skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, rant coming. (I assure the mods this is impromptu and not copy-pasted; verify yourself.)

I don't see a lot of productive progress being made on this question. Judges constantly try to apply conflicting standards of whether someone is "really" an employee, but you can't make progress on that question until you can measurably answer why you're asking that question to begin with.

For another context, take "is alcoholism really a disease?" If we don't want to be stuck in unproductive talking-past-each-other, we have to transform that into a more concrete query, like, "are alcoholics responsive to social pressure?" or "does the urge to drink stem from a chemical imbalance?"

Those questions, you can actually -- in principle -- make progress on. Maybe you find some chemical under which alcoholics stop drinking because it doesn't appeal to them anymore. Or maybe you find that shunning changes their behavior, and the appeal to "alcoholism being a disease" maps to a specific game-theoretic strategy.

Or maybe shunning just turns out to make alcoholics miserable and resort to more expensive, covert techniques to get their fix. Or maybe the evidence is perpetually ambiguous. But at least you can make progress on those questions.

What are the corresponding criteria for the question "is this Uber driver really an employee?" How would you know you got it wrong? What are you really optimizing for when you legislate a distinction between contractor and employee?

For example, let's say you proposed a new test A, under which every purchase of labor makes someone an employer and employee. You buy a haircut? Great, you need to send this amount to this fund to pay for their unemployment insurance. And you need to give them this notice about their rights as a worker. And you need to pay into this worker's comp fund.

Or let's say you proposed a test B under which the buyer is the sole decider of how to classify, and every employer/buyer in the world elects to classify the provider/worker as an employee, and screams in glee as they offload all the liability and expenses onto the worker. By what standard, concretely, do you know you erred?

It doesn't work to say "that's absurd". What's important is to say the specific desiderata that make that situation absurd.

I have yet to see someone propose a (satisfying) standard/desideratum to ground the employee/contractor distinction in law. The closest I've seen is "we want to make sure workers don't get oppressed" (or some equivalent expression), but that doesn't suffice -- there has to be some reason you don't go with the A test above. What is that?
How many is “many” though? I’m assuming slightly more than thought Star Wars was real, and slightly fewer than think Iron Man was real. That’s not ignorance, that’s mental illness.
It is a surprisingly nice looking website for an academic project.
Relevant for non-residents / foreign owned LLC :

https://onlinetaxman.com/us-llc-tax-haven-for-foreigners/

If you don’t have a dependent agent that substantially furthers your business in the US and don’t have an office in the US, you are not subject to US tax. Even if the LLC generates income in the US, the income is not taxed in the US.

Furthermore, if you reside in a country with an applicable tax treaty with the US, then you would not be subject to US tax. Since you reside in your tax home, you can claim you operate a “permanent establishment” (e.g., an office or other fixed place of business) in your home country.
Dr CultureShock, or how I stopped worrying about Org Culture (Part-2)
Appeal to whom? This ruling/guidance was provided by the California Supreme Court about how independent contractors are classified by the state.
The website won't even render in the Materialist HN client for Android.
Some is probably due the codec VP8 vs h264, but they are not wildly different in efficiency. WebRTC doesn't use VP9 or H.265 yet. I view the higher bandwidth used as an attempt to maximize quality at every bandwidth they just didn't set a ceiling on the encoding frame size. It pushes the total quality number higher on the chart they've published.
Plenty, I won't go into individual details.

I am an architect for a company that does ABM, B2B ads, so I am well versed in the subject. We had to move all of our PI data in the raw form to a different AWS account, and only certain individuals with "legal" clearance can access it. This forced us to re-architect almost our entire stack, and rethink our main API.

The whole thing was a massive endeavor that took a whole engineering team two quarters. If this was three years ago, when we were less than a dozen engineers, we would have most likely thrown the towel and forego cookies and business in the EU altogether.
Yes, of course--the affiliation just jumped out at me.
I'm hoping for a joke as well. $200 for 3% is a scam!
Privacy: How to Disable Timeline in Windows 10 April 2018 Update
With all those bikes piled up, why are there photos of folks fixing bikes?
In my limited experience contractors are paid much more.
This is indeed the case for many people in know; myself included to a certain extent.
Thanks, I'm glad you like it. I haven't done any Android work, so I'm not sure how the A-Frame Architecture applies. From my quick glance at the ViewModel documentation you linked, that looks like Application layer code: in the first example in that document, the `loadUsers()` call would turn around and call the actual a specific Infrastructure Wrapper responsible for communicating with the service that provides the users.
Venezuela Offers India Crude Oil on 30% Discount, but Wait
That's what CICS is for, and has been around for quite some time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS
Funny, AT&T is more expensive than Spectrum where I am for even worse (if that's possible... Spectrum is pretty bad) service. We're also a Google Fiber location (albeit one of the ones that is currently frozen) and when it was announced somehow Spectrum magically "discovered" a bunch of extra bandwidth and upgraded their plans from 50/5 to 300/50 for $90/mo. Symmetric gigabit for $70 is so far off for us it might as well be science fiction. And this is Raleigh, a well populated area known for high-tech industry.

It's frustrating, and there are many places that are far worse off than us.
Exactly right. There is an irreversible entropy to this: once a certain number of implementations exist, it becomes almost impossible to create a "new standard" that fixes them all, because it has to be backwards compatible with too many of them.

As someone responsible for probably one of your astronomer friend's tools (Anaconda), I have to say that we can only do so much: the nature of Python itself is that we cannot ignore what the user puts into PYTHONPATH, PATH, etc. On Windows, at least, we do create shortcuts in the Start Menu to ensure that we get a well-defined command shell. But if the user forces things like PYTHONPATH, there's not much we can do to un-fsck the setup.

Maybe it would be useful to have a python-safemode (or python-portable) binary that explicitly ignores all environment variables, configuration files, registry settings, dotfiles, etc. etc. and only looks at files that are next to it in the path....
Right, they may have used VP8 because VP9 and HEVC are more CPU intensive and they could technically encode more frames per second than the input 60 FPS.
Few Extracts from the Unix Philosophy  Need Your Feedback
There's a talk one of the engineers gives[1] (that someone else posted here so I'm watching it) about their architecture that's published in March of 2014, and in it he talks about ~550 servers, which includes 250 multimedia servers and 150 chat servers.

The only places he mentions 16 is when he talks about the "multimedia database". I think there were 16 sharded database servers.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs
you can try finding another type of work that you might enjoy more. If you don't like coding you shouldn't try making yourself do it every day. what do you do when you aren't coding? you could be addicted to electronics also. just some random thoughts.
UNICEF is raising funds by asking donors to mine Monero in their web browser
Um ... from the paper ...

"6.1 Limitations of Salsify

No audio. Salsify does not encode or transmit audio."

Claiming that you beat a bunch of codecs that have synchronized audio (even though they disable it) is kind of misleading ...
Fixed with absolute
Most people are hired under terms of "at will employment" anyway.
> A person with outside perspective, rare skills, experience, and most importantly, is the outside voice able to bring real options to the table along with production proven, time tested ways and means, is worth every penny.

Such a contractor would likely meet the new "ABC" standard in the linked article, though. Those aren't the positions that are in danger of being eliminated, it's the "grunt contractor" folks who are contractors only because the employer wants to keep a buffer of positions that are active but can be terminated easily.
Analyzing Hacker News Hiring Trends
Same problem on iPhone X.
you can also try breaking down the task into the smallest task possible. just get one small thing done. usually once you get started it becomes easier. I hate setting up environments but once I get coding I enjoy it. Although I don't enjoy it as much. It's started to get repetitive.
Baile extremadamente gracioso
Why would she have to sign a form and wait a day to be eligible?

I have never had to sign a form to get healthcare here.
Yeah exactly. This is a question of state law and the Cal SC is the final word on what state law means. The only exception is if the USSC agrees that the state law violates some provision of the US Constitution and that’s extremely rare. Not going to happen.
It's strange that WhatsApp hasn't launched micropayments, e-commerce and wallets yet. In India PayTM (https://paytm.com/) has kind of won this space. Google has launched Tez (https://tez.google.com/). PayTM and Tez have given lots of cashback deals to people to install and keep the apps on their phones. WhatsApp is already there on everybody's phone.

I have heard WeChat is doing something similar in China for a number of years already. I think WhatsApp is loosing a very good revenue opportunity by not moving quickly in this space. It gives them alternative business model too. Two main properties (FB and Instagram) depend on ads, WhatsApp can bring the revenue from wallets and e-commerce. I think it's better to have a diversified revenue model.
I should have posted this earlier, but buried in the bloomberg is the decision:

https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Hargrov...

I honestly am not 100% sure of the ramifications, but I am sure that these companies are going to act in their best interest, and with the current imbalance in the labor market (some might argue that the markets are right where they should be), I'm relatively certain that will mean employees being turned into contractors, or worst case they'll take the walmart route and make everyone work "part-time", drivers will think they're pulling a fast one by working for more than one company but they'll really just be driving their own wages and benefits down.
That is a very conservative mean all-in cost per employee for a group of professionals. Edit to add: in the US that is.
Let’s not kid ourselves about what kind of houses they’d be: million tiny houses would be arranged like refugee camps. The cheapest shit possible that can be called a “livable shelter,” except it will be like a favela. The market of that wouldn’t be much.
Have you picked berries for hours on end? It's terrible work.
Judicial overreach? Someone has to interpret the law. The original standard was judge-created and the refined over several decades. It was a mess and gave conflicting results in quite similar cases. This, no matter what you think of the outcome, is unquestionably a giant leap forward in clarity.
Data Scientists and Machine Learning Algorithms for a Data-Powered World
Email Address Verifier API Written in Go
But crazy how americans pay to go to university. In majority of Europe we take nation wide exams on the last year of high school, on subjects like math and physics and if you study hard and score enough you pass, very difficult to make it in some schools though due to enormous competition. The advantage is that unis are free since people pay them through their taxes, ie germany, switzerland, greece (ece ntua), sweden etc
Huh? The example is for PostgreSQL's "serializable" isolation level, and that's what I'm confused about.

Serializability should ensure that the outcome is equivalent to some serial execution. What serial execution of those five transactions yields [1], [1, 10], [1, 1, 10]?

But also, I just read that prior to PostgreSQL 9.1 (released in 2011), the "serializable" isolation level was actually just snapshot isolation (now called "repeatable read"). So maybe that's what benmmurphy is referring to?
Or a trial balloon for commercialization.
> How do you even have a single member LLC that is a disregarded entity where the single entity is a corporation?

LLC stands for "limited liability company," not corporation [1]. When one says "corporation" in a legal sense, it is typically understood to exclude LLCs. (That said, LLCs can elect to be treated as corporations for tax purposes.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability_company
Would this affect companies like Google and others who have contractors/vendors, but use them as if they were employees?
Underscore Pi (2017)
Great point. I am certainly behind the times. However, I can only recall seeing textual animations like those in other HN readers, despite having 166 apps installed on my primary iOS device. Happily (for me anyway ;-), MiniHack is free of them.
There is no privacy in the cloud
FWIW, if you are unfamiliar with Dunkin Donuts, the most common item people buy from there is coffee, by far. In fact, I have seen Dunkin Donuts that only sell coffee.

A lot of their speciality drinks are basically milkshakes though.
Every crypto / blockchain white paper full text searchable
Are there open source core banking software out there?
Don’t be the change you want to see in the world. Get into politics instead.
The problem would be picking all the bits of tech, so much of what you're talking about is stuff you learn when you start working with your first big ball of mud.

Lets use java for simplicity. We're going to do a non trivial app thats web based so we dip into the exciting worl of java EE.

Learn about
maven
eclipse
jax-ws
jax-rs
cfx tools
wsi tools
Hibernate stuff
DB stuff.
Probably need to throw spring boot or cdi onto the pile of things to be a little familiar with.

Then you need to teach how app servers work. getting one setup. which computer/ os etc.

Zooming in take the build process, 'Setting up jenkins' Thats a big tutorial all on its own. you'd need to know Git or SVN or one of the others.

then you step into building a CI pipeline, Building a test suite, functional, unit and integration test. building reporting ontop all of that.

That would be mega tutorial series. And the moment you finished it, people would start pulling strips off it for being out of date. Or they would attack it for language and tooling choice.
Kudos for making things accessible. However, joint source-channel coding is not news, especially at the level of scalable video coding (probably 20-year-old research by this point). In academia this isn't as exciting as it sounds to industry.
Yeah?

I think that, taken literally, I'd be 0/3 in the ABC system.
The only real advantage is that most people have no COBOL experience, but many have Java or C++ experience. And of course, it _isn't_ better for the business mentioned in the article, because they haven't done it yet.
> is there any advantage (as a Californian) to having a Delaware LLC?

Two big advantages to Delaware:

1. Fast courts. When I last looked, it was 180 days from complaint to decision in the Superior Courts while California took 900+ days. (Also notable, Delaware proudly publishes these statistics. California's were tougher to find.)

2. Developed law. Since most companies are in Delaware, most law is settled in Delaware. Lots of edge cases have been smoothed out. It's also a more business-friendly code than California's.

That said, everyone's situation is different. Consulting with a lawyer is advisable.
> The contractors who stand out get selected for full-time work relatively quickly and consistently.

...but many of us pass on full-time offers nearly constantly. It's not like contractors are just waiting for the day when they are "selected."
Barking up the wrong tree. Nothing to do with regulations except as a side proxy tool of powerful NIMFOBY homeowners’ interests whom want their scenic views and low inventory to keep their property values high.

Regulations aren’t automatically good or bad, consider each as a possible multi-edged sword. Banning leaded gas in cars was mostly good.
Transaction costs for one. It sounds like an incredible mess to actually implement. And why shift that burden to the customer? In a haircut scenario, the person getting the cut is unquestionably a customer and not an employer. So why make him/her shoulder the administrative and legal burden?

Think beyond wage and hour. Customer #2 gets cut by scissors, suffering serious bodily injury. Who does she sue? The barber, sure. But these actions were performed during the course and scope of employment. So now (per 400+ years of common law) the employer — aka previous customer - is now on the hook for those damages.

I’d certainly never get my hair cut there. It might cost me $100,000.

Ok so change that law, but now you’re ditching a few centuries of agency law and getting exactly what in return? A system no more efficient than what it’s replacing.
> He also noted that billions of dollars would likely be needed to implement this kind of migration across multiple agencies.

> You can’t just rewrite the whole thing.

Is it that bad? I guess I'm being crazy thinking I can do it single handedly in 5-10 years for a couple million.
To me, the key innovation here is the tight integration between network conditions and codec frame size. Standard codecs are created with specific bandwidth requirements and they provide encoded frames that 'average' around that size. You could just re-initialize a codec at a lower bandwidth on the fly, but you would have to send an I frame (large full frame) to kickoff the new series of frames (as video most video frames are just updates of a previous frame). Having a codec accept a bandwidth target per frame is a really good idea.
>And why shift that burden to the customer? In a haircut scenario, the person getting the cut is unquestionably a customer and not an employer

That's exactly the reasoning I said doesn't work. You can't just say that a situation is "absurd". Why is it absurd? What's the standard so you can derive the boundaries?

>Customer #2 gets cut by scissors, suffering serious bodily injury. Who does she sue? The barber, sure. But these actions were performed during the course and scope of employment. So now (per 400+ years of common law) the employer — aka previous customer - is now on the hook for those damages.

No, Customer #2 would be a second employer.

>Ok so change that law, but now you’re ditching a few centuries of agency law and getting exactly what in return? A system no more efficient than what it’s replacing.

I don't know what that's responding to. I wasn't ditching anything. I was asking for what grounds the distinction.
(Disclaimer: This comment is my personal opinion, not that of my employer.)

Really exciting work.

Encoding multiple versions of a video and picking a smaller one in response to congestion already happens for video-on-demand (think YouTube and Netflix videos) in DASH. That said, with VOD you can encode the video slower than real-time.

I can't imagine this ever making it into Skype/FaceTime/Hangouts/Duo. The big corps will probably continue to focus on "more internet" (fiber optic, zero rating, wi-fi hotspots, and internet traffic management practices).
Free will doesn't exist so you're correct.

The subconscious mind controls everything and your idea of self and conscious choice is a ruse. It's been proven again and again in peer reviewed, reproducible studies over the last 30 years.
I think you're using a very overspecific definition of "contractor". At least half of my contract work has been doing the same job in the same office as the full-time employees, just for less pay and less job security. (And I did get health insurance, through the contracting agency.) A couple of those gigs even came with a company laptop.
> For my expander I actually implemented all let forms, for instance, as macros that reduced to lambda applications.

> Now other lisps might have more forms that don't reduce quite nicely, I'm not sure, I still strongly believe in my original point that lisp practically has no syntax

This isn't an argument against Lisp having syntax: it does have those operators, and each one defines its own syntax. The fact that they can be written entirely in the language itself doesn't mean Lisp doesn't have syntax, it means that Lisp has extensible syntax: you can add more syntax whenever you like, and in some dialects, you can remove or replace the pre-defined syntax forms. Syntactic sugar is still syntax, too: in C, arr[i] is just sugar for *(arr + i), but I don't know anyone who would claim that array indexing isn't part of C's syntax.
I'd rather have him do that then decide to stop complaining and give Facebook a pass now that he's one of them.
> Lots of things are 'more full-featured' and none of them work well in an HPC context, where individual user jobs may need to be staged carefully.

After long discussions with the Singularity folks I've come to the conclusion that the only special features that Singularity has are:

* Their distribution format is a binary containing a loopback block device, allowing you to have "a single thing to distribute" without concern for having to extract archives (because in theory archive extraction can be lossy or buggy). The downside is it requires (real) root to mount or a setuid helper, because mounting loopback is privileged because it opens the door to very worrying root escalation exploits. When running without setuid helpers I'm not sure how they have worked around this problem, but it probably involves extraction of some sort (invalidating the point of having a more complicated loopback device over just a tar archive).

* It has integration with common tools that people use in HPC. I can't quite remember the names of those tools at the moment, but some folks I know wrote some simple wrappers around runc to make it work with those tools -- so it's just a matter of implementing wrappers and not anything more fundamental than that.

Aside from those two things, there's nothing particularly different about Singularity from any other low-level container runtime (aside from the way they market themselves).

A lot of people quote that Singularity lets you use your host user inside the container, but this is just a fairly simple trick where the /etc/passwd of your host is bind-mounted into the container and then everything "looks" like you're still on your host. People think this is a security feature, it isn't (in fact you could potentially argue it's slightly less secure than just running as an unprivileged user without providing a view into the host's configuration). If you really wanted this feature, you could implement it with runc's or LXC's hooks in a few minutes.
Do you know if scalable video coding actually ended up being implemented in industry (YouTube/Netflix/Hulu/Amazon)?
Best place to experiment there, Chinese are really scientific in their approach, than other countries being scared of AI, every govt should do it. Everyone can learn a lot of their shortcomings. AI WOULD IMPROVE ECONOMY FAR-SIGHTED LY
They probably used it because source code was most available.