skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If Uber doesn't do background checks, and there are incidents (even a small number) it will hurt their business at the end of the day.

I really hate this mode of thinking. What's wrong with preventing incidents?

A background check isn't going to weed out 100% of muggers, rapists, or Enron Executives - but it will likely reduce the number of muggings, rapings, and fraud.

Your argument is basically "There's no need to inspect restaurants - if people die of food poisoning, the business will suffer."

Well, yeah - but how about we take some simple precautions to stop people getting hurt?
This specific case is not Windows. It's Lenovo's unbelievable hostility toward their customers in combination with their amazingly aptitude for being completely incompetent.

I would venture to guess that the adware service is running as SYSTEM. Any vulnerability in the service would escalate to system. You can do exactly the same thing in Linux (daemon running as root) and it would have a very similar surface area.

The only difference in this specific case is that Windows has idiots for hardware manufacturers. The only way to "fix" it would be for Microsoft to encourage users to wipe the default installation.
If you try this, put a glass of water inside the microwave with the candle. You don't want the microwave to run empty, and the water will keep that from happening.
He has his own particular style. If you can get past it [1], there are interesting things.

[1] I used to be able to, but as I got older I said "fuck it, it isn't worth my time for him to purposefully misunderstand me."
I wonder what are the legalities of this type of discrimination? Retail businesses aren't allowed to arbitrarily refuse service, they have to follow certain rules and be consistent.
Benchling (YC S12) is hiring to build the OS for biotech
I meant on my burger. It really left a bad taste in my mouth.
I guess the market will decide that ;-)
I agree, I use curl once or twice a week and need crib sheet to remember what switches to use and when. I feel it pushes the UNIX tool "do one thing, do it well" thing a bit far.
I've had the same thing happen to me a couple times, always seemingly on the way to the airport even. It's really frustrating. In those situations, I generally switch to Lyft and get picked up without cancellation. Unfortunately this isn't an option in places Lyft has pulled out of due to regulations like Houston that Lyft has pulled out of due to similar regulations by and thus only Uber remains.

This is one of the unfortunate side effects of a car service pulling out of a city like Lyft did in Houston. Now only Uber remains which, despite its flaws, is light years ahead of the standard yellow cab service.
[Video] SpaceX Tests Dragon Launch Escape System to Save Astronauts
hello, weave here. a few very quick comments!

weave has lots of very happy users who find that weave is plenty fast enough for their purposes, see eg http://blog.weave.works/2015/02/24/get-your-kicks-on-cloud66...

the strong points of weave network, as it is right now, are ease of use (not to be sniffed at), and enormous flexibility. it is really quite easy to create an application involving containers, that runs anywhere and does not commit you to specific architectural choices...

typically though, one weave network might be used by one app, or just a few. but you might run a lot of weave networks

weave works very nicely with kubernetes - later I shall dig out a few links for this

in our own tests, throughput varies by payload size; we tend to think of weave-as-is is best compared with using, for example, amazon cloud networking directly

for users with higher perf needs, we have a fast data path in the works, that uses the same data path that ovs implementations use... the hard problem to solve here is making that stuff incredibly easy and robust w.r.t deployment choices -- see above :-)
California Extreme is awesome; my wife and I went last year, and were heartbroken when we realized we wouldn't be able to attend this year. We're going to mark it in our calendars to make sure we don't book a trip for that weekend in the future because it's a really great experience.
From the docs, under "Cloud Bigtable and other storage options"

If you need to store highly structured objects, or if
you require support for ACID transactions and SQL-like
queries, consider Cloud Datastore.
How is this "antisemitic"? Jewish people are disproportionately represented on NPR's staff. I don't see this as a problem, but talk about a speck in your brother's eye when you've removed the plank in yours. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Go read 'patio11 or 'tptacek posts on avoiding competing on price. You want to compete on quality.

You don't even have to buy all in. I bought in just enough to get my head out of my ass, and have improved my financial situation considerably.
As a 54 year old alum:

Unless you've been seriously programming for a number of years, with a fair amount of that in teams, including face to face ones, you're probably not nearing your peak. I'd suggest reading The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (http://www.amazon.com/The-Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Ma...) and judge where you are in the range from journeyman to master.

If you're looking for "lock-in", i.e. be easily employable past your ability to fake looking under 35, I'd suggest getting a job with a serious security clearance, which can be a trick, or specialize in one of the fields that respects grey hairs like embedded (but only so much depending on the sub-field, e.g. Detroit car companies at least in times past recruited heavily from Course 6 because they too got rid of their older EEs and programmers).

If you goal is to really work for yourself, and you think you can eventually bill at a rate 5-6 times the income you want to receive---maybe talk to some professors who make a lot of money on their one day a week dedicated to that, albeit they do it with MIT Professor on the CV---yes, that's a very good way to go. But hard for most people. See e.g. this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9499561 which points out you have to compete on quality, not price, and a couple of HN contributors who've written a lot about that.

Medicine: in a county, or the developed "West", where people by and large don't directly pay for their own medical care, and those who do pay are looking at a rapidly graying population, well, it's a field you ought to run screaming from, unless it's your calling.

Don't know about MechE and so on, in general you need to talk to older engineers, the people who run the department, professors, etc., of course adjusting for selection bias. If you haven't already identified a calling, well, you have a lot of options, especially if you're strong at math. Especially before the 2008 crash, a lot of EE strong and therefore math strong EECS graduates would get initial jobs in finance with their proven math chops, which if they were smart got them in a good financial position to do something they really wanted to do later.
There's always the multimodal option (cab -> BART)
Sleepless Nights as a Struggling Tiger Woods Recalls His Father
This is something I just had to to — http://teespring.com/programming-is-who-i-am
Startup Alley Pitches Day Two
That's all well and good, but requirements are different from practice. In my understanding, engineering degrees and especially those from very technical institutions tend toward specialization. There also may be a factor in who chooses those institutions and how much they choose to specialize in both their education and career.
New Study: 95% Renewable Power-Mix Cheaper Than Nuclear and Gas
Deprecating an API is a bad way to go, especially if the API is fairly new. This post is telling me two things:

1) Dropbox's API was not designed correctly the first time. It should not just be a representation of their internal stuff exposed publicly. It needs to be designed first.
2) Dropbox is struggling to understand the difference between providing a consumer product (like their normal Dropbox product) and a developer product, like this API.
It's starting to be done [1], but by physicists. Among their basic conclusions from their simplified models:

- A free market naturally tends toward an exponential distribution of wealth.

- When debt is allowed in the model, the rich get richer, even without considering that interest is paid from the poor to the rich.

- The U.S. clearly has a two-class structure.

[1] http://physics.umd.edu/~yakovenk/econophysics/
The Martian Diaries
goat simulator.
Currently you can use the BigQuery Hadoop connector and write a MapReduce job to scan Bigtable and write everything to BigQuery. Works quickly. I'm sure dataflow support is in the works, since Google internally doesn't really use MR and therefore likely has this on the back end already.

Source--I wrote one of the whitepapers on the BigTable homepage.
> Have you ever run "./configure" on some open source code you downloaded? That's no more safe.

That is if you don't do a

view ./configure

first and go through it. You do take a look at the configure scripts, don't you?
I'm saying "It's impossible to deport half a Million illegal immigrants, because of logistic and ethical reasons" and you are saying "We have to, out of convenience!"

And yes, it's about convenience. The number of immigrants could be a few times higher before we're actually at a point where it's not just costing some money.
What are the physics like for that? Does it feel like the real thing? I've tried some pinball games on steam and they always feel "floaty", for lack of a better term. Building a pinball emulator sounds like a fun project, but only if the experience is pretty faithful to the original.
I agree overall but at the same time, it really depends on what you already have. Sure, if you own a $400 PS4 and whatever other items you typically buy with a game console, another $300-400 for a HMD is an easier sell.

But I don't have a PS4. What I do have is a solid, modern computer since I need one for all sorts of work and play situations. I can either spend $400-500 on a PS4 and any typical addons or I can spend $400-500 on a powerful graphics card for my computer. And with graphics cards, performance goes up and price comes down every year.

The other angle I'd need to consider is what you can do with the whole package (computer + Rift or PS4 + Morpheus). Morpheus will work on the PS4 and I'll be able to buy PS4 content to use with the Morpheus. The Rift will work on any capable computer and I can either buy games/content from Steam or from other sellers or I can go to Oculus Share and download all sorts of experiments and demos and games from all sorts of developers. I can even fire up the free version of UE and start building environments to walk around in via the Rift immediately. The power to create and share content shouldn't be underrated, especially at this early stage.

I think that in 5-10 years time, if this hasn't gone the way of 3D TV (something cool and easy to find but ultimately not that big a deal), the costs will be low enough and content will be abundant enough that it won't matter whether you use a black box under the TV or a silver box under your desk. But during this early time in the market, access to demos and creative tools will be a big deal.

When someone develops a VR teleconferencing app with depth cameras and live streaming, the betas and first release won't be on some Sony or Microsoft game console. They'll be on Windows, OSX, and Linux. When you want to use a sweet HOTAS for your VR flight simulator or enable VR support in the config of some new game, you won't be able to do that on a Playstation or Xbox.

All that stuff is more than enough to get me to lean toward a $500 GPU upgrade over a $400 console purchase. I think until VR stuff isn't early adopter/enthusiast territory by definition, the more packaged solutions will be lacking. Once it's commonplace, it'll be more a question of ergonomics like PC/console gaming is now.
Normalized to what? For me normalization or weighting is equivalent. Putting it this way there could be different normalization factors. Examples:

1. Average value over all phones
2. Standard deviation of the value over all phones
3. Minimal noticeable difference in the given property (it's quite vague though, it's basically custom weighting factors)

I don't think that there is an obvious best, but I don't think it's needed and all gives sensible results.

A more sophisticated distance wouldn't be Euclidean. If you look at x-resolutions and y-resolutions independently you won't catch exotic aspect ratios which should be weighted more compared to a standard aspect ratio phone.
I'm also a disappointed customer because my first payroll cycle was two weeks late. This (or worse) happened for my colleagues as well. Apparently the integration between Zenefits and ZenPayroll is not ironed out.
I am a 48 full-stack developer and I (still?) get at least a couple of job interview offers a week. I am at an interesting point in my career, though, where the company I work for decided for me to try a more managerial role (not because of age or technical impairments... it's more complicated than that).

I've accepted the new role, just because I'd like to take a step back (as in "looking at the forest and not at the trees"), manage and mentor people and – why not – step out of the f*cking comfort zone. You should do that, right?

Anyway, now I am very puzzled about how to present myself in the near future: a 48 "rookie" manager (who needs to prove himself on the ground) or a seasoned, bad-ass developer with 25+ year experience on any software tier you can mention? I can sell myself very easily as the latter, while the former... I don't know.

Luckily I am not losing ground on the technical side, which means that I can easily switch back to a more technical role (architect would be awesome)... but this bound me to _this_ company, which provides me the luxury of this choice in the near future.

Interesting times ahead... you'll never get old unless you want to :)
The fact that somebody can't write nigger destroys the flow of the article and wrongfully elevates the word. It's just a word, stop giving it power.
Ask to meet them, and befriend them. Do it genuinely.
With our product (Periscope), you type SQL and get charts from your SQL database. We spend a lot of time helping customers with their SQL queries and also write a lot about SQL on our blog. So we thought it'd be a good idea to put together a free guide on writing faster queries. Hope you enjoy it!
Collection of Examples of Ruby Patterns
Musical Gif embed on Twitter
You make some great points, however I question how big the Kansas market really is. I'm from a 150,000 person city in the Midwest, and there might be 5 taxis operating in town. Kansas has a few bigger cities, but the demand for personal drivers in the Midwest isn't like it is on the coasts.
It's absolutely victim blaming, not just coming close to it.

Of all the backwards and ridiculous comments I've seen on race-related threads here, that one is really exceptionally stupid.
I'll pile on, too.

Professor Robert Rose had some great advice for me as a freshman: as an MIT student, you can probably succeed at whatever you want, enough to enjoy life. So pick a field that gives you personal satisfaction.

Money is valuable and ego-boosting, but when you hit your 30s you will realize that enjoying your workday is much more important than maximizing your paycheck. (But there are also easy ways to increase your paycheck. If you can become better than a potted plant[1] at negotiating, you can boost your salary.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289750
Well that's obnoxious that the insurance companies would play hot potato and not cover the 5 minute pickup windows.

But how much is insurance for that period going to cost? Is Uber even going to notice the difference?

Or is the problem that a 'work vehicle' is going to have no insurance the entire time it's being driven around? Even when it's not actually being used for Uber? Now that sounds unfair to make Uber pay for.
Some people (e.g. Bill Gross) think there's a bond bubble too. As bond prices and interest rates are inversely correlated, and it's hard for rates to go anywhere but up at the moment, imho they're probably right. I don't think anyone has a good handle on what asset classes are particularly safe (or, equivalently, will yield reasonable returns over the near-intermediate term) at the moment. My best guess is that P/E ratios are still fairly sane-ish, so my investments are in stocks atm. YMMV, I am not an investment adviser, etc.
A Teenager’s View on Life and Virality
Thinkpads have long had good driver support for Linux. Pity they don't sell a Linux notebook like Dell Sputnik.
MIT alum in my 40s; never
Of course. Not to be dismissive, but I am familiar with fail2ban. I was wondering if anyone had this idea that did not require manual or pre-set rules, like that the program would go passive for a few days, reading log files and learning certain log entries will be indentical minus timestamp, then some change with a small amount of text in addition, and others have never been seen (or will not match in the next stage). Next stage turns active, and the machine filters down and sends you anything it has not seen over time and knows must be something anomolous.

I like fail2ban, a lot, and alternatives in that field, but when I looked at the Arch Linux package last time there were dozens of commented-out, but heavily commented nonetheless regexp template files like you describe. I think this would be a neat machine learning thing.

What I am going for: use AI to train a passive entry-level sysadmin to warn you.
Manipulate videos directly from url with Cloudinary : ridiculousely crazy
Not sure why this was downvoted. Does anyone care to elaborate?
That's a bit of a fig leaf: dart never had the clout and popularity Python has, and it was clearly something no other browser vendor could get behind. Python has significant cross-vendor mindshare and wouldn't be perceived as fostering anybody's agenda.

It's true though that getting even two major browser vendors to agree on supporting another scripting language in addition to JS, is really really hard. I don't see it happening unless Nadella's "Really Good, Honest! (TM)" Microsoft makes some sort of grand gesture towards Google or (more likely) Mozilla.
> but it's clear to me that this is at least where Lyft is headed

The opposite is actually clear to me. Lyft in SF previously had the functionality you describe Uber in Manhattan having. You put your destination in, it gives you an exact price, you decide whether to call it. When Lyft Line (the carpooling variant) was introduced, that feature was actually removed, and now with a standard Lyft ride there is no way to know your fare in advance (though there is now with Lyft Line).

In a similar vain, Uber gives a max fare on Uber Pool (so you know at most what it will cost, guaranteed). Uber also does do fare estimates on UberX and other rides. I've heard from a few drivers that they may have avoided giving exact fares in advance on UberX and others because people tend to want to use them a little bit more flexibly than get from point a to b (Stop and pick up a friend on the way, for instance).

Point of all of this being, it's not clear to me that either company is committed to providing or not providing price quotes. I think we're still in the early stages of experimentation, with features being added and removed and changed between locations all the time, and I don't think we can yet characterize what either company is committed to doing or not.
My Lenovo came with a recovery partition from which I could reinstall Windows. However, I suppose it would also automatically reinstall crapware, which is beside the point.

The solution was to download an official Windows 8 copy from Microsoft's website - the Windows installer will get the license key from the EFI.

Not as good as a recovery disk, as you will need to download and install manually all drivers, but vetting everything is part of the point.

EDIT: for those looking, this is the link from where I downloaded the Windows 8 binary from Microsoft website: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-re...
Damn, thank god I knew better than to use another startup's API.

Dropbox reached out to me a while ago when my product got on HN to use their Sync APIs.
MIT is theory-heavy and practice-light. I didn't learn databases or professional languages or version control in any of my classes.
Basically, heroku or random IaaS providers require some level of technical expertise and time commitment to run. That drastically limits who will use them, leading proprietary SaaS providers to dominate the market. If open source and federated web apps were easy and safe for everyone to run, they'd have a wider audience. Sandstorm aims to make that the case.

Longer version: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-ap...
Thanks for taking the time to write a thoughtful and non-defensive comment.
Good catch! I haven't been back recently and hadn't checked the news. I'm still waiting for the state legislators to prohibit city regulation of ride sharing services. This may roll back the requirements at the city level. See: http://goo.gl/7MIZFP
Maybe he didn't interview in person? Not everyone feels the need to physically meet someone before hiring them. What does it really say about us, that we so deeply feel the need to see someone before hiring them? It's not like their credentials change with visual contact.
Excellent sample projects, especially Skyline. This seems the closest thing to what I had envisioned sofar.

Very cool stuff. Do you use it?
> If a climatologist proposes a model, good or bad, we can still use that model to make predictions and then wait for them to come true (or not). The climatologist is in no position to coerce the weather to adhere to what his models says will happen.

> And economists as a group are in a position to steer the economy in the direction of whatever their model predicts.

> Any predictions they make are less predictions and much closer to being promises.

Economists are in a position to coerce the economy in a direction, but I don't think that economists are in a position to coerce the economy to fit a model unless they have an accurate model (which may or may not be the same model as the first model) of the economy already.

For example, I might predict that putting a 100% tax on oil will cause the stock market to rise. But that model is just wrong. I might be able to put a 100% tax on oil and then coerce the stock market to rise despite doing that, but to do that I would have to have an accurate model of the economy.

An accurate model allows you to coerce the economy intentionally--without an accurate model you can take actions that will affect the economy, but you can't predict what effects your actions will have.

You can't steer the economy if you don't have an accurate model of it.

EDIT: There is significant incentive for economists to lie; that is, economists might publicly espouse a model they don't believe in order to steer the economy based on a model they do believe. There is also some evidence that some economists do this. However, this should not be mistaken for a proof that non-economists are better qualified to talk about the economy than economists. Ignorance is no more truthful than dishonesty.
fellow bushwick resident here, I can confirm no yellow cabs want to go to brooklyn. many cabs also will lock their doors to prevent you from getting in, until after you've told them your destination.
Nvidia  GTC: Nvidia  Bets Big on Deep Learning
Regardless of your age, fuck employers who want you to work long hours.

(Unless you have a big piece of equity. .1% is not big.)