knowtheory

Because that seems pretty hard to swallow given how much people crow about Uber disrupting markets.

Uber does help define the landscape of drivers and availability. There are other sorts of pricing models they could even follow. Why not charge a little bit more during off peak times, and then turn around and incentivize drivers using the subsidy from off-peak hours, rather than dumping it all on individuals traveling during points of tumult/crisis?

There are a lot of models between the awful medallion system many cities have and the way that Uber works right now. And frankly as much as i hate how taxis work in a lot of US cities, and as much as i love the user experience that Uber delivers, they certainly should not be immune to criticism, especially over issues like this.

What if uber had been in his city and charged 4000$ for a ride to the airport? Does he live 60 miles from his airport? who the fuck knows?

The story isn't even a useful anecdote, it's a Rorschach test for libertarians to project their biases onto.

What about people who do not have the means to do so? Should they be the ones stuck walking because you can afford to pay more?

Being politically affiliated with hate speech IS a choice.

That is some straight up false equivalency bullshit.

In this thread: Lies open source developers tell themselves.

It's a sad joke Rubyconf attendees yearly confuse @bryanl and @daksis with each other, but it's happened at every Rubyconf i've been too (which is granted 3 but it's there).

Open Source is a community, and communities are about who you know, and how you interact with them. Open Source communities do nothing to fix or address the structural or cultural elements of racism.

Success in open source is like success in anything else. It's about building something that other people care about, and promoting yourself and your work to others (or having someone else promote it for you). That last component is entirely socio-cultural. There is no meritocratic component to it.

It's again worth noting that the modern etymology of the term 'meritocracy' was satire against the concept we identify it with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology

Being good at what you do and working hard is necessary but not sufficient to being recognized and successful.

Picking discrete questions like this is equivalent to building a decision tree for humanity. This is actually something that could be approached as an engineering problem (and there are mechanisms for optimizing decision trees).

The problem still remains in the face of both the technological capabilities of decision trees, and practical implementations like Hunch.com, that decision trees are reductive and discrete. Reality is neither discrete nor reductive.

It may very well be the case that there is a set of questions that could uniquely identify humans, but the insight that could be drawn from those questions might be essentially pointless.

For example:

* Were you born in the northern hemisphere?

* Were you born on an even numbered year in the Gregorian calendar?

* Is the country of your birth governed through a representative system?

Python is definitely major player in data processing (heck i'd even just be interested in how he's defining data science), but it's definitely not the only game in town by a long shot.

Granted there's a pretty broad spectrum of kinds of projects and kinds of collaboration. But even in the broadest most open of collaborations, fundamentally there are aesthetic, stylistic and design decisions being made about API structure and the usability of a code base's constructs (which is what is so frustrating about watching new communities of new programmers coalesce w/o the benefit of hindsight from previous cultures/systems).

It's just a hop, skip and a jump from those higher level domain concerns down to actual coding style.

Also, buildings and bridges are creative and artistic endeavors.

Edit: To be a little less flippant about it, the broader point is that writing code is always a stylistic endeavor. You can agree with your colleagues or friends explicitly on style conventions, or you can roll with organically created conventions. But to say that you can write code devoid of design decisions and stylistic choices is foolish (again, all buildings and bridges are designed objects, and sure there are best practices for how concrete is poured, but to declare that construction has no craftsmanship is incorrect).

Beyond that, the utility of forcing others to adhere to your style is one that should be more rigorously considered. My vast preference is to ensure that large engineering structures are constructed of compact and well factored components with sane/intuitive APIs, regardless of what their internal stylistic choices are w/r/t formatting.

Having a global style guide across multiple projects might be nice, but it also might be stymieing in terms of iterating towards better practices.

I'm not 100% certain that declarative is wrong for presentational information. It just sucks that HTML + CSS are so messy. I'd even go for something that had a more parsimonious (note: not coupled tho) relationship between presentation/structure.

The exception for this particular case is that i have met Zac and had some interesting conversations, because i also work on the University of Missouri campus.

So when the author of the slate post writes "And finally, in a rare coup for humanists, Ernst is departing for a lucrative job in the private sector."

I can say categorically this should not surprise people. Zac is the brand of humanist who is in the humanities not because they are not technically proficient, but because they are of a technical proficiency that allows them to pursue whatever they want.

DevelopmentSeed (the guys behind MapBox) designed & developed a frontend site and then handed it over to HHS. That's where the good stuff comes from. Clearly however, whoever received the project from that point onwards doesn't understand things like asset minification or packaging.

My completely random conjecture is that whoever inherited DevelopmentSeed's code does not know how this stuff should work.

Also see: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/pro...

So, languages and dialects have some sort of (nebulously defined) level of prestige relative to any particular population, and the prestige of a particular language/dialect is one of those factors for a bunch of cultural phenomena, such as where and whether it's appropriate to use a particular language/dialect in a particular social setting, and whether a language is taught to children, etc, etc, etc.

Anyway, point being, prestige is also one of those things you see in careers too. It may be that there aren't more men banging down the doors to get into dietetics and nursing because those jobs aren't perceived to be as prestigious as being a doctor.

People aspire to being the President of the United States, or a doctor, or lawyer or whatever. They don't aspire to being middle management, or nursing home attendants, or city clerks.

(p.s. I think that gender imbalance in any field is questionable/problematic. But on a pragmatic basis there's actual material harm when all of the prestigious and high earning fields are particularly biased.)

(and to be clear, my intent is not to bait, i'm actually curious)

Waldo's trying to describe a state of being. You can argue about whether Waldo really knows what long term depression is really like, but that's separate from learning what it feels like to experience a set of symptoms which he has never previously fallen victim to.

He's not claiming to be an authority or an expert, or to even claim that this some how makes him special. He's claiming that he understands depression better now, having experienced it.

People can bitch and kvetch about elevator-pitch/vision level descriptions of products, but such analyses are always shallow, and particularly for interesting products almost always miss the point.

Always look to the execution.

(on the flip side, the flaws of poorly executed projects can often be very easy to sum up)

But that's not the reality we live in (yet, hopefully). So if these sorts of opportunities exist, presumably we should consider them.

Stop and Frisk in NYC overwhelmingly targets blacks and latinos, to the point where it's been declared unconstitutional, for example.

Also, this is what a history of segregation looks like. Its worth remembering that small towns, at least in places like Ohio, were so inhospitable to African Americans that they were referred to as "sundown towns" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town ).

When people think that racism is over, maps like these serve as a pretty good starting point for asking them to reevaluate their POV.

Of course, there's always this you could start with too:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/13/white-definiti...

The US is not Zimbabwe or Burma or Jordan. It has its serious flaws and issues that need to be addressed, but we shouldn't mistake the kind of creature that we are dealing with. Making that mistake will lead one to seriously misunderstand what the interests and possible courses of action that western governments will pursue.

Also, if one wanted to be really crabby about it, it's kind of disrespectful to all of the journalists who paid with their lives to contribute to the civic sphere to equate pervasive surveillance (as serious and insidious as it is) with the pervasive fear of physical harm and death that some journalists face.

Marcela Turati did a terrifyingly good job of conveying the price that Mexican journalists pay at the Investigative Reporters & Editors conference this year. If you really want to get a sense of that, you can watch the video here: http://ire.org/conferences/ire-2013/keynote/

That's stupid. Of course they wouldn't. They would require them to stop reporting on the security state. But that is vastly different from shuttering them all together.

The Guardian certainly performs a public service in a variety of other domains (from which the government can and does benefit). The security state just doesn't want the press banging around in their domain.

Let's not let the hyperbole get away from us here.

Read the middle of the last page: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...

> Their discussion turned to the question of coming back to the United States. Greenwald said, half-jokingly, that if he was arrested, WikiLeaks would become the new traffic cop for publishing N.S.A. documents. “I would just say: ‘O.K., let me introduce you to my friend Julian Assange, who’s going to take my place. Have fun dealing with him.’ ”

> Poitras prodded him: “So you’re going back to the States?”

> He laughed and pointed out that unfortunately, the government does not always take the smartest course of action. “If they were smart,” he said, “I would do it.”

https://twitter.com/jorydotcom/status/367328492787994625

I'll add that Ben Vinegar's talk about how Disqus uses Backbone is also interesting, especially as a case study for a widely deployed app.

Again, Kristofer's & Mark's talks are really quite good. You should definitely watch them :)

Allowed to have gun? C/D

Privacy is way more complicated, and an inherently psychological endeavor.

Free from government snooping? C/D

is a much more complicated question, because it is untenable for governments to know nothing about their citizens or companies (it is good that we license drivers, and that restaurants have health inspections).

Also, the NRA holds a special relationship with an industry. The NRA is the lightning rod for attention after fire arms tragedies. No one ever goes in for gun companies after something like Sandy Hook, instead they go raise money off of the NRA.

There is no similar (legal) industry on which privacy and/or secrecy is a prerequisite, and for which a lobbying proxy would be useful.