Priceonomics' blog presents data-driven stories on prices and markets, such as diamonds, stolen bicycles, taxi medallions and academic paywalls.
HN links it for data-driven pieces, such as the diamonds post, which commenters reference, and for its analyses of used car and other pricing.
Rather than having a daily list, I use Feeder (Chrome extension: http://feeder.co/)
to read my RSS feeds, I had always preferred it to Google Reader, I never did get myself into the mantra of checking Reader often (it ended up being once every few months, when I randomly remembered)
; however Feeder is nice in its minimalistic approach, just showing me how many items for each feed, which encourages me to zero it out, although unlike Reader it just shows the titles of RSS feed items, so I end up judging whether or not to read an article based on the title.
A few feeds I follow:
News
* Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss and https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss [a lot of the posts are repeated over both, and note these are not necessarily the front page posts, my guess is that they are upvoted new posts, so I end up reading some posts before they reach the front page])
* Phoronix - http://www.phoronix.com/ (http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php)
* ThreatPost - http://threatpost.com/ (http://threatpost.com/feed)
* TheNextWeb - http://thenextweb.com/ (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thenextweb)
* Wired - http://www.wired.com/ (http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index)
* iClarified - http://www.iclarified.com/ (http://iclarified.com/rss/rss.xml)
* TorrentFreak - https://torrentfreak.com/ (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Torrentfreak)
* r/WorldNews - http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews (http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss)
Blogs
* Securelist -…
I don't think it's fair to lump all taxi regulations together and then say Uber is decrying regulation. I doubt Uber cares about transparent pricing regulation. They've always shown the fare breakdown on the website and in the app. You can also estimate the fare for locations in the app and website: https://www.uber.com/cities/san-francisco There was some initial complaining about using a phone with GPS to meter the ride, but I think that was just chaff from entrenched interests.
If the initial cost to start a taxi was low enough (i.e. medallions were used to vet the driver and not to protect existing taxi companies [0]), competition might arrive at transparent pricing anyway. Especially with e-hailing where you can be more selective about the cab you choose.
[0] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the-taxi-medallions
The hack is completely fair, because the existing medallion system is a hack itself, which the cab industry lobbies for in order to ensure regulatory capture.
That position is quite easy to defend if you understand the industry. The reason that you don't know any cab drivers living the high life is in fact because of medallions. Medallion owners don't need to drive taxis. If you control the medallion, you're made. No pun intended.
As recently as July 2014, medallions in NYC were being sold privately for over a million dollars (http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/july_2014_medallion_transfers.pdf).
Some interesting economics on the industry and how we got where we are: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the-taxi-medallions
I'm not sure I agree with that point of view. Phones currently can be located, and yet there are no repossession services around already. And police is already unresponsive when it comes to this* (I don't know if they uncover theft rings, though).
I think phones fall under the same category as bikes - good resale price, low risk[1]. A kill switch doesn't have to be perfect, I think. It only needs to be hard enough to circumvent to make the effort worthless, the same way that the woman in the article found her phone despite it being relatively easy to circumvent the "find my phone" feature.
* Results may vary according to your city and country.
[1] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-bicycles
You might be interested in learning more about Priceonomics (http://priceonomics.com/), a company does price comparisons for a bunch of stuff. I don't know what their engine is written on but it's certainly something custom, and that's most likely the way you want to go.
They also have an amazing blog (http://blog.priceonomics.com/) where they showcase products and nifty stuff they do with them. They use Tumblr for this part of the site but you might as well go for Wordpress or whatever you prefer.
No matter what you choose, you want to separate both parts of your site, and the comparison engine will most likely be a custom solution (Ruby, Python, PHP, doesn't matter).
> Most of the homeless in SF actually want to be on the streets.
To those surprised by this sentence, jarjoura might be influenced by this recent Priceonomics blog post: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/43085729257/the-street-kids-of-san-francisco
"Most street kids we spoke to came from one of two backgrounds: either they had job prospects (whether good or dead-end) but preferred the freedom of homelessness, or were transient homeless who fell in love with the street kid community...Street kids defied our expectations of living on the street as a last resort; instead they seem to be drawn to the Haight."