skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't do it. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend. Unions are not a bucket of roses.

You're exchanging one set of overlords for another. Literally sit down with anyone in their first 8-15 years of experience in a union and ask them what kind of influence they have on their industry, what sort of choices of work they get to work, who gets "the jobs" before you do, and about their fixed pay scale, and what are the consequences if they take non-union jobs.
I can't speak for the author, but in my opinion if you treat this as a checklist to follow instead of a set of observations, you will probably be intolerable to most people and will probably fail at your goal of being successful.
Where are you living that social nets are getting bigger and wider? It seems to me that the modern idea, since the 1980s, has been to constantly cut them back.
> Users can also purchase a subscription for Office 365 from within the apps, so they can get up and running instantly.

This would tend to suggest that Apple isn't getting a cut. Normally when they take one, it's on the basis of funds being transferred via their store, which doesn't appear to be the case here. But this is a massive deal between two of the ecosystem's biggest fish, and I'm sure an arrangement has been made to give Apple a piece of the pie somehow.
Absolutely. There are a range of definitions for successful, but I think in many ways it's best left as "in the eye of the beholder", in the sense that it's about achieving your own personal threshold. If you build a way of life that is sustainable for yourself and provides you with personal and psychological stability for you and your dependents, and if you feel at least reasonably fulfilled in this, you can call yourself successful.

If you don't think you're doing what you should be, or think you could be doing So Much More, or that you have wasted potential, then maybe you're not successful yet, even if you're doing better on paper than some people who do view themselves as such.
We can also measure people's height, yet we usually don't use it as a metric for success in life (you also don't see that many how to be tall posts).
Why would labor relationships be any different?

Well it seems like there's some interest to take that on at least from a product perspective when you look at these HR, Payroll, Employee Relations platforms coming out that could be argued try to take a portion of the market away from HR giants like ADP.

And then you have the various interviewing services (interviewing.io is an example I often point to), developer bootcamps with (presumably, at least by some of the verbiage used by said bootcamps) deep connections and mentor programs that ostensibly exist to get people hired.

Then there are your ZipRecruiters and Indeeds that claim to have revolutionized online recruiting and staffing.

Maybe the question isn't "why would labor relations be any different" but "how can tech make more of an impact in labor relations than just getting people hired and automating payroll?"

I don't have that answer, just thinking through my keyboard here.
Every time an Googler has a minor complaint about something that is miles away from their area of expertise expertise, it blows up to the front page of Hacker News. That's what I find entitled. They can't accept that one of the largest companies in the world is not going to bend to the wills. This happened with the Damore memo or project Maven, so they feed misleading information to the media to get populist pressure on their company. Now, everyone is acting suprised that Google is looking into protective measures.
You are correct, it is pretty heinous that we are all beholden to paying the war industry vast sums of money. Is it really worth it to spend millions on missiles that notoriously miss their targets? Wouldn't a very small trained team of operators be much better and far cheaper at safely eliminating a threat than blowing up an entire apartment complex from a desk hundreds of miles away with a missile that costs more than everything in that town? In August, Saudi Arabia fired a missile that killed 40 school children (1), probably one of the many weapons they bought from the US. I'm sure that missile that ended their lives cost 1000x more than whatever school building they were bussing to when they became the latest victims of geopolitical theater.

At which point do you realize you are engineering more and more expensive and advanced ways of killing for the sake of skimming personal profit for executives and investors out of public budgets? If I worked for one of these companies, I don't think I could live with myself with that huge guilt, knowing my great efforts lead directly to further destabilizing the world and ending peoples lives. I'm not comfortable using my skills to perfect ending peoples lives. That isn't innovation, that isn't advancement, that is regression. Raytheon is the barbarian blowing up the neighborhood, not a Yemeni schoolkid.

1. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/13/middleeast/yemen-children...
That is assuming there aren't also less smart managers who have short term interests of showing swift progress until the project collapses. Management will in best case take a long term interest in the company. They won't take a long term interest in employees. Certainly not employees who doesn't seem to be performing. That is what unions are for. To represent the employees concerns about the future.
A union is ultimately just labor doing collective bargaining, which is certainly something capital+management does. What is bargained for isn't set in stone; while lots of people are interested in making sure firing isn't arbitrary, labor doesn't have to bargain over making people unfire-able, or even on specific compensation. A well-run union bargains for what its membership wants. If a union of software developers wants competent productive co-workers, then it can leave at-will firings on the table and instead push for limits on hours worked per week, or bonuses based on revenue (with access to the books to double check), or employment agreements that vigorously protect individual IP rights to anything made on their own time, or sane office layouts instead of open plan, or a generous severance package with at-will firing, or provisions for no confidence votes for some management positions, or, well, any number of things.

What else can you imagine beyond compensation or job security that could be improved in the lot of a software developer? Maybe even some things could yield productivity benefits that management would like if they could see their way through it? And if some of these things are more likely with collective bargaining, why would you rule it out as a tool?
I understand the resiliency of Michiganders, my point was about maintaining incentive for the bottle program. If there was no deposit, how many people would collect bottles on the side of the road?
Remember part 2 of that section:

"establish the likelihood and severity of the resulting risk to people’s rights and freedoms. If it’s likely that there will be a risk then you must notify the ICO;"

So if it's a small irrelevant website, there isn't likely to be a high or severe risk to that "breach", so they should be ok.

In terms of options, I think there are more, mostly around sites getting more sophisticated at defending against credential stuffing attacks - treat logins as more suspicious if they are from a new device, new ip, use a password that you know is in a breach list (have i been pwned), etc. and put in place a 2nd factor like email confirmation of the login even if they haven't turned on 2FA. Or at least restrict access to sensitive parts of your site if the login was suspicious until you can verify it was an authentic login.
Seriously, it's incredible that someone could write this, redraft it at least six times, have it read by sixteen (16!) people, and not once acknowledge the boost provided to his life and career by family background (also race, but that can be for another post).
New engineers are often surprised at our hiring practices which are pretty different from industry trends.

So we asked ourselves some questions about the process and talked about the differences.
I cannot read about lapis without being reminded of this tidbit:

"In the middle of the room, set into the lapis lazuli floor, is the foundation stone of the Home of FIFA."

https://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/home-of-fifa/fifa-headquarte...
BuzzFeed News (Emily Dugan) have scooped some important stories about the justice system in the UK recently. That's the clearest example of great journalism from BuzzFeed News.
Flash Drives Are Still Everywhere (2016)
The current version would flounder because it has never seen the other races. But that is not a fundamental limitation. All it would take to fix it is more training time.
It's very easy to go over this limit by simply going to a different checkout line, or going through the same line multiple times.

At least that's how I got over the limit in Michigan when I was in college. We used to save all our cans and bottles for the whole year and return them all at once.

You're not going to make much profit off the effort though, unless you value your time at $0.
Obligatory, "Does this function bring you joy?"
If you look at history, cultures that have managed to form a wide group identity have wiped out cultures that relied on close, tribe-like cooperation. Here's a short clip from Sapolsky's lectures on behavioural evolution about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQKTnau5AEY I originally watched the whole lecture course, so I don't know how well the point gets across in this clip, but I highly recommend his lectures for this and other related subjects.
>> As a society, we make decisions against the will of individuals for a greater good all the time.

> Is it hard to see why an individual might be against that?

It's not hard to see, but individuals who prioritize their own desires over the greater good of their community are often (rightly) regarded as selfish. It is hard to have much empathy for someone who has their selfishness thwarted.
Thank You Google for Sharing My Data
> It’s not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US

Most people don't have any real access to capital, and most people's labor is totally alienated from its actual value. For most people, advice to "Work Hard" amounts to "Sacrifice More So Your Boss Can Get Richer".

Also, as far as "working hard", Americans are an extreme outlier: https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-product.... Maybe if Sam is hearing pushback against "Work Hard" as good advice, it's because Americans already work harder than other people in advanced economies for a lower quality of life (meaning less access to healthcare, less paid vacation, less self-reported happiness, etc).

Sam's a smart guy and knows all of this already, so it's baffling why he would include such a stupid throwaway line in this essay.
WebExtensions v3 considered harmful
> almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.

Being "rich" and being on "the Forbes list" are two very different standards to aim for. (Neither of which has much to do with being a good/happy person or living a good/happy life.)
> Not all of them can have it as nice as we do.

As nice as we do right now for a subset.

You know who companies spend a lot of time and resources trying to replace (even when it doesn't make sense)...their highest paid employees (that aren't executives, they earn their money! /s).

We get away with what we do because the number of (competent) programmers has lagged the demand for programmers since I was a kid back in the 80's.

It won't last.
That's the beauty of the current over-abundance of demand for devs. You fire bad bosses by quitting. Simply put, if you want to pick your best company, you have to be willing to find it. Similarly, if an employer wants to pick their best devs, they have to be willing to do things like not have bad bosses. In markets where demand is constrained, mobility may not apply, but neither do the benefits of cross-company unions.
Web Audio Weekly 100
out of curiosity, since it changes how the page prints and I haven't experimented much: have you tried printing while in the browser's "reading" mode? Or does that tend to be worse?
Where does it say the APM spiked during battles? If it's using it head-to-head with the human player, then that's bad, but how do you know it's not just herding workers and units individually?

I get the analogy but based on the distribution, 75% of the APM for alphastar is below the mean of APM for the human during gameplay. Following that analogy, both cars are on the racetrack, except one is applying acceleration with more precision - i.e. accelerating out of a turn rather than always accelerating. Capping acceleration wouldn't matter in this case.
> My two cents is to try and compete against yourself

This. With social media so ubiquitous it's hard _not_ to compare yourself to others. I, personally, find internal motivation so much more of a driving force than external motivation. As long as I do better than I did last time, I'll be happy.

For example, if I can improve my 1600 meter run time by 5 seconds, that's a great success for me. And if I'm able to consistently see improvement over time, I'm successful. On the other hand, If I compare my 7m5s 1600m time to my neighbor's 5m30s time I feel terrible. And depending on personality type, seeing such a stark difference between where you currently are and where someone else is, it might deter them from even trying to get better. "I'll never get down to 5m30s, so why should I bother running at all?"

I'm not saying _all_ external comparisons are bad but I think it's important to know when to compare yourself to yourself (to ensure daily incremental progress is being achieved) and when to look up and see where you are relative to others (to see how your incremental progress is summing up in the big picture).
How you measure success is how many people you bless - rick ross
There are few guarantees in life, and if you got paid well for your work then you're doing pretty well.

It's something of a luxury, but nonetheless, many people do work for more than a paycheck. Sometimes they want to be part of something larger than themselves. They believe in the mission.

When they go to work for the government, we call that patriotism. But companies encourage people to be mission-oriented as well. Google, in particular, encouraged this, particularly in the early days. Sure, they pay taxes, but their mission was not and still isn't about supporting America's military.

If you attract a bunch of idealists by talking up your company's mission, is it a surprise they take it seriously?

Maybe we should all be cynics and work solely for a paycheck. I'm not sure most Silicon Valley employers want to get by just hiring cynics, though.
The biggest reason why gamedev jobs tend to have lower pay and more overtime compared to many other swdev jobs is really simple: there are lots of sw devs who are willing to put up with those conditions because they want to work on games.

Also, it's easy to claim that one "wants" to unionize on a survey. But that's quite a bit different from actually doing it. So I would take this survey with a large grain of salt. It's not like most game developers couldn't get other sw dev jobs if they wanted to, after all.

If you want to know what people really value, ignore what they say and focus on what they actually do.

Disclaimer: have worked for game companies before
>> 2) Image recognition that can link to the database from 1.

What do you mean "link"? Link- how? Why does the image recognition model need a separate database? From your description, that sounds like a database with proximity relations between different objects. "Statistical weights" sounds vague- what statistics? Weights appying to what? In any case, what objects would go to the database? Where would they come from? Are you imagining a database of pairs of images of all possibles objects the AI might encounter and in every possible combination? That is unrealistic.

You are describing a setup that is not at all like the image recognition systems in existence today, that take in a large number of labelled examples of images of various types of objects (the labels determine the type of object) and output the parameters of a classification function.

4) Any object that shows up that shows a statistical unlikely placement triggers the quadcopter to fly around it in a circle in an attempt to get a different picture so that a relabel attempt can be made.

Yes, this is too ambitious. You seem to base this ability on the proximity database you describe earlier, but like I say, such a database is unrealistic. Even given such a database, your proposed system would not automatically have the ability to take correct decisions based on that database- you'd have to develop the ability to "fly around it in a circle" etc separately, and that is a very hard problem. Because it's a hard problem to develop intelligent agents with autonomous behaviour, particularly with intrinsinc motivations, like a motivation to refine their own model of the world. At the moment, this kind of thing is science fiction.

I didn't mean to offend you. The creation of the database you describe would have a very high monetary cost, but if what you propose could work you'd get your money back in spades, and undying fame through the ages, to boot, because you would have solved strong AI. So, if you really think it can work and you don't see why not- try it; and see why not.

But if you won't try it, at least try to learn a few things about AI and figure out why what you propose makes no sense given current technological capabilities.
isnt Firefox planning that same ad blocking breaking change?

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/10/26/firefox-chrome-an...
Yeah, I really would too. It always irks me when some highly successful businessman gives a talk about "do what you love and you will find success". As if billions of people before him that weren't particularly successful hadn't already tried that.
Honestly not trying to make an argument for/against unions (my own stance is I'd be totally fine with fully voluntary unions), but in isolation this comment doesn't seem to contradict the above comment's point about unions having outlived their usefulness.

On one hand, it's great the labor movement pushed for reforms in the first half of the 20th century. But we're in the first half of the 21st century now and as you point out, real wages haven't kept up with productivity and lots of people are financially insecure. So has the labor movement been slacking for the past ~50 years?

Of course, there's a whole lot more to financial insecurity than labor compensation, but you seem to be arguing for unions being one part of the answer to that. But we have unions, so where's the disconnect?
All such articles should be preceded by huge blink tags with 'Warning: survivorship bias ahead'.
> I don't think that's really making a big dent on SQL Server as the bulk of their revenue comes from the serious enterprise scenarios.

I'd say postgres can take 90% of the revenues.
I've worked in 3 of the top 10 european banks. Most of the SQL Server instances do not even need partitioning, for example. Let alone always on, hekaton and so forth.

People mostly buy peace of mind. Until they are charged millions and start questioning the stupid expensive bills saying "do we need that ?"

Really I have all the metrics to back this up: CPU usage/Availability requirements/data size... It is literally my job to collect those.

Also, proper window support, great postgis, great json support, open source ecosystem support are not simple and huge cost savers.
What does it matter, at this point?

The proof is in the pudding, and we are making more and more pudding everyday. Instead of caring about naysayers, we need to be working under the assumption AI is here to stay and rapidly expanding in scope, and we need to build the social and political structures to be able to handle it.
You don't want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high.

I'm having trouble reconciling this point. How can you continuously increase your effectiveness exponentially in a particular role? Take being a developer for example. Seems like the progression of skill is usually linear (with some variability). Is Sam saying that investing in becoming a great engineer ins't effective if your ultimate goal is to be extremely successful? I feel like this is overly reductionist. Maybe being an engineer for your entire career isn't going to lead to that massive success, but spending part of your career cultivating that skill does provide indirect benefits that can help you become super successful. For example, being able to rapidly prototype an MVP when you are testing product ideas. Building a business is the high-leverage action that could lead to massive success, but the years you spent cultivating your technical ability could be what enabled you to be able to build the MVP in the first place. Or maybe it allowed you to recognize good technical talent if your first engineering hires. I think exclusively focusing on tasks that provide orders of magnitude improvement is too direct and superficial of an answer. I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts.
Since it's game programmers, why not apply some game theory?

Aside from not wanting to be part of a union, people are reluctant to join a union if others do not do the same. Many people might actually join one if there was a big one, but a big one can't grow because nobody wants to be the first guy to raise his hand.

So someone needs to make a website that manages this. Everyone pays a deposit, say $100 bucks, and signs onto some secure site that will keep details private. If you get more than some minimum, the money is sent to the new union. Otherwise send it back.
The poster I was responding to was actually asserting that unions are bad because he would be forced to pay the dues, which you also seem to be asserting here. An argument that unions are bad because closed shops violate an individual's autonomy is completely incoherent if one also holds a belief that sometimes coercion is justified. This particular logical fallacy is commonly used by libertarians to dismiss policy proposals out of hand, in my experience.

To see why this belief is fallacious, abstract the proposition "Unions violate individual autonomy, therefore unions are bad" to "P violates individual autonomy, therefore P is bad." Replace P with criminal penalties, taxation, etc, and it is immediately obvious that this belief is logically incoherent if one also holds the belief that civilization is preferable to the state of nature.

Logical consistency matters. You can't make rational decisions without it. Either you believe that sometimes coercion is morally justified to achieve other ends, or you cannot have a consistent belief that any societal organization is morally correct. We can debate the pros and cons of unions, and yes, there are cons. But it makes no sense to dismiss it out of hand due to an incoherent moral belief.

You can coherently believe that coercion in and of itself is a bad thing, and I agree. That must be weighed against the benefits of said coercion when making such decisions. For example, most people don't like to go to prison, so I think there should be a really good reason to violate someone's autonomy in such a massive way. Thus, I only support prison for serious crimes that I really don't want people to do.

Taxation is also coercion. I don't like paying my taxes, but I support coercive measures to make sure everyone does because I like having a government.
These apps have already been on the iOS App Store for a while, and you can purchase a subscription in-app, so I don't think this will be any different.