skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
best part of the letter - two words I thought I'd never hear together: "BuzzFeed reported"
Barbie the Computer Engineer, Remixed
An important distinction: the waste in this case is on "organic" non-paid interactions with users on the social networks.

For Facebook, this means getting "Likes" on your dedicated Facebook Page (aka https://facebook.com/your_brand_name) for Twitter I'm presuming it's followers of @brandname.

This is separate from the actual paid advertising that the platforms offer - which is likely far more effective, targeted and profitable than say a magazine or newspaper ad.

Running a nail salon and want to reach women 18-45 who live in your city? Facebook lets you target that exactly and clicks to the ads just go to your website.
>"The new VLT results indicate that the rotation axes of the quasars tend to be parallel to the large-scale structures in which they find themselves. So, if the quasars are in a long filament then the spins of the central black holes will point along the filament."

Though I have no real idea what I'm talking about...

This feels intuitive to my mental picture of the universe.

The description of this large scale structure and the expansion of the universe has always put me in mind of watching the patterns form and reform from drips in a soapy sink or an elastic fabric being pulled apart.

In both cases, you end up with these big expanses bordered by dense stringy areas. That the motion of the stuff that snaps / shears / collapses or whatever into these strings and knots would be aligned seems perfectly logical.
The idea of a "social relationship" with a brand was always pretty silly, I think.

But Twitter is a good tool for PR (because every blogger and reporter uses it), and Facebook can be an efficient content distribution channel.

I think brands have a hard time on social media when they have nothing interesting to say. "Like my page" or "download my app" or "tell us how much you love your toilet paper" are not interesting, and Facebook is doing the right thing to hide that crap from more feeds.

But if you can create good content, you can spend money very efficiently on social media. You just need to boost it a bit over the noise floor, and then folks will share and comment to spread it farther.
Yes--the Boober made some asinine statements. Let him dig
his way out of his utter foolishness. Now to Uber. I
was shocked what they expect you to buy and drive in order
to become a Uber Driver. Nothing less than a 2008 vechicle?
And the list of acceptabe cars? After insurance it just dosen't add up--unless your sleeping in you car, or your in
a brand spanking new market.

In all reality, maybe he said these things just to get the
free advertising? It's too bad it's come to this? That
said, is there any freeware uber/Lyft type code floating around? Just curious?
How is forking an open source project disrespectful? For the past eight months I have only seen Neovim folks being very professional, open, and quick to respond to user input. They have been keeping their heads down quietly working on extremely hard problems.

Natively supporting Lua/LuaJIT and Python in writing asynchronous plugins, this alone is worth the wait. I am willing to give them A LOT MORE than 8 months if they can pull just this single feature off.

The request for Python integration has been sitting at the top of Vim's voting list for many years. It must be a very very difficult task, otherwise it could be done years ago. http://www.vim.org/sponsor/vote_results.php/

Other than the new plugin infrastructure, Neovim's GUI and embedding systems will be awesome. Anyway, I applaud people who explore and try to make progress (like from Vi to Vim, a natural process). In the mean time, I am happily using Vim which is both extremely powerful and stable.

TL,DR; I can wait.
This only shows that Snowden was correct that internal channels were not effective at providing real oversight.
Could you elaborate in a bit on this? This is the first time I have heard of this, and I find it very interesting.
People who find that an open-source program creates more hassles than it
solves don't use it. Folks who blog about their hassles induce other people
not to use it.

Would that it were so, but people still use mongo. You seem to be positing perfect knowledge, whereas crummy software seems to creep in places either because of marketing or because it's the default in some system.

Docker, btw, is awesome. You can use it to replace virtualenv (which only handles python libs) and system lib isolation in a much more scriptable, more robustly deployable fashion. So you can take python projects developed at different times that use different revs of packages (and those packages can require different libs) and make deploying them way better. Try it, it's just awesome.
I mean, I'm not thaaat surprised:

In many places they won't give you the PhD until you have job offers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8630724
Senators also have dozens of staff members who support them, especially on issues they're passionate about or committees they're involved in. And the committees themselves have their own staffs. Most likely one of these staff members is both deeply familiar with these specific issues and contributed heavily to this letter.
I did not, actually. Same subject, but the question is different since this is a CA signed by a CA in this case.
You guys have gotten your site penalized by repeatedly deleting and reposting here. Please email hn@ycombinator.com.

All: please don't delete and repost. If a story hasn't had much attention yet, a small number of reposts is ok. But use a slightly different URL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I don't have any internal knowledge, but I would like to point out that it can be more than one thing.

There's Chrome, in competition with Firefox, Mozilla's core business. There's also Google increasingly looking like a search monopoly, whereas Mozilla's mission is to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet." There's also the fact that Google are now feeling so secure about their grip on search that they were looking to reduce the amount they were paying to Mozilla in their partnership.

Individually, perhaps none of the reasons was quite enough for Mozilla to ditch their partnership with Google, but combined, it makes a whole lot of sense.
any entrepreneur able to build a prototype can get an idea funded

Except this is not true and I don't know where people are getting this idea. Maybe it's just SV or YC that has money but Angels and VC's in D.C. and NY at least are looking for solid traction before even bringing up the word term sheet.

At a recent Cooley pitch event a friend of mine who is already revenue positive came up from Ohio to pitch his startup. He told me not a single investor had followed up with him about a term sheet despite multiple discussions after the pitch. Another friend in CO is in the same boat, being revenue positive but with no interest from angels or anyone else.

I think stating that anyone can get money is a dangerous thing to say because it gives the wrong impression about availability of dollars. That post about things being frothy is so insanely different than the reality here on the east coast that it's staggering and totally unbelievable (not saying that I don't believe it by the way).
Does the end of your sales funnel have some sort of scarcity built into it? Or are you basically just linking out to the sales page, to an always available book/course?
Amazon Robots Get Ready for Christmas
Did you use a hardware calibrator? It shouldn't be hard to get a Dell monitor to a calibrated white point - they're not bad unless you got a TN panel model.
Ouch, I don't know how we missed that. Fixed now.
Huh? Always encrypt the ssh-key, and use ssh-agent for convenience. That said it is now quite easy to set up proper two-factor authentication: eg key and otp.
Dare to dream:

http://bbc.godbolt.org
How does a party go about determining a bid for something like this?
original vi was not free software. vim is a clone, not a fork.
So you may think it's overblown

I think it's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. I don't know if you read Sarah's actual article, but it reads as if this guy called her up and told her that he was going to murder her children. It is that sentiment, not facts about what actually happened, that has carried this "story" so far. She is exploiting others' fears about stalking and sexism for her own personal gain. IMO, that makes her far more evil than anything Uber could or would do.
Are you familiar with Vim's code? Just look at all the OS-specific files in the source tree[1]. Not only that, there are ifdefs-galore in the shared code. RealWaitForChar is over 400 lines and contains 41 ifdefs.[2] Many are for long-dead features or platforms. That function just waits for user input, but it has to be ridiculously complicated to account for platforms without basic functions like select(). The infamous eval.c starts off with ifdefs for Amiga, VMS, and Mac OS Classic.[3] Neovim has ripped out tons of this stuff, and it's drastically reduced line count.

1. https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/tree/master/src

2. https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/blob/master/src/os_unix...

3. https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/blob/master/src/eval.c
Interesting that Firefox users get it first. If they're clever (I think they are), that's a tactic to help Mozilla with user acquisition. (assuming the reimagined search experience is something that they can make people want to try)
Where can I learn more about back pressure? It isn't a set of terms that Google seems differentiate from spines.
I am almost never logged in to Amazon, but I've been noticing for awhile that they still recommend things to me, and they say up front "based on something or other to do with your Amazon activity." The only thing they don't do is call me by name when I'm not logged in. But they obviously know it's me.
I also detected 1893 palindromes out of 350064 total lines. Finally a (laughable) real-world use for my palindrome detection project[1].

[1] https://github.com/montanaflynn/palindromes/

Edit: I also pulled some more stats out of just the passwords:

Total characters: 2938676
Average character count: 8.39544955889747
Median character count: 6
Maximum character count: 294
Taylor Swift, Spotify and the Musical Food Chain Myth
Another severe blow to the cosmological principle.
The letter was obviously written by one of his 30+ staff; probably the staffer referenced by name at the end. It's mostly a summary of news reports...not rocket science.
Ugh, I swear I searched for that numerous times with various search strings, having sworn I had seen the article on here before, and only the submission with 4 points came up. Maybe I'm crazy, but I seem to have this problem fairly often with the new hn search.

That aside, there's nothing wrong with resubmitting an interesting article after a while, right?
If you're running an ssh server that allows password authentication, make sure you're also running fail2ban.[1] Too many failed login attempts will block the IP (at an iptables level) for a configurable time period.

[1]: http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
I find this ironic. When I used Hailo in Boston, it actually only integrated with taxis then moved to private drives. Uber on the other hand, contrary to what you're saying, started with only black cars then shifted to include taxis, and eventually UberX.
> you need a great iOS app

> you need a great Android app

Neither of these is rocket surgery. Good devs can create an app very quickly, especially if your directions are "clone this other app."

> you need a backed that is both fast and has rock solid 24/7 reliability. it can't be like Twitter in early days

So you need something that isn't node + redis + mongo + riak running heroku through cloudflare. This is also quite easy.

> you need to become a payment processor that interjects itself between users and drivers, which I'm sure comes with its own set of legal and logistic challenges * and you need to do it internationally

> and you need a massive operation team whose job is to onboard new drivers (recruit, train, supervise)

> you need a legal team because every state can have different rules

> and you need them also internationally

The beauty of all of these things is that Uber has already done many of them for you. Unless they have all of their drivers under NDA (possible, but unlikely) and haven't published any of that informaton on their website, you're going to profit from hundreds of thoussands if not millions of dollars of legal work that Uber has already done for you. It's not as simple as a sed script on a legal document, but it's way (way way) easier than starting from scratch.

The best part is that your drivers can also be Uber drivers, so you don't need the volume that Uber has today - you can slowly build up both sides of your market as long as the friction for drivers is minimal and the ease for users is equal or better.

Is it easy? Fuck no. Is it about 1000% easier for you now that Uber has done all of the hard work? Hell yes.
Nobody cares about quality, they care about bottom line and how quickly they can return their investment. No news there.
Hi kalid. That's awesome to hear you're grown the business to 3k/mo. Clearly the model of free content online + sales of curated book-length content works. Imagine now if a bunch of people with tutoring experience in chemistry, biology, economics, etc. write textbooks on their subject. Wouldn't the life of the ugrad student get suddenly better? (Stop the exploitation of ugrads! )

BTW, since you cover a lot of high school topics, you should consider making a textbook that is aligned with the common core math state standards---the big textbook publishers are scrambling to update their books right now...
While I wish your argument were correct, it's not. The flaw is in the inference voted for → was intellectually interested.

A model that appears to fit the data [1] is that multiple kinds of interest drive voting, and intellectual interest is not the most powerful one. This is the weakness of the story-voting mechanism. It is why, on a site that values intellectual interest, the vote signal must pass through other filters, like flagging and moderation.

1. Maybe we can test this someday.
Keith, you can find more details in the RCA that is published here: http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/11/19/update-on-azure-s.... It is updated with more details on the flighting and issues we encountered.
He's saying that with that many aids and resources, these letters can be produced extremely quickly if the Senator asks for it.
A customs dog sniffed me out and his handler searched my bag in 2010. I had some chocolates infused with orange oil in my pack.

She was satisfied but apparently you can't bring oranges into Mexico from the USA or vice versa.

Since then I always pack breakfast for early morning flights across the border, but I'm careful to eat it before landing or leave it for the aeromozas to clean up.
It's just a honeypot, not a real server with password-based auth.
Really no passwords with spaces in them, or a data-preparation error?
Facebook shuttle bus drivers vote to join Teamsters union
Accepting an internship puts you under no obligation to take a full-time job with the company. By offering you an internship, they're making a clear statement that they're not making a long-term commitment to you, so you shouldn't think you need to make a long-term commitment to them. If they really wanted you to commit to a long-term position, they should be offering you a real entry-level job (at a real salary), not an internship.

In any case, there's no guarantee that you'd even be offered a job by this company at the end of your internship, so you should be looking for permanent jobs elsewhere anyway.
The same problems with imperfect knowledge exist with closed-source software too, but they're worse because you can't examine the source yourself and the vendor often has an incentive not to let flaws come to light.
Same. Download, extract, double click on both platforms. It even downloads clojure for you...
Or Toys Ya Us.
Would it take a jailbreak to trick uikit into rendering at native resolution?

What would be the downside? Larger UI elements and less available space on the screen? Could a @2x instead of @3x mode work or would that result in super tiny "bad hidpi" UI?
In that case I stand corrected on that point, however I still feel like it's a bit of the same thing. :)
Building a few pretty apps is hardly a barrier to entry. It might be beyond the reach of a single founder bootstrapping but it's quite reasonable to build with a small VC investment.

Note that autowale.in (an Uber competitor, currently profitable) was started on an investment of about 30 lac - roughly speaking 1 year runway for 3-5 engineers. Various tricks: start in 1 city, do the onboarding manually, and ignore the legalities until you are big enough to be noticed.

Autowale.in dealt with the bootstrap issue directly buying inventory from drivers. I.e. autowale.in pays the driver for 20km each day, and then tries to find customers to use that inventory.

The major barrier to entry here is the fact that Uber is really good. But if Uber decides to exploit their market condition and rip people off, that will change.
Really exciting research!

I've been trying to replicate this work. So far haven't succeeded. The code for the system described in the article isn't available. Only a "newer" version is available. In either case, both implementations will behave differently depending on how quickly they execute, so reproducing the described results is proving tricky. Also the motor output program isn't available, nor well defined.

When next I get time, I planned on posting to the Google Group for this project and see if they are willing to enlighten. I re-implemented the code as a single C program, and re-architected it to use a synchronous tick, moving from one state to the next. So my program has re-producible results, regardless of speed. It just doesn't appear to behave correctly yet. More tinkering...
Taking Stock of the Uber Shakeup
How Magic Leap Is Creating an Alternate Reality
DuckDuckGo’s or Mozilla’s?
Are you talking about this: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/05/bagpipes-new-ha... ?
These types of letters do get sent to other companies. Here's one from Franken to some obscure app company from February:

http://www.franken.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=2699

Here's one to Google from Markey:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/googles-pl...

Here's one to the FTC about Facebook from Warner:

http://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?...

Here's one from Schumer to Zuckerberg:

http://www.schumer.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=324221

Here's one from Blumenthal and Franken to Social Intelligence (never heard of them before):

http://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blum...

I found all these by Googling something like "senator letter [company name] privacy". Most don't get covered here because they are typically routine pandering by politicians that doesn't change anything. (As is this letter IMO.)
The principle is meant to apply only at a sufficiently large scale. If any particular scale goes against the principle, one can enlarge the scale to see if the principle still applies.
> "We think this is a fairly sizable market we are addressing," Smith said,estimating it is in the billions of dollars.

That's not a very big market.
Curious what you mean with the health benefits out weighing the negatives. Can you explain with sources?
Yup, this sounds way too familiar. Happened to me. I agree wholeheartedly with sm88. Cut your losses and move on.. And here is why.

1. I have feeling you already know deep inside what you have to do and you're looking for reassurance which is totally understandable. I, myself, didn't realize that until waay after. So, go with your instincts. So, before posting, ask yourself. "Am I unsure about what I should do -or- do I already know what I must do but being hesitant or need reassurance, etc."

2. If you had said "we both believe in MVP but he wants feature A and I want B in MVP..and we are arguing.". I would tell you to work it out, work through it. Those arguments are actually great as long as you both are always willing go get drinks in the evening. Seriously, for me, it came down to that: "end of the day, can I still go grab drinks with my co-founder many nights of the week if I had to?" test. But you said "our difference in values cannot be reconciled and I worry that his vision.." Little too deep in my opinion. Huge red flag.

3. I hate making judgement without knowing the details, but come on, aggressively pursue a patent before MVP?...Maybe there are scenarios that warrant this but I think it is very very rare. So, another huge red flag.

4. Don't underestimate your opportunity cost. As long as you are working with this guy, you are not working with the co-founder you'll love (and hate at times). :)
This depends on industry, of course - in consumer web it's much better to risk pissing off a few customers but make the majority of them happy than to keep all your existing customers but risk losing out on a new innovation that gives a competitor a toe-hold. Enterprise SaaS probably has different trade-offs, and software infrastructure probably different still.

This paradox, BTW, could be thought of as the full-employment theorem for entrepreneurs. As long as it is rational for a business to avoid change for fear of having to remove or support it later, then there will exist changes that a company with no customers and no codebase could implement that no incumbent would dare. Some of these are bound to be useful to some segment of the market, and that's why you get continued disruption in technology markets.
> in my opinion Node has way too many issues to run in money-making scenarios.

You can say that about a lot of languages other than node. How many billion dollar companies have their software written in PHP - a language that many people would agree has far more glaring issues than node.

My point, is that I believe your comments miss the larger picture. There is far more involved with deciding which language to build a product with than "which language is best."

I don't disagree with you about Go being a great language - but for most companies, it is not even remotely practical to use. Hiring talented Go developers is hard because there are so few. Their current employees may or may not know Go, what do you do about that? Etc.
> I had no idea i was hellbanned

That's because you're not. You posted a couple of comments from an IP that was banned because of past abuses (apparently by others). We unbanned the UP and unkilled the two comments.

It's on our list to make the IP banning system better so that this happens less often. Having it happen at all is bad, obviously, but the measures available to counter abuse are often unsatisfactorily crude, and doing nothing is not an option.
Agreed. Sometimes I think the people who don't appreciate Google's "openness" are not old enough to remember either the early closed internet platforms (Prodigy/CompuServe/AOL) or the Microsoft products that are only recently getting around to open standards.
This letter is high level, and does not go into extensive detail. Why are you so defensive? The story may have been invented, and it may be accurate.

You are making it clear that you have an emotional interest in the story, and the people responding to you are just readers of this website.
Drivers often list themselves on both Uber and e.g. Lyft in the same way riders use both apps. So there are no network effects in play. All the drivers need to do is switch the signs on their windows.

It's the reason Uber is taking such extreme measures to scare "it's" drivers into not simultaneously listing themselves on competing apps. See: http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/04/technology/uber-lyft/
The alignments are exactly on the same scale of the filaments. It would be a contradition to the cosmological principle if, say, the alignments occurred only on one celestial hemisphere.