skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just moved from an Uber-only market (Philadelphia) to an Uber and Lyft market (SF) and it was immediately clear to me that these two companies are at war. UberX offers 25% off this summer, Lyft offers 30% off. Lyft announces Lyft Line, Uber beats them to the punch with Uber Pool. The drivers tell me that either company will give you $$$ to switch and that drivers are coveted. Every feature that one gets, the other will imitate.

As a consumer it seems that there is basically no difference between the two services, I take whichever has less surge at the moment and/or whichever my friends want to take. It seems like this price war has served to totally commoditize ride sharing; I don't know anyone who has a serious preference between UberX and Lyft (black car and SUV are another story).

Do they really think they can squeeze the life out of each other like this? I feel like VCs will just keep pumping money into them and fueling the price war. It seems to me that instead one should focus on really differentiating the service in some way to reverse the commoditization of private, on-demand rides. They either need to make their service preferable in some way to consumers (like Dropbox has done for file sharing) or make it a no-brainer choice for drivers to exclusively drive with them.

Not that I'm complaining, this war basically just serves to make private transportation cheaper for consumers like me.
>"There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". I disagree with this and think that it is a self-defeating, irrational attitude.

Yeah, I think he's misinterpreting what his photographer friend means. There are TONS of rules for good photographs, everything from technical ("sufficient lighting") all the way up to art theory ("rule of thirds"). The guy's point was probably that any subject, at any time, can possibly be photographed in a way the conforms to the requirements of an artistically pleasing image. Trying to fit that notion to the idea that entrepreneurs should just leap for the stars without checking to see if their figurative lens cap is off is not really very sound.
Look at it from reverse - of all the big/successful startups out there how many used any formality or rigor in validating their ideas?

Even if they did validate early on what made them successful often changed drastically based on what was known when the company was started.

In otherwords, what percentage of the time does this payoff?
You do get some of those performance benefits when you cross-compile. JS VMs have different paths for different types of code and the type of code that Emscripten produces goes through a faster path because more is known about the code ahead of time.
It´s good to know semantic differences between Spanish speaking countries. Here, talking from the south of Spain, matasano rarely refers to the "quackery" sense.
> Why did Sony keep creating such hard-to-code-for devices

While this was certainly true with the PS2 and PS3, Sony has largely moved away from this with the PS4. The Cell architecture of the PS3 was very difficult to effectively program. For the PS4, Sony spent a large amount of time interviewing game programmers asking "what would make it easier to development?" Hence the move to x86. Hence the simplified memory hierarchy, etc.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/191007/inside_the_play...
Yes, but asking someone how much they would pay for it takes them almost all the way, mentally, to actually paying for it. You're basically asking them to make a verbal and very informal commitment, but that's enough to make most people think about it seriously (as opposed to saying "omg I love it!!!" just to be nice).
http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts
It sounds to me like you haven't had much practice validating things. Nobody serious about this sort of validation would suggest you ask people what they want. Instead, when you think you know what people really want, it's your job to prove that.

Suppose that you make something that you're convinced is the best product in the world. You work for years, you spend millions. And then you launch. It turns out that nobody cares; you go bankrupt. Someone might ask: "Was it really a great product?" We could argue the answer to that, but I think it's the wrong question.

Businesses need to be sustainable. Some ideas work, some don't. I think the best thing we can do is to a) maximize our chances of success, and b) minimize the cost of our failures. I believe the only way to do that is to continuously and aggressively test our hypotheses. Otherwise, investment just ends up being the way we fool ourselves a little longer.

Products aren't art. They're commerce. If you want to do art, just do art.
I assumed all those things in my hypothetical example application of the scientific method to a decision. I'm not really certain what you're getting at?

The article linked above already goes into some detail as to how to use this to simply evaluate an idea. I was just expounding on another possible use just to show how invaluable this is. Heck you can even use it in relationships. You can tell if someone is lying. You can use it to tell if people like you. You can even use it to lose weight. I'm using it right now to see if I need to drink more water daily or if something else is wrong. It's basically a super power.
Is Your Open Office Actually A Twisted Experiment?
Yes! CUDA on ARM has been available for quite some time now. http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/cuda-arm-platforms...

In fact the most recent version of OpenCV already leverages this on ARM platforms that support CUDA. http://code.opencv.org/projects/opencv/wiki/CARMA_platform_c...
Not only late biding, but all the Python's powerfull reflection (not only hashes, but it's string hashes all the way down) makes it hard to write a fast compiler.

Not impossible, as lmm said, just hard.
This reminds me of quasi-literals, proposed (accepted?) for the next version of JS:

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:quasis

http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/08/01/a-critical-review-o...

The point is to eliminate content injection bugs (XSS). I suppose it's not really the same because JS isn't statically typed, but the motivation seems similar, and it looks similar.

Originally from the E programming language: http://www.erights.org/elang/grammar/quasi-overview.html
Carpel tunnel syndrome and computer elbow are becoming very common.
this is honestly a beautiful product! And I hate expense management.
Texas instead charges your property just for existing (3rd-highest property tax in the nation). Different states choose different revenue mixes; Texas has largely chosen property taxes, sales taxes, and oil/gas severance taxes, plus in recent years the "margin tax" on larger companies.
How mobile phone plans will be sold in the very near future
512×342 monochrome is much less computationally expensive than 320x240 8-bit color. There's a factor of 3.5× memory difference there.
scapy is the slowest thing on earth. It shouldn't be used.
From a many-worlds point of view there's not the same nondeterminism in the physics. There's nondeterminism in our subjective experience, but it's a surface phenomenon rather than something fundamental.

So I guess we've sidestepped the question the "theorem" is aimed at, because by adopting this viewpoint we're already assuming that humans don't have any kind of physical nondeterminism (or "free will", if you insist).

Personally I think the idea was stupid as stated; having a set of dice inside your head doesn't make you any more likely to have "free will" than if you didn't, and that's all that quantum nondeterminism really means. But I guess some philosophers really did claim that this was support for the notion of free will, so it's worth refuting that as directly as possible.

So I guess you're right: if anything, a many-worlds interpretation gives more support to the idea that quantum nondeterminism has something to do with free will, because it means the nondeterminism only comes in when we look at a human's subjective observations. So yes, I think we really do sidestep the claim this way.
novell bought WP mid-1994 iirc. i went to work for WP late 1992. i don't know the details of when a divorce was final or any such thing so he might have technically been married then. i also have limited knowledge of the culture of outing and what criteria people use to say they are now "out" as opposed to "in", so i can't really speak to when the official outing was.

all i know is that as early as late 1992 it was well known throughout the company that bruce was gay and that he had a boyfriend assistant working for him.

in the office water coolers i was around (when i wasn't traveling) there seemed to be a lot more concern about perceived nepotism than perceived homosexuality.
The first time I came across Ars I read an amazingly detailed, multi-part explanation of the Itanium/IA-64 architecture (must have been Stokes). It was fascinating. A few years ago I tried to find it in the archives and failed (maybe only subscribers have access?). It's a shame they let pieces like that die.
"the boss fired people as soon as there was a hint of misperformance"

Not everyone is good at everything and if you put someone in a role where they aren't likely to perform and fire them immediately then that you are missing the opportunity of employing them to do the things they are good at.

For example, I can remember a developer who used to report to me years ago who was an absolute genius at fixing complex bugs and adding new features to an existing code-base - I remember "rewarding" him by getting him to do the design and implementation of a new module in the product.

He failed - he literally couldn't do it and he was utterly miserable during that time.

So I let him go back to what he was good at he went on to work with us for years and probably be one of our valuable employees.
Writing for correctness in a language with no memory-safety, weak type system and, till not very long ago, no standardized memory-model, and UB in every other paragraph of the specs? Good joke. If they are really doing this, they have no idea what they are doing. There are plenty of languages better for safety-critical systems than C++; even widely hated, boring Java is much better.
Indeed. I can negotiate a connection to google.com:80 successfully on a 1000ms latency pipe just fine. Slowly, but fine.
MENB_REST
Why Your Pricing isn’t Working
"paying such high wages"

High wages? Not compared to doctors or lawyers or mid-level business folks. My friend is a marketing manager (a glorified secretary/copy writer with an MBA, by her own admission) and she makes more or less as much as a senior developer.

Enough already with the "high wages" myth. It is the exact cause for the shortage of software engineers in the US - most young people in the US don't want to pursue it because the reward is not commensurate with the effort and risk.
JS LDAP auth web service returns JSON Web Token withRabbit MQ integration
Thanks for the correction. That's even better as we're set to break 200K this year :)
Last I checked it's no longer the 2000s.

Microsoft did achieve dominance in the US market with the 360 in the late 2000s.
I've found remote desktop setup immensely frustrating in the past. Every six months or so I'll think "Wouldn't it be cool if it I could have an Ubuntu AMI on EC2 I could boot and remote desktop into?" Then it's hours of googling and config settings editing. Hopefully someone will point me to the easy way I've been missing?
And just to add my own personal anecdote, I've had a very good personal experience ordering a design on fiverr. I ordered a logo for just the minimum $5 (FIVE DOLLARS!) knowing full well that I'd have to pay an additional $20 if I wanted the PSD file after. I considered this a relatively risk free way to get a logo concept (I'd pay $5 all day for logo concepts). I actually received two different logos -- both of which were surprisingly good -- and had the option to have one of them edited once more, which I did. I gladly paid for the psd file after. Also, the whole flow of the process through their UI was seamless too.
One Quote from Robin Williams + a Story
I've got shoulder problems for 3 years and went to a tons of doctors. Got X-Rays, MRI and physical therapy. The shoulder ache is barely noticeable, but I've got a hardened tendon along the neck that presses on my hearing nerve and makes the right ear ring. Anyway, after 3 days of hanging I've got better results than after weeks of physical therapy. I'll keep it up and see if it'll help.
That's not my experience; I now avoid asking hypotheticals because the results for me have been very unreliable.

I'm certainly unreliable that way. There are a number of Kickstarters where I've said, "OMG I'd pay for that!" But if I come back to it a couple of days later, I'll never actually click on the signup button. I'm even worse with things like this in person. I don't like disappointing people, so I'll try hard to find the most positive thing to say about their product.

When interviewing, I might ask people a question like, "What's a fair price for X?" But that for me would be more about the follow-up question: "How did you pick that number?" An insight into what they see as equivalent products, related value propositions, or personal value metrics would definitely help me think about pricing.
You get this line from Top Gun? LOL.

Seriously naive either way.
This is somewhat off-topic but they turned user-scalability off, making it impossible to zoom out (of the pre-zoomed in) mobile site.

Other than that, it's an interesting proposition and I look forward to trying it out.
You're absolutely right about the fungible teams / Scrum fallacy, and it's one of reasons I always ask the person who's doing the story to re-point it if they feel the point allocation was wrong. This also corrects for the peer-pressure people feel in planning to give stories fewer points [1].

This way at the end of the sprint you get a better idea for how much work was really done. There's an opportunity for abuse - if someone wants to slack off, they can make a 2 point story into an 8 pointer, but that's going to get noticed by everyone, and it hasn't been an issue in practice.

[1] "That's not 4 points, it's definitely 2, it's really not that much work ...", etc.

EDIT: Fixed typo
The writer may have skipped class that day.

The writer took a class that seems to be very common in contemporary journalism, and what it teaches is very annoying to me, and apparently to the parent commenter as well.
Except that was written for an explicit purpose that wasn't speed. I fail to see how my suggestion of implementing low level networking in C and linking that to python code is considered a poor solution.
How to make a freaking iphone app
Indian Bitcoin Startup Unocoin Raises $250k, Goes After Remittances
Nice thing about having a passthrough partnership is that founders aren't employees - you get distributions instead of salary and you're responsible for paying your personal taxes. Don't have to have the overhead of payroll or employer regulations that shouldn't apply to you.
> Besides that it was slow and never felt like a native Windows app, the biggest problem I remember was that it tried to replace the Windows printing subsystem with its own driver system,

In the DOS-days (before system-wide print drivers), WordPerfect's had a huge advantage in the form of it's printer support. I can see why the organization would have fought against switching to someone else's driver stack. (Not to mention the fact that replicating the format of WordPerfect-driver output with the Windows GDI, and its drivers would be very challenging, I'm sure.)
one problem I recently found is the strategy of companies to get some permanent staff by hiring you in the first place. it's hard to negotiate your way around that, but so far I am still managing.
Ask HN: Which companies hire from their Open source project contributors list?
Hi all, I have be committed to open source software development since a long time now, and now I am in a stage where I have to think about my bread and butter.

A lot of silicon valley companies have dedicated open source projects.

So I was looking for open source projects wherein if you contribute enough significant patches to that project, you would land a placement in that company who owns the project.

Although traditional "apply via resume" (and referral) is always there, I wanted to try something else, as I neither have a good resume (poor college grades) and nor any refferals.

So are there any such companies who actively hire from their github project contributors list ?
http://www.la15th.com/roihodson/_watch_manchester_united_vs_...
MySQL Scalability LinkedIn Community: 6424 Members in 15 Months
Q: Why do you want to change /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf (besides hacking DNS for testing purposes)?
Let's be clear:

"However, only up to approximately 8.5% of all active users used third party applications that may have automatically contacted our servers for regular updates without any discernable additional user-initiated action."

This speaks to how many people use any third party applications with this behavior, and not whether they are bots. I also suspect that the number of bots is much higher, and that they have no idea what it is (if they know a specific account is used for spam purposes, automatic followership boosting, etc. it would be deleted).
I like your solution to prevent the kernel from interfering with your packets.

An alternative method I've used in the past is to add an iptables rule to silently drop the incoming packets. libpcap sees the packets before they are dropped, so you'll still be able to react to them, but the kernel will ignore them (and therefore won't attempt to RST them).
A startup I know had a great idea, great product name, validation from some actual people in the industry that it was something everyone would want. They built it and launched and discovered that the industry as a whole was technology phobic; the problem was that the supposedly representative people they talked to where among the few that understood the benefits of the technology (in this case mobile). It's like a poll I read about in the 30's where pollers called a lot of people to ask about phone usage. The problem was that they only talked to people with phones so the answers were useless.
FERS website says the annuity rate is 1% per year of service of the average of your highest 3 years of service. Sounds like a defined benefit to me. (even if percent-per-year is higher in some local agencies)
Interesting topic, but the article doesn't go further than doing a features comparison :-(
I'm used to commercial solutions and I would love to see more tests using HAProxy and Nginx.
Don't Quit Your Day Job Yet- Make sure you have these first
Fox News vs. NY Times: Sentiment Analysis
The trouble is that the likelihood of that logo actually being unique is extremely low.
Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics
Turning a Regular Smartphone Camera into a 3-D One
Sure, they might be. But why would I assume they are?
this seems to suggest that the /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf problem is being fixed: https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/5129
Half the articles I now see on Facebook have headlines like "Somebody Did Something... and You'll Be AMAZED at What Happened Next"

I now have a policy that prevents me from clicking on any such link, even if it sounds appealing.
some of us use HOSTS to write config

e.g.

10.0.12.34 mysql_host

This allows some degree of flexbility

1. boot up new instances quickly as long as HOSTS is correct

2. Don't have to hard-code actual mysql server IPs.

3. Make mysql master/slave failover much easier.
I can't believe I had never heard of Deming before. Thank you.
There’s a whole movement around Micropreneurship, which celebrates the fact that not all product businesses need to become "the next Facebook" to be successful. It all depends on your definition of success.

http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/80.03.MicropreneurManif...
http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com
http://unicornfree.com
Ask HN: OSM-based GPS replacement for Google/Apple maps?
You should probably not form an entity if you are not reading tax ramifications.

Also, 2 second google search will answer all the questions one might have about this invoice. You can also use the calculator they clearly advise you to use within the invoice.

Not a front page material.
I know this isn't the case for everyone, but... in my state/county, every car on the road has to have an annual (or semi-annual in some cases) safety check to be properly plated and stickered.
Show HN: Yotify.me – Get a Yo when you get paid
The quoted depreciation was $30 per day, you've used it per week. A car getting tens of thousands of miles a year is absolutely depreciating at a rate of thousands of dollars a year, but perhaps not the $10,000 implied there (but enough miles on a $40,000 vehicle gets you there quick).

There's no way that brake pads come with a warranty against normal use (it would only happen by regulatory requirement and then it should apply to the maker of the car). Autozone also explicitly disclaims commercial use in the warranty for here (but maybe that's different in California).
Learning to be a depth camera for close-range human capture and interaction
Sounds like two things here:

With #1 you found a problem, but failed to find a market. It's hard to say without knowing the product and/or situation, but it sounds like your product was in the unfortunate position of being an enterprise B2B product that was not solving a problem in the SMB space. The typical strategy for a B2B product is to sell it to SMBs early on, then use that revenue to fund the massive feature set that large enterprises usually need. This is one of the things that happens in startups -- sometimes you don't know your market is a dud until after you have a product. It's not a sure thing.

With #2, you just didn't have a large enough sample set. Response rates for e-mails collected via landing pages like this are around 1-2% in my experience. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem to be honest, and it's hard enough that many startups will throw a marketing budget into it.
GNU Typist 2.9.5
https://terminal.com
The camera was designed by Robert Brunner's Amunition, the same firm that did the industrial design for Beats headphones. Robert Brunner was the former chief designer at Apple, and was responsible for hiring Ives.
If a microcontroller and a Commodore 64 can do TCP/IP, Python on a modern PC can handle it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIP_(micro_IP)

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics-rock/surf-the-web-...
Innovation Breakdown
There are a bunch of categories in the 'games' section of the play store that allow you to discover games that you might like. Also giving reviews of games, the store will then start showing games of like types.
It was a really nice adventure to complete all the 6 sets. Learned lots of useful stuff. My great thanks to tptacek and the team who prepared such a nice hands-on crypto class.
P.S. 7th set is insane (in a good way).
Surf the Web on your Commodore 64
Python being magnitudes slower than C for networking code has a lot to do with Python, actually. Other smarter people have already explained it better than I can up above.
It may just be you, but given Docker's youth and novelty, you should expect some frustration. If everything about it seems like a pain in the ass, it might be the wrong tool for your use case.
I still havent finished the first email
Getting Concurrent With ES6 Generators
Yes. One of the smartest things I did early on was to get a good accountant and a good lawyer and maintain the relationships. I've had the same accountant for 17 years, and the same lawyer for nearly as long. When I have some question, I call 'em up and get a useful answer, often in minutes.

If you're in business and think accountants and lawyers are too expensive, you aren't yet aware of the cost of not using them when needed.