skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This doesn't just happen for low-wage jobs.

Yeah... little rant here... I recently got back from a year-long contract in Sydney.

Australia is one of the most labor-friendly places on the planet. So if this sort of crap can happen there, it can happen anywhere.

Recently settled and signed NDA... but I feel relatively anonymous on here.

Anyway first... they made me an offer letter, and I resigned from the old job. About a week later -- they knew I had given notice at the old job -- they came back to me and said, "Yeah, we thought our budget was X, but now it's 80% X. Take it or leave it." I was annoyed, but I took it.

Christmas came, they were giving out bonuses. Even though I was counted as a full-time employee, I didn't get a bonus like all the other non-immigrant workers. We found out that every Australian citizen or permanent resident got a bonus, but none of the Americans did. Shortly after complaining, HR sent a letter out to everyone saying that talking about pay or bonuses was a fireable offense.

I stepped up to cover a few holidays, and worked over the Christmas break. But they had automatically taken 2 weeks off of my vacation pool... it took about 4 months to get it sorted, I eventually did get the time back -- but only after I pulled time sheet records (something most employees couldn't do) to show I was working.

My final expense report never got paid.

They had my start date off by about a week. They had my end date off by 3 days.

Long story short, I ended up taking them to the Fair Work Commission (sort of like Small Claims Court). It was not an easy decision to do this. My network in Australia isn't huge, and I can't control the story they will tell inside the company, or to future employers who want to call and verify work / references. Clearly I can control who I list as references, but... far too much damage can be done when someone looks up connections on LinkedIn, and asks one of the shady folks, "Hey, what did you think of him?" I won’t get a chance to tell my side of it, I just don’t get the job.

So I won my claim (or at least got them to make me an offer that I settled for -- about 50% of what I was actually due), and helped a handful of other people win their claims... but I'm quite certain I alienated my manager and MD and everyone on the HR team in the process. It's expensive to stand up for yourself. Time to fight it, cost of a lawyer, and cost to the network... not hard to see why so many people don't fight it. A few grand... meh, I probably would have written it off if they paid any portion time, expense reports, or bonuses that they should have paid me.

Mind you this wasn't some Podunk 10-person agency... it was an agency with over 2,000 global employees. And I wasn't some day-rate worker, I was director-level and they tasked me with running some of their biggest projects for some of their highest profile clients.
For anyone curious about the MIT course numbering system:
http://catalog.mit.edu/subjects/
Exactly why I oppose unions. They are bastions of average. I want the opportunity to not be average.
Maybe there needs to be more incentive to publish the failures, so that knowledge of the ways that promising approaches don't generalize becomes common knowledge? I'm just kibbitzing here.
Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
I am still frustrated with the amount of incidental complexity required whenever I want to do this. My latest attempt was to use a Digital Ocean droplet with Django pre-installed. I guess the biggest issue there was setting up something so that I could easily deploy my local version to the droplet (ended up using git/Github), and ensuring those two environments were in sync. I looked into Docker in some detail about a year ago, and I think it's the only pretty good solution for this I've come across—but there's a steep up front cost in learning/setup etc. (or so it seems).

What services and technologies do you use when you'd like to quickly build a web app which may never be more than a prototype, but may also turn into something real? A big aspect of what I'm wondering is about automatically setting something up for keeping local/production environments in sync, quickly deploying to production, and not having to mess with a bunch of server configuration things, user accounts, security, etc.
That title looks like it was written by a markov chain
Vue.js virtual scrollbar
I find it to be a great hobby! It's rathe like writing fiction, except that it's fiction that you get to live. A form of LARP, if you will. You can get the vibe in some of Doctorow's and Stross' work.
Agreed. The hype surrounding machine learning is quite disproportionate to what's actually going on. But it's always been that way with machine learning -- maybe because it captures the public's imagination like few other fields do.

And there are definitely researchers, top ones no less, who play along with the hype. Very likely to secure more funding, and more attention for themselves and the field. Which has turned out to be quite an effective strategy, if you think about it.

The other upside of this hype is that it ends up attracting a lot of really smart people to work on this field, because of the money involved. So each hype cycle leads to greater progress.
The crash afterwards might slow things down a bit, particularly in the private sector. But the quantum of government funding available changes much more slowly, and could well last until the next hype cycle starts.
Its the bazar companys responsibility to avoid counterfeit goods, by having the company who trades their leave either there winnings and/or a safety deposit behind in case they get sued.

Its also to make sure, the legal system of the customer binds on the trading contract and inform/warn the customer that the item in question could be a molotow cocktail.
malloc, free :) in that order
I’ll be curious to see what happens when Amazon sells a fake Apple iPhone charger, which subsequently burns a house down. The difference here is that Amazon advertised it as Apple brand. Or is that going to be on the shoulders of the wholesaler^W”seller”, too?
Since a year or more Amazon is tough on vendors in regards to safety issues. More products require regulatory approval and a single product review mentioning safety problems can get a product pulled.
> Can you call the palette shifters from the API?

Every user of GrafX2 should get "DB's TOOLBOX"[0] - free additional Lua-scripts for GrafX2, that has many samples on API usage.

Latest version is "DB's TOOLBOX v1.4"[1] (released on December 2017).

[0] http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=12854

[1] http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26080
Having a module boundary in a place where function call overhead is going to be signficant is a code smell. C++ and Rust programmers just don't notice because the entire standard library reeks of it.
Those based on the Zynq-7000 line from Xilinx usually have ample IO, but start at about 100$, going up. You might need to do something in the FPGA part of them to use the IO though.
Possum's also eat ticks.
Yet lots of people do security CTF competitions (https://ctftime.org/ctf-wtf/) for free. Offer less instead!
I agree that we need police, courts, roads and sewers. But those are very tiny percentage of your taxes. The vast (over 70%) majority of taxes goes towards: Defense, social security, medicare and medicaid. And although those categories contain some worthwhile things, there's also a lot of waste in there. You really should look into where all this money goes before you assume that we need it.

And there is a point at which it becomes theft, it's just a question of where: 60% of income, 85% of income, 95% of income? As it is right now, in the US we currently pay 38% of our incomes to the govt: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spendi...

And if you live in New York or CA, you can bet, it's much much higher than that, both because the state taxes are higher and because of the higher COT which results in being at a higher federal income tax bracket.

Now, you may not see those income taxes all in your pay check because some of it gets paid by your company: those are lost wages that could've gone to workers. For consumer products, People think that they don't pay taxes that corporations pay. But, in a competitive economy, it's you, the customer that ends up paying for it. There's many many more.

Let's say 50% of your income goes to taxes. It's actually worse than you think. Because with the 50% that's left over, your buying power has been further reduced because any labor you purchase is taxed, which raises the cost of that labor by that amount. That's how you end up in a situation where you can't even afford to work because Day care costs nearly as much as your net salary.
CockroachDB claims to have compatibility with Postgres, but I wasn't able to make a cockroach db sample database using the postgresql dump files(cockroachdb doesn't seem to support schemas). I'll have to revisit it again to make the project work with cockroach db.
It's the same reason that burglarizing your neighbor's house while they're on vacation is considered by most jurisdictions to be a less serious crime

And yet you'd still go to jail for doing that. Potentially for several years depending on the value of what you stole.

Wage theft orders of magnitude larger than that burglary would still typically only get a slap-on-the-wrist (relative to the ill-gotten gains) fine.

To turn your attempt on its head: why is robbing one person an offense that gets incarceration, but robbing a hundred people may not even get you prosecuted?
Yes, Strand Books is indeed an independent book store. In fact that whole stretch of of 4th Ave a block away used to be NYC's "book row." See:

https://untappedcities.com/2015/08/26/4th-avenue-the-history...
Know c# take asp.net

Know Haskell take yesod
Aggregate intelligences don't have to be as well-defined as my initial examples. Consider the goal-setting behavior that might emerge from entire industries, networks of interest/policy groups with overlapping interests/participants, shareholders of sector/industry/index funds, networks of overlapping corporate stakeholders, and so on.
It'r rather strict. The 10h/day limit can only really be breached if there is something on fire (well, a network counts too), which has a great immediate risk to the company, or if human life is acutely at risk.
> I very much doubt it is sustainable

Autocratic regimes have lasted for as long as 3000 years (pharonic Egypt).

I'm sure lots of people want to believe the Chinese system won't work; but that doesn't make it true.
It's pretty easy to setup a bunch of pfSense VMs as gateways for various VPN services. Then you can create nested VPN connections through local internal networks. So each workspace VM is compartmentalized at both OS and networking levels. IVPN published my how-to guides for that. They're a little out of date, but the basic design still works well.
Ask HN: How would you turn a web agency into a SaaS for building websites?
This is largely a thought experiment. As someone who has worked at web agencies as a software engineer for years before, it has made me curious how they usually are content with not seeking beyond small/medium clients, as they seem to "plateau". Generally speaking, web agencies are not disruptive companies. I might seem them grow gradually over the years, from 10 to 100 people. And get higher dollar clients. But their growth is largely limited by their ability to acquire new clients.

How would you turn such an agency into a faster growing company that does SaaS for creating websites? The goal would be to be able to scale up acquiring customers, to the thousands, so basically you will need to automate the website building process. At some point the majority of your clients will use your online tools to create their website, rather than have custom work sourced out to your developers. What would be your strategy to change the company?
Did I miss something obvious where is the actual list of the 50 independent book sellers?
Tesla workers say factory paint shop has had multiple fires, causing problems
Can a turing-complete type system be sanely considered safe?
The article explains another way to see it - because the manufacturer in this case (and most safety cases involving Amazon) are sketchy Chinese companies that are selling products that don't even attempt to meet any sort of safety standards, contain counterfeit safety markings, and are basically illegal to sell in the United States. Both the seller and manufacturer are impossible to track down when something goes wrong. I would bet even if you were able to track them down it would be impossible to enforce any fines or judgements against them because they are in an outside jurisdiction.

It can be argued that Amazon should have some sort legal responsibility to do a miminal vetting process for things it sells on it's site. Or, in other words, should be required to make an effort to only sell legal products.

"Not our problem that someone else is using our store to sell illegal and unsafe products that we store in our wearhouses, accept payment for, and deliver" shouldn't be a valid defense.
They didn’t overturn that right. They affirmed that when an employee signs something, they are bound by the agreement they signed. Potential employees are free to not sign those agreements. Employees who have signed agreements can’t change their mind and suddenly complain about an agreement they willingly signed.

If we eliminated those agreements and exposed companies to increased litigation risk, what would you expect to happen to wages? They’d go down naturally.

Let’s pretend companies were bound by French style agreements — wages would quickly drop to French-style wages. American workers have more disposable income that almost every other country. If you want to reduce that disposable income, start allowing class actions.

Mind you, employees DO have protection against wage “theft” — that’s already a crime. A simple google search will return dozens of law firms ready to represent a worker who thinks they’ve been wronged. Even arbitration agreements can’t protect against illegal activity.

The only people getting paid for class actions are attorneys. The worker doesn’t win anything but maybe a $25 check. Meanwhile their employer has to incur extraordinary expenses. Who pays for that? The workers through lower salaries and customers through higher prices.
While it's a good idea in principle to publish failures, in practice it's a bit more tricky. So a particular model didn't work. Does that mean the model is fundamentally flawed? Or that you weren't smart enough to engineer it just right? Or that you didn't not throw enough computing power at it?

In a vast error landscape of non-working models, a working model is extremely rare and provides valuable information about that local optima.

The only way publishing non-working models would be useful would be to require the authors to do a rigorous analysis of why exactly the model did not work (which is extremely hard with our current state of knowledge, although some people are starting to attempt this).
In your eyes, what would be the mechanism for a US citizen to sue a manufacturer who has no presence outside of China other than the Amazon marketplace?
I agree with you, mainly from the perspective of writing Rust code. When Rust was new, a lot of people said that thinking about ownership all the time is a burden, but I think it's the opposite, it gives a sort of frame that helps to build the software's core abstractions. I think in this regard C++ is much more unopinionated, which means every codebase is different. In Rust, ownership is part of the type system, so a lot of the times learning a new API can be much faster because API usage is easier to understand and this style of programming is already familiar.
Don't ignore the different philosophical foundation of Asian societies. Confucianism is quite different from the Western line of tradition starting from the Greeks. Confucianism emphasizes community and obedience more, which is more compatible with mass surveillance.
Sounds like there needs to be a “know your merchant” law. It makes sense to me that Amazon might not be liable, but it makes no sense at all that people can’t get in touch with the actual seller.
There is no fallacy in my argument because my statmemt is that that taxation is not theft. I’ve not argued that the only possible way for government to get the money necessary to run is via taxation. Though it is true that I think taxation is best way for government to get enough money to run.

Also food and housing are provided by government to some members of society and this requires money. Throughout history in times of great distress government has provided food and housing to the masses. The story of Joseph in the Bible is a great example of this. Of course when government failed to do this sufficiently well revolutions occurred.
> Vim is to LibreOffice Writer, approximately

Think, GrafX2 is to GIPM what LaTeX is to LibreOffice Writer ;-)
> Things people do on their private time should have absolutely no bearing on where they work, where they live, or where they shop.

Yes, you are correct that the U.S. has passed laws that take a hard line against certain forms of discrimination, especially when it comes to employment and housing.

But even a law as accepted and adhered today as The Americans with Disabilities Act (one of the laws EEOC enforces [0]) is not even 30 years old. And in that brief time, into today, it has ongoing battles and controversies. The definition of "disabled" is most definitely not universally agreed upon [1]. Nor is there an easy consensus about the costs society should bear to follow the ADA. One example on HN that comes to my mind is this thread last year [2], in which many folks (perhaps the majority) argued that UC Berkeley should be allowed to continue producing online lectures without subtitles for the hearing-impaired.

You're probably aware even the most seemingly obvious consequence of the 1st Amendment -- that the government cannot censor people's free speech -- has been a continual matter of litigation and debate over the past century in every domain, from student protests to national security.

And yet you think that an expansive interpretation of the First Amendment -- such that no one in America should suffer negative consequences for expressing beliefs -- would have no complications or unintended consequences. How are you so wrapped up in your own predicament -- having to self-censor because you fear people may dislike and even shun you for your personal opinions -- that you can't see the obvious and immediate ways in which such a law would severely curtail the free speech of everyone, particularly the folks who do not have the resources to go to court?

If you believe the 1st Amendment stops the government from abridging free speech, isn't it also blatantly obvious how problematic it would be to enforce this law? (Hint: who do you think runs the regulators and courts who would be in charge of enforcing and passing judgement?)

Let's pretend we have the power to time travel and go back to rewrite the 1st Amendment; I challenge you to come up with just the words/phrases that would reasonably describe the free speech protection you want.

[0] https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/history/45th/ada20/ada_cases.cfm

[1] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=521f98d2-a9b0...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856
Genuinely great to hear! Congrats to every single person involved for reaching this milestone. I expect a lot more quality of life improvements to trickle down as more people opt into using it exclusively.

A side question: Can ReactOS build and run QT5? It would make building multi-build system / multi-programming language projects much much easier.
The entire Bill or Rights is to prevent “misconstruction and abuse of powers”.
My claim is that taxation is not theft. I’ve not stated any position on whether or not taxation is too high or whether or not our spending proroties are good.

I’ve merely stated that government is necessary, requires money, and that taxation is not theft. Is there any part of this that you find objectionable? If so what part?

EDIT: According to this website in the U.S. we clearly haven’t reached the taxation is theft level so your point doesn’t seem to be apt.

https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-revenue.htm#ind...
Right. Access to the environment is the dangerous part, not the eval function. There's a proposal to tame the JS global environment along those lines: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-frozen-realms

Note however that the threat model here does not include denial of service. You have to address that at another level like OS processes or E vats.
The consumer has no contract with the manufacturer. It is the vendor's responsibility. Of course, the vendor can sue the manufacturer but that's a separate thing.

However, Amazon is successfully arguing that they are not the vendor. The vendor is a third party using Amazon's platform.

Edit: that said, I think this needs to change.
I'm moron but nice article.
I could imagine maybe a law requiring foreign companies to obtain a bond when selling consumer goods, if they don't have substantial presence in the U.S. This bond would be a surety that consumers could recover damages in the case of negligence, at least up to a certain amount. I don't see the argument for requiring Amazon to perform that service, though.
Loving the lectures so far. Wondering if the assignments and readings are available somewhere, I haven't been able to find them.
If its a hobby and you otherwise have a full time job, 30 days is even too short. Not to mention that's when it stops becoming fun as the person mentioned.
"Another time, I got interviewed on a startup-support radio show, only to be asked to sign a letter afterwards saying they’d given us R188000 in airtime. (I didn’t sign.)"

What would the implications be if they signed?
Workers on temporary working visas like you seem doubly exposed to exploitation: not only are they subjected to the regular shenanigans of employers, they face the threat of the employer pulling the visa.
Speaking about young children and pregnant women...

I thought the "unintended consequences" of thalidomide was common knowledge and seen as a warning against the "look before you leap" mentality you're advocating.
Back in the dot com era, there were many hangers-on who cashed in on the mania as various types of leaches. They were characterized by their use of buzz words while not possessing the slightest comprehension of concepts underlying the terminology.
> In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail.

The West has had, for the last 200 years (and arguably for the last 500) the advantage that its economic system is better than its rivals. This is a massive, game-changing advantage. But it's not obvious to me that the West is still ahead economically -- look at China's growth rates over the last 40 years. Admittedly they are coming from behind, but because of their population they only need 1/4 of the GDP per head of the USA to be ahead on total GDP.

I would say there's about a 50% possibility that China will make an authoritarianism that works, that's at least as successful economically as the West. And if that comes about it will be a real game-changer. And frankly, I don't think the West is up to the task of meeting the challenge; certainly I would not bet on Trump, Merkel, May et al doing the right thing.
I'm not sure if it was Malerone, but I think some Malaria prevention treatments before travelling to Asia in the late 90s. It had some pretty bad side-effects. I didn't get the weird dreams, but it affected my body enough that I just stopped talking it.
Jesus christ that game was hard to get for a 10-year-old Scandinavian kid. Even the name is hard!
Good. React Native does not work for even the simplest things.
This is just going to make me more and more wary of buying through Amazon. Good companies aren't afraid of accountability.