skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The states bankrupted their own pension systems by borrowing against them. That money was there, it was promised early on and it was funded by bonds. If the city starts to run out of money, borrowing from a pension is not the fault of the worker. It's the fault of the god damn fucking state. The money was there.

If you fell short because the market shrunk and you told your workers it was privately vested in mutual funds, that's fine and just pay out everyone less. But most cities and states backed them by bonds and then borrowed against pensions when they started running out of money thinking they could make it up later. What the actual fuck?! No. You're not going to be able to do that. You're an idiot mayor/governor for even thinking that. Leave money that isn't yours alone.
If you don't care about performance and you don't care about having an electric car, why are you considering a Tesla?
There was a recent incident where an assault victim was forbidden from speaking at her attacker's sentencing (criminal!) hearing because of a non-disclosure agreement attached to a past civil settlement.

The US's approach to secrecy is... a mess.
So looking forward to the Metal renderer. Any idea when it will makes into a release?
Many states do not require a carseat in a taxi. California is not currently one of them, but I can see this changing when more vehicles on the road are automated.
Scene Dancing in Virtual Reality: A Mini Tutorial
The low floor gives the opportunity to have more headroom in the back. Yes, if you're used to sitting in front seats, it's lower than you're used to.
Site Down?

Edit: Backup now. When the Story was posted here, site was down.
The anti-redstater bot is still in R&D.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/13/security-robots-are-being-...
Justify it to tourists? How to we justify it to ourselves.

Richest city in the richest state in the richest country in the world and we can't even provide a place for people to live. It's a failure at every level, there are too many culprits to list.

Aside: I thought it was a great touch that in this article each homeless person pictured was mentioned by name. Humanizing these people is something we can all do without spending a penny. If someone stops you on the street asking for a dollar, at least have the courtesy to look them in the eye and politely decline. I've had a number of people thank me more forcefully for that small gesture than actually giving them money (of course, give if you can!).
Bitfinex and Tether Hold 3B USD
You can get around that with contract-to-hire (to make sure people will work out). California also bans non-compete agreements and has 11 month turnaround times for tech workers. It's a place that has innovation because it protects workers rights and also moves, incredibly, incredibly fast.
So based on that rate I should be able to easily purchase my ~550 sq. ft. apartment. In fact the payments on a 30 year mortgage would be about $1300/month. Clearly the problem is the price of land, made even less affordable because of density maximums. If the price of a lot could be split over 6 people, a lot more people could afford to purchase a house.
Black Triangles
IANAL but I suspect their only avenue for recourse would be private arbitration as chosen by the employer. This is pretty standard language in modern employment contracts and from what I understand very few things are capable of invalidating it. (unpaid wages is one example I think can void such a clause)
The problem I have with products like Asana has always been context. It’s just too much hassle for businesses with very unique processes, often requiring something more custom built, and of course, a deep introspection of data.
I wonder if Amazon would be open to reselling access to their distribution centers, a la cellular networks. I feel like the upside to them would be enormous.
Yes it was indeed heartening to see names rather than “a homeless man”.
I understand that. My point was that the modern tech tree has many ...optimistic technologies that don't even exist now but were considered "close" or even already developed in that time period like advanced biotech (like the parent comment mentioned) or fusion power (cold fusion).
not true - we have a historically stagnant minimum wage artificially deflating salaries; they are surprisingly not market or economy based in many fields, simply '2usd more than minimum wage, y our doing great!'

.. when minimum wage should be ~50% higher at least. Yay for market distortions.
Seems like it: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/blog.asana.com
When I first traveled to San Francisco I was amazed by the homeless problem. And I lived in NY where there’s a substantial number of homeless.

Sadly, each time I travel back, it seems worse and I’m jaded. I bring cash, you run out after just a block or two. I was staying in the Embarcadero and every restaurant and shop had a homeless person outside the door. Do even if you just gave a dollar or your change, I ran out.

This is a difficult problem and I don’t even know how to measure it, much less solve.
Because people are pussies who are afraid of risk.

At the moment, I still appreciate the idea of unionizing to improve the voice of non-management in certain decisionmaking, and especially for salaried workers, I think a group mentality making sure people aren't getting abused on hours is great!

But is it worth the risk to talk about it? After all, I've been told you might get fired by management! Oh my, well, I'd have to elect members, and sign papers... let's just keep working.
I've had no problems with the Pixel 2, I actually love. it.

So I guess what I'm trying to say here is:

OK GUY.
To be clear: 1 and 3 are not a risk to consumers; they are merely an inconvenience.
Because you expect to have a completely different set of coworkers every 11 months and everyone dreams of running their own company.
Crypto comes 'from Ancient Greek κρυπτός (kruptós, “hidden, secret”).'
Because we are not actually that smart. We are probably too smart to understand that collective bargaining looks at the survival as a group which protects it’s members. Most technologists are young and haven’t experienced hardships that would have been resolved readily by a union. These hardships include disparate health care (less likely to impact the youth), vacation time, involuntary separation, retirement etc...
And it gets more hairy because unemployment in the US (in most states) needs to be approved by your employer. That's really fucked up. If you think it helps prevent abuse of the system, I'd rather some people abuse the system and everyone get unemployment rather than people have to fight shitty employers for it.

Unemployment should be insured by the state. I've heard social workers tell me "Of course you should apply. It's your money" but I've also heard HR people tell me companies in most states have to pay out unemployment which is why they fight it so hard.

Anyone care to chime in on how unemployment generally works and who pays for it in the US?
The suggestion is that unions need not continue to exist just because they take credit for accomplishing something in the past. And then you say, "Oh yeah, well they can be credited with accomplishing something in the past." Okay. We've gone in a circle now.
I have been investing into creating my own business https://bitbank.nz a company that helps people investing in crypto currency. We provide live charts,apis, bulk data and ai forecasts
Should we have a law to have a 0 hour work day ?
Do you spend much time on Hacker News? Such opinions are expressed here regularly. More seriously, it's not unusual to see, say, Florida casually compared to, say, Eastern Europe without any sense of how absurdly one-sided such comparisons actually are (e.g. on measures like GDP, standard of living, number of jobs, etc).

Opinions are opinions. That's fine. But what I find as a Missourian living in NYC is that people on the coasts (who didn't move there from somewhere else) are largely ignorant of important factual properties of the South and the Midwest. It's not uncommon to see someone off by an order of magnitude about, say, GDP or population or whatever (expressed with extreme confidence, of course).
It seems possible that the external is the trigger to allow oneself to feel and acceptance and support internally. For me, that was the difference maker in talk-therapy; I learned how to treat myself better, tutored by an external resource.
It doesn't really invalidate his argument considering the quote was a summary of ancient writing in a student's thesis.
the techcrunch thread on same topic is bigger (but with a less obvious title): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269884
Based on my research it seems like Bittrex allows the trading of Tether and lets people cash out to USD. Poloniex also. Seems like a round about way of getting USD out of Bitfinex.
I saw policeman detain a man at the airport in Barcelona for taking a pictures with his cellphone at the baggage claim, which confused me a lot.
That's because we've outsourced enforcing government's accountability to The People...to government.

See the problem?
There are way too many "highly opinionated" productivity apps which are not built with enough freedom and "leeway" for anything but a very basic workflow. It's almost like the software is built for how the company itself works or from an idealistic design standpoint than for the messiness of complicated work.

I still think a properly configured JIRA instance is the best framework for a growing software company to build upon. It's very easy to misconfigure or mess up JIRA but done correctly, it's one of the best pieces of software for getting things done at a larger company (50+ people).
"Contract of adhesion" pretty well covers it. Ask to strike the arbitration clause, bait the potential employer to say "take it or leave it", get that in writing, and you can sue to your heart's content later.
Look for someone who also does commercial work.
And yet, Amazon fulfillment centers are fully staffed.

Side note: The minimum wage is a slave wage, as it’s not indexed to inflation.
Strfriend was very good, it helped me learn regex in a big way. Thanks!
My mother was in IBEW for ~40 years, and went on strike a couple of times. Grandfather was a union organizer. I was in IBEW very briefly as a teenager working for GTE.

My father went from being a union steward to having grievances filed against him as a member of management during his ~40 years at GE.

I've seen both sides.

imo, unions are best suited for workers who have no leverage: at jobs where the worker is an interchangeable part, or is unspecialized, or where the labor market is flooded, or when they want to minimize changing employers - software development is none of the above.

Personally, I think software developers should be paid 2-4x what they are now - I say that as a developer, and as an employer who cut their checks at a company I helped start. Their value-add is just way higher than the current pay rate reflects.

How to achieve that? Maybe a professional organization is needed - similar to doctors - but a union and all its trappings? Meh.
You can apply every one of those to companies as well. If companies 'modernise' the need for unions will go away.
There's someone building a huge one not far from where I live in the Ozarks in SW Missouri. It's at least 4 containers high and a few dozens of containers were used to build it.

The last time I saw it (a few months ago) they were finishing off the exterior and it was stunningly beautiful. You'd not know it was built with containers from an outside view.
You're somebody I pay for a job done. You could leave me at any time if somebody else offers you more money, and, statistically, you're probably going to in about 2 years. You don't even have to give me 2 week's notice; that's just a courtesy.

Employment is a voluntary relationship between two people. Sounds like you're trying to make it voluntary for you but not me.
What flaws?
Donald Trump Just Asked Congress to End the Rule of Law
This is sad and depressing to read. I was out in SF last week for a tech conference. A great time to escape the cold Chicago winter for arguably good SF weather all year round. Unfortunately, politics and poor city management has made this city much harder to live in. I would hop off the BART at Powell station and smell the strong stench of human excretion, or tents right outside the 16th Mission St station entrance. I feel bad for the homeless, but I don’t think the city is doing a good job is helping their situation either. I love SF for all the opportunities it brings, but hate the fact that it isn’t well distributed to all its residents, both the rich and the poor. SF highlights what’s good (and bad) about America’s current situation imo.
Why only ~50% higher? The minimum wage should be at least $100k a year. That would do wonders at fighting income inequality.
Once again even on star talk bill specifically mentions GMOs

https://youtu.be/6tn6ohImsZ0?t=2m45s
None of the stakeholders in American for-profit healthcare have any incentive to reduce costs so everything just keeps ratcheting up. Growth can't be achieved by increasing the population of sick people so the only other option is to raise prices. The insurance companies do benefit from this. They agree to cover the inflated pricing so that their 20% cut can be bigger. If ACA permitted rational price controls this whole problem would have been reigned in.
Another me-too from Google. It doesn't matter how much money they put on it, it won't work until they do something innovative. Apple had to do it to get where they are.
No possible effort by a steel workers union is going to stop globalization from hollowing out US manufacturing. That's a problem that has to be tackled at a higher level.
I think your point 1) is just a fantastic illustration of how effective companies have been at villianizing and attacking unions.

For example, Walmart could stomach some unionized workers, but they straight up close down stores in retaliation, and I bet it's not just Walmart.

Those stories then get played as "unions destroy jobs" when it's really companies are so beholden to stock holders they wont let workers get any standing to bargain.

That's just one example, union busting and breaking is a business at this point and companies pay for advice and strategies.

I get you're probably not trying to seem biased, but it just shows how deeply the US culture has turned against what seems like such a reasonable thing, workers being able to lobby together for fair treatment. Otherwise it's really just letting companies set the rules and workers being forced to play by them.
This is some next-level privileged snark. Your attitude is remarkably selfish and closed-minded. I want to live in your bubble.
As long as California's home construction continues to be below population growth, it will keep getting worse. There are a lot of causes you can point at, but until there's actually enough housing getting built, they're all red herrings.
I knew a friend: pretty smart guy who was working on his masters, hated his field and decided to go to trucking. He's been in a union for decades. He talked about union vs non-union drivers. A lot of companies will tell you all this crap about how union shops pay less, lay off tons of people, etc. etc.

He told me union trucking agencies do tend to lay a lot of people off after the busy seasons, but their contracts allow them to take other loads during those times, and many of them get hired right back on in a month or two. If you really compared union and non-union shops and factor in benefits and healthcare, you come out way ahead in union shops.

He talked about FexEx and all the videos they put out showing they're a better company to work for and how you can go from truck driver to pilot. He told me UPS is a union shop and they spend less money on that bullshit advertising and more giving their workers benefits, better wages and hours. (FedEx is non-union and UPS is union right? I might have this backwards ..was a long time ago.. anyway...).

I watched him debate with a hard core, franchise owning (he owned like 8 Jimmy John's), libertarian, anti-union guy at brunch once and they had a really good rational argument about unions.
Unions, like police, serve as a corrective force. Sometimes needed and often not, they are good only contingently.

It is sad that they are often seen only as either hateful or a panacea.
That sounds like an improvement. Slaves used to be paid nothing.
It would force the organization to its knees in my opinion. Unions for work in showbiz are ridiculous in that they restrict people to members of a specific union; e.g. All adjustments to an actor'a appearance must be done by the appropriate member of the cast, insofar as a sound guy couldn't brush a hair off of the shoulder of an actor.

Imagine the same craziness applied to which kinds of code you would be able to work on. I don't see the need for crippling the actions that enable our employers from innovating quickly for what amounts to more beaurecracy.
A few, but not most. I guess the presumption is we need unions otherwise the whole discussion is moot.
Star Merger and Nova Predicted for 2022
is this still the best approach to this problem? I would think that a GAN or similar would be better for keeping the correct features for things like faces etc.
No, the OP left that out de facto. And it’s disengenious to ignore the primary drivers.
In the wrong direction (male fetus to mother, not sure they tested the other direction), but...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1634/stemcells.2004-01...
"The male cells were found almost exclusively in Block 1, corresponding largely to the olfactory bulb."

Now this is starting to be interesting!
Weird how the pension system is the responsibility of the state to operate, but somehow when the state doesn't put enough money in it, it's the union's fault.
> There is another side of this coin too. I just finished reading The Box, a book on the advent of containerization, and it's appalling how unions fiercely fought any sort of mechanization. A job that required only 1-2 longshoremen mandatorily needed many more because unions said so. Days, and sometimes weeks, were wasted on strikes when a consensus couldn't be reached. Jobs that weren't needed anymore were still forced to be kept because any labor-saving innovation was undesirable. In the end, it was more cost-effective to compulsorily retire the longshoremen with a guaranteed income than to fight them.

To be fair, that's a failing with those unions, and in a sense part of the systemic problems with US unions; plenty of unions elsewhere saw automation as inevitable and got training for their members to find jobs in other areas.
>Does that mean I should not be allowed to coordinate with my coworkers

Companies aren’t allowed to coordinate together to get what they consider to be “fair” prices. I think it’s crazy that you actually are, because it’s everyone else that loses out because of your collusion.
Everyone expects to change jobs every 2 years. Unions don't help you get a new job, they help you keep your old one. Changing jobs would probably be more difficult.
> That’s true, but I think the rote programmers are making much less than the awesome folks.

What do you define as rote programming? The interview process seems pretty rote to me. Literally the same questions recycled over and over again.
my favorite is the last one:

> Tokia.io token sale is live! Secure the -35% discount for early investors.

spot on given the (imo) insane speculation that's been building around block-chain currencies for the past year.
I had good luck. As mentioned above, finding a good GC is not easy because they do not advertise. It is entirely word of mouth.

I live in the pacific NW where there are a lot of old craftsman style homes. High quality woodwork details is the theme.

I started by calling high end custom furniture shops and asked them if they could do built in cabinetry work. They did not, but they recommended a number of woodworkers that moved on from furniture into contracting (carpentry, custom window sashes, storm windows, etc...).

Then, I asked them what GCs they have worked with in the past and which they would recommend.

A few names came up often, I spoke with them, picked one, and was really happy with the work.

I guess the tl;dr is, good GCs use highly skilled subs, so find the subs then ask which GCs they recommend.
Who owns the 'innovation', and who benefits from that ownership? Did the advent of containerization mean the longshoremen could now only work 2 days a week and explore the fine arts with the 3 days they now gained ?
Just like we have a progressive tax structure, I believe most regulations regarding corporate obligations should be progressive.

Your decision to callously let one employee go, when your pre-tax income is $1,000,000,000, is negligible. The impact to that person is the security of their family and future.

Maybe if your PTI is $100,000, and you're a local startup or a bar, or a small MSP, it's more reasonable that you need flexibility in staffing and can't support any "slack" in employee output.

But yes, it is absolutely asymmetrical, to the benefit of the party that has the power to withstand ending the relationship more. Which one is that?
I wouldn't complain about a $100k/yr minimum if it was actually sustainable (I doubt it) but the 50% is mostly intended as a response to the fact that the current minimum wage is dramatically below the poverty line, in some cases to the point that you need more than 80 hrs of work a week just to pay rent and buy food.

It wasn't always this way. The federal minimum wage used to be livable.
“Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.“ I’ve tried the product and if that was their mission I couldn’t tell. Trying to force some sort of higher purpose into every company seems disingenuous at best. Seems like a stretch for an impact investment firm.
We had a huge HPV debate in Denmark in 2017 because of the problems surrounding it, but as usually it turned out all the fearmongering was completely unfounded and that the vaccine was much safer than the alternative.

Flatearthers are harmless. I’m not even completely convinced they are not just collectively trolling us. Anti-vaxxers mean while are responsible for weakening herd immunity in western civilization and by doing so, the killing of hundreds of people who got sick and died because of it.

The measles were basically extinct, now they are even killing people in countries with low amounts of anti-vaxxers. And why? Because a group of stupid people got together on Facebook and decided they wanted to create a version of reality where vaccines were evil.

Vaccines have side effects. Not taking them, however, has much worse effects. Worst case means you’re quite literally murdering people who can’t survive neither the vaccines nor the disease, best case is things like the HPV were it’s just you or your children getting completely avoidable cancer (still extremely tragic).

Hell, even Donald Trump has done far less lasting harm than anti-vaxxers.
Many developers often go "Gosh, I wish I could do software the right way, securely and using the right technology, but if I say anything I will just get fired and replaced by someone else".

If you had a union maybe you would feel more confident standing up to your supervisor and telling them "No I won't do this shady/immoral/incorrect thing".

It's important to consider the ways in which lawyers and doctors have "professional organizations" that play one of the biggest roles unions do (gatekeeping, professional code enforcement). It's why they can sometimes say "No, I won't put profit ahead of my choosing the correct procedure".
If you are a frontend engineer perhaps you should leave the php code to the backend developers who understand it. If you are a full stack living in a frontend world that's different. A union could help enforce that. Now your company is forced to hire a backend developer or relabel you full stack with addional pay.

There is a reason why developers need to leave a place ever few years.