skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A cable company is a monopoly.

It's extremely easy to create a website, add a PayPal button, and ask your supporters to donate that way. A lot of people have been doing just that after Patreon's recent deplatforms.

Or, there is also SubscribeStar.

Patreon are just a middleman, but their arrogance of thinking they are more and their crazy spending will make them go bankrupt pretty soon.
The same way you learn if a job has bad management when considering taking a job there - reputation, sites like Glassdoor, asking friends in the industry, etc. This problem doesn't seem unique to unions, nor does it seem that not having unions solves it. Management can still refuse to fire a bad employee in a non-unionzed shop. I've seen it countless times.
/lol @ “murder is down” when it comes slightly down off epic highs for a brief moment.

I recommend this as a starting place: https://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/functions-maxima-minima.h...
> So, you've basically just repeated media talking points

No, none of that is “media talking points”.

> and have nothing to say about globalism contributing to inequality and protest?

Other than the fact that I explicitly agreed that both xenophobic nationalistic corporatists and socialists are protesting in response to capitalist globalism...yes, actually I have more to say on the topic (and already said it in another subthread):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437188
My friend from Europe explained that this is how companies get around labor laws (for example, laws that restrict the number of hours a given employee can work). Companies essentially hire contractors who are paid higher wages which results in fewer actual positions hired by the company. Now there are fewer positions hired directly by the employer so in-effect, the labor laws haven't impacted much. At least that's how he explained it to me.
"With the addition of geological carbon dioxide sequestration it becomes carbon-negative."

LOL, easy peasy then

Can you make "grass charcoal"? If so, just pile the grass high and cover in a layer of clay before burning, as is done with wood. Then bury the charcoal, which also improves the soil
A similar annoyance: the browser insisting on switching focus once the page loads.

It happens nearly daily that I'll be typing in to an input field while the page is still loading, and Firefox will switch focus away from that input field when the page finishes loading.

The consequences of this are even worse for me, as I use the Tridactyl extension, which acts on vim-keystrokes when the focus is not in an input field. So if I'm in the middle of typing something in an input field and Firefox in its infinite wisdom chooses to switch focus out of the input field, what I type from then on will be acted on as commands to Tridactyl, which could do things like open, close, or reload a page.

Super, super annoying!
ZGC, included in JDK 11, has a 1ms average pause time and 4ms max on some demanding benchmarks, and they're now targeting 1ms max pauses.

https://www.opsian.com/blog/javas-new-zgc-is-very-exciting/
> OO in general is not fine.

I smell a zealot or a troll.
The pattern that I see emerging now is that companies treat Open Source as a way of offseting software maintenance cost. They will create something for their internal use, and once product is feature complete and relatively stable, they will open source it, so that they can receive free bugfixes, which I guess they merge upstream.

Some examples include Google with Kubernetes, Netflix with their cloud tooling (Eureka, Ribbon, etc.), LinkedIn with Kafka, Yahoo! with Hadoop, and many others.
Francis Spufford pens unauthorised Narnia novel
You can make any move seem reasonable if you make a sufficiently bad analogy.

A more comparable analogy would be one where the hypothetical security company isn't told who of their staff is banned, or for what reason they were banned. Maybe they were a bank robber, or maybe they were just doing business with bitcoin, and it's the bank's policy to ban all such businesses. And the security company isn't just not hired - they're banned from being hired ever again, from 88% of all banks in the world.
> There's many valid critisicms of Java...

Yes there are.

...but the parent assertion that Java will one day be like cobol; no longer taught in intro to CS course (where now we see python), considered bloated and legacy, and not picked for new projects (where we see the rise of languages like kotlin eating into what was once the primary growth for the language with mobile apps) and encumbered by problematic licensing issues...

Seems quite valid.

You have to live in a bubble right now not to get the feeling Java is stumbling, and there’s no indication to me that the overall direction of the language is positive right now.

...I’m sure there are still years ahead for earning a good living as a java developer, don’t get me wrong, but that’s a different issue.
Actually we only use plugin-container for NPAPI on Windows. I believe that MacOS was specifically the platform where we ran into problems.
Common in New Zealand too.
Love it. I'd be interested in hiring such a team.
PayPal has been doing subscriptions for years.
Well both really, important point is that there is a history that influences the current ideology.
I agree strongly. Unions don't have to undermine the productivity of a company (and really they shouldn't).

A few things that a modern union could do:

1. Place limits on expected working hours. Let the management know that working above 40 hours a week, or needing to be on-call 24/7 should not be the norm. Let management know that using all your vacation time should be the norm. Set minimum amounts of vacation time for people to take, when a company advertises "Unlimited PTO".
2. Fight for minimum cost-of-living increases, presumably tied to a fair metric such as the CPI in an area. Every company that I have worked for has had a hard limit on the raises that you can earn each year--usually around 3%. This is typically close to or just above inflation.
3. Collectively hold the company leadership accountable for their actions. When management doesn't act in a professional way, they should be held accountable in the same way that someone lower on the corporate ladder would be. 'Unprofessional' behavior could be anything like sexual harassment, being physically aggressive, etc. We've all seen this first-hand or heard about it; typically HR won't get involved because it's easier to make the rank-and-file worker change divisions or leave, than to have the upper management change.
4. Place limits on executive pay relative to worker pay. Today a CEO makes hundreds of times more than your average rank-and-file worker. This multiple is only increasing. A union could fight executive pay increases without commensurate increases to worker pay.

A few things that modern unions don't have to do:

1. Push for equal pay among everyone. I think we can all acknowledge that knowledge-workers don't all contribute to projects with the same level of effectiveness. I know some of my coworkers are better at their jobs than I am--and I'm okay with them getting paid more than me. Because we aren't just a cog in a machine, it doesn't make sense to treat each other as directly replaceable parts.
2. Encourage workers to limit their productivity, for fear of eliminating jobs. The union should win when the company wins. The union should do its part to help the company create more value for the world, and make sure that the employees get a fair share of that value.

I think it comes down to being fair versus being equal. Workers used to be equal labor substitutes, so the unions treated everyone as equal. Workers are no longer equal, but unions haven't evolved to the new business realities.

For what it's worth, I'm not a software engineer and I don't work in the Bay area. My city doesn't have many job opportunities, so I don't have the luxury of just leaving a company without also packing up and moving to a new area. For my coworkers who own houses or have a family, this is particularly hard. A union could help us create a better working environment, but many people have this idea of what a unions are based on a system of unions that was based in 19th and 20th century manufacturing.
I have a background in electronic engineering, and did a fair bit of digital design related courses so large bits of it were in my skill-set, but mainly work with C in an embedded context. This project has been going on for years, but I only spend time on it now and again, a lot of that is rewriting sections of the code base I do not like or trying out different things.

I think the main piece of advice is persistence. Doing anything on an FPGA is much harder than doing it on CPU, but as a consequence of that the designs tend to be a lot less complex. It is not only a new language to learn, but it's a new paradigm. VHDL and Verilog might look like programming languages at first glance, but they are not. They are hardware description languages.

Also the vendor supplied tooling sucks.

For the more practical side of things, you can get a cheap development board for less than $50 that will run an open source tool-chain (see http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/), although I do not use them myself. You will want to do your research first.

One final piece of advice.

Do not ignore any warnings about latches.
The main goal of going for a for profit company would be to increase funding. It's sad that Vitalik Buterin had to be the biggest donation giver when there are so many people much richer than him (and with shorter expected remaining lifespan).
I think Rankin has a great point. When you use AWS, your OS is no longer really Linux, it’s the suite of AWS services. The assumption that you need to tear up and tear down EC2 means that it makes sense for S3 to become your file-system, Batch to be your CPU, use a managed database etc. etc.
That's like saying that democracy is useless because politicians and public officers write and enforce the rules.

Yeah, authority structures have to exist, but the authorities make different decisions when they're appointed from above vs elected from below.

Democratic ownership and operation of the state has been the global norm for almost a century. It's not that radical to apply the same principle to business. What is business but government in microcosm? Why should we be content to spend 40 hours a week larping feudalism?
This is a month old, and fixes for all major distributions have long since been released:

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2019-6454
"One day Java will be like Cobol." I heard that one two decades ago about Java.
> what do I lose by sharing it?

absolutely nothing. Which is indeed one particular type of OSS model. The best kind imho.

But this thread has been talking about business models which involve using OSS to get a customer in the door who will then pay the business for other things (such as hosting/services). Under the OSS, this business model seems to be failing as major corporations start to encroach.
This concept of targeting civilians in a “continuous combat function” is pretty complex.

I started reading about it [1] and 20 minutes later feel like I’ve barely skimmed the surface of how hard it must be in modern combat modalities to actually enforce this.

My brother is a JAG and worked on authorization of force issues in Afghanistan. Part of his job was ensuring that rules of engagement were being followed, but I’m looking forward to a more in-depth conversation — if he’s willing to have it — next time we see each other.

People that are not in a regular armed force, do not wear a uniform, hold rank, or report to a superior, may still be taking an active role in combat. Can someone be a farmer by day, and a combatant by night? (a questioned posed by the footnoted article) How long can they be directly targeted as a combatant after a hostile act? What is a hostile act?

Continuous combat function requires lasting integration into an organized armed group acting as the armed forces of a non-State party to an armed conflict. Thus, individuals whose continuous function involves the preparation, execution, or command of acts or operations amounting to direct participation in hostilities are assuming a continuous combat function.

Turns out there are fairly complex guidelines for all of this, and with the amount of intelligence that is collected in the modern battlefield, there’s even a chance to track this down to the individual level.

The continuous combat function designation seems quite narrowly tailored, for example it does not include military, political, or administrative personnel who do not directly participate in hostilities (how convenient for the politicians it is defined this way!). It does not include reservists who are not actively serving.

A civilian who is not serving a continuous combat function in theory can only be subject to direct attack while they are directly participating in hostilities, which seems to include the planning, lead-up, execution, and return from a hostile operation.

Apparently very little of this is explicitly defined under international law, but there is a history and case law which can be used to draw guidelines from.

[1] - https://casebook.icrc.org/case-study/icrc-interpretive-guida...
I remember seeing a video demoing how to make sand flow like water by bubbling air into it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=My4RA5I0FKs
> xenophobic nationalistic corporatists

Literally talking points used to discredit conservative populism.

And from your previous comment:

> class-conscious, not targeted against any non-economic identity group, and socialist

Again, media talking points. PC culture has taken over the left; now instead of talking about inequality, they talk about a 'New Green Deal', gender pronouns, open borders/increased immigration, etc...

On the right, limiting immigration and tariffs are their solutions to reducing the outsourcing of labour (and both are valid economic principles), yet it gets dismissed with negative adjectives.

In both cases, all these talking points distract from the fact that inequality is the problem, globalism is one of the driving forces of inequality, and it's all glossed over by the media talking points you repeated.
They literally provide ‘stuff’. Not sure whether it’s actual solutions.
High-strength cannabis increases risk of mental health problems
I can handle maybe one popup a day asking me to log in/sign up, but the fact that it's every single article drives me bonkers.

I'm well aware I can just block it with uBlock, but I shouldn't have to. Forcing a hostile user experience to try and get me to sign up has just made me stop reading Medium articles.
The problem with C#, which I think is a fine language, is the small(ish) size of the ecosystem and the refusal of the ecosystem to deviate away from non-MS endorsed libraries and frameworks.

It's the ridiculously large JVM ecosystem that makes Java awesome, not the language.
That's exactly how it works: profits from business go to shareholders and executives, who are business people first and may have no idea about their company's business domain (how many GMC executives would be able to repair your car?)
Using the NYT iPhone app on the subway is maddening. Every time you go in and out of cell coverage the whole app pauses while it waits to load ads that will never come. It is so frustrating that I am close to giving up on it entirely.
That's definitely the impression those apps were going for, but the wording is careful on most of them. They're not technically saying you'll get 4 more GB of ram, just that the app can clean up some of the 4 GB of ram. They're awful, but it's not clear to me that they're violating a rule.
The new role of the designer in generative design (2018)
Please elaborate on how OO is fine. OO hides state, which makes reasoning about cache, and therefore performance very difficult, which is why most game programers take a data oriented approach. It hides state but gains none of the advantages of Erlang because all of the implementations forgot to make state only mutable through explicit message passing. Inheritance isn’t an abstraction because you inherit both code and state, which requires explicit knowledge of the intervals of the parent. It’s a code pasting tool. As OO tries to model arbitrary patterns in nature it’s also difficult to reason about the graph of objects apposed to the linear flow of data in FP. Pretty much all of the OO languages are walking back OO features at this point and trying to add type classes (contracts) or functional pieces, mapping and filtering a la linear data transformations.
Linux has the option of simply refusing your request and returning -ENOMEM. Is this an option for systemd?
The regulation isn't hard to design. You make operators of servers responsible for all the content they serve. They are forced to implement pre-moderation, or to disallow content from non-trusted sources. The same regulations would apply to websites, proxies, tor nodes etc. The EU is already going down this path to better enforce copyright. China, Russia, the Middle East are already well ahead.

Would the Internet basically lose it's purpose? It would still be able to connect consumers to businesses.

If you took away the USA and its DMCA safe habor, I'm not sure how much of the Internet (as we know it) would be left.
The Java Platform is state-of-the-art in compilation technology, GC, and monitoring/management; nothing else comes close on almost any one of those, and certainly not on all of them combined. The alternatives you mentioned are all "good enough" for some use cases, but are technologically years behind the JVM. Some people are fine driving a Hyundai, but others want to drive a Ferrari. Besides, if you need to write some serious software that has to be performant and manageable and that you're going to need to depend on for years and years, there really aren't that many alternatives. That's why Amazon and Netflix and Google and Apple and Twitter choose Java to run all/most/many of their backend. Such large companies tend to use Java more on new projects as they grow (that's the case with Facebook and GitHub).

It is true that for smaller, less demanding software, there are many alternatives, but except for a very short period (~2000-2005) Java never dominated that kind of software. Early on people used VB, FoxPro and Delphi for that stuff, and later PHP, Python and Node.
They're going to take their discourse elsewhere. Best to just skip the whack a mole and put them in camps.
Does it require specialized equipment? If yes, what’s the value of video vs fingerprint reader that’s more ubiquitous?
You think the work ethic is different elsewhere when employers treat their employees like shit in 99% of companies? There might not be seminars, but each worker figures out how to put in the minimum amount of effort on their own while looking like they are working hard. Why would they do anything else when most companies do not offer raises, promotions, merit-based bonuses, career advancement, decent vacation, or anything at all to incentivize their employees to perform at anything but the most minimal level? Employees who work harder are fools and idiots who burn themselves out for a company that doesn't give a fuck about them and will happily replace them like any machine part when they're too sick to work anymore. Appearances can be deceiving. Out of over a dozen companies I've worked for, I've never once seen anything different. This is what US employers incentivize and that is what they get, to the detriment of everyone.
Yes. They’re fiduciaries.
Do you realistically think that it will not be worth to scale the solution?

Many medications stay expensive because not big enough number of people are affected. Also don't think U.S. only: how do you stop people from going to China to get the cheap (but well tested) copy of a medication?
Yeah this was a problem for 6 & 7, but I've run plenty of code in production on OpenJDK 8 without issue. I think Java 8 was the first version where OpenJDK was the reference implementation so that likely helped a great deal.
So keep a supported USB wifi dongle with your Trisquel flash drive. These things can be had for ~$10 new on ebay, it's a total non-issue.
Ask HN: What are the small things that you’d automate in a software dev team?
Typically there are a lot of IFTTT kind of tasks that we do as part of our daily lives - if we are working on a ticket, we create a branch of code, if we start the work, we mark the ticket as in progress, if a qa verifies all the test scenarios, we promote the deployment and so on. What would be your few things you would automate?
mainly in communist china because they are persecuted by the communist party as being a threat... read the history
You could contact the American Red Cross and volunteer for disaster response. I volunteered for a month with them after hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. International assignments are an option but require long term (multiple months) time commitments but it seems like you might be available for that.

Helping others will help you heal yourself.
Even if rich people "cheat" and pay a smaller percentage than lower brackets, they still provide the overwhelming amount of tax dollars. The idea that rich people dont pay their share (whatever that is suppossed to mean, a moral premise that is very nonobvious) is silly.
It’s also hit or miss as offers fall through at every stage. A good agent is worth it just like a good lawyer or doctor.
Looks like the current target for feature parity with FF56 may be around 2020 or later, based on projected fixes of critical bugs.

Toolbar:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215064

Session managers:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427928
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1474130

It shouldn't take three plus years to fix an upgrade. The goal was good, WebExtensions are a significant step forward as a concept. Planning, execution and post-transition management sucked.
Not only do you have to figure out what’s going on in the JVM you also need to duplicate your effort to figure out how the JVM is running on the host.

Isn't that true for all other languages you mentioned? python, erlang, php, golang bundles a runtime, etc..
I have Alpine+gnome running on my little Dell Inspiron 5000 and I love it. It's super snappy where even Lubuntu was sluggish.

There are some missing luxuries like obconf and Emacs gui, but I mainly use it for browsing and sshing into Debian servers where I can just use vim anyway.

It was actually really straightforward to setup, too.
Switch expressions prepare the way for pattern matching (https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/305), instead of `instanceof` checks and casts.

But (in my naive opinion) double dispatch seems a more elegant and java-ry solution, i.e. polymorphism on argument classes, so different methods are invoked for different object runtime classes (instead of using the compiletime type of the variable).

The switching could be optimised, as ordinary polymorphism is in the JVM.

Sure, you'd wreck legacy code if you just introduced it, but there's surely a backcompatible way to do it that isn't too awkward.

BONUS: goodbye visitor pattern!
College Admissions Scandal – A Professor Writes
Blockchain: Some Ethical Considerations
I use US International layout, and Alt Gr (right Alt) + 5 (or maybe 6) works.
This is not to say that individual teachers cannot earn more or less, just that the scale on which they are being paid has been decided in advance, right?
Nasa's Mars 2020 Rover Is Put to the Test
Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 on the Day Before Deadly Crash
Very cool, thanks. I will probably be using this in the future
The CCP is 10x the cult that FLG could ever dream of being. Stop lapping up/repeating the antiFLG propaganda. Yes they have some weird philosophical beliefs, at least they are pro-love and anti-torture.
That stopped being an issue years ago. OpenJDK is a thing, you know?

If Oracle's ridiculous interpretation of API copyrights holds up, they have a kill switch for OpenJDK.
USCIS Announces FY 2020 H-1B Cap Season Start, Updates, and Changes