skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> demand based pricing

A misnomer. Uber sets the prices, not the market. Uber can market the concept as much as it wants, but it doesn't change the fact that Uber sets the prices and therefore, no free market really exists.
>the financial sector is not known for being innovative in technology

And the hospitality industry is?
> You want to arrange your program in such a way that you must deal with the errors you want to deal with.

Which would be fine but there is no way to do that without also having being forced to deal with the infinite errors you don't want to deal with.
I can see some pretty clear holes in that reasoning. If you spend even a few minutes investigating whether you should actually drive with the Uber app, you realize there's an incredibly complex set of calculations to understand profitability, what kind of car to lease, how much to invest in passenger extras to boost your rating, associated "hidden" costs to factor in, etc.

Drivers absolutely choose their tools and invest heavily in those tools which directly impact their profitability and their ratings. Drivers absolutely employ managerial skill in deciding what hours and how many hours to work and what areas to drive in to get the best passengers and best ratings.

For example, the last Uber ride I took, the driver explained how they specifically avoid driving during certain time frames and certain locations because the fares are more likely to damage their tools, or leave poor ratings, or start yelling at them randomly.

> Uber exercises extensive control over vetting and hiring drivers...

For a pretty lose definition of 'extensive'. Nothing compared to a typical job interview and vetting process that a real hire goes through. How many dollars per contractor does Uber spend validating drivers? Probably averages to something like $25 - $50. There's a validation process, certainly, but it's hardly a "vetting" process.

> But for Defendant's intellectual property, Plaintiff would not have been able to perform the work

This is also absolutely not true. There are a number of different apps which would allow the plaintiff to perform substantially the same work using the same tools and the same business plan. But for using the Uber app, they would not be able to pickup Uber fares, obviously, but that's a tautology. They certainly would be able to perform the same work though. Or they could write their own app and perform the same work (obviously fighting the network effect, they may not succeed, but it's certainly possible).

The fact is that plaintiff can drop Uber on Monday and be driving for Lyft on Tuesday, or even drive for both concurrently and arbitrage between the two apps.

Personally I think this ruling goes too far, but it is a close call and it will be very interesting to watch this develop. The chicken farmer analogy is a good one. If Uber drivers are employees, it actually breaks a fairly large number of well established business models. I think this has more to do with push-back against Uber specifically than technical compliance with the law.
I'm not sure I agree with ending racism. Maybe you were being tongue-in-cheek.

I mean, presumably someday far in the future, everyone will have access to the ability to alter fully their entire genome.

I would think in the next XX years, though, there will be plenty of remaining distinguishing features beyond skin color, and more importantly, plenty of people without the money to make any changes.

Besides that, I'm hopeful that we'll still retain diversity, so I'd think we'll still have plenty of races for ignorant folks to hate.

When racism is done, we'll just continue hating for other reasons. I speculate class will lead the charge next.
Amazon doesn't set the prices though, the problem setter does. I think that's a meaningful distinction as there is not one rate for everything.
They aren't 8 years behind.
Discussion on front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9731963
>With a conventional taxi company, if something bad happens, you deal with the taxi company, get compensation, etc etc

In many places, if something bad happens with your taxi ride, you're still dealing with just the taxi driver. They are independent contractors in many places.

I'm not sure what the makeup is of employees vs. independent contractors, but they are definitely out there in significant numbers. In NYC, for example, most are independent contractors, and this has resulted in a whole mess of problems ( http://nypost.com/2015/01/22/1-5m-in-taxi-drivers-money-held... )
The previous versions of Kindle Paperwhite did include 4gb of storage space. Consumers may start to compare the storage between their ebook reader and their phones, and feel that they are getting ripped off by Amazon. Of course, 4gb for a reader is a lot more appropriate than 16gb for a phone (I'm looking at you, Apple).
Edward Snowden Supports Apple’s Public Stance on Privacy
They explain their methodology and some defenses in a linked paper (PDF):

https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf

All in all it's pretty scary though. My browser is unique among 5.3 million or something. And then there's the algorithm they mention that can detect fingerprint changes with 99.1% accuracy, and be used to do things like recreate cookies that you deleted.
Why should you care? Possibly because you realize that undercutting your countrymen, the people you have to live with now regardless of whether they are employed or not, is something that makes your actual community now a worse place.

Call it self interest, but I want to live in a society that is functional and with neighbors that are happy. The alternative is to retreat further and further into an affluent bubble. Then, I admit, you don't have to care.
And if you sit through one of those pitch meetings, take note of who they bring along to demonstrate capability. Other than your account rep, you will never see any of those people during the actual project. You will be sent a bunch of "freshers" who are barely competent. The Center of Excellence (COE) staff are essentially technical pre-sales staff.
I really hope they bring back the large screen version. For PDFs the screen size really matters.
Right, there will be a wasm.js polyfill just like pepper.js, for browsers without native support. And once browsers have native support, that polyfill can be dropped.

The difference between PNaCl and WebAssembly is simply that WebAssembly doesn't come with a pile of API expectations established by a single browser, and that it has the blessing of multiple browser vendors. Ignoring the API, the latter could have worked with PNaCl just as well.
Next step: JavaScript API?
I think this quote speaks volumes - "WebAssembly has so far been a joint effort among Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and a few other folks." Sometimes I think maybe, just maybe the W3C and other web standards groups finally have some wind behind their sails.

It may have taken a while, but with all these individuals and organizations cooperating in an open space, we may finally advance yet again into another new era of innovation for the web.

I am really excited about this, much like others in these comments.

We have been beating around the bush to have a true assembly/development layer in the browser for a long time: Java applets, Flash, Silverlight, you name it - but no true standard that was open like Javascript is open. This component has the possibility of being the neutral ground that everyone can build on top of.

To the creators (Brendan Eich et. al) & supporters, well done and best of luck in this endeavor. It's already started on the right foot (asm.js was what lead the way to this I think) - let's hope they can keep it cooperative and open as much as possible for the benefit of everyone!
Introducing ShipIt by Shopify
So we're banning trans-fats because they are unhealthy and cause heart issues for the people whom directly consume them?

But smoking is A-OK even though it harmfully impacts people around the smoker and not just the smoker?

I do not find "because it is unhealthy for you" a compelling enough reason to ban something that tastes good and provides a convenience (storage) if we aren't going to be consistent with the logic of "its banned because its bad for you".
Mail in a Box: easy to deploy mail server in a box
I work at a company which was a victim of a hostile take-over from the VC. An Indian-American who is part of the VC firm has taken the reigns as CEO and ejected the founder.

The first thing he did was lay-off dozens of technologists and outsource their roles to India. The software fell apart, the people sucked (I was in charge of managing a few, and it was in general an awful experience), and the customers started leaving in droves. Everything about our highly custom software requires rapid responses to customers. It's impossible when you have people, no matter what their skill level, 12 time-zones away.

The CEO back-pedaled, and brought Americans back on. Suddenly, the customers are coming back, and we are growing again. We were always profitable, but he doesn't like the margins. So now he has again tried the outsourcing strategy, but decided to open an office directly in Pune and have direct hires.

The customers are already, once again, suffering. A competitor who does zero out-sourcing is eating our lunch with new customers. (if not for a strict non-compete, I'd jump ship to them in a heart-beat.)

I'm leaving the company, because it sucks working for a CEO who is a poor leader and not creative enough to find ways to make money other than simply cutting costs. I've been here less than a year and have single-handedly built two pieces of new software that are in production with customers. It's been hard, because all of the knowledge has left. The people in India are completely disconnected from the customers.

Outsourcing makes sense to some degree if a company has a core job other than software, and IT is an employee facing role rather than customer facing, but only if it's a somewhat plug and play job that doesn't require lots of domain knowledge.

If you're a software company, and you want to compete, good luck.

My recommendation to anyone on this list:

If you find out that a potential employer outsources, know that this is a sign of someone who sacrifices employee and/or customer happiness to increase profits. This is also reflective of a company that doesn't know how to creatively boost profits in value-add ways.

My CEO has deluded himself into thinking he is adding value, because he can increase the number of technologists for each customer.

Perhaps most comical about the whole thing is that we are a small company with 50 employees, and there are more executives than US based technologists now. I'm looking forward to giving my 2 weeks notice, but not happy about what the impact is going to be on my customers.
Outlook and Office are part of the Applications and Services Group. Windows was the Operating Systems Group. It's been this way since 2013
Nowy Friends – A P2P Social Radar App That Does Not Log Your Location
Interesting case, thanks for sharing.
The idea would be for drivers to in some way set the price - not riders.
Go to places before going to places
It reads like a sponsored post with just Kindle Paperwhite (an existing product that just got a bump).
No sellers, no eBay?
As someone who was a beginning, community college CS 101 coder at one time, I think focusing on the mechanical, "this code won't compile unless every i is dotted and t is crossed" way of thinking is only half the story. Getting code to compile, after about the 2nd week of class, isn't too hard. Figuring out why your code doesn't give the right result, even when it compiles and runs, is by far a harder skill for new coders to pick up.
> If the CIO/CTO etc are perfectly wiling to disrupt core functions to shave off some costs - you have to wonder about the strategic abilities of these highly paid morons who cannot think past the next quarter.

Agree, but isn't this a broader issue with the system of incentives in a publicly traded corporation? The drive to sacrifice core capabilities in exchange for short term profits seems to be a widespread recurring problem.
> This is pretty ridiculous, man. I don't think I know a beginner programmer who would be so stuck on "every character matters." (Which isn't even true, to some level, in many langauges - ; in JavaScript and Python? Whitespace in languages besides Python?)

I guess YMMV...but most beginners I've worked with are confounded by why code interpreters are so literal. The double-equals sign versus an equals sign is one prominent example...it's not that they can't understand why rules exist...but they seem to think the negative consequences (complete program failure) seem to outweigh the tininess of the error.

After dealing with `=` vs `==` errors in beginners' code...something that I almost never screw up on my own as a coder...I've begun to respect the convention in R to use `<-` as the assignment operator...
Both Uber and Lyft actively discourage this activity though. Knowing how Uber's data mining team works, they have probably already built models to identify drivers who do this and send fares to them less frequently.
My hope is that WebAssembly will start motivating a set of lower-level APIs, with higher-level APIs being provided on top of those by WebAssembly "libraries". JavaScript tends to motivate much higher-level APIs, and you can't turn high-level APIs into low-level APIs, only the other way around.
That's not a good analogy if you want to argue drivers are not ICs. The independent driver is allowed to quit driving if Uber sets the prices too low. The driver "sets" the price by only logging on when he agrees to the price that Uber has set.
At least they do upgrade the resolution. I guess it should help as well, if one has good eyesight.
Everything comes down to data structures and algorithms. It's just a matter of how much syntactic sugar you want on top of it. Image processing? Machine Learning? Real time communications? Functional programming? HTML/CSS/Javascript? Meteor? NoSQL?

It's all the same thing under the hood, just better syntax and tooling. Data structures and algorithms.
The most important changes would be that

- Uber has to take on a lot more of the associated risks (in practice that means paying a lot more insurance)

- Uber has to pay benefits to their drivers and ensure that their hourly wages meet local minimums

EDIT: Or, Uber has to change the way it operates so that it can continue to treat its drivers as contractors.
I was just gonna say; the starting portion is to get something displayed, next step is collision detection and the victory conditions.
Guilty as charged on the HMAC'ing the IV verification - bad example for a still-valid point. You still don't know whether closed-source code is using the rng properly, sending "debugging information" containing your private data to the mothership when internet is available/stars align, creating plaintext temporary files in %temp% folder (accessible by all other apps), etc, etc. Ie. there is a myriad of things the implementation could get seriously wrong, even though the repository itself is encrypted securely.

I would argue that KeePass and its loyal and vast userbase does not in fact seem to know they need a better cryptosystem (and ideally better implementation). My HN post was intended to bring this to everyone's attention.

"I'd still use KeePass before I used LastPass, though, and would still use KeePass before I used no password manager!" - so would I.
It's standard practice at any large company to make org changes at least once a year, and is considered mandatory at any that's "struggling"; i.e., not growing, losing money, and/or flopping with high-profile new products or acquisitions. It doesn't necessarily reflect any real change in product mix, day-to-day life for the rank and file, or any high-minded view of how the company ought to be run. It's just what CEOs do to demonstrate that they're "doing something" so they can keep their highly lucrative jobs a while longer. The departure of Elop was expected and is also standard for CEOs of acquired companies at some point from a few months to a few years after the deal closes. So all in all, nothing to see here.
Common Lisp is basically the successor to Maclisp - which already had the FORMAT function.

Common Lisp does not force you to use FORMAT. It has a bunch of simpler IO functions, too.
Combined with something like e.g. Flipboard's react-canvas, this means we could bypass and re-implement most of the browser stack...
Vampires! Technically speaking, parabiosis. Although it is not actually a new discovery at all, personally I'm convinced there are humans who have already transfused young blood plasma(as the linked article points out illegal stem cell transplants are common as well). Yeah, that's right, vampires.

http://www.nature.com/news/ageing-research-blood-to-blood-1....
This was not the worst campaign ever. They were posting updates often. They were communicating with their backers. Granted it ran over like many other campaigns. But they posted often about updates and what was happening.

Touchtime is much worse than this. Though some of the backers did get a watch but not all of them. They did not stay in contact with the backers. Contacting them about getting your device is impossible.
I did not know that V8 was that good as regexes. TCL is very fast, but it is quite likely that Node is faster.

On the other hand, I think the point that real world performance will depend on the task in hand stands.
I'm sorry to see that. There are always a few exceptions on these kinds of issues. For what it's worth, unless you really are in a desperate position, my usual conclusion is that you're probably better off for walking away as you did in this situation. A company that not only puts that kind of term in the default agreement but then also refuses to budge over it seems a high risk of trouble later from an employee's point of view.
I wanted to make a joke to the effect that if you've already looked at fractals once, you don't need a closer look, har har. But in fact that's the point of the article: "The kind of 'infinite self similarity' just does not hold true after a few orders of magnitude." Whether that's true or not is another question.
As a library, though, which is very different than providing it as an inherent part of a language runtime.

I'm hoping WebAssembly doesn't inherently imply a runtime.
So is the Turk an employee of the problem setter?
Somehow you never see large employers say, "You know, the real problem is, our business is just not subject to enough competition."
jerf is right.. you have a mental model of how a programming language works, and a new language is just changing the syntax used to represent those same concepts.

Does that mean there's no reason to switch? No.. since some languages are better at representing some ideas; some languages have better abstractions for certain ideas; etc.

I think starting with a lower level language helps with this way of thinking. If you learn everything about C (for example), and later learn a higher level language, it's easy to think of how you would implement a certain feature of the higher level language.
Despite this, Uber will still take over the taxi industry, albeit perhaps a bit slower. The quality control over all its components that Uber exercises will continue to bring market attraction to its services and will keep winning market share.
This sort of thing is why so many have decided to preemptively reject GMO foods. After so many failures, anything artificial in food is guilty until proven innocent.

Engineered food really has a terrible record. With the exception of a few early successes with nutrition enrichment (e.g. iodized salt) and sterilization/pasteurization, most of what we've done with food has been neutral to negative in outcome.

Part of the problem might be the incentives. Food is a brutal margin-crushing business. Food engineering is not being pursued with the goal of making food more nutritious or safer. The primary goal is to find ways to offer cheaper, inferior food at the same price -- to remove value from the product in such a way that the customer does not notice. Making food more addictive (junk food) is also an objective. "Heroin is the ideal product" as the saying goes.

With those objectives it's not surprising that "artificial" food has such a horrible reputation. It's effectively a synonym for food engineered to be superficially addictive but devoid of quality.

It's worthwhile to note that iodized salt and pasteurization were in fact undertaken with the goal of making food safer or curing a nutritional deficiency.
The Google Bot executes JavaScript and indexes the result, I don't see why it couldn't run wasm.
To be clear, this is not new regulation. This is a hearing that weighed the facts against the current set of laws as they are written. Under those laws, they're pretty clearly employees.

Changing the existing laws is a different issue entirely. There are serious pros and cons on both sides and the right answer is not obvious.
Any news on whether Apple will contribute these findings back to OpenStreetMaps, like Microsoft's apparent provision of Bing aerial imagery?
Visualize the current state of languages on the JavaScript platform
On the Future
Then you won't have things like live traffic, it is a tradeoff
What if you want to handle some exceptions in code? After all, this is why we throw exceptions rather than just call exit() every time something goes wrong. Eg. if this service call time out, we retry a few times. Without typed exceptions we have to perform some kind of string matching on the exception message.
In retrospect the title is a bit too attention grabbing. If I had anticipated the reaction I could justly be accused of writing flame bait, but I did not expect it to get so much attention or debate - I thought just TCL people would be interested!
My experience is that for a
software development project of
just a few people, for a
code repository fairly obvious use of
the hierarchical
file system on a shared server
is just fine.
> You get paid for X to do Y hours and nothing more.

Some of the incentives I can think of:

* possibility of a promotion, raise, bonus

* profit-sharing plan

* employee stock ownership plan
>You just made my point, if driving for Uber was terrible, people wouldn't do it.

Of course they would, because there is no alternative.
Analogies aren't mean to be perfect comparisons. That's why they're analogies.

The analogy works well enough, since we're dealing with private property (home, network) concealed by points of entry (doors, windows, nodes). Types of responses and feelings of security, etc are outside the scope of the analogy.
How would you avoid royally screwing over the people no H1-B sponserships? It seems that whenever visas are on the agenda no concern whatsoever is given for the fact that we are talking about humans, like you and me, who are only guilty of the crime of not being born in the US.

The word 'racism' comes to mind.
I find the opinions presented in this article are far too common these days in completely misunderstanding exceptions.

"The consequence, when you want to write robust software in C#, is that you have to keep an MSDN tab open at all times. Can this method throw?"

First of all, assume every method can throw. Just do it. It's either true or could be true in the future when someone changes that method. Maybe it doesn't use the network today but tomorrow it calls out to a webservice. So all methods throw. And forget knowing what exceptions they might throw. That's an implementation detail and we want to hide implementation details.

"Should I catch a PathTooLongException here?"

No, you shouldn't. What are you going to do any differently with that than you would FileIsLockedException or NetworkIsDownException or HarddriveIsCorruptException? You wouldn't do anything differently. Show the user the ErrorMessage in the dialog and allow them to restart whatever operation was in affect. Let them choose a shorter path, close Excel, plug their Ethernet cable back in, or whatever. Trying to play wack-a-mole is a fools errand. Put MSDN away, you don't need it.