skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Consumers by and large want to pay for these protections (at least they want everyone else to pay for them), which is why they elected MPs to implement them. If the general public perceived it unnecessary to pay for them, they could elect appropriate politicians to remove the added protections, but it is not up to a single company to decide “nah, not worth it” and break existing laws.
In an early paragraph of this text the author states that the 'self' is an illusion. To my uneducated mind in meditation but highly educated engineering mind, it is more plausible that the 'not-self' is an illusion. Like an optical illusion it naturally comes when the mind is in a specific state (of meditation).
The code it teaches is java :(
Introduction to functional testing with Selenium in Django
How to use circles in website design
For now, when I plan a trip, I google the location in order to see what activities are happening while I'm in that city, and always plan ahead. And, when I'm in my hometown, I usually find out what's going on in the city by asking around, or from a magazine that publishes upcoming events.
Well, Uber argues the same way. They also tried to cite the german constitution and argue that the law is unjust and violates the constitution. If that's really their opinion then the right course of action would be to apply for a permission, get denied, fight in court. Then the law would be repealed. But you don't get to choose which laws apply to you, just or unjust. You can decide not to follow the law (for example in civil unrest) and then go to court and fight it, but you don't get to say "I consider that unjust, so the law does not apply to me".
The taxi market is absolutely ripe for disruption. But GP did not provide any reasons why Uber should be the way to do it. Taxi companies are regulated for a variety of reasons, not just to keep out the competition and as far as I know nothing stops Uber drivers from getting the same certifications as regular taxis. If they do that and they are still blocked or if they are denied certification then you have a genuine case of unfair competition. Until then Uber is tilting the playing field in their direction by offering a product that competes unfairly with the regulated drivers.

Maybe this is the only way in which such a regulation effort can be challenged but I'm not convinced of that.

As for the 'careful now' and so on bits, anybody quoting Ayn Rand verbatim without adding much to the conversation is probably going to get downvoted, it's not as if she's an authority in the field of economics, and most of her writing displays a shockingly bad understanding of the field.
Thanks for the English-language url. We changed to that (from http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/uber-gericht-st...).
It would appear that my knowledge on relative bandwidth costs is either very out of date (or was just plain wrong to start with)...

On internationalisation: fair point on those that don't get the effort, though some effort being made is better than none.
Firebase (YC S11) Is Hiring a Senior Database Engineer in SF
I've never looked into it. I just know it complains if you try use it in that mode (or did last time I tried to run it).
Some more alternatives:
http://www.imgix.com/
http://www.thumbr.io/
Just because the government is elected democratically doesn't mean individual laws are just or reflect the will of the constituents.

There's no incentive for the government to side with the consumers on this issue since politicians profit through taxi medallions, political contributions from taxi companies, etc and it's not a big enough issue for anyone to change their votes.
Uber banned in Germany by Frankfurt court
Revealing illicit Bitcoin mining via network traffic analysis
> Uber plans to appeal the decision and said it would continue offering its services until a final ruling has been made.

I'm curious how they'll do that. They already said that in the Hamburg and Berlin case, but those were administrative decisions where an appeal blocks the injunction until a court decides. This time it's a preliminary injunction from a court, where an appeal has no delaying effect. The injunction can be enforced. The fines are also much much higher - in Hamburg it was a measly 1000 EUR per violation, this time it's 250 kEUR per violation or up to 6 month in prison for the CEO.
How to play fishboom game  like a boss , video
French Developers can earn double in Silicon Valley
To me a huge loss from that time is that you could still completely understand what your computer was doing and what the software running on it was. Bloat has solidly killed that possibility, you could not even understand all the code on your phone these days if you wanted to, let alone your desktop machine.
> But from a market point of view, people are like small firms that sell labor. We don't want a system where people can "go out of business" and be unable to survive, because that's inhumane.

You're conflating issues here. Something (or someone) that's not adding any value to an economy has no place (and no reason to participate) in it.

That being said, letting people starve is obviously inhumane. However, the answer to this isn't opening up bullshit positions in the economy, by introducing artificial inefficiencies, in order to accomodate those otherwise "useless" people. Regulations (ideally) are there to keep the markets efficient (in the long term) by maintaining "fairness". Not to ensure that individual humans don't starve.

Keeping people, that are unable to support themselves, alive and well is a welfare issue, and is not otherwise adressed by markets (directly).
Germany is not a direct democracy. Theoretically it could be that 100% of the constituents oppose these protections, but still elected MPs which support them. There are plenty of issues that are more important and more likely to influence one's vote than the price of taxis.
No, not true - life span has always been long (ish), but life EXPECTANCY has been low due to infant mortality.
Yup. In a truly free market, murder is totally fine. Kill your competition, literally! There's a reason we don't live in Randian fantasy worlds.
Free market can destroy itself, for instance by the creation of a monopoly.

Can it? Are there any good examples of a market with a significant size (with enough profits to support multiple suppliers) devolving into a monopoly without any "help" from outside the market?
Interesting, took an uber in Berlin about 3 days ago. The options here are much more limited (its UberPop, instead of UberX), and the driver coverage is smaller (my friend recognized the driver as being the same one he had seen a month ago). Cabs are relatively easy to get here and so cheap, haven't felt the need to really fire up Uber much at all for the most part - ie, it was raining last night, and found a cab in 1 min.
Yep use the built in postgres replication and something like wal-e (from heroku origionally) and then manage the failover with a trigger file.
But it is very easy to combine wal-e and the built in streaming replication.
HTTP/2 interop pains
Yeah, I know how they feel. I worked in the US for several years and something like a tenth of my salary was stolen by something called "Social Security".

Do I ever see any of that money again? Nope! Only if I work in the US for ten years do I have any hope of getting some money out of the Social Security system (if it's still going in its present form when I retire, which I doubt).
Quite, and it has the enormous advantage that I can extract all data using nothing more than an XML parser, rather than having a two stage [parse XML -> parse embedded DSL] parser for special cases. Even the media aspects of the srcset could probably be better expressed (with more verbosity though) as a standard XML structure.

I really wish it was - though I'm far from a fan of XML for most cases, it does work rather well for this when used as intended...
>Well, how would you be allowed to stay in China then?

Only work for a foreign company in China if they can get you a legitimate work visa, but for just working online from home an M visa is fine (at least this year, until they change the rules again).
HTML5 got one thing right though: standardization of the DOM failure behavior. As an implementation detail of their design, they went with "sensible recovery" for failures over stricter failure modes.

It was browsers that did that in the first place. HTML5 just standardized the exact behavior on failures.
What do you find disappointing about it?
Deutschland: Uber 0, Alles 1
Some context please?
Could be great to have a compiler js -> bash / batch
I live in Berlin and this is extremely satisfying. I'm beginning to doubt that Silicon Valley startups have any clue how European cities work. We germans in general are weary of evil, predatory enterprises that start a spiral to the bottom.

Jest aside: This is just not how things work here, for good or bad. I think there's also not that much room for disruption in the Uber case, at least in Germany. The market for cabs is very much unlike the market in the US - there's not a single huge company owning all the cabs in Berlin and a medallion does not cost a million EUR. Service has been pretty ok for me so far and I use a lot of cabs, so I actually don't see much of an upside but I do see a lot of potential downsides, not that much for me who could easily afford a surge pricing but for people that maybe can't and have to rely on regular cabs.
What's traffic safety got to do with being the Silicon Valley of Europe? Uber is outlawed not because of their technology, disruption or innovations, but because of hiring untrained drivers and potentially unsafe cars.

Germany's culture = safety first. So get TÜV certified cars and licensed drivers.
This is the key: each locker spins on local memory rather than the lock word at page 63.
So, the free market proponents argue that in that case the consumers should be able to choose freely between the two options.

That's pretty much the crux here: should consumers have the ability to 'opt-out' from these protections or not?

My beef with that is that taxi's are seen as public transport and people expect a certain level of service rather than a free-for-all where one driver will be courteous and professional, the car clean and serviceable, the next will rip you off and be a jerk.

Uber takes care of this in part by using a feedback mechanism, but - Unfortunately for Uber - in Germany these things are a bit more organized than elsewhere and the German taxi system - in those cities where I have used it - is actually quite reasonably priced and the drivers are typically professional and the cars are clean and well maintained.

So from that point of view they don't add value, they just undercut the existing drivers by sidestepping the regulations. And that is unfair competition.

The solution is simple: Uber should certify their cars and drivers for the German market under the same rules as the rest of the drivers and taxi companies, then undercut them on price and overdeliver on service.

That really would be the free market in action.
You can decide not to follow the law (for example in civil unrest) and then go to court and fight it, but you don't get to say "I consider that unjust, so the law does not apply to me".

I don't understand the difference.
React Mixins By Example
The affected companies will have two options. Register for VAT in each EU country in which they have sales, or avail of what is called a mini One-Stop Shop, commonly known as MOSS. MOSS, effectively, allows a company register with one EU tax authority for the filing of all their VAT. That tax authority will then distribute the VAT due to other EU member states. MOSS will eliminate the need to register in every EU member state that an affected company has sales (could be all 28 of course).
For some clarity try these sites:
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/posmoss/
http://blog.taxamo.com/moss-system-eu-vat/
http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_wo...
In the UK, "Mother-in-law's Tongue" usually refers to Sansevieria trifasciata [1]. The plant being sharp and pointed, the name is presumably an un-PC reference to the archetypal "domineering mother-in-law".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sansevieria_trifasciata
>However as I see it, research into human evolution sheds light on what the optimum diet would be.

The idea of knowing the optimum diet for humans is exciting. I used to spend a lot of time reading these studies, then I realized that like many other people I know, we read and pontificate these points to everyone else we know without actually putting them into practice to a level that makes spending so much time reading about them worthwhile. This is why I rarely look at diet and nutrition articles.

I'm sure some of you do follow them, but is being obsessive over everything you put into your mouth going to make your life significantly healthier and longer than just following the general principles we've established? I mean, I go shopping and buy fruit, vegetables, meat and some grains. I get my macronutrients and exercise frequently. Will I gain a decade of good health if I start doing paleo? I doubt it. Do I reduce my risk of preventable death if I follow religiously the latest diets (there's at least one every six months that everyone at works will tell me about)? Not likely.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm dismissing nutrition research, I know it's important, but if you're spending hours talking about whether a 30:30:40 ratio is better than a 20:20:60 ratio, then you eat dessert after every meal and get drunk every weekend, I think you'll find better things to spend your time on.

There's currently a group of anti-carbs lobbyists. The pro-carbs is not as vocal, but they have equally strong evidence that eliminating carbs isn't as important as you may think.
I think there is a misconception in what "startup disruption" means. One thing is to remove entrenched interests and "trimming the fat" of inefficient or predatory practices; another is to race to the bottom.

I could create a "supermarket startup" tomorrow, by using 0-hour contracts for the whole workforce, forcing farmers to earn less, stocking food of dubious safety coming from China etc etc, all thanks to some wonderful app that will calculate and manage all this for me. That's not disruption, that's robber-baron race to the bottom.

On the opposite, if I create a fully-automated supermarket that does not require any workforce but still provides exactly the same level of quality to consumers and producers, that's real disruption.

The startup ecosystem should not take their clues from Walmart and Ryanair. Before Uber can righteously challenge European legislation, they should prove that they have ways to address the issues that generated that legislation in the first place: are all drivers insured? Are their vehicles safe? Etc etc.
Thank you for the insights. A quick reply:
>Taxi companies are regulated for a variety of reasons
Correct. But mostly because they made a mess of their nr1 job: transporting people
Today we have new and far better ways t regulate a driver's behavior. Payment in advance, navigation to check the route and a easy way to judge the driver afterwards. That takes care of most of the complaints.
An open letter to celebrities (after the recent privacy incident)
Why, it is just the web being the hack upon hack, of this bending into application framework story.
Genuine question: Is Uber really cheaper than taxi? Honestly: in Italy it's not. It's hell expensive, probably a bit more expensive than usual cabs - which are incredibly expensive by definition. So yeah, this "We are a startup", "Silicon Valley" thing is just a horrible excuse to avoid complying with regulations.

If regulations in Silicon Valley (or wherever else) allow Uber business model to be sustainable, good for them. This isn't something obvious when you go international and it is part of the challenge. Simply not giving a fuck is just mediocre and you deserve to cease operations. Period.
Untrained thieves can also shoplift, which is a far easier and less risky way for thieves to steal goods.
I remember reading they pulled the implementation almost straight out of TAOCP, from good old Donald Knuth (if that's enough of a name drop). It might not be great, but at least it was from a reasonably respectable, academic source and not copy-pasta'd out of stackoverflow.
Fully agree. XHTML was a sane way to have a proper application development model, instead of this document as applications hack.

But the browser vendors failed to make a stand against bad HTML.
I doubt that there's a lot of political contributions from taxi companies. The market is very different from the US - in Berlin the 7000 Taxis are mostly owned by companies having anywhere between 1 and a handful of cars. A medallion costs the administration fee and can be freely obtained, they're more or less unlimited.

Certainly, the cab owners are somewhat organized and have some influence, but the degree is much lower than that. Uber alone has more lobbying power.
Currently working as a risk manager in a multi-mega-monster insurance company. We do a lot of analyses using the 99.5% value at risk, i.e., the value that there is only a .5% chance of exceeding. 0.001% is well into the range in which the risk would just be ignored.
Correct, the burden of proof is on the company that is supplying the electronic service. But it is not that they 'decide'. They need to collect required types of evidence (that do not conflict with each other) in order to prove where their end customer is. Accepted evidence includes the customer's IP address; their fixed landline; their mobile phone SIM card country code; and credit card billing address. VAT is based on where the service is 'consumed'. That German person who resides in the UK will have to pay UK VAT on any electronic service that they consume in the UK. There are a whole host of other rules if that person goes on holiday in the EU.

EDIT: If some of the evidence above 'conflicts' with the other, e.g. UK fixed landline but a German credit card billing address, then more evidence will be required until the merchant is satisfied as to the customer's precise location.
But that still leaves the certification of the vehicle, and with the number of kms taxis drive that's not a luxury. Your regular TUV checkups are targeted at regular drivers, not professional drivers. Your insurance company also won't like it if you start ferrying people around on a 150K km/year plan when paying for the statistical chance of getting in an accident based on 40K km/year.

In all these cases Uber drivers are using rules and regulations (and statistics) applicable to personal transportation and applying those towards a business.
Many (most?) vegetarians do so primarily for ethical or economic reasons: environmental, animal rights, food cost. Or religious reasons. Adding more dietary restrictions, like low-carb or low-sugar, would make the diet more expensive and onerous.
SEEKING WORK - Remote .

I'm a full-stack web developer. I love building prototypes/MVPs.

My skills : Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, HTML5, CSS3/Sass, jQuery/CoffeeScript, Bootstrap/Foundation, VPS/AWS/S3/Linux/Ubuntu/nginx, SEO/Inbound Marketing.

### Recent projects :

http://railyo.com (A curated job board for Rails Freelancers), http://assembleyourpc.net (a simple pc builder tool)

My Blog : http://blog.sudobits.com

Contact : ramesh at rameshjha.com
How We Test Crate Data #TDD
It just finds (and optionally deletes) duplicate files. For hardlinking the duplicates, there's freedup.
Civil unrest implies you decide not to follow the law, but in turn face the consequences - go to court, get fined, maybe imprisoned in the hope to show publicly that the laws that lead to the imprisonment are unjust, creating pressure to change the laws. It doesn't mean that you decide that the unjust laws just not apply to you and then get a free out of jail card.
I think the most amazing change of habitat for a bird is the Rock Dove [1], otherwise known as the pigeon that you find in cities everywhere. Their original habitat was rocky cliffs and coastlines.

[1]https://www.rspb.org.uk/discoverandenjoynature/discoverandle...
250K€ is about 328K in USD, in case the currency wasn't clear.
I hope you are doing fine now.
Compared to the US, Europe has a lot of consumer protection laws. Just, the other day it was highlighted here on HN, how good European laws are, that in Online Retails a company is not allowed to sneak in additional stuff without your consent.

Those consumer protection laws we have also in Germany for transporting passengers. Some details may have to be revised, but in general I consider them as good.

The consumer protection law for German requires, that a people who provide transportation as a service are required to have an according permit (Personenbeförderungsschein). This permit includes, basic checks, that you can drive and that you obey the law in terms of driving, which means you have clean driving record. This permit also includes additional requirements in terms of emergency first respond, before the First Responder arrive.

In addition the company (or you, if you self are employed) has to take care, that the car is in proper condition in terms of car safety (brakes and such). Proper condition for cars used for transportation business has be checked regular, meaning every year. Normal cars have to be checked only every other year.
Also, the company has to have an according insurance for this use case. Regular insurance does not cover it.
Finally, the company has to have also an registered business with the tax office, which is also understandable.

All these requirements are easy to obtain, but of course, have costs associated with.

According to this preliminary judgment, Uber is either required to validate, that all those requirements are fulfilled or they are punished with a 250.000 EUR fine, for every ride that does not follow the rule.

From that sense, Uber is not denied market access. It is only, that they have to follow the rule.

The problem is, that Uber says itself, they don't want to check those details. They just don't care. They explicitly say, they don't care. Because Uber argues, that they provide only "Ride sharing".

But that is wrong. If they would provide only Ride Sharing, than they would only offer UberPool. Uber is contradicting its own arguments, by explicitly having and marketing one service a Ride Sharing, while not offering this one service.

BTW: this ruling is only for UberPop. Because with UberBlack Uber shows, that it is able to follow the rules.

EDIT: Uber is not required to have a Taxi license. A Taxi license would of course give them additional benefits, like they are allowed to park in Taxi zones, drive in bus driveways and such. But there are also other obligations, like the price for the ride is set by the city and alike (no surge pricing). They have to take every ride, it cannot be denied for whatsoever reason, beside personal safety of the driver. The price is calculated by a certified taxameter. And may be other rules, I am not aware of.
And also make sure to read some decent reviews. I also was impressed by the GCBC, but I've been reading some reviews recently and turns out there's quite a lot Taubes took out of context, misrepresented or otherwise distorted.

This one seems a good place to start:

http://thescienceofnutrition.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/good-c...
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be insulting. I thought this was a little basic for the HN crowd so I wanted to make sure I left a disclaimer to that effect so people didn't think I was being condescending by explaining every little detail. I guess it backfired.
Before people get too worked up about this they should consider it from the other point of view.

If you're going to get strict about getting paid for every hour you work, you'd better believe I, as your employer, am going to start getting strict about making sure you're really working for every minute of those hours. No goofing off, no idle chit-chat, just work.

How many of us would be willing to be held up to this standard? I sure as hell wouldn't.