skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'm gonna stage a hostile takeover of your company and I'm gonna offer 50 percent more than the going price of the stock. If you fight me, every stockholder in the country will file a lawsuit against you for not accepting this wonderful offer from me."

"Ok, I will fight you. By company bylaws, you have choice of weapons. Meet me Monday at dawn."

I had no idea what happened to Sierra... turns out what happened to it is basically the prelude to Terry Pratchett's Going postal.
actual idea!
Digital Evolution Index – Tufts Fletcher School
My money is on some kind of trade-in/up program.

I wouldn't be shocked if they did nothing though.
Robot vs. Robot
At least I think so...
This notion is extremely foreign to me as a French and I think most of Europe (except UK) find this type of clause completely abusive. Our standard employment contract here is the CDI : contract of indeterminate duration. Both parties have an incompressible time window to respect if they want to terminate the contract, usually several weeks.
Not the same thing. First, taxi drivers used to have to pay to lease the medallions. This article from 1995¹ talks about paying ~$100 per shift just for the lease. A quote from that article:

In 1993, 32 to 45 percent of the income of a fleet or lease manager was profit, or $16,000 to $21,300 per car, up from $5,500 to $9,800 in 1986, according to the taxi commission.

I very much doubt Uber makes anything close to that per car - even disregarding inflation.

But besides that, do you think it's a coincidence that taxi drivers sued the companies last year, after decades of that system being established? When I said "kick the status quo", that doesn't mean they have any intentions of being better to drivers than taxi companies; but they still shook a broken system from its torpor and forced society to reevaluate it. To me, that's almost always an advantage.

¹ http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-di...
Developers wrestle with making 'killer app' for Apple Watch
I believe the word "sharing" in this context refer to the fact that people without cars are getting rides from people with cars, i.e. cars are being shared. I don't think the term has anything to do with the legal status of Uber drivers.
I had a teacher pass away in high school. He had young kids. All his students ended up writing a book about how he'd been, what kind of guy he was. I think it's therapeutic for people who remember him and quite valuable for his children.
Julian Assange case: Sweden offers to question him in UK
Oh, i really know, this problem. Nice idea!
Docker-client – docker client API in Tcl
A modern romance story: “She was my first fan,” Honnold told me. “She’d seen the film, and she posted, like, one line on my Facebook, and I was like, Oh, my God! There’s a cute chick talking to me! I posted back a smiley face, and then she did a winky face, and it was game on.”

So he's definitely human.
If someone has a confirmation request or tracker set on their emails I throw them out unread. No need for spammers to verify if my email address works or not and everybody else knows I read my mail but don't always respond right away.
That's just sharing. You have to build mass infrastructure around something like that to get "sharing economy".

I agree that the distinction between at-cost sharing and for-profit "sharing" is a mess.

When you say hotel, I hope you mean that the person renting the room is running a hotel. That I can agree with. But I would not call AirBNB itself a hotel, as some people do.
You're referring to the Adventure Game Interpreter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Game_Interpreter
“Shazam for Magazines”, Selectionnist raises €2M to go international
Web Design Company,Web Development , Digital Marketing , Seo Services Washington
> They have a high level of control over their work.

No, they don't. They are told when to pick up their passengers, and which route to drive, by their employers. They may not deviate from that route, they may not pick up passengers without Uber's say-so. They may not decline passengers without being penalised. While they are signed in to Uber, precisely what control do they have over their work?

Additionally, "complete specific jobs over a limited period of time that fall outside the usual scope of their current employer’s business" means that the test falls on the side of being a contractor if you are doing a one-off job that is not usually what the company does, and an employee otherwise.

The point is, a contractor is that person you bring in to write code for your SAP system, or fix the IT infrastructure, or build a new building, or program the A/C. Things where you give the contractor a task, and they complete it using their knowledge, where you don't get to define the specifics of how it's done.

If you want control over precisely how they do their job, and it's part of what makes the company money on a day-to-day basis (you can argue that Uber are selling their software platform all you want, but the service it actually provides is getting you a taxi, not access to its software), I don't see how they're not employees.
As much as I love old-school adventures, I think this interview by Shigeru Miyamoto is an interesting counterpoint to the whole story telling attitude as well:

Miyamoto doesn’t see himself as a storyteller, and worries that the video game business is now so hung up on providing film-like experiences, with grand themes and complex storylines, that the essence of play is being lost.

In films, he explains, the director and the creator are one and the same person, dictating what happens, carving out the story’s arc. But in games, he believes the director should be the player – his job as a designer is simply to equip them with the toys to direct. As a creative philosophy it’s pretty much the opposite of auteurism – though ironically, it’s one that has made him the best-known games designer on the planet.

“These younger game creators, they want to be recognised,” he sighs. “They want to tell stories that will touch people’s hearts. And while I understand that desire, the trend worries me. It should be the experience, that is touching. What I strive for is to make the person playing the game the director. All I do is help them feel that, by playing, they’re creating something that only they could create.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/11201171/n...
Additional benefit is that professional drive might drive better than some random rich guy does, so safety should improve a bit.
Fantastic presentation, this is a good conversion of magazine-style articles to the web.
They even went ahead and implemented a 'liquid feedback' tool. Which seems quite similar to democracyOS?

http://liquidfeedback.org/
Uber is not really a software company. They don't sell software, nor solutions based on software. They merely produce software to power their actual business, much like any other large company that has an internal development team.

A software company version of Uber is more like Mowares: http://mowares.com/
Wikipedia Bitcoin Statistics
It's bright and colourful and you can make the computer do things. It's perfect to catch the attention of a small child.
Okay, that's a pretty reasonable point. Also given that act 1 raised 3 million or so seems like they shouldn't need to dip into sales money to pay for act 2.
I enjoyed reading the article a lot more than watching the Apple craftsmanship videos it was based on.

The article was very easy to understand for someone with little knowledge about manufacturing processes and did a great job of explaining how much effort and engineering goes into making a great product.

The Apple videos on craftsmanship were overly clinical and fancy, which for me took away from talking about the engineering and effort they put into the product.
ñ is not in the Portuguese alphabet. In Portuguese, the palatal nasal sound is usually represented by "nh", e.g. Spanish "baño" -> Portuguese "banho".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_nasal
Also:

- One day, fall a huge distance and die.
One of the problem with these HDDs is that you still have the same number of spindles. These spindles now need to cover a lot more data, and they were already `challenged`
One of the arguments against representative democracy at all was basically the same: People were supposedly too uninformed, and someone else needed to moderate their wishes.

The arguments against expanding the electorate from land owners to all males in many countries were the same.

The arguments against allowing women to vote, again largely along similar lines.

As was the resistance to steadily lowering the voting ages.

As I'm sure you can tell, I don't really buy that this would be such a huge problem.

Sure, some decisions will end up different. It's not clear it will be better or worse. But personally I believe that giving people more direct ownership of decisions is valuable in itself. As is improving representation - with current systems (even proportional ones), a lot of people are very poorly represented because finding a party or candidate that fits their views and that has a chance of getting elected is near impossible.

There are many mechanisms to counter the issues of an uninformed electorate, such as for example allowing people to delegate votes to representatives (possibly with indirection, so you can e.g. delegate your vote to the candidate from some minor party you agree with, knowing they'll be able to try to parlay a voting block into influence with the parties with seats), or vote "I don't care / I don't know enough about this issue to want to influence it, so I want my representative to count my vote the way they prefer", and many others, while still allowing people to take control and override for things where they do care about deeply about the outcome.
Spot on.

A Rolex submariner weighs about 135g. Let's pretend that all but 35g of it is gold (it's less, but w/e). So we're at 100g of 18k gold. Now, 18k gold is 75% by mass, equal to 75g of 24k gold or $2900.

The cheapest, non-gold submariner costs $7500.

Buying gold watches to get the gold - or even considering the value of their alloys when buying them - is as dumb as doing the same with computers.
Awesome randomized GitHub repositories for you
Even still, as an Indie developer, I'd much rather develop against Vulcan than OpenGL from everything I can yet tell.
A very useful site - I've been following and promoting it for a while now :)

Could the 'Topics' filter be set to filter by UX events?
Standard in the UK is one months notice on both sides - I've never had a contract that stated anything shorter and have had friends who have been on 3-6 months notice period.

Though it looks like the Statutory notice period can be less.

https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/notice-periods
I'm a huge fan of old Sierra games but I still have very sad memories of having saved space quest II quite near the end, after having being kissed by the alien - and thus being unable to make few final moves :(

edit: oh, the painful memories.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SqKTBE0yC0
that xkcd comic might also be relevant here if anyone in Finland has thought of that cool hack and you get fined even if you have a poor person driving your car for you.
It already exists, and works wonderfully: http://aria2.sourceforge.net/
Cricket World Cup 2015 Terminal App
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink#Example_Metalink_4.0_...
Most people tend to automatically reflect back at others the emotions projected towards them: someone gets angry at you, and you get angry right back at him. Being able to notice this in the moment and sidestep the reaction is a learned skill.

On the opposite end of the scale, there are "sponges" who receive and absorb others' emotions unconditionally, as you describe. I've known many people like this, and many seem to develop unusual health issues -- but it's equally possible to notice this process in the moment and modulate it.

In both cases, practicing mindfulness meditation is the most direct way to develop the necessary skills.
The Specialists: Franklin Barbecue
Just comes to show how careless Ruby guys were while building this.
>They are told when to pick up their passengers, and which route to drive, by their employers. They may not deviate from that route, they may not pick up passengers without Uber's say-so. While they are signed in to Uber, precisely what control do they have over their work?

Told when to enter in a period they signaled as available, told what areas they are allowed to walk in, no other visitors...

All of that could apply equally well to someone contracted to fix the A/C.

The drivers choose when and where to work. Most of what they lack control over is in the definition of the job, driving people to destinations. (Are you sure they have to follow a specific route?) The main thing they can't control is which specific person to pick up. That's pretty minor all in all.

Your argument about having to "complete specific jobs over a limited period of time that fall outside the usual scope of their current employer’s business" is much stronger, but I don't think level of control over the work is going to get very far.
If you can't find reason in it, doesn't mean others cant.
1. Make it work
2. Optimize
SQLite developer must have received a lot of phone calls
frowns upon excessive punishments without lots of due process

At least the way it works in Sweden, you're not fined a specific amount, you're fined X days wages. The judge handing out the fine neither knows nor cares what the fine works out to be in actual money. So from a judicial point of view the punishment is exactly the same for everybody.
As a backer of many Kickstarter projects, I would much rather back a project led by a creative person than a business-oriented project manager (in other words, a producer).

A lot of Kickstarter video game projects have failed to deliver on time, but they were also extremely aggressive in terms of time and money (even if they didn't say so). You cannot make a game today for $500,000 without cutting corners (such as salaries). Even the "massive" amount of money that Broken Age raised would only cover 30 people's salaries for a year. AAA games today have hundreds of people on the payroll, with development cycles of 3-5 years.

I'm not mad that they were over-eager and more than a little naive. A lot of these projects were from people who hadn't made a game since 1998. Game designers like Tim Schafer (and Jane Jensen, Charles Cecil, Aaron Conners and Chris Jones, Al Lowe, Ron Gilbert, Lori and Corey Cole, Ragnar Tornquist and others) should be able to work on what they excel at: making (adventure) games. With some exceptions, they weren't able to do so for more than a decade. It would be nice if all of the games from these projects were released (and were good), but I don't feel any sense of outrage if it doesn't work out that way.

Imagine if creating a painting cost $1 million, and Picasso had spent the last fifteen years of his life twiddling his thumbs instead of pursuing his art. Or better yet, look at Orson Welles's late career, where he could barely get anything produced. If only someone had just handed him a blank check, how many more Citizen Kanes could have been made (or Touches of Evil for that matter)?

There's a lot of outrage when a publisher interferes with an anticipated game, by rushing it to market broken or changing the creative direction or outright canceling it. Kickstarter backers have shown themselves to not have a whole lot more patience, although at least they don't wield as much power. I presume that we've seen the end of adventure games on Kickstarter, given all the bad blood. That's too bad.

Creative endeavors are notoriously difficult to budget and plan and bring in on a deadline, and even more so when it's on the cheap -- in short, shit happens.
Uhm, duly noted and fixed. Thanks!
> Syntax only guides your eyes. Scanning only allows to locate pieces of interest. But to know what a code does, you have to read it and there is no other way around.

You could say "paragraphs and punctuation only guide your eyes, but to know what the text says you have to read it, there's no other way around" - ancient greek was written without word spaces, it barely introduces any ambiguity.

> 1194 lines for 86 definitions thus a ratio of 13.88

Just checked my current python codebase. It has 1540 loc, and 95 definitions , for 16.25 on your metric.

And bear in mind you can't put things all one one line in Python (i.e. it would be trivial to write 1 loc per unit in a Lisp, but not good practice). What would it do to your numbers if your program followed SRFI 49? Newline is just a form of punctuation, after all.

Ultimately "no, this language is more awesomer" gets nowhere, I think. You're clearly passionate about Lisp and think it is the best. Good for you. After writing hundreds of thousands of loc in several languages (incl. Lisps), I'm not so sure. Maybe I am just plain wrong. Maybe I just need to do more until I really 'get' it. Who knows!
Show HN: Gosrc.org – Go documentation site
Really. Every time I whine publicly how web programming people aren't familiar with even basic CS, I get a slap.

But really, I should move to web programming. I'll be an expert computer scientist there, probably.
Frequent enough that I've seen it twice on different arrays. The reason for this is that a drive failure can be caused by an external factor (usually multiple drives fed by the same broken power supply, but not yet so broken that it goes off-line).
But is it really? 10% of your income if you make $500 a month is a LOT, because it can make a difference between being able to afford rent/food or not. But 10% of your income if you make 10 million is obviously huge, but is it going to have any impact on your lifestyle? No.

I love how UK does it - the fines are relatively small, but your insurance rates can go up so much you can pay a small fortune over next 3 years after getting a ticket. You get a 50 pound speeding fine,but your insurance goes up by a few hundred for years. It really really hurts.

Still, this doesn't hurt "rich" people as much - but that's what penalty points are for. If you get enough of them, you will lose your licence, rich or poor.
Well this of course shows how things might work in one country but not in another, for example in some countries if you fight and lose you can be ordered to pay the opposing counsel. That would nix that strategy if the Fins have such a system in place.
I'm not very familiar with Ruby; where exactly did the duplication occur in the original code?
Show HN: tcl-augeas – Tcl bindings for Augeas
It's important not to skip step 2, though. Give everything a nice once-over for writing documentation and considering changes to API and algorithm.
You don't need encryption to provide integrity. What you want is a hash function that has no collision, and the shaX functions do that perfectly.

The only attacks that can happen are if someone gives you a wrong hash; which means we need to secure the hash distribution, but there's no need to secure the content distribution. Unless you want an encrypted distribution, but that's a whole another topic.
This is the sort of place real change is going to come from. Transparent public information, that at the very least will shame politicians into voting in the interests of the people.

I understand it's probably not a top priority, but it'd be amazing if prediction markets on the impacts of policies could be included in this tool. It wouldn't even need to be real money, just a way to keep track of people's performance, and weight their impact on later markets accordingly. This would enable true access to the "wisdom of the crowd", and allow citizens to have a proper insight into how candidates and citizens perform in terms of forecasting the impact of policies, and making decisions based on that information.
US military and intelligence computer networks
regulations have to have a rational basis.

Taxi regulations exist because it's impossible to hold them accountable because the taxi-passenger pair is not recorded (or particularly traceable) in the event that the taxi driver commits some sort of crime against the passenger.

In exchange for those regulations, taxis also enjoy some really nice privileges. These are most apparent in downtown SF, where taxis get to use bus lanes. Rideshare drivers do not get that privilege. Also, taxis get to violate child safety seat laws, seat belt laws, etc, etc, etc.
Jclouds
Announcing odpdown, a markdown-to-ODP converter
Aren't you amazed that the richest billionaire who buys this watch from their palace or skyscraper has only access to the same promotional videos we have? Do they have a personalized purchasing experience? I thought the same when watching golden phone cases for iPhones: However rich you are, what's inside is still the same iOS, with the same usability perks and defects, with the same Flat UI, with the same Appstore apps as everyone. How mundane.

I reckon it's excellent that Apple finally addresses the billionaire market with a gold experience. By taking the money where it is, it provides a revenue stream that can fund features that average people will use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
Ask HN: Laptops for work/code and social
Hi HN,

I am looking for a new laptop for when I am out and about. The purpose of this laptop is primarily code, skype, browsing and so on.

I was a big fan on the 2013 Macbook Air, but I don't think I like the new one that much due to it's lesser powerful CPU.

In any case, what laptop/ultrabook/etc. would you recommend for code/development and the social stuff like skype, and browsing?

Thank you!
> They may not deviate from that route, they may not pick up passengers without Uber's say-so.

Come again?

> They may not decline passengers without being penalised.

The penalty is trivial. Sure, repeated declines are grounds for termination, but you really have to do a lot. When I was dual-driving for lyft and uber, I think I racked nearly 20-30% rejection rates on uber, they didn't even warn me that I was doing poorly and I think I'm still a "highly regarded" driver on their system.
A problem with a points-only or points+trivial fine system, is that although it might scare straight a generally good driver who occasionally has a heavy foot; it only becomes a deterrent for persistent recidivists when they near the disqualification barrier. Even then, it's only a deterrent if driving whilst disqualified carries a heavy enough penalty.
One unintended consequence of this would presumably be that many more traffic tickets would be contested in court. For anything more than $1-2k, it would likely be worthwhile to hire a lawyer to help fight the ticket. Once you got nearer 5 figures, it certainly would be.
> An oft-quoted story about the "coolness" of the Senate involves George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who was in France during the Constitutional Convention. Upon his return, Jefferson visited Washington and asked why the Convention delegates had created a Senate. "Why did you pour that tea into your saucer?" asked Washington. "To cool it," said Jefferson. "Even so," responded Washington, "we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it."

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/common/briefing/Senate_le...

This concept applies to the government as a whole as it relates to the general population.

Everyone is focused on their daily lives. The point of electing a representative government is to have a group of people whose daily lives are focused on the task of running the government, and figuring out where it will go next. People outside of the government only have so much time to think about legislation, even when it's really important.
Shame to see it go but hey ho!
technically Uber is a software company, and Raisier is the transportation company. It's kind of a shady shell game.
I'm torn on this one. It's a great performance improvement, but on the other hand I would expect this way sooner than after almost 4 years of usage.
12 Years Later – What I've learned about software engineering