skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bear in mind that being really crazygonuts evil is a weakness: it's a vulnerability, begging for legislation or boycott. There's absolutely not a direct correlation between evil and profitability, unless maybe you're a banker.

Amazon's a storefront. They have to serve two masters, one of which is the customer. The other is their reputation among capitalists and rivals.

On the one hand they must promise to deliver better prices and choices than other storefronts, all while assuring customers that they have happy workers and aren't doing anything horrifying.

On the other, they must continue to convince Wall Street and possible rivals that they're the most brutal tyrants on the block and will inevitably kill and devour ALL competitors, all the more because they don't pay dividends and earn people money based on their expansion alone.

Amazon's designed to use psychology to get all employees working like Spartans. If you see this behavior in a sports team, or in open source, typically you go 'hey, cool' and approve of the fierce eagerness to strive. It's part of the human experience and can be used in many ways.

If it's used to condition warehouse workers to accept a situation where they're compensated, but driven to efficiencies that kill a percentage of them, that raises the question of what's the responsibility of those managers. To run a group of humans at those levels of output requires coddling them to some extent, and 'giving them the choice' to walk away (but if you're compensating them even a little better than usual they'll get used to it and resist walking away, even at their own peril: especially if they're thinking Spartan)

This desire to perform and be part of a team isn't something imposed on humans by evil corporations. It's a natural human tendency, which is why Amazon's strategies work. What Amazon does is exploit that as hard as they're allowed to do.

Offering the chance to shill for part of your shift, and offering this only to an elite who're able to do it effectively, is a really clever social exploit. Will it continue to be allowed? Maybe. It's very much the kind of thing that's bending 'the rules' for their benefit, and to do it properly you kind of have to be Amazon. Remember that the whole purpose of the exercise is to further crush any competitors, including those who might have marginally better labor practices… or buy and destroy anything that might have better labor practices, for instance Whole Foods.

It's fair to argue that turning employment into a monoculture in which everything out there works this way (thus foul and no fouler, we hope) is a bad thing to do.
Throttling of Fire Fighters Could Go Unpunished Because the FCC Repealed Order
What is with this constant obsession with surpassing China. This is just so stupid.
Do you have sources about diversity driving positive economic income ?

It seems to go without saying for you, but it's not that natural for me. There are several examples of very homogeneous countries, such as Japan or Korea, doing economical prowess.
According to your link, the longest you can be held without charge is 14 days under the terrorism act.

The longest ever proposed was 90 days (proposed in 2006), and the longest implemented was 28 days (between 2006 - 2011).

https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/human-rights/counterin...
For anyone that’s looking to drink less or moderate their consumption I’d recommend a book by Annie grace called this naked mind. I’m about two weeks past finishing the book and although I haven’t stopped drinking, I’ve had the first real mental shift in how I view alcohol consumption. She was a high functioning, heavy drinker and she dives into the unconscious mind and societal norms/pressures around consuming alcohol. I have a hard time picturing a life without ever drinking again (which is sad in and of itself) but I’m on the mental path of reducing considerably without counting drinks or time till I can have my next one.
This is what GDPR is for AFAIK.

IMO all the cookie warnings we see are just misguided attempts to ignore it and continue more or less like before and should probably not save anyone in court, again if I've understood it correctly.
European Aeolus satellite launched to improve weather forecasting
We adopted a set of formal guidelines [0] for our database docs, based on Google Developer Guide [1], and automated the checks as much as possible with linters [2].

The checks cover spelling, markdown formatting, broken links, and grammar/style. For instance, we specifically reject hostnames, domain names, IP addresses, person names, phone numbers unless it's on our Example List[3], which itself is largely based on RFCs.

[0]: https://axibase.com/use-cases/tutorials/workshop/technical-w...

[1]: https://developers.google.com/style/

[2]: https://github.com/axibase/docs-util

[3]: https://axibase.com/use-cases/tutorials/workshop/technical-w...
Writing Digital Copy for Domain Experts
It's much easier to reduce your hours at an existing job, yeah.
Parent was asking about the "Russian" part, not the "troll" part. As in, the trolls could be from somewhere else.
Woman sues US border agents over seized iPhone
Back when I was much more active on Undernet and EFNet, there was talk of 1-2 people actually having paid for an mIRC license.

Personally, a couple years ago I found the latest nagging screen guilt-trippy enough that I paid for a license even though I rarely use it.
Forget “Manned” Missions--Females May Be More Mentally Resilient in Deep Space
There is never any proof offered, only blatant assertions.

And its working very well as a propaganda point too - now, any time someone questions the powers that be and the way they operate, well .. obviously that person is a Russian troll.

The irony in how quickly Americans seem to have picked up this authoritarian control mechanism (propaganda==truth) seems to have been lost on a lot of people. Do they still teach Orwell in schools in America?
Thinking of next, as usual is only interesting for the usual type provider demos, not for the working programmer using C# and VB.NET across EF, Forms, WPF, UWP, ASP.NET MVC, IoT Core, HoloLens.
LOL Procter and Gamble Wants to Trademark LOL
When you're selling yourself, don't just focus on technologies.

E.g. if you're experienced enough to not just solve problems, but also identify problems in the first place, that's hugely valuable, but you need to make sure to convey that to potential employers. (Specifically I'm thinking of the difference between "Solver" and "Finder" in https://rkoutnik.com/2016/04/21/implementers-solvers-and-fin...).
Intel's attempt to suppress independent benchmarking suggests that this is not the whole story. This suspicion lingers even though it has removed the clause.
Huge nostalgia lenses. It was never that great, and besides there's no going back: the computing model of 15+ years ago simply wouldn't survive contact with the latest sophisticated strategies of malice and manipulation.

The reality is >95% of the population don't want to be, don't know how to be, or simply don't have the spare time to be the systems administrator for all of their technology. The computing model that Apple offers with iOS and the App Store is—in effect—the outsourcing of systems administration to a competent third party.

For most people this is not really any different to outsourcing the maintenance of your house to a cleaning service, or the maintenance of your car to a mechanic, or the minding of your children to a daycare provider. For most people the notion of "computing freedom" is not useful or helpful.

I'm the "computer help guy" for my extended family, and believe me, I am very thankful for Apple's approach because the amount of sysadmin-style assistance I've been asked to provide has absolutely plummeted. For many people who just want to browse the internet, an iPad is way better than a Windows PC. There are people in my family for whom I would fear for their bank accounts if they still used a Windows PC. I don't spend a moment's time worrying about the possibility of malware on their iPads.
Yes, it's the good ole "trap street". Works for combating scrapers too.
The irony is that Americans are quite happy to be manipulated through Dialectic Materialism, communisms favourite philosophy...
Numbertank social messenger
I just use Thunderbird... It "just works" for email IRC and RSS - and it's very consistent btwn platforms. Maybe I'm missing out on some secret IRC features?
Why is budget constrained a problem? E.g. if you can go to a bootstrapped company and credibly say "I am valuable enough you can't afford me, but—maybe we can work something out" that seems worth trying.
>Russia is successful against CIA because the Russian mafia does its dirty work...go kill /threaten /maim these 5 people and you have a "get out of jail free card" on x,y, and z that you did.

Nothing sound more ultimately true about the whole situation that this.
The cybersecurity firm helping Big Tech find election attacks – Axios
Somewhat related. I wonder how often someone would plant false information that would cause a panic sell-off, then buy on the dip, before everyone realise that it was a lie? It's like the opposite of inside information. (Does this particular scheme have a name?)

* Edit:

A quick googling suggests this is fairly prevalent. Must be keeping the SEC busy.
Worth pointing out that "getting value out of extra space", in the long-term, only benefits property owners, as rents will simply rise to consume the generated surplus. Worst case being that if you want to live in a nice part of town, not only do you have to earn good money, but you have to become a part-time hospitality provider.
If you're writing Haskell code you need to be able to understand Haskell libraries and other people's code. You definitely need to understand the type system and what monads are, unless you're main objective is to just write a toy program

The evidence is overwhelming, considering how many people want to learn and write Haskell and how many people struggle with it. If people could ignore all of this stuff they would've figured that out by now, but they can't ignore it to really be productive. I like Haskell a lot btw, just don't think it's very practical, and it's most important contributions to FP are already being adopted in other languages without the additional complexity
Wirex receives UK FCA e-money licence
Good to know :)

How did you get in HoloLens development?
Marvel Cinematic Universe?
I love the optimism, I'd just like to see tech folks clearly delineate "This is what we're doing. This is what it might look like we're doing but we're not." The hype cycle in tech, combined with a tech-illiterate public isn't such a good thing, especially in a democracy. Too often the only way we figure things out is by getting screwed. That's a recurring behavior pattern that has to end. Somehow.
Your nick is wumao 五毛. Ironic.
> Were aristocratic families the object of scorn back then? All the attention they received from society eventually led to bad stuff? Bad actors?

Not scorn, but definitely resentment. Worst case for that aristocracy was... the french revolution ;)
You can search Freenode's channel list at http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?net=freenode

I've noticed a #reddit-sysadmin , likely there's a ##sysadmin too and probably others. The double # indicates a topic https://freenode.net/kb/answer/namespaces
Depending what core that is, you get more on the Google Cloud free tier (600MB RAM, 30GB disk). But: only 30GB outgoing bandwidth.
Wait, so it’s a bad thing that they have more people? How does it make them any less powerful?

PPP is metric, good for comparing certain things. I wouldn’t think that, for the purposes of determining which is the greater power, less population would be more beneficial as long as the total economic output is greater.
Interesting comment. I have thought about this in the past as mitochondria, roughly speaking, is a bacteria. As such, it is in a constant flux of fission and fusion cycles and targeting this cycle is a potential target to treat my disease.

For a fascinating experiment, check out Longecity's "Manipulating mitochondrial dynamics" post [1]. Worth reading. Based on this, I am still trying to set up a protocol for my disease, but have not tried that yet.

[1] https://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/94224-manipulating-mit...
Unfortunately, yes. It's the same in both US and UK. You can sue the state for loss of income/whatever, but those cases are not always successful - all they need to prove is that they had reasonable reason to keep you in jail, even if you were found innocent at the end.
That's the way to get the warehouse workers to comply. Arguably it's BETTER (certainly more effective) if it's that way all the way up the chain, because you'll get buy-in if the lower rungs see that the upper rungs of the latter are pushing themselves just as hard or harder.

If Jeff Bezos cries at his desk, into his apparently meaningless kabillions of dollars, because he just CAN'T quite keep up with what he expects of himself, that would be the final piece of the puzzle. I would suggest that's not impossible: it'd fit the pattern.

At that point the question you ask isn't 'is this fair or are the people getting exploited'. Instead you ask 'are all these people crazy? Do we need to have some kind of intervention?'

The key point here is that you can't assume the situation is designed to abuse lowly workers and coddle management. I think a key innovation at Amazon is, everyone cries at work and/or dies in harness, no exceptions.

It's fair to talk about whether that's acceptable. From all the horror stories, and from my understanding of business, they manage to extend the abuse as high up as possible, and it might go a lot higher than you think. The goal is to make a company full of desperate, last-ditch warriors that try to destroy all competition to their last dying frothing breaths: again, no exceptions.

Should all society work like this? I think that's debatable, but allow an Amazon to do it and they'll steadily kill everything else, and that's the intention.
Better that a company like Apple holds the keys to my parents' iPads than my parents. Way better. Waaaaay better.
Wow, I was really distracted when I wrote the above. Specifically

> ...which I think means a single row or column has approximately 222 pixels in it.

No no. This was supposed to say that, at 4.5um, 1 millimeter of space has 222 pixels in it per row/column! (So given any 4.5um column, a 1mm width/height span will have 222 pixels in it.)
They still teach Animal Farm. Remember: Russians are Bad.
SMTP too.
Scifi writer Peter Watts on the dangers of connecting brains
I don't get really why this is so surprising. The planet Venus has had cometary plasma tails, as has Mars (and it is entirely possible that the age old religious tales of Mars being some sort of warrior, and Venus being an angry snake-headed goddess was just our ancestors witnessing a very rare interplanetary electrical discharge via Birkeland currents), so this is probably just a form of our own tail.

Aurora themselves are just the interaction of our magnetic field with that of the Sun's, so it seems unlikely that large scale magnetic fields are not also the cause of this one.
Good luck with that - I bet we never hear anything about it again.

Is there any way to bookmark these sorts of things an follow up on the story to see how it plays out?

Here are more details:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/woman-my-iphone-...
The same reason you don't visit a city and eat only at McDonalds: you want the local experience.

Last week I stayed at an airbnb in Copenhagen shared with the owner which gave me tips about restaurants and nice places to visit. You don't get that at hotels, only flyers advertising whoever payed the hotel.
Where I work, technical writers earn 0.92 of a developer's wage, while a team leader earns 1.4 of a developer's wage. These are calculated from actual contract with our client.

While I'm pretty good with some documentation tools like docutils and graphviz, it makes me wish not to pursue documentation skills too much.
Thank you for the information. Do you know how this works in the rest of the world?
> Compared to your typical Airbnb

Are there still Airbnb flats that are owner-occupied? Every one I've stayed in seems to be operated as a full-time holiday rental.

> the fig-leaf of the share economy

There's never been any sharing in the so-called sharing economy. It's just about outsourcing labor costs and ducking regulations to make money.
Some thoughts on Valve’s new Steam Play and what it means for Linux gaming
And to their credit they still allow Tor connections, albeit to an existing registered account and authenticating with key-based SASL.
It helped me to blog about technical things to become better at technical writing.
The people that made the most money in the California gold rush were the ones that sold equipment and clothing to the gold prospectors.
I wouldn't use a service for VPS either if they reacted to DMCA/Takedown Notice claims. As the operator of the server on that VPS the DMCA/Takedown Notice is my business not the providers.

Otherwise it's a way to convenient method to cripple the competition or shut someone's personal website down for shits and giggles.
Wow. This is spot on.

I am the CTO of growing startup and every single point resonated with me.

I wish I'd read this 3 years ago and heeded your advice.
He's not defending the honour of Ukraine or making a political statement about Manafort.

He's asserting that the US has more corruption in local police and justice departments than the average American would like to believe.
Isn't it the same everywhere in the world? My first hand experiences are the US and Thailand and I have also researched quite a bit the medical tourism industry. Although there are some differences, it seems universally the case that most locals have access to public healthcare which is generally bad while those with money (wealthy locals and foreign medical tourists) have access to excellent doctors and facilities.

I know there are people positive on nationalized healthcare in some countries. But then I read about how wait times for medical procedures have reached record highs at hospitals in the UK and that there is now wait-time insurance offered in Canada to pay for trip and treatment in cases where you will be dead before your appointment date arrives.

I don't know that it has ever been different. Or that it ever will be.
If being pilloried for that kind of management behavior costs Amazon sales and effectiveness, it's a weakness that must be stamped out exactly as much as it has to.

Progress is a loaded word. If you said that Amazon has been doing serious optimization on that stuff, I'd call that more accurate. Bear in mind that part of the pressure is 'don't get PR-worthy nosebleeds or have to pee all the time'; in no way is this an effort to make workers comfortable or complacent.

It's just that having people fall over dead, or getting punished for nosebleeds, or pissing in bottles to make quota, are such bad PR that they have to be optimized away. You can't go THAT hard. There's a limit to how hard you can push before it starts to look bad, so you end up having to be just as grimly competitive about the details of work environment.

Anyone thinking Amazon is trying to maximize worker suffering is a fool: there's a point where it becomes a liability, and they will optimize until it's just on the safe side of 'horror story'.
Funny but applicable McSweeney's article: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-list-of-things-ive-sai...
The moment a consumer-ready side channel is created, a few major brands will decide that delivering their app that way is better than conforming to Apple's rules and the whole security model comes crashing down.

If it can be used by a major brand, some unscrupulous actor will gently guide my parents through whatever convoluted steps are required to enable it for their seemingly useful app loaded with badware.

I'm glad there's no side channel.
While being open to dialogue, your argumentation and rhetoric leaves little room for doubt in your own opinion. You've also had to resort, even early on in the discussion, to weak rhetorical techniques such as:

- Using emotionally charged words and videos rather than basing your arguments on facts

- Assuming ulterior motives in my arguments (implying that any of my arguments are just an excuse for wanting to continue eating meat) and being intentionally obtuse in your understanding of my arguments

- Appeal to authority (some cherry-picked sample of people you consider great thinkers and Star Trek)

- Calling me a troll rather than addressing my moral preferences

Veganism vs non-veganism just comes down to moral preferences. Can you rank these preferences in order for yourself?

1. My own personal health and that of those closest to me

2. The health and success of humans as species

3. A diverse ecosystem and the continued evolutionary success of animals with a diverse range of evolutionary strategies

4. Minimizing pain/suffering for farm animals

That's my order.

Raising the living standards of farm animals is a valid moral preference and one that I also support. It's just extremely low on my list of moral preferences. I don't believe that current animal farming is immoral, however. You will meet some non-vegans who share your moral preferences and are just too lazy and would rather not think about it. I am not one of those people. I don't ignore the realities of factory farming in order to shelter myself, I just don't think there's anything wrong with it.
Why is it hard to make such an argument? Intuitively, just from the basic operation observable of most large companies and the ubiquity of corporate dysfunction, it seems obvious. To the degree that the burden of proof would go the other way.

It’s exceptional to me to say that companies pursue maximizing shareholder value in a way that generally accomplishes that goal, or to disagree with the conclusion that companies are mostly stagnant in terms of actual productivity measures and have been for a while (something that highlights the current extreme incongruity between aggregate financial metrics and societal productivity metrics). Those positions require extreme, special evidence since they are so at odds with reality.
Smart filtering of join/part messages makes irc so much nicer to use, available in my preferred client Weechat as well as Hexchat and surely others.

I only see a join/part if it happens within x minutes of someone speaking, and there's a shortcut to switch to unfiltered view when I want it.
"Too much repetition can make music boring." - where boring is a link to Ravel's Bolero. I stopped right there.
So, what type of tinkering would provide equivalent reward to what you specifically seek from Netfix and Reddit?

Find that, and you already have the itch+curiosity+motivation+rationale+justification (mostly the itch) to just jump in somewhere.

[NB. Mis-typed Netflix, then left it in.]
Can you expand on what you found lacking in the book that the online courses provided?
A strawman argument is when a person tries to disprove your point by attacking a presented argument that you did not present. I was not disproving anything you wrote. Eg. I didn't start with, "No that isn't correct, or actually I disagree, etc." I was just stating something I thought. Someone replying doesn't mean they want to argue or disagree. Personally, I feel people yelling strawman (especially when they don't know what it means) really ruins conversations.
How to Maximize a Design Agency Website Created by Jupiter WordPress Theme
> Otherwise, why not zone the entire city as a hotel?

Why not? All of midtown Manhattan, at least. If superwealthy and tourists will pay an exorbitant rates, might as well soak them for all the taxes they're worth and spend that money subsidizing transport and housing in the rest of the city for locals.
Of course. Very few people maintain servers but the parent's point applies to those who do.