Hacker News Reader

stdgyon Uber ordered to halt transportation services in Germany

That app doesn't do the same thing as Uber, though. Uber's variable pricing model and liquid supply(that is, drivers who are encouraged or discouraged to participate based on current demand) encourages fleet sizes that will correctly meet usage. Really, it's an attempt to algorithmically reach an optimal solution for the given marketplace.

stdgyon Hyperlapse, Instagram's new video stabilization app

Oops, good point! I forgot that they calculated the geometry and stitched the images to create novel frames.

The gyroscope data most certainly would not allow one to do the same.

stdgyon Hyperlapse, Instagram's new video stabilization app

Very different.

Microsoft Research was manually computing a motion map using heavy image-processing techniques that they then used to decide which frames to use and how to align them. Their work can do things like throw away a series of 'noisy' frames that wouldn't fit the overall scene motion. For instance, if you had a head mounted camera and were riding around on your bike, it could throw away the moments where you look both ways before crossing the street.

Instagram's technology utilizes extra sensor data to make their frame corrections. As far as I can tell from the brief article, the technology doesn't do much besides stabilization. That's not to belittle it, as it's a really neat application demonstrating the benefits of mobile sensor integration. And you might be able to create a similar motion map using the gyroscope data that the folks at Microsoft create through their image processing techniques!

stdgyon Small eruption near Bardarbunga

Here is a page that seems to be collating a good amount of information: http://volcanocafe.wordpress.com/info-on-bardarbunga/

YouTube LiveStream combining a few of the webcam sources, a twitter feed and a map of the earthquakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoISDUAPNgc

Kind of neat to see how much information we have access to.

stdgyon IBM Chip Processes Data Similar to the Way Your Brain Does

This is something I'm interested in discovering as well. I view most of these developments as modular components that could be used in conjunction with existing processor pipelines. For instance, with these 'neural' chips, I could imagine an existing processor querying the neural chip to look for particular activation patterns. Though I'm not too sure on the language one would use to specify which patterns to look for... Perhaps you could extract the parameters from the neural chip itself through a learning process, which you'd then use to bootstrap the process a bit and know what to look for? I'd imagine a lot of formal research is still needed here.

Neat developments, excited to see how they shake out.

stdgyon Judge orders Microsoft to turn over data held overseas

It's my understanding that Microsoft's complaint is that the US Government isn't bothering going through the proper international channels setup through treaty arrangements in order to retrieve this data, and is instead relying entirely on domestic procedures.

Is that not the case here?

stdgyon Uber protest gridlocks London

I don't think that is what these protests are about at all. For instance, in France, the protest leaders have called on instituting required time-delays for all Uber pickups(15 minutes). They've also called for a nationalized taxi hailing application that would exclude Uber, and have called for Uber's app to be disallowed from showing driver locations.

Similarly, Britain's protesters have demanded Uber to do away with fare estimates.

Notice how these complaints aren't in the form of: Let us do what Uber is doing. Rather, they take the form: Stop letting Uber do what it's doing. The Taxi owners want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to continue to protect their business models by placing artificial limits on competition, and they seek to disallow novel technology that would make their fare structure less opaque.

stdgyon Uber protest gridlocks London

Since the strikes were first announced last month, downloads of Uber’s smartphone app have skyrocketed, according to the technology research company App Annie, which tracks smartphone downloads.
In Britain, Uber’s app rose to the second spot on Tuesday in the travel section of Apple’s download store, while it ranked fifth on Google’s Play store for phones using the Android operating system.

A similar trend is appearing in other places in Europe.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/taxi-protests-again...

Looks like it's already happening. I have a hard time seeing this end well for the taxi companies.

stdgyon Tech firms write to U.S. FCC to oppose 'net neutrality' plan

That is a good point. Though, given the looming deadline, I would like to see announcements from companies explaining their positions.

stdgyon Tech firms write to U.S. FCC to oppose 'net neutrality' plan

Link to letter: http://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/assets/4422119/letter_to_FCC.pdf

Can anyone spot any big names that are absent, other than Apple?

stdgyon The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest

You should temper that 'best in the world' rhetoric.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cancer-care-in-the-u-s-v...

stdgyon Project Tango

What about this product is requiring you to surrender personal information?

stdgyon Thirty Years of Mac [video]

In case anyone is interested, here is the music in the background of the video:

0:18 -- Air Review - H

1:10 -- Moderat - Bad Kingdom

1:56 -- Air Review - Young

stdgyon Demonstration at Home of Google Developer. Google Bus Blocked in Berkeley

We are writing to warn you that your neighbor is a talented and driven individual. He should not be tru...

Wait, what?

stdgyon Rdio is Now Free on the Web

Unfortunately, worrying seems prudent. While I suspect this move had been planned for some time, it follows on the heels of a large layoff that decimated (triple-decimated, if the 30% number is to be believed) the company.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/19/5123004/rdio-lays-off-emp...

The music streaming business seems like an extraordinarily difficult place to compete.

stdgyon Rdio is Now Free on the Web

I'd like to add that both their Android and iPhone apps are extremely impressive. Very well designed, and a joy to use.

My only complaint with the service so far is that they haven't made adding gapless playback a priority.

stdgyon Nest, Google and you

It's not 'sort of irrelevant'. The entire thesis of many arguments against Google, and specifically the comment you made above, was that they distribute your personal information to advertisers and other corporate entities. That's just not true.

Frankly, if they did that, they wouldn't make very much money. They can demand money from advertisers because they have an information advantage over everyone else. That information advantage gives them an incentive to protect your personal information. After all, if they leaked the information a competitor could use it to formulate competitive advertising profiles, which would drive down earnings.

Edit: I wanted to add a few more thoughts since I let it spin around in my mind a bit. I think if you followed the line of argument regarding Google's profit motive as a corporation, you could reach the conclusion that their users' privacy(that is, the distribution of their private information) is a prerogative of theirs to protect. Their viability as a corporation depends on their profiles being the most accurate, and on being under their sole ownership. As such, they are driven to protect them.

I would conjecture that the profit motive for their need to protect their information has led to their relatively robust consumer protection ratings by groups like the EFF[0].

--------------

0: https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013

stdgyon Google Acquires Boston Dynamics

The article states that they said that while they intend to honor Boston Dynamic's current government contracts, Google is not interested in becoming a government contractor.

stdgyon Silicon Chasm: The class divide on America’s cutting edge

I believe the author would argue that these 'middle class' Valley engineers really aren't middle class at all, but rather upper class. They're likely up in the 95th percentile of earners. Though I struggle to come to terms with how to control for living costs and geographic inflationary trends. I would like to see an accounting of how wages across the employment spectrum are adjusted, as well.

In my mind, if wages for other forms of employment aren't similarly inflated, it makes a much stronger argument for a further bifurcated society.

stdgyon IE11 for Windows 7 Globally Available

The Safari picture is a bit more... complicated. The latest version of Safari only supports Mavericks(I believe?), but 93% of all online Macs are eligible for the free upgrade to Mavericks.

stdgyon IE11 for Windows 7 Globally Available

Just to be clear, the rest of the browser world offers modern browsers across a wide array of operating systems. Microsoft can't even be bothered to offer a modern browser across more than two of their own Operating Systems.

Chrome spans at least 7(And that's a conservative estimate) Operating Systems. Firefox the same. And both update in a sane manner.

It's nice that Microsoft offers a good solution to the 5% of users on the cutting edge, but they are still ludicrously behind the curve.

stdgyon Google Apps drop support for IE9

Google is effectively utilizing the same strategy Apple used with the iPhone. Namely, ignore the corporate market and capture normal customers. Deliver a great experience and integrate your products into their lives. If you capture enough of them you'll create a backdoor into the corporate marketplace by increasing employee demands for a modern experience.

I think it's a great idea, and it's the only way I see the web moving forward at a reasonable pace.

stdgyon Born of Reddit, Imgur now dwarfs the ‘front page of the Internet’

I'd like to add that they also provide many useful features, like nice album views and bulk downloads. And I suspect those useful features, combined with the eye-friendly design, help make people much more likely to paste non-direct links.

stdgyon Nginx Is Taking Over the Internet

Barry Abrahamson actually responded to a similar critique in the comments:

----

Hi,

Barry Abrahamson here. A bit of context to my comment about the stability of Apache. We started WordPress.com using the Litespeed web server, but decided that we wanted to maintain as much of an open source stack as possible. We looked at lighttpd but had lots of issues with memory usage (leaks?) so we naturally turned to Apache. It worked mostly as expected performance and functionality wise. Keep in mind this was back in the Apache 2.0 days. Our problem was that deploying configuration changes which required a graceful restart under production traffic levels didn't work very well. About 10% of the time it either failed to reload the configuration, Apache stopped responding completely, or connections were dropped. Keep in mind that we were reloading ~1000 machines at once, but 10% is a pretty high failure rate. Yes, I know we could have removed machines from production, reloaded the configuration, and then put them back, but it's slow and error-prone, even if automated.

This is when we started looking at nginx. The nginx configuration reload works as expected all of the time, so that was enough to make us invest more time in the software. The transition was non-trivial since we had thousands of lines of .htaccess files which had to be translated to nginx configs, but it was worth it. Today, nginx is the "Swiss Army Knife" of our software stack. We use it for everything we can. I joke that we would use it as a database server if we could :)

------

As a side note, this may be the first useful comment on a Wired article I've ever seen.

stdgyon N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

The problem isn't that they're working to break encryption. The problem is that they're maliciously inserting backdoors and subverting crypto-research and publication, which puts all of our security at risk. (Not to mention runs counter to their stated mission)

stdgyon Obama, tech executives met to discuss surveillance

Definitely less free than under Wilson. Prohibition was a failure on all fronts[1], and did significantly increase the prison population. But it has nothing on modern drug policy[2].

[1]: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_rates_1...

stdgyon Tor Freedom Host compromised, JS injected into multiple sites

Here's my current understanding:

- Freedom Host's founder arrested in Ireland for potential extradition on American child pornography distribution charges.

- Odd Javascript snippets found on sites hosted by Freedom Host. Initial investigations seem to point towards a possible 0-day targeting Firefox.

If the delivered Javascript is a browser-breaker, this strongly suggests someone is collecting the actual identities of the Tor users.

stdgyon Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

I thought that was supposed to be sarcastic, poking fun at the terminology as viewed from the non-tech savvy jury and FBI agents. Though, as always, that's not an easy thing to tell online.

stdgyon The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

It's true that they have many clients and require many employees. But I bring it up to counter the notion often put forward that foreign workers are needed only to fill extremely skilled, highly paid positions at the top technology companies. That they're the rockstar developers paving the road to our country's economic future.

The truth, of course, is that those rockstars account for a very, very small portion of the sought after visas. The vast majority of the allocations are for average professionals at companies far from the bleeding edge.

It seems odd to me that we would put in such an effort to import average workers when there is both not an insignificant number of unemployed American tech workers, and a large number of tech-educated American workers pursuing other vocations. This smells more like a failure of employers to lure the workers they need than of a true shortage.

I do think top companies should be able to scout internationally for top talent and bring them back to live and work in the country. But top talent demands top dollar, so there needs to be a bar. A company must be willing to pay them significantly more than their position's average salary. If they're the best of the best, they're worth it.

To stick with the soccer analogy, how much more do you think someone like Lionel Messi gets paid than a junior league player, or even an average pro player? It's understood in sports that you must pay top dollar to get top talent. I don't think it's too much to expect industry to do the same.

stdgyon The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

The issue with this analogy is that the vast majority of the imported foreign workers aren't rock star programmers. They're not Real Madrid starters. They're second string junior league players. They're consultants.

Facebook/Google/Twitter/Microsoft/Amazon aren't the major users of H-1B Visas. Consulting firms are.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134...