skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>has there been any factory floor, farm, private or government office where things have been different?

First thing I thought also. The problem is we have a society where people are dependent on their jobs to keep from being homeless and to maintain their lives. If people had an option to walkaway, the amount of toxic workplaces in any occupation would drop drastically. Any place where people are forced to submit just to keep their lifestyle is an opportunity for someone above them to take advantage.
Well, increased density is off the table without massive forced birth control/a massive die off. The population of the world has massively spiked in the last fifty years, the trend is continuing especially in poor countries, and all these people have to go somewhere.

A dense city is the only place for them to go and try to support themselves, since there isn't enough good land around for subsistence farming. Density is a given, in the future. Whether or not it makes people happy is an entirely other thing.
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I just recently watched "City of ghosts"[1], and while there are many strong moments - one that stood out to me, is about in the middle, where these people - heroes in our time - who fled isis/daesh because of being persecuted - because of being citizen journalists - are in Berlin at a counter-demonstration against a neo nazi rally.

And it kind of just slots so many pieces of wrong conclusions and xenophobia and dehumanization of the "other" together in one, painfully clear image...

I'm not sure of that moves the needle on being able to convince anyone.. But if not we might as well all build gas chambers and furnaces and burn vagrants as a source of electricity. Because if we give up fighting for the right for all of being viewed as human - what's left?

[ed: to more directly answer the question - I know I've made people pause - but most recently - a friend really made someone reconsider/reframe their idea of feminism/equality due to an hour or two of discussion and and real-world examples. So it is possible, but it takes patience, emphaty and knowledge.]

[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6333056/
> There is nothing they can do about it: the Constitution mandates an unrestricted internal market with no barriers to the free flow of goods and capital between states. That means that companies will go wherever they can get the best deal, and there is no way for state and local governments to restrict that movement.

Sure there is--DON'T GIVE COMPANIES TAX BREAKS.

This isn't that hard. Tax breaks mean that you lose whatever benefits a company would bring to your area--so you're better off not bringing them in anyway.

Lobby to help nurture your local businesses. If you use the same resources and manage to double the employment at all your local small businesses, you've FAR exceeded anything a big company tax credit will do.

Besides, Amazon's HQ2 just isn't going to employ that many people and is going to be the political rejects unless Bezos actually moves there. Anybody with real ambition knows that they're going to have to go to Seattle, anyway.

It's just going to be an outpost of software slaves where they try to suppress the wages they're having to pay on the West Coast.

As such, this thing is going into where software wages are cheapest and they can extract a big tax break. I would posit Pittsburgh/Columbus/Nashville/Indianapolis. Everything else is a smoke screen.

Interestingly, I'm starting to see resistance mounting against tax breaks in Pittsburgh. Good on them.

The idea that Amazon is contemplating anything in a populated East Coast city near the Boston-Washington corridor is laughable.
Did you look at sharing extensions by any chance? I know it's not what you're asking, but I can assume the reasons why there's nothing for CarPlay/Android Auto are very similar.

Also, you may want to check this out, it could be a starting point to get your project working: https://github.com/alinz/react-native-share-extension
> writing off bad behavior as "normal imperfect human behavior" is just an excuse to break rules

Which rules? There are no rules saying "you can't do marketing" or "you can't claim to change the world".

> Are you implying that the hyperbolic marketing of startups is a feature and not a bug?

I am implying it's a natural consequence of a startup being oriented on doing something new, never done before, and natural consequence of somebody being about to undertake a high-risk/high-reward activity. That requires certain mindset. Wanting to change the world highly correlates with such a mindset. Wanting to improve the cost of fidgelating type A sprockets by 0.1% does not. Of course, if humans were perfect robots, they'd always be exactly as much excited as it takes to be able to do a startup, and not one exciton over that. Imperfect humans frequently get more excited than that.

> there's a cognitive dissonance when 500 startup founders believe they are all changing the world

There's million of traders believing they can make a profit (which is arithmetically impossible) and millions of people believing they all can win a lottery (which is even more impossible since lottery is a negative-sum game). Of course, vast majority of these people are wrong. And 499 of the 500 startup founders will be wrong too. So what? Why is it "toxic"? What's your problem with them believing it? People hold much more dangerous and useless false beliefs every day than belief that you can have positive impact on the world.

> But there are SV companies which provide ample evidence that marketing is all the do. Juicero, Yo, etc.

Didn't I just admit there are some companies that are just hype in the very next phrase, and explained why this admission does not disprove my point?

> This is a very unique aspect of tech culture, and not at all a good one in my opinion.

High risk investment is in no way unique to SV. There are lots of people that invest in all kinds of crazy stuff, from hipster juicers to high-stake poker games. They can afford it, and they are the lifeblood of innovation and invention. All power to them. I literally can't think of anything bad coming from a billionaire spending some promilles of his outsized bank account on some weird innovative project, that may or may not change the world. Some of those would be stupid, so what. You can't make innovation without doing a couple of stupid tries on the way.
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What does Sterling mean by the “underclass”? That usually refers to the street criminals, permanently unemployable, and others who have fallen off the bottom end of the formal economy.

But the argument Sterling seems to be making seems like it more naturally would apply to the working class; while the underclass may be oppressed and SV may play a role, the way he ties Uber in just doesn't seem to connect to underclass as opposed to working class oppression.
This feels like the perfect timing for me to read this. I just quit my job on Sunday after 1.5 years of trying and failing to get on with the CEO. I'm not sure I want to stay in tech at all. I'd be interested in hearing other people's stories about changing careers entirely -- to sales (I'm not a people person but trying hard to learn the soft skills), to writing a TV show or movie (theatrics and drama are fun), to non-tech biz dev? Would love to hear people's stories and how they succeeded or failed to change career, and if they regretted it?

It's taken 8 years to realise it, but now I realise the tech startup culture is absolutely horrible and -- as they article says -- full of narcissists. If you don't realise how bad the culture is, I'd recommend introspecting a bit (wish I did this sooner).
In fact, it very probably is a tech-specific problem. Among the STEM fields, CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. STEM fields in general range from ~30-55% women, and those fields include things like Mathematics --- anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room --- which are strong proxies for CS ability. And, of course, among the professions in general, the difference is even more stark; compared to law, we're stuck in the 1960's.
Hitler was perhaps one of the stupidest people to ever grace the history books, and managed to wipe out vast numbers of his own people, including himself, in a completely pointless war of his own making, wherein he managed to make enemies of three of the most powerful entities in the world at that time.
That’s a myth, if you’re looking for objective verifiable facts you can get some useful information.

Also, if you have enough statistical data on torture methods, you can have a probability that a person doesn’t know something based on how long they’ve been actively tortured.
ha I remember your site
that's something i considered, but i also wanted to take the opportunity to learn more about creating a tight knit distribution. i could see a lot of appliances coming out of these rpi like devices, there definitely needs to be a tight distribution purpose built for people who want to build appliances similar to mine. i've also always had this task burning in my list of things to do to do an lfs type project.

my device connects to any hdmi enabled tv and provides a digital scoreboard for sports, basically i'm running a chromium browser (via electron) and autostarting that when the device starts. the device is then controlled by an ios app. i ended up using ubuntu-mate, but i don't think i even need gnome, maybe something along the lines of windowmaker, flux, or lightdm would do. i need to save microsd space so that i can have users upload media like images and video, and ubuntu mate really hogs up 4G and above which forces me to have to supply a larger microsd card which ups the total cost.
I didn't. Coders are often mistaken for engineers and in the Bay Area especially there is a strong emphasis on coding ability over engineering ability. Coding and Engineering are different skills.

The memo is a bit too dismissive of coders: to me it makes them seem as though they're inferior, less aggressive, or less able pseudo-engineers.
What did you see when you viewed the link? For me all I had to do was scroll, no special knowledge needed beyond that.

Maybe if don't have an account it shows something different.
Does playable The Witcher 3 sound right enough?
Hi, Dang. You've been banning me for years. I feel like we have a pretty solid relationship together.

You see, my resume is so solid that it gets me into any tech company I want for at least an interview or a tour. I make it a point to get onto their corporate inter/intranet and make a HackerNews account and post a valid contrarian position that you're guarenteed to always find a way to distort as a violation of guidelines. I repeat the process until your systems automatically ban/shadowban the entire IP/network from creating new accounts. And when I'm not doing this, the people I've trained to do this are out there doing the same.

You don't even know how many opinions of potentially "correct people" you've preemptively stifled because of my efforts. :D

I've been doing this for years. The more overtly activist Silicon Valley gets, the more effective I become at disguising myself as a socialist, the more network access I get to the "correct people" with "correct opinions", the more networks your system automatically prevents from creating new accounts.

Seems petty? Perhaps I could be more efficient? Why am I even doing this? I'm sure you could conjure up a myriad of reasons that make sense to you, so there's no need to give you anything more beyond that. You're a smart guy, you'll invent something. In fact, I'm relying on that self-healing moral plasticity.

You'll never see how you are part of the toxic tech culture. I have absolutely no interest in ever making you see this or changing your mind. The only interest I have is exploiting your moral plasticity.

Thanks for building and maintaining those censorship tools over the years. I can't wait to steer them against the people you claim you're protecting. And I really can't wait for your moral plasticity to justify the hijacking.

Don't forget to leak the IP to your "secret" network of resistance collaborators. My honeypots are waiting. <3
There's Raspian Lite, which is pretty much exactly that. You can just add a window manager onto it.
>If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out.

I used to think like this. After years and years of refining my own behavior, a non-work, non-"tech" friend let it slip that my fiends though I had turned into a non-confrontational, lawyer-sounding, people-pleaser. He wasn't wrong, I had gotten in the habit of always walking on eggshells, navigating every conversation like a minefield and letting myself be treated like a doormat. I did. After all, if I hadn't, I'd be one of those "bros" that only people who have never met a bro say are filling up the engineering departments.

The very next day I got chided about not being empathetic enough or whatever the buzzword was at the time. Maybe I could have kept up the facade if I was simply guilty by association. But it was specifically my behavior that was "toxic." That was it. And I'm out. I'm done.

The never-docile-enough nature of "tech" is what's toxic. I hadn't been able to feel comfortable in my own skin for years out of fear of being off-putting to anyone else. The people who's behavior is worth changing aren't listening anyway, so I'm done letting it be my fault, and I'm never over-correcting to make up for it again.

edit: Want to complain about something in "tech"? Why don't you (not you, specifically, parent poster) start with the ethics of your employer's products/practices.
Good short post. Here's a Joel classic from 2004 that is still relevant. It is a little long though:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
A lot of the swing states are controlled by Republican state governments who impose draconian racially targeted voter suppression measures yes, but this is true in every election. 2000 was won for Bush first by deep and massive illegal voter suppression in Florida (taking people who had the right to vote off the rolls because they had a black-sounding name, for example) and only second by the Supreme Court.

The Republicans have less support nationally and in states almost every election and it is getting worse for them as time goes on, voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering are the only things keeping them in office.
The 'underwriter' in dharma protocol is essentially current day middleman. You contradicted yourself by saying "trustlessly" in point 1 and then admitting to point 3. Point 2 is unenforceable without current legal system.
Yeah, that seems very close minded.
Still, gaming without the need for Windows is a huge plus that Wine is enabling for Linux gamers.
Of course I do. I consider myself liberal.
Windows might become a Linux distribution someday, the way it's going...
Sounds like I'll be divesting myself from any BlackRock investments. I invest to make money, not for some "social justice" platform which usually is justice only for the chosen. Plus the focus on the "climate", a non-science based position is dumb.
The proliferation of companies like that has probably increased the total number of jobs available in the economy. I don't see that as a bad thing.

If you have a problem with wages, then you really have a problem with the whole economic structure of our society. Most of those companies couldn't exist if they paid their grunt workers more so it's not like they have much of a choice.
> there is no good audio player on linux

Practically nothing beats mpv IMHO as a general purpose media player, with VLC being second best.

I can do this:

mpv https://danielamosboots.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-square
That was one reason he gave. I agree it's a poor one: being white in this country does not hurt employability in general, or in the tech industry.

However being over 40, having a family, and having experience certainly all can be detrimental.
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> I've been in SV for a decade now and I am not observing anything cult-like.

Over two decades, and the cult-like trappings are reinforced by the media to be sure. Maybe even originate there.

You're focusing on one small part of the article though. How do you feel about suggestions that you stay healthy, have friends that are not wrapped up in tech, have a life outside of The Company, etc.?

I think there was a lot to agree with.
You might want to check into Tiny Core Linux.
Wow thank you so much for the detailed response!

I've taken this comment back to my team and we're discussing our next moves now - I think the easiest and most immediate thing we can do is removing the scroll effect on the third screen to the homepage - hopefully that reduces some frustration for you (and i'm sure many others have felt).

Thank you for the kind words! Definitely trying to make an impact in the space :)
And because you can't really buy anything useful with your sh*tcoin or buttcoin, you can buy future IOU coins, ICOs!

This is a seriously great video.

The 'bubble' will only stop when we can finally use these currencies in the real world, until them, it's purely speculative on their potential future use.
Ah, James Damore, the guy who thought he knew stuff.

Seems like that is the worst possible example. It's like, self-defeating. It's like, yes, lets pick the guy who yet again wants to rationalize institutionalized sexism with bad science and thought it would be OK to tell his _coworkers_ why some of them are, scientifically, inferior to him. And expect for nobody to take offense to this and that he would not get fired for it.
> De novos, abbreviated 510(k)s, lesser used pathways.

De novo’s definitely, abbreviated 510(k)’s as well (that’s more of a requirements -> standard conformance challenge which a system like ours is particularly suited to demonstrate), but to your point they’re not that common.

> In my eyes it's really a question of how long FDA will be expecting traditional submissions while they roll out a model geared more around approval of companies vs products.

Yes but in a certain sense for many digital health companies this is already true, because they’re 510(k) exempt and FDA’s oversight occurs retroactively via QMS auditing.

The near term challenge for digital health, until precert comes online, is that there are a limited number of software experts at FDA. To the Agency’s credit, they have recognized this and are trying to remedy it. But the big problem we see with software submissions is that things get overlooked, and in such a way that speaks to an overworked reviewers. This of course leads to delays, which is why it’s very important for software submissions to be buttoned up. This is one the things we’re tryijg to make happen with our QMS, which generates more reports that clearly map from requirement->code->test.
I think you're entirely wrong.

There's a great bit in Johnstone's Impro where he has people paint simple pictures, and then shows them the work of others. The people exclaim at how bold, how creative the shown work is compared with theirs. The difference is that the old paintings are by kids, and the new ones are by adults. His point is that kids have a natural creativity that gets trained out of them over time. One can get that back. (In his case, he helps people get it back through improvisational theater classes. They work!)

90% of people have been forced to do things most of their lives. First through an industrial-age education system, then by employers running organizations designed to maximize compliance, not initiative, creativity, or agency. It's no wonder they have lost the joy of creation.

Tech for me was the ticket out of work like that. It took me years to work through my resentment. But now for me there's a joy in creation, a joy in service that doesn't match anything I can get with mere consumption-oriented entertainment. My nephew has been in a Montessori program since kindergarten, and he's far from inherently idle. He loves learning. He loves creation. We all do, deep down, if we're half encouraged in it.
It looks interesting - AR seems like an effective way to recreate or evoke the historical and mythological dimensions of a location, although as Pokemon Go demonstrated, it can also be intrusive.
There's a number of economists (not to mention the actual drivers of those services) who argue that these companies are bringing up the underclass by offering work opportunities to those who otherwise would find employment very difficult.
Partially correct; I don't like them, but it is precisely because I know too much about how Amazon is run.

Judging by your recent comments, you've been working there for about a couple of weeks at best. Get back to me when you've been around long enough for your RSUs to vest.
Getting Ready for a Friday Sesh with the Big Bad Wolf
Just don’t write any manifestos to your co-workers.
Ooops, that should read "Like many domain-specific algorithms" not "Like any ..."
As a consultant whose client portfolio used to include F500's in health, insurance, and NY finance, and whose portfolio now includes nothing but startups, and having had the pleasure of whiling away many languorous afternoons in the cube farms of those companies, I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that the average startup tech employee is "walking on eggshells" and being performatively docile compared to the day-1 baseline expectations of, to a first approximation, every non-tech company with more than 1,000 employees in the US.

The idea that tech employees are docile compared to the accounts receivable group at a major US insurance company seems pretty hard to support with evidence.
This is an empirical science. Any current consensus rules about what's acceptable derive ultimately from listening to people who are bothered by things. For example, in the 60s women started to object in large numbers to being wolf-whistled at when they walked past. Gradually, that became unacceptable in most workplaces. Many more things have become unacceptable since, and many more will in the future.

So there's no fixed rule, just a dialectic where people who are offended by things speak up, and people who run organizations listen and ban things that offend the most people. The process is always frustratingly slow, but it seems to be mostly moving in the right direction.
> You don't speak for all Americans. Many would be happy to do it.

Perhaps.

But if they took jobs with approximate pay and work conditions that the Chinese FoxConn employees in company-cities have, that wouldn't look anything like a modern American job.

It would look far more like an American coal mining job in the 1920s where workers toil under enormous pressure for meager wages and owe most of them (of not all or more) back to the company town for housing and food. This is AFAICT an accurate description of some of the worst working conditions of FoxConn.

And if there is such demand to work in such conditions, then how hasn't some enterprising American company started and supplied that dirt-cheap labor? There isn't enough supply of labor for the demand that you imagine exists.
Yes! I think the difference between minions and professionals is that professionals have standards. Doctors, for example, won't just do anything patients ask. Too many programmers seem to think they're minions. The job market for programmers is great; I wish more of us used that to stand our ground when asked to do something irresponsible or unethical.
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The irony is that there were probably significantly more female computer scientists and programmers in the 1960s than there are now. The industry has regressed severely from the early days.
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I believe webpack can run using multiple threads at least [0]

[0] https://github.com/webpack-contrib/thread-loader