skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unfortunately, the business logic underlying much of this personalization remains a mystery.

Price discrimination appears, at first glance, to be about maximising profit, but really it's about clearing the market.

Say you're a cinema, and you set your list price for a ticket at £10. 20 adults show up and buy the tickets and are happy. Then 10 students show up, scoff, and go home - they weren't willing to go above £7. The market has not cleared: you'd be happier with £70 from them than the nothing you've got, and the students would be happier being £70 worse off but having seen the film. Neither party got what they wanted, no trade occurred, and no economic value was created.

The situation could be improved so that everybody gets what they want without harming anybody else: set a student rate at £7. Students get to see the films and your cinema makes more money - everyone is as happy as they could be.

In this example, the criteria for price discrimination is discovered by intuition, existing knowledge of students, maybe surveys. But even this isn't ideal - what about that one really tight student who buys pasta in 20kg bags and who values a trip to the cinema at £4? Ideally you want their £4 and they want to see the film - but how to cater for them without shooting yourself in the foot by making the student price £4 across the board?

Until the advent of the internet and fancy algorithms that could at least try to understand you, you couldn't. But today maybe we can.

Everyone has their own "true" valuation for a given product (not how much they think it should be worth, but how much they're willing to pay), and if you're a supplier with a magic ball which can divine this with 100% accuracy then you're as well selling your product at 1p over cost if that's your customer's true valuation. Again: they get the product they wanted and you get profit you couldn't have had any other way, and everyone's as happy as they can be.

But we don't have magic balls, and you can't ask someone for their true valuation because suddenly you'll find yourself knee-deep in a bartering game of bullshit and lies. Your only option is to try to divine it somehow.

This is what these guys are doing. And it's a good thing. To say "this is wrong and it should stop" is incredibly selfish - with reference to the example above, an equivalent statement might be "Yes I'll pay £10 to see this movie, but only if those students don't get a discount, which I implicitly understand to mean robbing you, dear cinema owner, of £70, and those students of the chance to see this hot new flick, even though both of those things are fuck all to do with me."

If you're a habitual bargain hunter (not out of necessity, more as a personality trait) and you're feeling affronted by this then all you need do is take a cue from these companies and adjust your tactics to suit the 21st century. Googling around may have done you proud up til now, but the world has moved on. I daresay that once you've mastered the art of using a VPN, user agent spoofing, and possibly the cultivation of a set of dishonest consumer profiles, you may find you'll save even more money in the face of this new enemy.
It will take a huge amount of beacons to make this useful. But a worthy cause and an interesting solution. Let's wait and see if anything comes out of it.
Native advertising
It's even harder to see what incentive Uber would have to ask him to spy on his employer? Besides, I get the impression Uber is beating the pants off Lyft. What do they want from them?

Who knows why he did it. Maybe he had anxiety about getting rid of things. But it's worth mentioning that Lyft did not name Uber in the lawsuit, which they would certainly do if they had any belief Uber instigated it.
"a reminder you're walking by a place with great Chinese takeout"

is this just a way to target ads at people with a disability? if all I'm trying to do is get form point A to point B, the last think I want is "interesting facts about history" or targeted ads.
LIVE STREAM: CodeX by StudentRND
> C is a compiled language[...]

Not off to a great start :/
Yes, they do.

However, anyone running something called ChromeSetup.bat would expect a UAC warning to come up since they are expecting to install something anyway.

I've actually run in to this issue myself when I had a program called "Patcher.exe" (an internal dev tool) that didn't require UAC elevation. Turns out that name was on the list. You can include a manifest in the executable to say that you explicitly don't require UAC elevation to prevent that.
"Join us for an exclusive sneak peek at our biggest initiative yet. See it live online at http://studentrnd.org/live, or join us at our office in Seattle."
Alternative live stream link via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YheyroE0HeM
I get that. I just dread the days when malpractice for programmers is as common as it is for doctors. I like building functionality, not fortresses.
Starts in 2 minutes btw!
Apple Pay Website Integration – A Guess
Following in my father's footsteps, I became a commercial pilot really young, before quitting to pursue tech, I had logged a couple of thousand hours. I still fly teach at a flight school for fun.

"TV news increasingly reported sensationalistic stories of the dangers of ballooning, and public opinion started turning against baloeiros."

This statement made my blood boil since me and other 13 people almost got murdered by those "artists", this is what happened:

In 2009 I was flying a cessna caravan with 14 people on board. We had IFR clearance on 35R in SBSP. Since this was a precision landing you don't exactly pay attention to what's outside. At around 7500ft out of nowhere a balloon was in an odd position right above the airplane, without much time to think we "dove" a bit to go under it, only to be surprised by some kind of basket full of fireworks, attached to the main ballon with a single line. We hit the line, luckily it broke and both the balloon and the basket didn't get stuck in the airplane. The line got into the right wing 2cm short of a tank.

This balloon fell in the urban area of a city with 11 million of residents.

My story is just one out of thousands, which will not make into that documentary.
Assuming you do want off-site backups of your security footage, but only accessible to you (i.e. strongly encrypted), what are your options?

What if you want a remote live stream?

Linux or OS X, please.
Right. I agree it's not reasonable to expect any one entity to know every possible vulnerability in the world. But with all the money and brains they have, how huge this particular target was (for both defensive and offensive purposes), and how high the stakes are (as they remind us whenever we challenge them), you'd think they'd have static code analysis flagging these kinds of things the moment they're checked in to a public repository of any notoriety, fuzzers running 24/7, "shadow" code review against things like OpenSSL by their best hackers, etc., at which point it does almost become incompetence that they either don't have that, or it failed. At least, I'm wondering what all that money is for.

No, it doesn't really prove incompetence, but on the other hand "we released a trivial patch for an issue the private sector already found and fixed"* doesn't prove competence either, or inspire any sympathy from me. These are the types of people who trot out imagery like "cyber Pearl Harbor" when they're telling us why they need to be granted more power to protect us, yet their go-to public example of fixing a critical vulnerability in the national digital infrastructure is laughably irrelevant.

* Depending on what time of day it was, the official fix may or may not have been publicly released when NSA did whatever they're claiming they did.
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The capitalism that we see today is not qualitatively different from any capitalism that has ever existed. They've all had cronyism, they've all had different rules for different types of firms, and most of them have had banks. Thus, if "capitalism" was a good name for whatever they had back then, it's a good name for what we've got now. This better system of which we're dreaming deserves better marketing than a name so shabby as "capitalism".
IIRC someone analyzed the payload and compared it to a Meterpreter and saw a lot of similarities. Could have been provided (hacked together?) by the person who sold the vuln.
It seems however that informing is generally slower than populismusm, so there might be an increased probability that things go wild. That might actually be an advantage of the slowness of current democracies. Maybe one could add some sort of artificial deceleration and decentralization mechanism to a Liquid Democracy to counteract this problem.
I think it was a great presentation of the material. I enjoyed all of it except I think that the audible clicking went on a little too much of the page scroll.
There's a fine line between being opinionated and being plain rude. I think Matias Duarte is not the only person with his head too far up his…
I'd think a court would be OK with sealing any documents containing Lyft's confidential information, after establishing the accuracy of the documents' description.

The factual question is whether the defendant did in fact copy all that information as described, and there might be additional questions later about whether that information was passed to Uber, and if so, how that came to pass. If Lyft were to prevail and a jury was awarding damages, then it would be enough to know what sort of documents were taken to establish whether they were important commercial information or not, no?
Protecting Consumers APP from Uber Surge Price!
I've already registered 200 drivrs to start with a month from now and i've been developing this app the last 7 months. What kind of features do you think i should include that uber doesn't have? No surge ever! No customers rating! What else?
Student pricing at the cinema is disanalogous to the way price discrimination is done on the internet. In the former case, the fact that students (and children and seniors and, and, and) pay a different price than others is clearly disclosed to everyone. Online, it's not.
I will say the following: I don't do drugs at burning man, and most of the people around me also don't do drugs at burning man. Most of us are pretty busy working, or otherwise doing things that would be pretty badly hampered by drug use.
You can still get the first eight chapters of our book about Meteor (Discover Meteor) for free for one more day here:

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Show HN: Feedback Lite – Partner Program for Digital Agencies and Marketers
Bold move to put the number of members on the website while it's so low. It's professional looking, but the low member count immediately makes me wary. I would have waited until it was higher. :/
Typo in the first sentence..

"We collect the most popular real-world coding interview questions and carefully craft wrteups that are ridiculously easy to understand."

wrteups = write-ups.
So it appears that the device communicates from a signal from what they call is a "transcranial magnetic stimulation coil". But it also appears that the people doing the experiment have knowledge of the intended outcome. Therefore, I think that they are getting a simple headache and then firing the device. The most simplest double blind test would be to take someone off the street and see if they fire that as well. Apologize if they did this and I did not catch that in link/video.
If the standards were more strict, some of these issues would not exist. I see this as exploiting a lot of slop in protocols. It should not be possible to interpret a URL as anything but a URL, yet here it's being reflected back and interpreted as something else entirely.
> I want our collective ignorance to shine

Ok, I present to you:

Anti-vax: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/21/4767530/vaccine-deniers-i...

Climate change denial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial

Anti-GMO: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

Creation Science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science

> so we can confront it head-on as the destructive force that it is.

That hasn't been working so well...
A better analogy would be the CEO working for a company in which a single shareholder had majority stock ownership.
...you're not going to kill Uber.
There’s a problem with Tesla’s math on the order page (literally)
Co-founder of Divshot here (thanks for the mention, jchmura). We built our platform from the ground up to be the best possible way to deploy static JS apps.

Let me know if you have any questions, I spend all day thinking about this stuff. :)
Yes, the author mentions that in his paper. He contacted both Google and Microsoft; sounds like Google rolled out fixes before publication, while Microsoft is still working on them:

On March 2014, I reported a security feature bypass to
Microsoft which enables batch files (“bat” and “cmd”
extensions) to execute immediately without warning the
user about the publisher or origin of the file. Hence,
RFD malware that uses the bypass will execute
immediately once clicked.

...

Microsoft is working on a Defense-in-Depth fix to solve
this issue.

And:

This is the exact problem that multiple Google APIs
suffered from until I reported it to the Google security
team, leading to a massive fix in core Google components.
spoken with some authority?

https://talks.golang.org/2013/oscon-dl.slide#1
That website sucks.
...and it makes sense. Also, IMHO the thing isn't about people with PCs paying less, but people using Macs getting charged more.
Thanks!

(I'mma wait on pushing the fix until traffic dies down a bit.)
i hope it's not just questions from Gayle's book and glassdoor
Agreed. I've done several silly things just for the technical challenge.
I actually started a petition about this a year or two ago. Check it out and sign it: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/let-memories-live/
It is a real difference when you see that there is a student price posted at the box office, but you can also see that the regular price will apply to you, so you pay that.

In an opaque market in which everyone pays a different price, but no one knows what anyone else is paying, the consumer is at a disadvantage. There have always been coupons, special deals, and so on, but having every transaction getting prices separately and privately is something new, and consumers aren't going to like it, for two reasons: they hate the idea that other people are getting a better deal, and the information asymmetry means that they are almost certainly actually going to pay more on average.
You could say the same thing about (e.g.) Ember.js. It comes with all sorts of 'goodies' in its class hierarchies.
I thought I was taking an optimistic view? Software is a tool like fire or the wheel. Barring a "Doomsday" (which I don't envision), our descendants won't give it up, even if they use vats of bacteria or lattices of anti-quarks or something even less recognizable as "hardware". One can imagine them giving up humanity and civilization. Eventually, both of those will seem pointless to anyone who isn't an antiquarian weirdo.
Ask HN: Did Ellentube rip-off YouTube?
So I noticed today that Ellen launched her new video platform/app to share her own video content[1] - however it looks an awful lot like YouTube, even with 'tube' in the name.

Does anyone know if there is a commercial/strategic relationship between Google/YouTube and Ellen? The player and site UI look really similar.

[1] http://www.ellentube.com/
Colour me cynical, but this seems like the perfect opportunity for Microsoft to take payment from corporations to adjust a blind person's route past said corporations' branches, thereby providing a sneaky targeted advertising campaign.
Maybe we'll never know...

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/166236
Wasn't that developed by Adam Langley? (Google employee.)
Changing the currency of academic science
This is the most appropriately-named article, ever.
The only excuse they could give if they're exposed is that they're doing A/B testing with pricing (at least that's what I'd say), but it would be pretty bad.
To beat them in the market of course - the same incentive as in any other case of industrial espionage, if such it turns out to be. Most businesses would like to know what their competitors are up to. You're assuming that Uber is beating the pants off Lyft through merit, and concluding from that that Uber has nothing to gain.

Who knows why he did it. Maybe he had anxiety about getting rid of things.

Spreadsheet nostalgia!? Defending against this litigation is likely to be very expensive and his personal reputation has taken a severe hit regardless of outcome. That's some weapons-grade OCD you're suggesting.

Lyft hasn't named Uber but has left open the possibility of naming additional defendants. They do mention VanderZanden's admission to a Lyft board member back in August that he was in talks with Uber (before the termination of his employment), so you can bet they'll be wanting to look at any emails he might have exchanged with Uber. It's very common for legal complaints to be amended following the discovery process.
Hey "throwaway", I explicitly pointed out that Uber is as bad as any other company. Where do you think your clothing comes from, a unicorn? No, they come from a child slave in an Indonesian sweatshop. There's no company in the world with good ethics.

That's a great attempt at a diversion, though. It's almost enough to make someone forget that in this country, the United States of America, the greatest and freest country on the face of the earth, all people, including and especially corporations, are INNOCENT until proven GUILTY. Lyft needs to do more than just allegate for me to believe them. So if you have any evidence that Lyft's allegations are TRUE, you can show me (and the court! I'm sure they'd love it) now or take a hike.
It comes from https://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com, so it's not super useful for the sort of attacks that this approach would be used for.
What a fantastic read; I can relate to going back and trying to relive that sense of wonder in a certain place or time, whether it be retrogaming or booting up MS-DOS 3.3 and System 7.5 after my wife and child have gone to sleep. It comes back, if somewhat fleeting; I message my brother to talk about how much fun it was in those days, or to try and drive back a memory or two on how to do something I've forgotten.

So, so very relatable. Thank you for this. Now I want to figure out where I put my old archived BBS, unpack it, and take it for a spin in the dark.
Absolutely the case - I enjoy Javascript coding but can't stand having to follow Angular's opinions on everything that should be done to the DOM. Having a consistent model of interaction is great, and Angular enforces that while giving you quite a few nice tricks, but it does it in a way that feels so far away from JS itself that I'd bet it actually hurts your Javascript composition to know Angular.
This only works if you only plan on buying one thing. I may value the $10 ticket at an even higher $12 dollars so I'm willing to pay that and the algorithm changes the price to reflect that, but now I'm out of the $2 I was planning spending on popcorn and can't make that purchase. The non-transparent price discrimination makes it impossible to plan future purchases.
I think I've been into retro computing since the first time I was able to run ZSNES on a Pentium 133.

Does anyone think that some "retro programming" tutorials would be of any interest?
I wonder if this works in the other direction too: pretend you're accessing their site from e.g. IE6 on Win98... or maybe a somewhat more recent but still extremely-outdated configuration that at least will work with their site.

Several years ago, for a brief period I used no user-agent header, which caused quite a few sites to show nothing more than an obscure "500 internal server error" message, which disappeared as soon as a UA header was added, even if it contained nothing more than random rubbish.
Eh?

Um...that's true?
Time to remove OS information leakage from user agent string? Sites could still profile users by browser (e.g. Safari), though.
Maybe they are trying to make those of us who are sighted experience the hardships of being unable to understand what is being communicated to us?
Rip 3D Blu-ray to 3D MKV
Hi everyone,

If anyone has any questions, comments or suggestions surrounding our Partner Program we'd love to hear from you.

If you've had any experience running a similar program as part of a SaaS web application, we'd be keen to hear what you learnt from your experience, and any tips you have for us.

Thanks in advance.
Your unjust accusation of egotism still presupposes equal worth of humans and pets. This is wrong, regardless of your emotional attachment to yours.

From a purely economical point of view, you may claim that things have only the value you ascribe to them. But I believe in intrinsic, objective worth.

One man's teddy bear is another's broken toy. A person's life, however, is non-negotiable.
So customized billboards for the blind.
YEAH! You go disrupt that terrible incumbent!
I really love any ted talk on cities. Here are a few of my top picks.

http://www.ted.com/talks/aziza_chaouni_how_i_brought_a_river...

http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barasch_a_park_underneath_the_h...

http://www.ted.com/talks/edi_rama_take_back_your_city_with_p...

http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_the_walkable_city

A few others that I can't really find right now, Creating Forrests in Cities, and Unique City building design

Edit for readablility
I signed up to http://codingforinterviews.com/ awhile back and only got a couple problems in my inbox. Hope to have better luck with this one.