skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How much help did he earn? How much does he deserve? The money a driver gets paid is the help.

That seems naïve and inhumane. Compensation and benefits are understood to be separate things in the US at this time. From social security to health insurance, the costs of securing such things without an employer (an entity on the other side of the wealth gap, usually) are often untenable.

> Forcing Lyft to hire employees instead of contractors won't mean there will be more workers with a safety-net; it means there won't be any Lyft. That would be bad for both drivers and the people being driven.

The choice between untenably-expensive benefits as a contractor or untenably-unaffordable benefits as an unemployed person is no choice at all--especially for people with health problems/children/debt. Ignoring the people being driven (I'mma say that the benefit to the most needy customers of Lyft is negligible compared to the costs/benefits to the drivers in this scenario--otherwise we should have a different discussion about whether or not rides-for-hire should be a public utility), I think saying "you got paid your safety net in your insultingly-low wages last week" is deliberately obtuse and fails to engage with the issue at hand.
Unfortunately most times if an external vendor is delivering custom software the clients have already failed - software has a lifecycle that extends far beyond 1.0 delivery. This is why we still have things like X-UA-Compatible: IE=5.
Human drivers are just mechanical turks to build market share while self-driving cars become commercially viable.

Don’t they have to exist before we worry about commercial viability? You’re not the only one talking like FSDV’s are just minutes away, when the truth is that when you cut through the hype and wishful thinking, they’re an indeterminate period of time away. The conversation around this subject reads like people in the 30’s planning for the dawn of the fusion age.

The technology is not there yet, we don’t know when it willl be or if the avenues being explored now will lead there. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sell you something, like shares in a fundamentally unprofitable endeavor. I get it, self-driving cars would be very cool, and maybe we’ll even live to see them. Maybe not. It’s still a crazy company that can only profit if nonexistent technology emerges quickly! On the other hand I have some shares in my new space elevator to sell...
Patience, a 9’ pry lever, some iron pipe for rollers, and a stack of 2x6 cut offs will handle moving pretty much any machine around the shop. (A pry lever is a long lever with a pair of small sturdy wheels to act as a fulcrum and a short metal tang to jam under equipment. Mine gives me maybe a 2” lift for a 5’ sweep of the handle, so something like a 30:1 advantage.)

Mostly it is just lift-pivot-lower repeated many times to walk a machine along. For longer distances I’ll get it aimed right and up on rollers. For raising or lowering you need an assistant to put the cribbing in or out, but raising a ton of lathe 2 feet to work on the motor underneath is pretty easy, just always have secure cribbing in place so it can’t fall.
Mutual aid, same as any other problem. Presumably if there aren’t the resources or people or they deserve not having kids they won’t. Anything else is hard to justify at all.
That depends on the situation, I will surely felt emotional if the people is my family or someone I know.
> On that note, I find it supremely fucked up that people have to turn to crowdfunding to get their unexpected healthcare costs covered by benevolent internet citizens.

So who should pay for it? All taxpayers instead? All countries that have tried that are now in the red. The only good solution, I think, it to work to make healthcare a lot cheaper in the long run.
Cambodians Remember Victims of 'Killing Fields'
I love Rust and all my personal side projects are in Rust nowadays. But rust is definitely not close to the learning curve of golang and Java. In comparison with C++ I am not too sure.
Do all law enforcement and corrections officers, as well as anyone seeking public office first.
This might be like warning labels on the side of ladders. Somebody somewhere did something stupid with a ladder, and then a warning label is added to every ladder to prevent a future lawsuit.

and of course, mentioning things like this then becomes "news", spawning articles like this:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/misfortune
The supply side dynamics of trucking is crazy. There has been a driver shortage for 10+ years, easy. About 2/3 of the trucks on the road are owned by fleets of 5 or less, with most trucks being a 1 unit, owner operator.

The entire industry, small and large fleets, use owner operators as perverse cost savings. In some cases, you lease the truck from the large fleet, they charge you for gas and maintenance, insurance, etc; deducted straight from your check. You integrate with their comms / cpu systems, their tracking systems, etc. all for a price. You go where they tell you and when.

It's an industry that's almost impossible to run profitably as an owner operator, because those folks are skinned. But, people are in love with the idea of owning their own business - it's kinda like an MLM that way.

Now, I founded a trucking company that had as many as 15 trucks that ran over the road, both owner operators and company owned vehicles. At my size, there were very few economies of scale and we ran at a break even, at best - closing after a few years. We paid teams .40 cents a mile, all miles, backing out the per diem and paying SS / payroll taxes on the balance - an ridiculously high workmen's comp (first year was 24%, went down to 16.5% later).

I could go into more detail, but you get the point.
Scale and consumer behavior would be their moat. See Amazon, Google and Facebook for examples of what they have in mind.
Think about who your audience is before talking to them, talk in language that they can understand. I know a great engineer friend of mine who when he talks to analysts or business people delves into "stored procs, threading model", this is not what you want to convey to people who don't know what those things are, focus on high level overview, think about what would be important for them to know from their perspective. To do this ideally, you must as a manager understand business need, and what is valuable to them, then based on that you can communicate with whoever in the context of whatever they can understand and want to know about.
Chrome reports the site (this URL [1]) as deceptive.

[1]: http://exactitudes.com/index.php?/expo/all/

EDIT: Also, extremely loud auto-play within Series details pages with no button to turn it off.
> My cost for health insurance on the group plan? $560/mo.

Is that the full cost, or is your employer also paying something?
I thought the argument was that methane was more destructive than CO2 and has a shorter shelf life, so drastically reducing meat consumption would help quite a bit. Nevertheless, it would be a short term win, so it would only buy time in solving the CO2 elephant in the room.

Is that wrong as well? I didn't see anything in the argument address that point at all.
On the plus side, can't an independent truck driver or an Uber/Lyft driver claim tax deductions for all business-related expenses? From talking to a couple Uber drivers, my sense it that many are aggressive with the definition of "business-related" and deduct most of all their expenses. Appreciating the downsides (need to provide for one's own health insurance and retirement) I don't often see this increase net pay discussed.
That guy specifically was transfered and had plans to stay. He actually brought his wife and newborn daughter some time later but was still living in a shared home (not the same with 8 other people, but still).
America’s food giants swallowed the family farms
Its real, certainly not going in to client details though that would be pretty unprofessional.

Currently my main income is derived from a suite of software I wrote for a small winery who subsequently grew to be a very big winery. They got big enough to hire an IT team and a Manager and a consultant who basically are telling me that Delphi is ancient and my whole system is a risk to the business despite having 100% up-time for the last 10 years (Basically if their server was up the system was up). Nothing I am able to do is going to convince them otherwise and it is on the cards to replace it.

Again I will gracefully back down and support the system until it is changed so should get another 2-4 years out of it based on previous experience *

I was an IT Manager for a long time and I do understand peoples worries but I also understand that if something is working, is documented, has an open source and data structure, can be supported and doesn't have a forced end of life there is sometimes a bigger risk to making a change. Behind a lot of software is generally one guy or gal, I don't try and hide that fact and sometimes pay the price but and I know several other packages that have just one guy as the linchpin but there will be no pressure on them as they hide it behind a company.

I also have C and SQL skills which people don't find so offensive :-)

* The expenses system I wrote in the UK had the same decision made on it in 2004 to replace it with the new mega SAP R/3 ERP they were moving to and it was still being used up until 2016. A Time Management System I wrote in 2008 is still being used despite the client telling me it would be phased out in 2013 as part of a new CRM system.
I wonder if the author mean that he's stuck on OS X 10.13.n, and would be willing to install OS X 10.13.(n+1), just not 10.14?
It isn't free.
Employers are mandated to give health insurance to full-time employees after they reach a certain size in the US. So no, it is "probably" not true.
We're obviously not living in a best-of-all-possible-worlds simulation, but that doesn't preclude us either from being in a simulation or from being in one created by thoughtful entities for morally good ends.

If you consider that bringing into being all possible worlds and all possible creatures whose existence is net positive in utility to themselves, is a good and desirable and interesting project, then you would end by creating an untold number of simulations, many of which would not be the, or mistakeable for the, best of all possible worlds.

And it would be possible that many creatures who grew up in and formed a unique, not otherwise achievable, identity in the not-perfect worlds could graduate/ascend/sublime into one or more of the more perfect worlds after they had lived a life in their home simulation.

And being such a creature in such a home simulation, not yet ascended or aware that there are other places to ascend to, could also be a solution to the Fermi paradox: we see no other aliens because we have been placed here at least in part to develop our specifically human nature, without the dilution of that nature via the influence of other creatures. Cf. the Star Trek policy of non-intervention, the Prime Directive [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive].
I went through hearing the similar ("talking like an engineer") comment myself. One thing made a big difference in transitioning
to company leadership.

I thought I was a leader of the people reporting to me.
A leader in a generic sense, as in civic leaders.
I have to fight for or work towards their betterment.

With that thinking, every discussion with upper management would come across as the defence, for the team, for the processes.

One executed corrected my understanding that I am not a generic leader. I am a company leader. That means the company is first and foremost. My communication and thought process has to reflect that.

It sounded a bit harsh in the beginning but it helped me become a better company leader and good for the people reporting to me and customers in the long run.
The Debian Project Mourns the Loss of Lucy Wayland
Homeland Security Compiling Database of Journalists, 'Media Influencers' (2018)
In my culture we say "whatever" a lot.
Is an ACA marketplace plan available to him? And subsides based on income? I know people in their 60s not yet on Medicare with $800/month premiums with $600/month tax credits based on their income, so their premium nets out to $200/month.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

I come from a nation where there's no gradient in quality. Someone who is a "rice expert" is unthinkable, almost laughable. And even if they were really good at rice, it would be meaningless, just a form of hobby.

But in Jiro's world, there are rice specialists, tuna specialists, specialist butcher. Every one a master of their trade. The rice specialist needs the sushi specialist because no other person in the world could cook rice "properly" and so the best rice would be wasted. It tells how one of the chefs spent years learning to cook a type of egg sushi before it's even worthy of being served.

It resonated with me - I always loved this idea of higher quality. In this era of Candy Crush and Clash of Clans being the most profitable software, it's really tempting to stray. Jiro gave me the resolve to focus on that path.
They can deduct the employer share though? Or is that just self-employment taxes?
The US is the only major developed country that doesn't have universal healthcare and they are still deep "in the red".
They have the incentive to make the ones they use good.

This idea has shown to not happen in real life. Public schools, for example, do not deliver a "uniform" service.
> I guess when you sit on the highest volume pipe of money coming out of wallets for consumer tech, there is no reason to change?

This reminds me of the concept of "f* you" money that lets employees quit their jobs. It just dawned on me that some companies have that as well, w.r.t. their customers.
It's like people think Java only supports concurrency via thread pool and isn't capable of event loop / async io models.
I mean code base does not scale well, not performance. Performance of golang is top notch.
A universal health insurance may be unfair, non-american, going against a free market ideology and endorsing nanny state.

But it would relieve so many problems, from homelesness to our overly litigious society, that I'd vote for it with both hands.
I wonder what would be the optimal size for a (mostly)self sufficient ‘village’..with enough for themselves and then to trade? Can we go back to the times when we can have free markets AND a limited amount of protectionism AND self sufficiency? Or is that contradictory.

If 1 square mile is 640 acres. Let’s say it can support 600 individuals or 150-200 families...can we stop expanding at that point and rather than have dense cities, simply add another square mile to form another self sufficient town ..all interconnected and clustered..with local governance and self sufficiency.
(I am speaking generally and not particularly about CAFOs)
I am not romanticizing going back to feudal farming economy..but just borrowing their structure and applying it to our modern times to not stress resources and not create pockets of dense urban towns and then urban sprawl and then rural boondocks.

I could be wrong but at least with soil Ag, economies of scale don’t seem to matter with full automation as we rely on less labour costs. The supply chain is a problem and it is likely people will a little more for food. But we already way too little for food and commodity Ag is subsidized. We can’t be worse off by automating farms and making them smaller and doing away with economies of scale.
Side question on the leadership bit (not OP): my friend told me about this whole Toastmaster concept recently, does anyone here have experience? I a very wary of these kind of things, so would love to hear from another engineer's point of view.
Incredible, turns out I'm WAY behind the times I guess! - I had never heard of this before.

This from the Wikipedia article got a groan out of me:

"Often the request was for medical care or therapeutic equipment to help a chronically ill child, or might be for a hearing aid, a new washing machine, or a refrigerator. Many women broke down sobbing as they described their plights."

And then this:

The show became popular enough that NBC increased its running time from 30 to 45 minutes to sell more commercials, at a then-premium rate of $4,000 per minute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_for_a_Day
What does a simple idea like "stop treating women as though they were all idiots" have to do with any particular culture? If you don't understand the difference between "stop insulting your female colleagues" and Marxist economics or politics, obviously the problem is that there is not too much, but too little Marxism being taught in academia.
That's his cost. The employer is probably paying twice that much more behind the scenes. Money they could otherwise be paying him.
U.S. Falls in World Press Freedom Index
How could that possibly be improved? Append-only means no deleting or freeing up space by definition.
They started off by saying "Good." (agreeing with the decision) and then explaining what they feel is okay and what isn't.

I'm not sure how more clear you wanted them to be.
What would you do if you had an abusive boss in a dream workplace like Google/FB or even higher rated companies like Lightbend/JetBrains and your boss & HR teamed up on you? (Purely hypothetically/asking for a friend)

Would you even have any desire to continue in tech if the "world's best company" gaslighted you and tried to destroy you?

Is there any known way for an institution to detect and remove abusers given victims are afraid to talk (rightly so)? What if something really dark resurfaced from your favorite director's past? Cover it up and pretend it didn't happen?
Lunch with the FT: Bill Gross – “We were looking for every penny we could get”
I haven’t had an empty backlog since 2011.
They're not required to pay you while you're unable to work. And aside from some fairly narrow exceptions in FMLA, they could just fire you for being sick.
That's become my strategy as well.

1. Ignore all bills except the most persistent ones. Look at which ones are still being sent 3 months later.

2. Triage and sort the bills. Prioritize the ones that are related to the primary care facility where you were treated. Call them and negotiate to pay less.

3. Wait until 6 months and see if any bills are still coming. If they are, look at them again in order of priority, seeing if any of them are still reasonable and you have actually received the service/care.

After 12 months, if you haven't been receiving any care, toss any bills.
Apple have a real quality problem. I would say it is worse than Microsoft Connect.
Exactly. Everyone's 'in the red'. What are people getting for that debt, and who benefits? Elite will always be 'elite', but most other countries people don't have to worry about considering bankruptcy if someone gets an illness requiring hospitalization. For some bizarre reason, we've enshrined "health care" as a "benefit" which is only morally accessible by "employed" people who have "good employers".
You can be perfectly healthy without IVF.
As a rider, I am going to pick the cheapest ride. If Lyft pays their drivers less, it's because I pay Lyft less. If society as a whole picks Lyft, then it's society as a whole paying Lyft drivers less. I view Lyft more as a market maker rather than a company. In that sense, I agree with you, the market isn't the problem. The people to blame are riders, who got fed up with expensive and bad service taxis, and wanted cheaper rides. Lyft (and Uber) delivered on that, but they are only reflecting the will of us as riders.
I don't really buy Rust learning curve. The good IDE integration and package management makes it all a breeze. VScode with RLS is great. I went from zero to fully shipped software inside a week, with meager C++ knowledge beforehand. Only trouble was understanding lifetimes and getting the borrow mechanics solidified in my spine. The entire set of language constructs is actually very small, there's just a couple of new unfamiliar concepts. Biggest downside compared to C++ is absolutely library support. Sorely missing many powerful C++ libraries.
What is mutual aid? I haven't heard that phrase before.
Anecdotally, I didn't find the situation internally to be much better. Many bugs internally go unanswered because there is not enough time allocated to fixing core systems and designing better replacements. The truth is, I know personally of several teams that aren't able to get through the queue of internally filed and scheduled bugs.

To me, it feels like Apple hasn't resourced core pieces of infrastructure and engineering teams in line with upper management's plans for growth. While many teams are relatively sequestered, once you start talking to folks elsewhere in the company it becomes clear that many teams are struggling to stay above water. More still, everyone shrugs about it because it's not clear exactly what is wrong. The best description I've heard is in many cases engineers are willing to offer hacks as a solution to meet management's demands, and management is either willing to accept those hacks or doesn't know better. That is far from a full picture, and its an example drawn from a small slice of an enormous company. But it seems telling to me. I find it completely reasonable to imagine that most teams in a place to deal with customer facing bugs don't have adequate time to do so. Not to their satisfaction, never mind customers.

At the same time, I think it can be hard to appreciate the ways in which Apple is ahead of the curve as far as the categories of software projects it tackles. So I don't mean to imply that anyone is really to blame per se. And it's also a shame because Radar was the greatest bug tracker I have ever used. It is unclear to me if Apple doesn't prioritize menial things like handling external bug reports, or if problems like that are not visible to / perceived by those in the company who could do something about it.
I love this take.
Europeans might be particularly sensitive to this mispricing, because I think they enjoy SANE advertised pricing all around - such as including tax in the price.

Meanwhile, the shenanigans in US advertised pricing allows for enormous hidden costs - think cellphone, cable or telephone bills.
> Don't use your team to work on a project/product. Use the project to work on your team. They're not there to build the product. They're there to gain some personal fulfillment. Use the development of the product to grow them.

This is extremely well said and something I’ve been dancing around in my head and couldn’t quite articulate. THANK YOU.
Like... what?
Makes sense. Advertising the price as the amount that will come out of your pocket is important, and it's coercive to do otherwise. It's the same way for most consumer products, no reason cars should be any different.

There are ways to advertise the savings that won't be coercive.

By coercive I mean getting you in the door and beginning the sales process when you otherwise would not have.
Typed Spreadsheet Programming in Scala.js
Dershowitz Explodes: ‘I Don’t Want to Live in a Police State’
This might be behind a paywall for some. If so, google the title. Useful insights.
The US has substantial incoming medical tourism. If it really were strictly worse to european alternatives (more expensive or lower quality) europeans would not go to the US.
Not if your definition of health includes reproduction.
Top Healthcare Startups and Digital Health Tech Disruptors
Big companies like Google usually have internal mobility programs which, in my experience, work pretty well.