skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's unlikely that the cleaners will never clean again. They will just not be using a "tech" company as the middleman.
Even if an idea is valuable, implementation is rarely a simple process.
Er, I always went through them. So did many others. They stated they are folding primarily because of lawsuit pressure, not referral issues.
makes you wonder how many other startups are in the same boat.
> Too bad, this type of service has a lot of value to busy professionals and people with families.

Housecleaning service has a lot of value to professionals and people with families, to be sure. But that service existed long before Homejoy, exists in more places than Homejoy ever served, and was served by plenty of providers not working through Homejoy even where Homejoy provided services.

I'm less convinced that Homejoy brought indispensable new value to the table for customers or cleaners.
there are some yey, and now, there is Afrostream :)
How to Reduce Risk of Cyberbullying
Your requirements are absurd - Every business will be subject to some sort of government regulation that could limit barrier to entry. That's why your conclusions are outlandish- Microsoft was literally deemed to violate antitrust law in federal court; there are plenty of obvious historical examples (United Fruit, Standard Oil, US Steel); Pharmaceutical companies consistently exhibit price gouging in medical monopolies, etc. Furthermore, oligarchical monopolies, like the telecoms, are not somehow exempt- they operate, lobby, coerce, and consolidate power together, despite being 3 separate companies. Utilities are generally natural monopolies, not government created- the major barrier is the huge costs on upfront infrastructure, which dwarf any regulatory costs.
Most importantly though, you failed to grasp the fundamental concept, that a government granted monopoly is not somehow uncapitalistic: it's hypercapitalism, the end goal of the system itself.
Your answer is correct, but remember that if we are heating steam, it is at a much higher temperature differential than a typical heat pump. Good luck getting a COP of 3.5 from room temperature up to steam engine temperature. Steam engines operate at well above 100C. Actually, good luck even finding a heat pump that will operate at those kind of temperatures.

There is a huge gap in what is commercially available in high temperature heat pumps for e.g. boiling water. The best example that I am aware of is the EcoCute for water heating. Heat pumps are much more efficient for heating water for domestic use than resistive heating. However, the only ones on the market are fairly expensive. I'd be very interested if someone on HN knew of a better option.

I've tried building my own high temperature heat pump to go up to around 300C. It isn't easy, because most refrigerator technology is not designed to operate above 100C, so if you use off-the-shelf parts the seals will go or various temperature limit switches will actuate. Then if you try marrying engine parts to AC parts, you have to make your own high-pressure adapters. Overall, its a great way to burn a lot of dollars and hours in the garage.

I've considered just buying a Stirling engine and running it backwards, but I've not yet found one which is designed to be able to run effectively as a heat pump. Any Stirling aficionados here? I'd love some advice on using a Stirling as a heat pump.
Thats what I figured the problem was.
The rest of the cluster doesn't think it's the leader, but the problem is that it still accepts database connections as if it were.

If a client sees a stale value of the leader key (which is possible, either through network hiccups or etcd's normal behavior of allowing reads from followers) then it could contact the old leader and perform updates which won't be visible on the new leader.
As someone dipping into physics very late after a long journey on mathematics, this thread is both depressing and terrifying yet at the same time strangely motivating.

I think there are some big questions without answers still. I want to have a bash at them.
P3D – Aerosoft A319 – Difficult Approaches – Vagar – TrackIR
Sounds an interesting project, I definitely will give it a try. I've just checked your other article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9670062

Is there a benchmark suite that could compare various Lisp implementations? Would be interesting to see their overall comparison...
alternative: apt-get install python-sklearn-doc
I think the key differentiator between successful "uber for X" companies and unsuccessful ones will end up being the customer experience in the industry each company attacks.

Before uber, getting a taxi sucked. Talked to anyone who traveled extensively before uber, and they'll have plenty of stories about cabbies who tried to rip them off.

AirBNB is having similar success because getting a hotel also sucked - it was often overpriced, and the quality of the room often sucked, and as a consumer you didn't really have any feedback into the system.

But home services? Most people I know are able to mine their personal network pretty easily to find good home cleaning and home repair services. Or at least, it's a lot easier for them to do that than not get ripped off by a taxi driver.

These companies won't win in every industry "just because". In order for these companies to be successful, they have to bring some improved experience to the table that customers simply won't be able to live without once they've tried it.

Sad to see things come to an end for the team, though. I hope they find great success in whatever they pursue next.
I have a hard time understanding this. The markup and demand is extremely high. Were they just overvalued so couldn't meet expectations?
What are the assumptions behind "log plots of parametrized experimental progress"? What do these mean in the real world?

To give an example of why "pouring money into it and getting slower and slower progress" could translate into linear progress on a log plot, imagine you have to pour in x² amount of (money, people, time) to get to level x of progress.

In that case "we go slow" means, "we'll gobble up larger and larger amounts of money, but everytime people get impatient we'll have some bone to throw at them".
Yes, it is self-reported but the evidence is there to back it up.
A stroke of genius: striving for greatness in all you do by R.W. Hamming
Drone Delivers Medicine to Rural Virginia Clinic
(1) It was a different person every time, and (2) all booking is done online, with SMS interactions piped through Twilio.
Everything in the software industry is a "fad". How else can we keep marketers employed? ;)
Just to elaborate:

Thumbtack also services a very wide range of verticals, which allows them to succeed purely as a matchmaker. It's an inherent flaw in what folks like Homejoy were doing (although they had aspirations of a larger vertical focus).

I need thumbtack like 3 or 4 times a year. I need Homejoy once ever.
I wonder if they will be returning any money to investors and if so how much.
Robots Read News about Mexican Tunnels
So... the Unicode standard was right to have separate codepoints for "greek capital letter omega" and "ohm symbol", and wrong to share the same point between "latin small letter s" and "seconds symbol"?
I'm surprised they didn't offer to transition/sell their customers to Handy... that's prolly mid-tens of dollars in lead-gen fees off an active customer list of... thousands of customers probably (as well as a less-active list prolly in the tens of thousands range)?
Homejoy expected that a better service would increase the customer base. I don't hire a maid currently, but if it were easy to find a trustworthy and thorough maid, I might.
I'm not suggesting you shouldn't discuss it again here, obviously. Just that as I was reading it, I felt I'd read it once before... and I had.
We tested with PGPool and PgBouncer in various iterations.

PGPool failed at basic failover. It worked fine while the leader remained leader. It would failover to the follower who became leader, but after the first failover, it would stall on connections. We worked through various settings and attempts at making it more stable, but in the end we were not happy with the stability.

PGBouncer requires a connection to a single database and requires a user store associated at the PGBouncer level. One of our internal requirements for our Postgres service is give customers full access to Postgres capabilities. PGBouncer would either limit customer functionality or require us to build more tools for customers to use Postgres's complete functionality. For instance, if a customer ran `CREATE USER foo WITH LOGIN …` from the Postgres connection, the customer would not be authenticate as foo user because PGBouncer would not have immediate knowledge of the new user.

In the end, HAProxy offered the stability and enabled the base functionality of Postgres we wanted. In tests, it failed over quickly and reliably. The only caveat with HAProxy + Postgres is that you have to rely on TCP passthrough with SSL termination at Postgres. We'd have preferred the SSL termination at HAProxy, but Postgres engineered it's own connecting procedure to listen for standard and SSL connections on the same port. SSL termination at the HAProxy was causing issues for drivers that were built to use that procedure and cannot use a standard SSL connection.
Demo video: https://goo.gl/OVJZou
> Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting?

Isn't that what was done, and the decision here is striking that law down? It looks like you can't frame a law that allows format shifting without paying the copyright holder of the work.
this isnt that abnormal. i used to not see my cleaning lady for many months at a time. just left a $50 on the counter every wednesday on my way to work, came home to clean house, folded clothes, everything in its place... it was awesome.
I would recommend going for an A-list big company out of school (Google, Facebook, etc) for a couple of years. They will teach you a lot about infrastructure and software engineering, you'll find a mentor, and the name on your resume will basically guarantee you interviews for the next 10 years. Plus you'll meet a big network of people. You'll also peg your salary at a higher level which compounds throughout your career.
I tried using Homejoy multiple times but decided against it each time. The reasons varied from their cost, to not getting specific enough services, etc. I think they lacked in implementation, at least a little bit.
It's not just that rides are a commodity, they also have an immediacy effect. I don't care who drives me, but I care that they pick me up in the next 3 or 4 minutes. When an uber driver gives me a card that's great, but it's kind of worthless because they're unlikely to be nearby. Hell in the time it takes me to call them I can likely have another car at my front door if I just use the app.
If we're talking about fitness goals, generally, weight is actually a fairly poor indicator of progress. Someone can be 200 lb and another person can be 180 lb, and both can be the same height; yet the 200lb person might be stronger or more athletic, while the 180lb person could have very little muscle mass and a much higher body fat %.

Stated in another way, it's entirely possible that a person can gain weight and lose fat -- or even lose weight and accumulate fat.

The size of various parts of your body is a much better indicator compared to measuring weight (measuring one overall size isn't a great help either), although still not the best. Measuring body fat % would be best, but unfortunately, it's not very easy to do so -- at least not without special tools.
I guess you haven't heard of crunchy roll.
Interesting point - I would originally agree with the other posters that said Gaming is different because there is no chance of making back your money, but you are correct, in a lot of games with markets and currencies, there is a way to make money from your time spent gaming.

I guess this would only be an issue if the purchase-element manifested directly in a way to make money? For example with Team Fortress 2; you can buy keys to unlock the item crates (which deliver a player a single new random item) - but you can't buy the item crates themselves - and you can't buy an item to make the crate's randomness any more favorable.
I actually have to agree with this. If you're uncomfortable around low income (also, when the fuck did $15/hr become low income?) people, then isn't really your fault, not theirs?
I can't argue that driving is unskilled, but cleaning is certainly a skill. I've gone through several services for house cleaning in the last few years and the quality of service varies dramatically.

> The only skill required is attention to detail and caring enough to do a good job.

Thought experiment: imagine yourself cleaning 100 houses professionally for two hours. My bet is that the last house would be 2X - 3X more clean than the first.
inglor is a contributor to Bluebird, so I'd guess he'd say Bluebird. Bluebird is the much faster option and has a lot more features, if you're using babel (and a recent node/io.js) you can transpile async/await to bluebird coroutines for maximum performance and syntactic beauty.
> FWIW Thumbtack and many other companies have the same problem, and it can be solved by just charging the cleaners more money for the initial introduction.

Which inherently reduces the degree to which the service is attractive to contractors compared to other marketing channels (which is really what it is for them), which reduces the contractors on the service, which reduces the value to consumers.

That it works in some industries doesn't mean that its an easy solution which works profitably in all industries.
Do you really believe that's how higher education works?
What? I had no clue this was comming. I'm surprised there wasn't more signs
Mostly clickbait...one of many problems the company faced.
You're demonstrating perfectly the urgent need for self-driving cars.
PEP 0448 – Additional Unpacking Generalizations
I live in Hayward
The NSA can do it, maybe they should contribute some engineering effort to help scientific causes like this and gain some good PR in the process.
Yes, there are laws surrounding employment. Minimum wage laws are one example. IRS regulations/tests as to whether you are an employee or a contractor are another.
Ask HN: How do you recover from a bad day?
When you have had a bad day, what do you normally do to take your mind off/switch-context just to feel better/not-shitty...

Does anyone have any routines like some games, books or some other activity (apart from exercise as it's normally already 8ish in night when you realize the day is gone, and it was quite horrible, and you don't have much energy or motivation left to go to gym or a run...)
Hello,

I am Ludovic, cofounder and CTO of Afrostream.
You are right the "African culture" in two words, doesn't exist in fact.There are a lot of different cultures in Africa. Do you know that Nigeria is the second or third producers of movies and series (behind India, and sometimes, USA :) ) Ghana is very productive too. West Africa (Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, Ivroy Coast...) have some interested movies too. Our goal is to show the difference, and to spread the word about these cultures.
Their point was that people don't respect laws when laws are as absurd as this one. It undermines peoples' beliefs that they should follow the law when:

1) It's absurd to the general population

2) It can't even be enforced

>undermine communal belief in the importance and relevance of laws

Laws like this undermine the common-held belief that laws are important or relevant. Because everyone breaks the law and it's not enforced - which makes the law not important and not relevant.
Boiler startup was essentially solved by Doble 80 years ago. The steam generator (Sort of a JIT for steam) could produce useable pressure in less than a minute.
Even if they do develop nuclear weapons, so what? I can see only see a positive side to it where the USA will think twice before messing with the internal affairs of a country again.
I really like the idea of being able to rent specialized spaces with equipment. The examples were things like a beadmaking studio, but I could see other specialized working spaces like a machine shop with lathes and welding equipment also being listed. Once you establish a reputation for being a decent person that takes care of tools of others you might use in their workspace, it would help in people approving you to work in their space.
I don't think that was a terrible choice. Just that maybe if you're going to do that, that there should also be a "Start Here if you have no idea what's going on" option that would be an ordered walkthrough of the basics.
There are laws surrounding employment?

California has extensive laws that impose fixed costs on employers (paid family leave, for example). CA is also notorious for lawsuit risks. There are also federal laws - Obamacare for anyone working 31+ hours, and many more.

In economics, fixed costs and regulations like this are called "rigidities", and are well known to cause shortages/surpluses and misallocation of resources. (E.g., according to Keynesian economics, such things cause most/all recessions.)
> the balance of power between the tech company and the "1099 contractors"

That hits the nail on the head. A 1099 contractor has to cut some 30%-40% off their wage to support things like self-insurance, etc (or add yea much). If you're "working" for a gig provider, you're not a 1099 employee by the inherent nature of the thing. Granted, you're not in a normal employer-employee relationship, but neither are you a skilled freelancer contracting your labor out on wages you yourself set and negotiated.

While I fully support the idea of TaskRabbit, Lyft, Uber, Homejoy et al, certain realities have to be faced squarely: they are not being real about the nature of their business. They really are something like employers, with something like employees.

Cheung is likely correct that a third legal category needs to be created (neither 1099 freelancer nor true employee), but in the absence of that, it seems profoundly more ethical to consider the workers employees.
casinos didn't birth into existence fully regulated. their illegality and regulation came about because they were fleecing their many patrons.
My interpretation is that you agree with each other.

I think @hyperion2010's point was that this interpretation of law can't be taken seriously, and by extension that if this part of law can't be taken seriously then law in general is undermined.
almost every employee i ever fired in california got some kind of check as an offering to ask them not to sue for more... at will is misleading statement in a litigious state.
There are three defining occurrences in Iran-US relationship:

1. The US organized a coup, removing liberal elected prime minister of Iran to bring back the king Iranians despised and have effectively overthrown. This would change the course of Iranian history forever:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

2. Iran hostage crisis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis

3. US support of Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. Even when he started using chemical weapons against both Iran and his own people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...

For an article which wants to find why Iran fell out with the west, it is not merely ignorant to remove the first and most important cause of the current mistrust. It looks very much like propaganda.
Show HN: EZwurd. The easy way to learn Spanish pronunciation
Is that the old paper game where you place shots on grid references to sink your opponent's ships? Or something else?
The F.D.A.’s Medical Device Problem
TED Talk explaining how the car sees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiwVMrTLUWg
CVSphoto.com Hacked: Investigation Underway
My wife, a linguist, and I, a techie, made a website to help American English speakers learn Spanish pronunciation. I can see this being useful in classrooms when students need to prepare for oral tests. I would love feedback and suggestions.
Reddit's Most Racist Community Rejoices as New CEO Says He Won't Delete It
“Connect Home” Is Bringing Affordable Broadband to Low Income Families
Do you know what means the word "Niche" in France : it's a house for dogs, literally, http://www.jardiland.com/mes-animaux/12431-chiens/12432-habi...

We, Afrostream, have a bigger house to fill ;)
Interactive spin sequence of NASA's Pluto imagery
Failure is the path to success, no?
This is an interesting point. It can work out the other way. The Thirty Meter Telescope, a very large segmented mirror optical telescope, is being built on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Construction is being protested by activists for desecrating the mountain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope_protest...

and a pretty good listicle here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/13/hawaii-telescope-pr...
I once asked Adora why they are not a marketplace instead. She replied that the branding and bonded/insured cleaners would be more attractive to customers.

Obviously easy to say in retrospect what mattered in the end, but I'm wondering what is a method to test this kind of assumption?

I go by my own use case - I really only care about price, and I build trust by the person and not by the company. I prefer to stay home while it's being serviced as well.
Any specific ones you recommend? Try adding them to - http://hackr.io
I agree that it is not a very skilled job. But attention to detail (i.e. caring to clean the house) is a more rare skill than you think. I have so many operators who have to come to clean our space and have done a messy job. The difference between good and bad operators is very stark - and it is the good ones you want to deal with.

With driving, nothing of that is required. Many people are in auto mode when they are driving. Think about it - is it easier to drive vs. cleaning your place? Of course you want basic driving skills to be there - but I think the DMV licensing process and Uber ratings generally takes care of that. You are going extreme by talking about death etc. - but how many Uber journeys have resulted in that. There are millions of Uber being driven every day - and I haven't read about a single death (of the passenger).