Ask HN: How to keep marginal employees - <AUTHOR>

I work for an engineering company that has been in business 30 years. I have been here eight.  Occasionally we let someone go who is not performing up to par, and that is probably going to happen again in the first quarter of next year.  I hear comments like "His work always needs to be checked," but I believe we should have much more checking of everyone's work.  I know we pay recruiting fees on the order of $10K per new hire, but we don't invest like that for training or for remediation of under-performance.  I would like to come forward with ideas and knowledge that can help these co-workers become better at their jobs so that they can be retained.  I am in a position to make some sacrifices and I am willing to do that if I believe it will help make my place of employment a better place. Do you have suggestions or experience with this situation? <comment><USER2> "Dave, is there anything we can do to improve your experience as an employee? Anything we can do to help you take your skills to the next level?"

Then listen to Dave. He probably knows his work isn't as good as the rest of the team.

I worked on a team where I was Dave. The manager tried to avoid uncomfortable talks by making very indirect statements involving me, to my team. and my teammates would never, ever talk to me about my work. They all talked about it, though. Avoiding it created a _lot_ of resentment.

Getting laid off that team was, to date, the best thing I've experienced in my career. Talk to Dave. Listen to him. Practice the conversation with someone else, first.

<comment><USER3> This is a good suggestion.

More generally, it's good that OP you are thinking about investing in making your team better. When I managed large teams (~350) my thinking always went in this order for weak performers: a) What can we do to allow them to perform in their current role (an honest discussion is usually a good place to start) b) If they are in the wrong role, is there another role within the org where they can thrive? c) If there is no role (typically this supported by either brutal incompetence and/or no desire to work at this place) it's better to get them out of there so they can find a place better suited to them.

Getting rid of bad people is good thing and shouldn't be shied away from. But the first step is asking how to make it work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish every senior level employee/manager had this thought everyday at their workplace. That would make the organization stronger in long term and improve quality of product much better. If every company out there try to find the best of best which is around 10% of the pool then who will take the rest and train them to bring up to a level? It just shows the shortsightedness of the organization and profit as a short term goal.

</comment><comment><USER5> Quite likely you pay a lot more than $10K per new hire.

If you send me a link to your employer's homepage, I'll list it at [http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/](http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/)

There is no charge for this service nor will there ever be. I am quite specifically trying to do away with the practice of paying for resume submissions. Consider that a recent study found that the average recruiter "reads" resumes for just six seconds apiece. For that you pay tens of thousands of dollars?

While not strictly necessary it is quite helpful if your employer's site has a "Jobs" or "Careers" page, as well as a "Contact" page.

If your site doesn't explictly say where your office is located, please tell me the city, state or province if any, and country.

You don't need to say that it's from you, specifically, if you wish to remain anonymous. I get submissions from lots of people.

<comment><USER6> You also need to factor in loss of productivity while bringing a new hire into an organisation.

They won't be 100% productive (50% might be aspirational for some roles for the first few months) and they will also reduce the productivity of their colleagues while they are brought up to speed.

$10k seems like a low figure for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For what my internet opinion is worth, find a place to work with a culture that meets your professional standards, you're not going to create a business case in favor of professionalism that persuades your current employer.

Since it is already obvious that the person will be fired and yet it hasn't happened, company culture issues perhaps run deeper than you are in a position to change...e.g. an engineering culture where it is believed that a second set of eyes on work product is not just normal professionalism.

<comment><AUTHOR> I worry that you are right. This is my fifth job in 34 years and the best place I have ever worked. So I was hoping to make an improvement from where I sit instead of looking for a better environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mentors who aren't in management and can meet regularly to go over tasks and offer one-on-one customized training.

Also, the mentors themselves can benefit from this in terms of people skills.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, everyone for the help. I'll be talking to Dave and working on some of the other suggestions, too.

</comment><comment><USER9> Are you management, engineer, software dev? Who is telling you the person's work needs checked?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am an engineer and I heard that from other engineers. I have gotten a little bit closer to management than average, not because I do superior work, but because I am not afraid of losing my job. So some other people here will tell me things they want management to know and some things are not mentioned to me directly because people think I am close to management. In other words, office politics and rumors.</comment></comment>


An IDE is Not Enough (in response to LightTable) - <AUTHOR> http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=680&src=gw

<comment><USER2> "... so long as we are programming in descendants of assembly language we will continue to program in descendants of text editors."

What a brilliant quote. Jon gets it in a way few people do.</comment>


Ask HN: Opinions on Selling SaaS on AWS Marketplace? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Will you be the only one doing it or will 10,000 people offer it and beggar it? What does SaaS think of the concept, the beggaring etc?</comment>


Show HN: Hacker News Comments - <AUTHOR> http://hncomments.nathancahill.com/

<comment><USER2> >Although many websites and blogs have a comment system, the quality of the discussion on Hacker News tends to be much better.

Probably because your random internet stranger has never heard of HN.

It's a shame, for instance, that I was ever allowed to find this place.

<comment><USER3> If that ever changes and HN is overrun (insert dramatic and sad Hans Zimmer score) what about starting a new HN just for programmers? I wouldn't be able to get in at the moment, but someday I'd hope to be able to.[1]

[1] I'm assuming you'd have some kind of rotating or individualized Project Euler style problems that you have to solve to get in, and that they would be pretty tough. It occurs to me that you could also have temporary student accounts for people who are just getting into the software world as well though.

<comment><USER4> Passing a programming test is no guarantee for having anything interesting to contribute to an online community, just look at your company's internal IT mailing lists.

<comment><USER3> Totally! That's why I'm not suggesting anyone do it _now_. There's a place for kludgy solutions, but not until you've tried everything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Scraping comments on HN hits the robots.txt wall rather quickly.

At a maximum 2 scrapes per minute, your cache will be 60 minutes old when you're watching 120 (single-page) comment threads. That might be tolerable. Now try 1200 or 12,000 comment threads.

You can do smart cache refreshes, but you will miss bursty activity. You can ignore articles older than X days, but you'll miss the "dupe, comments here:" resurgences.

HN gets about 150 posts per day that hit the top 60, at least briefly, as a point of reference.

This is a neat thing, but if it gets popular you will have a problem. On the plus side, it's self-limiting. As the usage gets higher, the experience will degrade and usage will decline. No intervention required by you. :)

I've wished for a policy-compliant way to cache comments in a timely manner, but there's just no way to stay current under the existing rules.

<comment><USER6> What if you're scraping with ajax? Wouldn't each individual user's IP take the hit and not the domain's IP?

<comment><USER7> You can't scrape with AJAX because of cross domain security restrictions.

One potential solution to obey robots.txt might be to spawn multiple small EC2 instances with different IP's and have them coordinate with each other to share the crawling without individually running over the limits. (This is also useful for scraping from sites that have rate limits)

<comment><USER8> robots.txt doesn't enforce itself so there is no IP limitation; this is still a violation and no better than simply lowering the delay on a single scraper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd definitely use this on my blog (<http://sachagreif.com>) if it was officially supported (or at least tolerated) by HN somehow.

And the fact that people can only comment if they have an HN account makes it even better!

</comment><comment><USER10> > Although many websites and blogs have a comment system, the quality of the > discussion on Hacker News tends to be much better.

Wouldn't this risk changing that?

<comment><USER11> Probably not, unless your blog has an organic audience that is bigger (or at least comparable) than that of HN homepage...

<comment><AUTHOR> Blogs this big are unlikely to implement a third-party (and unsupported) discussion feed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In my preferred model of Internet content, stuff like this would be available for every element without scraping.

Good job.

<comment><USER13> The word for that is <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion> , and it's interesting that it was a core component of Xanadu (see the Wikipedia link there).

<comment><USER12> Yeah. I know.

We also need a micropayment processor that can do sub-penny transactions.

EDIT: Actually, I would be fine with penny transactions considering that the current state of things with say, paypal; is 30+ cents per transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How hard would it be to have your script look for the submission on HN by url instead of having to manually put in the id? Maybe it could use the one with the highest score if there's more than one?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's the plan! A new API endpoint will use the referring page to capture the URL, then link it with the appropriate discussion on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great contribution Nathan, looking forward to using this to embed comments after my next blog post. Can you let me know how the comment system works? Are you scraping HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm respectfully scraping. I've rate limited all calls to YC's servers and am caching all comments on my side.

<comment><USER15> Seems respectable. Out of curiosity, why did none of the existing 3rd party API's suit your purpose?

<comment><USER16> Probably the same reason no one should you use this to power their comment section there is no revenue, and no real reason to keep it up. Things like this come and go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This would make more sense if it was entirely client-side code towards an official JSONP endpoint, such as the official hacker news API.

<comment><USER18> Not saying this is necessarily true for Hacker News, but unfortunately a lot of sites don't have the time/resources to develop and then maintain a public API for the majority of their content. And mostly see an RSS or XML feed of their news/articles/stories as good enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do you think people are going to wait for someone to submit each post to HN? I think this will encourage writers to submit every single story they write to HN, just to get a comments page.

<comment><USER20> Even if someone put every single story they write on HN, that's not a guarantee that it will get comments, since it might not get up-voted.

I think if I were to implement this on my own page, I would probably have two tabs that expand if clicked. Something like this:

Show [your site's name] comments | Show HN comments

And then for the HN comment tab, you would use the OP's awesome submission. Thanks, btw!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's a question, is it possible to put a Hacker News upvote button on your blog post? Or is that against the HN rules, or something that's frowned upon in the community?

<comment><USER22> I created hnlike.com about a year ago that helps you to setup an upvote button for your blog. I have disabled the upvote feature as the community seemed worried. See the HN discussion on my story for details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I hope this doesn't further impact the quality of discussion on hacker news. It seems that every day I notice more and more people posting completely non- contributing crap in the comments that you'd expect from Reddit or something (one-liners, stupid jokes, etc). I go to Reddit for that, I come here for insight (which, granted, you can find a lot on Reddit also, but HN is supposed to be a bastion of intellectual thought and discussion).

</comment><comment><USER24> This idea is kind of alluring. But you can't really include discussions on your page that might be happening all over the Internet. Reddit etc.

This is where the browser should really be smart enough to do a search engine lookup, and propose smart links alongside the page you're reading. Or even summarise and merge discussions found elsewhere.

<comment><USER25> I'm going off topic a little but...

An element I really like from random blog posts I've seen off of HN is using the sidebars for additional, short commentary/details. Your comment reminded me of that, but sadly this might not work well if an article were all chopped up with tons of commentary (I'm thinking of used books where 'important' parts are highlighted and comments put beside them by a random reader, which I dislike). Well, then again, perhaps for people who like to dive into subjects and really digest an article, there could be a straight text version and a feature to see it marked up w/ smart commentary.

This also reminds me of a small 'movement' a year or two ago for citing in- article links at the bottom instead of linking to them throughout the article itself.

<comment><USER24> Does it really matter where the links are listed - in the article or at the end?

Opera has a side panel, one of which is the Links panel. That pulls links out of the page and lists them alongside. But this alone isn't that much use. The browser however could do something more interesting with them.

I think a lot of pages seem dreadfully wasteful by placing in the same old accessory content on their pages. Buttonitis etc. I don't think this necessarily should live 'inside' the 'page' at all. The content should remain dumb. The inbound links, and chat around the content augments it. And this could be summised somehow by browser tools / other services.

I understand the author's want for embedding HN comments on a page. There's a simple and elegant solution to the problem. Simply open up another browser window/tab and point it to the relevant HN comment page. To do so, the author could include a simple link in the page, leave it to the browser to infer, or just let the user discover it for themselves (pointers do help though.)

Why the obsession of stuffing our pages with content?

It also feels a little snooty doing something like this (embedding HN comments on your page that is.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why isn't this open source?

<comment><USER15> Why would you want open source for this? Do you want to spend the time to deploy your own instance just to have the exact same result?

<comment><USER27> yes i would. to implement the whole thing, instead of only this little jquery snippet shouldn't take much longer. but then i'm not dependent on someone elses server being up/fast.

<comment><USER28> If everyone could implement their own scrapper they would be able to follow robots.txt guidelines/limits, but HN servers might take a big blow it it gets popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow, I really like this, great work!

I've previously thought that comment threads on blogs tend to die down fairly quickly, whereas discussions on HN tend to last a bit longer, so this is doubly cool.

I guess the only downside is the near-impossibility of letting people comment directly from the page without having to log in again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a downside. I'm not allowing posting comments or upvotes through this system to maintain the integrity of the discussion on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just a heads up, I tried to test out your inline "Give it a try below!" but it's not working right now. In the browser console: "GET <http://hncomments.nathancahill.com/comments/4285019/html/> 500 (Internal Server Error)"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, there were a couple hiccups handling the large amount of traffic. Should be in working order now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nice work, this is pretty cool! I've been working on a similar approach but using Github (mainly because I host my blog there using Jekyll). I'll try and get it released tonight :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Very, very interesting! So you already calculated that the cost of this will be insignificant for you even with millions of pageviews? Blogs have a long tail of visits... ;)

</comment><comment><USER32> How do people opt-in to allow their comments to be shared on sites other than HN? Or is this strictly opt-out and, if so, what is the opt-out mechanism?

</comment><comment><USER33> This is very interesting! Great work.

<comment><USER34> This comment could be an upvote to the original story :)

<comment><USER35> Couldn't your comment be a downvote? ;)

<comment><USER34> The downvote arrows don't appear sometimes! I don't know how the software decides....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> looks good :)

<comment><USER34> Upvoting gives the same result as "nice job!" comments like yours :)</comment></comment>


The Novelties of Lua 5.2 Roberto Ierusalimschy (pdf slideshow) - <AUTHOR> http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/talks/novelties-5.2.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> The attitude towards _goto_ really struck a chord with me. It's "powerful" and "easy to explain". It's also "simple" to add to the VM. It's in, and purity be damned.

There's something to be said here about pragmatism versus purity. Maybe also a comparison with the recent posts about OO and Rails. I'm hand-waving. I mean to write something longer about this, but I'm still trying to decide what exactly I make of it.

<comment><USER2> A lot of people wanted it is Lua is quite widely used as a code generation target, and generating gotos is useful often to match other language constructs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For anyone wondering about "C upvalues", which wasn't clear to me, there is some explanation here:

<http://www.lua.org/pil/27.3.3.html>

Essentially, they are unbound variables that have to be reachable from the function by some mechanism, making it a closure.

Apologies if I've misunderstood anything here.

<comment><USER4> You got it. Quoting from the 5.2 manual:

      Because of the lexical scoping rules, local variables can
      be freely accessed by functions defined inside their scope.
      A local variable used by an inner function is called an
      upvalue, or external local variable, inside the inner
      function.

i.e., the external local variables the closure is closed on. And for C functions made available to Lua scripts:

      When a C function is created, it is possible to associate
      some values with it, thus creating a C closure (see
      lua_pushcclosure); these values are called upvalues and are
      accessible to the function whenever it is called.

\- <http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it is worth to mention:

Structured programming with go to statements (1974) by Donald E. Knuth ([http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.103.6...](http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.103.6084))

</comment><comment><USER6> What this leaves me wondering is : what are the continuation semantics for the gotos? Without that part it's hard to know if "ill formed" gotos that result in trying to execute expressions with undefined variables can happen or not.

<comment><USER2> A label is visible in the entire block where it is defined (including nested blocks, but not nested functions).

A goto may jump to any visible label as long as it does not enter into the scope of a local variable.

This can be determined statically.

<comment><USER6> ok, so the semantics for lua goto's is to enter at the start of smallest enclosing block that has no free variables in the current environment? Or to statically reject code that tries to do so? That doesn't sound quite accurate, unless you're saying that lua does some static analysis before execution, which I was not aware of.

<comment><USER7> Lua compiles to a simple bytecode. It makes sure gotos are valid during this compilation.

It jumps directly to the label, and can't skip forward over the declarations of variables that are in scope at the label.

<comment><USER6> cool. Thanks for the info. Where are this and other features nicely documented?

<comment><USER7> I would suggest reading The Implementation of Lua 5.0

<http://www.lua.org/doc/jucs05.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> can someone smarter than me comment on whether delimited continuations are better or worse than goto and/or "ordinary" continuations? (because i suspect they are nicer in how they handle scope, and they are what are typically implemented, aren't they?)</comment>


Top WordPress sites vulnerable 6 weeks after caching plugin fixed - <AUTHOR> http://hackertarget.com/running-wordpress-patch-your-plugins/

<comment><USER2> I just spend half day cleaning client's website from intense attack targeting outdated timthumb vulnerability. Attacker discovered inactive old theme (canvas) within website, scanned for thumb.php and planted external malicious PHP script inside website. Then through that planted malicious script - infected about 100 of other PHP files overwriting header of each with malicious code. This type of attack couldn't be cleaned up just by reinstalling wordpress as attacker could use _any_ of newly infected files to re-infect the whole site again. Luckily her website was hosted at [http://hostrum.com](http://hostrum.com) where she had a detailed report of all suspicious files that are suddently appeared. Lessons: 1\. Make sure your hosting company has realtime malware notification and protection. Very little number of hosting companies do that.

2\. Do no keep uninstalled old themes or old plugins - they can be used as a backdoors into website. Delete them if not used.

<comment><USER3> Just as an FYI, those attacks are fully automated. There wasn't really some guy on the other end doing this. Had a client have this same thing happen to them and the request to re-infect kept coming in long after the initial issue was resolved.

Another good thing to do which will disable 99% of these kind of attacks, is disable the following PHP functions:

disable_functions = exec,passthru,shell_exec,system,proc_open,popen,curl_multi_exec,parse_ini_file,show_source

There's very, very few scripts which actually need these, and if you run across one that does... you probably shouldn't use it anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks HN, this was news I could use. (I didn't turn out to have anything vulnerable, but certainly could have.)

<comment><USER5> Same here, and I did have something vulernable: Super Cache. I just updated.

You know what would be nice? Opt-in e-mail lists for each plug-in. If I hadn't seen this article, I might not have updated for months. If I'd gotten an e-mail that says, "SUPER CACHE COMPROMISED, UPDATE NOW," I sure would've.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had an attached comment with this information but want to break it out as it will likely be useful to people without lots of time dealing with the various ways Wordpress can/will (mostly will) get attacked.

First: Double-check your folder and file permissions. A lot of plugins like and love very open folder permissions so they can write stuff everywhere. Be very careful with changing permission on core Wordpress stuff! If for instance you give the web-server write permissions to the core, you're going to have a bad time. This is made worse by the fact that many people are used to using the wp-admin 'upgrade' functionality. In my view this is beyond awful. A lot of WP exploits would be made much harder by just not allowing this and manually upgrading the Wordpress core. It's very easy anyway.

Second: Disable the following PHP functions in php.ini on the server hosting Wordpress

disable_functions = exec,passthru,shell_exec,system,proc_open,popen,curl_multi_exec,parse_ini_file,show_source

You can just add that line anywhere in the php.ini, restart apache (or php-fpm if you're using that) and you've suddenly blocked 99% of the Wordpress and greater PHP attacks against your server. Essentially you'll run across some PHP scripts eventually that want one or more of those permissions. If they do, run them on a server separate from Wordpress and also keep the application way up to date (or you'll have a bad time).

Third: Install and keep this handy [http://wpscan.org/](http://wpscan.org/)

WPScan allows you to do a URL/folder based wordpress scan looking for vulnerable files, wordpress versions and plugins. It is a very good tool to keep handy if you host lots of Wordpress sites.

Oh, one more little thing. The timthumb vuln issue someone mentioned below... keep this handy for newest version [http://timthumb.googlecode.com](http://timthumb.googlecode.com)

Any questions?

<comment><USER5> How do you know WP-Scan itself isn't a vulnerable extension?

<comment><USER3> Wait, what? WPScan is a standalone Ruby script. You run it against a Wordpress site. There's nothing to install on the WP website in question. You can even run it against public WP websites if you wanted to (although I imagine you might get some sternly worded letters from some).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The specific vulnerability mentioned in this article is only exploited when a comment containing dynamic snippets is posted. Most WP blogs use comment moderation of some sort to prevent spam and that prevents this attack from being widely exploited, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wordpress.. the reverse shell with a blogging engine.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how he deteremined the top wp sites? Is that via alexa, some other ranking? It's not clear.</comment>


Game-ify debugging/cs? - <AUTHOR>

For an end of quarter project, I'm supposed to build a computer game.  I've noticed that both my girlfriend and her mother play puzzle-like games (go through a maze, word searches, match objects, etc.) obsessively.  To take advantage of all this effort, I think it would be cool if you could embed a real bug finding, debugging, or other coding task in a puzzle game.  For instance, it would be neat if whenever you completed a puzzle, not only did you complete the puzzle, but you also found a concurrency bug in the Linux kernel.
So far, it's been difficult to come up with translations from code to puzzles.  And I figured that lots of other folks on this site might have some really good ideas.  Right now my rough ideas were: <handwaviness>
   1) Treat loading registers, reading from memory, and operations on registers as "moves" in a game.  Get the user to try to re-write generated code to run as quickly as possible.
   2) Place and route for chip layout
   3) Requiring programmers to notate code with invariants and using those.  For instance, Code Block A and Code Block B cannot be run at the same time.  And provide a call graph.  Is there a way to navigate the call graph so that they do? </handwaviness>
Let me know if you have any thoughts (positive or negative are welcome).  Thanks. <comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea and can make for educational games, but I don't think it will see much traction as a means of doing useful work. The vast majority of bugs exist in the gulf between a programmer's characterization of a problem (or a problem's requirements) and the actual use case. And of course, if your puzzle generator can understand what is _meant_ by a piece of code sufficiently well to identify a bug, it can fix the problem without human involvement.</comment>


Zendo: Design history of a board game (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.koryheath.com/zendo/design-history/

<comment><USER2> this is a really lovely game, and i encourage everyone to get a few interested friends together and give it a try. 4-5 people is the optimal number (one game master and 3-4 contestants in each round).

also while you can play a game with a variety of tokens, there is something very satisfying about using the icehouse pyramids, due to (1) their sheer aesthetic appeal (2) the fact that there's a tradition of using them, so you feel like you're playing the game the 'proper' as opposed to makeshift way and (3) the community has already worked out the optimal way to use them to play zendo (i.e. which properties are relevant and which are not, what makes a good koan, where the balance between too simple and too complicated lies, etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there's something to be said for just trying it out first with whatever is on hand. Lego blocks are a good and very easily available substitute. Use 3 size of blocks (e.g. 1x2, 2x2 and 3x2) in 4 colors, more options than that will just muddy things up without adding anything interesting. The set of possible relationships between pieces is different than if using pyramids, but it's roughly as rich a vocabulary.

Though with Lego you do need to make it clear up front that rules like "a koan has the Buddha nature iff it looks like a dog" are too subjective :) Doesn't happen with the more abstract pyramids.

<comment><USER2> agreed - lego is probably the best easily-available substitute for pyramids; the difficultly is that you have to be a lot more precise up front about which features and combinations are and are not acceptable for use in koans. it does have the easily-relatable trio of colour, size and pip-count, which is nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For a second I thought this was Kindo, by [http://www.spacebears.fr/](http://www.spacebears.fr/) (great game design!)</comment>


Turkey's block on Wikipedia violates rights, court rules - <AUTHOR> https://in.reuters.com/article/turkey-wikipedia/turkish-court-rules-wikipedia-block-is-a-rights-violation-idINKBN1YU0PF <comment><USER2> From the outside this seems strange in light of the current autocratic nature of the government in Turkey where we hear stories of wholesale purges from civil service jobs, universities and etc.

<comment><USER3> Turkey is a weird place. (Context: Turkish person living in the US). It is autocratic in a very specific way — it elects its autocrats. As in, Erdogan legitimately wins his elections, and he is as popular as the votes indicate, which is around 51% - an unfortunate fact for those of us at the remaining 49%.

For comparison, it's not like Russia at all - Erdogan is very vulnerable to just getting elected out and while he does have more leeway in doing what he wants, he ultimately has to do what the population wants him to do or risk losing the next election.

For the things that Turkish population puts less immediate value on is the places where he gets the most leeway, and rule of law in the western sense was until recently one of them. As of now though, he is bleeding out votes because of various issues, like this one, which I would speculate as the everyday person in Turkey sort of discovering _habeas corpus_ is actually kind of important.

I've always thought it's a cultural remnant of the sultans.

<comment><USER4> > Erdogan legitimately wins his elections

It's very easy to win elections when you kill, imprison and lay off _hundreds of thousands_ of your "enemies" and have total control on the press and the judicial system. Westerners nowadays forget that fear is a very, very effective political tool. In fact it's the most effective political tool by far. In Turkey, thousands of people were imprisoned based on just DNS queries that are being logged by intelligence services. Fucking DNS queries! even if your application/website connected to a "terrorist affiliated" server once via some ad or anything you get arrested. Turkey has, and now shamelessly supporting the most dangerous Islamic groups on Earth. How coincidental that after the alleged pathetic coup attempt, within days, around 100,000 people were arrested, how can you arrest a fucking hundred thousand people if these people aren't on lists a priori?. If hundreds of thousands plotted a fucking coup, how on earth could it fail? How can it even be a coup when hundreds of thousands plot it?. This is like Kirov assassination v2.0. It's not even a secret that Erdogan moving extremely dangerous ISIS members in civilian planes from Syria to Libya to destabilize Egypt. The US used an Iraq base and even asked the Russians to clear the way on the Syrian field for the planes that were going to kill Al Baghdadi in northern Syria despite having a big base in southern Turkey that can do the mission in minutes. It isn't hard to get that even the US army and CIA don't trust Erdogan having his men spying on the base and warning AL Baghdadi within seconds

Every day, every fucking day, you open the news and see Erdogan "threatening" somebody, some country, some group, not just in Turkey but everywhere. Since he has been doing this for more than a decade now and nobody stood up to him. He's been seen now as the Caliph by islamists and extremists all over the world. It's the romantic reflection in the islamic legacy of the strong muslim ruler humiliating the infidels. The holy grail for every extremist!

<comment><USER5> See, these people are on a list because they were fast-tracked into the positions they got due to their affiliation with the people who organised the coup, back when the coup organisers and Erdogan were BFFs.

It probably sounds like tin foil hat conspiracy theorists to people unfamiliar with the life in Turkey but in Turkey, there are religious cults that are good for networking and social support. Essentially, they will pay for your education and get you to the top places but expect you to report to them and take orders from them when it comes to. Like the Chinese Govt using its citizens employed in tech companies to steal secrets etc.

This particular one was active since 30-40 years now and was able to scale its operations to enormous size, having people everywhere. The founder was the original podcaster and Youtuber, spreading its message through VHS tapes etc. later creating a business model based on subscription(literally, subscribing to their newspaper multiple times) and expanding into a business network where you get business but you also pay in some of your profits. So these guys were on the radar of the secularist for a long time and are routinely purged from a critical position up until Erdogan teamed up with them. At some point, they got into a fight and Erdogan won and Erdogan had a list of their names of those he directly enabled, the rest were deducted from there. Imperfect but very well educated guess of the cult members, let's say. Probably not too much off since he had at least 3 years before the coup to polish his list of Gulenits.

After the coup, Erdogan gained unchecked power and this is scary stuff. He is trying to be influential leader over the whole region but I am not sure that he is smart enough to do that.

BTW, Erdogan dropped the Islamist rhetoric after the coup. He is now on the nationalistic side of the things, having the support of the nationalist secularist. All those imprisonments of the Gulenists were a wet dream of any secular nationalist. The rhetoric about foreign powers trying to destroy Turkey, evil west etc. is also not stranger to the secular nationalist.

<comment><USER6> You forgot the most important part: Gulen was Tayipp's closest friend, ally, and advisor .. until he wasn't. Gulen was a _huge_ part of Gulen gaining power, and he used that network to his advantage. Go back to whatever it was called, Operation Sledgehammer.

I was here during the fake coup, watching the f16s, watching Tayipp descend from his private jet like he was jesus, his arms stretched out, telling his people to come defend him, hoardes of nationalists swarming the tarmac to his defense.

The whole time it seemed like bullshit. My friend's father, who is 80 and has experienced 5 or 6 coups, went fishing 5am saturday morning. When his children told him not to, he said, "I've been through this 5 times now, and I call bullshit. This isn't a coup, this is a theatrical rendition of 1984, and Gulen is Emmanuel Goldstein.

Interesting anecdote: I met a Gulenist in Ukraine last month. I'm a US citizen living in Türkiye, working for an American firm, and was in Kiev meeting some contract programmers. One programmer, a Tatar from Russia, One found out I was living in Istanbul and approached me really excitedly. He wanted to tell me about the great Turkish organization which funded his education.

I stopped him right there and told him that an in-law of mine was hurt in the fake coup and he would do well to end this line of conversation, but he persisted. When I suggested Gulen was a terrorist, he rather .. aggressively told me "No Erdogan is the Terrorist" and got in my face. I politely told him "Both can be true, have a nice night".

The next day I had him removed from our account due to his actions, but in reality, due to his association with a terrorist group, and let my account manager know what was going on. He's no longer with that consulting company either.

<comment><USER7> unfortunately you wrote too much anecdotal gossip. gulenist islamist circles based in usa - were hinting that night and few months earlier and preparing and praising a military fascist islamist coup. it was a coup attempt by fethullah (imam of the universe) followers fearing a final purge from the military posts they occupied by faking the admission process and cheating in all the exams. Noone in turkey disputes that. The coup was supported by cold war remnants in washington and fake liberal circles in turkey. Period. Gulenists were purged, and politicians will lose power by elections and life will go on as usual. turkish people were so much disgusted by the gulenists that it's a gift that they got purged. now the rest is politics as usual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "One of the sad issues is this: We expressed on every platform since the > first day that the process of blocking access to the whole of Wikipedia was > unlawful," Gonenc Gurkaynak, a lawyer representing Wikimedia, wrote on > Twitter.

Huh? So does this imply that blocking access to specific Wikipedia articles _would_ be lawful?

That would not be such a reassuring concession by someone representing Wikimedia.

<comment><USER9> Funny you should say that, because a lot of US companies eventually implement filters that follow local censorship.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, they do.

I hate it. It's one reason for using VPNs.

But the global takedowns, that really sucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I truly resent and despise the infantile attempts at self-preservation through censorship. I hope this years-long embarrassment resolves itself.

<comment><USER10> Aaaand the article is gone from frontpage (and second page, and third page, and fourth page.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good! It is hard to watch all the damage being dealt to institutions in Turkey with these "terrorist" laws. So I'm always happy to note remnants of a functioning civil society. It means that when the antidemocratic AKP is voted out, the country doesn't start from zero.

</comment><comment><USER12> Edit: Sorry, I misread a quote from the article.

<comment><USER13> Nothing in the article implies that the page will be blocked at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Erdogan will probably try to fix it by setting up more agreeable judges or by changing the constitution itself, like Putin is planning to do.

<comment><USER2> >like Putin is planning to do

My understanding is the Russian courts have for a LONG time been weak and simply deferred to Putin and Co. The Russian courts don't even come up as a question when most Russian news is discussed.

<comment><USER14> Russian courts are simply rubberstamping whatever they are told to do indeed. They are just an empty facade. In this since Turkey is in a better situation, so far.

But Erdogan is gradually trying to take all that way. He already changed the system from parliamentary to a presidential one. Why would you expect him to stop there? He'll try to get to the courts too.</comment></comment></comment>


What I've learned about .NET Native - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rendle.io/what-ive-learned-about-dotnet-native/ <comment><USER2> I love C# and find the syntax of golang... primitive.

However, the green-thread/channel combination is powerful. It is not just that it is performant (it is) but that it is x10 the code and mental overhead to use compared to something like the TPL (task parallel library for you non .Net-ers).

So I'd caution against comparing C#.Net to golang. C# Async/Await is fine for event processing but it doesn't match golang channels. And channels are really the defining feature of golang.</comment>


Show HN - <AUTHOR>

AngularChat
Chat app written in AngularJS and socket.io (running on node.js) Writeup: http://tamas.io/angularchat/
Demo: http://goo.gl/gQQzFx <comment><USER2> When it was suggested that you repost this as a "Show HN" in the other post, I'm pretty sure that it was implied that you title this something like "Show HN: AngularChat". :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Just can't get it right can I? :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Transmoggit (aka "HTF is trim in Python?"); What next?  - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,
After inerte's post a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446507, I thought I'd use it as an excuse to fiddle with GAE and jQuery.
With props to Bill Watterson [1], I banged up "transmoggit": http://www.transmoggit.com/
(try something like "trim" from PHP -> Python, as an example chosen not-at-all-at-random)
It does the obvious mapping thing, and lets you add your own. That's all fine, I guess, but it's not super-useful, until the 2.0 bit kicks in and "people" start adding clever translations. Of course, no one will bother to amend translations until there's some reason to visit first.
So, my question for the wise crowd: any suggestions on how to automate getting sensible mappings for, say, the easy 50-80%?
(any other suggestions are quite welcome too :)
thanks, scott
1. http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/9876/transmog.html <comment><AUTHOR> And linkage for the lazy:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446507>

<http://www.transmoggit.com/>

[http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/9876/transmog.htm...](http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/9876/transmog.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Hey :)

\- A submit button; I typed "trim" and it did nothing :p Had to change language's dropdown or click a suggestion;

\- SEO! There's no unique url, with proper title, for the entries. None searching for "trim in python" will find... my blog post is getting 2 or 3 visits a day from people searching "python trim" and/or "trim in python". And I am not even on the first page. Aactually depending on my browser and language settings, I am (5th result).

\- Filter duplicates (I entered string.strip is PHP's trim twice)

\- Suggest the relationship the other way around. If you know that trim == strip, why not say "hey we think strip == trim"?

How to automate? Do some similar text search thing. For example, you can get the function definition for trim() on PHP's manual, if you match against sections of Python's manual, you can offer your visitors suggestions, and let them one click away to approve the connection. Easy to do?...

Anyway, it's soooo nice to see someone implemented HTFITIP... and I really liked the clean design! And the name!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, no "submit" wasn't well tested obviously. Dumb! I was always selecting an item from the autocomplete.

SEO + filter, good ideas, will do.

reversed mapping: it does try to do this a little, can you describe what didn't work for you? For example, "str.lstrip" as Python->PHP doesn't have the exact answer, but does look in the other direction and you get a suggestion.

<comment><USER2> So I just entered len() for PHP's sizeof(), and when I searched the other way, I got a suggestion...

But I am pretty sure that when I searched strip in PHP, nothing came up. I don't remember if I clicked a suggestion item or I selected a language from the second dropdown. That might be the problem, since I think you're mapping string.strip() to trim(), and not strip() to trim(), which is understandable :) Maybe a LIKE %% search instead of =?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, that's probably it. Thanks, I'll look into it more carefully.

<comment><USER2> Hi scott!

I thought a little bit more about the SEO part and I think the best thing to do would be to drop the Ajax which loads the similar functions and go with simple GET requests, which will give you a nice url and possibilities to treat it as directories.

For example, submitting PHP's trim in Python should load this url:

<http://www.transmoggit.com/php/trim/python/>

Loading <http://www.transmoggit.com/php/trim/>

Would show trim() in every target language.

Loading <http://www.transmoggit.com/php/>

Would show the list of functions, maybe with the languages that you have the alternative.

Loading <http://www.transmoggit.com/trim/python/>

Would show the equivalent on "from" languages.

I don't know how much serious you're about this project :) I really think it can make you some money, maybe not enough to make you quit your EA job :) but certainly some to help pay the bills.

I also don't know how much SEO you know, but basically you need to think what content your webpage should have to answer typicals queries on your market. For example:

q: trim python

\- Put "trim in python" on <http://www.transmoggit.com/trim/python/> on the title, and a H1.

q: python remove whitespace

This is what I've used a couple times, many moons ago, when "python trim" didn't return good results.

You can answer this query, if on your <http://www.transmoggit.com/trim/python/> page, you list excerpts of the manual of the "from" languages. Upon loading /trim/python/, you select the from languages, its functions where you know the similarity, and show something like:

C#

transmoggit doesn't know how C#'s trim in Python

PHP

PHP's trim in Python is <a href="python_manual_for_string.strip.

Here is PHP's manual definition for trim:

This function returns a string with whitespace stripped from the beginning and end of str . Without the second parameter...

I know that's a lot of stuff! But you seem to have experience with software development... then you know software it's always 90% complete :)

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey inerte

Thanks for all your suggestions. I'm not too knowledgeable in all-things-SEO, but this all sounds reasonable. (The anal-retentive programmer in me doesn't like the vagueness in the method name.. what if there's a language called trim? :) but something along those lines makes sense. I remember reading that /php-trim-python was recommended for urls (vs php_trim_python or something). Is there a consensus on whether dir/ecto/ries are better or worse than hyphens?

The only thing I'm not sure about, is that I want to make sure the main user experience of looking up one function is as fast as possible. I thought it would be a bit faster to not have the search redirect to another page. On the other hand, google.com is obviously "fast", so maybe it doesn't matter too much.

I don't personally think it's a money maker, my general feeling is that programmers are too "tech-savvy" to click on many ads. But who knows, I guess. Either way, I'm just doing it because it's fun, and somewhat useful for me. I love my "real" job anyway, so, not really looking to quit. :)

Thanks again for all the feedback, scott

<comment><USER2> Dashes vs. underscores are different because search engines see dashes as spaces, so /my-cool-blog is actually /my cool blog while /my_cool_blog is /my_cool_blog (a single word :)

Here's a page where Matt Cutts, head of Webspam on Google, explain: <http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/> Several other people working with SEO have come independently with this observation. And I am pretty sure I've seen a page from an Yahoo guy saying the same thing (but can't find right now).

dir/ecto/ries are used to divide content into "sections". One good example is:

/news/sports/basketball - News about basketball

/news/sports - Sports news

/news - All news

So you can have /news/politics and /news/economy too.

While if you do:

/news-sports-basketball it doesn't look like the division is there. Think a few years ago, when url mapping/rewrite wasn't much used. The / character was a actual physical folder/directory on the machine. Therefore, if you were a search engine, you would assume that everything under /news/sports/basketball falls into a "cluster" of related content. You would think that probably /news/sports/basketball/1 and /news/sports/basketball/2 are related.

Programmers don't click ads, FACT. Maybe programmers looking for travel information ;) but not researching for (usually) work related stuff. My HTF post got over 3k hits in 2 days. I really can't tell for sure, but I don't think there was a _single_ click on my ads. Maybe one click, actually. The situation is worsened because the hn crowd is not simple programmers, we live and breath the net. So we're ad blind. The poor guy coding Java on a consulting gig on a branch of a financial firm, while he is more ad-blind than soccer moms, it's not something you can base your income (at least not only Adsense).

Now, I didn't optimize my ad placement, so I could do better. But from a ~0.70% CTR on my main domain to almost _zero_... that's quite a lot.

Of course, while programmers are generally ad-blind, it all depends. For example, selling .NET books on a .NET oriented website works...

While I agree that looking for a function on transmoggit is fast because of Ajax, people have to know about transmoggit first :) And the truth is, depending on your market and your brand, 60% to 100% of your visitors will come from search engines. Sure, after a while, you'll start to get referrals, but how did the person who linked to you found the page? Using search engines.

Don't see SEO as a way to trick the search engines ;) I know there's a lot of bad karma around its practices, but if you think that by applying SEO to your pages, you're just making easier for people to find your content, then you'll be happy to do it.

I don't know if you can ask around EA for its website statistics. I am pretty sure you'll see that >75% of its visitors come from search engines, even on obvious cases People type the domain name on search engines, for fsck's sake. Or what could actually just be the domain name if they followed with .com (searching for Youtube to go to... youtube.com).

There's actually some very good explanations for this behaviour, for example if I want to see the webpage for the Dead Space game, I don't have to guess if it is deadspace.com, deadspacegame.com, deadspace.ea.com, deadspace.games.ea.com, etc... Typing "dead space game" on Google is 100% more effective.

I am talking too much :) And I don't want to complicate things further to you. But just make it easier for people to find the webpages :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the info, much appreciated. On the off chance you see this old thread, the "category"-type links from a few posts above are implemented now. I'm not sure if it'll help people find the pages, but I'll find out soon enough I guess. :)

The best type of ad that came to mind was a programming-job-ad, since that would be very targeted and possibly useful, but I suppose Joel and 37s have that market covered pretty well.

Haven't fixed all the UI bugs people noticed or added too much more data/languages yet... next weekend I guess. :/

<comment><USER2> Hey scott, I click my own comments link here on HN regularly :p

Yeah, just saw "categories" <http://www.transmoggit.com/PHP/trim/Python>

If you go to Google and type "site:www.transmoggit.com" you'll see what pages it has indexed. I just did and there's no "sub-page" indexed, just your domain name... but this is normal! In my experince, Google will show the domain index first and other pages in 1-2 weeks.

And since sometimes the pages Google shows are different between its datacenters, here's something that I use to see among them all:

[http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter- google-...](http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter-google- search/)

About Job ads, I don't remember the company name, but I did see someone who works with a referral program. You show their ads, and if it works, you get paid.

But anyway, if your site gets somewhat popular, you can ask for a lower price than Joel and 37s. If companies have to pay $250/$350 to ad on these sites, a $10 fee on yours will be an impulse buy :) And you can always raise the price if it works...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> First impression: Nowhere near enough swearwords :)

Also, if I type "trim" and hit enter, I get imagick_trimimage. If there's an exact match, I very much probably want that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will do (the second part anyway :). I'm using jQuery's autocomplete but it's maddeningly broken in those sorts of subtle ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks like a hard part is going to be method scoping. For things that aren't in the global namespace, it's sort of hard to give a single answer, because you are asking two questions (e.g., which object or module and which method or function?). It might be better to pick the object/module first, and then the method/function.

<comment><AUTHOR> I felt like it was probably always method/function name that you would care about. That was mostly based on the assumption that similarly named methods on any object do similar things, at least in the language's standard libraries.

Did you have a specific language/module/class/method (or set of them) in mind?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any chance of adding Javascript as an option? I spend half my life tripping up over Javascript/Python inconsistencies, this would be immensely useful.

Also, I'm not convinced your google account sign in thing works right; I clicked on it to login to google, and then google didn't know where to redirect me to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, JS vs Py drives me crazy too. JavaScript is high on my todo list. Just need to find the "canonical" reference for it.

I can't reproduce the login problems? Non-gmail.com acct? Browser/OS matter?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> this is awesome.

Automating the first 50-80%? Try some very simple natural language processing, with a human being acting as a sanity check. If the PHP documentation for a function is "upper case" and the Python documentation for something also is "upper case," then the two might be similar...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, sounds interesting.

In practice, I'm not sure what it looks like. I wonder if something like "minimum number of edits" would work? Probably not, I guess since that's more like a "diff" and the docs are not likely to be similar in that way.

Perhaps just "the function who's documentation uses the most same words", stripping common words? Perhaps that could be improved a bit via synonyms too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome!

I couldn't figure out how to submit it though :(

I know it's probably a bad idea, but I feel wistful for the original "How the fuck is ___ in ___?"

</comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome. What about VB? :-P

</comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty sick. Nice job.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Shucks, the transmogrifier doesn't know what PHP's count is in PHP."

hehe

<comment><AUTHOR> heh, I tried to fix that in the UI (the wrong place, obviously). There's some browser that doesn't do <option disabled> I guess?

Perhaps a sarcastic answer is the best solution. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What about Scala?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I'll try to add it.

I don't personally use Scala: what reference would you like to see? <http://scala-tools.org/scaladocs/scala-library/2.7.1/> or is there something better?</comment></comment>


Windows 7 Users Will Soon Start Seeing a Windows 7 End-of-Life Notification - <AUTHOR> http://www.thundercloud.net/infoave/new/windows-7-users-will-soon-start-seeing-a-windows-7-end-of-life-notification/ <comment><USER2> I had it on Tuesday, I was surprised by the wording used by Microsoft once you click on the "Learn More" you're redirected to [1].

"Going forward, the best way for you to stay secure is on Windows 10. And the best way to experience Windows 10 is on a new PC. While it is possible to install Windows 10 on your older device, it is not recommended."

It's the first time I see Microsoft actively recommending to buy a new PC for a new OS and even helping you purchasing one !

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/windows7](https://www.microsoft.com/windows7)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Its a new nag popping up that talks about backing up your files and prepare for whats next

it look like this:

[http://thundercloud.net/infoave/images/2019/kbpic.png](http://thundercloud.net/infoave/images/2019/kbpic.png) [PNG]</comment>


Prisons Are Quietly Building Databases of Incarcerated People's Voice Prints - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/prison-voice-prints-databases-securus/ <comment><USER2> First of all, there is _no_ reasonable expectation of privacy in inmate/confinee calls. The system they use plays a message to that effect at the beginning of the call. Jail/prison/brig phone calls are routinely recorded, and prosecutors listen to those phone calls. That's why defense attorneys will come see you in person. It's also why every once in a while you'll get an admission or other indications of guilt from someone who doesn't listen to those warnings.

[http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/03/26/jailhouse.calls.recordin...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/03/26/jailhouse.calls.recordings/index.html)

Second, an anecdote. The system they use in my jurisdiction uses phone cards. We once had a group of confinees switch phone cards to make it difficult to trace who was speaking (and at the very least introduce reasonable doubt). I listened to dozens of hours of audio in one case, just hoping for the caller to identify himself (since the advent of caller ID, it seems a lot of people just say "Hey"). Voice printing would have been very helpful here.

<comment><USER3> I think this is a bit different... This is clearly asking the inmates to utter phrases with the intent of training a model, with the threat of revoking the ability to contact loved ones if you don't comply. This isn't being constructed from the existing phone calls, but specifically targeted action to collect clean training data.

<comment><USER2> The article says the voice prints are used in "a new voice surveillance system," specifically that "algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call."

I read the other posters concerns about Fourth Amendment protections as responding to the surveillance use, not to the collection. My post was in response to my general read of those concerns.

It seems your objection is primarily to the collection of the voice print itself. Why do you feel like that's different from collecting finger prints?

<comment><USER4> >It seems your objection is primarily to the collection of the voice print itself. Why do you feel like that's different from collecting finger prints?

Fingerprints are harder to use in electronic mass surveillance.

Databases are easy to combine, the only barrier is often just a legal one (which is a joke for national security). So I'd like governments to collect as little of that data as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if all companies offering free voice calls like Facebook, Google are collecting voice prints without user consent. I wonder if they offer other parties a service where input is a recording, output is identified person.

<comment><USER6> Read the ToS when signing up to those things. They're collecting everything and according to the law, blindly clicking "I agree" counts as consent.

<comment><USER7> > blindly clicking "I agree" counts as consent

Not in the EU, where the idea of "informed consent" exists within law.

Maybe the US needs better data protection laws, too.

<comment><USER8> Scratch that 'maybe'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> FWIW, customer service of your average corporation is likely to already have voice fingerprinting in place.

<comment><USER10> I asked my mobile provider (Rogers) if they had any alternatives to storing my birth date as my account verification method and they offered to enrol me in their voice print program. I declined.

<comment><USER11> Why not just lie and give them a fake birthday?

It's not like you can't give them false information.

<comment><USER12> Someone knowing your birthdate isn't really a big deal anyway

<comment><USER13> Social Security, dark web crackers, and crappy online forgotten passwords websites want to know your location. I jest. But seriously, DOB is extremely valuable, which is why I never use my real one online except for government stuff like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >...such as "multiple inmates speaking to one person on the outside on a reoccurring basis."

This sounds like a niche use-case scenario: Inmates that speak to the press.

<comment><USER15> Kingpins in prison yet still running their empire.

<comment><USER14> I would think the kingpin would be outside of prison for that scenario, yeah? =]

<comment><USER16> I believe he means literally people in prison but with enough power and influence to continue to manage operations from within.

<comment><USER14> Aye, the statement was many on the inside to one on the outside, yeah? =] For the "kingpin" scenario, it would be many on the outside to one on the inside, right?

(Admittedly, I may be misunderstanding, which is why I'm asking.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The bigger threat that WW3 or Global Warming is pervasive monitoring. Whoever survives all the other disasters can be completely controlled by whoever has the ability to monitor everything (and then kill anybody who acts or speaks against their interest. There is no such thing as resistance when your ability to resist is detected and monitored.

<comment><USER18> Currently, you're downvoted to near the bottom, while the top comment is defending this violation of dignity.

What's going on here; are we that out of touch with this community's values?

<comment><USER19> Maybe they are downvoting because the apocalypse would have destroyed the physical infrastructure needed for such surveillance? It's sort of dystopia or the other; you can't have both!

<comment><USER17> Well, if that is their reason for downvoting then they really haven't thought it through. Pervasive monitoring is pervasive in large part because modern monitoring sensors are produced by the billions and are incredibly tiny (I'm talking about custom military stuff - not "spy-warehouse" stuff.) These are distributed systems and even today they spread their data all over the world to many huge secret underground bunkers (I know NSA guys who've describe these to me.) So even today there is a lot more monitoring than people realize. And this is analogous to the old nuclear first strike logic - if somebody strikes first then they have won. Once you get full control, your monitoring can't be fought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is interesting. I could see this being used for a sort of Shazam of anonymized voice data.

You have access to anonymous voice data (from service providers, messaging services etc.), but you can't connect that data to an individual without alienating their rights. Something like this could be used to filter that data for specific voice prints if you have a warrant.

Tinfoil hat take: It won't be long until voice prints are collected and shared for the majority of the population and connected to individuals via ad networks. It would be relatively simple for somewhere like Starbucks to install microphones, cancel out the in-store music, and keyword conversations for advertising purposes. The time for powerful privacy legislation is now.

<comment><USER21> And if your shoddy tech matches the wrong person and the judge and jury don't understand the broken tech and tortured statistical model, there's no problem because everyone in the database is already a known criminal who deserves to be punished.

<comment><USER20> Yes. To be clear I think this is a terrible idea, but the appeal of the power this could wield as an investigative tool will likely outweigh all arguments against it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You know, there are illegal cell phones in prisons. If the prison folks have the ability to determine whose voice is speaking, then they can related an outgoing cell signal at the prison to a particular incarcerated person.

It would be like a wire-tap without a warrant. Do they need a warrant for someone already in prison?

It is going to be funny/ironic when the "Social Credit" system in China has voice-fingerprints of nearly every person under surveillance, so that words heard by any listening device would be admissible to analysis. They could then detect someone saying things of folks in power, both in adherence to political norms, and also in detection of fraud.

Thought-crimes, coming soon.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is disturbing. I'm no lawyer or legal expert, but shouldn't this be contested on 4th Amendement (unreasonable search and seizure) grounds?

<comment><USER24> I don't think incarcerated people are afforded that right.

<comment><USER25> Their rights are limited, yes, but what about the person on the other end of the call? I feel this is a gross violation of the 4th amendment rights of anyone who receives calls from an inmate subject to this program.

<comment><USER26> You aren't likely to see any 4th amendment cases brought here because even when they do investigate crimes with info from prison calls they can easily use parallel construction to build their case on something that doesn't fall under the 4th.

<comment><USER2> Also because any expectation of privacy you have after hearing "This call may be recorded" is per se unreasonable, so the Fourth Amendment has no applicability here.

<comment><USER26> Sure but once they start moving into the pen register side of things to connect the dots between the folks on the other side of a prison phone call and the second level of connections they create you start to get into some gray-er areas. It becomes easier to dig through a trash can to find cause for a warrant than to use the call + pen register data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We need a public database of voice prints of political figures. Not hard; they talk in public a lot.

Political figures have no expectation of privacy, after all.

<comment><USER28> What's the point of having this, other than to getting petty revenge at "The Man"? It's not like you control a surveillance system that could use those voiceprints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You could make a neural network that categorised those who are more likely to be criminals based on this data.

Big if, but if it was accurate to say 95% would it be moral?

Strange times in which we live.

<comment><USER30> I expect it would just categorize all younger men with African American accents and a gradeschool vocabulary as criminals. 37.1% of 20-to 34-year old black men without a high school diploma or equivalent are _currently_ incarcerated.

[https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_a...](https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2010/collateralcosts1pdf.pdf)

<comment><USER29> Woah 37% is terrible, good point about the racism it would no doubt match against...

My real question is as we get better AI systems and more accurate ones should we use them to make decisions that can affect people in profound ways.

Seems that maybe this is not the right place to discuss something as open ended and off topic as this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Folks like to think of 1984 as disturbingly prescient, but I think of Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle often these days. The plot involves the use of a voiceprint (developed by imprisoned scientists) to identify the speaker in a bugged phone call. Wouldn't Stalin have loved our technologies of surveillance?

</comment><comment><USER31> Well they have to do it quietly or they will mess up the recording :-D</comment>


Skype threat to Russia's security - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE56N41I20090724?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews&rpc=22&sp=true

<comment><USER2> I almost had to laugh, this sounds like a plot from an Ayn Rand novel.</comment>


Do You Think This Short Story Is Scary Enough To Be Made Into A Movie? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thefireroad.com/story/day-one/ <comment><USER2> yes, it's like books turning into a movie.. same concept</comment>


Show HN: Available: Seamlessly share your calendar availability inside of Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://availableforgmail.com <comment><AUTHOR> Available is a Chrome Extension that allows you to easily share your calendar availability inside of your Gmail compose/reply view. The best part––it pastes the times as plain text.

I've been a user of various calendar scheduling tools in the past, but always felt awkward sending a branded widget or URL to my recipient asking them to book time on _my_ calendar. Especially if I was the one asking for their time.

I've been using this extension for a few weeks and it has saved me quite a bit of time by not having to switch between Gmail and my calendar tabs every time I'm coordinating a meeting request!

Excited to share this with y'all. If you have any questions/run into bugs, feel free to DM me on Twitter (@_shahedk) or email me firstname.lastname@example.com :-)

<comment><USER2> Can't load the page, getting too many redirects: ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS</comment></comment>


Lyft Raises $530M in Fight with Uber - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/03/11/lyft-raises-530-million-in-fight-with-uber/ <comment><USER3> This is great. More competition is great for me, the consumer. Recently Lyft and Uber have bother offered flat rate rides for $5-7 anywhere in SF. When people ask me how it can be so cheap, I always joke it's because it's a $15 ride but you're splitting it with a venture capitalist.

I wonder if either company has any serious long-term plan to make sure they are not competing in a commoditized space. Currently the services are basically indistinguishable. Sure most people have a preference one way or the other, but it's not a preference they'd stick to if the other service was a few bucks cheaper. They seem to be in lock step, doing the same things and alternating who makes the first move.

If they're not careful they will become like the airline industry. 40 years ago airlines were a glamorous new way to travel. Now they are reduced to who can offer the cheapest point-to-point ticket with 17" of leg room, customer service is an unexpected bonus.

<comment><USER4> The difference is there's a network effect. Uber & Lyft are not actually transportation companies anymore than Airbnb is a hotel company. They're networks.

So it's not just about price. It's about the size of the network, which means availability -- how fast can you hail a ride. The more drivers on the network the better the availability, so that's where the consumers look first, and so that's where the new drivers join, and so on in a virtuous cycle. Once one network reaches a tipping point and becomes dominant it will be harder for upstarts to enter the market and match the availability of the winner's gigantic network.

That's the theory at least. All this VC money is about trying to get to that tipping point where one of them takes the whole transportation network.

<comment><USER5> This is very much a theory. If the companies are not able to create a network effect, much of their valuation is not defendable.

I personally believe they do not have a significant network effect. They have a _brand_. But they do not have a network effect.

When I search for flights, I start with JetBlue. I have the most points there, I generally have good flights, and they have the most flights out of my local airport. That's the power of a brand. However I'll go to Hipmunk and start looking for alternatives if the JetBlue options don't look great. If something is better, I'll buy that.

On the other hand, I really don't like Facebook. Yet, there is nothing I can do about dragging my friends to an alternative. That's a network. There is literally no value for me to be on a Facebook alternative because my friends are not there.

From my experience taking rides in Uber/Lyft, it seems like many drivers are using both. Customers are often aware of both. I have used both.

While it is true you need a minimum network size to ensure that rides are available, I don't think the network is _exclusive_. You need a minimum amount of capital to buy airplanes and setup of a network of flights, that doesn't naturally lead to a single airline.

<comment><USER4> There is no Hipmunk for Uber/Lyft. That's one reason the network effect is stronger. And while many people check both services _now_ , that's because they are both still floated by tons of VC money.

One we reach the tipping point -- let's say Uber wins -- you will be as likely to check Lyft as Sidecar. When was the last time you checked Sidecar? Exactly.

<comment> tuna-piano I think there is a huge difference between being a monopoly and a duopoly. The fact that Lyfy can exist, and it is (at least currently) easy for both drivers and passengers to switch, makes it so uber cannot institute monopoly pricing. The best example of a network that can would probably be Ebay. Uber is definitely no Ebay, and I doubt it ever will be.

<comment><USER4> It is not going to be a duopoly forever. The current duopoloy is sustained by massive VC funding. In time the network effects and other advantages of size will lead to one winner taking all (in theory).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My car's in the shop getting fixed so I've been using Uber and Lyft in the suburban south bay--a market of long roads, horrible traffic conditions, and high rate of personal car ownership.

Since the past week I've learned a few things:

\- all the drivers have both apps running and have no loyalty

\- drivers prefer uber customers, however

\- drivers don't like lyft's demo of college kids and local rides, it earns them no money

\- lyft drivers think uber is evil, uber drivers thinks lyft drivers are hippies

\- all the international travelers coming into silicon valley have uber and used to uber service

\- uber dispatches to lyft dispatches are a 5 to 1 ratio

\- drivers always complain lyft keeps them afloat but doesn't get them ahead

\- uber, whether intentionally or not, actually has viable career plan. an uber black driver i rode with on the lyft service explained how after selling his real estate company and investing in three lincoln escalades was able to make his money back on one of the cars after 7 months.

\- all the drivers concur uber is pretty evil, don't like the 1099 relationship, hate how uber corporate doesn't support the drivers over customers or incidents, yet sadly resign and accept the situation. it's oddly depressing talking to a uber driver.

Over half a billion dollars at the E round is quite a lot to drop into a "community" instead of Uber's business.

Hopefully the money is put into innovating locally instead of international expansion because they're definitely losing the game. And when the automated cars are here it would have been the tech game's worst investment cycle.

<comment><USER7> "all the drivers have both apps running"

"lyft drivers think uber is evil, uber drivers thinks lyft drivers are hippies"

??

<comment><USER8> It's like brand allegiance in consumer brands. You might be a Apple user but have to use Windows to make a living.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lyft, with a valuation of around 5% that of Uber, is clearly losing this battle. However, its mere existence is causing something that is rarely seen: the transfer of billions of dollars out of the bank accounts of absurdly wealthy investors, almost directly into the hands of people at the lower end of the economy. After all, the vast majority of this money is going into incentivizing drivers to sign up/stay, and subsidizing rides.

As long as this battle goes on and investors are willing to fund it, I'll be a fan of both companies. Sadly, it won't last forever.

<comment><USER10> > the transfer of billions of dollars out of the bank accounts of absurdly > wealthy investors, almost directly into the hands of people at the lower end > of the economy.

Aren't those AKA paychecks?

<comment><USER9> Yes, but no tech startup has ever employed this many non-Stanford/MIT grads at relatively high wages. Most Lyft/Uber drivers would be laughed at if they tried to apply for a job at Google or Facebook. Yet some drivers are earning more than entry-level engineers at these companies.

Normal, everyday people with or without degrees are the recipients of most of this VC money at the moment. The fight for both drivers and riders is so fierce that drivers are being overcompensated and riders are being undercharged at the expense of investors hoping that these businesses will one day be profitable.

<comment><USER11> I don't disagree with your premise, but it's a slight exaggeration and isn't factually correct.

> _Yes, but no tech startup has ever employed this many non-Stanford /MIT > grads at relatively high wages._

They are contractors.[0] There is a big difference here, as a Stanford/MIT grad contracting would easily make 2x that of an Uber driver.

> _Yet some drivers are earning more than entry-level engineers at these > companies._

Proof? My understanding is that the rough maximum you can make driving is $25/hr. Most junior web developers contracting make $40+/hr in SV.

[0] - [http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/12/us-lyft-drivers- id...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/12/us-lyft-drivers- idUSKBN0M72JM20150312)

<comment><USER9> I said that _some_ drivers are making that much. This is anecdotal, but here is an interview with a Lyft driver (in front of Lyft's CEO) saying that she was surprised that she was making $300/day ($90K/yr....relatively close to the $40/hr you claim a junior web developer makes in SV when they have work):

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-03-06/heard- lyft-w...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-03-06/heard-lyft-was-a- great-way-to-make-money-hockaday)

<comment><USER12> A) $300/day is not 90k/yr unless you are working 6 days/week and 2 weeks off the whole year.

B) There are _significant_ direct costs that come out of that $300, it is not even $300 before taxes, it's $300 at the top of a Schedule C.

I think many of these drivers simply have not done the math.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This makes me happy. After having been an Uber customer, then an Uber driver, and now a Lyft customer, I'm more than happy to transition my business to Lyft. Where Uber made me feel douchey, Lyft has made me feel part of a community. Even though functionally the two services are indistinguishable, I've always had better experiences with Lyft. Lyft feels more grounded. You have the opportunity, if you wish, to sit next to your driver and not treat them as a lower class citizen. I don't hear about Lyft employees being ruthless or money-grabbing. And generally all Lyft drivers I've met have been happy Uber driver converts. I totally buy the Southwest Airlines angle they are trying to achieve.

<comment><USER14> > I totally buy the Southwest Airlines angle they are trying to achieve.

I wouldn't compare any service I actually _like_ to Southwest Airlines. Southwest seems to be one of the _least_ appealing airlines in terms of comfort and quality.

<comment><USER15> My guess is that you're 30 or under?

Southwest during its rise to prominence in the 90's and maybe early 2000's had this friendly, relaxed reputation. It was definitely an economical option, but they tried to be friendly and jokey and get out of your way.

I agree that nowadays that has all gone away and they're just kind of cattle- cars.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. There was a time i wouldn't fly anything BUT southwest if i could help it. I don't fly enough these days to care that much, but back when I did fly a lot, I really preferred their approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I might be missing something here because nobody else brought it up: Is this not just a necessary move to salvage investments in Lyft? Assuming Uber won already, Lyft investors need to keep it dangerous enough to force a buy out or write it off completely. Keep Lyft alive until Uber is forced to buy it pre/post IPO? At some point the Lyft competition is going to cost Uber more than the price of just buying them out. Please note that I am not a biz guy so if I am wrong I would be very happy for an explanation on how/why.

<comment><USER18> The industry is big enough for multiple players.

<comment><USER17> It might be, but then it's a commodity! I think the valuation of Uber and Lyft is based very much on a winner takes all model.

<comment><USER19> To some extent those valuations are based on expectations for the future, where the companies don't even need to employ human drivers. Whoever owns the "Johnnycab" concept twenty or thirty years from now is going to be very profitable.

<comment><USER20> Is a strong brand much of a moat? It seems the only way there can be much pricing power is onerous regulation preventing others from stepping into the market.

(For example: Why wouldn't an airport charge local cab owners a small fee to be listed in their registry? Why wouldn't passengers access that registry to save $10?)

<comment><USER19> _It seems the only way there can be much pricing power is onerous regulation preventing others from stepping into the market._

That could be another aspect of first-mover advantage: no latecomer will have the same opportunities for regulatory capture that Uber and/or Lyft will have.

It's not a question of _if_ the taxicab incumbents will lose their grip on the regulatory process, but _when._ Whoever takes their place will be able to shut their competitors out, or at least make life hard for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Im glad investors are backing Lyft even if today its the underdog compared to Uber. Its no secret that Uber's practices provoke disgust or discomfort, and that many would wish Lyft to do better just because at least in appearences they havent been behaving as douchey as Uber.

But I'm happy because no matter how you appreciate Uber as a company in spite of their practices, there should be no monopolies, and competition is often the most healthy result to great results to consumers and to CREATE VALUE.

I hope that ALL YC companies remember that the final destination to a profit driven economy is creating value to people. A large number of companies have made their cake and made their founders and investors very rich: stop looking at the bottom line and focus on creating value. Not things you can charge and make money of. Value.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm shocked. </sarcasm>

So, to ask the question that Thiel has asked, is this a market that supports a monopoly, or is it going to be a consumer-favoring highly competitive scene?

> Thiel is also an investor in Airbnb– yet another darling of the sharing > economy, valued at a "mere" $10 billion compared to Uber's $18 billion. > Unlike Uber and Lyft, Thiel argued, there is no obvious competitor to > Airbnb. That in and of itself makes it a more valuable company because of > the distraction and profit erosion that he describes throughout his book.

Thiel seems to think that it doesn't support a monopoly, and I'd tend to agree.

So, assuming that it's a competitive market, and Uber and Lyft repeatedly copy the features of one-another, I'm very curious to see what kind of profit margins and therefore valuations are supported.

For a competitive market, it seems like the gap between Lyft's $2.5bn and Uber's $41 is bound to be reduced, one way or the other.

</comment><comment><USER23> I support alternatives to Uber, not because they're bad or anything, but because I don't want to see a monopoly develop. Competition is the best way to ensure that we don't wind up with the next Comcast.

I found this analysis to be the most compelling thing supporting alternatives to Uber that I've ever read: [http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5822.html](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5822.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think Lyft is making a major tactical mistake by using surge-pricing, and in my experience, in many cases at rates that are higher than those of Uber. While this may ensure that their drivers make a comparable amount to Uber drivers, its at precisely the times that Uber is surge-pricing at 1.7x+ that people are most-likely to look at alternate options. Indeed I've witnessed many instances of friends doing just that- checking Lyft and realizing that the cost is actually higher than Uber's and just using Uber or (gasp) an honest-to-God cab. If Lyft truly wants to land-grab from Uber, that is the most opportune time to do so.

A secondary problem is that Lyft has far too few drivers (at least in DC) to realistically compete, which probably further compounds the aforementioned problem of constant surge-pricing. IMO to compete with Uber they should use this money to get more drivers on the road in major markets and do away with surge-pricing for some time until they have reached a higher market saturation.

<comment><USER25> I've never experienced significant (higher than 1.5x) surge pricing on Lyft but have frequently with Uber. The last time I was in New York the surge was 6x on Uber. This lasted for hours. The entire weekend I was there it never dropped below 2.1x. This was not during a holiday or bad weather. It was just the weekend.

<comment><USER26> In my experience both Lyft and Uber use surge pricing in NYC. I've seen Lyft as high as 2x, Uber much higher. But I usually launch both apps to see what level they are at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here in Salt Lake City, Lyft already won by a long shot. Its crazy, they got here like a week or two before Uber, but their arrival seemed to just not leave any room for a competitor.

Uber can rarely be found here, and if it can its always longer and more expensive than Lyft. Long live Lyft.

Also, thank god they got rid of the mustache thing and just put the pink sticker in their back window.

</comment><comment><USER28> Hopefully Lyft puts some of that money towards supporting more platforms that could make it competitive with Uber. I would love to have alternative options, but unfortunately, it seems like Uber is the only service that offers a Windows Phone application and a Mobile site to order off of. While there aren't too many non iOS/Android mobile phone users, all of us are collectively tied to Uber.

<comment><USER29> I think this tells us something very interesting about the startup economy: your choice of car service is dictated by the brand of mobile phone that you own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think it's extremely premature that people are saying Uber has won. These companies operate in a bunch of silo'd markets so for Uber to "win," they'd have to one by one take all the markets.

It's more appropriate to look at individual markets where both are competing and see how they perform relative to each other. I think Uber's higher valuation is probably due to the fact that they've aggressively expanded and are in more markets than Lyft, Sidecar, and others.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm a little worried. More Lyft drivers on the road might mean it's harder for me, a simple pizza delivery man, to deliver value across the city of Chicago. At the same time, I welcome Lyft to challenge Uber's dominant position - <USER2> hope they can gain market share while maintaining a stronger moral stance than the incumbent.

<comment><USER32> why do you mention being a simple pizza delivery man in all your comments?

One of your recent comments:

>Well, that's possible with compile-to-JavaScript languages. Also you have the option of plugins like Unity, if you're going for something graphically adventurous.

>That being said, JavaScript is a powerful tool, if wielded correctly. It's so flexible. In a lot of ways, it's like a pizza. One man orders a pizza with anchovies, another with green peppers. And on and on. Eventually it's like they've got two completely different dinners.

if you know about compile-to-JavaScript languages, and consider JavaScript a powerful tool and so flexible, why are you a pizza delivery man? (An unskilled job requiring no training.) Why don't you get skilled work as a programmer, even entry-level?

And why would you make an inappopriate pizza analogy in a thread about javascript, or mention

>When I knock on someone's door, and then hand them a hot box of pizza, they smile and often hand me money: $5's, $10's, sometimes a $100. I'm just doing my job, just like this Harlan "Father Time" Stenn. I suppose we take for granted, that which we can't see.

in a way that is completely unrelated to the story you posted it under? Are you using this as a 'novelty account'?

<comment><USER33> I, for one, value the contributions of the pizza engineering sector here on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think this industry is going to end up exactly like the airline industry. IE: no margins to speak of really.

I just can't see how one company can ever have a long term competitive advantage. I think any current perceived advantage is down to the amount of VC cash flowing in and also how abysmal the old school taxi competition is.

</comment><comment><USER35> When does Lyft expand internationally? The value of this kind of ride-sharing apps to me is primarily when I'm traveling. Getting reliable rides in a foreign country is such a gigantic hassle. Uber seems to be only international ride-sharing app nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER36> More competition is surely better for the consumer. As I'm based in London, I'm very much an Uber customer but I hope to see the pink moustaches driving around Buckingham Palace soon! Will be interesting to see how they plan to expand to the UK...

</comment><comment><USER37> For once I get to disagree with A16Z, " _Scott Weiss, general partner at Lyft investor Andreessen Horowitz, sees the company beating Uber by emphasizing better customer service...he compares Lyft's opportunity to Southwest Airlines and Virgin America_ "

I don't believe the comparison is correct. Catching an Uber is a quick decision process. I don't believe the change will be big enough to convert Uber users to install Lyft's app. They would have spend all that money raised and give it a way to get Lyft customer to refer friends with a free-ride coupon codes.

</comment><comment> cndl-mkr-lvl-9 I'm curious where these companies and driverless cars intersect. I guess Uber transitions to driverless cars and cuts costs. It's crazy to think about. It's more or less cheap driverless taxis.

</comment><comment><USER38> I still prefer Uber because it's _nicer_ than Lyft. Not uberx of course, but even then uberx is basically on par with all Lyft drivers. If I'm paying for a car service, I don't derive much value from a fist bump. I want a bottle of water in the back seat, tinted windows and the door opened for me - and the few extra dollars is more than worth it. Yes competition is good, but which supporting demographic do you think will keep a company afloat? I'm betting on the people that fly business class. There are good reasons Uber attracts the big money investors.

<comment><USER39> I'm inclined to believe you simply based on evidence. Uber is till, by far, the choice for most. Moreover Travis Kalanick seems to have the passion for efficient transportation as Steve Jobs did for Apple products.

And I suspect there is some biased on Hacker News in favor of Lyft. Thiel is now even a partner of Y Combinator. And if I was Lyft, I'd rely on the passion of techies and engineers to push Lyft's "benevolent underdog" fight against the "evils of the goliath" Uber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> if self-driving cars become ubiquitous how does that change lyft and uber's business model? not unreasonable in a 10-20 year time frame right?</comment>