skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is necessary, but not enough. To operate a taxi you also need a taxi license (which sometimes just is a 50 € fee, sometimes has to be taken over from an existing taxi company, all depends on the city) + of course insurance etc.

You can use it to operate a "rental car with driver", like UberBlack does, but that has other limitations to be not too taxi-like (most notably you can't take new passengers or their orders while on the road, you have to return to your home location after every trip)
NSF announces plan for comprehensive public access to research results
SAAS business: Prospective Client wants to meet in person
If you are runnning a SAAS and a prospective client wants to meet in person, what do you say to that ? This SAAS business charges $200-$400/month and it is a platform that clients have to invest in with their time before they can get a return. The prospective client seems very serious and a big fish (they want to pay for the whole year upfront)
Have you ever encountered this ?
Were the old jobs better? Hardly. The very reason that people came to work in these horrible conditions for minimal wages was that what they did before was even more horrible.
You get the thrill of drivers who are uninsured and poorly paid (once you factor in the capital costs of the vehicle and the cost of vehicle maintenance). Welcome to the libertarian paradise.
They are still working out some bugs with the latest XPS 13 and Ubuntu. Check out http://bartongeorge.net/tag/project-sputnik/
In a similar vein, this documentary is fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bzMrxVwl74

It's about African conflict diamonds, but also covers the DeBeers monopoly.
Because the oversight, privacy, and standards are working ever so well..

[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/taxi-driver-20...

[2] http://coconutgrovegrapevine.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-county...

and so on..

Call me when your "overseen, private, and up to standards" taxi has an immediate rating system that will cause the driver to effectively lose their job if they continue to provide crappy drives.

I do blame them. Bureaucracy sucks, and I can see why people would want to subvert it. Government's just mad they're not getting their vig. That's all this boils down to.

(Fixed link 1)
I went through 18 years of study in France, without having to answer a single MCQ or item.
Such developments are just a logical consequence of the reliance on statistical methods to assess knowledge.
As to the violation of privacy...
Or they could just lower the tax so it won't be cost effective to avoid it. End it is the end consumer who will eventually pay this.
Perhaps you could substitute "doesn't generate too big a loss" for "profitable".
I just saw this announced at work and it was just too good not to share. It's my first submission.
The Physics of Elearning
Oh well, first, I was not the one who said that. Then, there are HIGH chances that the original comment meant 'milliseconds' differences and not one millisecond difference, which all of you didn't even try to consider.
AeroFS is now free up to 30 users
They tried and failed:

"Once the world's second-largest Linux distributor, Red Flag Software has shuttered reportedly due to mismanagement and after owing employees months in unpaid wages.

China's state-funded answer to global software giants like Microsoft, the Chinese company filed for liquidation over the weekend..." (2014)

http://www.zdnet.com/article/chinas-home-grown-linux-os-shut...
So they are worried that have lost the power to persuade people??

Why would I want to know about a hurricane the other part of the world? IMO 99% of the news are junk, but is my opinion. Imagine all the time you lost on being brain-washed.
> Precisely because the industry is so highly regulated I don't see how Uber offers anything that I don't get with a regular taxi.

This seems to be a common argument against private competition to government-managed services. "Well, I don't see how a private company could do this better than the government." And yet, Uber is so obviously superior to any regulated taxi service.
That babies can learn multiple languages with ease is a surprise to no one in the world.

Only surprise is that education systems around the world continue to waste so many years of people's lives trying to teach them additional languages when they're teenagers, instead of having done the bulk of the work when they were babies, the way that nature's been doing it successfully for tens of thousands (or more) years.
If you want to read up more on this, look up third culture kids. The wikipedia page is a good start.
Tufte is not that omnipotent, did he even ever consider colorblindness? Hatches are awesome substitution for color.
This is lovely, congrats to the author
More like germany doesn't want drivers without proper papers and sloppy serviced cars. Taxis work quite well here with reasonable fares. No need for uber which exploits their employees... well they are not employees but exploitable individuals with very little power. It's good that the government cares for a certain standard. Of course there are regions where this degenerated i to bad burocratie
So then what is the cause?

Maybe because the demand for rings is not for their commodity value, but for their signaling value? So buying a ring from Tiffany's is worth a lot more than buying one off craiglist? And they aren't scarce so jewelers don't need to snatch them up off the "open market", but they need to make high margins to cover the overhead of their fancy stores.

Are you looking for a cause to the "absurdly large" degree? Or just pointing it out as some mysterious conspiracy?
> On the other hand, I bet a tech savvy company can do vastly better at predicting what the actual bus schedule will be

It's mainly traffic issues, or a single wheelchair/baby carriage clogging up the exits and requiring more time than anticipated. It's hard to make useful predictions for that.

> as well as communicating any deviations from the schedule in real time.

The municipal public transits in many European cities already have real-time schedule updates (and replacements) delivered via smart phone apps and digital signage posts at the bus stops. Big IT (I think Siemens, e.g.) has been offering and deploying solutions for this for years now.
F# isn't exactly OCaml, but it's a close relative and... I don't know if it's the next big language, but it feels like it's one of them.
Ours to Master
Sure, having no unification at all would be bad, but the issue is with the gray zone. Some characters are written identically in each CJK language, but among those that aren't the amount of difference varies widely. The trouble is that Unicode leaves separate codepoints for each version that somebody, somewhere decided were "different enough" (even when they are the same character historically and linguistically) but merges many characters with (consistent, well-defined) differences because somebody felt they were close enough for horseshoes. People often think that characters were only merged if they were linguistically the same, but that's not the case.

Also, comparisons like "different ABCs for English and Spanish" are spurious and unhelpful. If you could tell an English "b" from a Spanish one by looking at it, the comparison would be sound.
You really can't be bothered to at least `aspell` your website?
we're talking about germany here (where oversight and standards are generally running high), not NYC
Other, competing services to uber, aren't functioning (or at least not as pervasively) in germany.
Stick to your guns.

You can still get an awesome engagement ring for, let's say, $500, with no diamond, just a nice blue aquamarine or some other wonderful gemstone. Something that goes well with her eyes.

Lay it on thick. Put in a lot of effort to have it custom made. Involve her in the customizing and decision making.

But stick to your guns on the diamond. It's simply not cool.

Or find one on Craigslist but please don't buy one from a jewelry store if you can help it.

God bless!
I don't think those are programmed into the driving software as much as it has learned them through machine learning. Most of these systems have gone through the equivalent of millions of years of humans driving so I'd trust it over a human driver any day.
The light switch is a good interface to light up a room.

Putting in a motion sensor and removing the light switch forces the user of the room to meet the conditions the engineers of the room designed it for.

Providing a motion sensing light switch that has a manual toggle on it allows the user to correct for potential use cases that the automated sensor is not programmed to meet.

The best interface is the intuitive one, not a lack of one for the sake of saying it does not need to exist.
tl;dr: being a parent is totally different from what you plan to be as a parent

(and that's actually awesome)
Games like Pharoah (a direct descendant of the Caesar series) also had agent modeling in the late 90's where you could see what the agents were doing. That said, the computing power and storage capacities of the time limited the set of possible animations. The LOD and graphics are incremental improvements on a feature that has existed for decades (not to say they aren't welcome improvements).
So when will Apple make Swift available?

Not that I care, as I don't have any issues with commercial code, but it is a good example of basing work on BSD licenses without giving it back.
What is "obviously superior" about Uber?
If your model for the torus is the unit square with edges identified together, then the metric is the usual Euclidean metric, dx² + dy². (Alternatively, the metric induced from the embedding into Euclidean 4-space, with a parameterization like φ=atan2(y,x), θ=atan2(z,w), should give you the same answer give or take some factors of 2π.)

(Also, Mathoverflow relevant to the double torus question: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/194451/canonical-immersion...)
But I'm curious what actual 'realism' did it have?

Like the above poster said, the agent model may have been intended to be more realistic, but in practice you couldn't follow a single sim and see a facsimile of reality: they would go to the nearest workplaces and return to the nearest house even if it wasn't 'theirs'.

So where did Sim City 5 succeed that no others have?
This is the kind of thing i dislike. It reeks of "if you're not the customer you're the product. Why would anyone make something that cost millions free unless they could gain something else from it.
>> Non-American here. Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but why is a private company even been allowed to test kids?

That is the key question. And it is a rhetorical question. It would be better to point to the fact that "this is not supposed to be the job of a private company." Phrasing it as a question implies that there may be a legitimate answer, and offers the people pulling this crap an opportunity to try to justify it with an answer.

I've been to school board meetings where concerned parents ask rhetorical questions. IMHO the approach needs to shift to pointing out the boards responsibilities and the fact that they are not meeting them. Outsourcing is both failure to do your job, and also violating the childrens privacy as mandated by law. "Opting" in or out is just a diversion - it implies again that what they're doing ok because it's optional.
In my opinion the "right" way for static things. Keeps the browser from computing, no need for the original data and libs. Of course being able to inspec other people's d3 code is fun on the other hand.
Show HN: Rhombus, a fast, image-based Reddit app for iPhone
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220210
Something missing from the victim shaming party is comparing the glass screen to other common household objects that are made of glass and stared at, such as house windows, TV screens, dishes, bottles, glasses, and car windshields.

A glass product that is not fit by manufacture and design to tolerate glass cleaners is obviously poorly designed.

Because Apple is the definition of good design even when they aren't, the problem must transmute into moderately annoying victim shaming.
For comparison, a taxi permit in New York City costs over $1 million. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/nyregion/1-million-medalli...

Yes, NYC taxi permits are about 2,000 times as expensive.
The marketing of that website is that they don't waste money.
UberPop and UberX are similar services.
IT Trends 2015: New horizons for software developers
I think the parent was referring to typing at a steady tempo not typing with a single key at a time. I rarely type with tempo at a computer. It would be interesting (and challenging!) to try.
US sets new record for denying, censoring government files
Check out how beacons will change the museum experience for millennials! It is exciting to see the internet of things hit the art world.
OriDomi – fold up DOM elements like paper
I get the sense that you are an advocate of Uber's and that type of approach to business and society.

The problem I have, no matter how much I like the idea and concepts and technical solutions, is that there is a social flaw built in, which is American society. What we, as a culture don't realize is that Uber and it's minions of supporters, just like so many other cultural phenomena in the USA, is a corporate con job race to the bottom.

Just so you have a starting point, Uber is the equivalent to Conservative causes like opposition to universal health care or a social safety net or a minimum wage (expectation of income for work) or job security; or any other of the numerous pernicious memes on the right that are self-harming.

So, go on, blabber on about how much you love Uber; just be aware that you supported the very process that will also lead to you having to scrape by for crumbs just to survive in a saturated market in which you are little more than a commodity, essentially a head of cattle on a ranch.
Security Cameras , Networks ,Home Automotion , كاميرات مراقبة , حماية ومراقبة
Yes! There are two places where there have been issues with taxis. (Though the first link is broken, so I can't tell exactly what the issue is -- judging from the URL it involves a cab driver that raped passengers.) This proves that all regulations everywhere are a waste of time.

More seriously, nobody claims that the existing regulations ensure that there will never be an issue with a taxi. The claim, of course, is that things would be worse (or, if you prefer even worse) without them.
> What's intolerable is when untalented people cargo-cult Jobs or Linus and pretend that their personality is what caused them to succeed.

Yes, some other, less talented developers are being jerks and decide that they should try to hide their deficiencies by imitating Linus Torvalds. That does happen. But I'm sure that to a far larger extent, imitating the style of the great leader is just something that happens subconsciously.

That is really the reason why I disagree with nkozyra's grandparent comment. Even somebody who really knows their stuff must be conscious of how they communicate, because of the potential problems that arise when their style is inevitably adopted by those who don't really know their stuff.
What does the Citizens United decision have to do with any of this? Standardized tests have been written by private companies for decades, it didn't just happen recently.
شبكة ومنتديات الاميرة
What could be better oversight than the people actually riding in the cabs rating the quality of the service provided?

Serious question. That's a level of feedback that simply can't be provided by a government agency.
How to Make Great Landing Pages (With Crazy High Conversions)
Yes, I didn't imply that it was Warren Buffet's book.
The spinning machines were an actual technological improvement, whereas Uber (and many other valley companies) are just replacing old middlemen with new ones.
If they don't have integrity, then intelligence + energy makes them "dangerous" to your company. Think Frank Underwood (House of Cards).. Smart and ambitious, but out to improve his own position, often at the expense of the nation (or company).

If you hire someone who doesn't have integrity, you want them to be dumb and lazy to limit the damage they can cause.
>Uber is so obviously superior to any regulated taxi service.

Please do tell us how a taxi service with uninsured drivers is superior.
in Canada, UberX is 100% non-licensed taxis (i.e. just normal people with their personally owned cars picking up passengers using Uber)
The real speed advantage static rendering has over dynamic rendering
"Semiology of Graphics" is a great book, but this was published in the 1960s when those graphs where drafted by hand and color printing was probably not an option.

I am ignorant as to what tools a draft-mans hand for shading then, but I am sure hatching would be easier than creating a fine range of halftone grays.
Evoking More Conversions Using the Psychology of Color
I'd agree with you. The last few lines add a completely new agent and change the meaning of the poem.
> "San Francisco faces some very real challenges. Taxis are impossible to hail. Private car services are extremely expensive at peak times,"

I'll admit that this line actually made me angry.
Me too. I try not to listen to the radio, read the newspaper, or watch the news on TV. I figure the big stuff will find it's way to me, and the rest is marketing bullshit. News is a commodity, created to sell advertising. Only the big draw stories get air time. Just watch the CBC National; the world is ending every evening, don't miss it.
Atari hits Llamasoft's TxK with copyright claim
If France, the network cant increase the loudness during the ads. Instead, the sound is (sometimes, heavily) compressed. Annoying as hell.
In 2010, I was living in Washington DC and one day I heard the pettiest political squabble between two strangers. It prompted me to stop paying attention to politics, which up to then I followed rather closely, because I realized how bonkers it was making me. Everyone is just a bunch of angry assholes yelling at each other. It doesn't improve life, it makes you upset and unhappy. It wasn't too long until I felt similarly about the news, period.

I'd say the biggest challenge in no longer paying attention to the news is the idea that it's a serious person's domain, or even duty. That you're "not a real grown up" if you stop paying attention to the news. Every now and again you'll be among some NPR listeners and you won't know what happened in Kuala Lumpur or whatever. You need to be OK with that.
It's a hard problem to solve, and it might be a good crowd-sourcing opportunity. They need to expose some API for managing traffic, so that the community can experiment with new routing and scheduling strategies.
I don't understand why Uber (not UberPOP, which in theory operates with licensed drivers) has been also banned.

Can anyone explain why?
Because stuff like technical checks and insurance can't be postponed until the accidents happen, generally speaking. In the EU (at least all countries I know) third party car insurance is generally mandatory and it's details depend on how you use the car, be it commercial or private. You can of course always claim that it's a subject to "market forces" and people might opt out from insurance, but this is really not how we roll in Europe.
Or Matlab can take the code, fork it, improve the version way better than the existing BSD licensed code and never return any changes back.

Eventually the only version containing the desired numerical algorithms with better performance will the be commercial version.
I've lived in SF and Seattle. In SF, in the old days, you got lots of bunching, and usually on particular lines (like the 6 Parnassus which ran in herds), but these days there is very little of that at all. Might have something to do with computerizing the schedules awhile back, I don't know.

In Seattle the buses have posted times on a schedule at each stop and they pretty much nail it in my experience. If a bus is more than about three minutes late people start looking around and checking their watches.
Darpa creates dark web search engine
Show HN: Crowdfunding forecasts and benchmarks
It was produced by Dave Fridmann, who is pretty notorious for mastering albums way too loud.
Take a look at Caesar 3. It's "only" hand-drawn, high-resolution 2D, but the amount of detail is impressive. People enter the map carrying their belongings on hand-drawn carts, erect tents, go to work, walk around on the streets, the building slowly grow all the way up to small palaces… or a mob with torches and pitchforks assembles and razes everything, only to be mauled by the local amphitheatre's lions (or wild wolves). Kids run through the streets, food is carried from the farms to the silos, to markets, to homes, …

It's similar for other games of the time, like Settlers II. Only in the 2000s the detail level was massively cut down.
Stock market !== economy. The stock market can rise without lifting employment meaningfully (as we've seen ample evidence of since 2008) and fall without meaningfully hurting employment. Meanwhile, low interest rates mean little incentive to save (for emergencies or retirement) when you have no hope of keeping up with inflation.
The fallback font used on my computer isn't the most appropriate one, but Japanese also uses Song/Ming fonts, and this is much more similar to the difference between a serif and a sans serif font than between different characters.
The situation is a little bit different in the US than in Germany.

In the US (depending on the city) taxis are often difficult to find, overpriced, rude and/or uncomfortable.
Having to know metadata about text is precisely what made the pre-unicode days so bad. If you're writing a word document, sure, choose your fonts, but if you're rendering a web page that doesn't happen to declare its language, things aren't so simple. (And if you're writing software meant to correctly handle user input in multiple languages, good luck...)
* A median 2 minute pickup time

* Knowing where your driver is and how close, who they are, what they're driving, and what their ratings are before you even climb in.

* Payment is all handled on the back end. You call the cab and don't have to worry about it. Tips are not a thing.

* Bad ratings cause drivers to get kicked out of the program - and since they're automatically prompted for as soon as you get out of the car, they're going to be done more often (and therefore be more accurate) than a complaint-based model. It solves the problem of "Well, this driver was surly and slow, but I've got better things to do than go on the taxi commission's website and fill out a complaint form"

* MUCH cheaper rates than taxis, though that no doubt varies by area. I know in SF, it only cost me $15 to get from SFO to the wharf. (About an hour drive, IIRC) Equivalent shuttle: $34-50. I priced it.

* Random everypeople drivers, rather than career folks. I've met some pretty interesting people via Uber.

* Drivers can't arrive and then refuse to drive you - they know where they're going when the app pings them. If they don't want to drive you, one of the others surely will. Drivers are penalized for dropping rides.

None of this is specific to Germany, the topic of the story notwithstanding. These rideshare outfits face the same government interference in every single country they operate in.

After tooling around California for about a week or so, I am 100% on board with these guys. Uber was consistently awesome and less expensive, taxis were consistently more annoying and more expensive.
Not for much longer, one of the highlights of the past couple of years of NAB has been new algorithms and hardware to combat exactly this issue.
Web Development – The Complete Reference