fosk

> US Air marshals (armed cops who sit on every aircraft secretly with plain-clothes)

Do they really sit on every flight?

It’s incredible to realize how foundational the Roman Empire was to what we now commonly consider Western civilization.

Rome certainly was a highly advanced society in its time, but what a shame to think that because of vast abundance of slaves the Roman society never pushed further with technological innovations, effectively preventing the human race from having mobile phones by the year 1000, if not earlier.

Some argue that with less slaves an industrial revolution might have triggered much earlier, and Roman society was certainly ingenious enough to push the boundaries if there ever was a need to do so.

> not some fake pseudo- altruistic bullshit

Ha! Welcome to SF. The city that pretends that letting homeless people shoot up and overdose in the street means that we are respecting their right to live the way they want. In any decent society we would be helping these people, and we would disrupt their destructive way of living, which is destructive not just to them but to society as a whole (public health concerns, needles and human excrements on the street, etc).

But...electric scooters are the current biggest problem for the city administration.

Edit: to the downvoters, care to explain your disagreement?

SF is a city thriving with homelessness, drug abuse on the streets, dangerous needles and human shit everywhere. Glad to see they are spending time on things that matter.

Among other things, on 6th street there are people sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk, peeing on walls, camping in front of liquor stores and barbecuing illegally on the sidewalk (!) in broad daylight. Yet the fabulous city administration considers electrical scooters to be the topic of the day.

Correct - ZipCar is not cheaper than traditional rentals, but it gives me something that Hertz, Enteprise, etc for some reason cannot commit to: no BS and time accuracy.

I don’t want to wait in line or deal with their representative upselling me a thousand addons, I don’t want to think. I’d rather show up and hop into a car, a-la ZipCar, without having to spend 20 minutes talking to anybody or figuring out what insurance I should choose.

That's intentional. By doing so you are interrupting the occupant's peaceful moment, make him anxious, and as a result he will get out faster.

These apps wouldn’t exist in the first place without these caveats since they operate on thin margins. Sure, we could put them out of business and then how will that help people who can’t find a regular job? At least now they have options. Also we have a big problem with unskilled workforce nowadays - if you are unskilled by choice or (unfortunately) by circumstances this world is not going to be kind on you. That’s the sad truth.

Assuming you can survive the initial blast, how do you plan to protect yourself and your family from radioactive dust for 7-10 days (assuming windows are broken by the blast - or by you).

I am sure people are willing to help you if you give them a way to donate - have you thought about setting something like that up? HN is a big enough community that even a small donation by a few users could cover the 3-4k expenses you will have to pay for your exams.

If I may ask, what kind of functionality have you been trying to implement in a Kong plugin?

Marco here, Kong's CTO. We hear you, we are aware that plugin development is not as easy as we wish, and we are planning to rollout a few improvements next year to make it mainstream, including:

- A built-in Lua plugin API that abstracts away the underlying complexity of NGINX and OpenResty. Among other things the plugin API will make it easy to interact with the lifecycle of request/response objects.

- An official testing framework for plugins (unit and integration tests).

- A new DAO to get rid of some magic and make the overall system more robust and extensible (with an in-memory DAO implementation for example).

- Support for remote gRPC plugins to support plugin development in any gRPC supported languages.

- And finally supporting plugin installation/versioning within Kong itself using the HTTP Admin API to install/uninstall plugins cluster-wide on any Kong node (as opposed to installing plugins on the file system).

NGINX and Lua (on top of LuaJIT http://luajit.org/) were chosen for their reliability and performance, the next step for Kong is to focus more on making the overall Kong ecosystem bigger therefore simpler plugin development is a very high priority item in our roadmap.

This is not how we do things these days - you will have an option to buy an accessory on every delivery for $9.99 extra.

Is Gold in a bubble right now? Because the current price of Gold strongly exceeds the intrinsic value of the material and it has been like that for a while.

Bitcoin has pivoted away from being a currency. Bitcoin is now a store of value, like gold.

In my experience Uber is cheaper than Lyft for any 5/10 minute ride within SF city borders.

It could be but what collision would output a fragment of this size and shape? Maybe a supermassive one between two large planets

Oh come on, you know what he meant.

This is getting to a point that even genuinely talking about it, and rightly so, risks backfiring at you because there’s always somebody willing to make 10 extra mental steps to find it offensive.

Visiting Rome is one of the most beautiful experiences you can do, it's a time machine back into the past, it's walking through history.

> Since Lua is more typically used for extension and embedding

The LuaJIT (http://luajit.org) is another reason why Lua is very popular (although it only officially supports Lua 5.1). It’s a very fast implementation of the Lua VM. OpenResty (https://openresty.org/) is a very popular framework that allows Lua scripting on top of NGINX and LuaJIT, and it’s the same stack that Cloudflare uses. Basically over 5% of the world internet traffic goes through Lua, but only a few people know it.

This is the same stack that Kong (https://github.com/Mashape/kong) also uses, probably the most popular OpenResty-based application. Lua on top of LuaJIT can be extremely fast especially if you leverage FFI.

Lua is an extremely simple language which can be pretty much embedded anywhere, and the LuaJIT just does a great job at making it extremely embeddable and fast.

Disclaimer: I am a core committed at Kong.

> What you want is for any partner you get, to be happy to leave whenever you don't want them around anymore.

Just to clarify, same for my partner, I would want them to feel they can leave anytime instead of sticking around. This topic may came across as a selfish point of view, which is not really my intention, it works both ways. I believe in long-term relationships, in fixing problems together, in building value between two people. All I am arguing is, you can do that today without a contract.

You are correct, a prenup may fix things - but too strong of a prenup effectively invalidates the marriage contract and the contractual incentives in the relationship. Thing is, at the end of the day it becomes a contractual negotiation, but heck, I just wanted to care about my partner and be happy until the end of time, instead it becomes "If you love me, initials here and signature there".

No. Two people can and should be together forever if that's what they want. It can be permanent even without a traditional marriage.

> We wanted to make something permanent, something we weren't going to back out of.

Couldn't the same statement be made without signing a piece of paper? Isn't mutual love, understanding, affection, protection between each other enough to make this statement?

What are we afraid of? That without marriage maybe one day some of this love, affection and protection will go away? But if it's really strong, aren't we going to find again mutual understanding with our partner and fix it anyways, with or without a marriage? And if that piece of paper is really the only thing holding two people together, shouldn't they re-consider that maybe they are not meant for each other and there is another person out there who is waiting for them?

> When you find an amazing place with really inexpensive rent, how long of a lease do you want to sign?

If I told you that this place could be yours forever even without signing a lease, you could just move in and enjoy it for the rest of your life for how long as you wanted, why would you sign the lease anyways?

> All relationships have their ups-and-downs, and there may come a time when the only thing holding it together is a promise that was made in front of other people.

Marriage is not a pre-requisite for going through the up and downs of a relationship. Normal relationships with no marriage have ups and downs too, and if there is mutual understanding and affection it will survive anyways. If it doesn't work, well, then maybe it's better to put an end to it and find a better partner?

I guess my question is, why are we putting ourselves in the corner with a contract just to force ourselves to stick around a little bit longer, since you could do that anyways without that same contract?

Maybe it's part of the human nature to go through this, to find a partner that we think will be loved forever, and then it won't work, and we learn from it, and we make more mistakes until we find the real one. Society tells you to find a life partner between a specific age range, but what if it's not true? What if you must make mistakes, you must break up with a partner, maybe only to find out that you both love each other and come back together. Maybe all of this must happen, but we are not letting it happen because of external contingencies.

In a way it seems like we are artificially containing our human nature.

In a society that offers both, why would anybody choose marriage over a civil union?

I thought marriage was about love, but if it ends up being about managing resources then why not start something like a company with equal(or not) shares, vesting periods, etc? It would make more sense to me because it's a more efficient way of dealing with shared assets than the current legal form of marriage.

I tried to answer to your question here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15179002

My goal is having two individuals loving each other, protected during their relationships with some rights (ie, if she/he is injured at the hospital I am recognized the right to go see her/him), that are able to move away freely from each other without feeling stuck in a contract.

Some of this couples will last forever, some will realize they are not meant for each other and they can walk away without ruining their or their partner's life.

Maybe some of them will ultimately be more happy with their lives and meet other people who they really love.

The current legal form of marriage formalizes love in a contract that doesn't take into account the fact that love can disappears one day for no reason, but assumes marriage is here to stay. Or to be more accurate, it does take that into account with a very expensive trigger called "divorce". Therefore the divorce is putting a price to my lack of love, and makes the decision to quit harder. By doing so the decision of staying together, which should be governed by love, is determined by cost, effectively negating the whole purpose of a marriage.

Unless it's purpose keeping two individuals together no matter what, even if there's no love. Maybe it made sense in the medieval era, not in our century.

This is correct. Why can't we, as a society, move away from marriage as it is today but still implement rights between two individuals who love each other in a different, more modern, way?

Correct me if I am wrong, you could still love her, and do all the things you do, and keep supporting each other just with the power of your love without grabbing a pen and signing a piece of paper.

I am not arguing against long-term relationship or against honest and true love, I am arguing against the actual marriage practice.

Sure, but why getting married?

A couple can believe in love, without contracts on the side.

And if they decide to break up, then let it be so. Marriages more often than not seem to force people together when things are not right anymore, instead of letting them be free to choose something else when love is gone.

I am not married, and I am in my twenties, and I don't get why people are signing a contract with high termination fees just so they can compromise on everything for the next 4 decades. Somebody please enlighten me, why are we still stuck with this 2000yrs old tribal behavior instead of moving on with a more modern approach?

Edit: controversial arguments come with downvotes, but I'd really like to know your opinion on this.

Of course Travis still thinks that, he is the founder. He cares about the long term survival of Uber, not about an exit event. Uber is in a complicated industry, in complicated times with very aggressive competitors. It just takes time, but somebody is unwilling to wait anymore.

The bird cannot fly, we already know that. They are crashing Uber against a wall and they just don't care. Do you know what's going to be the next word coming out of the new CEO? It's going to be "layoff". Whatever it takes to fix the books. And then what?

Then maybe Travis comes back to right the ship if it's not too late.