skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get the benefits of having benefits. But even in Germany, independent contractors are "a thing", and there are at least some workers who don't have their employer/main client directly paying for their benefits. And for (at least some of) those cases, we can recognize that it's pointless to make that main client pay for their benefits. Some workers believe they are better of by having contractor status and buying their own benefits, and you would need to find a compelling reason not to let this happen; that's why I'm asking for the logic behind the mandate against it.

When you think someone is flouting a reasonable law, that should directly translate into "here's a collective action problem whose solution they're disrupting".

"X should not be allowed to pollute at Y levels." -> "There is a collective action problem of preventing damage to the environment, which requires that everyone pollute less than Y, even though people privately benefit from doing more."

"Hans should not be allowed to pickpocket the wallets of passersby." -> "There is a collective action problem of ensuring stable property rights, which requires that people respect others' possessions, even though they privately benefit from stealing."

"Uber should buy health insurance for drivers." -> "There is a collective action problem of ????, which requires that Uber buy health insurance for drivers, even though they privately benefit from paying them cash instead."

Note 1: your answer to ???? must not be so broad that it proves you should buy health insurance for every person you buy a service from, including e.g. the independent courier that delivered your package.

Note 2: I made an honest attempt to unravel the logic of "what is the law accomplishing with the employer/contractor boundary", in an attempt to answer that question, in this post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10717768

If you have a better answer, I'm very interested in learning from it.
Ctmg – Simple wrapper around cryptsetup for encrypted containers
I honestly thought this would be talking about a startup pronounced "Findster".
"Why yes, sir, we'd like to be 3 separate monopolies please."
SML is one of a very few languages that have a formal description of the meaning of the language.

http://sml-family.org/sml97-defn.pdf
> This involves a user-selected five digit PIN in combination with a software token that automatically installs in their mobile or desktop browser when registering.

So to access government services I have to install software into my browser, be interesting to see if that works with Linux browsers (should do).

That'll be going in a VM either way though..
GE selling it's appliance business to Electrolux AB.
Technically the FTC didn't block it, but GE did back out before the FTC made their ruling. Most likely because the FTC was going to block it.
But there are tons of good reasons to ensure people can't profit off an active brand's image.

So, should a brand get to control in perpetuity whatever they choose to associate with themselves? Should we extend trademark protections to whatever a brand wants to self-identify with, even if it falls outside the traditional scope of a mark?

Basically, I'm getting to the question: should it be the brand's responsibility to choose a protectable mark, or should it be on society to accept a loss to the scope of public domain whenever a brand has a lack of foresight? (and/or arrogance they could keep getting laws written for themselves?)
It is weird to see that despite all the lessons from the past century and the financial crisis, some people in this thread still argue that the market is going to regulate itself and the government should just stay out of it.

What's it going to take before you accept that public accountability is important? An end of civilization?
Seems like I can't comment normally anymore due to downvotes or some other mechanism. So I quit the discussion now.
The current state of machine intelligence 2.0
I think I meant to imply that the combined company will then break up into three independent publicly traded companies, one focusing on agriculture, one on materials, and one on specialty products
Probably. And probably flawed and awkward for the sake of stepping on other peoples ZKP patents.
Computer science is highly interdisciplinary and syncretic and as such cannot be neatly fit into a first-order subject without diluting it or investing in lots of prerequisite instruction, which for the purposes of a compulsory schooling system is next to intractable.

"Programming and scripting" classes are a different matter altogether with highly dubious benefits beyond far-fetched theorizing by its overly optimistic proponents.

Too much faith is put on compulsory schooling. Everything must be coordinated and planned. The very idea that one might acquire programming as a means to a pursued end later in life appears to be anathema to many people, who instead advocate that a ritualistic drilling of how to write lines of ALGOL will mystically make people "technically literate" and appreciative.
Anyone else notice the headline was "jaw-dropping" but the URL was "job-dropping"?
Likely they're holding their cards close to the chest as it's a competitive market.
The combined company won't have a monopoly by any stretch: in the chemical space, it'll compete against the Germans (BASF, Bayer), and in the Ag space it'll compete against Monsanto.
Part of what I did was point that they didn't fall into that category out to them. And that because of that they couldn't use Community edition for anyone.
I'd be curious to know what else this sort of thing shapes. Reminds me a bit of Ken Iverson's 'Notation as a Tool of Thought.' Programmers often talk about how learning different programming langauges improves their ability to conceptualize problems differently. I wonder if the same is true for spoken/written langauges?
Front End Optimization is tricky – or why FEO isn't a good solution
My dream language would be 1ML with a co-effect system as described by Tomas Petricek (pretty big in the F# community, but unfortunately his research isn't being incorporated into F#). But yeah, unless some company goes into full sponsorship mode, ML will always be on the niche side.
Golden+Leaves
D'oh. Sorry. It's release day here.

POODLE is the best example, I think.
+1 for Hiking Boots.

I wear a pair of keens most of the time. If I am standing for a long time then I switch over to a pair of over-ankle boots -- which I happen to think are Vasque brand a well -- put a layer of polish on them from time to time and they'll last for years. My pair is starting to approach a decade of use at this point.
Small remark: Go I/O layer is safe to use only with network I/O. Only network I/O plays nice with goroutines.

File I/O or everything else treated as syscall by Go runtime might turn you program into 10k-os-threads-monster. Scheduler will be creating new OS threads to replace those locked on syscalls until thread limit is reached and whole program crashes. Only way to prevent it is to restrict your syscall layer into fixed-size goroutine pool.

I had an interesting case recently - my app serves some data from tons of files laying in NAS, accessing it by NFS mount and one day NAS hunged completely, every I/O call to it was lasting forever. Even 'ls /mount-point-of-nas' was just doing nothing forever until Ctrl-C. In my case I've applied poweroff-poweron cycle to NAS, and everything went right in minutes, just as NAS booted.
And after it I wondered, what if my server was written in Go, instead of Erlang...

And, BTW, you can never be sure, that underlying libraries of your code are safe to use.
Avvocato+matrimonialista+nella+separazione+dei+coniugi
Thanks! I added Ask HN to the title.
How Structured Debate Helps Your Team Grow
The system for doing that is called trademark.
price.
Haha, true that. Grüße nach Kiel aus Heidelberg. :)
Thanks! I always try to extend my network as much as possible.
It was a second reply to the OP, not meant to be reply to my own first remark.
I believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that in a pyramid scheme the individual participants receive money from new participants that they recruit (and the people your recruits recruit, and so forth down the line). If you join a pyramid scheme and then do nothing else, you receive nothing.

A Ponzi scheme is centralized, with new participants joining directly with the scheme, and proceeds paid out to all existing participants.

As structured, this sticker scheme is a Ponzi scheme, since it's all centralized and you don't do anything besides send in your sticker and postage.
kuschku's comments only make sense if you assume the US media is a direct arm of the US government.
Direct link to Hoverfly source code: https://github.com/SpectoLabs/hoverfly
Holiday lights and gadgets are killing your Wi-Fi
In none of those broad industries is Dow-DuPont going to be a single provider, and it won't even be the leading one in all of them.
Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a QA Team
The expression "dog's breakfast" is also correct - the OED lists it as being first used in 1892 (vs. 1933 for "pig's breakfast"): "dog's breakfast n. slang (in early use only similative) a confused mess; = dog's dinner n." http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/56405#eid6367451
Yes, you can still have a "contract", but the driver and rider either accept or reject a prewritten, third-party contract.

The driver cannot negotiate directly with the rider as you would expect an independent contractor to be able to do.
Came here to recommend this book. It's very good.
Space telescopes see Jupiter-like storm on small star
I started enjoying Netflix more when I realized I shouldn't be looking for stuff I knew of from elsewhere, but rather explore titles, rate, and help their algorithm to suggest things to me. Has been working out well so far - I got into an area I didn't think I was interested so far (superhero series).
Terrific work! Not presently having time to read the entire paper, I am curious: did you find much of interest in the metabolomic and/or genomic data? Or did MRI prove most fruitful. Also, did you obtain any MRS data?
> You want to say humans came from the ooze? Then you can't really say we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator.

Why not?

Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss, ecstasy, and love on scales only previously imagined by the Brahmin.

And anyways, his Bible believing audience section would have believed that God created humankind from dirt, yet still loved them, equally.
AT&T and T-Mobile was blocked.
And subject to ITAR export regulation, as you might imagine.

By the mid 80s, personal computers were starting to get close to these limits and the US government had to start tweaking the rule's thresholds.
We think it's "run the full emissions process" but we're guessing. It's a very good guess, but it's essentially unsupported. It could have been an interaction with one of the other things that got turned of. This seems unlikely,. but it's not 0% probability.
While it's not certain, it's only forecast to be "17 percent of global pesticide sales and about 40 percent of America’s corn-seed and soybean markets."

Since the economics-textbook definition of the power of a monopoly is that they have power over prices, it's not entirely clear how monopolistic they will be in practice. Roundup Ready corn is nice (well, for farmers anyway) but if they raised the price too high farmers could always just switch to regular corn. And there exist alternatives to materials like Teflon and Kevlar as well.
No, I'm not that interested. I like the non-programming/startup content.

But every post from the beginning is still available. It wouldn't be too hard to write an app to research that question if you are.

A fairly recent archive:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791
Afero: Universal Filesystem Library for Go with Full Windows Compatibility
>Their innovations include a sweeping variety of now-ubiquitous chemicals, including ... chlorine

Really? That's impressive, to have invented an element. Surely this must be a method of storing and transporting chlorine and not the halogen itself.
For interested people, there is a very nice OCaml MOOC for beginners currently: https://www.france-universite-numerique-mooc.fr/courses/pari... !
Bulk of whatever value exists. My point is that there probably will be no value for the investors to extract as none of the people who do the actual work would stand for such a structure for long. It would be trivial to introduce an organization that performs the same function, but which distributes all accumulated value to those performing the actions of the organization. Such an organization would have no use for investors who exist solely to take value out of the organization.
Good, short article.
I made a "JSON parser generator" a few months ago. There is no memory overhead because it just puts the json data straight into a C struct while it's parsing.

https://github.com/marel-keytech/jsoncc
Because they've got 5000 GitHub stickers left over from a conference and don't know what to do with them?

Personally I love it.
Is there any precedent for this sort of merger/split? First time I've heard of this sort of arrangement, short of a government-mandated break up.
Top Devices for iOS App Testing
I've always been puzzled as to why everyone suddenly thought that the adblocking apocalypse was about to happen.

I mean, adblockers have been around for many years. Every browser that supports third-party extensions has adblockers available. Which, until this year, has effectively meant all browsers except mobile Safari.

So the one last holdout browser finally gains adblocker support, and this is going to be the tipping point that kills ads as a revenue source for web publishers? Does mobile Safari really have that big a majority of usage among all browsers? And even if it does, is such a huge majority of mobile Safari users going to install adblockers?

Though techical people tend to forget this, the internet is now mainstream, and the vast majority of web users are non-technical people. These are people who just use whatever software is built comes with their device, never change defaults, and never install any software whose installation/configuration is any more difficult than pressing "Buy" on the app store.

So, again, it always seemed strange to me that mobile Safari in iOS 9 (finally) getting adblocker support resulted in all this panic about the adblocking apocalypse being upon us.
No, he was not. It is totally safe.
As far as we the public know right now, the only wealth transfer Uber has produced is from investors to drivers and other parties.
It might have pricing power, and hence a monopoly, in some more narrowly defined market than those broad spaces, though.
I find it hard to see how anything could claim to be vi/vim-like and not have "xp" cut-letter-paste-letter-after (ie: transpose letters)? I suppose some might work for "dlp", but not "xp" -- but it sounds like a strange omission?
The I in ISDS is for "not in the US civil court system", so the big unknown is how it will work there. I'd still bet a lot on nothing in that direction happen in the current VW case, but some uncertainty remains.
I think it's interesting watching Uber become politically savvy. When the company started, it simply ignored regulations that weren't convenient. Now they seem to lean on lobbying, as well as campaigns to drive the public to contact local politicians. But that only works because they're large enough now.
But trademark is restricted by trade classifications, and must be monitored and defended vigorously by the trademark-holder.

If you sell construction equipment, you can have a Tarzan brand of earth-mover. If you sell space tourism, you can have a John Carter brand of travel package. In order to lawyer-smack you, the estate would have to show the court that they were already using the trademark in that line of business before you.

So you could call anything that Disney does not already sell a "Mickey Mouse". Think of something NSFW. When they go to C&D you, you can demand to see proof that they are actually in that line of business. They either successfully defend the trademark and get a PR disaster or you get to use the trademark for your trade class.
Why exactly is the German auto-industry as a whole been tainted? I can understand avoiding the entire Volkswagen group (including non-German Seat, Skoda, Bugatti, Bentley, Ducati), but I don't see why this situation should give you a similar distrust for Mercedes or BMW.

Similarly, Chrysler was German-owned (through Daimler) between 1998 and 2007. Are Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge models from those years now tainted as well? What about the years after 2007?
Based on the definition of the word "regulations". Not "regulating force", "regulations", as in a government telling you what you can or cannot do.

But anyway; competition on the market is a very powerful regulating force. It happily regulates pain, death and suffering into the work. I'm less worried about us having to re-learn the reasons for taxi laws, per 'panzagl. I'm worried that, as evidenced by people saying things like you did, that we'll have to re-learn the lessons of the Industrial Revolution. There is a reason we regulate markets, why we have employment and safety laws. Our forefathers paid in blood and tears to bring them into existence, so that most of us can enjoy working in safe environment and reasonable hours. The default, if you let competition have its way unchecked, is sweatshops.
[T]he style associated with the feminine gender[...]

That very idea is the most profound, insidious form of patriarchy there is. Think about it.
No but that's hilarious. I wonder if it was intentional.
Still Living with Parents? That’s the New Norm
My preferred solution is to pay a middleman, or middlemen to provide metered access to nag-free content. The only thing keeping me from subscribing to NYT, WSJ, The Economist is that they're all expecting me to pay magazine subscription rates when the only articles I'm reading are links from aggregators like HN. I have zero desire to pour enough time into any one outlet to make the friction of managing yet another login worth it.

I don't want to see fucking pop ups asking me to subscribe, I don't want to see bitching about my adblocker, no, I'm not giving it up. Hell, even Wikipedia's yearly donation drive is getting annoying. Donating does not stop the nagging. I'm very close to finding a way to block that too, Wikipedia does not seem to offer a yearly donation option, so I need the nag to remind me to donate. I just wish I could switch it off.

Just quit fucking bugging me and let me read in peace. How much money do you need to make that happen?
To me, this question (conform to List<T>) only makes sense as in interview question if some hand waving is allowed.

My instinct is that the question is intended to accomplish two things. First, they want make sure whoever is taking the test has to implement a linked list that works more generically for whatever object is stored, rather than just for ints, strings, and so forth - so they're going to want to see object comparison.

Also, they want to see if the candidate is aware of how to implement an interface. So implementing a few key methods would be a good demonstration of skills.

That said, my instincts have certainly failed me in the past. I figured that a big of hand waving and an explanation of the data structures to solve a problem, along with some code, would be good enough for technical interview, and I have been rejected - companies can't give too much info because of possible lawsuits and so forth, but I have been told that I didn't make enough coding progress on the technical interviews. So eh, maybe they really did expect this, I couldn't say.

On another point - I'm not really outraged by much, in terms of hiring policies. I mean, it's bad to waste people's time, but in general, I'm OK with companies having high standards and tolerating a very high false negative rate, if that's their choice.

What I can't stand is the constant complaining about how hard it is to hire from companies that do this.
Disney & copyrights are really interesting. The linked site has a lot of info about why releasing to public domain doesn't harm content. But is there a Mickey/Disney equivalent internationally? I can't think of one, but I'm American...
Can't we stop this consolidation and keep the market competitive just by having a progressive corporate tax? Are there any arguments against such a tax?
Chemical interactions are mostly about charge, not spin. I won't say there's no effect at all, but it would be a small effect.
Pretty Linux – desktop screenshots from 1999-2001
"Right" is a subjective weasel word that has no meaning. You have to draw it out from context in every different piece you read. In my experience any definition of it that doesn't include those three you named is purely academic and detached from reality and the way people use the word to the point of absurdity. Those are the essence of what it means to be "right", alongside say Rand, Nixon, and Joseph McCarthy. Though your experience is clearly quite different.

The point is it doesn't mean anything.
You could write a great short story in this form.
Golang Editor LiteIDE v28 available
My favorite general guidebook for writing good, readable, maintainable, defensive code is "Code Complete": http://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Const...

It isn't domain specific but there is so much good advice in there around variable naming, code structure, general principles of bug-resistant coding that you will get a tremendous amount from it.
I guess it is a question of power. An IT Contractor for example, may be tied to a specific client and the client may have strict requirement, but actually enjoy the same flexibility as the company as he can leave and reasonably assume he can be contracted somewhere else, or work on its own.

On the other hand, if McDo was to label all its employee contractor, most of them are tied to that specific employment and don't have actual flexibility.

I guess the contractor / employee law is meant to protect #2, but can catch #1 as a side effect.

So whenever you say "I don't want to be an employee" you most likely in position #1, while people in the other group simply would say "I can't be an employee".

That said, I have no idea what status Uber driver really should have. As taxi driver, I guess they have a variety of option for revenues and are only tied to Uber because Uber is a good source of work rather than being dominated by Uber ?
(couldn't reply to your other comments as it seems the comment depth is reached.)

Let me make one thing clear: I've not defended VW for the cheating they've done, not even once. I've just drawn attention toward the bigger picture within these events have unfolded and because commenters have raised questions as to why VW has been targeted so swiftly despite it's apparent that other manufacturers are having similar issues (more or less).

These are common ways of how back-door negotiations and arm-twistings occur. Neither Obama nore Merkle would publically admit to you in your face of these things. But we the public remain foolish to dismiss such an evident corelation as conspiracy. Or do you think we live in a utopian world where every official action is guided by altruistic motive? Well if yes, you may very well see what's happening in Syria, the whole of world's major power are flighting their airforces, just to defeat bunch of terrorist? who are anyway financed by oil smuggling to countries part of the coalition .... give me a break.

You should read my earlier comment on US policy of wars in Middle East https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10580490

Well if you doubt that politics cannot plan and execute such policies for decades then you're fooling yourself. Evidence are right there just need to open our eyes.
We need the competition, I don't understand why as a society we would want a megacompany controlling the international chemical market.