skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I honestly don't see that big of a difference between Uber and the medallion-mafia. The only real difference is that Uber is the underdog - we've already seen proof that they'll use abusive, borderline illegal, behavior to sideline competitors instead of honest competition.

"Giant improvement" Uber is not. It's wannabe robber baron vs. incumbent robber baron. They'll be a net benefit to consumers as long as they're the underdog - God help us if they ever get into the top spot.

I'm a fan of disrupting the old medallion cabs, they've been sitting idle getting by on substandard product for eons. But I'm adamantly opposed to letting Uber write the new rulebook - from everything we've seen from them they're less interested in evening the playing field than locking everyone else out of the market except themselves. They will abuse transport regulation - just like the old cab companies - to monopolize the market if we let them.
Because they don't want to be associated with ripple. It looks like the point of stellar is to restart ripple but with a not for profit organization and a fair + open distribution scheme.

They are also focusing heavily on getting non technical users. (As evidenced by using facebook as a free funds distribution method.)
Would really love to see this take off!
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I'm not sure that 2nd option is really an option. Minecraft is a total black swan. I'm sure there are plenty of people trying to copy what Notch did, but, I think significantly, I've never heard of any of them.
> Doesn't turn up when I book it

This is my most frequent complaint (Boston and Pittsburgh). My success rate is about 30% when I have to call for a cab.
From what I know, taxis look the same because of fleet discounts. Here in Victoria, they also need to be marked with a yellow chequerboard pattern, but that's not the case elsewhere in the country.
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It is very cool to see the Quantum Valley Investments fund here. I'm joining the Cory group in the fall and can't wait to get started.
Yes, wear them. You've got t-shirts for the rest of your life.

In my experience, if you take care of them, wearing them once a week and washing in the machine once a week, they can easily last three years (still good after that, only less nice). So you would use them at the rythm of 7 each 3 years. 140*3/7 = 60 years.

Now of course, you probably have t-shirts of various sizes. Either you will fatten or get slimer, and be able to wear them all, or you may have your children and your wife wear some of them, but that should still be good for 20 years.

Now, you just have to find a startup that would print pants instead of t-shirts, and another with shoes, and and you'll be entirely clothed for life! :-)
You mean solutions in Clojure? We got 'em. Or do you mean "crypto issues specific to Clojure"? What would those be?
I'm pretty sure he's talking about Uber's practice of booking and cancelling competitor rides as unethical.
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I'm curious about the "Angular drawer settings" section in the settings page.

Is this list "discovered" in some way, or is the list of Angular services to inspect hard-coded?
There's one company already investing/building on this called SubPartners - http://www.subpartners.net

They are planning 3 submarine cables:
1. APX Central - Connecting Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide and Perth. http://www.subpartners.net/cables/apx-central.html
2. APX East - Sydney, NZ, California. http://www.subpartners.net/cables/apx-east.html
3. APX West - Perth, Jakarta, Singapore. http://www.subpartners.net/cables/apx-west.html

All 3 are planned to be completed by Q3, 2016. Obviously lots of factors and risks involved.

If Google (and others with investments in local clouds. eg: Amazon, Microsoft etc) wanted to invest, those 3 would be what you'd want to invest in.
HN is a community.

I heard about it in the car on a sports radio show. People were calling in to a sports show to talk about Robin Williams.

Sometimes the purpose of a community is not the thing it was formed for, but just to be a community.
Just to be clear, both of those things absolutely exist in cabs.
> The most frequent complaint is that drivers purposely break their credit card machines so that payment via card is not possible.

That's not a problem, because they are required to accept credit cards (read the "Passenger Rights & Responsibilities" that they are also required to display). I've never been refused with this response: "I can pay the full fare with my credit card, or I can give you the $1-5 in my wallet."

OTOH, a lot of taxi drivers will break their machines and ask to use Square instead. I hear that Square's fee is about half of the company-provided machine's fee. I don't object to that, because the convenience is the same on my part.
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The huge giant glaring difference is Uber is being aggressive to provide a better service while the mobbed up medallion racket is being aggressive to line their pockets. I know which one I prefer!

The cancelled rides here are part of the giant recruitment drive both companies are in as they rapidly try and scale up--they're trying to hire away each other's drivers.
There's a list of approved car makes and models for use in NSW[1], and the livery must be approved by the government[2] for it to be used.

NSW[3] has a number of different criteria. Put basically, needs to be either 1) wheelbase of 2800mm (which is almost always luxury cars), 2) a hybrid car seeting 5 to 9 people, or, most commonly, a car that luxury goods tax was sold on.

[1]: http://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/taxi-operators

[2]: http://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/b2b/hire...

[3]: http://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/b2b/taxi...
That's a 30 minute walk ... and you could've stopped at the East Sydney Hotel for a cold one on the way.
A mandatory cancellation fee would be handy, but of course Uber and Lyft would have to opt-in. I think it'd be fair to charge customers $5 for a cancellation.
> (literally had an open bottle of wine under the handbrake)

Get out of the cab. Pay or don't pay, it doesn't matter. Note the cab number and call the taxi company or whatever organization polices the drivers internally (in Chicago, I think 3-1-1 is sufficient). YOU saw the infraction, who else do you expect will fix it? Sometimes the taxi driver will not see anyone else from the company, only the other driver who shares the car.
Here is what's going on:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Uber-Lyft-Sidecar-put-...

> "I was driving for Lyft in November when I picked up two attractive women," said the driver, who declined to give his name because he fears repercussions from the apps. "Like anybody, we started chatting, but they were sort of awkward. I knew something was up when they didn't tell me clearly where they wanted to go."

And this:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/05/30/how-uber-an...

> Another part of the game is knowing the enemy. Uber employees and loyal Lyft drivers regularly try to infiltrate opposing driver ranks for inside information, and often call up a rival car for a ride so they can pitch the driver on switching.

The cancellations are probably after they see that they got a driver they had already tried to pitch. A huge portion of them came from just a few recruiters... Seems like an easy fix if Uber wants to fix it, though they may not considering Lyft isn't exactly free from devious ploys:

> On Tuesday, the rivals descended upon the humble intersection, where Uber usually hosts car inspections. Lyft started recruiting drivers by hosting daily luncheons in the parking lot (with a free taco truck, pink mustaches ziptied to the chain-link fences and two bouncers in black at the gate).
> Nice try, blatant GoPro investor

Lol..umm...no. I actually don't get the whole GoPro craze, but I do know that Polaroid doesn't stand a chance, even if they have a better product. I'm not investing in either.
I cannot resist to point out that your assertion that "Uber lies, cheats and steals" rests entirely on logical fallacies.

Let's stipulate your one assertion of fact, that Uber acknowledged that on one occasion an employee called in rides they had no intention of taking. From that one fact you jump to a Hasty Generalization [1].

We cannot admit your other evidence that "multiple competitors" made the same or similar claim because it's plain Argumentum Ad Populum [2].

Everything else is supposition and innuendo.

Please note, I'm not saying it ain't so, just that you did not support it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
I could almost parse "wide angle" as an adjective, but it hurts.
thanks for this, I would normally skip over a video with a title like this on looks alone but my bad for being so judgmental :)
awesome I like it.
Oh boy, another white elephant government agency that we don't need. I feel SO much better now, knowing that the US government is done wasting taxpayer dollars of failed IT initiatives.

Here's an alternative idea: radically (and I mean Radically) downsize the federal government, cut its scope and size by about 90%, and eliminate the need for almost all of its IT projects altogether.
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My mom wrote books using WordStar on the original IBM PC. She didn't like the default keys so she learned assembly to change them.

She didn't change ^K^B, I still remember that one.

I had to learn WordPerfect in High School and hated the clunky command codes and the keyboard overlays required to make sense of it all.
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> They'd flip out if you tried to import an HT that could hit GSM freqs.

How did Chris Paget's IMSI catcher demo at Defcon a few years ago work then? http://blog.marinetelecom.net/2010/08/01/ham-radio-operator-...
That was Uber Black (you can see the car type) in a Lexus, Uber's original (and more premium) service.

Not fare to compare this to a $9 taxi fare in SF. In taxi, that would have cost me maybe $15 or $20?

Check out the fares for your city. They offer taxi cabs as well https://www.uber.com/cities/san-francisco
Typical crop plants are ~1-2% efficient at gathering sunlight. You get ~100 watts of solar energy per square foot for ~8 hours a day. So that's 8-16 watt hours per day our .33 to .66 watts per hour so it's at least in the right ballpark.

Note: Sugarcane peaks at around 7-8% efficient so with the right plant .25w seems doable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
That's a good question, unfortunately it's hardcoded since the whole list of services contained two nodes that created a lot of branches which are the $window and $document services, to overcome this problem I created a custom Angular analyzer as you can see here https://github.com/maurizzzio/PojoViz/blob/master/src/analyz...
Well, you say hasty generalization, I say pattern of behavior.

And "Argumentum Ad Populum"... I'm not talking about what people believe. I'm talking about a behavior that was admitted by Uber. That isn't a belief. It is a fact that Uber engages in this behavior.
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The article in OP specifically states this is not the first time.
sad to hear that! My epoc is on its way.
Would you mind expanding a bit on the usage of Range?

The simplest case involving items is clearly `items=10-20`, but that has its own set of problems (your set must be ordered; I assume you'd use the key you're sorting over as your `ranges-unit`).

The place where this solution seems less than ideal is when you want to start from an id, but get a certain number of items. That is, the "infinite scroll" use case: If you simply do "sort by date, discard 10, return next 10 items", then you have a race condition where you do your first request, a second agent adds a new item, and you do your second request: the last item from the previous page is now the first item from the current page.

So, ideally, I want to request: "Ordered by date, where id > <last-id>, 10 items".

If you're strict about the definitions of `Range`, this doesn't seem possible.

Maybe the best way to do this would be `Range: items=decacfb98eface89+10` or similar?
Very well done, its always reassuring seeing smaller companies with so much success. Your execution and focus was so spot on, so many companies try to tackle so many different problems.
That makes more sense. Thanks! I'll check out the paper. I was hoping you had some revolutionary new scraping method.
What is amortized time?
It depends! Generalizations about taxis are usually false. In San Francisco, cab drivers do own medallions -- you actually have to drive a cab at least 800 hours per year in order to own a medallion.

Not every driver in SF owns a medallion. Drivers who are owners can and do rent out the medallions to other drivers for when the owner is not himself out driving. In this way, medallions can theoretically be utilized 100% of the time. The way it works in SF is that most drivers are affiliated with a fleet (they are not employees of the fleet). The fleets typically (though not always) own the vehicles. The fleets rent the medallions and then hand them out along with the vehicles to the drivers, and the fleets also handle insurance and other infrastructure stuff, plus dispatch. The drivers pay a "gate fee" at the start of their shift to the fleet, and then keep their earnings that they make during the shift (so they start out in the hole and earn out their gate fee (hopefully!) and then anything on top of that is profit to them).

It may be completely different in other cities. My understanding is that in NYC, drivers are typically not medallion owners, and there aren't really fleets in the SF sense -- instead there are taxi yards that offer some of the same functions, but have a less exclusive relationship with taxis and some kind of different business model. But I don't know much about NYC. In cities with less expensive medallions, I'm sure it works differently again.

Source: I am an employee of Flywheel -- we work closely with SF cabs.

EDIT: By the way, again in SF at least, where medallions recently cost $250k (they've gone down since), you might ask "How does a cab driver pay $250k"? The answer was simple: they get loans. There are or were bank loans available to get a medallion, on the basis that medallions gave you the earning power necessary to pay back the loans. So, given that banks are not charitable organizations, if you're wondering who got the excess value created by the legal monopoly of the medallion, part of the answer is "banks."
http://elm-lang.org/elm-runtime.js

I'm very curious what it looks like!
sigh

I need help. I showed this to my son (14) as a prop to encourage interest in STEM work.

"You mean I could control Minecraft with my brain?"

Yes, son, that's exactly what it would be for, so you can look at a block and make it disappear.
How much control does the gene gun process give you over where the new sequence ends up? Is it in the same place in all of your production seeds or do they structurally differ? I guess a related question is if all the seeds come from one ancestor cell where the insertion was done or if you do the insertion multiple times?

(I work with human genetics and am fascinated by the prevalence of structural variation.)
That's not a GoPro. Or are you saying the Vivitar mounts fit GoPro?
It's not startup founders themselves. Many would rather build long sighted businesses. But exit focus is the only thing that gets funded.
Try PyPy - python with a JIT. Any long running loop will be optimized.
Sure! I chose extjs -- it's a pretty big framework, so that may have something to do with it.
And once the mobbed up medallion racket dies, you think Uber will still be aggressive about providing a better service?

Uber is no different than any other wannabe monopolist - they'll fight hard to monopolize the market - whether by regulatory capture or sketchy fraudulent activity like what we're looking at today (based on what we've seen from Uber, it's a mix of both). Once they do it's game over for consumers.

How do you think the medallion racket got here? This is how we got here in the first place - lots of shitty unregulated cars engaging in awful abuses, prompting public outcry. Cab companies upped their game, consolidated, fought for regulation, and successfully drove that element of their industry out. And then promptly started feeding at the trough. Once upon a time, the evil cab companies were the good guys.

There's no reason to believe Uber is any different. They've already demonstrated all the willingness to skirt basic business ethics.

Uber is a necessary evil to shake up the entrenched awfulness of the cab industry. It also needs to be kept on a very short leash lest we end up with the new boss, same as the old boss.
Oh hey, that's my job.

I work in the Failure Analysis division; my job is to take an electron microscope and look for defects in wafers that come out of the fab. Our results get sent to the engineers, who make the changes in the fab and make more wafers for us to tear apart. I don't think I'm allowed to say much about it, but it's a pretty cool process, and I'm happy that I decided to move up to Hillsboro to work for them.
In CA, they don't exist in a loophole, they are licensed by the California Public Utilities Commission to operate, just like any limousine company that has a TCP number on its cars:

http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Enforcement/TNC/TNC_Licenses_Issu...
30%!!! Wonder what his/her conversion rate was at $500/head.
This is the kind of story that motivates me. I like being reminded that the internet hasn't become the place where initiatives (big or small) either become billion dollar companies or they fail completely, contrary to the picture the startup sphere tends to paint.

Truth is that having a backup like Storemapper can empower you to do something way bigger, in other words it can be the greatest investment you can make.
English is not my native language, but this is one of the few times I need help understanding the interview. Could you please explain what he means by:

"I testified actually twice -- once at the FCC, once in a congressional committee -- that if you required location tracking, I was going to give one up. ... I said I would give it up, and went ahead and did it."
Yes, soliciting or advertising any outside service or product by driver or rider is explicitly forbidden.
LAUNCH had teams assigned to one of 15 groups of judges and you pitched them and the winners from each group of judges made it forward to the next round which meant one 3-5 minute pitch only. The downside was that you didn't get to see most of what everyone else built.
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here is no HackerNews for science; Use this www.sciencedaily.com,nautil.us,scientificamerican,nature.com,
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e
I liked this idea a lot, especially the angle that it is made for groups. It looks great too, keep up the good work. A few thoughts:

- Would it be useful to integrate this with existing issue-trackers? Would it help if all members of a group can add tasks in a common pool and then pick tasks out of that pool (like an issue-tracker?)

- Is there a danger of people being afraid to add tasks that are new ideas because everyone would see a half-finished idea? Also, does announcing what you plan to do make it harder to change your mind if you realize what really needs to be done is different than what you announced would get done?
Uber has received in the general vicinity of $1.5 billion in capital. They are several orders of magnitude bigger than any taxi fleet I've ever heard of.

The entire taxi industry in the US has revenues of about $11 billion (source: http://skift.com/2013/08/06/are-uber-hailo-and-other-taxi-ap...), and that's split across literally at least thousands and maybe tens of thousands of companies.

In SF, Uber claims to do more rides itself than all the taxi fleets put together.

It long ago ceased to be the underdog in this fight.
Yes, I live next to Prospect Park and I know faces of most of my neighbors (at least in the same 4-story building), and regularly 'socially interact' with some of them.

High density is one of the principal things I like about proper cities (like NYC or London or Moscow).
> They will abuse transport regulation - just like the old cab companies - to monopolize the market if we let them.

Are you saying that they will partner up with government to create a protectionist racket as the incumbents did so effectively some decades back?

Maybe some day they will. History testifies that as incumbents grow they are drawn toward regulatory capture and licensing schemes. They find willing partners in government who can sell it under the banner of consumer protection.

Yes, one day Uber might try that, but right now they're tearing down those rackets. The "lock in" they are creating now is based on customer service, innovation, brand marketing and partnerships. I'm not denying there are any dirty tricks, but that's a sideshow played up by populist press.
As someone who is disabled, it truly enables me to have more mobility than I ever have had. I find it truly disturbing when people equate taxis with these services. For those of us who aren't as able to run around hailing cabs or waiting on a dispatch that often never comes, the difference is HUGE. I know they don't accommodate all disabled people yet (wheelchairs for example), but they can serve many disabled people and there is an opportunity to expand the reach.
If you persist in burning more calories than you ingest, then the growing energy deficit will waste and kill you, by the law of conservation of energy.
If FCC and Congress required location tracking, the guy was going to give up his mobile phone. He stated this in his testimony.

FCC/Congress required location tracking. Greer gave up his mobile phone as a result.
Yeah, I had a Contour Roam 2 which I absolutely loved; the rotatable lens with laser alignment, super easy flick-start recording, slimline helmet mount were all awesome features. The Roam featured inset grooves on either side through which the mount could be attached, and combined with the rotatable lens attaching it on the side of the helmet was quite a workable solution.

Unfortunately I lost it on the trails as I was too lazy to set up the tether strap and I used a fork mount and must have hit some particularly hard bumps. I now have a Virb, which has arguably superior quality video, and also features a flick switch. However due to the way the Gopro style mount insists on popping it out and away from the helmet, I've moved it to the handlebars as it just got too much for everyday wearing.

I personally find that for helmet mounting the Gopro as well sticks out like an eyesore, and am looking forward to hopefully seeing a Roam 3 from the resurrected company.

FWIW, I'm using the Australian Fly6 on the back of my bike and am loving that there.
O: in my work I use that and sencha touch too, during the development process I had some problems adding it but I'll try to fix it soon, thanks!
"Gave up" as "stop using"? Did FCC and Congress require Greer to personally track himself? (Why?)

Also, I find it wonderful that in USA you still have an option to use a pager. Many countries don't have it anymore, because all paging companies went out of business already.
Ask HN: Benefits of technical books beyond transferring knowledge?
Nonfiction books provide background knowledge. They're also generally well written and thus improve one's language, which could also apply to fiction books.

Technical books, however, contain a lot of technical concepts, less background knowledge, and are written more with the aim to convey concepts efficiently rather than for the sake of being well written. With that in mind, could technical books still provide any benefit beyond the technical knowledge they aim to transfer?