skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The livery and identification of their jobs significantly narrowed down the search from "person with car" to "cab #xxxx".

Uber knows exactly where each of its on-duty vehicles are down to the meter and maintain well-organized logs -- better than any Taxi company.

> I bet if you hunt down crime statistics on kidnappings etc. on regulated taxis vs. unregulated taxis the percentage of global incidents on unregulated taxis will far outstrip those of regulated systems.

Correlation does not imply causation. Obviously well-developed countries with overpowering legal systems capable of implementing and enforcing taxi regulations are going to have less crime in general.
The distinction between forelegs, arms, and wings can be fairly arbitrary at times, especially when we don't know how the animal carried itself.

Although in the case of sauropods, yeah, forelegs would be much more appropriate. Really can't imagine that behemoth standing on its hind legs for any length of time.
How about the new OneNote for OSX?
Maybe there is a geographic culture difference. I'm based in Chicago and EVERYONE I know in tech here has a full-fledged side business or at least has side clients.
The fact that American citizens need protection from the police in America is sad.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Coursera
They are in no way using his software. This is a combination of the syntax chosen by several independent markdown implementations written in several different languages (off the top of my head: Haskell (pandoc), Ruby (GitHub), probably Python (Reddit), maybe others).

I don't think many people actually use Gruber's perl code.
Lethal Headbutt Vine, Man vs. Bin
For every famous dinosaur North America had, South America had a bigger one.
It was probably a bad idea long before it was deadly, both in evolutionary terms and individual lifespans. In either case, there'd be some pressure against - whether it would "know" depends partly on how we define "know".
As a side note, Bayer lost the trademark on Aspirin (along with Heroin) as a punishment for WWI. But that only applies to some countries. In other countries, it's still trademarked. Heroin doesn't seem to be trademarked at all anymore.
And the award for the crappiest man page goes to tccutil
man tccutil
>
If you are involved in startups, you should have other friends and acquaintances who are running startups. Some of them will be funded and you will at most be one or two steps away from a billionaire like Thiel. You should have these friends not because of money but because you need people who have similar struggles as you.

All very true, however that is a different context than Thiel and a few others mentioned in this thread (Gates etc...). The difference is really in the "Terms" or lack thereof and the proofs.

Yes it is true that I can reach out and touch a handful of millionaires, and in fact spoke with a few yesterday on a conference call. However they weren't "Friends and Family" like the Thiel/Gates case, they were businessmen looking at me like a potential asset/liability. The relationship and the bar for getting their money is completely different and I think not comparable.
That was the basis for YCVC.
The license only applies to derivatives of the markdown.pl code. The spec describes a "reverse engineered" implementation that is partially interoperable with the original but isn't actually derived from it. Reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is a legal activity in the US.
Not sure I understand. Lets say the tax burden on a Texan today is X. Without the TSLA factory, lets say it would be Y, and let it be Z if the TSLA factory is built.

Why do you think Z would be much higher than Y ? The government isn't paying to build the factory is it?
Perhaps you are just not beating your employees hard enough?
Too bad, singing was the only thing that could get past the NSA's automatic transcription service.
The comments here are ignoring the jobs this brings into Nevada. It's like an investment. Tesla gets a tax break because it will provide jobs. The jobs create economic stimulus. People spend more money, leads to economic growth, this is not corruption, this is competing for companies to bring jobs into the state. There is no evidence of personal financial gain for the officials who got this deal to be made. In the absence of evidence, all you have is speculation, based on a misunderstanding of how tax breaks for jobs usually work. So Tesla building this plant is a good thing for Nevada.
He holds the copyright of his code, which is not the issue at hand.

If he wants to protect the format, I suspect he'd need a patent.
So I'm actually not disputing the possession of my. I couldn't care less. I have a problem with painting this as something that "wives" would use, instead of something that you or I would use.

It's like saying: "Show HN, SportsRank. Fantasy score prediction I built for my Bros"

Sure, you could use it, but really I built it for Bros, not you. Because you and I have an implicit connection. We are both probably nerdy programmers, and I'm saying that I don't use it so you probably won't either.

edit: I'm shadowbanned, so I'll edit here.

So I don't think it actually is that different, bro vs wife. The implication is that we are a homogeneous group that doesn't necessarily include the "other" group. But more importantly, I think there are better and less exclusive ways to say that someone elses itch encouraged you.

MealDays: Meal planner inspired by my wife.

MealDays: Meal planner designed by my wife.

MealDays: Meal planner idea from my wife.

To me, "for my wife" implies a somewhat passive wife who is going to use this thing. The ones above imply the wife taking an active role in helping and specing, which based on the OPs comments and programming best practice is more realistic anyway.
"Template Markdown" for the pandoc roots
It is simple. The target Carmack is aiming for is mobile VR. Tethered experience is a necessary middle step. Oculus will release their version in the future and Gear allows him to develop the tech.
T3TR0S – Tetris in ClojureScript
What I would rather do has been the most elusive answer to find during this soul searching period, but I may be bored with life in general.

Before side-stepping into software development I studied economics and then environmental policy in school. While studying Geographic Information Systems I discovered Python and really enjoyed it. After graduation a great programming opportunity presented itself before I was able to find a compelling environmental job, so I took it. I told myself it was better to pick up hard skills like programming while I'm young, and could always go back and learn additional soft skills for environmental work later. When I made that decision I'd also envisioned doing more GIS-type work, until I later discovered that most of those jobs are .NET programming which I'm not keen on.

I occasionally look for environmental opportunities but get discouraged because I have no real-world experience and 9 years have passed since I obtained my degree. The possibility of taking an unpaid internship at an environmental organization just to get some experience is unappealing, I feel too old to do something like that, and yes it would be a shot to my pride.

Other areas like digital art are interesting to me and I dabble in them, but at my age I honestly don't know if I can devote years to improving my abilities in order to carve out a career in a creative field like that. Most of these possibilities also mean a dramatic reduction in salary and the lifestyle change that comes with it. I don't have a family to support which makes it easier, but hobbies like international travel would go away.

And that's why I say I may be bored with life in general. After the years of school and hard work I'm potentially starting all over again. I come home from work exhausted and have a few hours to try to figure this out, but have yet to find something appealing. I've considered just taking a break but think I'll end up with more questions than answers, and am not eager to put dead zones on my resume that I'll have to explain. I'd love to hear from people that went through similar transition periods.
Last night? This is one of Gruber's most famous
projects, and you're giving him hours to respond?

They've tried to get him on board and be an active stewart of his own project for literally years - since 2009 or so, at least.

The entire time, he's alternated between being uncommunicative and outright dismissive of any attempts to clarify his original Markdown syntax.

The fact that they're involving him at all is a courtesy, a well-intentioned mistake. A mistake I definitely would have made too. (Not that I have the 1/1,000 of Jeff Atwood's coding chops or industry influence!) In hindsight, they should have forked and never looked back at Gruber.
Well, if the buffer is so critical and yet small, why not just free it and re-allocate the whole thing next time we use it.
Yeah, with his experience I bet he has way more of an edge with private investing.

Good point, several mistakes and failures throughout his tech/investing career path too, like that $100K investment in Luke Nosek's startup that failed. It goes with taking risks and playing the game, only way to learn and level-up.
I think the styling definitely could use some improvement, for a broader audience, as well. It's really all my wife's artsy flare (she has an architecture degree) :) She drew it up and then I just replicated in code.

Multi-meals per day sounds like the way to go for sure. I always had that in the back of my mind

Great idea for monetizing.

Thanks!
Main memory decays in milliseconds.
Governments tend to VASTLY overestimate the benefits to the economy. The same thing happens a lot with sports teams/stadiums and events like the Olympics.
9% ($120M): Transferable tax credits
6% ($75M): $12,500 per job transferable tax credits (6,000 jobs)

This is the only part, as far as I can tell, where the state could potentially lose out.
"Open source tradition"? Can I ask after your own open source contributions, so I can get a sense of the authority behind this assessment of how "open source" works?
Haha. To run with that, how about "Selvage Markdown":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selvage

> The selvages keep the fabric from unraveling or fraying.
Agreed. The people here decrying this as near-bribery or unethical don't understand economics. If the 1.25B tax break causes a net gain in tax receipts due to the expansion of the economy, then the deal is a net positive for everyone, job-seekers, Nevada, and Tesla.

No one loses when the economic pie gets bigger. Economics is not zero-sum.
Not nothing. His Markdown page got 3.3 million page views last year. That's something worth protecting from his perspective (I suppose).
I hope this will be good for Bre. He's a good guy, did a great job bootstrapping an entire 3D printing industry, and made a small fortune in the process.

I still remember him at Gnomedex 5-6 years ago, chatting with a handful of folks about the vision of a crowdsourced manufacturing line of printed objects, when the first MakerBot was still in beta. We're not there yet, but he got pretty close to the vision.

For those interested, strongly recommend watching the documentary Print The Legend [1]. Seems it'll be on Netflix later this year. I watched the premiere at the last sxsw, and it painted a colorful (and somewhat bittersweet) picture of what happened behind the scenes with Bre, MakerBot, and its main competitors. Can't say much more without giving any spoilers.

[1] http://printthefilm.com/
>They might make that up in payroll, sales, and property taxes from the employees alone.

I might be wrong, but I think Nevada doesn't have income tax. And property tax is typically paid to local county/city governments.

I think it's still open to debate whether Nevada will really recoup all this money in taxes. Of course there are benefits other than pure tax dollars. This could lead to a convergence of high tech manufacturing in the area.
How about instead of assigning to your function pointer directly using `memset`, instead use `dlsym()` to look it up? You could even declare the fnptr to take a `volatile` argument as well as the ptr itself being `volatile` (not sure that is useful here).

Of course, using `dlsym()` isn't exactly portable...
Wireless for starters is just better and required for VR to rock, with the exception of seated experiences (racing, flight sims, mech games, etc) where presence is kept and you can benefit from a PCs far less limited GPU/CPU capabilities.

Also they have a direct line with the phone manufacturer for the display technology and with this strategy of tying in with the mobile world, they can potentially get into a loop of rapidly updating hardware that's subsidized by phone contracts and the like.

The limitations of mobile graphics can and will be solved in hardware and software. It may turn out for instance that something focused on high FPS and resolution can be achieved via low complexity shaders and some novel custom display/GPU hardware.
How to export a function into a worker
I am furious because you misspelled "mecanics". JK. Well said.
From another comment upstream

>It doesn't appear to be a problem with Uber or Lyft since they have some kind of QC, but what happens when the market is deregulated for anybody to open up whatever kind of taxi service they want? It's the next next guys that worry me.

> Correlation does not imply causation.

Correct, that is until the causation is understood to have been detected by the correlation.

Your claim now puts the burden on your to demonstrate that unregulated taxis, in countries with regulated taxi systems, are at least as safe as regulated ones. And I can tell you before you start that you won't find that to be true.
Gaming Journalism Is Over
Dead store elision is not a C specific optimization.
My point is that Thiel probably wouldn't have been able to raise a million dollars to start his own fund if he hadn't worked at Credit Suisse, and it wasn't a "gimme" for him to get that job having started outside of finance originally. That's relevant to any entrepreneurial Ivy-student who contemplates starting his career outside of finance or consulting.
@jrock08 (I can't respond directly because your comment is already dead, but I don't think it was actually non-constructive):

I didn't mean to suggest that you did contest the "my" - I was just agreeing that I've seen that before and that it is obnoxious and reading more into language than is there at any level. My second part was intended to emphasize, however, that that objection only applies where it applies, which as you say is not your comment.

I still think the title is substantively different than your "bros" example; it is referring to one particular person, and I think that matters a lot. As I said elsewhere, "Hackers build things to scratch itches, and then they share them. The fact that it's a particular other person's itch that got the ball rolling is interesting and potentially inspirational."
Gruber's code is protected by copyright, but nobody uses his code as anything other than a reference.

The process expressed in the code could conceivably be patented, but he's taken no steps to do so to my knowledge. He freely and openly admits that the formatting syntax of Markdown is derived from existing de facto conventions, so good luck to anybody who tries to patent that.

The name "Markdown" could be trademarked, but he never did. Even if he had, his trademark would likely be invalid (genericized) since he has never enforced it.
Agreed! Not about Tesla, but noting the constitutional angle -- http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2013/10/14/negative-sum-us-stat... -- I have not searched much but would love to know if anyone serious has arrived at this conclusion.
And yet, kidnappings rapes and murders from well regulated taxis in those countries occur at a much lower rate than in unregulated taxis.

Why do you suppose that is? Random happenstance?
Right, so in order to register a trademark that is valid for the whole web, you'd need to file an international trademark following "the Madrid" protocol (eg:[1]). I quote: "Processing time in each country may vary, but is not normally longer than 18 months. The reason for this is that the regulations regarding the Madrid Protocol stipulate that national authorities have only 18 months in which to refuse registration."

Sounds like a lot of bureaucracy just to avoid having others dilute a simple technology concept like "a certain flavour of plain-text markup".

[1] https://www.patentstyret.no/en/Trademarks/International-trad...
From the 3D Print post[2]:

“We have exciting news to announce about Bre. Now that we have a team in place to carry on with MakerBot and continuing to move Full Speed Ahead, Bre is launching a new initiative (separate from MakerBot), The Innovation Workshop, with Robert Steiner, Liz Randel and Aljosa Kempele, to showcase what is possible with MakerBot, Stratasys and Solidscape 3D printers. I can’t wait to see what they make … and for the launch party!”

[2] http://3dprint.com/14012/makerbot-ceo-bre-pettis/
Isn't the argument from the article that the pilots are just idly chatting all the way down because of excessive automation?

If, like the article claims, human error is the leading cause of accidents (and I assume it is implied that distraction is a major factor in human error, though the article doesn't explicitly claim this), isn't mindless automation a major problem that should be addressed? To quote NASA's researcher: "Companies were introducing increasingly specialized automated functions to address particular errors without looking at their over-all effects [...] As it stood, increased automation hadn't reduced human errors on the whole; it had simply changed their form."

I don't know if it's accurate to call these pilots "irresponsible people". Probably it is. But how does this help in reducing accidents?
You should have test cases to verify the zeroing behavior in the object code. Even if the standard says a compiler must do something does not mean that it does.
It is negative sum for the world.
Looks like my co-founder has failed me. Time for an Ask HN: My co-founder didn't register our domain!
Best comment I've read on the issue, from metafilter user archagon, although I doubt most HNers will agree with it.

http://www.metafilter.com/142475/Standard-flavored-Markdown#...

Yes, ambiguity is a feature in this case. Markdown was designed from the top down by a writer, for writers. This gives it the rare characteristic of being intuitive to understand and use, but not necessarily easy (or even unambiguously possible) to implement. The lack of a standard helps keep people honest by making them follow the spirit of the law, not the letter, as you see happening with things like HTML and CSS. In fact, I'd argue that's the entire philosophy behind Markdown: usable and understandable by ordinary humans, all the way down to the spec. (Ever try reading the C spec? It feels like you need a PhD to get anything out of it.)

I'm with Gruber that Markdown is successful because of its ambiguous (read: easy-to-understand) design, not in spite of it. The proof is clearly in the pudding. My feeling is that the people running into edge cases are trying to use Markdown as some sort of replacement for HTML, not a massively simplified syntax for writing articles and pages.

What I see here is a group of developers who arrogantly think that they know better than Gruber what to do with Markdown. They could have called it anything else, but they chose to make the issue political. It's juvenile, especially coming from people who we're supposed to look up to in the tech community.

According to Gruber, Markdown is the hardest thing he's ever worked on. He didn't spend a week on it, the idea was not obvious, and its success was not accidental. If I was him, I'd absolutely be seeing red too..
You need traction and/or a network of people that can vouch for you. The perceived ease of raising seed funding is confounded by YC, acceptance in which makes it drastically easier to quickly raise.

The reality is that capital does not flow so freely that you can take a couple meetings with just an idea and a prototype and walk away with a check.

Not being full-time probably doesn't help either.

Concentrate on traction. Things will make more sense when you have it.
Actually, there are apps out there that give you meals based on pantry items. My sister in-law used one a couple times.

This would be a great feature to add.
It's good to know that even John Carmack has to deal with this sort of thing though. It's not just us lowly programmers, even the legends get hassled.
Social stigma? How so? I didn't see that referred to at all in the article.
Why do we need to tether to a desktop for the extra power? Can't we create a wireless video standard to drive the VR headset?
You could say mobile VR is a necessary step towards AR (augmented reality).

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...
The answer is clout. A 25 employee software company that is equally innovative on a per-head basis would get laughed out of the government offices if they requested a rate-equivalent tax break.

Your point is taken, but the ability of Tesla to do this whilst other companies do not have the same opportunity strikes many as unfair.
Finding this unethical or wrong doesn't mean we don't understand economics. Even if this leads to profit for the state through higher tax receipts, I still question whether this is a good thing in the big picture.

It's one thing when an entire industry gets a tax break, like how a lot of states have tax incentives for film makers. But to give only this company a singular and specific tax break just seems wrong and anti-free market. It's one step towards a planned economic model.

Plus there is an outside chance this blows up in their face. What if some other company has a breakthrough that makes this battery technology obsolete? What if Tesla then goes belly up and the factory is shut down? That is very much a possibility. Should our government leaders be deciding what companies to bet on? It's almost like they are quasi-investors in Tesla now.
It's less about the mobile as in using-while-walking-around than the ability to have with you wherever you're at and not tied down to the context of sitting in front of a PC. VR is for everywhere: the couch, the kitchen table, in class, at work, social gathering where you can easily share it, etc. The tether of the current dev kits actually takes away from presence.

While there are hassles of VR with Android that were only solved by making deep changes to Android, the hassles of PC are greater. And this is a phone accessory that is specifically not designed for changing hardware and software: it only works with the Note 4 running a custom optimized version of Android. But they do agree with you that a dedicated unit is what they want to do as well which is why this is not their own consumer unit.
I agree with you, I just wanted to make the important distinction between investment banking and trading careers, which are often conflated. The difference isn't whether trading is as hard to get into but what are the "exit ops" and how they compare to those in IB. Trading has few, investment banking has many, especially in business-analyst/management-track roles in industry. The upshot of trading is that it is potentially more lucrative.
Ask HN: Ideas for a CS Senior Project?
So I've just started my senior project class at my university, I'm a computer science major but my curriculum has been more software development than CS.

My teacher wants us to come up with something that will fix a new problem or change a new industry, something "disruptive". Made me think of startups so I thought this would be the perfect place to ask.

Any ideas are welcome really, he would like us to do a mobile/web app but if our idea is good enough we can do anything (dev tools, commandline/desktop app or whatever).
We have a team of 4 with 3 months to do it, we're supposed to put in about 500 man hours of work into the project.