skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a moderately informed opinion that might change as I learn more.

It seems that a few bad drone pilots are causing problems for all of the good actors in the system. Since there is so much potential for injury, and since it only takes one terrible incident to bring down stiff regulation on everyone, perhaps drone piloting should become a licensed activity or sport.

Establishing drone pilot licensing would theoretically ensure that legal, licensed pilots are aware of the risks and are willing to assume greater personal liability in the event of operator negligence. The hobby would gain legitimate legal grounding and become less "cowboy" more or less overnight. I can't imagine it would be remain crowded with careless risk takers.

If this is done early, before any major incident or bad press, the FAA won't have to step in and put more rules and regulations in place. If there are to be new rules, I imagine that they wouldn't be nearly as overbearing for a well-behaved professional hobby that doesn't needlessly put health and lives at risk.

I think professional hobbyist (not an oxymoron?) drone pilots should lobby lawmakers for something like this to take place as soon as possible, before the FAA starts making mandates. I can certainly see the FAA's concerns--there is legitimate risk and danger. Something will eventually happen that brings the entire house of cards down. If the drone pilots don't ask for this self-regulation themselves, I wouldn't necessarily be against the FAA moving ahead on its own.

On a personally related note, I'm involved in hobbyist high-wattage laser projection for making video games and interactive displays. (I think there are videos linked from my HN profile). The entire lasing community cringes when there is news of some idiot shining a laser pointer at a plane or when someone is caught using a high-wattage laser for destructive purposes. It's a seemingly regular occurrence, and I'm pretty certain there will be regulation coming down the pipeline eventually. It seems there is no shortage of careless ignorance when it comes to dangerous hobbies.
How to Play Back Blu-ray Discs on MacBook Air
In order to boot strap a connection to a P2P network, one must contact a well-known server. It doesn't matter if the well known server is a "peer" that happens to be running the same software, or if it's the BitTorrent DHT bootstrap servers, what matters is that that peer has a disproportionate amount of authority and influence over the network, amounting to a single point of censorship or failure.

NAT (and firewalls anywhere except the networked computer - even at the subscriber's router) contribute to/create this asymmetry, where one side has to beg to connect to another, and so everyone winds up settling on the most-memorable 3rd party. Everyone has heard of the king (or Verisign), and so the rich get richer...
You need to work on the copy and I hope you're doing A/B testing.

I would revise some of the copy to be shorter and see if that helps.
Not technically, there is the FOSS Android App Store provided by F-Droid.

https://f-droid.org/
New experiment at Fermilab focuses on nature of space itself
> The door is open for motivated hacking!

Exactly! We are very interested in privacy, mesh networks, etc. (look for instance at the tor integration done by a moz employee on his free time at https://github.com/OrFoxOS)

But we have limited resources, and to be successful and get enough leverage we have to balance features that are market driven with our dream pipeline. Ultimately this is a good thing, because a purely hacker driven phone would probably not be the best one either ;)
Only about 11,000 on campus though. I'm sure most of their employees couldn't afford a fire phone.
Banning RC planes inside class B airspace is does not seem like that big of a hardship. There are only 50 or so of them total in the United States, and they are very very busy most of the time.
Except they're not Lyft employees. They're independent contractors. They set their own schedule, choose where they wish to work, ect...

I still agree that it's perfectly legitimate for them to put forth effort to block recruiters but I think the fact that the drivers aren't employees does make it not quite as bad as your analogy.
> I'm sure the mafia would love the end of the witness protection program.

if there was truly no privacy, then the Mafia would cease to exist.

think this through.
Show HN: CSS Layout Modules, 2nd edition book and video tutorials
Create and Publish EBooks from Google Drive
We thought about replacing the dots with little animated people that run to their position...

Awesome comment - replying inline:

...could be integrated...

pol.is does have an API

...consensus based decision making tools and processes...

One of the most compelling pieces of feedback we got in two years of R&D was "...could be used for upstream analysis of potential downstream policy impacts..." which was exactly what we were thinking when we built it. When I worked briefly in D.C. ... well imagine someone in charge of forestry policy who has never worked with the people in the field. How could he write a proper survey? Open ended text is vastly superior for gathering their feedback in response to potential policy changes. We're trying to make that seamless.

...much much easier for a group to see what's happening...

It's probably a bit heady but our driving purpose is to help organizations become more conscious of themselves, be they governments or corporations, and you speak to that point. That's why we show the visualization to all participants.
If Amazon wanted to lead in music they could try this crazy new strategy called: offer a quality product.

You're Amazon. You ARE datacenters. So why the ever-living-hell can I not buy FLAC-encoded lossless tracks? There is an utterly negligible cost in providing this content, its the only market which still moves CDs so there's obviously demand, but no one is touching it?
If you're on the west coast, Prime now means having to deal with OnTrac: www.yelp.com/biz/ontrac-south-san-francisco So it's really not a great deal.
Not all of it. In one of the recent HTC updates they pushed some incredinly inane "features", for instance a "volume warning" that forces you to click ok to move the volume past about the halfway point - even if it's the BLUETOOTH volume.
OK, to be fair, R is a reasonable language for statisticians and others. I guess R and S are different enough from usual programming languages that I may be biased against them. But I did spent five years working on bioinformatics and statistical genetics using it, and I couldn't wait to get away from it when I did. I will list my personal peeves.

1. R's syntax has problems. This is well documented on the web. I recall : has wrong precedence.

2. My biggest problem is R's lack of basic abstraction facility. Beyond functions there is nothing good. There are three object-oriented programming systems, none of which are simple or straightforward. It has first-class functions and lexical closure so at least basic functional programming should have been possible and fun. But R functions' have a weird parameter passing mechanism which scared me away from investigating deep. In the end I used RCPP to write large codebase and expose an R interface. And I like to delve deep into things. I was learning template metaprogramming when I was working on bioinformatics.

3. CRAN has way too many low quality packages, but far more importantly almost all packages' documentation consist of use-cases plus reference. To this day I don't have a good mental picture of genomicRange (a foundational bioinformatics package in Bioconductor for NGS data analysis) data structure and how to manipulate it (one main data structure, I believe). This is annoying at best and infuriating at best.

4. R, more than any other language I know, is an implementation-defined language. The language reference manual frankly admits fuzzy rules for some of the more advanced features. Python, which has been recently criticised for similar problems, is clear at the basic language features level.

I don't want to this discussion to degenerate into a flamewar. Programming language preference is a highly personal thing and I respect people who use R, even admire programmers who create awsome packages. ggplot2 and Plyr are some of the best packages I have ever used, and their documentation is superb. I just don't believe R is a good language for statistical students if they hope to move on to professional programming in other languages.
I work for a big Hadop vendor and I regularly diagnose performance issues with big clusters. Yes, sometimes even thousands of nodes. Most of the time, it comes down to an incorrect assumption or configuration. There are certainly real bugs and shortcomings, but the bottom line is that the systems we sell are orders of magnitude cheaper to build and operate than what they replace.

And that's about it; I was going to respond point by point, but your post displays a general lack of knowledge of large-scale hadoop deployments, so it's basically a waste of time.

You can't even respond to a single point? I'm sorry to hear that. I have been polite and respectful to you, can you pay me the same courtesy?
I agree with you here -- I'm not necessarily pumped about ride-sharing because it's the best way for everybody to get around, but it is an outstanding way to wake up the taxi companies and force them to actually consider customers. Until recently, they've had enough of a corner on the market that they can have broken credit readers, unsafe drivers and suspect billing without much consequence. In my city, they seem to be regarded as the Comcast of the transportation world.
Unfortunately, that does not provide a solution. Since public IP addresses are becomming scarcer, and since at least one side needs a global address, all of the workarounds for NAT will tend to centralize the 3rd party coordination/proxy role.

Even IPv6, which should provide direct addressability in the long term (assuming ISPs provide it on the wire), may wind up increasing the centralization in the short term (creating a single point of failure and censorship) if the only way to connect to the IPv6 Internet is to tunnel into a major tunnel broker; rather than hundreds of ISPs, there may only be a handful - easy targets for mandatory kill-switches, censorship, and surveillance - and what started with more addresses than stars in the universe, will have degenerated into a global hub-and-spoke network.
it costs way too much for 3g in developing country like India, right now I have Rs.199 unlimited 2G and works fine for everything on 4.2 inch android phone. (Whatsapp, facebook and email and may be flipkart are apps i use most )
You get to sound smart when you compel people to ask what jargon-word X means.
> probably purposefully ignoring

Thank you for the accusation of intellectual dishonesty, but you are wrong about this. My process was: Google for articles about taxi regulation, and see what percentage of them make the argument that regulation protects the underprivileged. In my sample of 3 or 4, the answer was 0%, which seemed a clear argument against the sweeping claim that protecting the poor is "the entire point of taxi regulation in the first place" (note: not taxis, taxi regulation).

Furthermore, your links (or the few that I had time to investigate) do not support the central thesis that taxi regulation specifically protects the poor and underprivileged. In fact, many of them are specifically contrary to your shallow analysis.

> Seniors, housewives, the disabled, and the poor each account for a much higher share of taxi trips than their share of the population (Rosenbloom 1985; Weiner 1982).

This says nothing about taxi regulation benefiting the poor. And in fact much of this paper is criticizing regulation; it even cites evidence arguing that regulation hurts the poor (emphasis mine):

> Others (such as Eckert 1970, Beesley and Glaister 1983, and
Frankena and Pautler 1986 advocate removing entry restrictions and
eliminating monopoly rents. Beesley and Glaister (1983, 611) estimated that entry and price restrictions lead to nearly $10 million per year in welfare losses in the city of London alone. Embedded in those welfare measures are
the poor without cars, the elderly, the disabled, and others who now and
then need affordable door-to-door transportation services and would
benefit from a more competitive market. They are on the wrong side of the
political calculus, with their dispersed costs overlooked in a regulatory
process dominated by the concentrated benefiaries (Taylor 1989).

> Factors Affecting the Use of Taxicaps by Lower Income Groups

The abstract of this paper specifically argues that the poor would benefit from reduced market entry restrictions!

"Increased availability of taxi service by reduced market entry restrictions and reduced cost of taxi service by permitting group riding and providing subsidies would increase the mobility of the poor."

I have to run and don't have time to see if any of your other evidence is any better. But maybe you can narrow it down to a more compelling list.

To prove your point, you can't just show that taxis are good for the poor, you have to show that taxi regulation is good.
you gotta release something to be able to iterate it
Top 3 Marvel Characters That Need a Live Action Movie
Looking at this post as well as the Firefox OS phone ($33 one) on HN today, I was wondering whether it makes sense for Amazon to release an FFOS device with Amazon's product's on centre stage (Prime video, Amazon store (not the Amazon app store), Kindle etc.). If they came out with a phone that had specs comparable to the Flame (or slightly better) and price it competitively($175ish), both companies can do well.

If the 2-year development timeframe is correct, one can see how Amazon couldn't even have thought of FFOS as an alternative, but now, FFOS is slowly but surely getting there. If Amazon uses it's engineering chops to advance FFOS – and I am sure that a lot of developers at Amazon will be happy to contribute to FFOS too – perhaps they could compete with Android and iOS?
I don't want to discourage people from playing around with snarky comments, or even from trying to make people feel bad with their hands tied behind their backs. It's good for people to challenge themselves in all kinds of creative ways. But this is supposed to be Hacker News. Making hypocritical comments hasn't been newsworthy in a very long time, and I think it's laudable that something like this is at the bottom of the comments page while vastly nicer things (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8229841) revel in the limelight.
The article inflates the price of transit by a factor of 10.
Am I the /only/ person commenting that has had a better experience with Uber? I am having a hard time thinking about using Lyft over Uber in the future (West LA area).
Not implicitly, although people are free to use that as a negotiation tactic.

If people try to negotiate you down, you negotiate them right back.
I'm pretty fond of Sony's (generally mild) changes from stock from the 4.0 era on. These days they seem to put most of their efforts into apps (where it belongs) to differentiate the camera, media players and so on.
Q&A with Battery Ventures about HotelTonight, Gogobot
That's quite enlightening. My comment was due to my industry-related naiveté. I thought a principal PM has the final say on both the features and the business side of a product. I didn't realize VPs add additional filters.
How I learned to love separation (CQS / CQRS)
A lot of people on here are defending Amazon "because they take risks". Yea of course they do, they burn capital like a startup; when they have been in business for ~20 years. That is just negligence, not persistence. Sure they took a risk here, but it was vastly un-calculated and if it took them awhile to develop the product it still doesn't justify the attempt to win the high end as a newcomer in the space with a undeveloped app marketplace.
The Kindle was a super nice device (to me) and in the days before tablet-ubiquity I'd see them everywhere. I'd never cared for the UX of ebooks until I got one, now I can't stand dead-trees. The Kindle Fire, on the other hand... I wish I'd never ordered the ones my wife and I own. Most expensive paperweights we have.
Yes, the whole "trivial exercise" thing is in itself a big problem with how mathematics is taught. Someone who's struggling just to understand the text could probably really use a worked-out example.
What do you mean by "UI component API"? Couldn't you use Blaze in order to construct the the UI you need or modify existing components to fit the Meteor reactive model?
Our purchase of the first-gen Kindle Fires convinced my wife and myself not to buy any further iterations. There are 9 tablets in our house... guess which two haven't been powered on in the past year.
I think that this notion of _generality_ that meteor embraces is essentially the struggle for platform relevance. I take isobuild to mean iso-platform, one platform to rule them all. Take the discussion in the video about DDP. It's like "get on board people, we've figured it out!"

There is a tension between generalities and specifics, between abstraction and things that are concrete. I don't doubt that having a solution that satisfies everyones hopes, dreams and desires would be awesome, but I feel tension when I work on meteor apps. It feels super easy to code up demos (generalities) and then once you get into the business of building out complexity you bang into trouble. It's almost as if the underlying platforms percolate up and clamor to be heard, if you stray from that meteor happy-path.
When the site has more content and good traffic:
Kenny.sendMessage Apple app store has an affiliate program.
Those profiles are probably just trying to make her seem more relatable.

Extremely fast thinking is the name of the game in the IMO and similar competitions. In fact, the emphasis is so much on speed that there are often doubts as to whether the medalists will also be good at research.
I'm surprised at the comments. To the person that did this: Great job! This is very neat and shows the kind of boundaries you can push with CSS. So what if this is not practical per se, it does show that you can potentially do simpler things than this in pure CSS and that may, in fact, be practical in some cases. Seeing an example like this makes it abundantly clear that that simple of effect you might be wondering if is possible to do in CSS is definitely because clearly this exists.

Besides that, this is HackerNews; it's relevant.
VC firms use data to identify startup founders before they know it
But why are you contradicting your own anecdote? Do you have any evidence to believe "elite" university graduates are more competent? Seems to me like you and the sibling comments who also would pick the "elite" graduates could influenced by marketing.

But in the real world you don't have to roll the dice. You can ask applicants what courses they took and what their grade scores were. So if you had two applicants with the same grades in front of you, would you still pick the one that went to a brand name university?
Hunting Nuclear Weapons from the Sky
I agree. It is VERY strange to complain about R in the context of IT/Developers, considering R is widely complained about by statisticians (since .edus have incentive to encourage the purchase of SPSS, SAS, and Mathematica).
I feel like you're trying to paint the inverse picture where the taxi company is the 'little guy'.

> It's no different than what Wal-Mart did to mom and pop shops, or what Amazon did to small retailers, or what Starbucks did to local coffee shops.

Mom and pop shops rarely had regulators preventing Walmart and Starbucks from touching their market share. We're talking about very large centralized taxi companies that run entire cities. Most cities have 2-3 large companies dominating the entire city with a few minor players running limo services. Even in small towns the companies are hardly small friendly businesses.

My father drove taxi for years for multiple different taxi cartels and they all paid their workers poorly, withheld funds for weeks whenever customers used credit cards, and often only hired new drivers within their family/network. He loved the freedom of driving but hated the companies. He only enjoyed it when he could become a broker aka owning his own car and being able to distance himself from the company.

I hear similar stories from every Taxi driver I speak to, which is often. They see Uber/Hailo technology as liberating.

I see neither Uber nor the Taxi companies as the David vs Goliath. But Uber-style technology has given drivers the opportunity to make higher wages AND be independent from local cartels, while opening the door to new entrants in the market both for new drivers and new tech, even decentralized tech in the future.

So I do agree that the tech/news industry should make sure the real issue being debated is technology vs the nature of regulation, and stop looking for archetypical narratives. Instead of trying to reverse the narrative in favor of the other side.
21 Year Old's Amazing Ad Video Inspires Aspiring Entrepreneurs
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If you need a video like this contact: gary@fromthehaze.com
It doesn't have to mean those things, but yes, it often does unfortunately. I still think there are some white hat techniques that can get results, but I'm no expert.
That is the greatest possible defence of golang's current course and heading, and god knows I want as much of my world to build from source as possible, but

> sure, you can just pretend the source is an IR (but if some library you use chooses a different build tool chain than you, you're going to have a bad time

In the jvm world right now, for example, I won't touch maven with a ten foot poll. And yet I regularly use libraries produced by people who do. The portable, stable bytecode is a boundary between me and them where the buck stops. Anyone can use any build toolchain they like, and the interface for collaboration is well-defined.

Don't get me wrong, there are many things to love about golang, and there are many things to love about building from source. But I do think it's worth pausing to consider the flexibility that an intermediate representation can unlock.
Quite excited by this as a creative tool for making abstract composite photographs that would look good on a wall.

Previous techniques have mostly been manual. The easiest of which is multiple exposure using a film camera (and you get great results[1]).

Now once the research team release the software (hopefully open source), I'm sure a whole new genre of creative photography will take off.

[1]:https://www.flickr.com/photos/forestclara/sets/7215762581978...
I was excited to download and try it, but honestly it didn't seem like it was stabilizing the frame at all...the camera shaking was still in the video...
I had worse luck while trying to walk with it. I didn't want to be that guy recording people so I just dangled the iPhone in my arm. And yeah. I was worried I was recording the pavement and adjusted to much.

http://stfudamnit.com/ryan/store.mp4
... are you casting Gilded Age robber barons as underdogs?
Looks like it only has native share options for Instagram and Facebook. Seems a bit petty not to offer Twitter. How about let me decide where I want to share?

From an implementation point of view, this app doesn't use UIActivityViewController, but instead one they've rolled themselves.

They could in fact have added Instagram to the built-in share view controller but decided not to. This also takes away options of Twitter, SMS, email.
The Number of Homeless Veterans Really Is Falling
Let's nip this trend in the butt. Outside the organization in question we really have no idea what's going on and who is or is not responsible for a particular poor outcome. It's not fair to the individual - or to the real executives who fucked up - to call out one person in this way.