joshuaellinger

Taxis classify their drivers as independent contractors. They are required to do fingerprinting.

Funny. I'm exactly the opposite.

I use Lyft only because it is nicer. If I cared about the price, I wouldn't use either. I don't shop at Walmart for similar reasons.

Ultimately, I think that payoff from being nicer is with the drivers, not the consumers. How it plays out is going to depend on which side of the market is the limiting factor on growth.

"I was not directly involved with firing her" => "I have someone else to do my dirty work".

I don't know why this one person's story bothers me so much personally. I think that it was her 50 lb bag of rice comment reminded me so much of old Charlie Chaplin bits.

I actually went and found my old Paypal account, gave her $50 bucks, and deleted my Yelp app.

I love C# and find the syntax of golang... primitive.

However, the green-thread/channel combination is powerful. It is not just that it is performant (it is) but that it is x10 the code and mental overhead to use compared to something like the TPL (task parallel library for you non .Net-ers).

So I'd caution against comparing C#.Net to golang. C# Async/Await is fine for event processing but it doesn't match golang channels. And channels are really the defining feature of golang.

If possible, find out who is going to be there and what their top three pain points are. Focus on showing the person(s) in the room that you are relevant to the problems they personally face -- IT has totally different concerns from Marketing.

Your goal in the first meeting is to get the second meeting. Thus, it doesn't do you a lot of good to have them think they understand what you offer (especially if they get it wrong). You want them to need to talk to you before they make any decisions. This all points to focusing on the problem and convincing them that you _can_ solve rather than explaining how you solve it.

You could replace "Bernie Sanders" with "FDR" and it would sound like it was written almost 100 years ago.

That's a misleading article.

For example, in Austin, Ann Kitchen's proposal passed 9-2 and fingerprints are required. Austin already had horse-and-buggy rides for the tourists so relabeling it was a funny tactic but not substantive. What's more, Uber/Lyft lost the fight over fingerprints in Houston and San Antonio.

Overall, it looks less like a giant coup and more like responsible regulation change to protect public safety.

Uber/Lyft are effectively saying is that so many of their drivers lie about their names because they have minor criminal records that Uber/Lyft can't recruit enough drivers if they have to do effective background checks. That's not going to fly.

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/local/whats-next-for-ub...

I use the Microsoft stack but run a lifestyle business, not a startup. It has a lot going for it and it is not costly. I spent years on Sun Solaris in the 80s -- I like Linux a lot as well.

I think there are a couple of things: 1. Amazon supports Linux better. 2. Good C# people go to work for big corporations. 3. Certain Funders (A16Z) really don't like Microsoft. Can't imagine why. :) 4. A lot of new, interesting stuff is open source, where MS doesn't really play. 5. The startups that use it don't talk about it. 6. MySQL. C# is cheap. SQL Server... not so much historically. 7. Microsoft lagged behind on the modern javascript world. Still does a bit.

From where I sit (Capital Factory in Austin), I see about 10% C#/.Net. There is probably another 5-10% that I don't see.

Microsoft has always been very good to developers. I think the biggest consideration would be can you find and hire good people on the stack. But then, that is always going to be the main issue.

Rick Webb's comments on banner ads are a pretty good indirect rebuttal.

https://medium.com/@RickWebb/banner-fraud-doesn-t-matter-fc8...

Interesting extensions.

The nice part of the syntax is that: 1. it is clear when you are going external. 2. procedural code can be written in C# -- big win there.

But it misses the two big issues in ETL that I always run into:

    1. You have a bunch files that are 95% the same but have 2-5 columns that are different.
    2. Someone sticks the wrong type of data a field.

For those issues, you'd be better off mapping a file (or a group of files) to a virtual table so you can specify the schema up front.

I am slightly surprised that it is legal to ask potential employees for W-2s. I guess it is not like health records but tax filings are in-general private.

If I were asked for W-2s, I would respond by asking for the same information from the company on the existing sales reps.

Or he could just do what people do -- pay the taxes. Because corporations are people, my friend.

I've been using Windows Phones for a while after using iPhones for a while. The (former) Nokia hardware are solid and the entry level devices are being given away. Check out Cricket -- they are on the AT&T network but can't advertise it.

My basic take is that, so long as you don't have a big interest in Apps, it is a better device. It makes full use of the real estate and feels more like an integrated platform than a collection of functions.

But the App situation is still a mess -- no one builds for it. If you have anything you really want, check in advance.

I went to one of their events. The new-tech/startup mentality thing is legit but...

they really suffer from trying to pitch when they should be sharing information about what they are doing. SXSW sessions are always a little content-lite but it was just a recycled recruiting pitch.

they'd do much better if they had some outside review of their content.

Upvoted -- you got the tone of go exactly right. We're headed back to C#. Don't like religion in politics or programming languages.

China is a special case. For most of human history, it was a major power. In a sense, their recent growth is just catching up to the long-term historical norm.

It is also different in that the US basically shipped them manufacturing capability (in some cases literally shipping the machines from Ohio). I don't think that has happened before at anything close to this scale. This is the first industrialization period without a major destructive war at the end (so far...)

What happens if China shifts from a nation of producers to a nation of consumers like the US did in the 1950s? What happens if nuclear weapons or the example of the US keep their rulers from getting into costly wars? What happens if they control energy production in 25 years because they force all their producers to convert to solar early and dominate the industry.

Overall, I am skeptical that a historical study really generates much insight -- we are in uncharted territory.

Finally, I can't read anything by Larry Summers without thinking about this article from Naked Capitalism. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/why-larry-summers-sho...

Ah. Venturebeat. Never shy about hyping the future.

The power industry was saying that nuclear power would be 'too cheap to meter' in the 1970s.

Ray Kurzweil does not make that mistake but is he right about the cost curve going forward? It's not like semiconductors where you get cost-reduction driven by a physical effect.

Yeah, I was overstating it when you look at the top line numbers.

The real action is where and how the money was spent and I'm having trouble finding a good source that splits it out that way.

You had a number of different things going on.

1. In the 80s, Federal funding got focused on big defense and big science projects that basically didn't payoff unless you give them credit for bankrupting the USSR. The biggest miss has to be investing in solar.

2. Deregulation shook up a lot of industries and took on a life of its own. Big companies became a lot more short-term focused as competition increased. A lot of them were funding be R&D labs and that started to disappear in the 80s.

3. What we wind up with today is a couple of the crazy profitable tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Apple) have internal R&D capable of taking big steps but only Google is really looking deep into the future. The rest of corporate America has outsource R&D to startups.

4. The problem with startups and V.C.s in the context is that they are great at taking a breakthrough to market but don't have the time/money/patience for the 10-20 years of basic research.

...

So Mister Peter "There has been no innovation since Disco" Thiel really wants big innovation then he should support a return to the 1970s -- you know, top tax rates of 70%, heavy regulation, and big companies/government looking out for the long term.

Personally, I'm glad to be in 2010s but I do have a little bit of concern about how we are heating up the planet.

1. Big Build up in defense spending 2. Very High Interest Rates (Volcker in 80-81). 3. Collapse in Oil Prices

Yes, ending the cold war was great. I even give Reagan some credit for it by pushing them over the edge. Seems like we could have gotten the same outcome at a 1/10 the cost.

Reagan (really more Phil Graham) killed a lot of the depression era regulation that made financial markets safe and boring. But the talent drain into Finance didn't really pickup until much later.

Certainly a giant waste of smarts today.

You know what is damn funny about this....

In 1980, Reagan got elected and cut a ton of forward-thinking basic research. I won't go through it in detail but there was a giant shift from publicly-funded big ideas to privately-funded little ideas. All the big companies also got short-term focused and outsourced their labs to startups.

Now we have this big-government-is-bad guy, who probably looks at Reagan and his gang as Saints, lamenting the lack of progress.

This is what happens when you put all your best minds into either (a) building weapons or (b) advertising/marketing or (c) the legal profession.

Let me know when he says that we need to raise his taxes to do stuff that collectively benefits society. Until then, he's just like a drunk complaining about a hangover.

I was trying to figure out why I could write a ring buffer in Go and it would perform so much faster than the equivalent C# implementation.

This is part of the answer. Despite an attempt to align a struct to leverage the cache, it was getting rearranged.

Of course, there is also less inlining and the schedule behind the async command really doesn't like it when you get more active pseudo-threads than cores.

In the end, the data flow TPL was the only implementation that was roughly in the same ball park.

I am a rare (for Hacker News) C# dev and I've just been toying around with Go. There is stuff to like but my feeling is that the biggest weakness of the language is that it is designed to solve the problems that Google has (surprise), which is only a fraction of the problems that the world has.

It is a scalpel verses a swiss-army knife. The question is which do you need.

If you are doing Internet-related things (server-side plumbing and apps, not search), it looks like a pretty darn good fit. It naturally leads you build up a set of small start tools that you combine to build a larger service. The channels metaphor is a really nice way to deal with concurrency.

If you are building anything else (desktop, LOB apps, DB front-ends, mathy stuff, etc.), it looks a bit limited. For example, it doesn't have a modulus operator. Not a big deal but it shows that the language designers are more concerned about supporting their target domain than supplanting Java, much less C#.

Really, the thing that I fine the most troublesome is this feeling that the designers of the language have such a focused vision that it will hinder the growth in the future but, for now, it needs that to keep from becoming overgrown like C# is.

Don't worry about suitors - worry about hiring people. Team matters much more than Tech.

But, as perspective, MS Dev tools cost about $10K per dev + $3K per year per dev after the first. Engineers costs $100K+ per year. +10% productivity covers the tools. If it costs you a month to retool or saves you a little on salary or lets you hire a little easier, you have paid for the tools. So what matters are things where you get x3 productivity or x3 better ability to hire.

Also, I think you are asking the wrong question. The problem you are trying to solve drives the platform decision and language (even DB) are only a small part of the equation. Amazon works just fine with C#/.Net and it is cheap to free at first. To get a fair comparison at scale, you need to include the price of EC2 instances against a dedicated self-hosted database server. Depending on your application, you'll get very different answers.

In your shoes (based on limited info), I would try to get into the BizSpark Cloud program. It is free MS software plus a big credit on Azure for three years. Then count on the price war between Amazon/Google/Azure to keep prices in line.

My wife is an ex-IBM and the cut-to-get-growth story rings true.

But it overlooks a core problem that IBM faces. The cloud is a competitive platform for problems that previously required mainframes. They successfully defended (kinda) against Oracle/Sun in areas like running large banks and stock exchanges.

What happens to IBM when you can solve hard real-time transaction problems on 1000 loosely-coupled distributed computers instead of 1 large mainframe (made up of a 1000 processors with shared state)? That day is either here or close.

My take is that they can't ignore the cloud but they can't win it either. Tough place to be.

You'll want the 16GB ram on the bigger one if you are running any databases locally. Otherwise, 8GB will work.

Did you consider the Yoga? It looks pretty competitive.

Given that you seem to be viewing this as a first level screening, I think you need to make the 1000+ karma people review 10-20 pending comments before reading any article based on what's in the queue.

This would insures that the queue doesn't pile up. It would actually encourage good comments in the same ways that knowing a blog reads everything does. It would insure that if the system doesn't work or has problem, you'd hear about it immediately from long-term users.

I would implement it as "( ) endorse ( ) favorite" side-by-side so that the net effect is that great comments pop out of pending with better velocity.

Finally, the 1000+ karma rule for reviewers while convenient is probably a bad framing.

Instead, I'd say that 1000+ karma users are required to review and 100-1000 karma can volunteer to review. If you volunteer, your endorsements have to correlate with 1000+ over 95% of the time or they don't count. Obviously, you can randomly test that to whatever statistical significance you like.

Good luck with the new system -- this is the only site where comments are any good in my experience.

Worst case is that we hit a feedback loop after at +5C and spike to +10C or more and we get a repeat of the Permian extinction.

No responsible scientist can come out and predict this because it is unknown territory. But if you want to go to Mars based on a meteor-driven event at the P-T transition, you damn well better worry that we recreating the events that lead to the 'Great Dying' at the end of the Permian that took out 90% of all _species_ at the time.

I'd take his argument more seriously if he were talking about doing something about climate change. Risk to the species from climate change in the next 100 years dwarfs the risk of an astroid in the next million.

A small colony on Mars won't survive without Earth any more than the Vikings survived in Greenland without trade from Europe. Read Jarad Diamond's COLLAPSE if you want to understand what destroys civilizations.

I'm in a similar boat except that I think I can keep the good (C# / .Net) and leave the bad (Microsoft Analysis Server).

We are looking at scaled DB backend using column stores, multiple compute instances feed through message queues running on Amazon or private cloud, and a mostly Javascript / HTML5 front-end. It is all tied together with C# and so far it doesn't look like it will be too bad.

Not surprisingly, the stickiest part of the puzzle is... Microsoft Excel, specifically Pivot Tables. Weird but true.