skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tony Fadell says,

> I think that manufacturers and app developers need to take on this responsibility, before government regulators decide to step in.

Tim Cook recently said, "I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation". And Tony Fadell expresses a similar idea here. That no regulation is the best idea and that companies should "behave" so that the status quo of no regulation continues.

But how do they keep these opinions in the face of all the enormous evidence that companies are very specifically designed to be unable to self-regulate? The very structure of a corporation today means it is incentivized to sneak by and almost break as many laws as possible to be short-term profitable. This is incongruent with long-term health, growth, capitalism, and everything else, because it is a strong forcing factor towards very bad corporate behaviour. Constantly lobbying for "no regulation" or to act quickly before those big-bad-regulators come in to protect consumers from poison and addiction makes no sense.

Companies will behave badly as long as the law allows it. Suggesting that the companies should behave better while suggesting that there should be absolutely no consequence for bad behaviour legally is a bizarre doubethink. I don't get it.
Oh sure they're not forcing them to pee in a bottle, they just fire anyone who doesn't hit the performance quotas, which just happen to be barely attainable by somebody who takes no breaks.
(FYI, this was posted yesterady -- there were some interesting comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16842414)
It's great to read the ongoing stories from the boots-on-the-ground still doing the actual deployments: http://planet.laptop.org

Unfortunately as the project loses momentum these types of stories are dwindling; here's one example from the aggregator:

http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/2630
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849392
Watch SpaceX launch NASA’s latest exoplanet-hunting satellite
Sure, I can't tell you about white collar folks pissing in bottles, I may have exaggerated there.

But in healthcare (for nurses, therapists, aides) its quite prevalent that people don't drink/eat enough at work nor do they take proscribed breaks because productivity standards are so high.

Look I'm not saying its right or fair or good. I'm simply pointing out that its not unique to Amazon.
That's exactly his point. It may be commonplace in Spain or France, but not in the Netherlands or Denmark. So absolutely not all of Europe.
I don't think that is true. I haven't used Windows in years, but in the past I have talked to Microsoft support on the phone, as an individual without a support contract. To check that it is still possible, I went through the IT professional and developer support flow [1] and ended up with a button that said "Contact Microsoft. Have a technical support representative contact you. Start request". So it is at least possible to contact them, though maybe it isn't on the phone anymore.

If you are a paying enterprise customer of Microsoft you can get very good support. I briefly worked for a company that ran their compute infrastructure on Windows (~2000 physical servers), in the month I worked there they had multiple tickets open with Microsoft. If I remember correctly, one was for excess memory usage and Microsoft dug through a memory dump to find the problem.

I hear Google has improved for paying enterprise customers, under Diane Greene's leadership, but they certainly burned some bridges in the past with poor support.

Public bug trackers are super helpful for professionals, but the lack of one isn't necessarily an indication of poor customer service.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/assistedsupportproducts
> People want to give away responsibility.

What do you mean by that? What is the point of technology, if you don't save time or effort by using it? Can you explain what should people do?
> Concerns about digital sovereignty will be one of the primary forces shaping the tech industry for years to come.

They have been for the last 35 years or so.

> This action is ostensibly about sanctions on North Korea, but it’s clearly part of a bigger battle where both the US and China are trying to reduce their technological reliance on, and vulnerability to, the other.

No, it has the exact opposite effect. It reduces China's reliance on the United States. Normally the United States would welcome such dependencies. By playing this card early it loses its power at a moment in time when it doesn't matter much giving the Chinese ample time to source their bits and pieces elsewhere or even to set up domestic production.

> Governments are realizing that they can’t depend on companies controlled by potential adversaries.

Again, you have it backwards. The United States is giving up control over a company, it's not that the United States is forbidding it's own companies to import hardware from China, it is forbidding US companies from exporting components.

> If the US and China got into a war, does anyone doubt that the US would seriously consider ordering Apple and Google to deliver “updates” turning devices in China into bricks or spying tools? Or demand that FB hand over the private messages of all foreign users?

I don't think anybody would be dumb enough to assume that.

> And does anyone doubt that China would consider doing the same with Huawei or ZTE phones and networking equipment?

Neither, but it doesn't have anything to do with the matter at hand. The US and China are - for now - not in a war. Though given the degree of uncertainty and randomness in the present day configuration you can't rule it out either.
That's a compromise. Settings is deep-searchable and unified between platforms. Control Panel is still there for backwards compatability (including with MS's own stuff)
Yes but it certainly isn't as flexible and for networking computers requires ensuring uids and gids don't clash with local users. There's talk of replacing posix acls with nfs4 acls, which were modelled on Windows ACLs.
>On the other side of the coin, if they hadn't spent the money on reinvesting, they wouldnt be the size they are now or employ as many people.

Where is the evidence? Whose to say how much faster they would have grown without the employee misery and churn?
But as a customer, relying on SaSS solutions is so convenient. You can't just preach to people about the long term collective harms caused by SaSS - in game theory terms, the strategy where everyone willingly endures the pain of non-SaSS solutions to avoid collective harms is not a Nash equilibrium
complaints about study funding aside, checkpoint inhibitors really are stunningly effective for some cancers.

it’s the first major advance we’ve had in oncology in maybe 25 years.
If you're buying AMZN on the market, that's coming from other investors, not the company itself. It's already sold that stock (the IPO was back in 96) and benefited directly from it at that time.
Nope. That's exactly why money isn't spent on people. There is no reason for Amazon to invest in them.

I'm not a fan of people thinking they will lose their job for taking breaks, but why would Amazon invest money in something that may go away in 5 years? They'll invest in the R&D of the replacement.
Nah, this is the worst possible outcome for ZTE. They are going to be severely crippled in the international market without being able to use SoCs from Qualcomm (particularly since they haven't invested in creating their own chips like Huawei and Samsung have)
I like the sentiment, but I would rather a potential hire just apply cold than if a company told me to look at a candidate they just let go (even if it was google).

Warm intros from an entity that just rejected you would be a terrible signal.
Europe/Japan are as worried as USA about IP theft and totally unfair access to the Chinese market.

India and South-East Asia countries have no love affair with China.

Africa is more and more disillusioned with China `investments`.
It's almost as if someone's feeling bad for having given up their own indipendent e-store to favour a certain DRM ridden publisher.
The Vending Machine That Spits Out Short Stories
And I doubt the AWS staff is peeing in bottles to make their numbers.
As a renter you pay for services that you have to provide when you're an owner.

When I rented, I shopped around and made sure I found a landlord that wasn't bilking me as a revenue source.

Keep in mind that your analogy can be applied to property owners who think they can just occupy a house for a few years and walk away with a massive profit.
It got a new owner. I think they reduced but didn’t eliminate the surface area of the questionable ads. This url is a forum and appears clean on mobile.
I'd say the author's own work stands in opposition to his conclusion: vi is over 40 years old at this point and hasn't yet been rendered obsolete.
I don't know about that joke anymore. Being an Amazon customer used to be great, but the deliveries are bordering on ridiculously horrible now.

I order something on Prime, then it doesn't show up when I expect it to, I get no notification of any delays, and then when I log in to see what's going on they have changed the original expected date so I can't even see what I was originally promised unless I took a screen shot.

This has been the case on 2 thirds of my deliveries over the past 3 months. And I'm not even going into the sham that is 3rd party selling.
I'd just like to share a story from XKCDB, the chatlog of XKCD's IRC channel. http://www.xkcdb.com/10124

XMPPwocky: My own https://xkcd.com/349/ story. Yesterday, I worked my way from "I should try installing Qubes OS on my dual-boot" to "I have no working boot discs, no CD drive, and no OS on the actual hard drive". Today, i got to try and fix that.

XMPPwocky: The issue is, this is my only computer. so I can't make any bootable media to boot from, except I also had, tucked away in my closet, an OLPC XO-1. Aaand I couldn't find the charger.

XMPPwocky: What I could find? The hand-crank charger.

XMPPwocky: To make a long story short, I cranked through the
entire download and installation of an Ubuntu liveCD.

XMPPwocky: would not recommend
Stopping an 18 wheeler loaded with freight for N minutes is a lot more expensive than a single distribution plant employee not packing boxes for N minutes.
>single individuals have too much influence over international commerce and globally significant arrangements

Care to elaborate? Which individuals? Sounds more like this was the culmination of an investigation by both the Commerce and Justice departments. And I'm fairly certain the sanctions themselves were imposed by the US Congress back in 2010.
I don't think that makes it safer to touch the package after peeing in a bottle. Employees are required to wash their hands after using the restroom. I believe that state law may even require it.
Rather unconventional, but Windows 10 on desktop and mobile do have a Feedback Hub [1] where Windows 10 users are able to provide all sorts of feedback, either as a suggestion or a problem. All the feedbacks are public and users can freely vote them up to draw more attention on them. The more vote they have, the more likely they receive a response from the developers and also get the priority in the queue of issues to be resolved.

I use it every so often when I notice something peculiar. None of my feedbacks actually became so popular. Even then I know one of them has been fixed. The fix probably didn't come because I have pointed it out, but I was happy about it regardless.

I couldn't find a web-link to the Hub, so I think it is not entirely public, but surely available to the Windows 10 users.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4021566/windows-10-...
Interesting theory. One point towards another bad behaviour that incentivized crypto-assets can lead to..
The measure of innovation and progress is how a society treats it's most vulnerable members.

With Amazon, it's hard to imagine all the smart people that are being paid well, and used indirectly to squeeze the folks on the "factory floor", however unintentional.
My bad. I did post it a minute before.
They didn't say to buy Amazon stocks.
I think the posts here are almost all about comparing repeated-dose regimens of Ketamine vs SSRIs; otherwise if we were comparing the effectiveness of single doses, we might as well claim there isn't a body of evidence that suggests SSRIs have an anti-depressant effect for much longer than just a single day, right? Or do you mean that the repeat dose just a week later (, and so on,) would have little anti-depressant effect?
That depends on your definition of a glass.

Most people will pour a much to large portion, if told to put a glass of wine.
Of course some know but don't care, but the majority I met don't know.
Deliveries are not done by Amazon where I live - it's usually 3rd party.
>So China will be 'open for business'

And open to steal your IP as they always have.
Because you get first class support for modern JavaScript while staying true to being a static site first.
Microsoft Has Come a Long Way
Retail positions are different than warehouse positions. It's like how UPS drivers make bank, but the guys who load the trucks break their backs for scratch (even with union representation!).
It's more nuanced than that, of course. For example the technological barrier of "our payments infra suck, so credit cards charge a minimum fee" rule out some kinds of micropayment business models (other barriers like UX or cultural attidudes do too), but not models like Spotify's. I would consider a different business model necessary but not sufficient.
cool to hear. i will check out the latest, and report perf problems, if any.

(i hope my comment didn't come across as overly negative. i am very excited about xi! :-)
Why spend more if you can spend less?
That's whataboutism.

There are people in terrible conditions all over the world that US citizens can do little about. When it happens in the country where we can vote on laws and candidates, we can do something about it. So it's important to focus on those cases and set an example.
Yes, it is incredibly easy, except when you upgrade to tensorflow 1.6 and it fails with [a cuda error][1] and after couple of sleepless nights you realize nvidia has deleted the docker image of cuda version 70xx from dockerhub and you need to find the right commit that works from their git repo and build everything yourself.

[1]: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/17566
It's the same for many companies. I'm experiencing (what I believe) Nvidia bug. There's some strange page, I submitted that bug and I know nothing of it, absolutely zero further communication, I'm not even sure that this page works.
I disagree. If you regulate the company doesn't enforce the results of the regulation then you further punish like this.
To not further punish would be to cloud the waters. Business wants to know where it stands and for the waters to be clear. These guys clearly broke the rules and are being punished and all the other companies will be pleased about the clarification of where the lines are.
But they bring the products to your door...
>abolish health inspections.

Well, it would be interesting to look at impartial cost/efficiency research regarding "health inspections". I routinely travel to countries where those inspections are just a pure formality, or completely non-existent - and, I must say, in most cases there's no trouble finding a good, safe place to eat.
Author here. Thanks all for bringing this to the HN front page.

The jist of the article is getting a PWA into the app stores is harder than it needs to be, especially on iOS. Between Google, Apple, and Microsoft, I found Google's Play Store to be the simplest and quickest store to get a PWA published in.

Another interesting bit is that web technologies haven't caught up to native. My PWA isn't super complex -- it's a glorified music player -- and yet integrating into the OS (now playing song on the lock screen, for example) was painful and non-standard, particularly on iOS.

All that said, I'm quite excited about PWAs. I think they will win in the long run, and will eventually (~5 years) become the dominant type of app in mobile and desktop app stores.
Imagine it would get even worse ;-)
Good point. I think people have to learn and start with their own backyards.

People in the east may look to the west culturally in some ways.
Long haul truckers have a goal they are trying to reach, an end of the line that completes their job. It's reasonable to expect that they would occasionally take opportunities to cut time down to reach their destination faster.

Warehouse jobs have no goal, no end in sight, it's a nonstop churn and having to use tricks to shave your time down doesn't result in extra time off, it just results in more work.
The Chinese are doing exactly what the United States, Europe and Japan have been doing for the last 50 years or so, they are flooding the world with their products while at the same time protecting their home market. Japan did this far worse than China is doing it at the moment.

I'm all for leveling the playing field, but I'd hope it would be done with some intelligence rather than these knee jerk responses that actually achieve the opposite effect. Nobody forced United States and EU companies to relocate their manufacturing to the other side of the planet. If we want to be less reliant on the Chinese then it starts with no longer buying the cheapest crap possible.

IP games are the last resort of failed companies, maybe it will also be the last resort of countries that have lost all their other abilities.
Yea I ignored that one thinking the IRS would just laugh but I suppose a naive crypto youtuber might try such a thing.
anti-paywall: https://outline.com/dv5m2N https://archive.is/smORn https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Fart...
I did not downvote you, but I will speculate that the single question does present as somewhat confrontational and, depending on mood, might have been interpreted as combative.

If I understand your meaning and if your post's "confrontational" mood is/was the issue, you might have cast your post declaratively instead of interrogatively.

For example,

> Using compensation to buy stocks would benefit the company even further even though the company may unfairly exploit its employees. This would run counter to the employee's own interests.

Or something along those lines.

Recasting questions as statements sometimes reduces the rhetorical signals which can be interpreted confrontation.

EDIT: Remove double quotes; add emphasis. Clarify last sentence. Use past perfect in first sentence. Recast second sentence.
Absolutely agree with your point. I don't think the practice in any industry (trucking, healthcare or distribution centers) is okay but I'm simply pointing out its not a unique problem.
I ran a semi-distributed team. 4 hours seems to be the sweet spot. Once you start moving to 5 hours, it's just a little too far to do easily and some things start being dropped. One thing I found helpful was to have flexible hours as well. When I was 4 hours away, I would start work at 10 or 11 local time (or 6am client hours).
I haven't ever heard of holotropic breathwork, will give it a go, thanks. I have had really good results from meditation, especially when sleep is out of the question.
Ask HN: Is there an easy way to search your own favorites on HN?
It's .5mg/kg, so even 50 mg is enough for a pretty big guy. 500mg would knock you out for awhile. He might be misplacing a decimal there.
I have no issues with the Swisscom box.
As a Microsoft employee, I can say that that feedback is taken pretty seriously in most teams, especially if the description is good or if the problem recorder/screenshot tool is used. It's not all based on up votes.
Well, increased buying of AMZN would drive the price higher, and ostensibly, this percolates up to Amazon and it's employees.
I agree, but Amazon maximizes their profit by using these conditions. They eek out profit margins by using human sacrifices.
"Changing the world", one bottle at a time...
Erlang is not a panacea. It excels as a middle layer, one that orchestrates work. It's not a tool to perform intensive calculations.
Combating Alert Fatigue with a Global Issue Dashboard
The "funnel problem" manifests itself as a data problem. More importantly, the "funnel problem" is a social problem. A modest level of commitment to learning software is much more modest than a modest level of commitment to fixing software. Learning how to use open source mapping software is based on the immediate practical value of getting from A to B. Learning how to fix open source mapping software requires a different set of values, it requires a commitment to a philosophy/ideology/goal of arguable merit. I'm not arguing for or against it. Only pointing out that taking the moral high ground leads to the idea that signing up and working through a tutorial is a reasonable act by ordinary users when the alternative is Google Maps.
See also: Japan, Korea, Russia and to a lesser extent India.

The only countries that have strong IP laws are the US and the EU and it works against us as much as it works for a small group of very wealthy countries and individuals. The whole idea of IP originated here.
Shitty jobs is already spreading. Uber driver, Deliveroo biker, and their hundreds of copycats, all of them where "you're not an employee, you're a contractor".
How does their stock vest?
FWIW: I think Amazon's stock vesting schedule for ICs is reasonable considering the sizable hiring bonus (iirc ~$20k for new graduates). Stock grants are intended to reflect an employee's ownership in the company, and rapidly increase with tenure.

That said... Amazon is definitely not human-oriented. Leadership within established business units is brutally efficient, with far too much faith in their metric goals. Ask any engineer about HR's survey tool, I think that's a prime example of cultural decay within Amazon.

Amazon used to be "customer obsessed" with a strong engineering culture... these days the cultural values are "maximize revenue, minimize costs".
>(particularly since they haven't invested in creating their own chips like Huawei and Samsung have)

They can't really 'invest' in creating their own chips. Currently, all the countries that have semiconductor technology have put them on their export control and won't hand it over to china at any cost. IIRC China overbid for the tech (Was it Micron?) and the government blocked them.
> Websites ARE the ads, because that's their point.

Sounds like that's a perfectly profitable business model, broadly defined
So I need a replacement for broken GPS cradle mount. Can I get at Costco?, no, but I can buy a new GPS for a couple hundred. At Amazon I can buy this 6 dollar item and bundled with few more low price items I can get it delivered for free.

Costco has far fewer SKUs and sell in bulk only high quality and price items. So they can afford to pay well because they only entertain customers which are spending far more for fewer high selling items and not few dollar obscure replacement parts.
White collar jobs are somewhat different than. We have choice, we have power.

The best bet for amazon warehouse employees, and delivery drivers, would be to unionise. This would lead to either
1) More investment in robotics, taking away menial jobs
2) Better conditions for shelf-stackers.

Both are good -- as a society we should not be making people work when the work could be done by robots.
China isn't open for business, unless you want to keep only 50%.

America just reacts, I wished the rest of the world treated China as they threat others
Doesn't MediaTek provide complete SoC alternatives to everything that Qualcomm offers? It seems like all the low-end Chinese Android brands are already using MediaTek chips.
It's not just reducing hours. For example you might start getting rotated around different shifts. They'll make your schedule as irregular as possible to encourage you to accrue points or quit. My friend saw this happen to several coworkers in her two years there. Towards the end her direct manager even asked her why she hadn't quit yet.