skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FTA: "In the late 1930s, there were just under 12,000 medallions in circulation; more than 75 years later, in a city larger by one million people and benefiting from far greater prosperity, there are only 13,000."

Population growth alone would require another 600 medallions. But remember: in the 1930s, we were just coming out (or on the upswing) of the Great Recession; so affluence would dictate a much larger number. So why is the number so low?

> Instead, arcane aspects of state and local law and, crucially, the power wielded by wealthy and politically generous fleet owners — who don’t want to see the creation of more medallions lest the value of theirs decline — make that [more medallions] virtually impossible.

There you have it. It is, for the lack of a better word, greed. When you have hedgefunds owning medallions[1], you know it's a bad sign. Essential services for the general populace should not be a vehicle for hedge funds.

An ideal (or, a better) system would be responsive. It would look at how busy cabs are, and accordingly change the number of medallions in circulation.
Every year (or every nth year, take your pick), have a Dutch auction[2] of the desired number of medallions. Disallow renting of medallions (only the owner gets to drive the cab), which will kill speculation. Put an app around the whole system, so users can hail cabs from their mobile devices. Pain eased.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023036530045792143...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction
although the parcel cannon is a fantastic idea! ..not to different from how my paper is thrown at my house at 4am today :)

I'm thinking parcel cannon + small airbag bumpers and maybe a little parachute to slow decent at exactly the right time :)
Here's a nice timeline style review of the history of programming languages that uses videos: http://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.h...
https://vdesign.kde.org/

And the UIs for all this stuff are going to be done in QML, and if you can do HTML and CSS QML is much easier and more intuitive. It puts all the animations, gestures, etc in the QML files and they have a visual designer in QtQuick so you don't actually need to write code at all if you don't want to.
Here in Hong Kong we have a contactless payment card called the Octopus, one of the most successful of its kind worldwide, and the basis for London's Oyster card.

It's been around for almost two decades now. With the exception of taxis and smaller shops, Octopus is accepted pretty much everywhere. If I randomly decided to stop using cash for a month, it wouldn't be too hard.

Nonetheless, cash is still everywhere. Some part due to necessity but mostly human nature.
yes, this is correct and what I alluded to.
HTML/CSS Course
So I am taking up a HTML/CSS class at Pragmatic Labs in Singapore which costs 1,500 SGD for a 3 day course. It costs a ton of money, but I felt like I needed some serious help learning how to program computers from scratch. Hopefully this is a good start towards my dream of building the next Google, getting back to America and staying there P :P

Course: Web Front-End I: HTML and CSS (Complete)
Date: 29-31 July (Wed to Fri)
Time: 9.30am to 5.30pm (with 1 hour lunch break)
Address:
21 Cuscaden Road
Ming Arcade, #05-01
Singapore 249720
(5-min walk from Orchard MRT)
It will run apps from every major mobile OS except iOS, and it will be completely free. It will be able to do "convergence" desktops before even Ubuntu Touch because its running an identical software stack to Kubuntu, you just need to switch the running shell.

What drawbacks, again?
The Design and Evolution of C++ [1]

[1] http://www.stroustrup.com/dne.html
Mi sa di si ;)
yes - that's the type of thing I'm talking about. I've heard of taxi's running on compressed air motors in dense urban environments ..maybe NYC?.

The power to weight ratio is the key issue. Also -- noise could be an issue too -- want to have quiet deliveries.
I thought Sourceforge had been compromised by bad people and should be avoided on principle.
Yes, restrictions on prices indirectly redistribute wealth. But what I was saying was that the government should only redistribute wealth directly, via welfare and taxes (eg income, sales or vat).
I think I disagree with this. It seems natural to start to code with a functional style as you become a better developer. I worked on scala for quite a while, and took a detour to write Java. The Java that I wrote was way more readable and testable than any of the imperative code I wrote before learning FP well.
Yes, and if you set the deadline on the client, the server knows (subject to its time skew) when the request needs to finish. With a timeout, you have to factor in latency, which is necessarily error prone.

Basically, deadline is a context-free timeout.
I think I disagree with this. It seems natural to start to code with a functional style as you become a better developer. I worked on scala for quite a while, and took a detour to write Java. The Java that I wrote was way more readable and testable than any of the imperative code I wrote before learning FP well because I approached the imperative language from a functional perspective.

If you look at Bloch's book Effective Java you'll see he describes functional approaches quite a lot (eg prefer immutability) - these are places you go when you see that they're better.
The big improvements often come from better algorithms and data structures.

Using a function style or a higher-level language sometimes makes it easier to modify the program (and hence use a better algorithm).

I remember people swearing by assembly language back in the 80's, thinking C would make their programs slow and bloated. In reality, it was usually the other way around because C code is much more malleable than assembly. You might want to give FP a second look.
In clr land we've already seen c# adopting a fair few functional things - I think largely ahead of Java. There's this pretty interesting article from an f# (if anyone's unaware that's a Microsoft built functional language on the clr) tutorial site addressing reasons to still use f# over it. It's quite opinionated but worth a read and largely applies to Java/functional on the jvm: http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/is-your-language-unre...

They take a different view to the comparison, looking at things the language enforces more than features/syntax it permits. Of course backward compatibility and plain sanity stop Java making such enforcements so the argument is that the functional languages maintain some strong advantages.
If KDE could get good voice recognition like Google Now (somehow) voice activated Krunner on a phone would be insanely juicy.

Doesn't Google have Voice Recognition APIs? Would it be alright to use their services in KDE?
"Interesting, but in most circumstances I think this falls into the "too clever" category. As with most of C++'s weirder features, you really only want to use them when you absolutely have to."

The C++ committee has been trying to get ownership semantics to work right for about 20 years now. Remember auto_ptr? They've piled hacks on top of of hacks, and it almost works. Almost.

The Rust borrow checker is the right way to do this. Rust has a clear conceptual model of ownership and a way to enforce it. Trying to emulate that via the type system and templates is like pounding a screw. It sort of works, until it doesn't.

Rust doesn't have all the answers, but the ownership model and borrow checking are a huge advance. Any new attempt to solve this problem has to be at least as good.
In addition to successful innovations looking bad, successful founders often look pretty bad as well. Maybe not right when they're starting whatever business that is actually going to be successful, because presumably by that point they more or less have their shit together. But certainly five or ten years before, when they are spending their time learning things that are valuable rather than optimizing for grades, career success, etc.
The Strange Drinking Habits of the Aging Affluent
'The Imitation Archive' Turns Near-Extinct Machines into Music
HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt, put on this tie
> didn't they teach us something about that in econ 1a...

Cash is desired by some businesses because of lower transactional costs, though, not due to scarcity. It's a superior good (along some axes and for some people) and is valued as such.
I was in Greece a few weeks ago. ATMs did not worked, shops would not accept credit cards. Good luck without cash.
How are there so little medallions, yet so many idle taxis? And taxi drivers still making barely over minimum wage (if you subtract the living costs)?

This theory that greedy property owners stifled medallion creation is certainly appealing but it doesn't seem supported by the facts at hand.
Removing features will be met with criticism, but a lot of KDE software is still using UIs made in 2007. A much more modern approach would be minimalistic defaults with a lot of under the hood configurability (which Qt and KDE are really good at - you can add panels, frames, etc to tons of apps seamlessly and put buttons everywhere if you want) which includes settings, where you have the default settings panels be the known most popular / important options (default download location, font size, etc) and you have an advanced toggle to get the traditional KDE overkill settings panel.
I haven't looked into it much in the past few years so it is possible the inner class overhead on Android is not significant anymore, but a few years ago it was definitely something to watch out for on Dalvik.

Again I wasn't being very clear, sorry about that: Kotlin doesn't always reify generics, but it can for functions you mark as inline if you want (it's useful!). Check out the inline function docs!
Good point. Reality is more fine-grained than the account of my own perception.

Do you know if contrib packages are also getting security updates ? If no then why didn't they just move the ffmpeg package there. To me it felt like the really wanted the ffmpeg package to be virtual and pointing to libav.
I think it's undue ego. If a developer gives you code but imposes conditions that the code must not be modified because this damages their artistic integrity, (and I have seen people make this claim), most people would consider that ridiculous, because code is functional and usable. In the context of a videogame, artwork is no less functional and usable. Your ego is not more important than the people who are using your artwork for a videogame.

If you don't want to give people your artwork, then don't. But don't impose conditions that you will give it to them but feel personally offended if they modify it.
If you don't understand the difference between the original Microsoft tablet and the iPad, then it's not surprising that success appears to be all luck.

Details matter.
540M Active Plugins Makes WordPress a Billion Dollar Market
Personally, I like shared_ptr not just when ownership is unclear, but also for when ownership doesn't matter too much. There's obviously some risk involved if you have complex object graphs set up, but when the graph is simple, I like the ability to pay less attention to lifetime management.

Way I think of it is that using shared_ptr gets me some of the productivity advantages of garbage collected languages, with some of the costs. In areas where performance is not terribly sensitive, this can be a good trade off.

On the other hand, you're absolutely right that this constructor is too clever by half.
I don't have much time for my self, so my sessions have to be carefully planned — and I think planning helps not getting distracted with minutiae. The times I have been drawing high were well planned, and very productive.
Is there a video available of said talk?
Tel Aviv - lots of tech guys... just need to find the right one :)
I organize a lot of my of files by date actually. Pictures and other miscellaneous stuff. Music files are organized by artist and album. And project files are organized by project name.

I have been working on an new way to organize my files but I haven't had the time to really do it. The idea is to have a tag/ directory and hard link files into sub-directories named for the tag/labels they represent.
Show HN: Analytics Dashboard with React and ZingChart
A Letter to Millennials: Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution
This is a constraint problem, right? Yes, you can outsmart the market and/or be lucky and pick a big problem at the right time, have the right resources, and nail execution. In that case you don't need to have any of the above to be successful. That's not exactly a revelation but it's not actionable, either. The interesting part that's going on here is that you can actually be successful without picking the right problem at the right time, with almost none of the right resources, and sometimes even with horrible execution.

It's like a recipe for waffles. There's a lot of ways to make good waffles, where good is defined as tastes great, crispy, browned nicely, etc. You can tinker with the browning in a few different ways, you can tinker with how to get them to be light and fluffy, you can tinker with the flavor. Other than flour and water, almost nothing is absolutely required, but you have to have _some_ of the other things, and in the right proportions, or you're going to have a crappy breakfast.

It seems like in both waffles and startups some recipes are more robust than others. They increase the chance of success even when other requirements aren't satisfied. I think what Jessica is getting at is that the most robust founders have perseverance (the first 3 all roll up to that trait) but aren't too stubborn to change their idea (#4). Their motivations are intrinsic, not externally defined (#5). None of these ingredients are absolutely required, but most successful startup recipes include them.
Ask HN: Why is software often slow, despite the great advances in hardware?
All sensible.... and yes I need tech input.... but 8 weeks could help consolidate the idea, focus, provide good connections etc... still I appreciate the risk (and hence the q)...
Luck is important, but not uncontrollable. Successful people manufacture their own luck - they study probabilities and maneuver to become exposed to the best chances, repeatedly.
It took me until the question marks to realize that the words were repeated.

Weird.
Go try modern Plasma (5.3, 5.4 in a few months) and only use the shell and its widgets.

Those are what the VDG has made so far, there have been UI mockups for a lot of software from the file manager to software center that are leaps and bounds better than what are in place, but the manpower in general KDE is really lacking to keep up with the VDG's mockups to actually implement them.
Agree entirely... I know HOW to get the business running, I just haven't (yet) found the right person to help me do it. My advantage is that my tech needs largely already exist in other contexts so I know the tech exists and can be re-applied with some tweaking.
Cimgui release 1.43
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9946060
[Can you tell I had waffles this morning for breakfast? They were yummy, too! Yeast and an overnight rise makes for some really fluffy waffles, you should totally try it!]
I hope not. There are plenty of people who would rather use even Java 6 than Go, and Kotlin is dramatically better than either of them.
"On July 20, Octopus acknowledged selling customers' personal details to Cigna and CPP, and started an internal review of their data practices" [1]

That does not inspire confidence in me. The government is also the largest stakeholder in the company and I assume they and their security forces must love all the data it generates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_card#Privacy_abuse
All computer simulations are models, but not all models are computer simulations. What's taught in graduate school are text-book models which are descriptive at best. I am arguing that more thought should be given to trying to develop computer simulated economies now that computing power is much cheaper. The paper I linked to you shows initial success is at least being able to describe how an economy behaves. It's worth exploring, especially when we have huge test data sets in the form of online gaming economies.

In graduate-level economics (got my masters) there is very little connection between the micro and macro world. Macro economic behaviors are emergent properties of the underlying agents who are guided by a set of incentives, and graduate economic programs generally teach a fractured system. You either apply steady-state models to the macro world or you run behavioral experiments. There is (or there was in 2010, anyway) very little emphasis on modeling both systems as one.
But what if the citizens of Squanderville have a bunch of guns and aren't afraid to engage in ruthless activity to prop up their lifestyle?
But all that better stuff Americans can buy is largely due to bigger household incomes from women entering the workforce. Back in the fifties/sixties, a single working class income could support a family of 4-5, comfortably. That's laughable today.
It's not a matter or "impressions" but rather the matter of chance: when a vulnerability is published you may have the chance to fix it before someone figures how to use it in a exploit.

If the exploit is released immediately, that chance becomes effectively nil.

Of course this doesn't change the fact that everybody should apply the patch ASAP, but delaying the exploit simply adds some delay to the bad guys.
When I read about founders, I always think back to a college class I took, Weapons War & Strategy. The instructor had a favorite anecdote, to show the vast difference between normal people and elite warriors. In WWII, the German Navy used submarines to prowl around looking for shipping to sink. And it had a big (at least psychological) impact. But statistically something like 90% of tonnage sunk by the Kriegsmarine was due to 1% of U-boat captains. The rest of them were apparently just cruising around the ocean trying to avoid getting killed themselves.
What have you tried? (2008)
Kubuntu already uses MAC, and since this is using Muon they can plug whatever app store they want in, including kde-apps. If they wanted to, they could mandate the inclusion of AppArmor permissions files with apps, and then present the requested permissions to users at install, or even more easily do what Android M does and prompt the first time an access permission is invoked.

That, and xdg-app is a thing. They will probably just use those. But there are a lot of ways to do sandboxing of apps on modern Linux.
Here's the relationship. How can you guarantee your low-level code is correct? Here's one way. You have a language like Idris create a DSL that targets the machine you want. You can model what the set of correct programs in your domain look like, and then produce correct code. That's why functional programming in general, and dependent-type programming in particular, is useful for low-level problem domains.
There is a very active attempt to make GPUs FP-friendly called C++AMP. And for streaming transformation tasks, it's a nice abstraction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B_AMP

However, my best algorithms are stylistically equivalent to a map-reduce with combiners entirely in GPU-space. The map tasks themselves carry all the scope I need. They are independent units of work executed by independent warps (synchronized groups of 32 GPU threads) whose results need to be reduced to floating point numbers. That reduction is done with 64-bit fixed point atomic ops (my combiners) because:

1) This insures the sum is deterministic

2) Ever since Kepler (GK104), it's much faster than reduction buffers and uses a fraction of the memory

3) It's possible because I can precompute the expected dynamic range and adjust the fixed point exponent accordingly

Now given that, do you see a functional programming equivalent that significantly improves on this design? I haven't yet.
It's a fairly traditional one, because "too many taxis clogging up the roads" is a common complaint of residents. The first taxi-regulation law in 17th-century London was passed to limit the number of hackney carriages (along with requiring minimum maintenance standards of the vehicles). Of course preferences vary; people who want to take taxis will tend to prefer there be more, while drivers of private vehicles will tend to prefer there be fewer. Residents typically also prefer fewer, unless their own use of taxis overrides that preference.
Even better would be to just get rid of taxi medallions and let anyone who passes basic safety regulations drive people where they want to go for money.

Safety regulations do not require a medallion system. Artificially limiting the number of jobs for this industry is not necessary to impose safety regulations. Its only unique purpose is to restrict competition and grant a few drivers a monopoly at the expense of consumers and all other would-be drivers.

I don't see anyone arguing that the number of software developers needs to be arbitrarily capped to prevent software bugs. That makes about as much sense as taxi monopolies.
Tech Incubator/Coworking Space Backed by South Korean Government Opens
To be clear, I'm not endorsing anything the author says. I just figured this might spark some interesting discussion on the moral implications of running a tech company, and might also give those in the Silicon Valley bubble a sense of how some outsiders perceive the dogged libertarianism of the Valley's most prominent leaders.
I don't believe the population will stop growing, ever. I also don't believe that we will forever be able to break through resource walls with our technology. Maybe it takes 10000 years and a population of 500 billion, I just think that's the most likely scenario.
> The site tracks your savings, and if it's less than the membership fee, you'll receive a refund for the difference.

I'm incredibly skeptical but hopeful for a feature like this. Most likely this is going to work like Amazon's "discounts" where nobody would reasonably pay the crossed out price but they're going to call it a discount to make you feel better. But this kind of feature has amazing potential where they track and show, on their own website, their competitors prices and prove that theirs is lower or match it if it isn't. It would be a great way to create an immediate brand following.
This game isn't exactly simple. There's an entire meta language called WML (Wesnoth Markup Language), support for a powerful AI and Lua scripting. There's also very intricate multiplayer code that I don't think in any way could be trivial with JS.

Yes, Wesnoth is hamstrung a little by its tech stack. The dev team very much wants to move to SDL 2 and support OpenGL in the future.

How will they do that? With more and interested developers. Hence, the call to action.
Why would the band have to be 20-25 for every insurance company in the country? Why not be innovative and create an accurately priced 24-25 band and undercut your competition?

I'll tell you why: because insurance companies are a rent-seeking oligopoly with an enormous barrier to entry. They just sit there and make a fortune doing jack shit.
You've probably already seen this, but the Wikipedia article on the subject isn't a bad introduction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...

It gives a great overview of the different generations of programming and the significant languages in each.
One that I've encountered is that I had trouble setting up live streaming to youtube with libav. Something weird with the rtmp code, with ffmpeg it worked out of the box. Not sure if it matters that it was on a raspberry pi.