skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a lot less sure.

Whole Foods sells and uses factory protein. They have to: they're one of the largest grocers in the country. I'm an investor in a very well-known Chicago local butcher, and they have trouble meeting demand --- and they're a store you have to go out of your way to drive to to get local food. I'm somewhat skeptical of Whole Foods meat. I buy it without worrying, and I do actively avoid Tyson and Smithfield and whatnot, but I'm probably not avoiding antibiotics or animal cruelty by doing so.

(WFM discloses this to customers with their 1-2-3-4-5 scale).

General rule of thumb: if you can buy a package of 12 or more chicken thighs, and there's another of the same package of 12 or more chicken thighs sitting right behind the one you bought, you're buying factory chicken.

Most restaurants are eliminating trans fats.

I think HFCS is a cosmetic issue. Sugar is sugar, and it's all bad for you. But then: if you make potato salad at home, is it likely to be more healthful than what you get at WFM? The opposite is, I think, true: WFM's is tailored for palatability, and yours is tailored for ease of preparation, because you only have one family to feed, and WFM can amortize palatability over hundreds of families. Palatability means sugar and fat.
Unions are also formed to prevent large corporations from colluding to keep labor costs artificially low. (Yes, large corporations do that. Recent example: leading technology companies in Silicon Valley who colluded for years not to poach employees from each other, keeping compensation lower than it would have been if there had been true competition for employees.[1])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Minimum wage does not qualify for middle class. The idea is it's what's between the rich and the working class.

So ~50% to ~95-99% income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_middle_class So, ~50k to ~170k. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States

Programmers generally qualify but a dental assistants @35k generally does not.
> It’s not perfect, and it isn’t very simple to type, but it beats writing out The Artist Formerly Known As Prince each time.

I'm assuming the author is not being serious? Because you need to make sure the reader has access to that font, and otherwise ensure some sort of degradation, which is a lot more work than just typing TAFKAP.
I really love them. I may be a programmer, but I still like have SOME social interaction and daylight. I could never work in a cubicle, that's really what hell looks like to me.
> Would he be willing to forego YC's union-like attributes?

Interesting view point! I would note though, that before the YC & AWS era of young founders starting companies on the cheap, venture capital had union/old-boy-network like properties. There were only a handful of great VCs and they would be very connected and collusive on deals. So maybe YC collective bargaining balance out VC old boy network?
Cheat, or get fired: VW engineers cheated out of fear of (ex-CEO) Winterkorn
This article is from 2012.
This is one step closer to when I think wearables will turn an important corner: when they're commoditized as OEM parts that can be built into enhanced versions of things you already want. Rings, shoes, bracelets. Oh, and when people resign themselves to wait another 5-10 years for parting the workspace from the device form factor.
Wait, isnt doing the same thing on the employer side called a trust? If this isn't what you had in mind please elaborate.
If I were to put this tweet in my own words in order to convince others of its truth I'd say something like: companies in industries that have met both of the necessary conditions of having unionized workforces [0] could probably be improved by the application of recent technological progress to that company's operations, but most large companies lag in their efforts to refactor their processes, so there's an opportunity for brand-new companies to gain market share by using new technology in ways that make them categorically better at delivering the product or service associated with that industry.

The problem I have with this tweet is that it makes PG look like an arrogant, detached asshole. It's the kind of thing that non-VC's imagine that VC partners say amongst themselves while swilling $500 organic Merlot in their palatial estates in Woodside. PG to a great extent is seen by the outside world as speaking for the Valley, which is usually a good thing because usually the stuff he puts out there is thoughtful and makes him look smart. I'd say this tweet is a pretty big outlier from that pattern.

[0]These are: a) existing for long enough and b) employing enough people that their workforces decided to unionize
What is the opposite of working from home?
Fully agree. Workers sell their labor to employers and should be free to form associations among themselves and negotiate the sale of their labor together or individually as they please, just like any other seller. Unless of course they start using force rather than negotiation, or begin to hold a monopoly on the sale of all labor in a given field. Just like any other seller.
In some ways public sector unions are worse than private sector unions. In the private sector, the stakes are higher; you can contribute to the bankruptcy of your company if you are too aggressive. You also can only negotiate with the company itself. Maybe you can get a boycott of products in some cases.

With public sector unions, bankruptcy is very hard to achieve. The union also isn't negotiating with the government agency; it's negotiating with politicians as well, who have aims other than efficiency. They want to get elected. If enough of your constituency is in the relevant union, there's going to be pressure to not negotiate as hard.

Look at e.g. public transit unions. The DC Metro is falling apart, station managers sleep at work, escalators don't work ludicrously often, repairs are shoddy, and the drivers aren't terribly good at driving their trains (seriously, since they disabled computer control it's started giving me motion sickness; I have never experienced this on other transit systems). Yet the union is asking for a raise.
> Why would I give the customers a better deal when I could just take that money for myself?

Barring a monopoly situation, this isn't a choice you get to make.
VAT question for anyone.

I sell apps on Google play from the UK. Google keep the VAT even for UK sales. According to my accountant they shouldn't do this. If they're paying the VAT on my behalf, where's my paperwork because (1) can they do this and (2) when i book sales, according to HMRC, i owe the VAT which i haven't received.

this all started since this EU VAT change.

any ideas?
Well, if you're going to be realistic about it, humanity does not scale either. We need a negative growth rate to get it back to sustainable.
Sad but true. OTOH, while 1-2M/yr can be bad for VCs, that feeds quite the team, and thereby shifts the leverage if you don't crazy burn.
Growth of services to help students cheat in online courses
The reason people think you're trolling is because this

> Babies on the other hand are easily replaced

sounds like something a sociopath would say about it.

I mean really, is the answer not obvious? Babies need constant care and attention or they die.
Arduino Wars
Yes—we’ve posted a few things over the years. A couple got some traction, even hitting the home page. That said, even staying listed in New for more than an hour seems pretty tough these days.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. As the community grows, the threshold to reach the homepage simply gets higher. That said, I figure if there’s another way to get folks some visibility, why not? (And preparing those channels took me all of 10 minutes.)

And—yes—the feedback is the best part! I love new site visits, but user input is so incredibly helpful. :-)

I haven’t seen the “No posts yet” message, but it could be something we’ve just overlooked. We’ve been so busy with client work and building Officehours that we haven’t given Chapp any love in a good long while.

Posts will be sorted by age, for now. If this sees a little interest, we could sort by nods (the Chapp equivalent of likes/points).
Why computer programmers need to stop calling themselves engineers already
I think both you and the parent I was replying to are guilty of the same fallacy: transposing economic value on the individual level to society at large.

People at large want to have kids, they want to not die from treatable illnesses. Even when those two goals are at odds with optimal economic realities societies will still try to attain them, because we build societies and economies as a means to an end to attain our goals, we don't live our lives purely to satisfy economic efficiencies.

We're an organism that's the product of billions of years of evolution, all organisms try to spread their genes to the next generation. To say that you're better off with one child who's a collage graduate than two who aren't might be true economically, but ignores what's fundamentally driving us all forward as an organism.

Does anyone really think the primacy of reproduction can be superseded by some clever economic theories?
How do you figure? A trust is when employers not only organize, but that they all join together such that there is no competition. The equivalent on the worker side would be a single union that covers all workers in a particular field. And while I'm sure such things exist, it's nothing inherent to unions.
You're very perceptive.
I don't believe we can say there completely has been a move away from "liquid calories," particularly when you look at the calories in a typical Starbucks order. Your drink can easily have 400 calories, more than the chocolate croissant you are eating with it.

Sweetened carbonated beverages are over (for now), but their non-carbonated equivalents- Vitamin Water, Odwalla smoothies, "coffee drinks," etc are not.
Corporations also have inefficiencies, because they’re biased against tech which happens to empower workers and removes management layers. (They prefer to deskill labor to be replaceable cogs. David Noble wrote about this.)
No, it would just mean that hedge funds would end up owning large portfolios of "small" companies selling crappy food, while staples would get more expensive, so that white people would feel a little bit better psychologically while the South Side of Chicago would remain a food desert where families have to rely on McDonalds to feed their kids every night.
Yeah, Naive Bayes isn't very good for probabilistic estimates, but its often quite good at classification. I've had great luck using it to classify poorly coded medical data. I maintain this ruby gem [0] that implements Naive Bayes as a text classifier, and for a lot of tasks, it's good enough.

[0]https://github.com/jekyll/classifier-reborn
War is one of those things that's absolutely a survival advantage if everyone else does it but which is nothing but destructive compared to a hypothetical world where nobody does it. Thus we all get pushed into it, even though it's a massive net negative.

Which is incidentally like a lot of other destructive ideas and traditions.
You realize the reason people move to 2 incomes is because they can't afford to live off one?

You realize that a lot of people don't have savings because they live paycheck to paycheck trying to survive?
I think cause and effect may go the other way - being grown at scale allows them to lobby/buy politicians hence subsidies.
The link is right there - right at the top of the page. It's not hard to find, and honestly, if most of the traffic on /show are from people actively looking to comment on projects and mvps, then all the better. A section of the site with a narrower focus should have less traffic than the frontpage.

It's unfortunate if most users act like those thirty links on the frontpage are the entirety of HN but trying to siphon traffic to chapp.is as an "alternative" is probably doomed to failure, because the network effect and the culture keep people here.
Union serve to benefit the people running the union. The actual union members are all too often left out.
Your list of benefits missed taste. Local produce is picked closer to peak ripeness because it doesn't have to survive as much shipping.
Starbucks is unhealthy, but it is nowhere near the public health problem that PepsiCo is: as Dave Arnold points out sometimes on Cooking Issues, people use sweetened soft drinks as a complete hydration solution, often drinking nothing but. There are people that do that with Frappucinos, but not a lot of them.
+1 for any link from HN to an article that mentions Wizardry!
If you like this, check out http://3eanuts.com/

Peanuts strips with the third panel removed. Often revealing some existential angst.
I also have no idea how you reach the conclusion that capitalists are the most benefited from it, but I guess it comes from the old labor-capital analytical framework. You completely ignore the benefits of less intrusive unions to consumers which, at least to me, seem to be the most obvious ones.

"We can almost always find someone who will do a job for less money". Where does this come from? Try hiring someone equally capable for half the salary you are paying now.
For point 3 you might also be able to change your loan to interest only and thereby reduce the amount required.
I agreed with pretty much everything until the following:

"Mothers are also holy in a way that fathers are not expected to be. Mothers live in a clean, cheerful world filled with primary colors and children’s songs, and they don’t think about sex. A father could admit to desiring his wife without seeming like a distracted parent, but society is not as willing to cut Ms. Waldman that same slack. It is unseemly for a mother to enjoy pleasures that don’t involve her children."

Uh, are we living in the same society? Moms are more sexualized today than they ever have been. Have you ever been to a daytime CrossFit class? Lisa Ann has been the most popular adult film actress for years, for God's sake.

I agree there is much progress yet to be made in resolving a variety of gender-equality issues....but the argument that society's increasing valuation of children is driving a newfound societal demand for Victorian prudishness in mothers seems to fly in the face of all available evidence.
Hmmm, I or rather my computer center "inherited" an 80 MiB CDC stand alone SMD drive with a Xylogics (sp?) prototype Unibus controller, which I was told was the CONS machine's disk drive, but I wasn't involved in that acquisition. You aren't thinking of the Fujitsu Eagle 10.5 inch 470 MiB Winchester rack mount disk drives that everyone including LMI loved in the early '80s are you (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_Eagle)? That was an amazing drive, Fujitsu was turning out a lot of nice stuff, their Sparrow? 8 inch 80 MiB? drives powered a set of WD->TI workstations that were donated to MIT, that I and a friend salvaged 4 of for the EECS database computer in the late '80s.

Core, yow; we weren't sweeping up raw memory, although it was sweet that our 2nd hand from the Logo Lab's PDP-11/45 had core, made booting from a crash easy unless the boot code had been scribbled on. I suppose you used some core because it was handy and DRAM was dear? If it was DRAM, I'd assume simply from the date and their partly being located in Worcester, it was Mostek, and I can imagine you itching to design a memory system with their addressed DRAMs. If you were familiar with the Intel 1103 from it being used (or so I was told) in the MIT-AI and Logo 11/45 display systems, and it being available, then that?

As I recall, LMI's CADRs used 74LS logic, but I could easily be wrong.

(Besides working for LMI in 1982-3 and playing with CADRs before then, in 1980 I started a student run computer center using the Logo Lab's then surplus 11/45; much of this I know from being told as opposed to direct knowledge, but I do have a weird memory for details.

And, hmmm, I guess I did a lot of salvage in the '80s; that student computer center eventually ended up with MIT-AI's KA10, and my EE friends marveled at the schematics, pre-standardized symbols and occasionally a gate's output would be hit hard to change its state.)
People are paying more attention to what they eat, but you've missed the biggest driver... the desire to look good and/or be healthy.

Society as a whole has nearly always rated appearance highly, but that's more true today than its ever been in recent memory. Whilst it's true that all body shapes will look attractive to someone, the general consensus is that a healthy body is an attractive body, and you're not going to get that by filling it with food that's full of empty calories.

It's not good to be too obsessed with being healthy, but even people who are only casually interested in health will still make decisions to cut out/down on certain food and drinks. For example, I started avoiding cow's milk after I learnt about the increased risk from cancer. The more you learn about food, the more you know what to eat more of and what to avoid, even if you don't make a health-based choice every time.
This is also a common, and sometimes exploitable, coding error with C++ smart pointers.

I agree with you: I'm not sure how this is any more powerful than any encapsulated ADT-style foo_t-wraps-a-void-star C library.
Why is "Be civil" a rule here? Because if it weren't, incivility would dominate and destroy the community.

This doesn't stop applying just because someone else did worse. On HN, please post civilly and substantively or not at all.
If we want to get nitpicky about locale of food sourcing, some things simply don't grow in a lot of places in the U.S. so you can't get them locally. At least not year round.

And arguably, they probably shouldn't be. Modern agriculture has obliterated native plants, and even the microbes supporting the correct soil conditions for those plants. Eating environmentally sound and "locally" means eating native plants, and when that's not possible, it means eating the animals that do eat those plants.

Ask people to do that. It's not very practical.
This has been my view for many years now.

I tried to explore it partly here http://000fff.org/he-power-of-digital-ecoystems trying to define digital ecosystems as an extension of biological ones.

I would even go so far as to claim that technology is the result of our genes "trying to" find ways to spread themselves. Technology is a much better medium for that than human evolution. Biology, technology. They are both systems that carry information, pattern recognizing feedback loops that extend themselves further and further.
They are wealthy enough that the investment price means nothing to them if wasted, but if successful, this will affect technology on a fundamental scale
Anything is relevant to Hacker News. It's in the rules.
I haven't missed it. I don't believe it's there. I don't believe people are eating more healthfully. I think they're buying packaged food that claims to be more healthful but isn't.

I do believe people are drinking more healthfully: they're buying less soda, and I think they're going to continue doing that. I think that will make a major dent in public health. But that has little to do with whether Nestle should continue investing in frozen food research.
> Too much money is startup poison.

I see this statement over and over. You know what? I call bullshit.

Maybe in the valley. I'm not even sure I buy that.

Most of the places that I have seen that went apeshit with investor money did so because the investors demanded it. Most of the businesses that have been frugal to that point don't magically start buying hookers and blow just because they got a couple million in cash. They know all to well how quickly money goes out the door.

You know what raising enough money does? It makes you independent of the need to raise more money. Which moves the power balance from the VC's/investors to the founders/managers. This is why all the VC's/investors whine about "too much money is poison" and are so stingy with Series A's.
You don't negotiate with a 2 year old, you have massive amounts of control over their life.
(Off-topic)

That story is absurd, considering that a lot of modern diplomacy is essentially deciding how much Dane-geld you should pay to appease America, Russia, or (insert your regional power here), and how much you could expect in return for promising that you will not pay the Dane-geld to the other side.

If you don't play, you end up like North Korea, ever so proud for their fierce independence, cut off from everyone else.

I find this cute tale, from a subject of the British Empire, doubly insulting. If you are powerful and you can extract Dane-geld from others, fine, but stop insinuating that other people pay Dane-geld because they're stupid.
Hummingbird Hunting with Millennium Falcon Drone
> While we can almost always find someone who will do a job for less money

Why not let that person have the job?

That's probably the poorest person, who needs it the most.
Yes, I disagree with the "obvious" conclusion that college graduates are most valuable. Additionally, I think the argument put forward supposedly in support of that conclusion - i.e. that we've invested more in graduates - actually leads to the exact opposite conclusion. As others have pointed out, it's not valid economics but pure sunk-cost fallacy.
Based on a similarly quick websearch, even a non-EV code signing certificate seems to require jumping through a number of hoops:

https://www.dougv.com/2008/09/my-experience-getting-a-code-s...

If you secure your official download page via HTTPS, MITMing that connection requires getting your website cert signed by a CA. Which, while possible (see: DigiNotar) tends to be something the CAs try to avoid - lest they lose their license to print money by having their certificates revoked by browser vendors.
You don't need a special font installed. It works fine in Chrome on OS X without anything extra installed.
Was anyone else disappointed this wasn't about the legume?
Or a counter explanation:

1. American colleges are still overwhelmingly the best in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Univ...

2. 96% of students at American colleges are American.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2014/...
You can just as easily look at this and say you've gotten 50% worse at it.

That app can't evaluate what you actually accomplished in a given time period.

So one might also interpret the results as it took you twice as long to solve engineering problems than in the previous month.

And considering that 280 hours is about 12 hours a day 5 days a week that sounds about right.

I don't know of any one that is capable of doing thought intensive work for more than 4-5 hours a day effectively, 12 hours sounds like pushing code lines around while not solving any real problems.