skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a question I haven't seen anyone ask: What about email servers (SMTP/IMAP)? I need a good cert for that more than I do for https, personally. I could obviously have a web server up just to succeed at the challenge/response and get a certificate, but I actually just try to avoid running webservers at all these days, to be honest. I'm also not 100% that certificate would work.
And possibly trying to whitewash their history.
I think their post (also now deleted) inferring a connection between welfare checks and spikes in prostitution might have been even more cringey.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140827195709/http://blog.uber....

Note that both of these posts had been up for years and only disappeared in the last few days.
I love Pow, but I really, really wish they'd change their default tld from .dev to .local.

The .dev TLD might end up existing soon[1], whereas .local is reserved and will never exist on root nameservers[2]. So eventually, developers using Pow might have conflicts between their local-only dev sites and real websites. Bad mojo.

1 http://icannwiki.com/.dev

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local
Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems [video]
> It's as if Walt Disney had been separated from his eponymous empire

Hmmm, I guess they don't know how hard Disney screwed his best friend Ub Iwerks.

In the end it's business acumen that wins these battles, a bitter pill to swallow, perhaps, for the true believer in skill and talent winning through.
His rant isn't about decentralization.

It's about centralization's bad effects. If there was a way for the bad affects to disappear, there wouldn't be a reason to rant. All things being equal, people prefer centralized utilities like electricity, water, and gas.

Just as it's possible to decentralize the Internet, I don't see why it's impossible to fight the bad effects of centralization. If you see insoluble problems, please feel free to list them here.
Look into "high risk merchant accounts". Quite a few CC processors specialize in it. Porn shops, gun shops, marijuana dispensaries, etc, all fall under that umbrella.

Despite the derogatory name, I actually doubt these kind of businesses present a higher than normal financial risk. For example, all gun purchase undergo FBI's NICS background check, so I suspect that gun shops have a lower rate of CC fraud compared to other retailers. As for porn shops, Guy Ritchie says it better than me:

Tom: Listen to this one: you open a company called the "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club".

Soap: You what?

Tom: You take out an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos. You sell it with, I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", "the latest and greatest in sexual technology", "guaranteed results or your money back", all that bollocks. Now, these dils cost twenty-five quid a pop. That's a snip for the amount of pleasure they're gonna give the recipients. But they send their cheques to the other company name – nothing offensive, er, "Bobbie's Bits" or something – for twenty-five quid. You take that twenty-five quid, you stick it in the bank until it clears. Now, this is the smart bit. You send back the cheque for twenty-five pound from the other company name, "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club", saying we're sorry, we couldn't get the supplies from America because they ran out of stock. Now, you see how many people cash that cheque: not a single soul, because who wants their bank manager to know they tickle arse when they're not paying cheques?
Someone signed up at reputation.com
How Medium Goes Social Using Golang and Neo4j
That's really interesting. Perhaps people feel they are getting a better deal if they 'win' (buy) something at $20 that someone else wanted for $19. But if you had of just listed it at $20, then they feel that the seller is just trying to extract as much value as they possibly can.

That is - they are getting the market value rather than the arbitrary value the seller assigns. Even if that value ends up being the same.
A Napster moment for TV?

Having squashed a single company they could deal with, the TV industry may end up having to contend with some sort of P2P TV rebroadcast.
What data are you ingesting to build similarity and how are you creating your index? All the searches I did are way off.

For example, when I put in my company - Indicative - you identify us correctly, but I don't see any other web/mobile analytics companies, only a bunch of completely unrelated companies - everything from digital coupons to banner ad A/B testing.
I don't get it, they are interested in closure and have a codebase in C, why not simply using C++11 with lambda? This would make the code portable to GCC/MSVC...
Arguably they started before C++11 was officially released, but clang and gcc supported lambda before the official release, and also since then they could have used a rewriter to transform their blocks into lambda to help for the conversion.
Given the time frames they looked at, couldn't a bunch of these be people going to a pub, and then leaving after last call?

This would also explain the spike near the weekend, among other things.
Is it sad that in the realm of Uber blunders I find this relatively tame?
> I think the idea that someone would host a personal website in future is slightly backwards. Just clone their website's public repo and browse locally.

If you're cloning the public repo, that still requires someone to host the website -- instead now, they are hosting the whole history of the website (or not -- they could rewrite history and just have the most current version) -- and anyone who wants to view it has to pay the cost (bandwidth/latency) to clone the repo before they can view it.
I think GoreName should be the canonical pronunciation simply because it's more fun.
even more cringey is the original title of the post which you can see in the url:

"uberdata-how-prostitution-and-alcohol-make-uber-better/"
You can also use state machines that coordinate themselves over time, regardless of drift - although, of course, this would be eventually consistent. Check out this (unfinished) article: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Conflict-Resolution-with-G... .
Is an eight-year-old company still a startup? I vaguely recall CoolIris having a plugin for the old Mozilla suite.
Cpu limit likely means you are doing an inf loop, at least in my experience.

Its also possible that their rate limiter is not tied to the performance of the system, but rather to the wall-clock. Given that the simulator runs in the local browser, there would be a lot of variability in this kind of thing.

For my ant simulator, I'm focusing heavily on performance testing and instrumentation for precisely this reason. Having to adapt to various browsers means you need to have some pretty tight metrics.

Performance in the browser is an interesting problem.
I've seen some advanced libraries rely on Acorn.js - a JavaScript based JavaScript interpreter - because its faster than some built in JS bits on older browsers in regards to processing large amounts of JSON. Boggles the mind.

Once this thing gets up and running, I doubt the limitations of the browser's runtime will be an issue since it will be relying on node.js on some type of cluster server.

I'd really love to dig into this thing on my own. I hope they get funded and start hiring.
The war and truce between TrueCar and auto dealers
http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/1792/348195-j...
> More recently, the company focus shifted to a mobile app...that allowed users to browse photos from across services like Facebook, Flickr, and Dropbox.

Does anyone know whether this is a violation of those services' TOSes, and if so, how they got around it?
Game programming
Hey guys im very interested in learning jow to become a video game programmer. Ik programming is a very important essential and was wondering if someone could teach me. Thanks
Perhaps some bias from the Amazon UK page, fewer reviews and the bad ones are at the top.

I think a good example of this problem is Numerical Recipes. It's got a 4.5 in Amazon UK, slightly lower in Amazon US. Many people agree that it's not a good book - the main issue is that the authors apparently have little expertise in the areas they're professing to claim expertise in.

http://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~lekheng/courses/302/wnnr/nr.ht...

I'm sure Skiena knows his stuff, so that doesn't worry me, but it's entirely possible that people miss the mistakes. I'd just like to know why people gave such bad reviews.
Economics is easy for people who can faultlessly predict the future. But who is that? Lots of states a lot of the time make tax-incentive deals with business corporations that may or may really make the economic pie bigger. (Well, almost all of those deals make the economic pie bigger for the business corporation, at least in the short term, but the question is always whether they really make the pie bigger for an individual taxpayer like you or me who isn't a direct party to the deal.)
One just needs to be aware that nested sets eventually hit a limit.

I experimented with a variation by Vadim Tropashko using something called "Farey fractions" [1]. These represent the intervals as a 2x2 matrix of four integers rather than two floating point values.

The numbers are effectively limited to 32-bit values in the matrix since a multiplication is required (resulting in 64-bit intermediate results).

It was very interesting, but couldn't model a file system hierarchy well. It could roughly 10^32 items in the best case, but a very small number (hundreds) in edge cases.

For example, it maxes out at a depth of 17 with 100 items at each level, or a depth of 34 with 10 items each. This might be fine for modeling some hierarchies, but definitely not a file system. The edge case is if the fraction extends along one edge. So if we have 10 items per level, and add a child at the leftmost edge each time, we create the most costly fractional subdivision. Do this 35 times and you hit an math overflow.

[1] Check out the Chapter 5 and Errata links: http://vadimtropashko.wordpress.com/“sql-design-patterns”-bo...
Is it cringey because of the data they present, or because of the conclusions they draw from that data?
Will using a certificate from letsencrypt.org require any kind of agreement on the part of web site administrators or visitors to their web sites?

The CA's I've looked at have these agreements. I'd like to avoid binding myself or the visitors to my website to any legal requirements from a third party.
Show HN: TrueJob – OkCupid for Jobs
You are still wrong, because "net gain in tax receipts for Nevada" is not identical to a net gain in the economic pie. It's not necessarily better for the USA, and if a loss of benefits per capita is realized, might not even be better for Nevada.

You are correct when you say economics was not zero-sum, and according to some people the government is too big, but that wasn't what your claim was about.
that would certainly explain the Boston geographic map.
How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
We're planning to add OCR to the email field to have that part :)
You can't do that. If you are an internet middle man your job is to deliver traffic from one network to another. If you're failing at it then you're failing at your job and quickly someone else will take your place and you get out of business.

On top of that there are peering agreements which might also mention against that.

What's happening here is that ISPs such as Comcast already purposefully hurt their own consumers by providing sub-par service. No one else would normally care about it but to Netflix that's large number of their own customers and they're willing to bend backwards to be able to stream to them.

The problem is that there's really no competition so either we should remove laws and allow once again for competition, provide competition for example by letting cities provide Internet as well or heavy regulation (starting with title 2/common carrier) of existing monopolies, similarly how we do this to other utilities such as electricity/water/gas etc.
Es6-6to5-browserify-boilerplate
To me, it's not even the use of data per se that is most creepy about this post. Really, the tone of the essay seems to revel in "having 'fun' with user data," as if a sophomore at a university wrote it.

I mean, I found the idea behind the post interesting: of course you can analyze trends in ridership to draw interesting conclusions. At the end of the day, however, it's a horrible idea to say "Hey, we know which of you are being 'frisky' and where!"

Perhaps with a different motivation, this post wouldn't be nearly as ruinous. How about ridership patterns of sick or socioeconomically disadvantaged people? That's the kind of data that can change lives for the better.
In another deleted post [0] the author talks about using a name-to-gender API to look at ride locations by gender, which implies that these analyses were not done using anonymized data.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140827195715/http://blog.uber....
Why? Do you find OkCupid's blog posts cringey too?
You could make a shallow clone with just the objects you need for the front page. If we're taking Git literally here, you need to get the current head somehow, then fetch the commit object, then fetch the root directory object it points to, then fetch the index.html blob object it points to. If we're not using HTTP URLs to name the objects, and the objects in question are small, it would be pretty easy to configure the server to "optimistically" bundle the commit, the directory, and the blob into the response to the request for the head, so it could be a single RTT.

It might actually be more efficient to do a single-version shallow clone than to fetch all the relevant assets with separate HTTP requests. Git already supports shallow clones, and you can already use them to clone things like Github wikis, and now you can even push from them: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6941889/is-git-clone-dep.... A --depth 1 clone of https://github.com/kragen/500lines is 7 megabytes, although the full history is only barely larger. My phone has 400+ megabytes of RAM.

More promisingly, though, Git blobs are identified by their hashes. That means that if both my home page and your home page use Twitter Bootstrap 2.3.2, your phone only needs to download it once to render both home pages, since it can see from the blob IDs in the Git directory that it already has the relevant blobs. (Assuming it hasn't been optimistically included in the initial message response!) It doesn't have to worry that one of us might be serving up a maliciously-backdoored version in order to steal users' login cookies on the other's site. By the same token, you can accept the blobs from anyone who has a copy, who might be closer to you on the network than the origin server. Especially if, like me, you're in Argentina with a 250ms ping time to the US.

(This assumes you're using something cleverer than the standard git clone protocol, which builds a thin pack including all the objects you lack.)

So git-cloning websites to view them could actually be faster than loading them over HTTP the way we do it now, because it eliminates a lot of the unnecessary security issues that we work around with bandwidth duplication and high latency.
Stuff like this is one of the many reasons I love archive.org. I think i's really important to capture historical artifacts for future analysis.

The service they provide doesn't allow the "Ministry of Truth"[1] to doctor historical documents to meet their present day narrative.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Truth
Big bro is watching you.
I followup that response with asking for an email address, if they say no to twitter.

I find asking for something specific tends to work better than asking "how can I contact you."

People will usually propose an alternative without any prompting if they don't have a twitter account or don't use it.
"in order to compete at higher levels" implies that the we are talking about the players who can manage all of it. And if people can just 'ally' like you suggest, then isn't that the same as paying to win?

Its not like this is EVE online where corps paying for newbies to play with them is fun and part of the gameplay appeal.
Off-topic: Because of situations like these, I'm surprised that part of the checklist when launching a PR blog is not: "Block googlearchive/archive.org robots"

There have been very, very few times when a company's webpage was down and I needed to go to google-archive or archive.org to refer to some innocuous information. However, the times that I've used those sites to gather evidence of possible whitewashing? Many, many times, in comparison.
Suggestion, get rid of the "retail value". I first saw that and thought "$115 for a 1/4?". Or at least make it less prominent. $95 for a 1/4 still seems high, but since you're aiming for the high-end weed and it's delivered, all in all, not too bad.
Why interpreting gross customer-analytics can be a bad idea
these services all provide APIs for viewing their data.

as long as they are within those terms i don't see what's wrong.
7 reasons North Africa has huge tech potential
All IE versions on XP, alas.
Free, real-world stock photos for your projects
Your argument is that all deals governments make are bad, this is a deal, so it must be bad?
There's a BOM and board files linked near the bottom of the page: https://sites.google.com/site/affordableeducationrobot/home/...
So how about the objections in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579893
Sex is OkCupid's business, while it's not Uber's business. And yes, a lot of people find fault with their blog posts too. You'll see lots of comments like that on any related HN submission.
WoW to me is like the movie Avatar. An age old story (EverQuest == Last of Mohicans) rehashed in a polished (3D/visuals) experience that anyone can enjoy.
Similarly, is a company without any growth still a startup?

(ref: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html)
Google, don't be evil as you seems to be!
To be fair, there are already a number of dispensaries in SF that deliver medical cannabis. (Lifted Health and Wellness, for one.)
An episode of the podcast 99 Percent Invisible is about this. They talk more about how you would communicate what this place is 10,000 years in the future, however.
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/

really good, nonetheless.
What is the benefit over an existing SF delivery service like the Green Cross? They have better rates and I can have up to an ounce delivered within 90 minutes. They also have 'top-shelf' product and an itemized list of strains available. I don't mean to denigrate the idea, just want to hear some thoughts because I have been extremely impressed with every aspect of the Green Cross' service.
Sadly, it does.

archive.org respect the robots.txt of the current website owner. This can mean that they have the data but choose not to give you access to them. I have seen cases in the past where a website I once frequented became defunct, then the domain expired, then someone parked a holding page on that domain including a robots.txt that keeps archive.org from displaying the old data (which do not even belong to the current owner of the domain!).

If they wanted to, there are a number of ways Uber could prevent archive.org from displaying that blog post. Many of these ways are due to the good faith under which archive.org operates (nobody is forcing them to respect robots.txt), and some even involve resorting to legal methods. But history is always mutable.

(Nothing but love on my end for archive.org, believe me! But I do want to point out the lengths that some people will go to alter the historical record).
What is funny is that using robots.txt would have been enough.
Uber employees are the kind of people who kept a telescope in their bedroom window to peep on girls down the street. I'll never understand why they're still in business.
Random mom-and-pop folks have been able to buy high-DPI laptops at Best Buy for well over a year. (And higher DPI than discussed in this article; for example, 3200x1800).

In computer lifecycle terms that is a long time and it is a little bit embarrassing that Linux works as poorly as it does in these situations. (Windows ain't so great at it either, which reflects poorly on Microsoft, but it still handles the situation a lot better than Linux does.)
Covered this and several other techniques here: http://www.slideshare.net/quipo/trees-in-the-database-advanc...
I like the simple home page with just a search box, and the idea of a
way to find similar companies seems really useful.

1.) The site does not function without javascript. In most cases, this
won't matter, but in some cases it will be a non-starter. This often
causes significant accessibility problems for the blind.

1.1) I realize you're doing just about everything in javascript, but
this means there is no way to share a link to a particular search. Using
url parameters like most other search engines solves this issue.

2.) The modal and forced email entry when trying to "view more" and
"view details" is unexpected and unpleasant. Though you certainly want
to get email addresses from users, you're violating the principle of
least surprise here, and many users will be uncomfortable with handing
out their email address.

3.) The text/copy shown when forcing email entry is coarse and
uninformative:

>"Great! We're happy you're enjoying our product. Please enter your
email address to continue using Nova."

Is there a reason why a user would want to give you their email address?
If you can communicate a reason, it's a better approach.

BTW, you might want to remove the "no@example.org" address I entered for
testing, and you might want to do some verification of entered
addresses (not easy, but doable).

4.) After getting the "Thanks!" on email entry, the "view more" and
"view details" links still don't work.

5.) Your database of businesses is too incomplete, and your similarity
algorithm needs improvement. (Note: a small number of database entries
may be entirely forgivable if you're just starting out and are looking
at your lengthy todo list with lots of data you need to import ;-). I
tried searching on two company names, [Rocket EMS] and [Information
Handling Services] as well as the common abbreviation for the later
[IHS]. The first (rocketems.com) is a newer and specialized local
company, and the second (www.ihs.com) is very well known and has been in
business for more than 50 years. You returned no results for the two
company names, and mostly incorrect results for [IHS].

(sorry, reading Matt Cutts of Google and similar search related sites
has me in the habit of using square brackets [] around queries)

You did locate one of the many subsidiary sites (brand names basically)
of IHS, namely "IHS Engineering360 Media Solutions", but not the parent
company. Though the subsidiary site does earn some of its living through
"Marketing & Advertising" (this tag is most likely derived from SIC
codes), it's not exactly correct or complete. Since you seem to be
basing your "similarity" measure on SIC codes, the "similar" companies
listed are very dissimilar.

I'm not entirely certain what I should have expected from the phrase,
"find similar companies" so maybe my expectations were too high?

Well, it may be a little rough in a few places at present, but a company
similarity search engine seems really useful to me, and I wish you luck
with it.
Personally, I think they do it with raw access to the database. https://www.uber.com/legal/usa/privacy under the heading "How do we use the information collected" says nothing about anonymizing rideshare data.
Thanks for the info, I didn't know that.
This is a good example of using the power of technology to enable the weak against the powerful.

And yes I don't care what you think, but a company with a billion(ish) of funding is more powerful than YOU.