skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting that people are not considering the business point of view...

I read some people mentioning about working 10-hours a day and work from Monday to Thursday. If I was a business owner I wouldn't allow that. I would rather offer 5~6 hours work per day than allow him to work more for 4 days.

In my field of work (engineering) as a regular worker, I see people working 8 hours but they are not 8 hours productive. Discussing this with some friends we concluded that usually an average developer can focus for around 5 to 6 hours, tops. Then, by adding two hours a day, he won't be 7~8-hours-productive.

My bet (and that's a my own point of view) is that an average developer will keep being 5~6 hours productive. That's because the development process leads to mental exhaustion. After some time people will be much more distracted, leading to mistakes, etc.

Of course there are some folks that will argue that they can do 10~12h work per day. While this is true, usually they don't do it for long without being burned out. A very few exceptions can do that without getting stressed.

So, If I'm a business man and I want my employees to have more free time without affecting my business, I would reduce the hours per day rather then do 10 hours x 4 days a week.

* btw, that's about software engineering only. I don't think the mechanics of other business would work that way.
It's not clear, are workers maintained through the entire session?
When my kids' lunch container gaskets leak, I have to throw the lunchbox in the wash.

When my iPhone's leak, I'm out potentially $1500.
Replaceable batteries aren't even just about the 3 years later when it stops holding a useful charge, it's about day 1 ownership where I happen to want/need more flexibility.

I loved that with my now rather old G2, I effectively never plugged the actual phone in, I had a wall charger for batteries and just swapped them in and out. Now I just use a powerbank which isn't nearly as convenient. Rapid charge on phones has made running out of battery far less painful however.

Laptops are the one that really drive me nuts and I haven't heard a very compelling argument against a user replaceable battery. Some thinkpads even have a small internal battery that provides enough juice to let you swap out the main battery and not have the computer shut off - that's super cool and practical, i'll take a few mm extra thickness.
Theoretically, the quality of work per hour goes up. More than half of the observed workday in my experience is taken up with chitchat and other bullshit.
What annoys me about tourists in Edinburgh, is that everyone wants to pile into Old Town, even though it is so small.

No one contemplates Leith or Newington. Neither of those places are beyond a short walk (1-2 miles) to city center, also there are more options for food and drink (especially on Leith Walk).
Lawyer here! Crime is the general term, and describes any offense against the people or the sovereign. Offenses are divided into severities, ranging from felony (worst) to infraction (least), with penalties to suit.

In this case, swimming on the free beach is probably an infraction, much like failing to use your turn signal. The worst penalty you’ll face in the usual case is a fine. But if you swim on the free beach, get yourself in trouble, and a rescue party has to come save you, the fact that it’s a “crime” now gives the state the ability to recover their costs from you afterwards.
Yeah, XP for the skepticism. But not for anything else.
I’ve definitely reached a point where I’m uninterested in proving myself or my worth. You absolutely can ignore me, I’ll take my show somewhere else.

The work we end up doing (as distinct from the craft one may learn) is deeply silly in many ways, and not worth investing too much of one’s self-esteem in. Especially since our industry is so clearly inept at assessing skill.
That's obviously not true, because for virtually everybody, there are plenty of subjects where we're simply not qualified to do that sorting, and will only mislead ourselves by trying.

The virtue of good reporting is that they can cultivate expert sources and analysis that you don't have access to.
OK so now I'm considering switching my primary work browser to Safari instead of Chrome (I use Firefox for a lot of my general/personal browsing already). The one thing holding me back is development tools. Which has better devtools, Firefox or Safari? (I've tried both several times but always ended up running back to Chrome...)
This will never stop being funny.
The same people who thought it was a good idea to give control of the lockscreen to third parties who are notorious for attention-seeking and brinksmanship (album art) -- and then to remove the setting to control it.

(Album art is communicated through notifications so you can still revoke access on a per-app basis, but the new setting is not explicit, not global, coarse, and overrode my preferences during an "upgrade". Ugh.)
There are two main points of information here that make Amazon the target.

One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire employees who fail to meet their performance metrics and hire new at the same wage. If they have no problem doing this at the current wage level, at a higher wage level it will be even easier to find new people willing to meet their strenuous performance demands. Here it seems like unionizing or passing worker protection laws would be necessary to improve working conditions.

The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it.

Is it that Amazon is more willing to employ marginally-skilled workers, or is there a bias in which individuals actually receive SNAP as a subset of those who would be eligible to receive the benefits? Closest thing to a primary source for the data about food stamps appears to be this [1], with this [2] chart representing the breakdown in five of the six states that they were able to get information for.

Quotes like "Amazon was the 28th largest employer in Arizona last year, but it ranked fifth for the number of employees enrolled in SNAP" are also ambiguous, because this could be seen as Amazon willing to give jobs to the lowest strata, with the other 27 employers not willing to even give them a job. Or even that well-intentioned policies of the other top employers to ensure that their workers are well-paid means that they hire fewer workers for the same total spend.

[1] https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-states...

[2] https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-e...
Illegal can be things that hasn't yet regulated or made legal. Autonomous driving car, advanced ai even travelling to mars are things that yet not exists, thus are illegal at time they exists.

Recent examples are GDPR, where before it isn't regulated to track user information without consent, now being prohibited with clear penalty. Next they should regulate personal assistance like alexa and siri
Not sure that actually makes things any clearer to me. Is it actually illegal, or is it just "not allowed"? (Is the free beach public?)

What would make it "a crime" as opposed to just being "illegal"?
GraalVM: (native) Clojure [slides]
Investment money doesn't come in one discrete unit: it's allocated across many different things, including (for energy, climate change, etc.):

- Nuclear (existing tech, emerging tech, fundamental research, fusion, etc.)

- Renewables (wind, solar, geothermal, current tech, emerging tech, fundamental research, etc.)

- Fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas, existing tech, emerging tech, fundamental research, etc.)

- Carbon capture (reforestation, underground storage, fundamental research, etc.)

- Geoengineering (space shades, reflective aerosols, fundamental research, etc.)

- Economics/sociology (carbon markets, incentives, subsidies, public awareness, fundamental research, etc.)

We should be debating what the total budget is, and how it's divided proportionally among these.

A blanket statement like "invest in renewable energy" only makes sense if we think the proportion of investment allocated to renewables is smaller than it should be. I personally think that's a fair argument to make, so saying "invest in renewable energy" is a statement I agree with.

However, doing so "instead" of nuclear only makes sense if we think that (a) nuclear already has too much investment and (b) it's better to defund nuclear than to defund other investments. I disagree with both of these.

Nuclear is in need of more investment, for example there are many new reactor designs that have not been commercially exploited yet; and the old-tech plants are near retirement (which keeps getting extended). The fact that we're not seeing retired plants replaced with new tech, let alone many brand new plants, is largely due to lack of investment, as well as issues of regulation and public awareness (which affects the investment; but could also be invested in themselves!).

Regarding defunding: investment in fossil fuels can make sense (e.g. replacing coal with natural gas is a "quick win" which buys the climate some time), but as long as so much is over-invested in actively harmful areas (e.g. coal, tree burning like UK's Drax, etc.), then not only is it better to spend that money on renewables rather than taking it from nuclear, in some cases (e.g. marketing climate disinformation in the US) we'd be better off even if we burned that money for fuel, let alone invested it in renewables!
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Taking Care of Your Knee Pains [Fitness Tips Guide] – ViralTrendsLab
>Consequently, I follow no out of domain news sources.

I wonder if this has the opposite risk of creating a kind of "journalistic capture" where the reporting of the journalists who are experts on the topic can be too highly influenced by the industry they're covering.

>"Hillary cancelled her post-election party."

A quick search suggests to me that it's well documented that she canceled some kind of party at the Javits Center on election day rather than days in advance. Do you have anything offhand that speaks to this? Am I perhaps searching for a different party than the one you're describing?
Not sure if anyone mentioned that but WBasic would be a much better name I think. Just like GWBasic and QBasic.
What I need is a weekly work day :). My workplace is so distracting that I barely ever get to do focused work. The background noise drives me crazy and then always somebody wants to have another meeting about something that has been discussed dozens of times before.
That kind of misbehavior is why I usually try to stay away from Amazon. It might not be a huge dent in their bottom line, but maybe one day it becomes big enough for a change of policy.
I have, which is why I know how poorly those pull strips work. They often break off leaving the battery firmly attached and it needs to be heated/pried off (which can be quite dangerous).

The pull strip was a nice addition, but they need to improve their strength so they cannot break.
I think the long term nuclear storage problem is at least partially, if not mostly or fully, a problem caused by political opposition.

NIMBY essentially.

They couldn't even get storage done at Yucca Mountain, and that's in the middle of the desert.
Has anyone found the app permissions being reset for many apps abruptly? I just faced it!
The Singularity in the 1790s: William Godwin and Thomas Malthus
How two-year old start up became BMW's sole insurance partner
You can give honest, useful feedback without using words like "stupid."

The fact is resorting to insults and name-calling is toxic. If you can't provide constructive, honest feedback without being an asshole, you need to work on yourself.
> Maybe it's too hard for the rootless masses on HN to understand what its like being rooted in an area over generations to just watch it become a foreign country within a decade.

I can't remember the exact number, but the majority population feels threatened when the non-majority reaches some like 5-10% of the total population. When you feel threatened, the minority population isn't exactly overwhelming. America has had this kind of xenophobia before. Irish, Italians, Ukranians, Jews, it's all the same noise, and it turns out the same - you still have America, it's just a little different, a little more culturally complex. And don't give me that whole "but they aren't integrating" shtick. They may not integrate easily, but 2 generations from now their grand kids will be as American as anybody.
> I'm a bit skeptical about this one and wonder to what extent the effect is actually measurable for newspapers.

I notice the effect all the time reading any coverage of legal or regulatory issues in mainstream newspapers. I pretty much just flip past any such article these days--it's too painful. As to the alternatives, they're domain specific. For legal stuff, there are specialized legal journals. Blogs are top notch too--anything you read on PopeHat is 10x better than the NYT.
FAPP, a company is a bunch of people (mostly a bunch of managers who make the decissions) so at some point some manager decided to squeeze his workers beyond reason - this would be bottom up opression. Or perhaps a higher manager wrote the inhumane procedure and a lower level manager implemented it - top down opression.
Basically they pretended to go out of business and reorganized the company slightly to purge all equity holders they didn't actually want to have equity.

I lawyered up but I can only afford a five figure lawyer, at that point they were willing to bring in a seven figure lawyer so that was that.
iFixIt are forced to use unofficial parts (Apple won't sell to them), unofficial guides (Apple won't provide the documentation), and no jigs/tools (proprietary). iFixIt aren't a good argument for why Apple's devices are easily repairable, they're an example of overcoming the roadblocks Apple puts between the consumer and repairing their Apple device.
LogDevice clients do notify sequencers if they have seen newer epochs, which would cause a sequencer reactivation, which indeed resolves the issue within the context of a single client.

However, there can still be reordering in the context of a wider system. E.g. if client A sends a write (w1) to sequencer in epoch X, which gets replicated and acknowledged, and after that client B sends a write (w2) to sequencer in epoch (X-1) which gets replicated and acknowledged (because epoch X-1 is not sealed), then readers eventually will see w2 before w1. If writes in epoch X weren't accepted before the sealing of the epoch (X-1) had completed, this reordering would be impossible, however as a result write availability would suffer.
I only ever use == to do “x == null”, to check if x is undefined or null, but not any other falsey value like 0.
chitchat, facebook and replying to HN =)
I doubt even in the case of international affairs things are any better in the manner traditional media is covering it. Eg: See the coverage of Syria, there seems to be hardly any first hand reporting appearing, most reports read like analysis written from afar.
Well, at least in modern Android it's not as bad as it used to be - it used to take up the entire background of the lockscreen. I used to need an Xposed module just to fix that.
As a society we've decided that we do, because we are.
The shoddy treatment of Amazon's employees has been publicized repeatedly for years.

The issue is that while the average person is lead to believe the notion that they can work hard and make enough to have a comfortable living, they can only afford it at the expense of others.
The wealthy will not let that be at their expense - they want it to be at the expense of other poor people.

Pitting middle class people against lower class people is a proven tactic, and that's what's happening here.

Most products and services provided by companies are subsidized by providing poor working conditions or wages for their employees, in an attempt to maximize profits.

If all of those subsidies were to vanish, the standard of living for most lower to middle class people would drop substantially - while the upper class would be unaffected.
Show HN: Shellsync – shell-scripting with tests, mocks, and Node.js
I don't know, fellow Nevadan here and I didn't feel like I got a lot of ads on Yucca but I did feel like the way it was framed made it such a non-starter for any politician so it became impossible to back.

No one wants to be the Senator who voted to let nuclear plants dump their toxic waste near Las Vegas, especially given the atomic testing history of Nevada already
Big "philanthropy" isn't a new concept. It's more than a 100 years old and was created by the "robber barons" of the gilded age to shelter their money from taxes and keep the wealth under family control for generations. An added benefit of these family charities is great PR. The most famous beneficiary of the charity PR is john d rockefeller whose reputation improved immensely after setting up his family charities. Rockefeller revolutionized the modern use of a PR team to burnish one's image through radio, tv, etc. A more recent example of this is bill gates who used charity and pr teams to shift public perception of him from a greedy tech monopolistic to a charitable philanthropist. Bezos is just following in a long line of extremely wealthy people.

Whether it is good for society to immense wealth controlled by family trusts/chariities or whether the wealth should be taxed and used for public purposes is something people can debate for an eternity.
Ask ABG: Which Under-Counter Ice Maker Is the Quietest?
Google was fined billions for outright illegal practices and is mostly concerned about power, not illegality.

Furthermore, in hierarchical structures people only care what those above them think. "Illegality" of the feature is something for lawyers, not them. At best they rely on morals, but even that is screwed by perks, incentives, the environment they work in, peer pressure, management, corporate propaganda, etc. Generally in such structures you can make people do anything, even kill other people and be ready to get killed.
It feels arrogant by Google to take the liberty to even add the possibility to changes customer's settings remotely without them having a say in it. It's like the forgot who's phones they are. My guess is that they're so used to A/B testing on their web sites that they think the same is OK on peoples personal devices just because Google makes the software that runs on them too.
Ohh yeah like reading. But other than that I don't think there can be other indicators to know how much active you are on your Mac.

Can you provide any other examples which does not include mouse & keyboard?

I think mostly Developers, Designers & Gamers spend their time the most in front of the computer & need breaks.

For me, this app worked immensely well because I for the past couple of weeks I've been coding for 9+ hours without a lot of break (not more than 5 minutes) & it hurt my eyes & also there is a lot of headache too. Now I don't have to consciously remind myself to take breaks. AFK takes care of that for me :)
There is a middle ground though. Linus wasn't just direct, he was outright derogatory. If Linus stops saying (not an actual quote) "this is a stupid idea and you are a retard for suggesting it" and starts saying "this is a stupid idea" instead, then that's a massive improvement.

Edit: Of course being constructive with your criticism is even better.
Hackers Leverage Evil Cursor in Chrome to Lock Out Users
Everything is contract work in technology now unless you're a software engineer. They do exactly the same things. It's cheap exploited labor.
You jest, but having worked in the ad tech industry, I can say this is actually a completely viable means of tracking people. This is why you don't load uBlock Origin into your Tor Browser or use a custom User-Agent string while using your VPN. Everything you do that is different than what everyone else does (i.e. the default) is a means of identifying you. And if I could do it at that startup, certainly Google can do it in a million more ways a million times more accurately.
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Isn't there relationship already problematic?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/20/firefox-g...
I think what the article is trying to say is not that the free market has an unchanging interest rate, but rather that it is determined by market forces. Anyone that wants to try to change the interest rate has to take risk to do so. The Fed, though, can change the interest rate in a risk-free fashion. So organizations that depend on the interest rate always have to hedge against potential changes in the interest rate not driven by market forces.

I think the biggest issue that this article is chasing is that the interest rates so given are preferential by nature -- only certain eligible banks can claim the interest rate, and they are not being permitted to pass that on to their customers in an unadulterated form, so the market has to find ways to flow around this, to allow things like betting on derivatives related to a bank's performance in order to try to gain exposure to the underlying Fed-offered interest rate.
Well, we don't all agree that the changes are tantamount to "damage", first of all.

I'd wager that anybody who suddenly had an illegal hotel running out of her neighboring appartment will very strongly disagree with that statement.

Unless you personally made that experience, in a house where parties live for 30 years+, you are not aware what a massive impact this can have on your quality of life.

Since I've been there I stopped using AirBnb, period.
There a million shops where you can get the battery on an iPhone replaced.
Google Contributor was service from Google that used a pool of money set aside by the user to bid on ad slots, and if a particular ad auction was won, the ad would be replaced in the pageview with a pictorial pattern of the user's choice. The program was not well publicized, although tech journalists have covered it and I have written [1] about it in my comments when Brave and Flattr came up and have wondered why Facebook (sitting on a huge trove of real identities) never did the same.

But in 2017 it was shut down for a few months, and relaunched as a program which would omit all ads from the target site if the site was a partner, and the user has marked that site in their account. The amount charged for each pageview is set by the site [2]. Only a handful of websites are supported, although most are news sites -- local papers or TV channels.

This new Funding Choices program aims to greatly expand the list of sites that use Contributor by offering a managed solution that solves a better-than-before subset of two pain points at once: regulatory compliance and monetization.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20google%20contributor... [2] https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7359560
That used to be the case, actually life cycles in earlier years were sometimes even shorter than that (apparently it was only a year and a half back in 2007 -- http://reconanalytics.com/2015/02/2014-us-mobile-phone-sales...).

But several articles seem to point out that the upgrade cycle is slowing down -- up to 2 and 3/4 years according to this source (https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/20...) for instance.

I think the second link is correct that 5G might offer some incentive to upgrade, but else wise there's just less reason to constantly upgrade your phones these days. The delta between an iPhone 7 and an iPhone 8 is not that huge versus the delta between an iPhone 3GS and an iPhone 4.