datawander

That book you read was Russell and Norvig, it's one of the best textbooks ever written on any subject:

http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

Yes, I read the article and I applied an idea I took from one of the first articles on Nate Silver's 538 'news' site [0] of using Bayesian statistics to decode news as you read it and in my opinion the data presented is very underwhelming and there isn't any firm ground they are standing on here.

Here's my 'Bayesian logic' applied to it. My 'prior believe' in the claim being made is that I don't believe Uber has broad penetration across all demographics. Yes, people who are in the tech world and under 30 know of them, but not much outside of that. I was the first one of all my friends to use Uber (I would know because I have gotten over $60 in credits for signing them up). So outside of SF, my initial personal belief is that Uber doesn't have wide usage. So either the largest demographic of DUI violators are nerds who are younger than 30 or Uber is magically being used by people who would prefer using a more expensive Uber service than driver over a cheap taxi ride.

So let's look at the evidence they provide to see if it changes my prior significantly: one city was explicitly given data about without any hint as to what time-frame they are talking about. The other cities were literally the equivalent of hearsay arguments so because I'm the judge of this court, that evidence doesn't count. When you're talking about month-over-month and even year-over-year trends, a drop of 10% is just as easily explained by a random process modeled as a poisson [1] over the entrance of Uber. I would know having dealt with lots of time series data.

One finally comment, my apologies to the author of the bar chart, but that is just terrible. It's hard to read and doesn't make much sense from looking at it first. How many bar-chart graphs are out there that look like that? It could just be me speaking aesthetically because I'm weirded out by the random floating bars in the middle, but I feel Edward Tufte would have something to say about that.

jusitizin, I know you weren't speaking to me directly, but I read the article. Hope this comment proves it :)

[0]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-formula-for-decoding-h...

[1]

http://www.wired.com/2012/12/what-does-randomness-look-like/

It actually doesn't even provide data for two cities, just one. It talks about anecdotal data that is the equivalent of hearsay: "we consistently hear from our riders in Chicago and elsewhere."

I don't really buy it. What if DUI rates fell across all cities nationwide, regardless of Uber being on the market?

I wholly agree with this article. The exact point the author is getting at is something that I have been trying to say, but rather inarticulately (probably because I didn't actually go out and survey people and define "what is programming and what is wrong with it").

I really can't wait for programming to be more than just if statements and thinking about code as a grouping of ascii files and glueing libraries together. Things like Akka are nice steps in that direction.

I find this sentence very weirdly written from a stat viewpoint and not helpful at all to the "average" reader.

>>>>About one in 14 tech workers is black or Latino both in the Silicon Valley and nationally. Blacks and Hispanics make up 13.1 and 16.9 percent of the U.S. population, respectively, according to the most recent Census data.

Why didn't they say about 7% rather than 1 in 14?

1/14 ~=7.14..%

I accidentally scrolled into the comment section and my head imploded. Thank goodness for HN :)

People will look back upon this date with utter lament because the world of lambdas has been unleashed upon a much more dangerous and wider world of programmers.

You realize the same exact thing could be said about video game designers, right?

There is also a complete lack of tests. It'd be nice if there was a library of tests for all sorting algorithms. I'm sure there is, but something more widely accepted and well known.

There already are a pair of data-driven journalists at the WSJ whose day-to-day sounds more like a data scientist than a typical journalist. They are Tom McGinty and Rob Barry.

They gave a great talk recently, which I wrote about (shameless plug below), summarizing how they investigated the Asiana airline crash in SF recently and what their day looks like. They're brilliant:

http://datawonder.co/blog/2014/01/15/data-skeptics-wsj-meetu...

The demotivation poster (we'll ask for estimates, but then treat them as deadlines) really strikes a chord because that is one of my major 'gripes' with the agile planning process. Particularly when a manager is heavily involved in that process. It may be no coincidence that the best projects I have been on are the ones where the manager deliberately stepped out of the room or was not a part of those phases of the planning process.

Agile is part of a more disturbing trend I've noticed [0] of companies striving very hard to turn software into a literal sausage-making factory [1] and to make software engineers just another cog in the machine or a replaceable part to fatten the bottom line with a lower salary. This is provably the aim of some of the top companies given news on no-hire agreements. [10].

[0] with Java being the favored "currency" of programming languages being the other disturbing trend-- it's much easier to replace a Java programmer than any other for a reason

[1] you know what they say about how sausages are made

[10] http://gizmodo.com/apple-guilty-of-price-fixing-730018979

Thanks @acoustic, it's always nice to see bunk-busting. Just looking at the quote makes the statistic sounds hard to believe. Did the story include drop-outs like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg?

Until I see hard data supporting one way or another, it's all bunk and personal anecdote.

Though I will comment and say I do like the one about "just show up" rather than waiting for being in the mood.

Actually, robot traffic accounts for a much larger share of traffic for any of the big websites than you think.

Wasn't criticizing the sale at all (edited to clarify tone), just found it interestingly related.

I use it myself, but not sure about the 5 years wager. One of the main reasons quite a few people I know use it is precisely because it wasn't Facebook. My bet is FB guts it and tries to {force, gently-push} everyone to switch to their well-designed app. But the FB app is probably too bandwidth-hungry for most WhatsApp users.

NYTimes actually pointed out another curiously-related Tweet [0] from the other co-founder, Jan Koum:

"totally agree with Vinod Khosla. people starting companies for a quick sale are a disgrace to the valley... 3:47 AM - 17 Jul 2012"

[0] https://twitter.com/jankoum/statuses/225134737285578752

edit: I am not criticizing Jan at all and would gladly do the same given the same position.

I welcome the change and think it is a good solution.

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet, especially for the HN crowd, but it's relatively easy for any developer to write a bot to auto-register them-self. One could even use Selenium.

There is a very popular Google Developer's MeetUp and space for 200+ runs out in less than 5 minutes of unannounced meetings opening up for registration. I am 100% sure that a lot of bots can and do register for these events.

Same here, thanks!

Just another thought, I have grown to completely mistrust any 'well-used' rating service and thus must say Uber and the like has a long way to go before I will trust their ratings by one iota.

I remember a friend once opened up a bakery and sent out an email to friends and family to review it on Yelp. So within a week of opening, there were 100+ 4-5 star reviews. I've stopped using Yelp since then and have found a great new review since then that I hope businesses don't discover, and so far they haven't, and so far the reviews are spot on.

The role of government (in theory) is to serve the people and it will not make any extra profit (aside from bribery, which again, leads to job loss) and in fact lose their "elected" jobs if their regulations fail to protect people.

Uber and other companies have a monetary incentive to squelch and play down bad reviews. In a pure capitalistic system, one should simply follow the money and realize that '1.0 regulation' doesn't sound so bad compared to '2.0' regulation by companies that have a vested interest in manipulating it to their means.

Interesting post, however I have two things to bring up.

1) The author works at Union Square Ventures, which has a vested interest in '2.0' regulation. A quick search shows that although it might not be directly related to Uber, it is certainly in the ride-sharing space to the tune of $30 million [0]. I am sorry, but whenever someone (not the author personally, but still...) has that much money on the table, it's hard not to take what they say with a grain of salt.

2) What exactly is meant by the "real world"? Just because the Internet is not a thing we can touch or see, that does not make it "not real" and thus things that apply to the real world equally apply to things that are on the Internet and vis a vice (which is a nice point the author does make).

In either case, I do agree that something needs to be changed and there is something obviously foul with some of the things I have read recently such as that NYC had has gone from 10,000 to ~13,500 Taxi medallions over the past 30 years, which is just bupkis. Throw that in with the fact that American-born taxi drivers are a rare thing, the average taxi driver makes less than minimum wage and the owners of the medallions make a killing imply something is wrong. Please let me know if you'd like sources for what I just said, I'm sure I read most of this on HN though.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/24/uber-rival-hailo-reportedly...

The US has invasion plans for every conceivable scenario, friend or foe.

As fascinating and as much as I like these topics, this is on Hacker News because....?

But if that is displayed as a line chart, that clearly displays the year-over-year differences. So if someone wants to ask "what is the overall trend of spending over the past five years?" that is nearly impossible with the pie chart.

Pie charts are by far one of the worst forms of graphs ever devised and should be killed off as a concept for good, as in, please remove this from Excel.

Seriously? Startup time as a deal-breaker for using this? What about other, much more important and relevant metrics? If you have to spend 23 seconds but save, let's suppose, thirty minutes with faster development and runtime, isn't the tradeoff worth it? I'm not saying that's a guaranteed with Julia as I can't speak to that, but I think of all the things to care about, startup time would be a relatively trivial concern.

Also, "one programming language to rule them all" is quite a fanciful stretch considering people having been trying to write that since the first programming language.

My favorite rule is 4.1.1; always use braces even where optional. I think a small fraction of the economy may have been damaged by the bugs caused by the silliness of leaving out optional braces and then having another developer come along and, well, you know how that goes :)

As someone who once read the Sun Java Style Coding [1] (which at a quick glance, appears to be a super set of the Google style guidelines) standard years ago and found it exciting and very helpful material, I unfortunately did not get such a kick skimming through this. Perhaps it's because after having read Clean Code [2], I feel that there is much missing that can lend itself to better code.

[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsman...

Yes, that's exactly why, because the FCC said to do it that way. There are countless examples of "why is it this way" being answered "because that is what some arbitrary person picked."

My favorite example of this I remember reading in Andrew Tanenbaum's Networking book that the first frequency-hopping protocols used 88 frequencies because that is how many keys there are on a piano:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect...

To be honest, I'm shocked this is on the front page as this website has been out for years and already notably mentioned, but I guess it's good to recycle very important websites for those who haven't heard of it.

My favorite problems is 98. This problem, along with the Sudoku one at 96, require much more careful programming than some of the others due the drastically fewer number of people who solved it compared to the surrounding problems.

By the way, this is written by the sixth-place winner of last year's Kaggle Competition for detecting Whales. [1]

I think another very interesting point brought up was when that even such a well-ranked model on Kaggle did a poor job when applied to an different dataset and had to be retained, which is a nice example of over-fitting.

Excellent article and nice details, thanks!

[1] http://www.kaggle.com/c/whale-detection-challenge/leaderboar...

Last time I checked this was Hacker News, not Reddit, and I am getting sick of articles like this making it to the front page (as I am aware other commenters have noted).

I didn't even need to click on the article (but did in a vain hope) to know that there was absolutely no information as to what they actually did from a technical perspective that deserves notice on HN. The most technological it gets is "Using 360-degree radar, ultrasonic sensors and cameras, the cars sense and adapt to their surroundings.", but then what does it do that is different from what the Google Car and other autonomous cars do? Is it any different from the Audi that drove itself up Pike's Peak as quickly as it could?

The rest is offtopic, but as a long time read-only user, I must come out of the woodwork and make my first comments (other than a few days ago) to be to beg of submitters and upvoters to please only submit/upvote stuff that is actually relevant to what should be the audience of Hacker News, not the general reddit population...

I got sick of reddit and 'general' news years ago and don't want to go back to it.

I stand corrected and wasn't aware of the multidigit claim.

Awesome to hear from you! Good points and I believe you're right on all of them.

I thought there was more to it because the headline made me think that the general problem of taking a random StreetView location and finding the addresses in it was solved, which really set some high expectations.

This work is equally impressive and good stuff. Hope to see this headline again in the future soon.