kkowalczyk

No one is making an argument that Uber should be allowed to "operate in any way they decide".

Currently the problem is that they are forbidden from operating at all. The reason are usually violations of stupid laws (e.g. Uber collects payments via an app but the law of a given city says you can't do that) or because new laws (that didn't exist yesterday) are introduced to specifically kill Uber business model.

Uber, as a business, is already subject to many laws and regulations, just like any other business. It also complies with town car service laws specific to transportation companies.

The battle today is about nullifying stupid laws that serve no other purpose than to protect taxi companies from competition from Uber.

Finally, saying "the new way is better today, but who know if it's going to be better tomorrow", without even hinting at what possible problem can be, is fear mongering, not an argument.

This argument assumes two things:

* Uber will wipe-out taxi business while being more expensive * Uber will always be more expensive than taxis

Neither is true so conclusion cannot be true either.

If Uber is more expensive than taxis and there's demand for a cheaper alternative, there will still be demand for taxis. Maybe less than today, but as long as demand is there, the taxis will be there.

But this point is moot, because Uber (or someone else) has a chance to be cheaper. UberX is already cheaper than Uber and they just announced up to 25% fare reductions on UberX in SF, to compete with Lyft and SideCar, which, I believe, are already cheaper than taxis.

What is in the interest of everybody (rich, poor, young, elderly) is more competition. Uber is competing with taxis, hopefully forcing them to improve their service. Lyft and SideCar are competing mostly on price.

The only losers from this competition are existing taxi companies, and that's exactly how it's supposed to work: people benefit when new entrants provide better service or the same service at a cheaper price.

It's a clever sophistry but your "no" isn't really a "no" to the argument.

It's clear that taxi industry is broken. The existing legislation you keep bringing up doesn't protect the costumers the way it should (and maybe, at some point, was supposed to, until it was perverted via medallion system to protect taxi business more than taxi customers).

Uber's self-regulation (via comments, for both drivers and riders) is a better way to provide good service than the regulation which is routinely violated and not enforced.

By which I mean: * taxi drivers routinely avoid picking up people they don't like, who also happen to be minorities/black people. I don't think they are allowed to do that by law but there you go: it's impossible to enforce that law so it isn't. In Uber, a given client can be banned but only because it behaved badly in the past. There's no pre-judging based on his color of the skin * forcing cabs to service undesirable areas - you've got to be kidding me. I once spent an hour phoning different cab companies trying to get a cab to less populated area of SF. Extreme frustration when you call them, they say the cab will be there but isn't and you don't know if it's because they blew you off or the cab is really coming. With Uber - again, no problem. They would be stupid to to not service you and they can manage the fleet effectively to dispatch cars where there is demand. Plus, you get real-time feedback on where the car is - there is no guessing

Ultimately your arguments are dishonest because you present a binary choice: either Uber complies with existing taxi laws (which in most cases means their business cannot operate the way it does) or doesn't, in which case you automatically assume that it's unfair to taxi companies.

How about third option: create laws that allow both taxis and Uber, on equal footing?

I'm all for laws protecting the customers of Uber and customers of taxis, but as of today, it seems Uber does much better job with self-regulation than taxis with government regulation.

I'm all for fair competition but as of today Uber is being denied even ability to compete via government regulations lobbied for by taxi companies. We don't have to rally to protect "poor" taxis that provide bad service, from Uber, which provides good service, but rally to allow Uber to compete at all.

Maybe when we do have competition, taxi companies will be forced to finally improve the service they provide, something that decades of legislation haven't been able to achieve.

Maybe when that happens, we won't have to have laws to force companies to service all of Chicago and they'll do it because there's demand and they will do it to profit from that demand.

You know, the way a free market is supposed to work and not the way it currently works when we have law to artificially restrict supply (medallions) and (ineffective) law to "fix" the problem created by artificially restricting supply. Which, if we were to believe you, was done for the benefit of customers and in the spirit of fair competition.

"A random guy with no particular qualifications to write comments, writes a comment."

See how this is not the most productive line of "argumentation"?

Interesting how everyone is falling for this logical fallacy of a question.

There are 2 modes in which Google buys a company.

1. For the product. This is the case that might entail 5x valuation and in this mode the intent is never to "kill" it. That would be stupid.

Obviously, it doesn't always work out and the product might end up dead but it's never the intent of neither party at the time of acquisition.

2. For the people i.e. acu-hire. In that case the startup is effectively dead anyway and the founders and investors know it. Google won't pay 5x in that case, both parties know that the product will be shut down (but it would be anyway at some point) and the team simply gets a lucrative (?) job offer.

There is never a case where Google pays 5x for a product they intend to immediately "kill".

Did you read a different article than I did?

They make an Android-based phone, like 10+ other companies (Samsung, HTC, Sony, Lenovo, LG etc.). What is shameless about that?

That is a plausible statement except it contradicts pretty much any economic study done on the subject i.e. when economist look at this issue using historic data, they find that industries thrive at times of weak patent protection.

This is not actually surprising. A patent is a monopoly. A monopoly creates an environment where you can jack up the prices without improving the product you're selling and that's why americans pay much more money for pathetic broadband speeds than majority of other countries, while cable companies are comfortably profitable. It's also why a day after Google introduces 1GB broadband in one area, Comcast or TWN suddenly announce that they also will provide such speeds in this area (but not anywhere else).

Monopoly is what devastating to economy. Patents are monopoly and they are devastating to economy.

You don't specify the "resources"

Usually when people say that, they mean either hiring more people or hiring better people by paying more.

Given the very low quality of granted patents, hiring more of same kind of people won't help. We'll clear backlog but since the percentage quality will remain the same, we'll just get even more bad patents.

Hiring better people seems more plausible but is also naive.

The biggest problem is that patent examiners have bad incentive: they are judged by number of patents accepted. Since a rejected patent can be re-submitted ad infinitum (after slight wording changes), their best strategy is to just accept a patent. I don't know of any negative consequence for patent examiner for just rubber-stamping bad patents (an example of that would be firing people after N patents they've accepted were found invalid by independent re-examination).

The second biggest problem is that the standard for a patent is vague and apparently very low. In theory patent should be novel and non-obvious, in practice (especially in software) they are ideas that a competent people come up with during regular work and not as a result of some year-long R&D process focused on one problem.

Finally, given the amount of patents it's absurd that anyone can actually do a fair job evaluating them. This is not something that scales by adding more bodies because in order to say whether a given patent application is novel, a patent examiner would have to do linear search of all existing patents to make sure that it's not like something that has already been patented (not to mention the prior art requirement). Even if we limit the amount of data by trying to search only on related topics, the search space is still absurdly large. It just cannot be done well, which is why it's done so poorly.

>Why are ideas worth nothing?

Ideas are worth exactly as much as you can sell them for.

> If I have a breakthrough while researching, I'm screwed unless I also manage to form a company with a production line?

You would be exactly right if you removed "screwed" because it implies that you're entitled to be rewarded for your ideas and not being paid for ideas alone is unfair to you.

You're not entitled to that.

You're not even entitled to be rewarded for actual, hard work (e.g. if you work for a year on software product that fails to sell, you worked hard but that alone doesn't mean someone will give you money because of that).

The problem with patents is that they grant 20 year monopoly on patented ideas and people finally realized that there are very lucrative ways to abuse that monopoly for financial gain, without actually creating any value i.e. if you patent an idea for making an ice cream and don't actually make an ice cream, you can still extract value by suing people who actually do make ice cream, even if they came up with the idea independently, as it usually happens, given that in U.S. alone there are 300 millions of mostly college educated people i.e. a lot of people to come up with ideas.

Unfortunately, the guy responds with his own misinformations.

Google said: "For example, mobile has several requirements around bandwidth and battery that are simply not part of the standard"

He says: "This glances over the the fact that the X in XMPP stands for eXtensible, which still results in proposals for new protocol extensions every month."

His misinformation is this: XMPP is XML based. The bandwidth that Google most likely refers to is a result of verbosity of XML. You can't eliminate that by extending XMPP, something that a guy who serves on XMPP Council should know.

The only way to fix that specific problem is to change the protocol. Which is what Google did.

This is an example a bad advocacy: badmouthing companies that decided to no longer use something you work on.

I also find troubling the pounding Google gets for every little mis-step.

When it comes to using and promoting open technologies Google is seemingly from another planet compared to other tech giants (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, you name it).

And yet the furor is not about Microsoft using completely secret protocol (Skype), not about Apple promising to publish their secret protocol (Facetime) and then not doing it, not about Apple preventing fair browser competition in iOS etc. but about Google no longer using XMPP.

A lack of perspective.

The difference is: you pay for Google Drive (including bandwidth).

To give you some perspective: I have a popular open source project hosted on Google Code. I host my binary downloads via S3 and since it's popular, it costs me $200+ a month in bandwidth.

If I used Google Code for hosting those binaries, Google would have to pay for that and why should they?

And that's a grey area example i.e. I would be using the service as it was intended to be used.

I'm pretty sure plenty of smart alecks simply abuse the service by putting and random stuff there to avoid paying for bandwidth.

This is a tragedy of commons: Google offered a free service, people started abusing it via excessive usage and Google chose to no longer offer that free service (as opposed to e.g. spend their resource on never-ending battle of policing abusers).

That is very much their right.

Unfortunately how?

Amazing person doing amazing things has an option to not take the money and have 100% of the upside of his amazingness.

What people seem to forget is that it's about risk.

VC investing is high risk. For every 10 investments, 1 is wildly profitable and the other 9 are failures or low returns.

For that reason the ROI for that 1 out of 10 success cannot be "fair" by your metric - VC has to make enough to cover the 9 losses and some profit.

What the amazing person gets from the deal is knowing that even in the likely 90% case of failure, he won't sink in debt to fund his work.

Yet another project that lands at HN because people don't bother to look at what it actually does.

It's 44 lines of Python code.

An "insert" is implemented by loading the whole "database", in json format, into memory, adding an element and writing the whole thing back to a file.

It's not a database, it's 30 min coding exercise by a Python beginner.

Also, inexcusable self-promotion by max0563 (this is his 7th submission of a toy python program of his, with grandiose names like "NoSQL database engine in Python" or "Dropbox clone in Python" but whose implementation boils down to few lines of code).

Sure, so now instead of praying that the main host won't get hacked you now should pray that none of the N mirrors will get hacked.

And if you understand the basics of probability, that's not a good scenario.

Actually what is insane is to have your production code do anything else. "pip install foo" and similar schemes open your code up to the following problems:

- incompatibilities that were introduced in the version 1.2.1 while you've only tested your code with 1.2

- the host is down so you can't compile your own code because your dependency is not available

- the host is hacked and "foo" was replaced with "malicious foo"

- exponential increase of testing (you really should test with all version of your dependencies you use)

Ultimately, I don't understand the doom and gloom point of view. C, C++, Java, C# etc. programmers have been pulling dependencies in their repos for ages. In my SumatraPDF I have 12 dependencies. I certainly prefer to manually update them from time to time than to have builds that work on my machine but fail for other people or many other problems that are a result of blindly pulling third party code.

Not in this case because then technically YouTube is a publisher and Google pays the license.

But if you were to post this video on your website and and if there was any income attached (e.g. you also have AdSense ads on your website), then you have to pay.

If there is no income attached, you don't have to pay royalties but still need to get the license and good luck with that if you're a dad and all you want is post a video of your kid on the internet so that his grandparents can see it.

This is clearly stated in e.g. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/licensing/mpeg...

"Where MPEG-4 Visual material is provided for remuneration, video providers may be required to pay royalties for the right to use the decoders and encoders in the following circumstances:

* MPEG-4 Visual material is provided for direct remuneration (for example, remuneration is from a user for a subscription and the number of different subscribers exceeds certain minimums, or for specific video titles).

* Remuneration is from other sources (for example, free over-the-air broadcasting).

However, in the case of video that is delivered via the Internet to a user without charge, no royalties are payable during the first term of the license (ending December 31, 2008), but you still need to obtain the license."

Because "Microsoft and Apple pay for the licenses on behalf of developers and users so licensing cost only affects a very tiny minority" is not really true. See http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/licensing/mpeg...

If you encode a video into mpeg4 format, even using a commercial tool whose makers pays mpeg4 license, that license doesn't extend to the resulting video.

If you post such video on your website, you're violating mpeg4 patents and have to pay mpeg4 licensing fee (up to $5 million/year).

That basically puts mpeg4 out of reach for 99.9% content creators that cannot afford even talking to mpeg4 consortium about the license.

Not to mention that most people don't use commercial tools. We use ffmpeg/x264, which is not only free but has better quality than expensive commercial tools. Even using those tools without paying a license is not permitted (although, obviously, most people simply don't understand that or willfully ignore banking that mpeg4 la won't sue them).

Microsoft and Apple pays so that users of their software can CONSUME mpeg4 format.

All CREATORS are left out in cold and have to license the patents.

Given that video becomes more and more ubiquitous, it's not an acceptable situation for the web just as it wasn't acceptable to have to pay for using .gif format to post a picture on your website (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html)

He earned what "several times over"?

What logic compels you to conclude that if you get viciously and frivolously sued by someone and publicly badmouthed by him (on his weblog) you should give him a lucrative and prestigious employment (i.e. the Entrepreneur In Residence)?

Do you think a sane SV VC should employ a toxic person that publicly calls Zuckerberg a psychopat?

So far he filed a bunch of frivolous lawsuits against anyone who came into contact with him and looked at him funny. He always represents himself, so there's no cost for him but it hurts the defendants because they have to hire and pay for real lawyers.

His previous lawsuit has been dismissed by the judge http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/case.html?id=716057

His other lawsuit (http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/case.html?id=716056) is in shambles on procedural grounds because his California lawyer wants to withdraw from the case which would leave Greenspan as the only lawyer and, just like in this case, he sues on behalf of his company and a company can't represent itself, so his has to have an outside counsel to proceed.

The most likely reason gcc was used was that Ian Taylor, the guy who is part of Google's core team and wrote gccgo, was already familiar with gcc by virtue of being long-time gcc developer.

There already is a project to build a go compiler on top of llvm (https://github.com/axw/llgo).

Except that Megaupload was not selling duplicated CDs of albums of US musicians or some other obviously infringing activity.

They provided a file hosting service, like Dropbox or Google Drive or Skydrive.

Judge Mooner, I'm pretty sure, doesn't own rights to Sinead O'Connor's music and yet DOJ is not currently suing YouTube because of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t77DexLMjOU

The rules for determining if a file sharing services like YouTube or DropBox or Megaupload violates copyright are not as clear as you seem to imply which is why e.g. Viacom lost it's case against YouTube (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Yo...)

It's far from clear that Megaupload violated U.S. law, let alone New Zealand's.

Go doesn't "force" you to use one method of concurrency.

It has more than one (you can do erlang-style share-nothing style or Java/C++ style of using mutexes to protect shared state from concurrent access).

I know nothing about Closure so it's possible it has more features but it's not necessarily a good thing. Is the complexity of 4 different solutions worth it? (by "it" I mean: a programmer has to learn all of them and when to use what; the implementor has to implement them; write wrappers for all standard data structures (what about third party libraries?) etc.).

Feature bloat has a cost.

Go gives you all you need to easily write concurrent programs and it does it with refreshingly simple design (both for people to learn and to implement).

Your "anecdotal" experience is rubbish.

I'm getting unsolicited requests for interviews from software companies by the bucket.

There are 180 open positions at Google in Mountain View alone (https://www.google.com/about/jobs/search/#t=sq&q=j&j...).

Multiply that by all Google's locations, add job listings from hundreds of other tech companies in SV.

Every time I hear this topic discussed by people who actually know what they are talking about (i.e. those running companies that try to hire competent programmers or those that are involved in the process, like VCs), it's always the same: finding good programmers is brutal.

Now, I'm sure that what you said is true in Alaska and many other parts of US that are not one of the tech centers, but when it comes to SV/Seattle/NY etc., it's clear that there is more demand than supply for skilled developers.

He wasn't charged with anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_A...

"Assange has not yet been formally charged with any offence.[62] The prosecutor said that, in accordance with the Swedish legal system, formal charges will be laid only after extradition and a second round of questioning. Observers note however that Assange has not yet been interviewed about several of the allegations,[63] including the most serious, and that Swedish law allows interviews to be conducted abroad under Mutual Legal Assistance provisions.[64]"

Because APIs are more functional than creative.

Imagine an Array class. How many names can you come up with for: "number of elements in an array"? Count(), Size(), Len(), Length(). Those are 4 common names.

Now imagine a system where you can copyright those names. The first 4 people who use those obvious, functional names get a monopoly on their use because that's what copyright is: a government granted monopoly.

We have hundreds of languages, and many languages have multiple Array classes.

Can you see how such system would destroy our ability to write understandable code?

An API is a very small part of the overall code.

If you want to compare this to writers: code is the novel and it does get copyright protection, just like a novel.

API name is like a chapter name and just like Melville doesn't get copyright (i.e. exclusive use) of "Loomings", a programmer shouldn't get a an exclusive use of Array.Count().

Reading the comments it's clear that majority people do not understand what it is, mostly because the title is misleading.

It's a custom, toy browser with Ruby support, not "Ruby in the Browser" (where the implication is that the browser == chrome or firefox or safari).

I'm just trying to clarify that so that people don't get the wrong impression from the misleading title.

It did happen long time. It just died because of lack of adoption.

<script> tag has a type attribute. IE used to (still does?) support Visual Basic as a script. See http://www.w3schools.com/vbscript/vbscript_howto.asp

But even the combined might of IE and Microsoft (that was long time ago, when Microsoft and IE were mighty) couldn't get it broadly adopted so it's effectively dead.

It's a cool hack but it's pretty much DOA.

It's a modified version of WebKit. WebKit devs won't allow this to be part of WebKit itself (https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024...).

Even if it's actively maintained (and maintaining a fork of WebKit, even if it adds just one feature, is super hard), it'll be of extremely limited appeal.

Basically it's a custom, "toy" browser that you have to download and the ruby scripts you write will not be usable by anyone else (because no one else will use that browser).

There's no way this thing gets traction.

Nevertheless: kudos to the author for a cool hack.

There's a big difference between "my use case" and "all use cases".

Sure, JavaScript is fast enough for a lot of things.

But it's also too slow for many things that reasonable people would like to do on the web.

See Mozilla's pdf.js: it makes perfect sense to have a PDF viewer written in JavaScript (and not a blob of insecure C++ code in the form of the plugin).

pdf.js would not be possible at all "long, long time ago", even though JS was adequate for your use cases at that time.

pdf.js is barely possible today - it works for simple documents but its performance on more complex documents is still so much worse than what C++ plugin gives that many people go back to plugins.

Performance is one of the most important competitive aspects of software. Given 2 products with similar features, people go for the faster, which is a big reason why Chrome was so successful.

We're still far away from making JS speed covering all the important use cases.

Until JavaScript can decode mp4 in JavaScript (at speeds not much slower than optimized C++), JavaScript is not fast enough.

Go allows you to share memory between goroutines (i.e. concurrent code).

It doesn't force you to do so.

In fact, the Go team explicitly tells you not to do that: "do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating." (http://blog.golang.org/2010/07/share-memory-by-communicating...) i.e. they tell you to use the Erlang model.

But as everything, there are trade-offs. Even Go team uses shared memory protected by locks in some cases (see Go standard library) because it's faster or easier that way.

Every good idea (sharing memory between threads is dangerous and therefore should be avoided) taken to extreme becomes cargo cult programming.

Yes, it is dangerous, but at the same time there are plenty of successful projects that do it because there are programmers that can contain that complexity despite the somewhat popular view that this approach dooms you to failure.

With that attitude we wouldn't have much improvement in anythin.

No one really knows if a given product will be successful or not.

The creator of this product wrote (http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/march/myNewCompanyAndOurF...):

"Little Outliner is a new beginning. Our easy on-ramp. We want to re-introduce idea processing, and using outliners to create presentations, but this time the difference is networking. I think you'll be amazed at what we come up with in the coming months."

Now, whether they'll be successful or not is anyone's guess, but clearly they have a plan and presumably that plan involves doing something better/different than workflowy (which is a good product that I pay for).

Let's wait and see and give them the benefit of the doubt?