skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except it's not really banning a product or a service. Taxis still run in the city and Uber still runs in the city. Uninsured rides for money is what remains banned. The company would have to ensure that Uber drivers have the correct insurance. It's not a p2p lift share scheme, it's a business.

In the UK it is illegal for a mini-cab (not the standard black/yellow taxi, hail taxi) to take you without booking. Their insurance only covers pre-booked fares.
'Science fiction' was the wrong term, 'science mythology' would have been more appropriate.
Show HN: Get to grips with NSTimer in Swift
So that is why this looks like PLT's documentation format.
I use Uber in Paris - I've always wondered what the insurance was for Uberpop - and although outright banning it may be too extreme, I'm happy to see this part of the "sharing" economy more regulated.

I think Uber still has a lot going for it specifically in Paris: convenience, accepting credit cards, etc, without having to skirt around the law...
Why doesn't the Metro run later in Paris? If I remember correctly from my last visit there around 2005 the Metro shutdown at 1 or 2AM.

Maintenance? Cost? Politics? All of the above? It seems odd for a truly world-class city such as Paris to not have a 24/7 subway system.
It's mostly a matter of lobbying... Public safety, assurance, etc... if it were the problem, they'd ask drivers to show their assurance card to customers, and warn customers. But if they only want to ban Uber so satisfy taxi drivers, any excuse will do.

The French press even mentions that Uber was banned in India after a driver raped a client. What's the point? FUD.
Will they ban every profession with at least one raper in it?

Btw, french politicians were convicted of rape too... lol
"We did that Uber shit before it was cool." -- The airlines.

Another thing that surprises most people is how expensive business and first class are, relative to coach. After all, if you're only getting 1.5-2x as much space, it doesn't seem fair that you'd have to pay 10x prices. The truth is that many of those seats are filled via upgrades to frequent fliers and more fairly priced in that view. But someone who asks for an assured first-class seat (which is where the 5-10x premium is charged) is identifying himself as a captive buyer. About half of the first-class seats are upgrades (especially to make room, because airlines often overbook) given that day, and those are cheap or free, but the other half are a mix of business travelers under time pressure, invited conference speakers whose flights are booked by a third-party, and people with disabilities. While people complain about the "assholes" in first class getting marginally better treatment, a surprising percentage of the people up there aren't rich at all, but have disabilities (e.g. back and knee problems) and can't fly coach, and those people fly once a year (!!) at most, because they can barely afford it. Perversely, the disabled guy of modest means is going to see a higher fare for a first-class seat than a business traveler on a corporate rate.

Oddly enough, air travel is getting to the point where airlines are intentionally making coach travel worse to make up for a decline of first- and business-class passengers since 2008. While one might think that the purpose of the checked bag fees is to make a little extra money (and that's part of it) there's a much larger gain in filling up the overhead bins (thanks to those horrid checked-bag fees, overhead bins always fill up early) and then selling early boarding for $50 per ticket. Waiting spaces at many terminals have been deliberately neglected for acoustics and outlets, to push people into buying first-class tickets just to have access to the lounges. Natural demand for first class seats hasn't recovered since 2007 and, even with the economy back, it won't, so air travel is now an experience where unpleasantness is deliberately induced.
I live within the city limits of Austin, and I frequently hear coyotes (and nearby residents lose pets to them). When I lived on the east coast, there would occasionally be a deer encounter. People don't normally think of whitetail deer as aggressive, but during the fall rut, the bucks can be pretty territorial.
Gary Marcus on the Future of Artificial Intelligence
I was hoping for something that explained the part where they get you to pay a higher fare by tracking you on the Web. But maybe an insider site like this wouldn't be willing to talk about that.

There are many sites that describe this happening, such as [1]. And I've seen it happen to me: a fare would go up by $50 while I was searching, and opening a private browsing window would make it go back down.

[1] http://www.halfwayanywhere.com/budget-travel/your-guide-to-c...
In my (only a few days) experience with UberPop in Paris... it was horrible. I've used Uber (various service types) in a few cities, and most of all use them regularly in London. I think I'm close to adding them to my list of companies I just don't want to give business to, but that's a whole other barrel of worms.

I spent a week in Paris last month, and while I'd normally ignore an UberPop level, my hotel was down a straight road to the place I was going every day that week, and with UberPop I exactly hit the minimum (€4), whereas paying more than double that I felt guilty enough to walk the 10-15min..

I don't think I've ever had such consistently bad experiences with any taxi service, be it modern or old, global or local. All the UberPop drivers had no GPS, or GPS that didn't work. All had trouble finding me to collect, despite Uber's seemingly straight-forward system. I had to give directions (not just "my hotel's round the next corner", but directions for full longer journeys), luckily my French is just good enough...

After a few trips I stopped trying to save money and went back to UberX and UberBerline. All sorted after that (a couple of language-caused issues, but that's my fault for being English in Paris and not speaking French as well as I'd like!)
Working in the U.S., even on odesk, without a proper visa is illegal.
More than fair point. Craft beers usually do have a higher alcohol percentage though, so they would actually get you drunk 'better'. Taste would be subjective however. Personally I'd be 50/50 on getting drunk, having a nice drink, no reason you can't have both :)

The point being, if all substances were legalised, I think we all could easily see there being a wide range of branded drugs that might offer the same base experience with different subtleties to it. Longer and harder or short and sweet etc. You don't think so?
Hey, sorry for the delay on this. That's not quite how natural selection works, but it's a very common line of thinking. When making an evolutionary argument, you can't make "top down" arguments. You have to look at it from a "bottom up" perspective.

Lets analyze the scenario where individuals don't die by aging. So we have some members of the species from generation 1 who grow up, then reproduce. In generation 2, there are some that have mutations that make them more suitable for the environment and some that make them less suitable. The less suitable ones are outcompeted and don't survive, the normal ones mostly group up to survive, and the ones with beneficial mutations outcompete all the others, leading to the deaths of some of the ones with the "original" genes, and procreate. This then happens again and again with beneficial mutations and they eventually becoming ubiquitous in the population.

There's just no way that an individual member of the species with a mutation that gives it a definite lifespan has a fitness advantage over the others, all else being equal. What's more likely is that immortality is not necessary to pass on genes, so it simply never developed because it would involve many complex systems, the individual components of which would not have conferred enough of a fitness advantage on their own to become universal in a population. And since the natural environment is harsh and predatorial, most animals don't die of old age anyway, which again limits the usefulness of an unlimited potential lifespan.
10 Incentives for Entrepreneurs to Bootstrap Their Startup
Alan Kay disagrees that objects exist to 'encapsulate state'. I agree with him. They also encapulsate behaviour. While it's difficult to get a precise overview of Kay's definition (he never gave them explicitly), this page does a good job of collecting the various bits: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlanKaysDefinitionOfObjectOriented

Notable for the "behaviour and state":

3. Objects have their own memory (in terms of objects).
4. Every object is an instance of a class (which must be an object).
5. The class holds the shared behavior for its instances (in the form of objects in a program list)

But my point is that I don't agree that an object is "a value that maps names to stuff". I bet even Alan Kay would disagree, seeing as he was a proponent of the Actor model style of working, where objects exchange messages instead of method calls or values. In that case, there are no names to map, there is incoming data that matches a protocol. The object itself determines what behaviour to enact on its own state. Seeing an object as just values and methods is too simplistic, and at the same time too vague to mean anything.

And more importantly, as a first sentence to explain what an object is, it's misleading and will raise a lot more questions later.
I'm guessing the cost of staff factors into it. Some Paris Metro lines are ATO, but still operator run. I can't speak to the SNCF lines, but I imagine since they're prone to striking...
Indeed! :)

I may well give in to Pinboard while it's still a lifetime rate, but apparently my needs are so simple that the delicious drama didn't really faze me.
Give Pedestal another chance
Personally, this taught me that with time we all forgot what was provided by old platforms. It's a strange feeling. RyanAir for instance, provides 20$ air tickets... but you can't have more than 1 luggage, and you won't get served food, toilets aren't free, etc etc. Makes you realize that older companies prices aren't complete fluff, but we just forget what's included in their service. Until we need them.

Same for new 'disruptive' startups. You don't pay as much as a Taxi, but it's a random guy, may have insurance, may know how to drive safely, etc etc.. Seems like ensuring all this features to be stable is what drove the cost high in the first place.

Cycles.
>Banning dangerous and illegal services is fine

Things that are banned are always described as "dangerous and illegal".
Marmaris ucuz Oteller
Stories can't have both urls and text, so you need to pick one. If you keep the url, you can always post your text as a comment in the thread.
“Surge pricing is automated” - @Uber_Sydney
"The tax burden has been shifted to the middle class."

That does not correspond with the latest news I've seen: http://www.aei.org/publication/new-cbo-study-shows-rich-dont...
Got fed up with other password generators so I made my own
In Safari, for "native" Pinboard integration across any browser connected via iCloud, I make a favorites bar folder with primary category tags as individual bookmarklets. This shows up as a dropdown menu in Safari UI for Favorites.

Then I can bookmark and tag anything into a primary category with a single click. The bookmarklets look like this:

javascript:q=location.href;p=document.title;void(t=open('https://pinboard.in/add?later=yes&tags=vod&noui=yes&jump=close&url='+encodeURIComponent(q)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(p),'Pinboard','toolbar=no,width=100,height=100'));t.blur();

In addition to tagging the item, this is also archiving it for future reference. Don't ignore the archive, it's worth the $25 if you save even a single needed reference from bit rot.
Good. It's about time. We really ought to be working to bring this about: people should be freed from their godawful jobs to do something enjoyable and meaningful with their lives.
things usually get ugly with projection (one class = one select) or class reuse (mapping)

this is code -> sql string -> exec -> code (mapping results)

best approach (ihmo) is using:

sql string -> exec -> results

with type for input/output directly generated sql string (and check for types)

like F# sql type provider ( http://fsprojects.github.io/FSharp.Data.SqlClient/ )

[<Literal>]
let query = "
SELECT TOP(@TopN) FirstName, LastName, SalesYTD
FROM Sales.vSalesPerson
WHERE CountryRegionName = @regionName AND SalesYTD > @salesMoreThan
ORDER BY SalesYTD
"

type SalesPersonQuery = SqlCommandProvider<query, connectionString>
let cmd = new SalesPersonQuery()

cmd.AsyncExecute(TopN = 3L, regionName = "United States", salesMoreThan = 1000000M)
|> Async.RunSynchronously

//output
//seq
// [("Pamela", "Ansman-Wolfe", 1352577.1325M);
// ("David", "Campbell", 1573012.9383M);
// ("Tete", "Mensa-Annan", 1576562.1966M)]

everything typed, but:

- without the need to define class for input / output

- without learn a new functions

- easy add database specific syntax
If Antenna Gate served as a template for how they could respond, the Jobsian answer would be one of: "upgrade to a larger phone", "use iCloud", or "don't take so many photos".
Marmaris Ekonomik Oteller
Prison visit bookings: using data to troubleshoot a digital service
Epic whining.
You "could" say many different things, but that won't make them true.
Foreign workers: Microsoft gets green light from Ottawa for foreign trainees
The 16/64/128 GB lineup for the iPhone 6 ensures this is only going to get worse. Why they didn't bump up to 32 GB as the base level is beyond me.
Wrong. I have been using my iPad as an extra display for my MacBook Air for about 2 1/2 years using the AirDisplay (getairdisplay.com).

It is odd that this company would place a large lie as the first readable text.
What's the difference between UberPop and UberX?
I've actually just downloaded their MacOS App and tried to install and launch it.

It now basically does nothing just blinking in the statues bar.

But I observe sudden CPU usage surge of this app from the activity monitor, not sure whether it is because of not pairing an iOS app or not

And also, my chrome feels significantly lagged.
Incidentally, I think his tutorial series is one of the best ones I've read for understanding how compilers work, even better than all the "traditional" literature like the Dragon Book.

Totally agree. I was interested in how compilers work when in high school - long before I heard of the dragon book and had no idea how to even start on making a parser and code generator.

When he walked through a basic recursive descent parser, it was like a light bulb went off over my head - such a simple and elegant solution to a otherwise seemingly tricky problem.
Not everyone needs masses of storage on their phone - I know I don't. I'd rather not pay a premium price for an extra 16GB of storage I don't need.
Most of blablacar drivers do not respect the law regarding this.
The rules for computing the cost of a ride are fairly rigid. For instance, the toll price cannot be taken into account.
Here are the rules : http://droit-finances.commentcamarche.net/faq/4835-bareme-ki...
The all inclusive branch also does this, you search a nice holiday, get hyped, tell your family or mates, and when you get back a day later it's suddenly 200 euro's more..
While I agree with Dawkins as such on his point, I can also imagine a future in which both "mother" and "born" become a bit of an anachronism. In that future I wouldn't be overly comfortable simply slapping the label "human" on everything.
Very few cities have 24/7 subway service. NYC is pretty much the only one I can think of. German cities generally have 24 hour service on the weekends, but not through the week.
I'm certainly not a twitchy mouse user, but I see very visible lag when using a mouse at 30fps and it drives me crazy.

Even scrolling text on a terminal becomes and 'issue' at 30fps. It get's 'blurry' is the closest I could say, Again, it drives me crazy.
Maintenance, it's an old metro and there is no second railway like in NY.
Hide data inside pointers
On Habits, Shipping and Choosing Your 20 Mile March
Wasn't HtDP written to address issues in SICP ? completely or partially ? I always felt that HtDP was sharing more than a language to express programs in.

> It somehow goes for an entire fifth of a book without any data structure at all

Funny, in the MOOC I linked, from what I remember, they spent a lot of time writing programs without compound data types too. Only by having naive conventions (item0, item1,...) to let us recognize the logic behind complex type in the problem data and let it sink in our minds. I don't know how close to the book this was though so I don't wanna give off conclusions.
There is no such thing as NoOps: it is an awful word
One workload where I find it worse: if my access pattern is sequential reads from the start of a file (no seeking or random access), or could reasonably be rewritten as such. In that case, using mmap() breaks some expected Unixy flexibility, because it demands real files, while there's no reason in this access pattern that your program should die if it finds a named pipe instead. Of course you could test for pipe and provide an alternate read path, but then you might as well just use that for real files too, instead of maintaining two paths.
This is like the complete opposite of creativity. I actually feel a bit sick..
No, it's that there is no time to do maintenance unless you have extra tracks. In NY you can close the one pair of tracks and do maintenance on the other. If you've only got dual track, then you can't do maintenance.
In general I agree with your sentiment, but toilets are indeed free on ryanair flights.
True that they don't annoy any powerful union, or company.

(nope, Vampire the Masquerade tribute username ;) )
Yet somehow they can't figure out how to display phone numbers in Sheets...
Here's a good myth:

"Only program in C++ if you absolutely have no other option."

I believe in this myth, I also am currently working on a project in C++ and reading one of Strousup's books. I think even Strousup shares this belief, but he would probably phrase it a bit differently. (My project is interfacing with the Unreal Engine by Epic that exposes a C++ API.)

Just putting this out there for the discussion's sake, perhaps someone could engage on it. I recently discovered to my horror that Apache Mesos is written in C++. They use the nice futuristic style Strousup would probably applaud though, still I think any other practical programming language would have been a better fit since it's just a sysadmin tool. Obviously they disagree.
Heh.

Oh I know it still exists, but while this is admittedly anecdotal on my part (and likely heavily biased by the institutions I've been a part of) I haven't seen a single new person who defaults to Perl in a very, very, very long time.

And to be clear, I'm not trying to rip the author or the article, it just seems ... oddly timed, like writing a contemporary article on how to use COBOL in the business computing space.
Finding coworking locations while on the road
Weird... Sometimes the pass includes just letters and no symbols. Also you could include numbers.
UberPop drivers are regular people like you and me. UberX drivers are professional "tourist drivers".
I don't automatically trust any government's statistics.

In addition, I know that you have to investigate before comparing what are ostensibly the same statistics coming from different countries.
Maybe to point out that the number of seats in a fare bucket doesn't need to change at any second for the displayed fare to change. For most airlines, the fare buckets are not independent and bookings in one bucket may decrease availability from other buckets. These formulas make it unnecessary to change the number of seats allocated to each bucket all the time. Most changes you see during the day are just the result of new bookings and cancellations that are coming in live.

The volume of pre departure cancellations can be crazy for some routes to a point people wouldn't even believe.
This Futuristic Office Doesn't Have Chairs and Desks
How to Detect an Exoplanet with a DSLR
London and Tokyo are both also not 24/7 (although London announced a couple of months ago that some central lines would move to 24/7 in the next few years I think).
I love it. The practical side of me, however, would recommend increasing the name space a little bit and adding checksums; human memory is not perfect, and having built-in error correction would help immensely.
I spent a full week of vacation time once playing around with Factor. It was a real trip -- I'd been reading some of the Forth books the month prior for the first time, and reading over jonesforth, and then when I began using Factor the experience felt very civilized. Scripting-language feel, surprisingly good performance, and very clean refactors.

It's not the same feel as the "virtuous abstraction" of macros in, say, Common Lisp -- Factor has some very general abstractions that aren't always free (whereas macros can be near-free. And though Factor has macros, I remember feeling that I was somehow fighting Factor every time I wrote one). And the documentation, through the REPL/docs browser that comes with Factor, is almost terrifyingly complete ... and presented in a cross-platform GUI built on OpenGL.

In short, Factor is one of those projects so all-encompassing and impressive that you briefly fear that someone has "won" at hacking, and that the pastime will shortly be retired.

But it has no package manager.

It seems amazing. They've solved so many other problems so beautifully. Why not solve the one problem that (empirically, seems as though it) controls the growth of open-source programming languages?

It's not a trivial thing, of course, to build a package manager. But it's amazing, given the talents who have made Factor what it is, and what they've accomplished, that no one has taken it on.
I work next to a bioinformatics team, they split their work between Perl, Python, C and Java depending.

Perl is mostly used in the niches it's traditionally good at, munging data or cleaning it up with quick to write one-off scripts. The data is then fed into a higher performance C or Java program for the actual analysis.

They tried to use Python for that kind of task, but the language is stricter than Perl (you end up writing lots of exception handling code) and the text gobbling faculties are just ever so slightly not as good and it ends up just being easier and quicker to Perl the problem away. However, the newer folks are coming in not knowing Perl at all and it's likely it will simply go away in a few years and everything will be done in Python anyways.

Python and Java tend to be used on the back-end of the web reporting systems they build since there's better server-side support and tooling for that case. And I think some of the analytic tools are cross platform Java desktop clients.
If anything, the Rust community seems more concerned with only showing the good sides of its community than it is with only showing the good sides of Rust. That of course has its social/"political" advantages.
Sparse Matrix Multiplication with Elasticsearch and Apache Spark
Simple Financial Budgeting and Modeling for an Indie App
After World War II, communists, who had been on the right side of the conflict, got enormous power. This eventually percolated in the education system, and now France is left with a few generations that have been force fed progressive propaganda from an early age.

Combine that with a more ancient bend for Jacobinism and technocracy and you have the current situation. Very powerful unions who can lock down reform, and a population who polls to the left of Cuba in terms of political opinions.

Ce pays est foutu.