skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Income inequality is not the issue here or in the Gilded Age. It's monopoly power.

Of course, in the Gilded Age monopoly power was enabled and defended by capital concentration. Not so now: global interest rates are at a historical low, often pushing the negative barrier, and capital is so swamped that its owners are begging any fool with anything that call itself an idea to take it.

The microeconomic issue in each case is increasing returns to scale, which builds huge protective moats around the big industrial players. But now increasing returns to scale are enabled by nearly-free technology - industrial production in the gilded age required expensive and heavily patented machinery, while now every relevant tool is at hand, either for $0 or for peanuts.

It's not "monopoly capital" as made famous by American marxists such as Paul Sweezy. It's quickly drifting away from "capitalism" as defined by K. Marx himself. We need to understand the differences if we're going to protect and improve the lives of those less empowered to escape drudgery and the rat race.
Unfortunately, those rules have just been relaxed to allow chools that prey upon unsuspecting students to carry on doing so.
“decent wage for work performed, not pressured to perform as fast as possible for gimmicks in an ever quicker race to the bottom to see who can wreck their health the fastest.”

These are not exclusive options. Workers can make a decent wage and be incentivized by bonus programs.

I’m not sure how this is undignified or how to have enough dignity in such a program.

It’s a challenge to try to maximize productivity and having elective programs where individuals can choose to put in extra effort than they normally would could certainly be structured in a way that isn’t compulsory and reduces the risk of someone harming themself.

It certainly would award workers who work harder and produce more than others. And there could be valid reasons for lower productivity (ie, poor health) that are outside of worker control. But I think the aim is not to evenly distribute wages across all workers, but to allocate wages to the most productive workers.

Manual labor is a challenge to manage.
To me this looks way more like a series of blog posts than a book.
Has anyone ever run a native application with compressed pointers, rather than just 32 bit pointers?
I worked in both research and profit-center sides at a so-called non-profit private university everyone knows by name with a ten figure endowment management company. They wasted $150 million on a campus-wide accounting system that consultants failed to deploy something usable. And, an 8 year old $30 million donated building was torn down to make way for a $120 million complex with underground parking. They have money to burn, even in economic downturns... they do the feigning poverty routine with so-called budget cutbacks that are ostensibly to cut spending but are in fact false signals to game donors into donating more.

Nearly all US universities are so flush with cash that they're constantly rebuilding to attract customers (ie students). The scamming ones must have owners and executives taking the money and running, because there's no way they can go bankrupt unless they're trying hard to do so and/or completely incompetent at managing business survival.

PS: The associate vice provost of a dept I worked for was reimbursed $80-100 from the university for dinner nearly every night,
had a free suite just off campus (worth $3000/month) and seriously requested helicopter rides to work. They were in-charge of the biggest cash-cow besides undergraduate tuition, netting around $200 million annually.
I’m a backend python software engineer in my day job, working on production code in a standard git, text editor, .py files workflow. I occasionally use Jupyter notebooks (e.g. yesterday for the AdventOfCode challenges). I am ashamed to say that despite the beautiful front-end that works so well, I absolutely hate using Jupyter notebooks.

- The mutable state with global variables from all cells in scope drives me crazy. I just want to run an ephemeral script repeatedly so I can be sure what the state is during execution.

- The process of starting the server and moving code from version-controlled .py files into notebook cells to become part of Untitled(25).ipynb, which can’t be sanely version controlled, drives me crazy.

- Not being able to use my normal text editor drives me crazy.

Instead of building up lines of well-tested python functions in a disciplined line-by-line fashion, periodically committed to git with readable diffs, I end up with a chaotic mess of code fragments in various cells with no confidence regarding what will happen when some subset of the cells are executed, and none of it in git let alone with a sane commit history.

I’ve tried so many times over the last 10 years, and I feel bad because it’s such an amazing project, but I really dislike the experience of using Jupyter instead of standard python development tools.

The reason I do it is for graphics. This isn’t a Jupyter gripe other than the diverted attention, but why the fuck can’t I just import matplotlib in a normal python file? (under macOS it throws something about “frameworks” which no-one cares to understand. I think there’s some incantation that makes it work but seriously, this is ridiculous). And maybe draw graphics to a GUI graphics widget from the (i)python shell like R does.

(No need to reply "Because you haven't written it"! This is deliberately a rant; I contribute to open source projects.)
>There is no pressure to perform or participate in a hackathon

I guess you haven't had the pleasure of participating in monthly workplace "hackathons". Of course participation is optional, but it can look good on your promotion case wink-wink nudge-nudge.
What do you mean by "loss in caching and other optimizations"?

I get the part about duplicated libraries, but I'm not certain it's that big of a deal: Most people don't have more than 2G of code so it should be possible for the 64-bit libraries to be used (and just mapped low) with an m32-built application, if the things that create new pointers can be limited to 32-bits.
Example of using satellites and ML algorithm to build a precision farming app
In a world where all of your biometric data can be easily identified and linked back to you, there won't be much room for bad behavior.

That's a world that I sure as shit never want to inhabit.
>>I suspect Amazon could find the money if they wanted to.

Or they can close down the shop if they can't find the money to do the right /required thing.
How to do with probabilities what people say you can’t (1985) [pdf]
> manipulate (motivate)

> go against the values of some people

This reads like you have experience with bad leaders.

When I try to motivate colleagues or team members, it's not at all manipulation. It's helping them through issues that they're dealing with and getting them happy about what they're doing. I'd rather do that than let them be unhappy and unmotivated. When you manipulate, people will see through it, when you motivate, people will appreciate it and work harder because they want to. I'm not sure why that would be a bad thing.
This seems pretty reductive of all labor since we perform tricks (show up to work) in exchange for treats (wages).

The context of this practice matters quite a bit, but it’s hard to say that work incentive programs are undignified because dogs get treats for tasks.
Microsoft's architecture usually uses Kerberos Delegation, so access control is implemented in the backend. Say you've got an IIS web server, and SQL server; when the user logs into your application, they either delegate their tgt to the webserver or the web server gets a ticket on behalf of the user via Kerberos Protocol Transition (if they used a username and password in a form), the IIS server then authenticates to the backend, essentially impersonating the end user, so that the backend SQL server can look at it's own ACLs, rather than the web server having full access to the database and implementing its own ACLs. All this relies on having users in LDAP (specifically Active Directory). You could also go with what most people do, which is what is described in that article, in that you have groups as roles in LDAP, and simply lookup what groups a user belongs to, to determine access levels.
What good is a company that is not sustainable enough to pay its employees enough to live?
The dish that burns in the right places
Well.. those other ships weren't really on their right (at that time). They were on their left (as can be seen on the video of the radar monitoring). The reason stated by Helge Ingstad's radio operator for not turning starboard was because of some reefs to their starboard.
At the time of the crash those reefs were still 750m away (to starboard) though.
She created the first computerized stand-alone word processor, but the tech inside was less important than what it could do for businesses - and from what I can tell it wasn't significantly more capable than IBM's older electromechanical MT/ST system, which also had the advantage of having IBM's name and financial resources behind it. It was also made obsolete a few years later by display-based interactive systems that resemble what we think of as word processing today.
Just reading the string "Compiz" gave me absolute nostalgia-whiplash.
I was probably wrong about next too, then. Still, they both hail from the Steve Jobs school of blurry fonts, which is all any sane person tries to avoid in a web browser ; )
If you enjoy this article you will find the Zulip project's commit guidelines interesting as well :)

https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/version-...
> It's capitalism:

Actually, it's not. It's a page taken out of the old soviet playbook, where factory workers were pushed to increase production through means other than pay increases or productivity rewards, and played with psychological tricks such as appealing to nationalism or even conformance with the regime's ideal.

The exploitation trick is as old as time, but it's not specific to an economic system.
That's a really good point actually, I hadn't thought directly about this before. I've just evolved a position on it without articulating it directly: I almost never include them in my public APIs, almost never see them in the better APIs, and tend to count it as a strike against a package if I see that they're used without strong justification.

I find there's a lot you have to do manually to handle them correctly and it's easy to miss details. I think they're best cordoned off behind isolated, encapsulated parts of a channel-free public interface.

To walk back a tiny bit from my earlier "80%" claim, I reckon channels are probably more like 50% complete. The existence of "context.Context", itself very much half-baked, is a symptom of that.

You have to think long and hard about cancellation and blocking every time you interact with them (even if you decide you don't ultimately need to), and the results, once you've (hopefully) handled all the corner cases can degenerate into a tangled mess that's hard to reason about, harder to test, and impossible to change. I like to call this kind of code "channel soup".

I'd be interested to see proposals for what the 80% version of channels would look like. What we have now is a great start, but it's not great yet.
> Or US voters could do the more efficient thing and ask for nationwide paid maternity/paternity leave, vacation, and removal of “exempt” employees.

Who is supposed to pay for that? If it's the employer, they'll just take vacation/leave out of your/everyones paycheck. If it's paid for by taxes, then the most efficient thing would be to just hand the cash to the people and let them decide whether they want to work or not.

> And decoupling health “insurance” from employers, dump everyone on healthcare.gov or taxpayer funded healthcare.

I agree with the first part, but dumping "everyone" on taxpayer funded healthcare will only create crappy healthcare for everyone (UK) or two-class private/socialized healthcare (Germany) - except it will be worse because of the inherently higher healthcare costs in the US.
Yes, though also mentioned very early in this article as perhaps not the most accurate portrayal :)
>>> Don't you think it's reasonable to compare a first world country like the US with another first world country like France or Germany?

I was obviously replying to that.
I live in Tanzania and I think you lack perspective. Many people here would appreciate any home at all that isn’t made of mud and shit. There are price controls on grain and export bans in order to make things “cheap”.

The result? People are hungry, some are starving. Businesses can’t function due to the high taxes. Farms are closing down because they can’t turn a profit. The country is falling apart.

I came the from the US, and it has completely reframed by perspective. People desperately want capitalism: they want cheap phones, they want cheap food, they want the government to stop exploiting them in the name of “social good.”

The only people in the world who want socialism are those who are already in rich capitalist countries. They can’t appreciate what capitalism has delivered for them because they have nothing to compare it to.

Capitalism delivers and is by far the most optimal system (and also the only stable system).

We talk about “the poor” in the developed world. But the poor in the US would be in the top 1% over here.

If you don’t think that capitalism has helped everyone, I think you might be misinformed.
There's Shibbeloth: https://www.shibboleth.net/

Not as easy as LDAP, it's designed for bigger places, like Universities
Tetris3D
Thank you! I'm trying to improve it daily so if you have any suggestion I would love to hear it.
Actually, workers increasing the cost of labor will certainly accelerate deploying automation.

There’s currently a cost of robots and a cost of humans. When the cost of humans goes above the cost of robots, automation kicks in.

Technology innovation is dropping the cost of robots. A fulfillment center unionizing will increase human costs, unlikely that it will go up so much as to make robot deployment feasible.

But workers definitely can do, or not do, things to affect the timetable.

I would expect that human cost would also increase with lowered productivity and that’s directly in worker control.
For an "average user" Linux, and FreeBSD are absolutely identical. If it's supplied with pre-installed GUI (say Ubuntu as Linux, and TrueOS on BSD side) it's more or less the same point-and-click experience. If it's bare console - well, it would be the same OMG-what's-that experience. Differences will start to appear for a user who wants to dive deeper, but that would make him/her non-average apparently.
You are 100% right. The website is 3 weeks old and the "book editing" feature is not released yet.
For managing desktops and not servers, Group Policy is still unbeaten. I have yet to see a unified strategy on Linux of being able to say, mount these drives on logon, show these applications, don't allow them to do x, change the background to y etc.

Sure, managing linux servers is a doddle, but desktop environments are miles harder to get right.
What’s wrong is that it’s easy to exploit human psychology with a variable ratio reward schedule using raffle tickets and prizes.

It’s a job. If you add more value, you ought to be paid for it in dollars, not raffle tickets.
Vonnegut’s Asterisk (2013)
Oh, Amazon won’t explicitly say they’re being fired for trying to unionize. There’ll be some cover story that the workers violated some rule no one ever heard of and everyone else ignored, too.
That works only if you assume that all of the current spending is completely necessary and cannot be reduced. Or that internal processes can never change. Neither of those are true though.
Nice interface. It's also a plus to see that I don't have to create an account to use the service. Good job.
> Unions is also a legitimate force in capitalism. In many ways it could be good for Amazon. If gives them a way to deal evenly with their employees.

This. Capitalism is all about freedom of association. Unions only start to become incompatible with capitalism if they start to force themselves as a monopoly to control who may or may not work for a company.
What on earth has that got to do with this case? The radio operator and the navigator on the bridge weren't female.
Not the defacto standard, but plain POSIX. Carriage return + line feed to enter a new line starting at the left margin makes perfect sense mechanically, though, and a lot of systems with ASCII/ASCII-like encodings use some variation of this sequence (e.g. <cr><lf> or <lf><cr>) for "newlines". Of course, in the interest of compatibility I'd prefer if it was one way or another, but I don't think it's fair to say that POSIX is the defacto standard. Lines in network protocols, for example, typically use <cr><lf> as well.
Crypto is becoming more popular in Iran
These fulfillment centers aren’t in Manhattan and San Francisco.

$19 is certainly enough to live (~$38k/year). This is way above poverty and one of the highest wages for unskilled labor.
Exactly what we need, more globalisation. Thanks.
They were on their left

You are of course completely right. I apparently can't read maps or forgotten which hand is which :)
Telnet over SSL.
FYI, CIFS refers specifically to the version of SMB1 that was submitted as an RFC. You should absolutely not be using "CIFS" these days.
Look to Smalltalk for lessons on this.
Why Nations Fail (amazing!)

Chimpanzee Politics (interesting)

Corporate Confidential (paranoid, but worth a read)

Developer Hegemony (red pill for developers!!!)

Bargaining For Advantage (reasonable)

Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision Making (abstract as hell but rewarding)

Thinking Fast and Slow (loved it)

The Elephant In The Brain (seriously underrated)

The Brain That Changes Itself (inspirationally freaky)

The Power of Habit (good!)

The Secret Barrister (mildly disturbing)

Thinking In Systems (huge fan of this book!)

A Short History of Truth (meh...)

Man's Search For Meaning (brooo... I am so sorry)

Thinking In Bets (meh.. really meh)

The Road To Ruin (alright. Interesting even.)

Lying For Money (lots of fun!)

Great Answers To Tough Interview Questions (what it says on the tin)

Traction (good overview of marketing tactics)

Lean Customer Development (pretty good)

The Mom Test (eye opening)

Lean B2B (solid playbook)

Principles (instant classic)
Are they slaves forced to work for their local lord? Probably not in this time in the US - "the only option" is not a credible hypothesis.
also i always recommend my idol jerry weinberg https://www.amazon.com/Weinberg-Writing-Fieldstone-Gerald-M/...
it's not his best book, but yes, he was one of us (nerds, geeks, technical people, hacker, ...) and he had writting figured out.
how do you explain the pixels having problems go unresolved for months at a time?
> Well until it's tried I guess we'll never know...

It has been. The BBC tried selling Doctor Who via Bittorrent for example, with signficant publicity.

The DVD market is big because it's cheap and no other reason.

People already have an abundant legal alternatives that are widely available and simple to use.
I made a quick list[0] of cheap shared hosting providers I found on LEB[1]

[0] https://gist.github.com/shaunpud/35f77b542eaec7c7024bbb15c2e...
[1] https://lowendbox.com
The environment variable here does not refers to a Firefox variable but rather to the OS environment.

To test it once you could execute:

GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 firefox

If you want a more persistent solution you could add

export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1

to your .profile or /etc/profile (if you want it for all system users)
At this wage, it would be unwise to live alone in a single bedroom apartment and would be much smarter, although more difficult, to get roommates to reduce rent costs by 25-50%.
Suppose you want to indicate that a particular variable is a list of int. You might write "list[int]" to indicate that. But try that in a Python interpreter and you'll get an error -- "list[int]" attempts to subscript the list class object, which doesn't work.

So typing.List exists to be a subscriptable object you can use when annotating, and "typing.List[int]" works. Same for the other names.
Interesting COW for whole process images and a tree like interface to jump between them. Could work if well if the process image itself had structured interfaces for everything important. Otherwise you'd end up with black box images everywhere.
> and ad impression on Firefox is not worth less than an ad impression on Chrome

True, but Firefox might add more aggressive ad blocking, whereas Chrome might want to disable/discourage that.
I used ScrollMagic in 2014 and quite enjoyed it. I think it should still be a pretty good library.

The article is "meh" (and wrong about jQuery being required), for more technical details have a look at its Github page: https://github.com/janpaepke/ScrollMagic
I've actually looked at it, taking all $3 billion of Amazon's 2017 profit and dividing it among its 500,000 employees adds up to 6000$.

To be fair though, they aren't making money on fulfillment really, they're cross-subsidizing it with their more profitable segments which also do not require that many workers. In that sense it isn't comparable with Wal-Mart and McDonalds.
Apple successfully leveraged UNIX to develop macOS (officially UNIX) from which they developed iOS. Google successfully managed to leverage the Linux kernel (Unix-like) and Java to develop Android. Windows Phone, on the other hand, flopped.
OpenChange tried to build an exchange server, and it worked to a certain extent, but it's now dead I believe. Keeping up with the recent protocol changes in Exchange was too much, though ironically with the REST and MAPI over HTTP (not RPC over HTTP), it should be a lot easier to create an exchange replacement.

Samba still does amazing stuff on the directory RPC front.
Working is not a trick and earning your livelihood is not a treat. A lousy raffle isn't even a form of income.
My gripe with the American unionization debacle is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, you're the pillars keeping the problem standing. It's the same with tipping. If everyone suddenly stopped tipping, then people would not have enough wages to meet their obligations. This results in people not being able to pay rent etc., however, this also leads to a walk-out of the servers that don't want to work for under minimum wage anymore. The problem is that people that are tipping and servers that are encouraging the tipping are keeping the problem alive.

It's the same thing with unionization, unionization is beneficial for workers, yet everyone keeps undercutting each other to stay afloat and meet their obligations. Because people can not properly cooperate and work together you are stuck in this bad equilibrium where companies have so much power over you.

That being said, this exploitation of the working class has lead to a lot of technological innovation coming from the USA, let's not forget that. Of course, this has lead to a huge inequality and divide in social class and wealth.

So that concludes my rant basically. Your attitude towards these kind of problems is complex, but completely human and understandable. No complex question has a simple answer ... but I think that this is a step in the right direction.

I want to conclude that I'm a European, so if you feel like I completely missed the mark, please feel free to open a dialogue with me!