skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is absurd. The idea that workers band together to try and get a company to stop from not only a lawful activity but one that is done for our country in particular really is upsetting.

This isn't a reasonable request by any standards. The idea that employees get a vote in what a company does and everything it does can only be expressed one way. Simply resign if you want. And that is not what is happening here. What they are trying to do is clearly extort some type of behavior en masse against the company. That is quite different.

Will be interesting to see what happens when the tide turns and tech employees aren't in such demand. This will happen. Only a matter of time when the supply and demand curve shifts.

Only one reaction by Microsoft is appropriate. We aren't pulling out of the contract if you don't want to work here find another job.
Also, medical schools limit the number of seats available to prevent an oversupply of labor from occurring. This helps keep salaries very high.

Right now, the big thing keeping the supply of software engineers down is the lack of housing available near software companies, but this will slowly change as more and more companies start outside the bay area.
It seems close to my goals, but violates one of the main ones related to lowering the entry barrier.

All the letter (and sounds) used NEED to be pronounced, the same way, for native speakers of English, French, Russian, Spanish, and also various major (eastern) Asian languages. That means that when an otherwise uneducated (in languages/reading the squiggly version of words from a dictionary) user in one of those languages tries to read one of the words it should sound like only a slight accent, not a major flub.

J should never have been used.

"14 Latin letters, a e i j k l m n o p s t u w, are used to write the language. They have the same values as in the International Phonetic Alphabet:[38] j sounds like English y, and the vowels are like those of Spanish or Italian. Capital initials are used to mark proper adjectives, while Toki Pona roots are always written with lowercase letters, even when they start a sentence.[39]"

--

Edit about the difference in vowels/etc: If there isn't a common ground in notation for symbols, then the writing for the language CAN'T map back to any existing phonetic symbol system either. It MAY use existing non-phonetic symbols and assign new uses for them, but it MUST NOT reuse such symbols that have conflicted mappings in existing languages.
There is the old (very old) classic, Corewar [1]. I enjoyed playing Robowar[2] back in the day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboWar
"so the game dev shops know that most/all inhumane treatment will be accepted by the next person who will gladly endure it to be working in the industry."

This is precisely the environment where unions emerged. If individual workers had a lot of leverage, there would never be a need for unions.
That’s not a bad idea. I’ve found that this approach to the world (trying to think of reasons why something makes sense, instead of reasons it doesn’t) makes everything easier to understand and makes life more satisfying. And if you do come to the conclusion that someone is wrong and needs to be opposed, you’ll do a better job at it.
Indeed you might not, but the person that wrote your JVM does, and the person that wrote the system that runs on does, and the person that wrote GAE does...

That single instance you're running on already took half a dozen or so other systems developers and more before it got to you, so in your example you're the minority.

It's because of the work they've done, that you can not care about the architecture you're running on, not in spite of them.
Consider that a century ago technology had advanced to the point where artillery could kill people that couldn't be seen. With a map and a slide rule, trajectories over the horizon could be calculated with disturbing lethality.

Of course the psychological impact of such artillery was almost as devastating as the lethal impact. Knowing that at any moment you could be killed without warning by a shell you'd never see coming, by a man over the horizon induced a great deal of PTSD.
Only if you believe these companies’ demises can be primarily attributed to poor CEO ability, and that a different CEO could have shown better results.

I believe that in many cases a bad leader can cruise on the success and momentum of an already smooth-sailing company, and similarly a good leader can fail to turn around a sinking ship. Who knows to what extent company performance can be linked with CEO ability or efficiency?
For actors/staffers of the entertainment industry, that's the largest and nearly only outlet for those workers to have gainful employment. For people working in the games industry, they have other options and choose to go in those positions despite known horrible conditions.

On the topic of unions in the entertainment industry, is there a union for computer graphics engineers in the entertainment industry? I couldn't find one, but I'm genuinely curious.
OpenAI's GPT-2-Based Bot That Replies When You Talk to It
Haha, could be yes. And at the opposite end:

If everything I do can be achieved without thinking hard I'll be replaced with a tiny shell script written by someone who does.
Are you talking about the distinction between weapons and non-weapons? Is there another legal distinction?
In his write-up, he explicitly calls out Wilson as his inspiration.
Another one is giving insanely long names but only changing one little part, instead of taking advantage of the heirarchical nature of programming languages and coming up with a nice nested structure. Example:

class TheRpcThing
{
object TheRpcThingHost
object TheRpcThingHostTimer
class TheRpcThingValidationException
{
object TheRpcThingHostValidationException
object TheRpcThingHostValidationExceptionErrorMessage
object TheRpcThingHostValidationExceptionErrorMessageFormatter
}
}

The cognitive cost of reading a bunch of previously-unseen code, which has an accumulation (the perfect word for this kind of thing) of the above can be so frustrating.
Drone pilots are not disengaged from the psychological and moral trauma of war.

> Some say that the drone war has driven them over the edge. "How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?" Heather Linebaugh, a former drone imagery analyst, wrote in the Guardian. "When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience."

> "It was horrifying to know how easy it was. I felt like a coward because I was halfway across the world and the guy never even knew I was there,” Bryant told KNPR Radio in Nevada. "I felt like I was haunted by a legion of the dead. My physical health was gone, my mental health was crumbled. I was in so much pain I was ready to eat a bullet myself."

https://www.salon.com/2015/03/06/a_chilling_new_post_traumat...
If you're working on a technology that you know is created in contract with the military, is that not concerning?
That should only affect Super-Exec's base pay if they can prove up front that choosing them can be expected to increase profits by 10%. Otherwise the "10% of profits" expected value figure needs to be diminished according to uncertainty -- which will send it straight back down out of the stratosphere. Yet that doesn't happen. Which suggests a different game is being played.
Why would you need to run 'Scrum' or any kind of formal methodology with a team of 2 people?

My advice: Get them in a room, co-located, with a clear directive. Standups and retros can and should happen organically if we're talking about 2-3 people (or even 6). Thats a small enough group of people such that they can actually talk to each other throughout the day (think about how startup engineering works... 5-7 people, at a table, coding, talking whiteboarding, testing, deploying concurrently, beautiful mess style.

It's not clear the real problem you're trying to solve.
>> I was serious that I can separate the person, so that's an existence proof.

> Those of us who are mere mortals can't reliably predict ourselves to achieve perfection on complex, subjective tasks like this.

I was able to separate the two as well without much of a problem, so...I guess I must be some sort of god too. :)
Technically verbal contracts, like when one pays someone to cut one’s hair, are contracts, I think?
I don't see that as a bad thing at all. Ethics should be at the forefront of discussion in new technology. But we need to bear in mind that military capability is, in fact, something we must have, and that many people are able to worry about the ethics of what our country does because our military ensures that very survival is not the conversation we are occupied with.

Which is to say, our military can be unethical, but us having a military is not unethical.
Uh, you are aware that game developers are actively talking about unionizing, while most software developers aren’t? The shitty conditions are what’s making them decide to start talking about banding together to demand a bigger piece of the profits.

Every discussion of game unions I see here tends to have a lot of people talking about how they are quite happy with their financial compensation at their non-game job, and how they don’t want to unionize because what if it was a shitty union?!?

Also, Hollywood is kind of one of the major bastions of strong unions in the US. There’s a lot of entertainment unions in show business.

(My favorite example: compare the conditions of folks at union 3d animation gigs with the condition of folks in the non-unionized VFX world; better pay and more stable jobs for pretty much the exact same skills.)
This is the actual report: https://www.asyousow.org/report/the-100-most-overpaid-ceos-2...

The methodology "lists the 25 most overpaid CEOs, identifying the company, the CEO and his pay as reported at the annual shareholder meeting, and the pay of the company’s median employee."

Activision Blizzard's Kotick's $25M comes in at 306:1; Electronic Arts' Andrew Wilson's $35M is 371:1 .

Ronald F. Clarke of Fleetcor Technologies Inc is a generous 1517:1.
The term does, but not it's application to software hiring...
On seeing the title I clicked the "more" button on the bottom of the front page and was confused why it seemed the same.
I see. They’re positive concepts but they still have negative underpinnings. Why do we need Labor rights? Because of labor exploitation.

Brand name choice is extremely important, please give it a deep thought.

Use labor, self-titles and related synonyms: Work, Studio, Atelier, Space, Office, Lab, Laboratory, Place, Court, Library, Market, Identity, Passport, Expert, Master, Etc.

For example:
BinaryPassport

It’s quirky, cool and kinda makes sense - Passport to software engineering.
I see. It makes sense, I'm curious to see how it will evolve.
Microsoft is responsible to its shareholders, not your country. A mass exodus of employees would harm their bottom line. Preventing that is in their best interests.

If you want to subject corporate interests to the military on the basis of nationalism, I've got some bad news for you about how that works out historically.
Yes, but the workers in those original unionization events didn't have as many options as the workers who are doing game development. People weren't working in factories and coal mines because they loved it, turning down other, less inhumane and more lucrative positions to do so. The options were the horrible companies or unionization.

For a game developer, the options are horrible companies, unionization, or a development job in any other field.
> All the letter (and sounds) used NEED to be pronounced, the same way, for native speakers of English, French, Russian, Spanish, and also various major (eastern) Asian languages. That means that when an otherwise uneducated (in languages/reading the squiggly version of words from a dictionary) user in one of those languages tries to read one of the words it should sound like only a slight accent, not a major flub.

This constraint effectively removes vowels from your phonetic inventory.
If you've "never done anything but pass through California" then you should probably refrain from saying that you share the Bay Area views.

For example many people in my workplace will genuinely call you racist if you say "employment decisions should not be made on the basis of race or gender." Threats of violence towards Trump voters varying degrees of subtlety are made on public channels with no apparent repercussions, and these were positively received by much of the company.

Are these views and behavior that you agree with? Sure most liberals probably agree with Bay area liberals on national issues, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
My point is that hiring someone more effective for that position may increase revenues but there is nothing inherent in that effective person that is yielding an additional 50$ million in profits that a normal person couldn't come out with a yield of 40 or 45 million.

This is a conflation between an important position (being able to resolve disputes and push decisions and direction) and being an important person. CEOs have skills, and have invested heavily in training those skills (if they aren't terrible) but those skills are not skills unattainable to the normal person, society just doesn't need very many people with those skills and the apparent value those skills create via business decisions appear to pay off handsomely. But that $50 million the exec's decision has made for the company isn't solely due to their work, if the company didn't have programmers and labourers and marketing and manufacturing to support the decision and deliver on the decision then that $50 million wouldn't have been earned.

Their decision is important, but their involvement isn't worth the full value the company receives based on making that decision, because without the supporting labour their decision may have been genius, but it would have netted no profit to the company. I think this sort of highlights what I consider to be a real issue with how we evaluate personal value in the modern world and why assets are becoming so concentrated in the hands of so few.
I assume you have not read Sarte's comments, then?

Whenever you participate in a community you accept that there are going to be individuals controlling the discussion to an extent and cleaning up things that affect the site in a negative way. For example no matter how kindly you might argue or how much data you may provide on how the Jewish people should be eradicated, that sort of comment would get you rapidly flagged on HN.

The definition of odious does evolve over time according to a societies standards, and I don't think it's a particularly big leap to say calls for genocide are odious. Communities do eventually need to take a stand for what they represent, for allowing people with said beliefs on their platform means those people represent the platform.
Humans can light the earth on fire with thousands of nuclear explosions. Almost nothing would survive. I’d say we’re well past natural. But your ways less extreme.
Pins and Needles: Quickly Script Digital Signal Flows on the Raspberry Pi
Linus is saying basically the same thing I said in HN comments some time ago. This was regarding the Qualcomm Centriq server processors. I asked where I can buy right now a standard ATX motherboard + CPU combo that I could mess around with at home. For any sort of reasonable price. The answer was deafening crickets.

As compared to how easy it is to buy a decent quality $119 motherboard + $179 AMD Ryzen quad core CPU.

Not just that it was literally impossible to buy a motherboard+cpu for any reasonable price, for a midtower desktop PC format. Also near impossible to buy a 'cheap' 1RU server or similar for any sort of reasonable price, as compared to $400 Dell R620 with two-socket, 8-core-per-socket older Xeons I could buy on eBay.

There is a very real chicken-or-egg problem with economies of scale. If the top ten Taiwanese based motherboard manufacturers don't think it will make money to build boards for it, they just won't. Super low quantity of 'evaluation' boards that you have to 'contact a sales rep' to acquire are not going to gain widespread adoption.
Only policy change can make your military more humane.

If your military policy is to siege populated cities and villages, bomb amd shell them, killing thousands of people caught in the cross-fire in the process, that's what should be the focus, if you're interested in humane military.

That's already much more indiscriminate than some Google killer drone ever will be.
Note, when I brought up Hollywood, I wasn't referring to unionization, I was talking about workplace issues. There's a lot of workplace issues in show business despite a lot of entertainment unions.
Quite aside from that, the historical lesson is that large numbers of unemployed soldiers is not a stablizing force on a society.
Pro-Amazon Protesters Paid to Demonstrate Against Company's Withdrawal
i actually suspect that a failure to do that is one (of many) reasons his political opponents are not remotely as effective as they ostensibly could be.
What about a humvee? Is that a 'car' or a 'gun'? Is a jacket with pouches necessary to hold rifle ammunition a weapon, or merely innocent clothing?

Wherever you draw the distinction, know that it's arbitrary.
Union will never come, how do you unionize different studios in different countries ( different law ).
Just as a note, $3k a year raise for a QA tester making 42k is going to do quite a bit for retention. If 3k seems like nothing then I have a bathroom renovation that I'd love for you to bankroll with your pocket change.
I would suppose that pure mathematicians help solve issues in high-level physics?
I hope not, that's a usability nightmare when you're trying to find something.
> Nintendo manufactures and ships millions of hardware units

I'd expect Nintento to have some ODM/CM like Foxconn deal with all that.
And it's going to be tough to find common ground with the Russians and East Asians, whose native writing systems don't even use the Latin alphabet.
Drive over 15,000 Pixels with These Serial WS2812 Driver Boards
It's multiple years of weekly threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/search?q=flair%3ACul...
This is more like: "no one will need gold audio cables!" "No one could ever tell the display refresh rate was 1kHz!" "No one will ever use a mineral oil bath to cool their PC!"
> If you're using it to broach a conversation on automata, regular expressions, and context free languages well yeah delving into that is bad unless you're writing real parsers/compilers at this gig.

If it is a compiler gig, I don't think we can get much mileage out out of the balance parentheses problem. Language implementors either just deal with paren balancing as part of the parser or, if they want better error recovery, write a simple paren balancer as a separate pass between lexing and real parsing. In the latter case, implementors will just go with the most simplest solution available and won't bother with a PDA (since it really isn't necessary).

If you really want to test a language implementor, ask them how they would implement a parser for a language that allows < and > to be used as both comparison operators and generic type parentheses.
After joining you got brainwashed of course ;-))
It's a minor detail but it's still irritating for me that it doesn't have the same name as in Github. More accurate or not, but Github was first.
> So we have to do whatever the army wants

using straw-men like this doesn't typically end well, so why use one?
CEO pay is often set by compensation subcommittees of the board. On the board are typically people who have familiarity with high-level management, often, suprise!, CEOs of other companies. By bias or intent this leads to excessive CEO pay.
Extortion implies that Microsoft ultimately doesn't have systematic power as a large corporation over their workers.

Also, I sincerely hope one reconsiders the position of positioning a lessening of labor power in one of the only fields in which workers have any power. The first to go will not be the engineers in demand enough to protest, but women who are let go after becoming mothers, people of color, people with health conditions, mentorship programs, generous pay and working conditions...

In short, if or when the tide turns, and the tech sector is not ready for it, we will all be weaker for it.
Wow, I have five hundred cores, now it’s no longer a big deal that (insert cpu-hogging Electron app) is constantly maxing out four of them!
There is a huge difference, but that doesn't mean this project is Ok. Supporting war is supporting war. The budget and size of the US military are so far beyond what is needed for practical defense. If we want our military's actions to be humane, we should drastically cut their budget and stop sending soldiers to kill people in other countries.
BJP is pro science? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/28/indian-prime-m...

Sure Modi is just an individual, but the BJP elected him to office.
Not really. Undefined means that no purposeful explicit behavior for handling has to occur even within a specific implementation, which means things can blow up randomly just changing some compiler settings or minor things in the environment (or even randomly at runtime).. eg running out of bounds of an array in C is a perfect example of undefined behavior.. no guarantee on what occurs from run to run. Yes obviously time doesn’t stop dead and something happens, but I think that stretches any meaningful definition of “handled”.

True, undefined behavior can be implementation defined but that is not a requirement, and it usually is not.
Corollary to "resign if you don't like what we're doing" is "fire me if you don't like what I'm doing".
you don't need a computer to code while walking, do it in your head and type it in when you get back
Not only that, controversial stuff gets lots of pageviews. An organisation driven by metrics, such as Facebook or Twitter, won't want to moderate it.
Just to be clear: you're arguing in favor of doxing/no-platforming/otherwise suppressing people who espouse 'ridiculous, harmful, or "bad"' ideas?

Leaving aside the issue of pre-judging which ideas fall into that bucket, what about the fallible targeting mechanisms of the mob? Do you think that what happened to the culture war thread was good and justified?
Late to the party but... we don't need fossil fuels to launch rockets.

Aside from synthetic fuels, you can launch rockets on methane. Can't make methane? (You are a robot society by now, because it would mean there is no biosphere anymore). Still fine! We can convert our oceans into fuel (hydrogen + oxygen), given energy input. Energy can come from renewables, nuclear, etc.

No, we are not going to run out of fuel for as long as we have water.
bonuses in C-suite and senior leadership of large companies are usually much greater than 5%. Same goes for "VP"s in finance
Actually, he is right.
Yes, very much so.
Having a C++, GO, Java, RUST, Python and F# IDEs running on Risc-V.

Allowing to debug, experiment, without relying on centralized hosting providers -- would be a huge boon to Risc-V.

Early adaptors will be developers, than their family/friends circle. Then there will be Risc-V-First movement (mirroring mobile-first movement), and there it will start...

> So RISC-V CPU designers should aim for the developer market then? First win the hearts and minds of developers, then everything else will come.
At the end of the day, I'd love for any solution to game development working conditions, which will likely be unionization. I will certainly be surprised when it happens, though.