skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking of taxi legislation as the example (EU city example, can't speak for the US). Taxis in my city need to be registered and the drivers need to have a taxi license, the cars need to have prices clearly listed on their window, as well as the driver's ID visible in the car. All of this is due to consumers getting repeatedly ripped off, complaining about it to the city's politicians, which then wrote up the regulations. The consumers are much better protected now, and have a clear channel for complaints.

To me that is clearly a consequence of consumers wanting more regulation. Same as with perishable products having to be clearly marked with its due date in stores, and practically every consumer protection law/regulation out there.

Not saying that these laws can't be abused, but that doesn't mean the consumers aren't the main reason behind their existence.
Really? My view is the other way around. Customers ask for more regulation and businesses are against it. Some of the consumer requested laws include national laws like the Pure Food and Drug Act and Clean Water Act, state laws like various lemon laws, and local laws like rent control.
Interview with Travis kalanick last week, check out 4:40 where he is asked about the Lyft accusations: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/uber-s-kalanick-hires-former-...
Linux Trojan ported to Windows
LOL, entanglement, twins feeling the same pain and telepathy... I should have noticed immediately that this is some spiritual rubbish.
What is the point of doing that instead of using SVG?
By creating images in css you don't have to load any additional assets. But I suspect these are more just for the author to show off her skills :)
*EDIT his -> her
Does Lyft still require a Facebook account?
Oops. YMMV.
How Your Speedometer Reveals Your Location
That or we will all have to write Javascript in Javascript.
1,000+ US Companies Are Hit by POS Malware
That or we will all have to write Javascript in Javascript :)
Everything you wrote could describe Venmo as well, which has been around for a while and has a lot of traction (at least in my social groups).

Is there any reason you prefer Square Cash?
I thought to pòlis, in Greek.

Edit: https://pol.is/5hfrym
It may have been his akward attempt at hitting on you. A lot of computer guys have no idea how to talk to females. Also this is not limited to tech all over the world racism, sexism, ...ism exist.
There is a big difference between - delivering food you have in your trunk in under 10 minutes, and what Postmates or Caviar does. It seems UberFresh is closer to a Sprig/Spoonrocket model than a Postmates model.
And misquote to you 1% of the time? That would open them up to a fraud claim 1% of the time.
What a great PR move for Uber!
Take the number of times you've heard the sentiment "and this will protect consumers! yay!" - call it h (for hope). Now take the number of times you've heard such sentiments be justified in a logical, rigorous manner - call it j.

Calculate an independent thought index, t, as follows: j / h.

Call me if it's greater than 0.01. I'll be over here in the corner watching as we entrench half- (or hundredth-?)baked ideas into statute books that don't change for decades.

The economic damage of these petty regs (enforcement, compliance, cognitive load on businesses, yadda yadda) far outstrips that which brought them into existence in the first place - that I'd put my life on (but good luck actually measuring it.)

These kinds of 'consumer protection' laws are exactly the reason why the UK only has 5 major banks operating as a government-backed cartel - the laws became so complex that the market is impossible to enter now. Just ask Richard Branson - he wanted a bank for a long time, but the only way he could get one was to buy a preexisting one. This argument extends almost verbatim to the insurance and payment processing (and more) industries.

The internet is what it is because it has been almost completely free (as in liberal) and had very low barriers to entry up until very recently. The day I have to fill in a government form to open a webshop else fear prosecution is the day we let another good thing die - and shit like this is a big step down that road.
> One of the things noted in the study is that being on social media makes people less likely to discuss topics in person

No, that's not noted in the study at all. The study only notes that people who don't want to discuss it in person certainly don't want to discuss it on social media. It didn't say anything about whether a person's use of social media made them less likely to discuss the topic in person.
This is some nasty innuendo and I find it distasteful. If you want to throw a punch at someone, square up.
I don't see how you can think your beliefs are the product of "independent thought" while theirs are just an attempt are "feeling important". This is awfully arrogant and dismissive. For the record, I support gay marriage, but that doesn't mean I'm ready to let go of rational thinking: conservatives' opinions are not inferior to mine simply because I disagree with them, and I hope you can understand that. There is no such thing as a "moral high ground", only self-deception.
And then instead of mostly working (when the network isn't down), your code fails to compile and doesn't work at all. And you have to either spend just as much time reworking things to handle the errors in a user-acceptable manner, or take shortcuts and stub out the error handling to either die or fake things and keep going (ie, to mostly work as long as the network isn't down).
X-axis scaling: running multiple identical copies of an application behind a load balancer

Y-axis scaling: splitting the application with functional decomposition (a server for account info, another for catalog, etc.)

Z-axis scaling: each server runs an identical copy of the application (like X-asis) but each server is responsible for only a subset of the data - some other component of the system is responsible for routing each request to the appropriate server (Ex: sharding)
Probably because they see how well AirBnB is doing in the same vein of "ignoring local laws".
The neat thing about it (for me) is that it doesn't feel like a commitment to anything the way Vemo or PayPal accounts do. It's actually super light touch. You don't have a special account that you have to cash out and you actually don't have to link your bank account. You just give it your debit card and it lets you send from your debit card to someone else's.
To be fair, all you know re: China is that an IP address near Shanghai was somehow involved (possibly as an innocent/unsuspecting member of a botnet, possibly as a malicious attacker, possibly as a decoy to throw people off the scent, possibly as a single node in an onion router, who knows).

I think it's a stretch to title this "What the Chinese deploy..." No need to go there.
You're not liable for fraudulent debit card transactions so there's no risk to you, any more than with a credit card.
Possibly. Sounds like it may have been an attempt at "negging" I've read about in seduction/red-pill forums. In which case the guy is doubly a douche. Means he doubled down on his sexism in an attempt to pick up a lady. Instead of, you know, treating her like a human being.
DHH had a really great comment on this worth sharing with HN:

"Take the higher ground, man. Let the runner-ups do the runner-up shit. You're sitting on a throne but acting the peasant."

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/504374011711594496
Comcast allegedly trying to block CenturyLink from entering its territory
I decided to try Lyft Line yesterday and it matched me with somebody else in the neighborhood. Just as the driver pulled up to the second (shared) fare, the ride was cancelled and my driver was stuck driving me alone and accepting the half fare.

While I can't confirm whether the cancelled fare was Uber initiated, it did occur to me that both Lyft and the driver were getting screwed by the cancellation. If it happens enough times, I can definitely understand why my driver would jump ship and drive for Uber instead.
CEO Travis Kalanick is attempting to defending Uber's practices in a Twitter conversation with DHH.

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/504374243790831616
If the html runs on the phone completely and doesn't require remote rendering power, then such a device could be used as nifty self contained monitors for websites.

Have a dozen servers?

Well you could have a phone display for each one.

But I guess at that scale you could just buy a 4k monitor and some kind of pc to power it too.
The disadvantage with Venmo is you have to carry a Venmo balance and cash out. Square sends straight from card to card.

Sort of related, the onboarding with Square Cash is easy enough (no bank account numbers needed) that I feel less bad sending to someone who doesn't already have it than I would with Venmo.
An article well worth reading: it contains an actual smoking gun, not just speculation and he says/she says.

Hint to all entrepreneurs and managers out there: if your job includes building an online form so that your team can generate any number of fake credit cards numbers as well as throw-away cell phone numbers, maybe you should take that ethics 101 class again.
laws should be based on logic and not emotion. unfortunately I doubt anyone will campaign against this and if they do they will be portrayed as pro-cronyism or that they are somehow for the things that this measure aims to prevent.

the UK seems fond of things like this though. As I recall you must be 18 years old to buy a plastic knife, as it is considered a deadly weapon.
The thermogenesis effect is relatively small, but it is combined with naturally reduced calorie consumption on an otherwise unrestricted high protein diet, which is attributed to satiety, i.e., feeling full [0].

[0] Skov AR, Toubro S, Ronn B, Holm L, Astrup A: Randomized trial on protein vs carbohydrate in ad libitum fat reduced diet for the treatment of obesity. Int J Obesity 23:528–536, 1999
In the office we say the latter. The meaning behind the term isn't posted on the site but is appropriate to answering your question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polis

In short, Aristotle thought there was a max size to the self governing city state, so we played off of that as the goal was to create a comment system that could handle tens of thousands of opinions and stay orderly (think virtual town hall / lots of people on the bus to work responding to a mayor's question to the whole city). Email, discussion threads, comments that scroll down, etc, top out pretty well beneath that, and simple upvoting and downvoting doesn't capture groups.

While we started out in politics, we're exploring a lot of different avenues right now with our current users, including education, replacing comments on blogs, etc.
Interesting to hear Travis Kalanick's response to the Lyft accusations last week where he mentioned that "competition is better for the consumer, better for the driver"

@ about 4:40 in this video:

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/uber-s-kalanick-hires-former-...
Uh, not actually. In theory - yes, but not in reality. Try to join two large RDDs and spill the result, you'll see what I mean.
Cyphr – Encrypted Messaging Simplified. By Golden Frog
Agreed that the end goal isn't unethical or illegal, but the way they're doing it has some unethical effects, i.e. every time they find out that they've been assigned a guy they already sent a recruitment pitch to, they cancel a ride, meaning somebody wasted gas and time to go to a non-existent fare.

I don't see anything wrong with trying to lure your competitor's employees away, but fucking up their business as a knock-on effect isn't okay.
That's probably why they're employing such shady tactics. They need the fastest growth they can achieve, in order to become huge enough and making it difficult for the regulator to shut them down by means of law.
It sounds like you don't understand how Lyft and Uber work. You have no control over which driver you get; the driver app lets all the drivers in your area (and an increasing area over time) know that you want a ride. Whoever clicks "accept" first gets it.

The fact that there are so many cancellations is a direct result of the Uber recruiters using a CRM to avoid pitching to the same driver more than once.
As far as I understand, the experiments show explicitly less work done, as in, if you do the 60 hour workweek for prolonged time, then you have less widgets produced per week, period.

It's NOT a tradeoff of more volume for less quality and increased risk. All the drawbacks you list are valid, and come on top of less total productivity.

You don't get a product built faster but with more defects and technical debt. You get the product built slower; with more defects and techical debt; and at a cost to the workers personal life in a true lose-lose tradeoff.
More like "386 emulator in javascript", methinks.
That doesn't make any sense. How can a phone cash checks? No phones have a cash dispenser.
As an aside, I'm starting to think that some types of non-disclosure agreements should be as unenforceable as non-competes in California.

"After Uber became aware that The Verge was asking questions, Target CW sent out multiple emails warning contractors that talking to the press violated a non-disclosure agreement they signed when they joined."

My problem isn't using these agreements to protect trade secrets, or when they are simply a contract between a company and an employee or contractor (you agree to treat certain types of things as "our property" rather than going off and selling them to a competitor).

My problem with non-disclosure is when they are used to hush up embarrassing details or otherwise keep the public in the dark about shady business practices.
Another (Much Higher) Count of Homicides by Police
Wow, that's actually very reasonable. I never thought I would say it but the FAA should take some pointers from the Brits :P.
Resolution 320x480

In 2014 ? That doesn't seem useful.
Last I checked, it's impossible to do a useful "sort by price" for many items. I was looking for...I think it was a 3.5mm audio splitter, and I wanted to find the cheapest one. Searching by relevance mostly returned 3.5mm audio splitters, but dozens and dozens in no particular order. Searching by price returned every single thing in the database with "splitter," "audio," or "3.5mm" in the name or description. Frustrating.
But when you're using CSS to turn one element into three... what is the "whole point", exactly?
With regards to your third point, I just took an uber yesterday and the driver was using an uber-supplied navigation tool. maybe part of the existing app used for drivers? on my end, the app asked for a destination address and it was synced with the driver. the route was what i would expect.

the driver did complain however that they were forced to pay $10 for this ability and had no way to opt out.

this was in sf
hopefully never. The more of these frivolous regulations the more hard it becomes to compete with existing businesses.
As someone above spoke to it seems like these claims are now facing public outcry because Uber is beginning to lose it's underdog moniker...I imagine myself saying "now would I be concerned this was an ethically egregious action if that had been trying to 'sabotage' cab companies?" The answer to which being...eh I'd probably say "GO new/little guy!...f* those guys."
Agreed. I can't even sign up for their app on Android using Google account and Google Wallet. I emailed their support email a week ago and haven't heard anything back. The Wallet dialog pops up but I can't click anything. Looks like I won't be signing up with Uber anytime soon.
I've been a huge fan of Firefox OS for a long time[1], but here's something I think many people here aren't realizing: Firefox OS considerably lowers the barriers to entry for app developers.

Firefox OS apps are just html pages in a zip file, so all you need to create one is a text editor and a browser. In fact, Firefox will soon include an IDE[2], so you don't even need a text editor anymore. I think that will have a massive impact on how many developers will make apps for Firefox OS, especially local developing world apps.

If you only have non-administrator access to a computer in an internet cafe or some other shared computer, you can probably still develop Firefox OS apps since it may already have Firefox installed. Additionally, there's millions of tutorials online about web development, many of which are very beginner friendly and in multiple languages.

This extremely low barrier to entry will allow local communities to easily make apps that cater to just their local needs. Want to know where the best location to get water is? Want to know which farms in the area are hiring? Want to see the local mayor's latest scandalous photo? These all can be coded in a weekend at the local internet cafe.

EDIT: Also, where can I buy one?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3MU3jxEye8

[2] - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/WebIDE
I was in SF a few weeks ago (for YC Hacks, actually) and virtually every one of my Lyft drivers (~4) was a driver for both Lyft and Uber.

All of them said they vastly prefer Lyft — they said Uber's policies for firing otherwise excellent drivers as soon as they dip below 4.6/5.0 stars makes them very worried.

As a user, I found the actual driving experience of Lyft better, but the Uber app is vastly superior to Lyft's – not being able to split rides being a major annoyance.
To Be or Not to Be Linked on LinkedIn: Job Search Using Online Social Networks
California Kill-Switch Law Based on Garbage Research
[pdf] Style in the Long Tail – Best Industry Paper at KDD 2014
AFAIK you can embed images in CSS using data URIs, so there goes that argument and only the show-off one remains ;)
BruteProtect joins Automattic
A safer approach to JSON parsing in Swift (safer than valueForKeyPath)
I scanned through some of this paper and the interesting thing I saw was that the single most important factor on if you got the job or not is if you were married.
you're not allowed to ask that these days, we have to celebrate using inferior means for the sake of doing so.
Each business has different profit margins so I'm sure each would have to set a bare minimum price thus the aforementioned "pricing algo".
If you want to come and learn more about RethinkDB, there is a meetup early next month in San Francisco - http://www.meetup.com/RethinkDB-SF-Meetup-Group/events/20080...
How Hardware Startup Accelerators Surprised Me
"But Burger King already managed to get its tax rate down to 27.5 per cent last year, company filings show. Tim Hortons paid 26.8 per cent tax in Canada last year, according the its annual report."

Of course, these are the mean interest rates. If it has the opportunity to shift higher-than-average taxes into lower ones by geo-shifting, without affecting its lower-than-average taxes, it's average rate will go down.
Coin Cards Will Be Obsolete Months After They Are Released
But as a side bonus, nearly every home computer now have a poor man firewall. I find this to be insanely important for the global internet security.
Although that sounds completely believable, I think in this instance it's only sharp knives over a certain length, and if I'm not mistaken I think the age 16. But never fear, HM Government will no doubt fall over themselves trying to appease the relatives of the one teenager who managed to gouge their own brain out with a plastic knife (when it happens).
Why not just call it sharding? There's enough jargon as it is!
Super interesting feedback, huge thanks.

Some of the things you mention are actually relics from when this was a game, that limited how you can browse. (The initial idea was a game where you browsed as fast (ie few clicks) as possible from one artist to the other, but the feedback we got indicated that the discovery part was much more interesting)

But then again, we definitely get lost in our own (power user) perspective. We were dead set on using arrow keys as main browsing technique to start with, to get that mechanical and low friction feel. Not great for most users though, probably.
You seem to be very knowledgeable about Hadoop. Could you tell us a bit about the technical reasons why its performance is so god-awfully underwhelming. Is it a wrong choice of algorithms, internal data structure, architecture, design. I have used Google's implementation of mapreduce and then current version of Hadoop. Hadoop's performance was a piece of crap in comparison, and yes the the bottleneck was shuffle. With Java, I would have expected a 20~30% hit not a slowdown by 4~6 times and using roughly that many times more memory. Weirdly enough, I have heard that Python streaming on Hadoop outperforms the Java Hadoop, but I have not tried this myself. At that time UIUC's sector would outperform Hadoop too, and that was an university project maintained by a grad student.

Finally has this changed with Hadoop 2.* And in case you have experienced Googles's mapreduce and Hadoop (which seems likely) I would like to know more.
Really great work! I installed it yesterday and I have to say that I like it. It's different from most AV/security products in that it is very low-profile -- probably because it is intended for a more technically-inclined audience. It doesn't bother you when you try to do stuff, it doesn't really spam notifications, and it doesn't nag you to buy useless shit.

Is there any way to opt-in to share network stats? I, personally, would not mind and I think it would lead to a stronger product.

Here is a small suggestion. I actually didn't know I could close the tray notifications. When I looked closer at the notification, I saw the X in the top right corner. The X looks just like the background; maybe you should make it a little darker or somehow add more contrast.

Also, I think I may have discovered a bug. GlassWire thinks that Microsoft Word has transferred 253.7 MB, when it was actually Microsoft Silverlight (I was watching Netflix and had MS word open for a while). http://i.imgur.com/84qFF42.png
That depends on whether you define free market as anarchy or free of regulation or whether you define it in the original economical theory sense: a lot of competitors with essentially same product and everyone instantly know all available into (so everyone buys cheapest of the same).

Monopoly is not free market in the original sense, even if it came out from unregulated competition.
Yep, the CAA (and the BMFA, a voluntary organisation who admin the <20kg stuff) are quite pleasant to deal with.

It'll probably get privatised and subbed out to the lowest bidder at some point.
> I would see this slogan (consciously playing on the Eastern complex, to be sure) as somewhat offensive in its coarseness. What was it really saying? 1000 years of European history and heritage doesn't matter and you are disqualified from being an European if you don't support joining the EU? :)

I'd see the slogan in a more positive light: After all, we are all Europeans and we have enough common heritage to work together. That's what I associate with the EU, the wish to overcome our historic differences and build a political union that is up to our globalized world, something strong enough to defend the values we share. And also the dream to live in a more united world. For example, when I worked in Switzerland for half a year, there were all those little things that acutely showed me that I was a second class resident. In other EU countries I've got more of a feeling of having a right to be there, not being just tolerated or granted a favor.

Maybe as a German I'm also a little bit insensitive to national identities. Having a glaring historical example in everyone's mind of what certain kinds of nationalism and patriotism can lead to has sure driven that kind of "belonging somewhere" out of me. Foremost I see myself as a European and as member of certain online communities that don't exist geographically and only then as a German.
Is it a Feature or a Product?
The Pipe: Product Hunt for self-published design, tech, and business ebooks