skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My own concerns about Uber/Lyft have to do with properly following regulation that are legitimately in the public interest. From what I understand, in additional to the 800 lb gorilla (medallion licensing), there are other areas where Uber and Lyft skirt regulation. For example, I have read Uber argue that they are insured, but is it to the same level that taxi company drivers are required to be? How about other licensing? If we believe that the taxi regulations are unnecessarily burdensome, then lets redraw the rules for all parties. We need a common set of rules that everybody follows. Only then can we have proper competition among Uber, Lyft, Yellow Cab, etc.
> I won't drop a dime for this education

Then I guess it's a good thing that it's available to you completely free, isn't it?
ES6: Iterators gonna iterate
I have no source either, but I'd bet a very small sum of somebody else's dollars that "most people" in the US, at least, listen to most of their music in the car.
Docker is modular, actually. They've got a plugin system, stable RESTy API and packages to work with various parts of their stack (libcontainer, libchan, libswarm etc).
How so? The very fact that someone makes a profit means that the end consumer is paying more than cost price.

If I pay £10 for something that costs £5. The organisation that just pockets the difference is less efficient from my perspective than the one that either reduces my next bill by £5 or gives me an extra £5 worth of service.

The point is that even if a private sector company operates with perfect efficiency, there is a built-in inefficiency from the consumer's perspective because investors need to make money on the deal.
Is Blake Ross an employee of Uber? Even if so, I have my doubts he would trade his integrity for any company...
Which, TBH, is all anyone should really care about. We can use dotnet for free if we like and it's getting officially open-sourced and supported across platforms; this is great.

-Not directing anything at you specifically
Amazon could start turning a huge profit tomorrow if it wanted. The only reason it doesn't is because of titanic capital expenditures funded by operating profits.

How exactly is a mission to Mars comparable to this?
A lot of the salary and pension information for California public employees is available online anyway for people to decide themselves. For example, the follow is pages of people who make 6 figure pensions.
http://transparentcalifornia.com/pensions/2011/university-ca... I don't know of any 401K plans that can top these numbers.
Containers Don't Really Boot
Notice that nowhere in the graphic is there a Martian lander. This looks like a re-purposing of the Orion spacecraft into a twin configuration to support a one-off slingshot around Mars on an approximately two-year free return trajectory, with a few months spent close enough to Mars to get some science done and photaos taken. It's an idea that's been floating around for years, and not very interesting because it's a strategic dead-end.

I am very saddened. When I saw the tweet I thought we finally got a commitment from high up to land people on another planet, and not just aimlessly building random congress-designed porkbarrel crap with a hope to someday do something somewhere as will be decided later.

A commitment to land people on Mars on a strict schedule would do so much to overcome the bureaucratic stranglehold on doing anything interesting in space ... too bad this isn't going to be it :/
Either you didn't read the article, or I am totally misunderstanding it, because it appeared to me to be a criticism of Uber.
Here Idris uses its effect system to verify correct usage of a protocol between a client and a server http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkIlW797JN8&t=53m35s
I believe you are misunderstanding it. It appears to be satire in the "A Modest Proposal" vein.
You're right. 1kbit/s over a month would result in 2.47gbit of data transferred, which is a bit less damning. To get to 2.47tbit, you would of course need 1mbit/s transferred (which is still not that much!).

However flawed my example, I think my point remains valid: data usage measured over arbitrary time periods makes no sense when the underlying infrastructure is built with blocks that only care about instantaneous transfer rates.
A grab bag of Git tricks (2013)
Can Helmet be Smarter?
Do you thing regulators allow to make helmets smarter? Bluetooth connectivity for SatNav direction, Talk to Girl Friend sitting behind, etc.
Not an Uber employee, not an Uber investor. Just had a terrible cab experience in Vegas last month and it finally spilled out on a plane ride yesterday.
Yep, you're totally right, I skimmed the middle section when the author was really laying it on thick.
The startup where I serve as in-house recruiter, FutureAdvisor, recently ran an experiment in hiring without resumes. It was called StaffupWeekend. The Chronicle's careers blogger wrote about it here:

http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a...

We recognized that resumes were poor indicators of performance. In fact, we believe that the only thing that correlates with performance -- is performance. A study that Google released last year supports that.

The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. They chose what they wanted to work on together.

In a sense, we were batch processing applicants while gathering much richer information than resumes provide. Strong candidates we didn't hire, we shared in the Sequoia network.

We ended up making eight interview offers (several candidates decided to work elsewhere), and we hired one engineer.

The whole event was inspired by this essay: http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234
But that's on the applicant's side of the equation. How is that a solution for the employer?
The requirement is to speak Polish. You're right, that's what we should've put there. (In practice, though, it's extremely rare that someone speaking Polish wouldn't be a native.)
I understood it. Forward P/E is typically next year's P/E. Investors expect nearly $100B in revenue, but almost no earnings (1/366th). Because the denominator is expected to be SO small (against such large earnings), the forward P/E ratio will also be ridiculous and not very meaningful.

No denying that many Amazon investors are bullish, but this is not the metric to prove that point. Other relevant drivers at play.
25 Fresh Tools for Developers and Designers – Code Geekz
I couldn't not back this. Yet it's rather sad that it appears to be missing a key ingredient of the ZX series: BASIC as the OS, which taught a generation of British hackers how to code.
No, case and point Objective-C
Warning: Autoplay audio
Huh? I think you're confusing the concept of "top of the funnel". Are you suggesting that I randomly select people to interview from a pile of resumes? What if I get a marketing person who has no software experience in the pile for a software developer job?
Bit depth affects dynamic range, and that's it. The only thing a 24-bit sample can do better than a 16-bit sample is accurately reproduce the difference between very loud sounds and very quiet ones. That's all. For the vast, vast majority of music listeners, the difference will be insignificant, as they don't listen in an environment where a dynamic range of 144 dB can be used to anywhere near its full effect.
And Google is orders of magnitude bigger by every reasonable measure than NASA both today and at the height of the Apollo programme. There are a dozen of other organizations we could point to (e.g. the largest oil or mining companies) which demonstrate that the private sector can organize on this scale quite well, thank you.
certainly, as there are in the "new world"/"india", they did it cheaply on the back of the know-how(geographic knowledge, on where to go and how to stay alive) and the labour of the indigenous.
I think you should look into ACA plans. This link might help regarding taxes: http://www.taxact.com/support/715/self-employed-health-insur...
Funniest reply I've read all day.
I think we're looking for a higher pitched sound in that video. I've heard it can take time to hear. I'm gonna listen again as well
Oh, for some reason I assumed `it' meant the world.
http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=23...

http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=20...

http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20...
If they're charging 3x whatever they paid, that pushes up prices for the companies hiring the body shops, which incentivizes finding cheaper competitors to body shops in the labor market -- like hiring domestic workers, for example. The pricing mechanisms of the market will optimize out a balance.
It's definitely not a solution for an employer who is just like scraping resumes off of Monster or something, but it's not much different from the uncontroversial practice of asking for a cover letter.
How nice it must be to know what's best for people you know nothing about. I'm sure they love it when complete strangers with judgmental attitudes feel the need to interfere with their private lives.
Well yes, of course. This is why the proposal is designed to make absolutely sure we bring in skilled, high-value immigrants. It's a filter, not a fence.
Don't Rely on Salary Data to Pick a Programming Language to Learn
That's kind of the point right: with Uber, there was a solution that didn't involve making anything illegal. Customers were allowed to easily express unhappiness with their ride, and Uber is able to provide customers better service. Seems like an ideal solution that, as you put it, simply balances everyone's best interests.

Uber is making the decision to get rid of drivers that take advantage of their customers, not the government forcing anyone to abide by some law. Its the same as how a restaurant can take action against a waitress if they provide bad service. Personally I think that system is way better than trying to create a series of laws that make it illegal to be a bad waiter.
I think you're misreading what the OP said. He wasn't making the mistake of associating 192 kbps with 192 kHz. It was just a coincidence that he used 192 kbps MP3 transcodes. He could just as easily have used 224 kbps MP3s versus 24/192 FLACs in the test he described. The point was that his friend couldn't tell the difference between MP3s and FLACs.
Software vs. Services: Is There Really a Difference?
All arithmetic in C and C++ is toxic. That's the reality of using bounded-precision types. Honestly, I wish they'd had the foresight not to use the traditional infix operators for built-in types; they practically beg programmers to implicitly treat built-in types like the mathematical types they very vaguely resemble.

Really, working directly in fixed-precision arithmetic is absurd. In order to be able to rely on its correctness with any degree of certainty, you need to very carefully track each operation and its bounds, at which point you may as well have just used arbitrary-precision types, explicitly encoded your constraints, and had the compiler optimize things down to scalar types when possible, warning when not.
I think the OP is saying that they need to be paid back because they made a purchase based on the government's promise to enforce a monopoly.

If I paid a million bucks for a taxi medallion, and then 6 months later medallions aren't necessary--either because the government changes the law or because the government fails to enforce the law--I'm going to want a refund.
Content aggregators serve a useful purpose in filtering out the noise of the internet & bringing you gems. You did watch this video because the O.P. saw this video on a "zero-value content aggregator".
HP was known for building generally good test equipment, including arbitrary waveform generators. Op is humorously referring to the fact that the test and measurement division was spun off first as Agilent, then Keysight (seriously?), and probably something else by tomorrow (marketing is furiously brainstorming new meaningless names. They only need to merge with Danaheer and rename themselves Flukeronix for the circle of life to be complete.
Learn to trust virtual memory. This is the real reason not to use temp files. Virtual memory handling is mature in all modern operating systems.
Started coding in 1986. So no cryogenic sleep, rather living through the whole thing.

Agree with all those points.

Actually C was already primitive in 1984 and only mattered for those coding in an UNIX system. Meanwhile, some of us had the chance to Modula-2, Ada and the myriad of Pascal dialects that were available back then.

Always with an healthy set of Assembly code, given the quality of generated code, even in C's compilers case, which were everything but fast back then.
There are lots of outdated laws, and executives work around them all the time. In fact, the chief executive of the US just recently did exactly that, and not for the first time. So proclaiming "oh, it's the law, there's nothing to be done" is ignoring the reality at best. At worst, it's a trick since the people who talk about "nothing to be done" are exactly the same ones who ensure the law stays in place as is.

>>> technology that is still very new to regulators.

So the natural reaction of course to ban it. Just in case.

>>> I don't like Uber as a company

You understand you liking or not liking them has nothing to do with their rights to do business, moreover - their rights should not depend on them being likable in any state that wants to call itself the state governed by laws and not by whims?
Several issues with this post:

> It's time to be using all of those high-level languages that are so fun and expressive

But then soon says:

> Something is wrong if most programs don't run instantaneously

Well, most higher level languages are getting interpreted, which require some cpu time to startup. Even with something not-so-high-level-but-sorta-high-level like Java or C#, you still have an abstraction level (JVM/CLR) that must first boot, then interpret, then execute.

> Highly optimizing compilers aren't worth the risk

Today's optimizing compilers are truly works of genius, and can perform optimizations on code un-thinkable by most programers. Even if they were thinkable, the source code required to produce the same machine code without compile-time optimizations would be hairy to say the least, and mostly unmaintainable (unrolling loops, bit-shifts instead of multiplication, etc). Not to mention 2-4x performance improvements is nothing to shake a stick at.

> Design applications as small executables that communicate

I don't have any particular qualms with this statement in principle, however with some enterprise apps this simply isn't feasible. Sure I may use a great many separate apps, all working together in orchestration (my database, authentication server, some 3rd party libs, etc), however for some apps, a great deal of the codebase will end up being a monolithic piece, and that is just fine so long as it's maintainable and extensible.

> Don't write temporary files to disk, ever

This depends on what the temporary file is (and how "temporary", temporary really means in context). If I'm writing a program that will generate some XML document then ultimately send that off to some remote server, I might want a local copy kept in the working directory so that in the event something goes wrong, I can look at the file and see what the last produced content was (or wasn't).

> Everything is so complex that you need to isolate yourself from as many libraries and APIs as possible

This seems to be in the context of writing system-level code. Even in that context, if a library has done something already that will be useful to you, use it. Taken to the extreme, this could imply one should re-write portions of libc into their app to avoid any external API calls in a vein attempt to guard against external dependencies and a potentially changing API surface. In my projects, I typically have a loose rule that if something is relatively maintained and recent, and it helps me get my job done quicker, I'll use it. That is a very loose definition, but typically prevents me from including some lib that hasn't been updated since 2002 just to parse some XML document.

> C still doesn't have a module system

Any why should it? It's a low-level language usually (but not always) reserved for low-level (ie. system) programming. This is not the typical language of choice to write your pluggable enterprise app in.
I have interviewed & screened a lot of developers both H1B (looking to transfer), greencard holders and US citizens. I can't say that I noticed any correlation between immigration status and mediocrity. I suppose if H1B was organized in a way to prefer highly skilled individuals then I should have seen a higher percentage of skilled H1B applicants.

I often wonder whether H1B should be restricted to full time employee relationships rather than also allowing sub-contracts (with provided evidence of a pending contract). If someone is top talent it should be in the interest of final party to offer a full time position.

Either way I firmly believe it is important that if the US is to maintain its lead in tech that there should be as few barriers as possible to getting top talent into the country. The problem is that it is hard to introduce a bureaucratic process that is free of fraud and yet filters out those who aren't "highly skilled". I find educational requirements for visas fairly meaningless (I hired one top developer who skipped college entirely), I find academic requirements for things like Extraordinary Ability category (e.g. published in journals, named on a patent etc) as uncommon in software.

Frankly software companies themselves make mistakes during hiring so I don't know how we can expect the government to do better; It's comparable to the patent office.

I'm surprised to hear that some software engineers working in the Bay Area think that wages are depressed. Look at the mean salary of households in the bay area compared with the rest of the state.

side note: unless green card process is started H1B is only renewable once for a total stay of 6 years.
I love all the people saying that Space-X's main goal is to turn a profit, or that they have to turn a profit. They're a private company, not a public one. As long as they still have people willing to do work for them for what they pay them(if anything) then a private company can do whatever it likes(legally) without making a profit at all. It's private, the goals are up to the whims of the owners.
All about Application Programming Interface(API)
This is one of the big problems I have with taxis and Uber and Lyft or whatever other company: There's too much profit motive to "cheat" or to try to skim or act just-slightly-unfair. Why is it unreasonable--not aimed at you, mostly a rhetorical question--to expect that a taxi driver not try to screw as many riders as he or she can?

This "interaction," or lack thereof, is why I stick to Metro and other transit in Seattle. If I need to go somewhere in a car, I grab a car2Go or a ZipCar. Metro has a set timetable, set routes, set fares, and set stops. I get on, tap my card, and I'm almost certainly guaranteed to follow a route I know in advance and pay a known price. Walking a couple of blocks at the beginning and end of my trip is worth it, to me, to not have to wonder how badly I'm gonna get taken.

(Yes, I can talk to the taxi or Uber driver to go another way if this is the "long way around." Yes, I can complain to the ride provider. But why do I want to put up with that?)
Efficiency is not part of the definition of public sector or private sector, so clearly your statement is false. It's inconsistent with the rest of your comment because you wrote "It's not a guarantee that a particular public sector project or department", which could not be case if it were true by definition. Your argument that public sectors, depending on circumstance, tend to be more efficient is quite different from your assertion that they are more efficient by definition.
I once saw a study that said perfect pitch is far more prevalent in mandarin speakers due to it being an penal language.
I'm surprised one of the smaller ride share companies hasn't pivoted into licensing/partnering with municipal governments. Share revenue and let them control the processes for accepting drivers and regulating them. Tada you're partnered with a entity that can legislate your competition out of business.
I believe Amazon's revenue growth is slowing because they're beginning to saturate the consumer market. However, they're only just beginning to penetrate B2B supply (http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/05/07/amazons-...).

Many large internet companies have fundamentally dubious business models. Google and Facebook come to mind, both have advertising as their primary source of revenue, making their users the product.

Amazon, on the other hand, provides something of enormous intrinsic value: the supply of any and all physical goods that can be put in a warehouse. This business is not going anywhere, and Amazon is only going to get better at it (faster, lower overhead, more products).

In the scheme of things, Amazon's other offerings (AWS included) are relatively unimportant. IaaS and PaaS are relatively fungible, as is evidenced by Amazon's competitors (i.e Azure). Taking a loss of a few hundred million dollars on the Kindle Fire is a rounding error relative to Amazon's revenue, the amount invested yearly on new infrastructure and capital reserves.

Also, if Amazon is issuing unsecured debt, it simply means more capital is needed to sustain the desired rate of infrastructure investment.
Artificial intelligence could eliminate mankind: Hawking
I would suspect that driving a taxi in most places reuqires some sort of driver exam. (Even if not everywhere is London with "the Knowledge") Anyone can start driving Uber/Lyft. Also, Uber is pushing subprime loans on its drivers and withholds their income against it essentially creating indentured servitude.

All in all, taxicabs suck but Uber should burn in hell.
Resumes are just a broad filter for skills and a way to find useful questions to later flesh out a candidate and their competence/experience level. It shouldn't be shocking that code samples and/or a short programming test and a phone call will tell you more about the candidate, and if they should come in for a full interview, than blind keyword bingo.
Show HN: A QuizUp bug which lets you win every time someone challenges you
>The opportunities to leverage tech talent are, however, larger in northern CA than most other places.

Ok, so why not move some of those opportunities to where the talent is?
Google is funding an artificial intelligence for data science
Awesomeness. I'll probably be in touch, though I have to see about the timing. Since I'll be available March at the earliest, when is a good time to actually get in contact?
I started a blog 3 days ago
Company-owned marketplaces are wonderful for the 95% of people who never run into problems, and some people such as Blake Ross may wonder why we don’t just retire the publicly regulated markets. What he is missing is that there is no due process on company marketplaces. If you happen to have a streak of bad luck, or you are targeted or discriminated against and you get too many bad ratings, you are kicked off with no appeal process. Uber does not care whether the complaints are legitimate. Similar problems happen to a small fraction of users on Google Adwords, eBay, and other company-owned marketplaces who ultimately care about their own profit instead of justice. As public markets are replaced with private marketplaces, I think the loss of due process is not something that we should give up without some forethought.
Law of conservation of modularity (2010)
@skriticos2: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141203050450-7...
It's not a bad argument in some ways, you should be required to have proper insurance to operate as an Uber driver.
Seriously, thank you for all the help you've given to those of us who've freely taken it on IRC. I wish you were a Stripe employee, in all honesty.