skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The paper for this research doesn't come out for a few days yet so this article could have just been the title. Nothing of substance in the article except to give a shout-out to the researchers.

TL;DR: "Researchers convert sunlight to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency."
I have yet to see any evidence for this and it's a wild accusation that I'm seeing a lot on HN without merits. Occam's razor applies here as well, with the simplest explanation being that search is a difficult problem to solve. And I've written here before that for non-US users at least, Google's results are vastly better than everything else, so it isn't that competition doesn't exist, but hey, you're free to try and solve this problem in a better way.
And iris? Yikes. Disappointment in an otherwise fantastic program...
> What fundamental limitation of human information storage/processing technology would prevent us from "making sense" of the universe at a general level? By "making sense", I mean coming up with a complete and consistent physical model.

The nature of that fundamental limitation may escape our grasp by definition. The article at least presents the idea that the strange observations of the quantum mechanical universe may sit outside the range of science. I think there's some merit to the idea that humans, not as "willful" entities, but as groups of particles swept up in a cosmic chain reaction, may face fundamental limitations to the "scope" of what we can grasp about the nature of the universe.

Of course, that could be totally wrong as well.
You seem to be arguing that this isn't the article that you'd like it to be, not that the headline or article is incorrect. You'd like an article on the regulatory environment around Big Data, and this is merely an example of one specific thing one specific Big Data company can do (and has done and is doing).

That doesn't make the article invalid. In fact, this is exactly the sort of article that needs to exist when there isn't a regulatory environment to protect the people - when people have to calculate their interactions with each individual company to ensure it's not going to bite their ass later, they need to know which individual companies are capable of doing what.
Previous HN discussion on the (now deleted) "Rides of Glory" post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8644080

They also seem to have deleted other blog posts that people have criticized, e.g. "Uberdata: How prostitution and alcohol make Uber better" [2].

Internet Archive links:

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140827195715/http://blog.uber....

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120524052917/http://blog.uber....
> If you're giving your data freely to companies, I don't understand what kind of oversight mechanism could or should protect you.

This argument doesn't make much sense to me.

What if I said,

> If you're giving your money freely to banks, I don't understand what kind of oversight mechanism could or should protect you.

I think the crux of the issue is that if I get a car ride with Uber, I have a reasonable expectation that I am paying for the service of a car ride. There is no reasonable expectation on my part that I'm giving them money for a car ride AND ALSO giving them the information about me/my ride to use freely, regardless of what the TOS may say.

The expectation on the customer's part is that ride remain private, much like anything that goes on in the doctor's office. The reality, of course, does not match that expectation, which is why I think there should be some hypothetical oversight mechanism that manages the differences between the customer's expectation and Uber's reality.

Just because Uber has data on me doesn't mean that I have given it to them to do whatever they want with it.
From: http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm#regulate (copied here because I can't add much more than this).

1. Limit what kind of behavioral data websites can store. When I say behavioral data, I mean the kinds of things computers notice about you in passing—your search history, what you click on, what cell tower you're using.

It's very important that we regulate this at the database, not at the point of collection. People will always find creative ways to collect the data, and we shouldn't limit people's ability to do neat things with our data on the fly. But there should be strict limits on what you can save.

2. Limit how long they can keep it. Maybe three months, six months, three years. I don't really care, as long as it's not fifty years, or forever. Make the time scale for deleting behavioral data similar to the half-life of a typical Internet business.

3. Limit what they can share with third parties. This limit should also apply in the event of bankruptcy, or acquisition. Make people's data non-transferable without their consent.

4. Enforce the right to download. If a website collects information about me, I should be allowed to see it. The EU already mandates this to some extent, but it's not evenly enforced.

This rule is a little sneaky, because it will require backend changes on many sites. Personal data can pile up in all kinds of dark corners in your system if you're not concerned about protecting it. But it's a good rule, and easy to explain. You collect data about me? I get to see it.

5. Enforce the right to delete. I should be able to delete my account and leave no trace in your system, modulo some reasonable allowance for backups.

6. Give privacy policies teeth. Right now, privacy policies and terms of service can change at any time. They have no legal standing. For example, I would like to promise my users that I'll never run ads on my site and give that promise legal weight. That would be good marketing for me. Let's create a mechanism that allow this.

7. Let users opt-in if a site wants to make exceptions to these rules. If today's targeted advertising is so great, you should be able to persuade me to sign up for it. Persuade me! Convince me! Seduce me! You're supposed to be a master advertiser, for Christ's sake!

8. Make the protections apply to everyone, not just people in the same jurisdiction as the regulated site. It shouldn't matter what country someone is visiting your site from. Keep it a world-wide web.
This is why I want to just pay for everything with Bitcoin. I gave my credit card to a site (not a subscription site) and they charged me and never delivered. I contacted them and they said they refunded the charge and put in a new order (???). So now I had TWO charges. Why didn't they just ship me the stuff without charging me again? I disputed one charge with the credit card company and the company refunded me after they saw the chargeback. Then a month later they ordered again for me. I had to charge back a second time (and I got a refund back again).

Are you kidding me? The model of "I have your credit card number and the code on the back and I can charge you as many times as I want" is clearly broken.
If plain words don't work, then invent new notation like physics and math do. Its nonsense because there is no "higher" concept. They are expressing pretty conventional concepts ... like for example the simple concept that language and meaning have a cultural context ... a concept which can be expressed both with simple language and simple anecdotes.

You ever notice how the best practitioners of Math, Physics, and Computer Science produce great output in multiple fields. Not just their chosen field. Like they might be 99.99 percentile in one field, and in another field they are 99 percentile. In other words they produce useful and interesting artifacts across a whole slice of human endeavors. Whereas it seems to me these post-modernists mainly focus on one thing ... this post-modern bullshit. And everyone I meet that spends time on this post-modern stuff is pretty third-rate in everything else they do.
A very common need is to do an bunch of independent RPCs. Small wish: Allow returning values from a goroutine, along the lines of "results <- go rpc(args)".
I believe profits and capital gains from foreign entities are taxable in Canada.

Not sure about the Estonian side: you might only pay corporate taxes, not personal.
I've been noticing that comments advocating P2P replacements of sharing economy apps all get downvotes, and no comments explaining why. I'll assume these downvoters are NSA puppets for now.
(setq-default
;; List of configuration layers to load.
dotspacemacs-configuration-layers '(erlang-elixir)
)
Regulation does help protect users in many cases.

For example, around 2009 the US government introduced an act which mandated that whenever a customer pays against credit card debt, the highest interest balance needs to be considered paid first if there are multiple balances at various interest rates. This reduced costs for consumers.

Remember how competition is supposed to solve everything - it did not, all banks were doing the opposite as there was no regulation.
I thought it'd be cheesy, but put on my headphones anyway. It's pretty cool, and very well done.
I like the way that the EU starts from the positions that users have an ownership interest in their data. People can require services to provide them with copies of all personaldata held upon them, and demand the removal of all their personald ata if they terminate their account on the service; in addition there are limits on how much data firms can store on tehir users without explicit opt-ins.

I'm summarizing heavily here, obviously - I haven't lived there for a while so this is neither a nuanced nor a fully current picture. Yes, it limits commercial upside in significant ways, but I think a lot of people here can relate to the idea of a muscular privacy regulator.
I upvoted you because a regulatory response is not really appropriate here. This is exactly the sort of thing the government is terrible at and their involvement will do more harm and good.

But that doesn't mean what Uber is doing is appropriate. What we need is a market response. The NY Times is doing it wrong by asking for "oversight" when they should be using their bully pulpit to encourage Uber's customers to demand that Uber stop retaining this information. The press can be as much a check on the market as it is on the government and that's exactly what they need to be here.

Uber isn't Google. You're paying them money. Companies that think they should get your money and your data can go screw.
Interesting. So "if foo then" would be a valid partial application?
@logn

Not sure the NSA would bother itself with such trivialities. An Uber exec or paid social media expert is the most likely culprit.

Or just your common troll (not that there's much of a difference).
Technology can and will be gamed. So can laws and policies, but but I' think it's naive to assume that social technology that has evolved over thousands of years can be replaced overnight with computer code.
Serious question, how would a decentralised system have dealt with the recent uber driver rape case?
Opportunity for an Uber-like service that destroys your ride data after you have reached your destination (why do they need it after that, anyway?)
For those interested in learning to play, Kiseido Go Server (https://www.gokgs.com) has a fantastic community of users - from total beginners to professional players. It also has an intro you can skim, but don't spend too much time with it - just like programming, the best way to learn Go is to dive in headfirst.

(Don't make the mistake of practicing against a computer to start. AI plays very differently from humans, and you'll develop weird habits.)

If you're in New York and interested in an in-person game, send me an email - ben at datanitro dot com.
>In JS this is just another object, like any other object.

You are mistaken, "this" is not an object nor a variable, it's a keyword and behaves differently than variable scope. Consider closures for example.
From Scum to Scrum: Your Guide to Agile Methodologies
The struggle to understand what is a primitive has to take into account what the instruction set architecture (ISA) is for the machine that will be running the system.

This article doesn't even consider the idea that the LISP may be running on any exotic hardware at all.

It might be instructive to look at the ISA for the Lisp Machine from the 1980s.
I saw this on a TaskRabbit thread too.

Edit: and they do concern themselves with shaping opinion via social media. I imagine they very much enjoy mining ride sharing data. But yeah maybe they don't care about HN comments. Relevant links:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110318/02153313534/us-mi...
Looking forward to comparing this vs Scribe by the Guardian! Which is already a very good, somewhat lightweight HTML text editor. I say 'somewhat' because I find the installation and their plugin architecture rather clunky.

Squire (don't know if the similar naming is by co-incidence) and it's one 10KB file seems very appealing.

/happy Fastmail customer
Probably not overnight, but possibly years and decades.

There's no need to eliminate social behavior, that's arguably the entire 'point'. What we likely can do is, identify places where code is more appropriate and use it.
I think we should separate out some developer documentation from the main documentation and put this there. This is a common question on a new contributor's mind, and having something like this written up in our developer documentation will probably go a long way towards putting them at ease.

The number of open PRs is now large enough, that it is not possible for any one person to chase them, and things occasionally do slip by.
No, I don't agree, I never managed to "study" programming using an editor and a compiler. I always had to have a reason. I read, poked away, tested, got burned, read, poked etc.

That kept me focusing. And, I learned it and mostly got better grades than the "student" types as well. (B.Sc Computer Systems).

Generally it seems for some of us it is easier to focus once things make sense and has a purpose.

"Studying" seems to be for people with infinte lifespans and neverending funding, I never had any of those and I guess it affects my learning style ;-)
> But when does this grief stop?

It doesn't, but we get used to it. I take the same view as Douglas Crockford:

I think there has to be something seriously wrong with you in order to do this work. A normal person, once they’ve looked into the abyss, will say, “I’m done. This is stupid. I’m going to do something else.” But not us, ‘cause there’s something really wrong with us.[1]

I'm pretty sure this "brokenness" can be trained, but tossing someone in the deep end is not the way to do it.

1. From Programming Style & Your Brain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taaEzHI9xyY#t=26m50s
That's better. 65K gates is probably close to 240K transistors. And an 8051 is probably close to 5K transistors, not 60K transistors.
I wanted to reply to your response to me, but...

> What oversight mechanism can possibly protect users from themselves?

The idea isn't, to me at least, to protect users from themselves, but to restrict the ways that companies can use/distribute data collected from the user.

Personally (and I obviously haven't thought this through/deeply in the last 10 minutes or so), I think something like HIPAA for transportation information might be appropriate. It would apply not specifically to Uber, but to any kind of transportation data collected by any company (say, self-driving cars, public transportation, taxi companies, etc.) and would place restrictions on how they can distribute or publicize that data and what kind of permissions they would need from whom.
This is dangerously brash and unsupported conjecture unless you've got relevant studies readily available.
One Woman’s Drive to Revolutionize Medical Testing
Interface Foundry (http://interfacefoundry.com) - New York City [LOCAL]

======= Front-End Developer [Fulltime] ========

Build out social widgets and interactive map themes for our mobile front-end and our bubble builder CMS geo plotting admin interface.
---- Knowledge of (or eagerness to learn): Angular.js (Javascript), CSS3, HTML5, PhoneGap, Git
---- Nice to have: Leaflet.js

======= About Us ========

Our first product Bubbl.li organizes the information relevant to you and makes it easily accessible when you need it. Our technology creates “databubbles” that are pinned to specific places and times. Users inside a databubble can access available information and have it personalized to their needs.

=========================

Interface Foundry is a Public Benefit Corporation. We believe in open source and transparency.

Our culture embraces diversity, we value a collaborative environment with lots of challenges that require creative solutions. We like walking-breaks, snacks and cats. We’re flexible about time as long as you get work done.

You’ll be joining us in our office in Flatiron, Manhattan NYC. When employees join full time, they receive:

• Stock options with vesting interest
• Health insurance
• Flexible scheduling

======= Contact ========

Interested? Send us a note:
hello@interfacefoundry.com
I use it on Mac OS X even if it's not as good as under Linux. Is there any chance it will get improved under Mac OS X ?
They don't seem to care much about their users. I had an account I hadn't used in years, long enough that the credit card associated with it was expired. This resulted in my account being locked in a way that required me to contact their helpdesk. After telling me to do the equivalent of power cycling my machine by going through their password reset screens, which I'd already tried, they told me that to restore my account I'd need to email them a picture of my driver's license. This leads me to believe that their support database is probably a goldmine for identity thieves and generally those databases are not exactly Fort Knox.
What about Go or Node make it more designed around concurrency than Haskell? It sounds like you are trying to say Erlang, Go, and Node have "first class concurrency". I'd agree that Erlang does, but I'd say that Node and Go do not. I'm almost tempted to wager the same is true for Lisp, but don't have enough experience with concurrency in Lisp.

Furthermore I'd wager that Go and Node have nothing in the realm of concurrency that Haskell doesn't have. If I'm wrong, I look forward to finding out ;)
Every single recent (and not so recent) item about Uber screams ethically & morally bankrupt scumbags who would soon as throw you under a bus (or an Uber) if it meant making a fast buck.

1) In the New Delhi Uber rape case -they failed to verify the driver who was a repeat offender, they had no call number and no way to access drive logs from India.

2) As others have pointed out - the concept of privacy at Uber is tragically laughable (Rides-of-glory, God Mode, Using riders info for non-ride purposes etc etc)

3) Playing dirty with competitors is encouraged

4) The VP who boasted of hiring a hit team to dig up dirt on Journalists families is still working at Uber after saying this in a very public forum.

And this is just the recent stuff.
Why anyone would patronize this scummy company is really beyond comprehension.

[1] http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/after-vi...
Those two things are very related. Knowledge of people having sexual indiscretions can be very powerful leverage to manipulate politicians (and others) with.
I enjoyed this comment in issue 0x00:

I met a professor of arcane degree
Who said: Two vast and handwritten parsers
Live in the wild. Near them, in the dark
Half sunk, a shattering exploit lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those papers read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the student that fed:
And on the terminal these words appear:
"My name is Turing, wrecker of proofs:
Parse this unambigously, ye machine, and despair!"
Nothing besides is possible. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level root shells fork away.
-- Inspired by Edward Shelley

https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo00.pdf (page 5)
A well discussed and related story from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8694940
This is a ridiculously absurd attempt at excusing fraud.

It is fraud, there should be no mistaking that. If you take someone's money with absolutely no intention of fulfilling the service or product they're purchasing, it is fraud, period.

It doesn't take a technical founder to log in to Stripe and shut down the payment processing. Or to call Stripe and get it turned off. It doesn't take a technical founder to alter the settings on the domain name and blank it that way either. I know people that can barely use email that can change settings on a domain.

It might cost $200 to $500 - worst case scenario - to hire someone to take down the consumer facing part of the site (or plainly neuter it). More than likely they could reach out to any number of contacts and get it down for a lot less than that. Don't have a few hundred dollars? Well then your responsibility is to go crawling to your family, your friends, Techstars, whomever to get it. Just to save their reputation, I'd be willing to bet Techstars would have helped in getting this shut down had they been asked.

There is no excuse for what they've done.
Sample thank you letter to help save time
Yes DuckDuckDrive will be out soon lol kidding
Uber Hired Repeat Offender: 5 Major Lapses in Delhi Rape Case
I used to love Uber. But all the stories made me more and more unhappy with using them, even though the service itself continued to be great. This "we could spend a million dollars" boast was the last straw and got me to delete the app from my phone entirely.

Now I use Lyft. I'm not sure if it's the best service. But I can't recall the last time I saw a bad PR story come out about Lyft, so I feel much more comfortable using them than Uber.
The market doesn't tend to work that way. Maybe some people will avoid Uber when they are actually having that one night stand....but you think significant numbers will boycott the service altogether on principle? I've never known that to work.
I'd like to be clear that I totally agree with you: data given to a service you pay for should remain private.

All I'm saying is that if you enact regulation to try to enforce this, you're going to cause a lot of unintended consequences. It may even prevent the Airbnb's and Dropbox's of the future from forming altogether.

Are you sure adding another law is the right response?
It's easy to say it should be publicised, but I'm not sure how someone can do that if the infected organisation specifically asks the antivirus company not to publicly discuss the malware, like what appears to have been the case with F-Secure. (https://mobile.twitter.com/mikko/status/536959936476221440)

Sure, they could just go ahead and disclose it against the customers express wishes, but how many would hire their services in the future if there's no expectation of customer confidentiality?

Edit: There likely is an NDA in place even before externals are allowed in, so breaching it might invite some additional problems than just image issues.
Ralph Baer, 'father of video games,' passes away
Understanding scopes in angularjs
But this is our official announcement of the DCOS project. The other post was about Ben's ideas that helped drive the creation.
Name.com Mail is a nightmare
Why is the choice between this and war? Where's the option of neither?
30 years old here, started off with TI-BASIC on a TI-83 that I beat the crap out of.
Its funny he cited Vox Media as a place where innovation was happening. I think their "Latest News" column for 12/08/2014 speaks volumes to what Hughes plans on turning TNR into. Every headline is made to be clickbait.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/90gd333hff849ih/Screenshot%202014-...