skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I appreciate that it's an artists impression and thus over-selling the possible reality, but I can't help but imagine most people, myself included, would not feel very comfortable flying in something that, from the inside, barely felt like it had any kind of solid structure.

People have an expectation of a certain robustness around them, and I don't believe it would be easily overcome.
This is a great, short piece of advice.
Perhaps the "deplorable charade" is the argument that PPA regulation isn't necessary in the mobility space? Or overbearing?

I don't much care for Uber's practices, but I agree with the argument that taxi medallions are rent-seeking and all efforts to break down senseless regulation of the taxi industry should take place. Note I said "senseless" regulation. You should still require insurance, background checks/driver's license verification or drivers, and so forth.
> Interestingly (to me), I am seeing more and more examples where clang and gcc are beating icc in performance.

Intel has finite resources (as much as Intel can realistically dedicate to the project), where-as both Clang and GCC projects have theoretically unlimited resources (as much as companies the world-over can dedicate to the project). Doesn't surprise me actually. Most say gcc version 4.7.1 overtook icc in performance by about 15% (and 4.7.1 is ancient now).
Prototype paper test can detect Ebola strains
With you on IQ but 'settled science' & 'denying global warming'? You evidently enjoy cliches. I don't know anyone on http://wattsupwiththat.com/ or other respected sceptical sites who says there's been no warming this and last century and that it's not partly related to CO2 levels. Anyway, here's a cliche for the collection: 'If you can't explain the 'pause', you can't explain the cause...". Where's the settled science there?

As well to remember that address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900, when (probably) Lord Kelvin - he, of degrees absolute, remarked "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.". Meanwhile a bloke called Planck ...
Personally I'd rather they just leave the fucking tree where it is. Kind of a sad, not-so-subtle metaphor for the way human progress seems to require messing with the environment.

They couldn't spend a little more money and change their building's design?
"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so. -Thomas Jefferson
This has never been more true when it comes to ride sharing companies."

Seriously? Never been more true?

Prohibiting unlicensed rides-for-hire (it's not 'ride sharing') is more unjust than say...Jim Crow laws?
London black cabs can use a meter and don't need pre-booking. London private hire cabs must be pre-booked and they must arrange a price before travelling - they can't use a meter.

Uber is free to conform to either of those modes but choses not to.
7 Ways Startups Should Use What If Analysis
As Alan S. Kaufman wrote in each edition of his textbook Assessing Adolescent and Adult Intelligence (I read the first edition in the early 1990s), what you and I don't know about effective environmental interventions to raise IQ does not at all imply that none existence. It's not valid to argue from ignorance that something that hasn't been tried cannot possibly work. Kaufman took care in the first edition of his textbook to point out that we were by no means sure in that era what was causing the Flynn effect (we still aren't completely sure about that). But he also noted that it is logically quite possible that we will discover environmental influences to boost IQ (or, more importantly, boost actual human achievement outside the testing room) that are well within our control as we engage in further research.
I find the way that Fuji in particular and Sony to a lesser extent have usurped Leica's target market fascinating.

For decades Leica made expensive but advanced cameras suitable for use by pros in the field. By now, however, people who want small, light, and fine-grained control in a package similar to the early Leicas look at the Fuji X100S or X100T (http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilm-x100s/) or to a lesser extent something like a Sony RX1: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-cybershot-dsc-rx1.

Even a Micro Four-Thirds camera like an Olympus EM5 (http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympusem5) is in some ways more a successor to the great Leica film cameras than the current Leica digital cameras. As DPR says: "The E-M5 is simply an awful lot of camera in a compact and attractive body. It's a nice camera to use and the images it takes are just as enjoyable. Without any reservations whatsoever, it deserves our Gold Award."

------------------

Edit: pesto88 links to his Flickr account in a daughter comment; here is some of my SFW work: https://www.flickr.com/photos/91262622@N02. I'm an amateur and it shows, but I like to think I'm learning. I also mostly shoot with an EM5 and primes, but the surfeit of great cameras at low prices makes a lot of discussion around the choices into pointless dissections and narcissisms of small differences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences).
Yes, exactly. I wrote my comment before I read yours. Repasting it here...

I wish there were more books and series like "Language A for language B programmers".

Whenever I'm trying to learn a new language, I have to sift through resources and filter out all the fluff which stems from an assumption it is my FIRST programming language and tries to teach me what a for loop is.

What's more, one's proficiency in language A can be leveraged by explaining some constructs of language B in terms of concepts that exist in A, pointing out specific traps, caveats, "false friends" etc.

I mean something like this:

http://appendto.com/2010/10/how-good-c-habits-can-encourage-...

http://blog.boyet.com/blog/javascriptlessons/?p=5

Or this:

http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/Content/Devs/CsToCpp-ASomew...

Favorite quote:

Templates are sort of like .NET generics except that they aren't.

:))
in my product offering, we focus on the core features and making them rock solid versus a larger competitor who has all the bells and whistles. you will lose some to the whole "they have it all" but a lot of logical people will see it as a better business decision to purchase something that the stakeholders will actually use.

we're actually more expensive then our competitor and bring professionals over to our offering all the time due to simplicity and most of all, availability. we win on customer service/support and enterprises (especially ENTERPRISES) are willing to pay for it.

I can't explain how many times we walk into the next enterprise and ask for more per user and astonishingly, they don't bat an eye. one day, we'll hit the price point of "wait what?" and we'll come back down but it blows our minds how much you can charge because your product clearly adds value.
Really – Open Source Back End for Realtime Apps in Scala
The internals of AoE II are quite interesting, especially when it comes to how the terrain is rendered. There is an epic thread here [1] where it's discussed a bit and one of the original developers (Matt Prichard alias MattP) chimes in and talks a bit about AoE II's development.

Trying to clone AoE II seems like a pretty cool and challenging project, and actually if I was going to write a game with 2D isometric graphics, I might steal some tricks from AoE.

[1] http://aok.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/aokcgi/display.cgi?action...
Interesting to see how many products they release every year. In the beginning they had a new model once every couple of years but after 2011 up to multiple each year. I'm wondering if this is just because of the improvements in the technology or because its expected by press/analysts to release sth at every major photo trade show and how this effects quality.
Nothing important happened before the Internet.
> Engelbart was not using the chorded keyboard for text input but for command input.

It was designed for both, and certainly Engelbart himself could and did type with it.

Context menus (originally from Smalltalk) are another substitute for the expanded command set of NLS' chording-augmented mouse.

The advantage of having a chord keyboard for typing is that you can avoid the mouse-to-keyboard-to-mouse hand-movements that are so annoying when you can only type with a two-handed keyboard. However a one-handed chord keyboard is even slower than two-handed QWERTY when it comes to typing, all else being equal, and there is obviously the burden of having to learn it. For programmers and many other people, then, a better setup is probably a two-hand keyboard that lets you control a mouse pointer with minimal hand movement: and in fact we now have these, in the form of pointing-stick keyboards and keyboards with a trackpad in relatively easy reach of the user's thumbs http://www.loper-os.org/?p=861&cpage=1#comment-16138 . The mystery is why why people are still selling and buying expensive keyboards without either.
I can certainly understand why people who have invested a ton into the current system are upset, but that just argues for a more orderly transition. The Knowledge is pretty well obsolete in the age of GPS. It'd be a sad thing to lose, though.
From the policy:

Some examples of ethical behavior we expect from founders are:

* Not using misleading, illegal or dishonest sales tactics.

* Not harassing any YC community member, employees, or anyone else.

* Not behaving in a way that damages the reputation of his/her company or of YC.

* Generally behaving in an upstanding way.

Looking at Avi's background:

"Like at age 16 when my co-founder and I wrote
one of the first Facebook scripts to mass-invite
people on Facebook to events we threw. Or how while
at YCombinator I hacked prototype day (To PG’s
disapproval)"

I think YCombinator is starting to have issues with their filtering process.
That's how Wool (the post-apocalyptic novel) starts...
Looks as if it might be interesting, if it were not verbose. Summary anyone?
Why Facebook and Twitter Account Authorization Is Faltering
So far as I can tell _nobody_ flies FPV (first person view) with anything except regular analog video cameras and radios.

I'm guessing that's at least partly for cost reasons, but mainly because you don't even need to ask the "what latency" question. Even though iPads/cellphones/OcculusRift have much better and higher resolution screens than most of the inexpensive hobby FPV gear around, the lag as you digitise/compress/decode real time video streams is both too long and too variable.

Remember John Carmak's rant about being able to get packets to London quicker than he can get them onto his screen? Imagine trying to control a ~400mph toy plane when you aren't sure if you've got 15 or 200ms of latency at any time? That'd represent "seeing where you are" something between ~10 and 200 feet behind where the plane is right now.
Today I learned that I am obligated to sign up as an UberX driver. I don't really need the money and I'd rather do other things in my spare time, but if TJ says I've got to, then I've got to.
Perhaps I embellished my argument slightly.

Obviously defeating the taxi monopolies is less important than defeating slavery.
There is a gray line for what you can or can not do to get attention, this isn't even near it. Even if Jason would have thought these guys company is the next truecar or something, if he ends up investing it will just solicit more hacks in the future, and it will end up with someone getting in big trouble. There are some risks that are not worth to be taken.
TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX... there are a lot of engines that can properly render a *.tex file.
Obviously so, it inconveniences young well-off white people.
"I love that story because it's a celebration of the wonderful difference between men and women"

But, that in itself is sexist. I don't feel like I've slain a beast when I've finished a program. It's more a sense of worry that I'm in a false sense of stillness. When I've finished testing and debugging, it's more a sense of relief that that things are no longer upset in the world.

Does that make me less of a male?

It should be a celebration of the differences between people, and not specifically between men and women.
Your original comment is fine, waterlesscloud is mis-paraphrasing you to make a point.

>>This has never been more true when it comes to ride sharing companies.

___"WHEN IT COMES TO RIDE SHARING COMPANIES"___, that part of the sentence is important. As in, you didn't say "when it comes to human rights!" or something overly-dramatic like that. You reduced the scope to only ride sharing. And I'm assuming you didn't edit your comment after the replies.
Nope. PRISM has do to with "direct access" to Apple's servers. This is according to NSA's own documents, and Apple may either be aware and forced by law to lie (Yahoo-style [0]) or unaware of this (i.e. they got hacked by NSA). Nothing to do with SSL being broken, especially as iCloud didn't run on Apple software but on Azure and AWS back then[1], and therefore iCloud wasn't itself vulnerable to goto fail.

[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-the-government-could-have...

[1]: see iOS security white paper from Feb 2014, iCloud was the same back in 2012.
A natural extension of "it's easier to apologize later than to ask for permission."

I'm curious to see how this plays out in terms of YC's response, because as a prominent player and popularly accepted thought leader in the start up "industry", their response will set the tone and draw the line in what is seen as acceptable for " getting things done ".

The EFI fine [1] demonstrated that it often pays to be illegal. The banks demonstrate this on a regular basis with their paltry funds and settlements. Will startups/small-tech follow suit? (Well, maybe only towards lay people rather than investors with power and money. Today's lesson: don't mess with people who actually have power!)

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/23/efi-underpaying-workers/
I agree completely. I own a Leica film camera, the M6, and I love it. I think the industrial design is spectacular, the image quality is great, and the unobtrusiveness of the camera lets me get shots I couldn't with a bigger film SLR.

But I can't imagine ever buying a Leica digital camera. They're overpriced, seemingly underpowered, and a far poorer investment than, say, a house.

Also, I should mention that as I write this, my X100s is sitting next to me, and its memory card's contents are being copied into Lightroom. Fuji's making absolutely amazing cameras with superb optics. Are they Leica-quality? Probably not, but I'd rather spend $1000 on an X-series camera than $10,000+ on an M with a first party lens.
I'm stealing one of the YouTube comments, because I actually thought it was pretty interesting. I started watching this thinking the interviewer was an idiot, but I think the issue is a little more complicated than it seems at first. Comment from YouTube user "tapo":

So in the 90's Sun Microsystems created Java, which has two components, the programming language and the runtime. The runtime (the Java you install) lets you run things written in Java on any device regardless of OS or CPU architecture. Write once, run anywhere. This was a huge threat to Microsoft. Why write Windows programs when you could write Java programs and they'd run on any computer?

So Microsoft wrote their own Java runtime called the MS JVM, and made it part of Windows, it extended Java to do Windows-only things, meaning there were now "Java" apps that could only run on Windows, destroying the whole point of Java.

This became part of the antitrust trial because it ruined Sun's product. In a separate case, Sun sued Microsoft and won.﻿
I think it would get closed quickly. It would be an "idea box" type of question and they are frowned upon on Programmers StackExchange, because there is no right answer.
> I'm not sure the lack of motivation for implementing SW is economic but rather: what's the point if no one is using it.

"what's the point if no one is using it" IS an an economic problem.
At the start I payed 60 euros pe year but I ditched them when they had those high prices and no 'infinite plan'.

Recently found Back Blaze and I'm sticking with them plus they are cheaper.
Heh... "[Leica M Edition 60] is also the best example of how Leica has lost touch with photography, even more so than the M9-P Hermes Edition."
You can certainly disobey the taxi monopoly rules in other ways.

I pay friends for "gas" when they come and pick me up drunk at the bar, for example. It's not really much different than hiring out UberX.
Nice!! It's amazing how little the design has changed, really. I like the M4 with its protruding rangefinder. I wrote a thing the other day about the others that have been adopting the old aesthetic and why it's not just for looks.

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/gadgets/dialing-it-back-camera-m...

Also Aaron the inertial scrolling in the timeline feels good.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. I did just check and I have an American geolocated IP, consistent with what you said.
It sounds like you have only watched the beginning, when they are discussing java vs the jvm. Later we get snippets like these from Gates' own emails:

> "Do we have a clear plan on what we want Apple to do to undermine Sun?"

> "I want to get as much mileage as possible out of our browser and Java relationship here. In other words, a real advantage against Sun and Netscape."

And in a conversation Bill participated in:

> "Apple wants to keep both Netscape and Microsoft developing browsers for Mac -- believing if one drops out, the other will lose interest (and also not really wanting to pick up the development burden.) Getting Apple to do anything that significantly/materially disadvantages Netscape will be tough. Do agree that Apple should be meeting - the spirit of our cross license agreement and that Macoffice is the perfect club to use on them."

It's a very different Gates from the philanthrope we see today, but back in the 90ties he was a bit of a dick.

It's a bit slow to watch it all, but the entire thing appears to be transcribed here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/micro...
I'd imagine--based on purely anecdotal evidence--that their market research indicated consumers are highly responsive to changes in price. People (even those who should know better) tend to have an irrational confidence in the idea that they won't need to fall back on a backup in the future. Hard drives crash, but mine? Unlikely. Foolish in the extreme, but far too common nevertheless.

Faced with that sort of thinking, the lower price likely helped them convince consumers. At $5, it's a low enough fee for most people to kind of just forget about it rather than consciously weigh the opportunity cost involved. The last think Backblaze wants is for its customers to think that they'd be better off spending the money on a really good hot dog or two rather than a backup service.
I'll post a comment later.
> Only advantage UTF-32 has over others is that allcode units fit into single code point (atleast I think so)

All code points can be encoded as a single code unit in UTF-32. Code points are the things like U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E; code units are what you encode code points as in a given Unicode encoding — i.e., octets in UTF-8 and 32-bit integers in UTF-32.
> MS didn't crush people - it crushed companies. There's a big difference.

Companies run by robots, I suppose.
If Elon Musk had made $16M, instead of $160M, from PayPal there would be no Tesla or SpaceX. He likely would have spent his time much less productively, and the world would be worse off.

And yet, very few people similar to Elon Musk ever find themselves in the position of being rich enough to field an army.

In a future where resources aren't so constrained we'll start to see "geniuses" everywhere.
> I don't think you can simply identify a problem and solve it, without the personal passion.

Sam Altman indicates this is true in his first lecture at Stanford's startup course.
Thanks, but I can't take any credit for that :) I'm using Timeline.js: http://timeline.knightlab.com
You can't win if you don't play. It's not like successful entrepreneurs were just sitting on their asses and success smote them like a lightning bolt.

Yes, there's a lot of luck involved, but it takes hard, risky work that most people aren't willing to put in just to have a chance at capturing that luck.
I'd give the same answers as you've probably heard a dozen times before. Binary logs, D-bus fundamentally baked in, the whole "shims are a perfectly good solution" viewpoint, basically the usual things people like me don't like.
At the time, Microsoft's licensing disagreement with Sun over Java frameworks and integration with native code had some overlap with the DoJ's case: Was Microsoft attempting to eliminate a threat to their Windows monopoly with "embrace, extend & extinguish"?

I think the government ultimately dropped that angle.
As the author mentions, it's a seller's market: the publishers are in a position of both charging thousands of dollars for subscriptions and making their life as convenient as possible at the expense of others'.

Anyway, surely it's no wonder many philosophy journals don't accept LaTeX documents? As far as I know, LaTeX isn't really a thing outside hard sciences.
In response to a blog post on Samsung Knox
The M6 Green Bay Packers and Hello Kitty Special Editions were also pretty heinous: http://www.kpraslowicz.com/2009/03/10/special-m6s/
This, of course, only applies in the fields where LaTeX is in fact a de facto standard.
I hope the bubble bursts, the sooner the better. And I have a son with medically diagnosed coeliac disease. The substitutes are overpriced and I assure you from experience they are usually fairly disgusting in either taste, texture, odor, or the ingredient list. The best part of his diagnosis was the whole family basically stopped eating junk food. Awesome health benefits from that. So.. no empty calories, no problem!

Stores are already full of gluten free products. I made a tasty homemade beef vegetable stew yesterday in the slow cooker with beef and carrots and potatoes and celery and thats about it (well, some spices, some salt, water, etc). This is what real gluten free substitutes look like. It tasted awesome. This is the kind of GF substitute I've come to expect, not a GF hot pocket or a GF package of oreos.

There's a big business around convincing people they have to buy substitutes so they can keep stuffing their faces with (now gluten free!) twinkies until they die of diabetes at 500 pounds. I'm totally not interested in that kind of substitute. If their processed food business model loses money or wastes executive bonus money on R+D or even better, outright dies out, I'm not going to shed any crocodile tears in my homemade beef stew.

You can see the propaganda way of steering thought by careful word choice:

"Sales of alternatives to meat have flattened"

They've flattened because they're disgusting soy based hyper processed plastic weirdness pumped out of a chemical plant that isn't really fit for human consumption. Not because nobody eats salads anymore.

The whole article is like describing modern online music stores as selling "vinyl free product, even though most buyers don't medically need vinyl free music". Its people complaining the world has passed their business model by. If people aren't buying your toxic cellophane wrapped people-fattener products anymore, instead of trying even weirder chemical plant processing or stealth marketing with complimentary copy, just sell me some cheap lettuce and stop complaining.
"I regret that I have but one scion xb to give to the profits of my company."
I like that design a great deal, and at a glance I find it subjectively more readable. I'd have to A/B test it with real wiki content for a while to be sure.