chdir

If you are a company touting yourself as the 'safer' alternative to traditional taxis, you should take such complaints very seriously. A background check on the driver would have shown his previous convictions. They claim to do background checks [1], but in reality they skip it [2], atleast that's what happened in Delhi.

They are providing a false sense of security to the passengers.

[1] https://www.uber.com/safety

[2] http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-we-did-not-run-backgrou...

To all those who think that this is a witch hunt against Uber, here's a glaring example of Uber compromising safety of their passengers. Had they taken timely action...

https://twitter.com/nps2113/status/542063133809192960

The lady was on TV saying that she had complained about the creepy driver to Uber, a few days before he committed the dastardly act. They gave an assurance but failed to act, which resulted in something much worse. Granted that the bigger culprit is the police here who let go off the individual despite his previous run-ins with the law. But Uber has absolutely failed the trust here. Just goes out to show that they care about $$ above everything else.

Response from Uber: https://twitter.com/nps2113/status/542352404478713857

News coverage: http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/the-buck-stops-here/woman-c...

(Credit goes to a comment down below for first mentioning this)

In its own hilarious way, this could be closer to truth than most of the stuff here.

HN will integrate it natively some day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297695

How many units does $500 fetch where you live? Would be curious to know a breakdown of the bigger portion of the pie in those units.

That domain name would have been one expensive purchase. I wonder if there's any significant correlation between buying an expensive domain upfront & success rate.

That aside, It has spent most of it's life being parked with ads. https://web.archive.org/web/*/wire.com

Either join a course or pick up a good book. I found this book immensely useful and simple to follow: "Mindfulness in Plain English" [1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Plain-English-Anniversary-...

Square roots should be improved, just ranges from squares of 0 to 6.

Under $12, with camera, bluetooth, FM, radio, flashlight and dual SIM

http://www.ebay.in/itm/Q-Tel-Cheapest-GSM-Dual-Sim-Mobile-Ph...

There are more available in B&M stores for $6-$7 with a reasonable lifespan (easily greater than 1-2 years)

+1, Related reading (all from Bill Karwin of SQL Antipatterns fame):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/192220/what-is-the-most-e...

http://www.slideshare.net/billkarwin/models-for-hierarchical...

http://karwin.blogspot.in/2010/03/rendering-trees-with-closu...

First time I've heard about such a service. Sounds useful.

Just curious, no offense intended, but how would I go about trusting a third party company which likely has much lesser reputation than the potential acquirer.

Crash investigation (Source - NTSB : http://www.ntsb.gov/news/2014/141112.html)

According to the pilot, he was unaware that the feather system had been unlocked early by the copilot. His description of the vehicle motion was consistent with other data sources in the investigation. He stated that he was extracted from the vehicle as a result of the break-up sequence and unbuckled from his seat at some point before the parachute deployed automatically. Recorded information from telemetry, non-volatile memory, and videos are being processed and validated to assist the investigative groups.

... The investigation is ongoing. Any future updates will be issued as events warrant.

The blog says:

It’s not a company that would be a natural product partner for us.

Here's the reply from the founder, to the comments on his blog :

Q: Alex - I'm curious why the company was doing such deep due diligence on you in the first place? Was this for a potential partnership opportunity (you said it wasn't a natural fit?) Or were you simply receptive to an acquisition offer at that time, even if you weren't sure you actually had a genuine interest in selling? ...

A: Thanks for the comment, Michael. The conversation steered toward a potential acquisition very quickly. I'm not opposed to exploring opportunities, so the meetings went on. It wasn't until after the offer was made that I decided to turn it down.

> We had a handful of meetings between with their business development team and executive teams, and their engineering team did a thorough technology review of Groove.

I'm curious, why would you let them do a thorough technology review of your startup in the first place? (Edit: Because it can be dangerous)

Agreed. I hope that's the take home message for Google. They started something good with Nexus and made it better with Moto . But 2014 has been a disappointment so far. Hope the successor of Nexus 6 addresses all these issues (and pray it's not called Nexus 7).

Nice work. Now just waiting for someone to normalize (currency) & throw it on a map :)

Ongoing discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8527774

Thoroughly enjoyed reading the anecdote (more than the original article). You should be a writer.

Thanks. As a follow-up, there are existing services that already have this database. So why build another one? Is it because the existing ones aren't open source?

Could someone explain the privacy implications of mapping Wifi networks to GPS co-ordinates. Is it an opt-out thing?

Taiwan investigating Xiaomi too : http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/technology/taiwan-investig....

Xiaomi is moving its servers out of China to address such concerns : http://www.financialexpress.com/news/xiaomi-shifts-user-data...

Both are great, but for a beginner, I too feel that Mercurial is much easier to get started. You don't have to spend any time 'understanding' how it works, just 3-4 commands is all that it takes to use it.

> Mercurial will get a lower and lower percentage of the market place over time

Lots of big projects continue to use Hg, some even switching to it from Git (e.g. FB)

https://hg.python.org/

https://hg.mozilla.org/

https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...

> The value of information/education is immeasurable

Doesn't the parent comment address that with : it seems like the majority of the book talks about stuff you can easily Google about (and typically find a high-quality answer, precisely because the Sublime Text community is so large and active)

I'm sorry to hear about the outcome. Did your Doctor mention what percentage of people share the same problem as you? If the percentage is small, isn't that the case with most medical procedures & medicines i.e. risk of side effects ? My understanding is that gall bladder removal has been perfected over a long time span and it's considered safe far a very high percentage of patients.

Dear Google, Please announce a 'Nexus 6 Mini' someday in the near future. Just trim the screen size to a sub 5" level and price to sub $400. Rest all features are welcome. The reduction in battery size proportionately is acceptable.

- Sincerely, A long time Nexus user !

Dimensions : 82.98mm x 159.26mm x 10.06mm

Weight : 184g

Source : http://www.google.com/nexus/6/

The trend of correlating device number (i.e. Nexus 'X') with screen size is going in the wrong direction. 6 is already too big (and heavy) for some. Next year, there'll be no distinction between phones & tablets.

Edit: Disappointed with the pricing too: $649. Google had set a good trend with Nexus series - Awesome devices at exception price. All that's gone. Kind of against the Android One initiative.

I agree Apple is to blame here. But, disagree with the logic.

> What's the point in them wasting their time just skinning something that is guaranteed to be slower than Safari

I'd say, consistency of user experience and sync'ing my bookmarks etc. Skipping iOS means you are losing a reasonable chunk of users who fall in the category of wanting the same browser on all their devices.