skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why are tech company staff wanting to unionize? For the most part, aren't tech staff reasonably to well paid - with good working conditions and moderate hour expectations (say 40-50)?
Those are businesses. Businesses are designed to make money. Open Source is a category of licenses designed to facilitate distribution of software.

I feel like much of the problems mentioned in this thread come down to people wanting to be paid to write software but not building a business that lets them do that. They spent all their time working on the software and not the business.

The book "The E Myth" about entrepreneurship tackles this. "You're a baker who loves to bake. You start a bakery. Now you're a business person first, not a baker." They say "you work ON the business, not IN the business."

In business, you trade money for value. If it's high value they can't get elsewhere, you might get a lot of money in the trade. You work on your business by figuring out what value you'll sell, and to whom ... and design your business by choosing those parameters so you make a living.

It's no different with musicians and photographers. You can love their craft, and be good at it, but not find something to sell that makes you a living. Wedding photographers generally don't like their job, but it pays great. It's generally not the art form they prefer, but it's the one that's easiest to make a living at.

Business is this constant negotiation between supply (you, the programmer) and demand (the people you're hoping will give you money). Not every product sits at a profitable place on this curve.

Open Source privileges the Creator, not the Buyer. I can make whatever I like and give it away for free. I might have one user or a hundred million. Because it's not a business model (an exchange of value for money), it isn't at all concerned with the financial viability of the programmer's lifestyle. That's why surveys repeatedly find that "most" "programmers" work for a company and are paid to produce open source (for some values of "most" and "programmers"). The companies handle the messy business stuff that isn't as much fun as coding, and programmers just get on with coding.
> but I’m pretty comfortable pointing to existing cloud computing business models or streaming services as a precedent.

Why are you this comfortable? Netflix, YouTube TV, Twitch, Sling, Amazon Prime Video -- basically all streaming services offer flat rates, not per-MB ones.

Further, all existing game library services tout unlimited gaming as a primary selling point! That's the primary reason you opt into Gamefly or Nvidia Shield, at least according to their own marketing.

And this offering is not for high-end gamers. It's taking the benefits high-end gamers get for their investment into their hardware, and making it available to the millions of more casual gamers. This isn't for high-end gamers, so creating a business model for them using Stadia makes no sense.

Finally, you're not thinking of this at the right layer if you're thinking in terms of things like s3, ec2, lambda, etc.. This is the product that's built on top of those, and the single price problem has been present for hundreds of years. It's a solved one, just ask any current MMO or hell, any clothing manufacturer. You're basically saying that an XL t-shirt is going to cost the same as a S t-shirt, despite tens of thousands of examples to the contrary.
"America’s political climate is changing; among other things, the 2016 presidential election brought up the issue of wealth inequality in this country and made people consider more closely the structural forces that define class here."

What on earth does the 2016 election have to do with wealth inequality (or unions for that matter)? Inequality has been on the rise for decades and Clinton was also a member of the 1%. This seems like a non-sequitur.
Visa Is Pivoting to Blockchain Tech and That Signals the Token Economy Is Coming
How do you edge cache games though? Edge caching youtube requires a giant pile of hard drives, Edge caching games requires a giant pile of hard drives and a giant pile of compute power.
It's a good time for spending dollars in the UK too!
Merwin was a remarkable writer. The Poetry Foundation's obituary has links to some of his more well-known poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/144293/remember...

And the New Yorker posted a piece talking about him with links to many of the prose pieces he wrote for them: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/w-s-merwin-in-th...

Including an old favorite of mine, "The Remembering Machines of Tomorrow", written in 1969: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/11/29/the-rememberin...

There's a copy that appears to be readable without a paywall here: https://books.google.com/books?id=o6zuPVOrVIQC&lpg=PA105&ots...
SF's infrastructure was never designed for high density. They can't just add homes by themselves. That would overwhelm the roads, sewers, electrical grid, schools, public services, etc. Those things all must be upgraded before adding more housing, otherwise the city will start to resemble a shantytown. The infrastructure upgrades will be tremendously expensive and in many cases would have to be done as huge capital projects rather than incrementally. There is little funding or political will to undertake such projects.

The root cause was a failure of urban planning decades ago. Now SF leaders and residents have to deal with reality as it exists today rather than what it ought to have been with better foresight.
The reason why these kind of initiatives fail is because they do not solve a real problem or issue.
The average Joe doesn't need another subscription just to play some games. Having a console where you buy games is more than enough.
I also silently hope that Google will fail hard with this one. Since they are the worst publisher on earth with absolutely no compassion towards its developers relationships.
What about your company and teams growth makes you feel like you’re being replaced?
unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others

Taking care of the next generation is an enlightened form of selfishness.

I am saying that even ‘caring for the next generation’ has to be sensible and rational.

I agree.

How is overcrowded schools ‘caring for the next generation?”

I'm for school choice.

High density housing does NOTHING except generate taxes for the government that spends most of it for the care and feeding of employees and to cover unfunded pension liabilities.

[citation needed]

In New York, it seems to have created a vibrant and diverse society. (While housing price pressure seems to be undoing that there as well.)

For what it’s worth, CA will not allow container mother in law units in the backyards.

Didn't Fresno pass favorable legislation?

This..THIS..is the reality of California.

Shortsighted self interest? No disagreement.
With apologies to Isaac Asimov, I did not realize they were ionized to begin with :)
Why not? The US film industry is mostly unionized, and there's tons of people who love movies, too.
So that means people who had more trouble getting a new job get paid more? Nice :)
In the US it depends on what state the union is in.
What is the overhead?
Kubernetes AWS API Gateway Controller
Were you using old wifi? I've only ever heard of latency issues when using wifi and then only when using older than N. Latency when using Ethernet is less than the HDMI latency on consoles.
Measuring the Limits of Data Parallel Training for Neural Networks
I believe it's non-default behavior. There's a keyboard shortcut to hide it.
What does your token issuer do when the purchase of a token is revoked?

That could be from a charge back, bounced check, or because the cash was determined to be counterfeit when deposited.

A big problem is the costs involved may be 10% at scale, but are certainly more than ten cents per transaction, so you need to get a deposit, but I'm not buying $50 worth of flooz to pay someone $1, because I don't know when flooz is going to stop working. Anyway, it's not that hard for someone to run a PayPal shop, as long as the product fits PayPal's tos and doesn't look suspicious.
Disagree. Percentages are absolutely unfair and baseless.
How exactly is Patreon a monopoly?
> There is not yet an organized blacklist for outspoken activists.

I hope you're right, but it's probably hard to know for sure.

My skepticism stems from the no-poach cartel discovered a few years ago.
Are we not already living in Brave New World a la benzos and opiods?
Check this https://modulate.ai/
I still think you're describing hourly work for the challenges of selling a $2MM house. Charge the seller hourly for open houses, pass through marketing expenses, etc.

At least I think we can agree that buyers and sellers should have choices! Today it is difficult to find anyone who doesn't play by the 6% rule, and realtors like keeping it that way.
I'm in the process to move out mass-surveillance social sites like FB, Twitter, Google, ... I'm about to install my own Matrix and ActivityPub nodes (Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, ...) on a cheap VPS.

I also have my own email domain hosted at Fastmail.com (I don't want to manage an email server).

This way I'll manage MY own data. I'll share it with who I want. And it's a fun project. :)
You can't plan to be the next Beatles (just as you can't plan to be the next Microsoft), but you can absolutely plan to make a living in the arts (just as you can plan to make a living in software).

When people look at a field from the outside, they only see the celebrities, but this is a completely unrepresentative sample. As Phil Greenspun once put it, "I can't decide if I want to be a scientist like James Watson, a musician like Britney Spears, or an actor like Harrison Ford."
An interview with the iMac product manager. Mostly a fluff piece but Jason Snell did ask about the continued use of non SSD hard drives. (Link will bring up a web page if you don’t have Overcast.)

https://overcast.fm/+Fcm8vPRGM
The supply of jobs is much lower in the games industry relative to the demand.
It's not just the levy - the paid officers of the union could still be working to support Labour Party activities, speaking in your name and spending your dues, couldn't they?
Software developers are so "in demand" right now, it seems like it would be better to not become a union worker and instead just shop around. It's really a sellers market for talent.
Mesa 19.0 Released
Yeah.. Who needs time management when you have crunch time!
What does the SSR story look like with pika/web? If I have code that has something like `import x from 'lib'`, can I make `lib` point to node-specific code on the server, and browser-specific code on the client?
So how is housing affordability in San Francisco working for you?

The housing density in SF is held at lower levels than the market equilibrium. The result is miserable, because the density is artificially low for the current market.
You don't have to have an agent as a buyer. Real estate listings are easy to come by, and you could just even drive around a neighborhood and stop in to any home with a "for sale" sign yourself.

But if you've hired an agent, why wouldn't you pay for their time?

While you're window shopping, they drive you around (or at least drive to the homes with you in their own car, paying for the car, maintenance, gas and insurance), they give you their advice on the homes and neighborhoods you see, answer questions about the home, about how the sale will go or any other questions you have about real estate, giving you the benefit of their years of experience in the industry.

They take time out of their life to give you rather than being with their families, or with clients who are actually serious about buying.

I honestly don't understand how someone could take all that from others without trying to compensate them for all they've given you.
> might be thinking of the specific gravity and using that to estimate the weight but an important consideration is that it's in a small crystalline form

I'm relying on the density of MSG being similar to that of sugar, and both being in crystalline form, then working from information around the web about the mass of heaped tablespoons of sugar.

(I know that not all crystals are of the same shape and not all pack the same. Something with needle-like crystals will end up fairly fluffy, unless mechanically crushed.)
In theory an union is a counterweight for HR. In practice hard to tell.
The 2016 election had very clear wealth inequality consequences where tax policy is concerned.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/2/16720952/s...
And.... the website is marked as insecure...
Looking for an Event Planning Platform
Does anyone know an Event Planning Platform that allows users to select multiple dates for the same recurring event from the same page?

Currently the ones I've looked into (Eventzilla, EventBrite) all require you to select one date for the event at a time.

If anyone knows a platform that supports this it would be very helpful.
In the 1980s the lock-in was in hardware: you buy this server, you get our OS and software stack.

In the 90s and 2010s it was software: you buy this software because others are not compatible with it.

Today's lock-in is cloud services. Will people ever learn?
Cong!

Just too many...

We need a top 10 list...
They have announced xCloud, yes, but have they announced the business model/pricing? So far, pretty sure the answer is no. So it may be a subscription, but it may also end up being akin to renting a VM with GPU in Azure. Time will tell.
How about selling adds that are embedded into source-code?

The target-audience of the adds would of course be coders because who else reads source-code. Maybe not a big audience but the adds could be permanent.

And what would the donors be advertising? Maybe development tools but also themselves as a potential employer. It would be basically VERY targeted marketing because only coders would see it.
Congressman Nunes sues Twitter, users for more than $250M
True... but they were talking about how their collection was limited to their single gaming system at home which wasn't true. They have options for that. But both of those are technologies to stream your own games, they do nothing to provide the games themselves. So it really is apples/oranges as a general topic.
There are a lot more socialists in the US than there were 5 years ago. Some attribute that to Bernie Sanders and his run for the dem's nomination.
>Being able to use it for free is quite literally the point of FOSS

The original point is to be able to debug, audit and modify the software you are running. And as far as I can tell that's still the core principle (note for example how there's no FOSS licence that prohibits sale of the software, and there is in fact niche FOSS software you have to buy to obtain).
The source you've linked to doesn't mention a stabbing, and nothing I've been able to dig up suggests there was a stabbing in the Köthen death. Death from heart condition was unrelated to the injuries sustained from a fall the victim suffered scuffling with the 18-year-old (which, yes, smells fishy, but I think you're casting aspersions on an unrelated coroner who was looking at a woman with a crushed ribcage because of possible malpractice on a local-to-you coroner's part, which is... Well, this is the sort of misinformation-spreading and stereotyping, and the harm it causes, that we're discussing in this thread).

Are you conflating the facts from two situations? Media coverage of the Köthen protests suggests there was a stabbing incident in Chemnitz close in time to Köthen.

All of that having been said: I think your point that Germany has laws discouraging you from casting aspersions on groups due to individual actions of the groups, and America has far fewer such restrictions, stands. Except... Germany's homicide rate is lower than the US. So Germany's clearly doing something right relative to its neighbor 'cross the pond (of course, it may not be this---but given that Germany had to deal with actual Nazis and the US has not yet had that challenge, I'm not in the habit of gainsaying Germany's strategy here regarding laissez-faire freedom of speech).
They do. At least in the US they do. I work with DOE labs in my academic research and everything I work on/with is open source.
How Good a Manager Are You?
A time cube...
Yeah, it is a bit annoying (I have also been using autoplay responsibly, i.e. the customer will only get autoplay if they have enabled it which is remember with a cookie) but way too many sites abused autoplay.
From earlier today about the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429522
Completely correct. Three of the top 10 election cycle 2018 contributors were unions.

* Carpenters & Joiners Union gave $38,366,262 with $37,822,215 to democrats and $529,000 to republicans.

* Service Employees International Union gave $28,224,658 with $28,219,509 to democrats and $132 to republicans.

* Laborers Union gave $27,538,080 with $26,810,870 to democrats and $708,100 to republicans.

Source: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?id=

As you can see, there's a massive amount of political spending by unions, and it's almost completely on one side. The "right to work" laws which are so demonized do at least provide one huge advantage: people are no longer forced to contribute to a political campaign which they do not wish to support. There has been court ruling around this area in the past few years, but it was a problem for a long time and, to an extent, remains one.
If you want better paying work, have the government stop taking more than 50% of the money.

(I don't mean that the government charges 50% taxes on workers. I mean that, in France, government consumes 50%+ of GDP - or so I understand.)
I wouldn't consider 1.5 hours each way an easy commute. Also, 600k for that kind of house is still really expensive compared to the rest of the country. Houses like that sell for $250k in Raleigh, and that would be a 10 minute drive or 20 minute bus ride into downtown. https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Raleigh-NC/pmf,pf_pt/6...
Well, when the Kickstarter staff unionized, they said "The goal of our union is to have a formal seat at the table to negotiate with management. We’re negotiating to promote our collective values, and ensure Kickstarter is around for the long haul. We care about preserving what’s great about Kickstarter and improving what isn’t.” In the last year, employees at Google and Microsoft have begun to agitate collectively to end sexual harassment and their companies’ respective involvements in the military-industrial complex and overseas censorship. Employees at Amazon and Salesforce have also implored their executives to stop selling technology to the US government. All of these requests could have more impact if made with a union behind them. All of this information was in the article linked in this post.
I think that the French economy would be better off if France simply outlawed all major US online monopolies. There is more than enough talent and ambition inside France to come up with better alternatives to all major US services... They just need an opportunity to start.
Looking for a specific thing is such a pain. Is it on netflix? Nope. 2 minutes loading the prime video app. Is it on there? Yeah, 3.99 for the privilege of streaming for a couple days. 2 minutes checking hulu. Nope. 2 minutes loading the HBOGO app. Not there either. Turns out, it was on showtime, the one service I don't have access to.

If its not there I'll pirate without hesitation. The only inconvenience is the time it takes to drag my laptop to the HDMI cable on the TV.
>- absurd "revenue cuts" - break down the costs. The human cost of doing email support and in some cases phone support. Legal, trust and safety, legal, etc. Now add the product development costs of a web service service in San Francisco. And finally add the % for the credit card processors, which isn't small.

For 2019 they're projecting 25 million in revenue in addition to their 5% transaction fee. I have no idea how they can't build a business out of that.

I think the GP has it right. Patreon can easily be a 100-200 million dollar kind of company with steady 10% returns. Since they've raised money at a big valuation that's not good enough. They have to be a billion dollar company for the VCs to get the return they want.
But it's not an ISP. Presumably this gaming service's primary market isn't Google's own data center employees.
I love Ruby and like Rails, but unless you can cache most of your content, scaling is going to cost you.
I'll admit I'm not very knowledgeable about the logistics of unions, but I imagine there's some kind of up-front legal overhead. Like, maybe there are contracts between the union and the company, or within the union itself to determine how it's governed? I also get the impression there is some overhead in an ongoing basis in the form of extra meetings, more complicated negotiations, etc.

All of those things seem like relatively minor costs when spread out across a large employee base, but I could see it being prohibitive for a smaller company. Or maybe this is a solved problem and you can just find some boilerplate stuff online that takes care of the whole process.
It's closer to a 'helper' than what you're suggesting.

There's no instability whatsoever in level flight, at least relative to other planes. The issue is that the large surface area of the engine nacelles is far forward of the plane's CoM. The effect of this is that the control stick becomes 'lighter' as you approach high AoA. This is considered acceptable - though not ideal - in many aircraft, but would have changed the pilot rating requirements from the old 737s.

Some people seem to be suggesting that this is some sort of advanced stability system; the reality is that this is just an automated trim adjustment. Clearly it's very important, but the idea that the plane couldn't fly at all without it is absurd.
> America’s political climate is changing; among other things, the 2016 presidential election brought up the issue of wealth inequality in this country and made people consider more closely the structural forces that define class here.

What is a structural force that defines class in America?
Google maps says it’s about 1.5 hours to Market Street arriving at 9am. $600k for a 1,000 sqft house with 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom in a horrible school district with that commute isn’t really a good deal.
According to The Verge “The goal of our union is to have a formal seat at the table to negotiate with management,” the Kickstarter Union organizers write in their email to staff. “We’re negotiating to promote our collective values, and ensure Kickstarter is around for the long haul. We care about preserving what’s great about Kickstarter and improving what isn’t.”
In 2015 there were still 2.1 million AOL dialup subscribers. Many people probably just don't realize they're still subscribed.

https://money.cnn.com/2015/05/08/technology/aol-dial-up/
Sounds like F-Droid and/or self-signed downloadable .apks are the immediate alternatives, and perhaps if that becomes enough of a percentage of app installs, somebody in the Play Store command chain will realize they're shooting the golden goose.

We can hope?
> They _could_ require that _after_ joining Kickstarter either join the union or pay equivalent dues.

That sounds like exactly the same thing as a closed shop. How is that practically any different?
Cloud providers don't distribute the software. GPL doesn't really help, except to make them more afraid about using wrong.
Well AMD will have to keep writing good Linux drivers which will most likely benefit everyone with an AMD card. They're also partnered with Unity and Epic Games which means these engines will make it easier to target Linux as the release platform and maybe port some DX-only features over to Vulkan.
It looks like you can at least view profile pages without logging in. Here's mine, as an example:

https://pixelfed.social/beardicus
I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure.

I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...