor with WordStar keybindings.
> Algorithmia will host the algorithms on multiple cloud service providers, such as Amazon and Rackspace, which will speed things up for customers who use those particular hosts

I've long wondered if this business model of service components is how industry will evolve. It seems to make economic sense - but so did ordinary components, and they lost to (free, modifiable) open source libraries.
Doing interviews on a Go Pro is not the intended use case.
I would contest that "largely".

Once it became apparent the rollout was a fiasco, Obama was associated with two major tech projects, one successful (his reelection campaign infrastructure) and one now famously unsuccessful (healthcare.gov). Bringing in people who he had worked with, who he trusted, and who had famously done excellent work for him in the past was an absolute no-brainer.

I have trouble believing that Obama's motivations were "largely" along the lines of "these guys helped me on the campaign, I'm going to do them a solid and bring them in to work on this hellish, high-profile disaster of a project".
Committer is looking forward to getting committed...

https://github.com/WhiteHouse/playbook/blob/gh-pages/assets/...
> suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem

As someone who has struggled with suicide, please stop saying this.

http://suicidepreventioncommunity.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/p...
"IIRC ... Microsoft required computer manufacturers to purchase an Office license for every Windows license. As a result, every new computer came with Office installed."

I think you recall incorrectly. I bought a couple of computers in the early 90s and neither came with Office installed. Admittedly this was in the home and small business market rather than enterprise -- it's true that Microsoft pushed Office harder into the enterprise market, but I still don't recall an antitrust suite over Office bundling, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#United_Sta... doesn't mention an antitrust suit over Office bundling. You may be thinking of the allegations that Microsoft withheld details of Windows APIs:

"The Novell v. Microsoft case was a complaint about Microsoft deliberately withholding Windows technical information in order to thwart its competitors in the applications market. The case brought to light an Oct. 3, 1994 memo from then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who indicated that Microsoft should withhold namespace extension APIs in Windows 95 from its competitors, WordPerfect and IBM, in order to gain market advantage for Microsoft Word."

http://redmondmag.com/articles/2014/04/28/court-nixes-novell...
I live in a newish neighbourhood. There were about 8 households that moved in within the same 2 months. One couple decided to have a get-together and put flyers in mailboxes (in January in Canada). 10 years later, some of the people I met that night have become my best friends. The folks that took the initiative are long gone, but what they did for the neighbourhood with that one leaflet has had a real impact.
> I think that Uber, as someone else noted, is a company run by assholes.

If true that is still a giant improvement over your average taxi company. Uber might be run by assholes, but it's not run by the mob or by cronyism.
Hi saryn - we're building gate-based systems and working towards quantum error correction. We've developed our own physical architecture for the processor that we believe is highly scalable and much cheaper than other approaches.
There was a lot of complaining, but I think the organizers did a superb job this time around. I have friends who went to Brazil and Finland, and the disparity was far greater.

It would be difficult to do much better than they did.
Uber is not a YC company.

Though, YC staff (including Sam Altman) do tend to speak highly of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8100101. pg also used to effusively praise Uber: "Uber is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it" -- https://twitter.com/paulg/status/222462460978937856
Plus, there isn't any stock/equity/etc. And less perks (for example, free food can easily be effectively raise your salary by a couple grand).
I don't believe you get to rate a passenger unless a successful transaction has occurred. I had an Uber driver in NYC explain this to me in very clear terms (apparently he'd had even more last-minute cancellations than usual that day).
No but we might buy some :)
Most people don't. This seems to be quite prevalent in most societies. News media doing anything to get a story to grab viewers. Another example is school shootings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4
Nope, except I refuse to believe Uber is 100% evil and Lyft is 100% good. Or that Lyft was stupid enough to let 1 person screw them so much with one phone number.
> despite being one of the few jobs that lets workers can seize control of their own working conditions and avoid the kind of capitalist abuses this article talks about.

The vast majority of prostitutes can no more choose their own working conditions than any other working stiff. Pushed out onto the streets by poverty, prey to sociopathic men, the average prostitute is mired in a dangerous, destructive, difficult-to-escape lifestyle that destroys her health and vitality.

The recent move towards Internet-enabled prostitution that empowers the working girl is very much an aberration. For an introduction to this topic, pick up Iceberg Slim's Pimp.

http://www.amazon.com/Pimp-Story-Life-Iceberg-Slim-ebook/dp/...
I wonder if this will improve connection to South Korea as well. Browsing .de websites from here involves a trip around the world, Seoul - San Jose - New York - London - Frankfurt for an average ping of 300ms.
Why do you imagine doing that wasn't work?
Money in bank is just a record in database, and they earn much more by trading money that do not exist.
1. Monitoring competitors. By monitoring product/service offerings close to my own operations, I can get bizdev people on the phone and speak to partners when I see indications in the public marketplace that someone has a better sourcing deal than I do. Haven't done this in five years or so.

2. Gathering basic data that should be freely available anyway (like currency exchange rates, global weather, etc.). Always this is done carefully and with a light touch, with maximum respect for load inferred on targeted systems. Again, haven't bothered in about five years.

3. Automating content acquisition. For search engines, media libraries, etc. This is more like ten years ago. These days there's so little call for it... maybe if I ran a boutique hotel chain in a copyright-isn't-respected jurisdiction and wanted to provide a fat library of in-room entertainment...
They usually hit the front page for a few days after an event. I assume it Robin Williams related. In the mean time http://i.imgur.com/vvAzSFi.gif
Secrets Management and Chef
I think it's fairly widely recognized in politics that whether government is perceived to "work well" has a large impact on what people trust the government to do. So politicians sort of agree and are acting on it. Enough that it's become a fairly common debate whether politicians are acting in good faith, or are rather trying to manipulate the efficiency / perceived efficiency of policies in order to achieve ideological goals.

For example, left-leaning Americans frequently allege that the current GOP policy is precisely based on that. Rather than (only) trying to convince people ideologically that small government is good, Norquist-style, the allegation is that their policy is to actively try to sabotage the government's ability to deliver social services, so people see it as inefficient/broken and therefore stop supporting it. Also occasionally a debate in Europe, especially around infrastructure projects (local/provincial politicians from the opposite party are sometimes accused of trying to actively cause a big infrastructure project of the ruling party to turn into a boondoggle, so the party can seem incompetent). In the other direction, officials are sometimes accused of cooking the books to make something that isn't running efficiently seem like it is. I think a lot of this kind of terrain is where modern politics is fought once you get beyond the first layer.
Your mistake is in identifying the government with the people who represent it (Obama, Bush) rather than the people it represents (us). If the work Dickerson and the USDS does helps improve the ways government serves the people, then they are performing a good work, regardless of whether the president is Obama or Bush or Ron Paul or the floating, disembodied head of Eugene Debs.
Looks like you can only see existing libraries on cdnjs? The version of elm-runtime is about 4-5 versions old.
Like Napster: a flawed product that nonetheless helped catalyze awesome results (iTunes, and eventually ubiquitous DRM free music) over the protests of a shitty industry that refused to change?

That comparison might be the most positive thing anyone has said about Uber in this whole thread. (For the record, I was nodding my head when you lead with "they're a bunch of assholes."
> If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there.

You can't talk about this stuff without going all the way back to the beginning with the "worm at core" of this issue. California's prop 13 gives homeowners a significant financial incentive to do everything in their power to discourage new housing development in high demand areas like SF and Silicon Valley (all while gutting California's public school system).

So Mountain View/Palo Alto residents and the elected officials that represent them all vote against any significant increase in housing all while approving a ton of new office space which raises the value of their houses by millions. Thanks to prop 13, their property taxes are capped, so that increase comes with zero down side.

Repeal prop 13 and the current housing crisis will go away.
> If they were brokering rides in areas that can't get cabs easily, they would have lots of defenders.

I've been in SF regularly for business for half a dozen years now, I've never had a cab stop for me when I tried to hail it like in NYC. When I've called cab companies, the cab has only shown up 50% of the time and only after 20 or 30 minutes. With Uber the car has always come, and come much faster, and I can watch on the screen what is happening and text the driver if needed.

The cab system is just plain broken and SF is very underserved. I imagine it is just as badly managed as the housing where they are refusing to let people build upward.
The goal of capitalism is to systematically disconnect us from every thing we need so it can be sold back to us.

Neighbor are free, so they have to go.
This particular bot seems to be more advanced than that:

> Later I found out how to completely turn off the game’s graphics, making the Diablo windows look like black boxes.
Check out the Laravel Framework . . . Laravel.com

(laracasts.com is a great place to get your feet wet)