skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Montreal has a taxi driver union? That would be unusual if true...

Taxi drivers are somewhat exploited under the present system. Someone else usually owns the medallion and puts the boots to the driver. It's the sort of thing that causes a union in the first place and there have been some efforts in Canada to create a taxi driver union.
This is sad. I live in Quebec Province, but not in Montreal. Quebec's laws regarding taxis are old and stupid, but they exists. I hope they will change, but in the meantime, sadly, this is their right to execute those laws.

The population (including me) wouldn't be so angry at the taxi industry if they embraced innovation instead of fighting with laws. Please, I want an app to know when my cab will be here, I don't mind that much about saving money, but I do want to pay easily and have a great and easy ride. That's all I want.

FYI, the taxi owners need a licenses, which I think is over $100k, and none were issued in a long time, so price increases. So, if I had one, yes, I would be super angry seeing Uber and stuff like that.

Still makes me very sad that this industry stagnated for so long and is not even trying to adapt now, but getting more laws :(

Edit: fixed typo.
> Sorry to say, but "does this feature make application developers happy" trumps "muh unix" when considering whether to add something to the kernel.

Which application developers? A hell of a lot of developers are really really happy with "muh unix". Why should a bunch of hipsters with half baked ideas get to rob those developers of that happiness because pushing through half baked ideas makes them happy?
Hey there! Glad you found a solution you're happy with. If you didn't let us know about the bugs you experienced, would you mind sending me details - colin at customer.io ? I'd love for us to have the opportunity to fix them for the future.
You don't even need to buy an amplifier. You can stick the key against your head and the water in your brain will amplify the signal. Bonus points for taking a plastic container of water for even further extension of the range!
Terminal displays [x] for some characters in my shell prompt for some reason. It also misses iTerms Fn left and Fn right start/end of line shortcuts.
In Manchester, UK (I don't know if it's like this in the rest of the country), uber is a normal registered taxi service, it's not normal people using the app to give people rides. It works really well
Alternatively, if the company still forces you to push the prototype to production, this can be a great way of sneaking in the technology stack that you wanted to use in the first place.
Muscle atrophy-natural treatments
Managing your CSS (GSS) files with variables and a theme by Jason Lemay
We have a few of these here in Brazil (i.e. http://www.99taxis.com/). The apps work just fine, it's the taxis that lack quality in their service. Cars are usually beaten down, dirty. Drivers are impolite, almost never use Waze or some other GPS app and the fare at night rivals Uber's.

There has been some drama regarding Uber v. Taxi around here as well (São Paulo, Brazil). One thing I know for sure is that as long as Uber's around I'll never call a taxi again.
It sounds like you're claiming a free monad approach couldn't handle an FFI. I don't think that's right.
The typical desktop screens are pretty large now, so browsing fullscreen is rather wasteful. And if you're not fullscreen, tabs reaching the top of the window make no sense. Instead, tabs on the bottom become optimal as it minimizes the distance between content and the tabs making them easier to target (Fitt's law). The screen sizes are bound to increase even more in the future (as 4k standard becomes more widespread), so the decision to move tabs to the top is going to look increasingly silly and counterproductive.
Show HN: PHaker News - A Stupid Markov Chain Experiment
I am having trouble finding a reason to strap a $400+ device to my wrist. I have not had a need to wear a watch permanently for over 20 years. Heart rate monitor? I have a Polar watch in my gym bag for that. Swimming? I have several swim watches, however, I will typically use a finger-mounted SportCount because it doesn't require interrupting the stroke to bring both hands together to operated (you operate it with your thumb, single handed). Time? I have my phone, computer, TV, microwave and, yes, el-cheapo LED nightstand clock for that. Even while travelling if I don't feel like taking my phone out of my pocket there are clocks everywhere. And, you might laugh, but years of sailing, kayaking and outdoor activities have taught me to estimate time to a useful degree of certainty by looking at the position of the sun. Silly, I know. I am simply saying that I can't remember the las tome I thought "If I only had a watch on my wrist permanently...". Anwering the phone? Please.
From a previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9383462

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance-bounding_protocol

(I don't pretend to have a clue whether it can be effective or not)
The Taylor Rule: A benchmark for monetary policy?
Any idea about which changes motivated the major version bump?
Our website is the first result, but the Google+ page for the satellite campus is the fourth result – our other campuses Google+ pages don't even show up in the first few pages of the search results.
For instance, parallelism can be in a single thread: "instruction-level parallelism" (pipelines in a CPU: fetching some instructions while others are being decoded and others still are executing on multiple functional units).
Well, at least here in Germany Google required publishers to waive their right to be paid or Google just wouldn't index their content in the news section (search wasn't affected at all). And in my mind, rightly so, a brilliant move. Of course all those publishers gave in since you obviously can't force Google to pay for content (snippets of it!) it actually doesn't need/want all that badly, while publishers on the other hand really, really wanted to be indexed.

This recent development is probably more of an answer to the EU monopoly investigation, where Google tries to show that they can behave.
Yep. I was really disappointed.
Instead of down voting everything I have stated how about engage in a conversation?

Isn't it true that the harm is Round Up related?
I'd like to see a simple line graph of a keyword and my position in the SERPs for that keyword plotted over a time.

For instance, I'd like see my position for the keyword "folsom county apple juice" at a certain point in Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr... etc.. Options for weekly, monthly, yearly.

I was at an SEO talk once and asked about that, and I got some canned response like "search optimization isn't a 'keyword' focused business anymore".

Maybe that's true, but I can see the ranks in Google Webmaster tools, and that's what I'd like to see plotted. I don't even care if it's an approximation, what I'm mostly interested in is the trend line. Am I moving up or moving down over time?

Granted, I'm pretty lazy and this might exist, but I've looked at a few services and I haven't seen it yet.
Note: this was originally posted at http://inpursuitoflaziness.blogspot.in/2015/02/thoughts-of-r... , however I thought it would be nice to go through the Polyglot Weekly editorial process and come up with a better version of it :)
The difference is that after println, the next line of code runs in a world where the previous println happened. After a Pure.println, the next line of code does not run in a world where the previous println happened, because it didn't and can be revoked at any point in time by later actions, affecting the ultimate outcome of the program (so that maybe that particular Pure.println call never prints).
I just started using CPPCAT for a small safety critical embedded project. I'm a "indie" developer so even at $250 a year it was the most expensive software I use. [I use Visual Studio but that costs less per year.]

I can't blame them for leaving the low cost market. Customers with small budgets often (usually?) have a lower ROI than customers with large budgets.
Either do something with speed-of-light delay ("fun"), or manually activating the key fob (degrades user interaction).
Is there a source for that? I find it hard to believe.
There's a Chrome extension for that. :P
OK that makes a lot more sense, thanks for clarification.
Thanks for the advice. I guess we'll have to do a bit of a feedback blitz. Do you have any idea of how long it takes for the changes to be implemented?
The handmaid's Tale
http://www.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale-Margaret-Atwood/dp/0385...
That is if you want to amplify the signal. But if it's an adversary, they need to do a sort-of MITM to take the car's signal, amplify it, and then turn around and take the key's response and forward it to the car.
Hailo was quite popular in Montreal for a while until Uber launched and drove them out of business. As far as i recall they shut down all of their North American operations to focus on EU. Wonder how that's going. I quite liked them, but I prefer UberX any day
It's not about COM.

COM is: "Unlike C++, COM provides a stable ABI that does not change between compiler releases. This makes COM interfaces attractive for object-oriented C++ libraries that are to be used by clients compiled using different compiler versions." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

Others are talking about the compound document format OLE. And about DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model). Both OLE 1+2 and DCOM are not that great implementation wise, in retrospect. COM on the otherside is fine.

D-Bus is like DCOM, and has similar/other deficits, as do the competition: CORBA, RMI, XML-RPC, SOAP.

MDI and compound document format were an oversold concept, that failed. Today we have HTML5 with iframes.
Building a ‘People Who Like This Also Like’ Feature
Well, OK. You end up with an impure thunk from Pure.println, Pure.println itself is pure.
The two situations you describe are more accurately called multitasking and multiprocessing. The latter gives us the "MP" in "SMP".

> Concurrency: [...] There is no parallelism.

> Parallelism: [...] There is concurrency too since ...

Oops, contradiction! :)
Absolutely right! Think how differently it would be if we had to pay $50 for Half-Life and another $10-15 for the counter-strike mod. Everyone would lose.
This is what I was thinking when they said "This is the same as you pulling a blue whale" because I don't think that's accurate. The whale would have a LOT more surface area causing a lot more friction and taking a lot more force.

Though I could be wrong.
This program is not developed anymore and is only provided for compatibility.
Use avconv instead (see Changelog for the list of incompatible changes).
I've lived across the various parts of the country. I've never been confused if I'm still in America. I've been through New York. They'll say things like, "Going way up there, eh?" But I still know I'm in the US and not Canada. Drive in New Mexico, there are points that just looking at the landscape, you might think you wandered into Old Mexico. As soon as you hit town there is an American feel; even along border cities.

Never have I been unsure that I'm in Canada. Crossing from Detroit to Canada feels like I'm in Canada. The country has a feel. I bet that there are few Europeans that are unsure they are in a different country. Again to reference the Brits, moving within the UK still can feel like being a different country ('cause you are).

That's what makes the argument that Europeans are so cultured humorous to me. They are cultured in the sense that they have to be. An Italian in a major city HAS TO BE aware of the German ethos. They don't have to like it, they don't have to speak the language, but the feeling is there regardless. America is "uncultured" because Europeans don't realize that we are cultured, it's just that we're versed in a gigantic culture that they will not match for at least 100 years while the EU (if it does) solidifies.
One of the founders? advisors? has a pretty heartbreaking (& funny) talk at Stanford about this.
Though Hailo is notable for recently having withdrawn from the North American market. Mytaxi.com is still around though.
Some years ago I came to realize that someone I was working for was using "Agile" in the sense of the first strip.

We weren't at a big company...
Dynamic JavaScript User-Interfaces with ReactiveX
"[...] was the most abundant animal to be found 145 million years ago, in what is now the Aysén region of Patagonia."

I read that as it was the most abundant animal found in the region.
This is a sweet little web server. Good job putting it all together!
> Amdahl's law only really makes sense in parallel computing.

Contemporary computing is parallel computing. Even phones have multiple cores.
I've visited lobsters a few times but it never seemed like the comments were particularly active.
From the Coding Horror article, number 30 is:

"COBOL is a very bad language, but all the others are so much worse."
> I seriously would wear a bracelet that had a larger usable surface

Then Will.i.am would like to sell you a smart cuff/bracelet thingy:

http://www.puls.com/

Sadly, despite being huge, it gets worse life than an Apple Watch, even if you don't use it as a cell phone.
SASS implementation in Go
Top 5 Eco-friendly gadgets to match the green lifestyle
The encoding for the surrogate pairs is a spec (not a standard) called CESU-8[1]. The modified UTF-8 in the ClassFiles is really just CESU-8 with an exception for U+0000.

1: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr26/
That just means that the adversary needs to get the repeater closer to you. It mitigates it, but doesn't stop it.
Having next to no Go experience, and zero Rust experience, I found this article a really fun read. Coming from a Node.js background, it was neat to see the concurrency approaches used in both languages compared -- quite different from a single-event-loop :)
That's not true, some apps have been at least polished/tested on real watches before the release.
To what extent does this leverage the capabilities of HTTP/2? Can I do things like give a higher priority to certain content?
You can just take it this way: if a company follow such stupid trends is a company worth leaving.
> That comes down to one question: Do you want to eat food that someone has tampered with genetically, or do you want to eat food that humans have been eating for thousands of years with no recorded negative side effects?

Well, that's the question asked by people who know absolutely nothing about the modern techniques that are not classified as "genetic modification" and, in fact, frequently accepted for "organic" labeling, like mutation breeding.

Almost everything in crop development is about tampering with crops on a genetic level; the differences are about particular techniques (and lots of the opposition to GMOs is subsidized by big business that makes money off of alternative techniques of tampering on a genetic level that produce results that are no more "food that humans have been eating for thousands of years with no recorded negative side effects" than the results of genetic modification are.)
Add comments to Dropbox files
Some googling yields this discussion:

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/101913/why-does-a...
If Montreal is like most other cities, people driving taxis do not own their own permit -- they typically rent them from a small number of people who control a large number of permits.
You can try to detect the amplified signal, and if you put an accurate timer in the fob you can make it take exactly 5000ns to process and then require a signal back within 5020ns.
AeroMobil flying car prototype [video]
It larger as it in has a larger screen which draws much more power. Not sure where you are going with this. There are AW watches that are smaller and last all day also, and then some. LG G watch, Zenwatch, Gear, etc.
If you also posted the mod for free, nobody would have a reason to pay for a re-posted paid mod. If you're both charging for it, then that goes into the realm of intellectual property. That's a change that could be painful in a world of previously free mods, but something not uncommon in other places.

It's an app store. The question comes down to: would you rather have an ecosystem of only free (or donation-driven) mods, or would you rather have some mods be paid mods? I really don't think the move to paid mods is as apocalyptic as reddit was making it out to be.
It doesn’t really work in Scala, at least not as this article formulates it. The basic idea in Haskell is that as far as the type system is concerned, we only ever compose impure actions from smaller ones. We never actually run them ourselves; the Haskell runtime does that. This means that we can pass around impure actions as values and manipulate them however we like. The Monad typeclass simply lets us write functions that are overloaded to work on many different kinds of actions, not just I/O.
I am talking about the view of the hex data. That view is about showing numbers, and the common complaint about LE is that numbers are reversed, but this is only the case when you break the convention of displaying numbers right to left.

For showing strings it's better to use left to right, as that's the convention for text.
Water could have been abundant in the first billion years
In most modern legal systems, the question is not what the law should allow but what the law should prohibit. So the question should really be, what are the arguments for a city to prohibit Uber?
The reasons tend to be closer to a century old than 5 years, and similarly tend to have been the result of preferential regulation in favor of the taxi companies.

A good history of the jitney transport industry[0]. I'll note that the statistics reported regarding length of service and demographics of jitney drivers indicate that UberX is a much more apt solution to the problem of matching riders with drivers than a "traditional" taxi service with full-time employees.

[0]http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/724795?uid=3739976&uid... - note article is available with a free registration.
That's indeed the norm I think in most cities.
It's disappointing that the announcement doesn't even mention that this is Mac OS only.
"schools" and "students"
> That's competitive with a lot of European markets, where its easier to break into considering the much smaller population/size.

Citation needed. A lot of the market entry barriers are political/regulatory. Also smaller populations make for smaller scales of economy. These together don't make it any easier to break into a smaller market. The total capital outlay may be smaller in a smaller market, but that does not mean it will be easier or more profitable.

The US market is not very competitive and the carriers do not compete as aggressively as European operators do. There are much more competitive European markets with three carriers that the US with four carriers.

> Heck, the entirety of Finland's population is about half the Chicagoland metro area.

And the point being? Finland is way larger than Chicagoland, has way lower popularion density and has far better and cheaper service.

> I don't see how someone with a budget plan in a highly dense country is going to be entitled to have the same economics roaming in countries with low desnity where the cost, per sq kilometer, for 3G/4G service is much, much higher.

You have gotten your assumptions completely wrong. Finland has the lowest popularion density inthe EU and the fifth largest land mass. Regardless of this Finland has the best and cheapest service in all of EU.

So, the question is more like this: Why shouldn't a user from a low density country be entitled to the same economics roaming in countries with high population density?

> A lot of the cost for US service is making sure people out in the boonies have service as well.

Citation needed.

> That comes at a higher cost than some of the more ultra dense European markets. Its subsidised nation-wide, which makes sense, but if you have a cheap Finnish plan because your tiny country is easy to wire up, well, don't expect those rates in rural Bulgaria or on a Greek island.

See above comment. Put up or shut up.
Focusing on drug markets rather than users means less crime (2012)
Gross oversimplification.

The Unix workstations were by and large simply a great deal more expensive, and there weren't any compelling options on x86 other than Windows, DOS, maybe OS/2, and a few other clones.

It was pretty much pure business--the technical merits don't enter into it. That said, Microsoft took on a heroic burden to attempt backwards-compatibility.

If you want a vindication of the Unix philosophy, look at the server space.
Ah, Safari. #FlexboxProbs I'll try to fix that soon!

Thanks for the rest of your feedback. I agree that a list of advantages needs to be more available. I'm looking forward to making that soon!
UberX is different, with UberX "anyone" can be a taxi driver.
Facebook ends YouTube’s unrivaled dominance of online video
OpenBSD has yet to successfully program human behaviour.
Most Canadian cities are fighting Uber's refusal to follow city bylaws and insurance requirements, Montreal is only the most recent:

http://globalnews.ca/news/1678342/city-to-announce-developme...

Uber's current tactic is to assert that their drivers are insured in Canada, but refuse to provide proof of that to anyone, including drivers themselves and city regulators. This sort of "Russell's teapot" insurance claim is, unsurprisingly, looked upon dimly by the regulators. The laws are quite clear in Canada that personal insurance will not cover Uber drivers.
CS is unusual in that a clutch of yearly conferences dominate the frontier of research; most other scientific fields prefer to publish in monthly journals. When you consider the reactions of other researchers being written up in blog posts in subsequent days (e.g., Derek Lowe's blog), it's not unreasonable to think that you could be interested in enough content to warrant a daily update.
Reasonableness usually implies more than just a logicality, including fairness. To then say that the 30% cut is reasonable means that to say that it's fair.

Let's assume reasonableness were equivalent to logicality. Then, for a decision to be reasonable, it must satisfy some logical conditions. I'd argue that is in our case maximizing a fixed metric in relation to all other possible options. One either doesn't value fairness in the decision-evaluation metric, the 30% cut is fair enough or it's unreasonable.

So, putting it all together, we get

(1) 30% is fair (enough),

(2) one doesn't value fairness prominently in decision making metrics or

(3) the 30% cut is unreasonable.

I'd say the 30% is _not_ fair (enough). That leaves one to pick (2) or (3).
if IBM says its "going agile" then its time to start funeral arrangements for agile.
Currently many deliveries are just left on people's doorstep, and people "Pre-Sign" for expensive things so they don't risk missing the delivery (Apple offers this option). I fail to see why someone would go through the effort of trying to get into a trunk when you can easily target the non-Audi owners with packages out in the open?