masterzora

A few reasons.

Convenience:

* There's a very easy-to-use app to request a driver that shows the locations of nearby cars and an estimate on how long it'll take for a car to arrive. No need to try and flag down a cab or call a company.

* Payment is done via stored credit card info, so no need to worry about paying at the end of the ride. No need to worry about tip, either.

Comfort:

* The town car is far more comfortable than a normal taxi. Nice seats, ample leg room (and I'm a large guy), no ads, actually useful air conditioning.

* There are magazines to read, if that's your thing. Some of the cars seem to be wifi equipped (one of my drivers has told me that that car had wifi, at least).

Experience

* They definitely ride the line between limo and taxi, to the point where I can't help but laugh. The driver even hops out of the car to open the door for you!

Really, if you're in SF, it's worth checking out Uber at least once.

Gouging may be good for a day (assuming there weren't other good transport options, which is simply untrue in SF), but it sucks as an acquisition method.

My experience with Uber was essentially: (1) "Hey, it sounds great, but that's a bit pricey. It can't really be worth it, can it?" (2) Decided to take someone to dinner via Uber because it was more impressive than a cab. (3) "Hey, this is actually pretty cool and totally worth it." (4) I'm now a repeat customer, even when traveling alone.

In my eyes, the key is that they need to find a step (2) for a more general case. Having a day where there are no cabs might be a small push, but having a day where there are no cabs and Uber is the price you would have paid anyway is absolutely killer.

Short answer: Long-term thinking is better for them than short-term thinking.

That's an excellent point. I don't know what kind of advertising Uber is actually using, but my Twitter anecdata says that there's already starting to be a nice bit of viral push to go with it. I really hope it'll be significant, because I absolutely love Uber and I'm planning on fully supporting them tomorrow.

I definitely understand the cabbies' concerns about prices, but this is huge for Uber. As the cabbies seek to shorten the gap between taxi prices and Uber prices and shut down for an entire day, Uber swoops in with a huge customer acquisition push. This won't be the death of the cabs, but I'll love to see how Uber makes out on the deal.

Yes.

If this is his conflict resolution system, I can't imagine that this is going to work out very well.

Here, have a few more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)#Adoption

Do these outnumber the pirates? I don't really have the figures to even start commenting on that. But I think it's pretty clear that it'll make some difference if the BitTorrent protocol is found to be infringing on some patents.

> I never said ALL and I never equated it to piracy.

No, of course not. You just said nobody was going to care if patents were being infringed because they use torrents for copyright infringement. No, you never said the word "all", but you did ask why this would change anything, which would be quite strange if you were at all considering, say, Blizzard.

Of course, this is before we even start to get in on your apparent conflation of the end users (who would be the ones committing copyright infringement with the software) and the developers (who would be the ones allegedly committing patent infringement).

And, because it's really not worth starting another comment for it: your automatic assumption that downvotes == people trying to silence the opposition and your subsequent goading are really childish. HN is, for the most part, a sane, sensical, and mature community and it reflects poorly on everyone when you make such baseless assumptions. Have you considered reflecting on what your comment adds or detracts from the conversation? I think you'll find that it adds little while the "everyone is so jumpy about it means I'm right" comment is an inane way to curb conversation.

Oh, of course. Not saying it does need justification, but just adding the string of replies about why torrents are not equivalent to piracy.

And World of Warcraft uses the protocol for patch distribution. That's a pretty sizeable number of people using bittorrent for legit purposes.

Yes, but he certainly wasn't the first one to come up with this idea.

That certainly explains some cases, but it definitely doesn't account for all cases. I still distinctly remember a video someone made that was just reading a joke list that is widely spread across the internet. The delivery didn't add anything to the list. There was no reason to be a video whatsoever. A number of howto-type videos are the same way (while some really do benefit from a video, many more don't). I've even seen a few videos with no audio and the only content was text on a black background.

My various problems with online video mean there's a lot of content from which I'm essentially cut off unless I want to put forth a special effort, and such effort is usually (though not always) not worth it.

HN is still run by YC and the jobs postings are from YC companies. The most recent change is roughly a month old and has actually made it more apparent that job postings are not regular stories.

From http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html :

"I've just released a new version that fixes much of the brokenness of the way job listings used to be handled. When I first added jobs, to save time I reused as much of the code for stories as possible. This worked well enough when HN was a small community, but it has been working less well now that HN has grown.

A lot of the newly arrived users seem not to have realized that job listings are the ads here-- that while they look like stories, they're not. The new code makes this more evident. Jobs no longer have points or submitters, and in fact the ranking algorithm for jobs is now completely different. Now instead of being ranked by points, jobs simply start at position 4 and slide down the page at 4 positions per hour. To prevent the frontpage from being overloaded with jobs, no one can post a new job when there is still one in the top half of the page.

I still have to make jobs persist longer on the jobs page. I may also have to add a job posting queue. For now it's first come first served."

This. A million times this. I don't understand the push that's been made on the web wherein content that would be perfectly usable as normal plaintext & images becomes videos. It is really easy for me to move freely spatially and really difficult for me to move freely temporally and this is no different on the web. Moreover, it is really easy for me to randomly access a single sentence of text and actually pretty damn difficult for me to do the same with a sentence of spoken word (and this is before you account for my minor hearing difficulties).

>If I may ask, what makes you assume they do?

I'm guessing the part where they said that they use Netflix and Redbox is probably a good indicator.

After sending it to you easily visible on a postcard, delivered by the originator handing it to somebody who happens to be heading in the same direction as your mailbox and who will do the same until it reaches said mailbox.

The problem with this analogy is that it is generally pretty easy to look at the beach and gather the information that there are huge waves and a rocky, dangerous shore (and sometimes even the sharks) and then you are informed. If the only people who can inform you are the ones that are trying to draw money from you, though, it falls under something more similar to consumer protection than it does under closing beaches.

I'm sure there'll be plenty of sci-fi, fantasy, and tech- or entrepreneurship-related non-fiction books mentioned, so I'm specifically trying to approach from a different direction.

The two I've seriously got to recommend are East of Eden and The Count of Monte Cristo. East of Eden is Steinbeck, of whom I'm usually not a fan, but it was phenomenal and definitely made me rethink my approach to life (it was high school, so this was easier to do, but it's still a nice feature in a book). The Count of Monte Cristo is also a classic, and I'm sure I won't be the only one to recommend it, but it's absolutely brilliant through and through. Make sure you pick up the Robin Buss translation, though (unless you're comfortable reading in French, of course).

Really? I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs who are in it because they have an idea they'd like to see happen or they think it's fun or to try to leave a mark on the world or a number of other reasons where the money is only a side effect.

Since it's legal for me to pay legal tender for software, for jpegs, for mp3s, and other digital constructs, how could a legitimate argument be made to make it illegal for me to pay legal tender for copyright-infringing files?

Since it's legal for me to take legal tender for software, for jpegs, for mp3s, etc., how could a law be passed to make it illegal for me to take legal tender in return for copyright-infringing files?

If I advertise that I want to buy copyright-infringing software, how can they stop me from spending my dollars/euros on them? If I advertise that I have copyright-infringing files to sell, how can the stop me from doing so?

I won't pretend it's not silly, but only so long as you stop pretending that governments have never made illegal the exchange of certain bit patterns.

[not the OP, nor am I affiliated with em]

I'd have to be at my home desktop and check my history for a good list of links, but I got to use a handful of competitors when I was looking for work a couple months ago. I'd have to try this one out to be sure, but the extra polish plus the ability to use the interviewee's own IDE could be huge advantages.

I'd be surprised if it was not intentional: http://xkcd.com/148/

Is it supposed to be a tutorial book? I always thought that it was trying (and epically succeeding) to be a massive reference.

I know O'Reilly has the llama and alpacas that are intended to be the actual tutorials, though I can't really speak for their quality (I actually did learn Perl via Camel Book + external projects).

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Obviously "do nothing" can't mean both. Obviously the entire point of a confirmation would be such that it would take an action to be "accept", so that means that "do nothing" would have to be "do not accept (yet?)". Obviously this is only useful for GH if trolling is the common case. And obviously I started my post by saying I did not want confirmations. So what exactly are you trying to argue against?

I agree that I don't want to see confirmations in my GitHub, but you are incorrect about them being equivalent. The optimal way to use confirmations is often not hitting "Reject" to requests you don't want. Just do nothing. In most well-designed systems, as long as there's an outstanding request, they can't bug you any more.

I'm not the author or the submitter, but it seems to me that this article is more or less in response to FSF's "We developed most of the central components, forming the largest single contribution to the whole system."[1]

[1] http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#why

Your paranoia is more generous than mine. Such restrictions always make me assume that they don't know how to properly sanitize data for their database, so they just disallow such characters rather than learn how.

It seems to me to be rather disingenuous to state that the entirety of startups is writing code or that the code writing itself is to be the source of all of the learning. The major education in a startup is the fact that you are forced to, through whatever methods necessary (be it copious research, learning from somebody who knows better, randomly stumbling upon an answer, what have you) learn more or less everything relevant to the startup, from business skills to people skills to infrastructure to, yes, code itself.

Maybe this is insufficient as an alternative education (I'd really love to see some numbers for that but, then again, wouldn't we all?), but it's silly to bring it down to "writing code".

I kind of had the reverse reaction. I'm familiar enough with the Daft Punk corpus that I could easily tell where each piece came from and whatnot. However, while the timeline was pretty straightforward, I had difficulty connecting the center visualisation with the music. I understand that there's a ring for each track and... not much else. I don't suppose anybody could clarify that for me?

I can't even read the headline without thinking of a couple yakuza bosses reviewing Yakuza 3: http://boingboing.net/2010/08/10/yakuza-3-review.html

And I suppose you think the House Committee on Un-American Activities should have been HCUA? :P