skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one is ever legally obligated to join a union in the U.S.

To "join": not officially. There have been cases of workers not having applications forwarded without including signed provisional cards (known as "card check" organizing[0]).

There is agency shop organizing in which workers have to pay full dues but do not have to join the union. It can be seen as a distinction without a difference to those who have to pay the dues.

Then there's full right-to-work situations, where unions cannot compel workers to join the union or pay dues as a prerequisite to work in that shop.

[0] http://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/how-union-card...

[Edit]: closed shop definitional error
OHSA powers don't apply in the absence of a union?
The question is, how would you better define hacking? To make the letter of the law match the spirit? "Exceeding authorised access" is an early attempt that predates modern internet usage. You can't just say "anything the computer lets you do, is legal" because code exploits are just a computer following the (poorly-written) instructions in its code.
It is at least implicit in testing practices; the reason diagnosis often involves a series of tests is that they first screen with cheap, low-false-negative testing, then apply more expensive tests to weed out the false positives. But of course the rarer the disease, the harder that second phase becomes.
That's really impressive. Seriously.

I think type providers are a really fantastic feature. I just wish that I had more cause to write f#.
same way you bring any hiring discrimination case: you get eyewitness testimony, you subpoena emails, you do the very squirrelly job of trying to figure out whether there was discriminatory intent, etc. if a heuristic was used that discriminates against people with the first name "rashad", but the operators of the heuristic didn't realize that, you get the company to stop using that heuristic. if they knew that's what was happening, and they were fine with it, because they thought people with the name rashad would probably be black, or muslim, or black muslims, then you penalize that company exactly as you would have if someone sent an email saying "i'm not considering the resumes of people that i think are [black|muslim|whatever protected hiring category]".

hiring discrimination regulation is already notoriously hard to enforce. that doesn't mean it's not worth trying, or that it's not worth trying to think about new threats to the goal of non-discriminatory hiring.
yes. and it was about bloody time the ugly crap that nagios is gets some heat.
What makes you think that union leaders advocate primarily for "the people" as opposed to their own best interests?
Ben Hamner (of Kaggle) on Twitter

> Replace "AI" with "matrix multiplication & gradient descent" in the calls for "government regulation of AI" to see just how absurd they are

https://twitter.com/benhamner/status/892136662171504640
Carl Icahn is not lovable at all.
The "greedy victim" is the typical explanation for fraud, and the article touches on this:

He makes mercifully short mention of the usual explanation—
“greed” on the part of ordinary people trying to get “above their
station”—which has been trotted out after every financial fraud
for the past 300 years.

The article makes the point that Americans get ripped off disproportionately, that there's something about American culture that either encourages or doesn't punish flimflam, Ponzi and confidence games.

Is it the ethic of rugged self-reliance? Or the idolization of entrepreneurs and the ultra-rich?

I bring up religion because America is much more religious than other Western countries, and it seems like people who believe without evidence might be more susceptible to confidence games.
That doesn't rule out good examples though. And some of these are close to universal, maybe not in set value, but at least setting them to some value, versus omitting them.
Glad someone caught it :)
I have built software for a number of MLMs in the past 20 years. I can tear down a compensation plan and tell you where the money will go and what the likelihood of success will be for "the little guy" as well as the upper management reward for the "hitter".

The #1 factor in deciding if an MLM is legit is the product. Many, many MLMs have products that have no real value to any market, existing only to attempt to legitimize a money game.

However, MLM is a pretty good marketing approach for products that:

1 - are new or difficult to understand, and where having a human explain or demonstrate in person helps the potential consumer decide if it's something for them

2 - depend on customer testimonials to express their effectiveness, particularly regarding consumables that are not or cannot be judged and regulated by the FDA or similar body

3 - are consumable, such that the buyers and _consumers_ of the product naturally evangelize the product, and then get rewards for bringing new customers

Let's be honest - there are a lot of BS products that are legally marketed through traditional, accepted, and even respected channels. And there are a ton of BS products marketing via MLM. The difference is that some MLMs have lured members with the unrealistic prospect of huge incomes and then guided the new members to buy a ton of product ("front-loading") so as to ascend more rapidly to the higher earning potentials. That's how you end up with people with a garage full of junk they'll never manage to sell.

I don't know if Herbalife does this. I rather doubt it. But really, if a new employee in a company could choose to pay $25k up front with the promise that they would be more quickly promoted to higher management levels, I think a lot of people would do it - even if they had no skills or motivation to work to earn a promotion. In some MLMs, that option exists.

Regarding compensation, every company that markets products takes some percent of product sales and directs that toward marketing efforts. What makes MLM unique is that it directs that marketing money to individuals (presumably based on the amount of sales they drive). And just as Division Managers of large companies may receive bonuses based on the success of their divisions, MLM leaders often receive some compensation based on the sales (success) of representatives they have personally recruited or who have been recruited by their recruits.

I could go on, but it's boring now. Point is, MLM isn't inherently evil, just as capitalism isn't inherently evil. But everywhere, there are some people who will do anything for a dollar. Some become hedge fund managers, and some become MLM lead marketers.
They often do either.

It's up to the members of a union to take sufficient interest in it that there are appropriate and effective governance structures in place - in the same way that it's up to the shareholders of a business to do the same.
Show HN: SoundBrake 2.0 for headphones- device alerts you to outside sounds
> well their original purpose was racism pure and simple

Exactly how much work-oriented racism was there in 14th century England, when trade unions were first outlawed? Or in industrial age Britain?

Stop spreading your crazy FUD.
I find it almost too ironic to see a hedge fund manager righteously calling out another business model.
It'd work for a few times, at least. In the 90s, BMW gave out plastic wallet-sized cards with flip-out emergency keys with at least some of their cars. Not super durable for repeated use, but handy to have. Looks like something similar continued into the 2000s for a while, at least: http://www.bimmerboard.com/members/q/original/BMW%20Transpon...
... which then has power to set wage thresholds and working conditions for every other hourly worker in the company, present and future.
> Also, if problems aren't certain as they are chronic, widespread or hard to diagnose you see certain specialists who are trained to diagnose. You don't see a general physician

This is actually (imo) one of the largest failings in the UK's various health systems -- Diagnosticians as you have them in the US, do not exist. The entire system relies on GPs keeping up to date on various diseases and symptoms. This means that a lot of the time diseases that typically present with vague symptoms, like cancer, can go undiagnosed for years.
You could also argue that good health is a privilege. It is. But it isn't special. The late 70s were a time when computers were flooding the marketplace, and that could only happen if they were affordable for regular people.

I graduated in 1979 with a whole class of people who were quite capable of doing what Gates and Jobs did, and that's just from one university. But we didn't, and Gates/Jobs did. How do you explain that?

My father was career military. That isn't a recipe for wealth, and is an avenue available to millions of people.

You might be interested in the book "Masters of Doom" about John Carmack and John Romero. They had none of the privileges you assert, and yet vaulted to the top of the gaming industry.
people can be critical of unions without being a puppet or a "wealthy bourgeoisie". Not everything is so black-and-white, especially politics.
You have to ask yourself, why do you want to change? Unless you're freelancing/working for yourself, being a cog in someone else's machine will be just as much a soul drain as what you're doing now. Changing careers is a huge step for anyone, you won't be a manager anymore, you'll be entry level, entry level at 30 years of age. Competing with fresh grads.

If it's something you want to do, I'd get upto speed then take an extended vacation from your current job and try it out. Don't quit your current job and leave yourself a way back in.
Apple stood for privacy in the US where privacy is part of law. It didn't stand by privacy in China where privacy in some forms is prohibited as part of law. Asserting the US law in China would discount China's sovereignty, implicitly declaring "your principles are inferior to ours".

A global company needs to be sensitive to these political/cultural differences and accommodate them. Even in the US where "privacy" is part of law, the legal system recently ruled that Facebook can continue to track users online even when they're logged out. So pretending that the privacy issue is one of "morality" is just borrowing the emotional power of the "morality" label for something that is not a universal law on the planet ... not even within aspects of the US. It is not different from a middle-eastern global company offering christmas discounts for its products in western countries, or Amazon not selling banned books in the countries they operate, or selling books on witchcraft and sorcery as though the books were of the same standing as, say, Principia Mathemtica.

Permitted? Do. Not permitted? Don't. ... unless the goal of your company is to champion a particular political ideology. So, frankly, this NYTimes article is, from a global perspective, "politically incorrect".
Climate change in drones' sights with plan to remotely plant ~100k trees/day
Block driverless trucks? I can see this only working short term. Long term, the benefits of driverless trucks are too great to ignore.

I'm curious to see how long and what tactics are used to delay this inevitable technology.

Similar to how Tesla faces all sorts of issues from the traditional car dealerships.

I'm also interested to see the politicians jumping on the bandwagon talking about saving jobs as an excuse to promote this agenda.
I've actually been going through this recently with a series of cancer tests with a high false positive rate. When I was discussing it with my specialist he said that he and other doctors don't necessarily think of it in rigorously Bayesian terms, but they're familiar with the sensitivity and specificity of each test and have a pretty strong understanding of what that means based on priors.

Talking to medical students I get the same impression. The refrain I commonly hear is that high sensitivity tests can rule something out, and a high specificity test can rule it in. Obviously that's a reasonably shallow understanding, but when they combine that with their intuition of a prior it seems like they get pretty good results.
Always good to keep in mind that this plastic will be consumed by bacteria. Sunlight and wave motion break apart the plastic into smaller and smaller pieces until bacteria completely consumes it.

Even so, we really need a solution to keep plastic out of the oceans for a plethora of reasons. One of the most alarming ones being the largest consumer of plastic in the ocean is the same bacteria which can cause flesh eating disease.
"It seems pretty intuitive, so maybe it's already largely applied?"

It is! That's why doctors don't order every single possible test every time you show up sick!

That's also why consumers SHOULD NOT be testing by themselves without medical supervision (I'm looking at you, Elisabeth Holmes and Theranos).
Good point! I'll admit my bias, I pretty much lost faith in the site's administration after they bungled the monetization of AMAs so poorly. It was exactly as predicted: AMA was the most obviously monetizable community, and was completely ruined in the process. The administrator who ran them quit over it and the quality has never recovered. I don't even bother reading most celebrity AMAs anymore because they're either a transparent advertisement or/and clearly written by someone with no understanding of reddit.

The management just seems to "miss the point" so often. The best AMAs in the early years were by a vacuum cleaner repair technician, not a movie star.
May we ask which union(s) you have been a member of?
Generally the solution is to come up with a descriptor like "Irritable Bowel Syndrome" or "Ideopathic XYZ" - these labels basically say that "you have some of so-and-so set of commonly co-morbid symptoms and we can't pin down a cause in your case". Not useful for cures, but useful for lumping together research projects and for managing symptoms. "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" is one such label, and may be a cluster of diseases that present similarly.

The problem is when doctors and researchers lump these things into the "crazy patient" bin and time spent helping these patients as wastes of their time, rather than just hard cases.
Going public is guaranteed to end in them getting acquired by a US media or tech company.

Once public, it won't take long for the present owners to lose control to far more powerful financial entities. The VCs will all liquidate out, leaving a power vacuum that will be gradually filled by those new parties, and they'll do the same thing they always do.
I use spotify. Love it.
My family uses Spotify, loves it.
I hope they go public.
We live in a free society that values free speech. We should be cautious when limiting it. In the case of market influence, it should be fine as long as there is full disclosure. In fact insider trading is perfectly legal as long as it's done with disclosure statements.
You do realize that traditional business is a form of pyramid scheme. Your boss probably gets more compensation than you do. He/she may have subordinate managers who themselves have subordinate managers who have non-manager employees.

The CEO makes bonuses based on performance of the company. The division managers makes bonuses based on their divisions' performance. The lowest people in the company probably make zero bonuses. And in many companies, the lowest paid workers were promised good future opportunities for growth in the company.

For every bad MLM (and there are many), I could probably identify 10 bad traditional companies.
Why does Apple get a free pass on this when Google has such a clear stance for free expression?

[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...
Aside from all the examples just given, you mean.
Just because the Nearby Connections API layer is neither authenticated nor encrypted, doesn't mean the developer isn't free to implement it. If I tell you an Ethernet cable requires neither authentication nor encryption, you aren't going to tell me it's impossible to authenticate or encrypt over Ethernet.
I wonder what Apple's reaction would be if China (or another large non-western market) demanded to have root on people's iphones. If Apple said, it's our HW design, it can't be compromised, I'm sure some market with enough heft could come back and say, make one specific to our market or you don't sell here. At that point they'd likely capitulate.
Makes sense thanks!
You ask yourself what the startup craze does to research. Back then, all the big companies had their Central Research Department (note: Microsoft, Google and Facebook still do), which would do stuff that paid off only after 20 or 30 years. Nowadays development has been devolved to universities, and much stuff is done at contract labs somewhere far away. The average startup is a webapp with Twitter for cats. That can't be good in the long run.
Ask HN: Where's a great place to travel if you want to just code?
I'm based in NYC, and I'm looking for someplace to travel where I can just code in complete peace. Cheaper is better than expensive, but I'm openminded. Domestic or international. Any ideas?
It's unfortunate that you are being downvoted - especially since you are citing John Hempton's excellent work on the topic. It's really worth a read and an interesting counterpoint to Ackman's analysis.
exactly. Outsourcing foreign politics or issues of morality to a business is both harmful (because that's arguably not what a company's task is or ought to be) and it circumvents Chinese law.

If issues of privacy in China are very important to you electing officials who's foreign policy reflects that is a better idea.
Having second-hand knowledge of a public teachers union I heard more many stories of terrible workers who could never get fired. That is the reason I'm not very supportive of unions.
But that same argument applies to unions, too. If your company dies, you're out of a job. Why would a union do that?
Fortunately, the legal system does sometimes consider intent. While the letter of the law may be followed, if the intent is obviously against the spirit of the law, the courts have some leeway to judge accordingly.
I'm in the US. I get that on paper unions are good, but I've always heard bad things about them. Recent anecdotes/experience I've encountered:

- Factory layoffs HAD to be done by seniority rather than merit. We knowingly laid off top performers, just because they were newer to the company (due to union contract rules).

- Vendors at a tech conference got in trouble for moving their display tables a few feet because that was supposed to be done by union workers.

- Promotions and raises strongly tied to seniority, less flexibility.
"...tracking how many sales or users exist in databases by watching sequential IDs..."

Seems like a great application of the German tank problem [1] that was mentioned on HN the other day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
It is way more nuanced than that. In general I support unions but police unions are one example of unions that have largely become protection cartels for police misbehavior, holding entire regions hostage to their agendas with the political power they have to make or break governors, mayors, city council members, etc.
Apple has most certainly taken a moral stance in the past as you point out. The galling part of the article to me was "The company has not fully tested its political and economic leverage in China." It is not Apple's job to take a political stance. They can if they want, as evidenced by the examples you laid out, but there is no requirement. If the NYT wants to talk politics and precedence, perhaps they should direct their criticisms toward the U. S. government, et. al., who collectively think that China's membership in the WTO, and therefore I assume free trade with China, is just a-okay.

Apple is playing by the rules, and this time decided that this is not the hill they want to die on. That's their prerogative. Don't like the rules? Then go complain to those that make the rules to begin with, not those that play by those rules.
So there are certain aspects that can be be iterated upon faster than others. Something like shielding is going to be faster, and can be iterated upon, compared to something like the main reactor. That may also be because that's what I'm more familiar with.

I am also in favor of more small reactors, vs fewer large reactors. I think this provides a higher safety level and ease of upgrading. Plus you can just bury these entire reactors in the ground.

As for regulation, I agree that it should be strict. But the process needs to be streamlined so it doesn't take too long. That time is prohibitive to the technology (see the new reactor construction and it bankrupting Westinghouse). I don't have the answers to how you would optimize the system, but I think think we need to open the discussion up. Start asking questions like "Is covering the first $12b of damage reasonable for all reactor types and sizes?" "How do we ensure that a reactor type is ready to move from research to production?" And such. I don't think "let China test them" is a reasonable response either. The questions get brushed off because most of the public is still afraid of the technology (see this thread. I doubt many of HN users has worked anywhere related to this field, but look at how many have strong opinions). But the people that work in it have less fear. It is like working with anything dangerous, you have to always be aware of it, but that doesn't make it too dangerous to even handle.
Not GP, but I can elaborate a bit. It was common Soviet practice in the post-Stalin era to, instead of explicitly arresting political dissidents, to classify them as insane and have them involuntarily committed. Looks less bad than calling it a jail.

I haven't heard of this practice being continued in post-communist Russia, but I wouldn't be enormously surprised to hear that it was.
You're right, of course, on all counts.

Today doesn't seem to be my high point for patience...
You're right. Life around the world would indeed be better if absolutely everyone was upper-middle-class with in-demand skills and leverage.
How to Clean Up Hundreds of Tons of Melted Nuclear Fuel
I'm curious how similar Metal is to Vulkan in API-surface terms. Would it be easier to develop a Metal backend for Dolphin by starting from the macOS Vulkan backend than by starting from scratch?
I've had Spotify for 5 years or so, and mostly used it to look up songs I already liked, and to create playlists to listen to while studying/working/programming. It was already pretty awesome for that. Then I started checking out the "Related Artist" section, and started discovering new music after such a hiatus of music discovery since my younger years.

But where Spotify has really just excelled, and dare I say changed the way I listen to music, is their newer ways of discovering music. Now I can make a playlist with all of my favorites, and then just check out the "Recommended Songs" section to find new favorites. And now I start most work weeks off listening to the "Discover Weekly" playlist and drag the songs I like over to my playlists. The amount of new music I've discovered hasn't been this volume since middle school.
Now go read the 3Taps vs Craigslist cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.) to start. To be clear here, I feel like I understand your argument that facts aren't copyrightable or protectable and that how you got them is not relevant.

I'm just saying the legal system doesn't see it that way, they have said so in many cases, and so far everyone who has used your argument or variations of it in court has failed to prevail.
* over 10,000 pounds.

Well, they also explicitly made it legal for trucks under 10,000 pounds ;)
I believe mywittyname is specifically referring to the LinkedIn profile pages that are publicly visible without requiring a login and is not claiming that all LinkedIn's data is public. Thus, the question is why doesn't LinkedIn simply hide all profile data behind user authentication?
Why Warren Buffett is a beta male