skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If Walmart engages in wage theft and is then sued for it, that sounds to me like the law works. Unless the penalties aren't enough to resolve the issue or something, that doesn't sound like an ongoing injustice - and at any rate, sounds like a problem for the courts, not the public. Sorting that sort of thing out fairly is their job, and they're surely going to be more thoughtful about it than angry internet mobs.

If Walmart employees can't support themselves and wind up taking advantage of charity - either privately or through the state - isn't this also the system working as intended? Systems are in place to help low income individuals. These are low income individuals. It strikes me as strange moral reasoning to say the low market price of unskilled labor is Walmart's fault.

It strikes me as particularly strange moral reasoning to charge the use of welfare in this case to Walmart's account and call it a subsidy. That would only make sense to me if the people earning that wage would do better if Walmart wasn't there. I don't think that's the case, though. Unskilled labor doesn't pay that well whether you're flipping burgers, delivering pizzas, stocking shelves, or waiting tables. It's not the fault of the companies offering those jobs - it's just what that sort of labor is worth.

But Walmart should just pay them more, everyone deserves a living wage? I don't think I agree. I think there is room in the economy for second incomes, for student jobs, for seasonal work. Not everyone is a single head of household, and if you don't have the skills to be one, often you just - don't move out. We have no shortage of help - private charities that do vocational training, societal safety nets to keep things from getting too bad, most people get by with help from friends and family until they can make it on their own. I think there's nothing wrong with that.

One of the things I would be concerned with is insisting that Walmart pay its employees more. That will surely come in the form of raising prices, and the very low prices at Walmart are a boon to low income folks - both those who work at Walmart and those who don't. I am skeptical that making Walmart less efficient will help the communities it's in, compared with the social safety nets and private charity - generally provided by the better off. Forcing Walmart to pay higher wages strikes me as taking from the poor to give to the poor.

On the contrary - the folks I know who work at Walmart are content with the situation and doing ok. They know they could go get a vocational degree or something and make better money as a welder or something. They don't want to. It's an odd job between stages of life, not a career, and good enough for the moment. If there are enough people like this to run a whole business that hugely benefits the poor by offering goods at low prices, isn't that system on the whole a good thing?
> Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy.

I agree with this particular sentiment but I don't believe that "deep work", as Cal Newport calls it, requires us to turn off social media or other forms of less-deep work altogether. Certainly, we must balance and control our usage of social media. Certainly, we must be more than just consumers and create tweets/posts/blogs/etc. These mediums can be great ways to give back to the community.
I'm currently in the process of withdrawing myself from social media.

I pulled the plug on Facebook and Instagram this weekend, not that I was a heavy user of Instagram anyway and Facebook a light to moderate user. (it sounds like I'm discussing a coke habit here). What I will find frustrating is that in my social group - and I'm sure I'm not alone - Facebook appears to be the central tool for organising one's life.

Everything is organised on Facebook. Social events, parties, last minute "Does anyone want to go for a drink?" requests, discussions and meetup arrangements on my side hobby of homebrewing. I fear I shall become something of a social outcast, particularly as many friends I have, I don't have their mobile numbers as all contact was made through Facebook messenger.

This is one part of the reason that I'm pulling away from Facebook in particular. Facebook has almost two billion users and the internet as a whole has roughly 3.5 billion users.

How one corporation having that much data willingly supplied - where they live, where they work, where they've been, where they currently are, among everything else - by so many people is, frankly, a disaster waiting to happen. I want no part of it. I've given them enough data over the last couple of years. No more.

And on a less tin-foil hat angle it is a huge distraction that, aside from the social life organisation aspect, serves no good purpose that can't be provided using other means (email? phone calls? meeting face to face and sharing your selfies in person?).

I've also withdrawn from Instagram and plan to start developing in VueJS or EmberJS rather than React. I'm not officially boycotting Facebook, I'm just choosing not to use their products.
Understanding MVC, MVVM,& MVWhatever
I removed social apps from my phone ages ago, and turned off notifications most places (especially slack which is massively distracting). It has helped, a bit.

I do still check hn more than I should...might have to work on that one next.
I think he was wrong. It's pretty hard but not impossible. You don't visualize them directly as 3D objects though, you visualize 3D objects with metadata attached everywhere. While you navigate the space in your mind's eye you have an extra layer of information that flows with you.

Consider Alicia Boole Stott. She created cardboard models of the various cross-sections of the 6 regular polytopes. Including the 24-cell which has no equivalent in 3D, the 120-cell and the 600-cell which are super complex figures. I think if you read her story you'll also be convinced that she indeed visualized the figures. [1]

I spent quite a lot of time earlier this year on this visualization exercise on the 4 simplest regular polytopes while working on an toy application to manipulate 4D objects and tesseractic honeycomb in VR.

You can have a good grasp of where every edge go and the angle between every faces. I could count the number of vertices and edges of a 16-cell or 24-cell just by navigating around the figure in my head. The tesseract and 16-cell are good starting points.

1: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086007...
Really? Sitting here waiting to graduate with a BSc in CS and I am absolutely awful at math naturally.
I disagree. I think we need to increasingly shift to pollution taxes because 1) physical pollution is hard to hide and 2) minimising pollution both improves the environment and maximises industrial efficiency.
Free SSL with Heroku and LetsEncrypt
We're running the same setup. How do you find Azure vs AWS/Google?
My feeling is that people with good critical thinking skills wouldn't buy into fake news anyway so wouldn't need an app to help them and people that buy into fake news don't want to improve their critical thinking skills so wouldn't use an app to help them either. People like being surrounded by other people that agree with them.

Are there any examples of subtle fake news stories? My feeling is they're really obvious especially if not being covered by major news sites.
There are a few libraries for using JRuby (like https://github.com/c9katayama/aws-lambda-jruby) But they may also have issues with native gems
Why is a moral lesson in a story a moral lesson? I can invent any moral lesson and put it in a story. That a supposed moral lesson is featured in a work of fiction does not lend credence to it.
It's not that distributed consensus is hard. It's that anonymous consensus is hard. Common stock has distributed consensus via voting based on share ownership. That's proof-of-stake.

The real problem here, as with spam, is the ability to generate large numbers of anonymous identities cheaply. Zuckerberg figured this out a long time ago; hence Facebook's "real names" policy.
The only thing this will revolutionize, is the alt-right's ability to deny more facts that climate change is real :(
But so is our rent, and I think silicon valley is harder to commute into than those other places.

I was making a comment on how I thought silicon valley is affordable for engineers, I don't really understand how the service workers make it, and I was implying that the obvious solution would be to pay them more, and raise prices accordingly.

Compared to the multiplier on rent, yes, I think food and services are cheap.
And yet the NWS won't incorporate Canadian radar data from storms moving across the Canadian sword into western New York.
it snia ;
>>Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss

No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit.

And blogger is easy enough to use. Heck, my computer illiterate grandma was using it before she passed.

The problem is that blogging takes time and effort, and the vast majority of people have no interest in it. The only thing they want to do is share their fleeting thoughts and/or tidbits they have found elsewhere. Which they can do easily on their smartphones. Blogging though, not so much.
What do you think NASA and DARPA are exactly, private companies? They're both part of the federal government.
It can be annedoctic, but same here!
You're gonna have to elaborate -- usually Twitter's "firehose" means the entire unfiltered stream of all Tweets, which would be beyond useless as a normal user for obvious reasons.
Just for fun, try a cheapo XL yoga mat. I find that the stiff-ish surface helps me sleep better and I wake up with less back and shoulder pain. Could just be me, and I still sometimes prefer the bed, but it's a cheap experiment and way better than an air mattress.
It's the same reason why kids were passing notes in school instead of paying attention. It's no longer called socializing/talking with friends. Its now social media/playing with your phone.

People want to feel like they are part of a group.
I use docker in production right now with ec2 container services and automated deployment from gitlab-ci. Been very happy with it.
> "But what developers really need is an organization that governs and regulates their profession like other industries have, both Martin and Sourour believe. Currently nothing like that exists although both the Association for Computer Machinery and the IEEE have made a start, with ethics documents and, in some cases, training."

I don't think the solution for this is to have an organization that regulates programmers to make sure a programmer will become ethical. No matter how much ethics you teach someone to become ethical, it is in their own volition to act upon a task that is provided.

What will you do it if a programmer suddenly decides to be unethical or agreed upon doing an unethical task related to work? Remove their license to become programmers? Ban them to use the computers? Put them in jail? Shouldn't the management be responsible for their decisions, too? Why are all the blame here being focus on the programmers? Why don't you teach "Ethics" to those who are pushing the programmers to do such a task? Yes, the programmers have the big decision to do it or not. But regulating them isn't the solution that would make their decisions ethical.

What if the younger generation wanted to code? Will you stop them from learning it because they are not allowed to learn it unless they are in school? Or they are not even allowed to ship code because they don't have a license or it is not under the standards made by the organization?

Remember programmers are people. Same with all the human beings in this world who makes moral decisions on their own. Their beliefs, attitude and principles in life are nurtured based on how they were brought up not because they took an ethics class in College.

If a programmer violated a law because of his actions, then treat them as a person who has violated the law.
The global internet infrastructure isn't the most complex, but it might win for the most jury rigged. Everyone in technology (I'm a Linux Systems Admin / Software Engineer) knows that the internet was built by a team of macguyvers and is held together by shoe string, paper clips, duct tape, and undersea cables.
False: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20313
If you were not trying to debunk anything, then this was a very poor choice of words:

> So, hypothetically speaking, say a laptop firmware has an SMM backdoor, how does using Linux bypass it in any way?

Aside from that, good point.
Automobile accidents in the US kill 32,000 people a year. Cancer kills about 500,000 per year. Heart disease kills over 700,000 per year.

Yet people fixate on a once in 200 year tragedy that killed 3,000 people. That many people die like clockwork just from automobile accidents every single month.

If you are concerned with saving American lives (never mind all the other lives around the world that are just as worth saving), why would you not try to prevent something that's very preventable and happens every single month, every single year, on a far larger scale, and that doesn't involve hating anyone?
That's true, but any incentive structure at all has similar hazards. (Ever seen the software quality bar lowered in order to meet a deadline?) So long as the company does have standards, and processes it trusts to enforce those standards, it's possible to guard against that failure mode, just as you'd guard against any other employee misbehaviour.

If you do have employees (or execs) bypassing the process or lowering their standards in order to meet short term goals, that in itself is a cultural problem the company would want to address.

Edit: it's worth noting that every manager who has more planned work than they can execute with their current head count already has a short-term incentive to lower their hiring bar and get someone in the door quickly. Managers get measured on executing to plan, so that's probably a stronger incentive than any bonus structure.

So my point isn't that lowering the bar to game the system will never happen, but that it's a failure mode that already occurs and that the system should already have defences against.
They needed to revamp the plugin architecture in order to support multithreading. The current FF extension API relies on the fact that the browser UI and the Web content share the same OS thread.

No, it doesn't. The long-obsolete XUL API did, but the current Jetpack API does not. There's a per-addon task and a per-page task, which communicate via message passing.
...or you can treat it like the public health issue it is and provide sharps bins in toilets.

http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/community/health-and-safe...

> Community sharps are needles, syringes and lancets that are used to administer medications and drugs outside a clinical setting.

> We need to dispose of sharps safely to prevent needlestick injury in our public places, at home and for workers who remove waste or clean facilities.

> Whether or not a community sharp is used for medication or drug use, sharps are to be treated as clinical waste, like they would be in a hospital.

> Local councils have a number of community sharps bins installed in community centres, libraries and public toilets to encourage sharps waste to be managed separately from general waste.
Reading Elinor Ostrom in Silicon Valley
This is why it's important to be able to trust the government. For this to happen, the government (and government friendly media) must not be in the habit of breaking trust.

Anne Applebaum and the other contributes to this piece blame the Russians for fracturing the agreement on truth in the West but I feel it much more likely that the Washington Post (for whom Applebaum writes) and the State Department (among others) have a much greater share of the blame in the mistrust. Case in point, the huge number of stories in Washington Post promoting the second Iraq war. Or more recently, the Hillary promotion and Trump slamming campaign. I saw a very apt name for Washington Post in a comment section "Pravda on the Potomac".

They really should clean up their act and stop the (obviously not working at this point) propaganda before pointing fingers.
Αγγλία: Κλείνει την αγωνιστική το Γουέστ Μπρομ – Μπέρνλι
This site is badly needed.
The topic of conversion therapy absolutely is relevant to the discussion, because Mike Pence is on recorded for not only supporting in the abstract -- but in having it mandated via federal legislation.
Big chance to poison the well - did you not get the promotion or job because you're not a diversity hire, or was it because the other candidate was better? I've seen Intel do this and animosity increased by a huge amount.
Cosmos was also a dead tree book. [1] It was not uncommonly given as a gift.

The original TV series was broadcast the same year as its publication, 1980, but I don't think it was readily available on consumer tape until several years later and then not at normal holiday gift prices. Back in those days, most video libraries were built by the librarian directly recording broadcasts. But most people would just wait for a rebroadcast.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_(Carl_Sagan_book)
>>About the only two successful federated communication systems I know of are phone network and e-mail.

And they were both developed by governments/universities with no profit motive. That should tell us everything we need to know regarding how to go about creating the next ubiquitous federated/distributed system.
If the goal of exposing corruption is only to bring down one government and replace it with a kleptocracy defined by corruption... then yes, you can complain about asymmetric unproven claims of corruption.

For example the criminal next door who has evaded $100k in fines for dangerous antisocial activities (ie drove above the speed limit to work for the last 10 years) can't be trusted!
They are self cleaning.

Melbourne also has pop-up urinals that come out of the sidewalk late at night because all the drunks used to just piss on the street or the sides of buildings...

http://ca.complex.com/pop-culture/2016/02/australia-pop-up-u...
You should visit Boston or DC some time. It will be an eye-opener. Both are cities that were designed well before cars. Snowbanks make things even narrower. This should be urban planner paradise, given the much tighter roads.

As for the much better drivers though... well see for yourself.
Curious, is that harder than fluid dynamics?
Fun question, even if it wasn't a serious one. Since I happen to work at a company whose business is related to ad placement prediction, I can try to answer.

In our case, we have 1000-2000 instances (the number is elastic, because AWS) handling real-time ad auctions and related data processing. Since we are just one of the many players in the industry, and far smaller than the largest ones (GOOG, FB), I am pretty sure in aggregate more computing cycles are used to optimize ads than oil or weather.

Crazy.
The Great CR 2016 Christmas Ad Review
My first paid job as a programmer turned to be taking the source code of some long forgotten app and changing all the text so it appeared to be written by my new employer. This was back when you bought a program you literally got the program source. Needless to say I balked and ended up at job #2 a few days later. Turns out my boss and every employee except myself were all ex-convicts.
ReactOS isn't particularly friendly to Windows users. You would be better off with something like LXDE.
Yeah, forgot about those! Been taking a wait-and-see approach to LG phones due to all the bootloop issues the G4 (and seemingly some of the v10's) have been having.
The point is that it is a benefit to society as a whole. Android being open source as-is today is hugely beneficial. It has transformed the mobile and embedded/consumer device landscape. I have a hard time believing that the impact to everyone would be the same if it was closed source.
Aye. Like television before them, people can consume twitter- and instagram- and facebook-borne content without engaging executive functions of the brain. Sadly this characteristic seems essential for truly mass appeal.

Forcing people to consider any aspects of federation will be an instant barrier to adoption that reduces the appeal by an order of magnitude, at least, and prevent any such service reaching critical mass.
Sometimes, while dreaming I will recognize and recall that I've had this dream before, maybe many many times...then I feel a sense of loss, like losing a friend. A moment of de ja vu I guess. It is a weird feeling though, and I don't even know if I truly had the dream before, or if it is a false memory!!
Create a Good Data Research Plan! Step by Step Guide For Online Businesses.
FCC Supports Google Fiber, Louisville in Utility Pole Fight
Proof of work demonstrates that a certain amount of work was done, which cost a certain amount of money to produce. It's burning money to get currency, nothing more.
>Either he was Satoshi, but really wants the world to think he isn’t, so he created an impossible-to-untangle web of truths, half-truths and lies. And ruined his reputation in the process.

This makes no sense as he was privately and publicly trying to prove that he was Satoshi. Why would someone that wants to convince the world they aren't Satoshi, go around saying that they are?

Occam's razor seems like the best principle to use in this controversy
Option (filmmaking)
The new multi-process architecture is fundamentally incompatible with many of their old extension APIs. The new multi-process architecture is one of their priorities (they're the last popular browser to get a multi-process architecture -- even IE has had this forever -- and it will solve many of their performance issues), and so another priority is implementing new APIs for extensions to use.