skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The familiar statist's mantra: That red tape is preventing all hell from breaking loose!

I suppose if it weren't for government regulations we'd still be living in caves and dying at age 30.
Very few people start consulting when immediately out of the womb. One's first client or few clients is often sourced by one's personal network: an old day job, a college buddy who went on to work somewhere, someone you met at the local meetup for Pythonistas, etc.

After one is actually working as a consultant, one can fix the "I have no testimonials or referrals" problem fairly quickly. Do great work. Explicitly ask clients, as part of your aftercare (or before), to give you testimonials and/or referrals. e.g. "I'm really happy that this engagement seems to have worked well for everyone. Over the next couple weeks, I'll make myself available to the team if they have any questions about $PROJECT. Naturally, I'm also going to be doing the consulting rainmaking dance. I've really enjoyed working with you -- do you know anyone else who would enjoy working with me?"

There are a few other methods which work in a repeatable fashion:

a) Go to events populated by people who can say yes to consulting engagements. If you cannot be invited to these for whatever reason or if they don't exist in your area, throw the event yourself. Do presentations which relate in any way to the sort of work that you do and then ask people at the end of the presentation to continue the conversation offline if they found it interesting. You will get 5+ coffee dates per 50 people you present to. Work on converting 1~2 to clients.

b) Figure out who should be buying your services. Cold call or cold email them. This strikes engineers as Black Magick Most Foul, but it is actually pretty routine in business, and clearly works in a reproducible fashion. Business owners mostly will not be offended if you send them a considered, personalized, one paragraph pitch to explore business together. Selling and being sold to is what we do all day.

c) I hesitate to mention it, since it is a long-ball sort of strategy and typically will not help you pack Q1 with engagements when starting from a standing start in December 2014, but putting a few writeups of what you do for a living on the Internet (you can use WordPress for this but, crucially, you're not shipping blog posts) plus an email capture opportunity can get you a lot of leads over the long run. Virtually anyone on HN who has ever shipped software with a business impact could spend four hours writing about that experience and get a handful of leads every month from now to forever for that investment. Assuming one's consultancy is known to work given people to sell services to, this strikes me as a good use of one's time between engagements.
The opposite is however true - completely unregulated carrier countries - places like India -- the result is barely function death traps driven by terrible drivers, resulting in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of passengers every year.

Taxi regulations, bus regulations, charter van regulations are all there to save lives and prevent a race towards the bottom economy of transportation. And when a mother and child's only chance of getting into town in on the back of a death machine - these regulations start to look very good indeed.
That's not his point. His point was a) Uber and Lyft are illegal and b) if we were to let this happen, he would personally want the team that was good negotiating partners, as opposed to the thugs and a*holes on the other team.

(edited for proper pronoun use.)
Yeh Kya Baat Huye – 5th December 2014
> I believe you're the first to complain about it

I did not complain about it, the Parent post did, I simply clarified a point you seemed to not understand. But now that makes it twice it's been brought up.

> So, again - if you open an issue we will address it.

I do believe it's been brought to your attention here sufficiently for it to be addressed without my involvement.
Why you should be (or not) a freelancer
Calculated Risk – The Future's So Bright
It means that the poem is not very resilient. It's pretty easy to misremember.
Professor Grimm's death is a horrible tragedy and a major blow to the community. He will be greatly missed by those who were fortunate enough to know him.

Perhaps institutions that issue grants should require that the receiving organization ban "quotas" from their internal policies.

Condolences to Prof. Grimm's family and friends.
http://httparchive.org/interesting.php
In some cases that is true. Health and safety regulations have been instrumental in extending life expectancy. Building codes have been essential in creating safe habitable cities. Without those, we'd be dying in fire traps with dysentery and TB at 30.
The benefits of have an online presence for small business
Maybe you've seen the "China 2049" adverts that popped up everywhere around China a few months ago promoting, among other things, an equal standard of living with Western countries by the 100th anniversary of the republic's founding. I guess they're designed to keep Chinese motivated to grow the economy further.
>The insurance becomes invalidated and so neither the driver nor the passenger are covered.

It seems like this is the true crux of the problem. Would the costs of commercial auto insurance be prohibitively expensive?

Perhaps Uber could get into the business of cheap commercial auto insurance as well...
This is exactly what I came to point out. Varnish was pushed in a very arrogant manner insulting other software that was just plain better. While they were trash talking squid and pretending the kernel could just magically know how to do everything perfectly for any arbitrary userland workload, we were consistently getting better performance from squid.
A predominately meat diet uses about 10 times the water and energy to produce.

Stop the free water subsidies to big agro businesses, and let the free market price of water affect meat prices.
>nothing we do can guarantee a long and healthy life.

I don't think anybody who works out is under the assumption that they will live to be 130+ years old.

We're all very well aware of babies with Cancer these days. Anything can happen.

But one thing's for certain, being active certainly prolongs life. That much I think we can all be sure of at this point.

How many true couch potatoes do you know that have made it past the ripe old age of 90? 80 even?
who says they haven't?

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Victim-of-alleged-Uber...

edit: yes it happens in taxis too, but in that case it's pretty clear that the taxi company has liability. not so clear if it happens in an uber. see: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/09/30/uber-driver...
> These PEER-TO-PEER TAXI SERVICES (as opposed to genuine
> ridesharing services) are illegal because privately insured
> vehicles cannot be used for commercial purposes.

The insurance thing is a red herring. Even if Uber were to demonstrate that the commercial insurance they purchase is in effect at all times when the vehicle is being used for commercial purposes, Uber drivers still wouldn't enjoy the same rights and privileges as taxi drivers do.

> Lyft and Uber try to get around this by describing passenger
> payments for these commercially offered rides as
> 'donations.'

I don't think Uber describes passenger payments as donations. Where did you read/hear this?

> And why legislate taxis? Because of the commercial abuse
> of the common carrier, in this case the roads.
> What does this abuse look like? Too many users.

I have not heard this argument in favour of taxi regulation before. Can you tell us more? (Intuitively, fewer taxis means more incentive to own a car, which means more cars on the road, and more car journeys overall as, if I have a car, then getting on my bicycle for a short journey is that much less likely.)
I have a DO VM that I use for a few hobby apps but mostly for a Tor relay. $10/mo plan. I've done my best to throttle the bandwidth usage within the plan bounds but can't say for sure whether or not I've been entirely successful at that. Nevertheless -> zero fuss from DO, nothing, not a single complaint or $.01 added to my bill. I don't think I (or the Tor user community) would have fared nearly was well with Amazon.
I haven't read that paper in ages, but Davis's points as I remember them aren't really fundamental. For example you can easily do IFS codecs in a wavelets domain and capture detail that zero trees miss, while still taking advantage of the energy concentration in that domain. This shows up in the focus on "fractal block coders" but the blocks here are not necessary.

Not that I'm arguing for IFS codecs, mind, but Davis did miss the point a bit.
Uber seems to be doing a pretty good job of providing a quality, safe service not just without regulations but despite them.

The regulations as they stand seem to primarily protect the entrenched businesses, not consumers. And our current legislative does not appear to provide any sort of reasonable mechanism to modify said regulations without first flipping the bird and demonstrating clear, intense consumer demand.
not true, there are a few mapping services that use data from CL but use snippets that link back to their source instead of full descriptions for example.

this is a not-for-profit fun idea that I hacked together for the windsurfing community.
I think the best-practices that can be learned here is that if you are going into emerging territory with a technology that is challenging the regulator limits, it's better to be the Lyft than it is to be the Uber.

In fact, I think this is one of Lyfts strategic advantage - that they aren't Uber, and they let Uber take all the hits. The costs of those hits must be realized somewhere in Uber (as in hiring David P.). Whereas Lyft can essentially sit back, garner goodwill, and enter a the market as a full competitor without expending the same resources. Now realize, that they can only do that because Uber also exist, and Uber does some of the dirtier work. If Lyft on it's own was trying to open new territories, they'd probably be a bit more like Uber. But it's a good lesson in creating a competitive advantage from unwanted competition. Kudos to Lyft for seizing that.
Regulation is how we, the people (via our government), get to have a say in how companies' that provide us critical services like food, healthcare, housing, finances, and (yes) transportation are run. It's a check on exploitation. Regulations are often not perfect, but they are important.
BeautifulSoup3 -- and .select() in Python which gives me fancy jQuery-esqe selectors.
Also known as "product".
That said, the JPEG decoding is still done with native code as opposed to interpreted JS.
Why developers don’t make millions of dollars
Portland should seek an injunction. Let uber try that 'laws don't apply to us, we move fast and break things' attitude with a judge. They'll quickly learn how broad judicial contempt powers are.
CSS on Diet: a preprocessor for designers
The Psychology Behind Serial Obsession
Theres 8-core i7s with 20MB L3 cache now.
When you specify the types of the numbers used, so that you are testing the transitivity of a single instance of Eq, you will find that transitivity does hold in this case.

a :: Double
a = 2^53

b :: Double
b = 2.0^53

c :: Double
c = 2^53 + 1

main :: IO ()
main = do
print $ a == b -- True
print $ b == c -- True
print $ a == c -- True
btw, i highly recommend windsurfing for everyone here. it's one of the funnest sports i've ever tried and lots of other programmers seem to be involved (that i've met at least). very affordable to get started. people usually give away free but old long boards and sails from the 80s. they will get you going.

the windsurfing fit is also great, you feel good and a bit buzzed from the adrenaline rush. today i learned a jibe (a way to turn) that i practiced for 2 hours.
The transport industry is not well regulated in India. As a result, every other month prices go up. So much so that the cost has doubled for some routes. And Uber is poised to make a killing here. One example is how they charge 100 Rupees (about $2) as 'toll fee' for rides to the Airport. The interesting part is there is NO TOLL whatsoever if the cab is in and out within 10mins. Even if you exceed 10 mins, the actual charge is 65 rupees (around $1). Flat 100 Rupee charge is actually too steep when you consider that the entire ride cost you a mere 250 Rupees excluding the toll fee.

Repeated contact with customer support at Uber is like talking to a wall. Out of the 4 contacts I had with them, I got a response only once. They didn't respond even when I literally BEGGED them to. In a sense you feel helpless with these corporates with no-face and corportes that take their customers for granted. Even though I have 1200 Rupees ($20) worth of free rides with Uber, I have since switched to local competitors. I simply don't trust them. Esp in a country like India where they aren't and won't be held accountable for liabilities.

Free market / unregulated market won't do consumers any good. Uber solves a lot of pain points and is an excellent product-- but the Government needs to step in with newer but accommodating regulations-- perhaps an open API for ride sharing, and a standard ride-fare API, and such. I don't see that ever happening in India to be honest.
iPhone 7 Concept Features Edge-to-Edge Display – See Photos
Uber does provide insurance for UberX drivers: http://www.scribd.com/doc/234793312/Ridesharing-Insurance-Po...

I don't know what it covers, or whether it is sufficient.
As to rights and privileges - should they? They are essentially illegal and unregulated. What rights and privileges should they get? Should they able to charge fares?

As to donations - Lyft regularly called them donations before they changed them to payment:

"“Starting tomorrow, we’re transitioning from donations to regular payments in Seattle, providing increased transparency for passengers and greater peace of mind for drivers,” Lyft wrote in an email to customers."

Common carrier abuse isn't dictated by the same terms as a free market economy precisely because the resource / infrastructure is subsidized. This is why regulatory limits are used.

And as to having too many private cars - well that's certainly a problem we are having, and a problem that places like London are trying to address with their Congestion charge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge
I had a family member attacked by a cabbie. He was actually mere hours away from getting away with it too because a) The passenger had no record of the transaction and b) The cab service recycles their camera data every few days.

The way I see it, there is no guarantee of safety in either situation. You never know if your driver is a criminal or crazy. But services like Uber seem considerably more safe: There is extreme record keeping, user ratings, and no direct money changing hands.
Right, but a quick search also turns up numerous stories of traditional taxi drivers attacking/abusing passengers. I think it would be interesting to see statistically significant evidence that one model is demonstrably safer than the other.
And for you downvoting fucks, wake up and smell what real world competition is like.
I agree completely. I've argued vehemently that the largest single most visible change that we are going to see in the next 10 - 20 years is our transportation structure. Private cars, ride sharing, valet parking, privatized parking, elimination of public parking, driver-less cars, city cores reoriented around public transportation hubs and cycling infrastructures - the transportation cities of the future are going to look as different to them, as horse and carriage cities, and manual stop lights look to us.
That's a fantastic idea, but it's far too practical and sensible for California. It doesn't include any feel-good meddling or opportunities for kickbacks for the powerful and connected.
> I suppose if it weren't for government regulations we'd still be living in caves and dying at age 30.

Probably not, but we might be living in rickety homes, eating food that's mainly sawdust, and working eighty hours per week for almost no money. Some of us would still be slaves. A few of us would be fantastically wealthy and powerful, but even they would be limited by living in a violent world populated by uneducated and over-exploited masses incapable of doing things like getting an education and finding their own passions that lead to innovation, invention, and creativity.

The pleasant life you live today is due to government regulations. You know how you can shop at the grocery store without fearing that something you buy might literally kill you? You know the drugs you take for headaches? For whatever ailments you have? It's nice knowing there's some science behind those, right? Nice knowing they won't kill you, right? Speed limits? Are they a good idea? You might be more likely to think so if you had kids and wanted to feel safe allowing them to play outside. Flying to an awesome tech conference anytime soon? You'd probably prefer the plane didn't drop out of the sky, right?

Etc.
They are a hacker organization, so to speak. They have a notorious reputation, they are known for publicly demo of security flaws and protest for several causes. They even acquired and published the fingerprints of a German minister in 2008!

Some of their actions can be construed as extremist. Why they act like anti-spiderman- all the power and no responsibility of the consequences. Their way of protest of shaming the organization and exposing vulnerabilities is what got them banned.

P.S. I feel any post against them is down-voted(terminated) with extreme prejudice. This should not be because they are hackers and this is hackernews. And I understand hacker could also mean a benign person with thirst for knowledge. This has more to do with a person's moral compass.
The best coders seem to have the simplest websites.
Where the Growth in Cloud and Enterprise Software: Marc Benioff Marc Andreessen
> And as to having too many private cars - well that's certainly a problem we are having, and a problem that places like London are trying to address with their Congestion charge.

It's funny you bring that up as an example, because:

1. The congestion charge does not apply to London taxis. These are the same cars that spend the largest proportion of each day within the congestion charging zone, and so contribute the most to congestion.

2. These same taxis are allowed to use many 'bus lanes', thus slowing down buses (genuine public transport) and using parts of the scarce road infrastructure which is unavailable to higher-density vehicles (picture a family of 4 in a private car, vs. a taxi whose average occupancy is ~2 people including the driver).

3. London has 'minicabs' which are also commercial carriers. They fall under different regulation as taxis, and must be pre-booked (can't be hailed on the street). What's the sensible argument for allowing them to operate (using the roads), having specific regulation and insurance requirements in place, yet not allowing them to (i) pick up passengers waiting on the street, or (ii) using bus lanes, like London taxis?

4. London taxis are _expensive_. I lived in London for 31 of the first 35 years of my life, and I can count on my fingers (not including thumbs) the number of times I hailed a taxi in London.
Eat your organic strawberry because it tastes good, and because you don't have to envision farm workers being sprayed by pesticides from planes when you take a nice big bite. Run because you enjoy it (and maybe it's good for you). Use that handwavy statistic for dinner-party justification of things you like anyway, like red wine, chocolate, butter, and broccoli.

You're right that nothing we can do will guarantee a long and healthy life. If nothing else, we could be hit by a drunk or texting driver while crossing the street. So enjoy the strawberry for the taste.
If "real world competition" smells like harassment of journalists and generally questionable business practices, then it sure smells awful.
Fixing our water shortage with energy consuming desalination plants will just continue the global warming negative feedback loop. Better would be to simply change what farmers are growing to conserve water.

* Edit: Why the downvotes? Look, solving water shortages with desalination plants, is like trying to fix air pollution with air filtration systems. Unless you're powering the plant with 100% clean energy, you're just further contributing to the core problem.

And even if you're powering the plant with 100% clean energy, that clean energy could instead be used to displace fossil fuels elsewhere if water was conserved instead of desalinated to continue business as usual.

Am I wrong?
> photo of beautiful young Lena Söderberg

You are either subtly trolling, or have an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance going on here. You both objectify her by using those adjectives ("beautiful, young") AND THEN go on to state that use of a female model is sexist. Is use of a well-dressed male model sexist? If not, then your entire PREMISE is, in fact, sexist! Not to mention this photo is ENTIRELY asexual. Are you suggesting we avoid use of human models entirely to dodge sexism? Good luck with that.
"9 women can't make a baby in 9 months, for example."

Very true. However, 9 women and 1 man are more likely to give you a baby in 9 months that 1 women and 1 man.
<cynical non-USA-centric view>
From _outside_ "your" healthcare and welfare systems, it appears that for a not insignificant number of people "living in caves and dying at age 30" is not some hyperbolic comparison to some distant neanderthal past - but something that's a lot closer to their reality that the privileges of the 1%...

(not that "government reguations" are "the good guy" here though...)
All good points in Uber's favor. I think you are right that with the right technology, so regulatory requirements disappear. I especially liked Uber's dissection of the Las Vegas Tunnel fiasco. Technology, when used correctly, was superior to regulation, and penalties.

https://medium.com/@blakeross/uber-gov-29db5fdff372
I visited India recently. In Mumbai, I found 'Meru Cabs' (www.merucabs.com) offered a great service, similar to Uber. Their app isn't as amazing as Uber's but the cars were clean, and the drivers were courteous.
That's actually the biggest problem with wind power; when you have excess power, you can't do anything with it except curtail your production and lock your turbines so they can't spin.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/01...

To be able to put that power to a good use, while also still realizing revenue (even at a lower per kwh rate) is win-win.

Wind power, without subsidies, is already as low as 3-4 cents/kwh. If the rate of install continues, price will continue to decline, and we'll have even more cheap wind available in the US for large-scale projects such as this.
Rice is largely (~95%) grown in the Sacramento Valley, which has plenty of water for it [0].

California produces 82% of the world's almonds [1].

California is a big ag state for crops requiring irrigation because we have a lot of water (relatively), good weather, and damned good farmers. People would do well to start thinking about California's water problems with the assumption that the farmers have thought about it a lot more than they have.

[0] http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article2598509.html

[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-california-almonds-201...
One-time password Go library and terminal authenticator
So, you can't really just appeal to the author's authority without addressing a single one of the parents points.

Is he wrong? Do the statements from the article make sense to you? Because the stuff he quoted looked like a bunch of nonsense.