skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s generally my understanding that unions tend to decrease labor mobility, and are most effective for improving working conditions when labor mobility is naturally very low, as in industries dominated by a few players (shipping, auto) or where company-specific knowledge becomes very important (retail, maybe construction?). Industries with a high proportion of freelancers tend to form guilds, which are slightly different and often focus on licensure (barbers, doctors, lawyers). But programmers — like managers, accountants and bankers — have highly transferable skills that give them lots of employment options. Additionally, programming creates its own communication skills by (literal) networking, which aids programmers searching for jobs (they can send code samples over a wire). As such, competition for labor is more effective in tech than in many other fields.
Agreed. But for complicated reviews, a high-bandwidth synchronous meeting can be useful. Perhaps start out asynchronous, with the reviewer requesting a live meeting/call if they feel it's necessary? That's always worked well for me.
Ask HN: Is Macbook Pro or Gaming Laptop Better for Machine Learning?
I'm on the verge of buying a new laptop to replace my broken MBP 13" 2015. I dropped my old laptop and broke the screen, the cost is over $500, so I sold it on eBay. I loved that machine. It worked fine and I was hesitant on new Macbook because of product quality concerns.

Also, I learn ML on the side. CUDA seems to be the current popular tech for GPU-accelerated DL programming. I have not used OpenCL much at all to know if Mac's AMD can do the same or not.

So far, I think if I continue on studying ML, I'd better get a laptop with a good nvidia graphics card like MSI GS65 stealth with GTX 1070/RTX 2070. I'd use it for tuning models before pushing work to ec2 instance. Macbook cannot do that. Matlab also works a lot better on Windows.

I have hard time letting go Mac OS, however, like the old saying "it just works." No BSOD, no crapware, blazing fast due to software optimization, clean packaging of applications, and I really like Scrivener, brew, and super-fantastic trackpad. If I get a Mac again, it's probably gonna be end of the year, because I'm waiting for the redesign and scissor switch keyboard. I might either get a 13" MBA, or 15" MBP with maxed out specs.

Biggest thing that held me back from Windows laptop is also the quality control. Granted, Macbook repair and Apple Care is not cheap at all. Repairability of Mac sucks, but I have very bad experience with Windows laptop vendors, too, and windows laptops have much higher chance of breakage within 3 years in my experience.

Please give me your advice, assuming I can only get one of them... it'd be much appreciated.
WeWork may borrow up to $4B, giving the company breathing room to delay its IPO
Free-climber spotted scaling The Shard
It seems to me that planting historically native trees would be best for preserving cultural landscapes and identity. Ireland is absolutely beautiful, but the sheer breadth of deforested rocky landscape now being used for sheep pastures is depressing.
> When a medical doctor prescribes you a treatment plan and drugs, do you claim it's all due to marketing wanketeering, and this is the problem of why healthcare is difficult? When they say something that doesn't make sense to you, do you argue with them from a position of ignorance?

To be honest, this is literally the level of discourse of most Hacker News discussions about healthcare.
Lots of land and electricity.
That is something huge in densely populated europe.

But I also think the costs are bigger.
It's fine for a review to be passive. The review is about the code, not the person who wrote it.

When the reviewer prescribes a solution, it requires the author to push back if they want to solve the issue differently. For example, if they noticed they could delete the variable rather than align it.

Though, I'm used to code reviews where the author and reviewer are both professionals and equals. I suppose if the author is an unknown person submitting a patch, you might want to rely less on their professional judgement.
And the context of those 6 words is? It could easily be her ridiculing a claim that American forces waltzed in and killed him (which they didn't from what I have read)
What about people trying out new, experimental digital modes? Should that not be allowed?
For a long time I had an impression that Microsoft had some kind of union(s) like group running things there.

Is it so, or my memory is playing tricks with me?
Well, the button is already dedicated to turning off the screen and on previous iPhones, holding it down gave you the option to turn it off.

Now, holding it down brings up Siri, which now dedicates a button to a function I literally never use. I shutdown my phone at least once a month, whether that’s to do a simple restart, while at a no-phones event, or to save battery.

Now, you have to hold down the power button and the volume button to not only turn off the phone, but to access emergency SOS. If I’m in an emergency situation, I might not have the dexterity to do that with one hand or both hands free to do it with both. I have to use the latter considering how big the phones are now (iPhone X). My one hand is big enough to hold both buttons at the same time, but I need the other hand just to get the one in the right position.
Are you genuinely asking the person if they will? If not, then you should drop the question mark.
> IIRC GitLab is "open core" which just means it's not fully open source

Gitlab CE is fully open source. Gitlab EE is proprietary. The same company produces both, but you can decide to use only the former, and remain fully in control.

This is certainly not the vision of the future that supporters of a fully-FOSS world like me wish to see, but seems strictly better than most proprietary companies, which still use FOSS code/libraries while contributing little or nothing.
High 5 Crypto Performers: XMR, BTC, BNB, etc., XRP
The benefit in tech is options. Don't like your job, get another one. Don't like your boss, get another one. For many locations it's just the matter of turning a button on Linkedin or for many people sending some emails.

That keeps people idealistic, vocal and demanding of the behavior from their employer/bosses. This is not the norm in other business functions. Unfortunately.
Biggest question is if a union or union-like system makes sense in companies where the average tenure is ~2-3 years mostly due to employee choice.
Not quite. Elixir code isn't set to the client as Blazor does with .Net IL. LiveView leverages a small runtime loaded onto the client which uses websockets to load deltas.

While it sounds expensive at first, the template engine has been extended to support delta tracking and the process model that Elixir inherits fits well for a heavily interactive system with thousands or millions of users. The end result is that it's a very lightweight client setup and outside of using the template system properly, there are no gotchas with learning which code runs where.
I used to be all around anti-union. Now that I'm older I regret that position. There are bad unions and there are good unions. Sometimes they can be corrupt, but they never really exceed the corruptness of the corporate powers they negotiate with. It's an imperfect solution, but it's the only one that seems to work. The idea that we are all lone super stars that need to negotiate for ourselves is not only selfish, but more than likely wrong. Even if I considered myself a super-coder, should I be willing to sacrifice the well-being of everyone else in my field?

Tech workers feel pretty good here in the US because they are compensated better than most. The time to organize is now, not after worker supply has increased or during a recession when workers are more desperate. We have real issues (Ageism, Working Conditions, etc) that we'll never be able to address individually.
What does it even mean to have an open-source license on a binary? Aren't those two things kind of contradictory?
The "do it yourself" mentality needs buy-in at least from your team and a spirit of frequent refactoring otherwise you're being difficult... I think if you can get one reviewer to ok the merge, then merge it, fix followup issues subsequently (as new tickets you can pick up or someone else) but if you can't even get one other person to sign off... that's a problem if you then merge anyway. Ultimately what is merged without signoff can be reverted without signoff, but hey, you might at least get someone to take a look at it then.

Just getting to code reviews at all is a huge win for a team, every process after that (including "definition of done" for reviews as well as tickets, merging without signoff (I do it for small trivial things) and the post's "be nicer" guidelines) should be discussed as a team in retros. Something that's worked for me (mostly on remote/distributed) for making sure reviews don't stay in limbo is as an author to be a bug and aggressively ask specific individuals for a review, even going so far as to schedule time to hop on a video screen sharing call if some background context and walkthrough is helpful. But the team needs to be accepting of this, otherwise again you're being difficult...

At a team level another successful practice was for everyone to block off a convenient (not identical) chunk of time once a week to dedicate to making sure you have no pending reviews waiting on you, and also letting you say "please wait until [time] or see if someone else is free" when you're busy and the author bugs you. Sometimes a good review of a large change takes more than a focused hour or two -- it's fine to push back for smaller changes, but if you just block off some time, you can plan for it and just do the big review and then a limbo period will just be at most a week.
For families? Our uses a mixture of e-mail, text/iMessage, iCloud photos and Dropbox
> In this case, the solution to the cryptocurrency tax problem hinges on aggregating all of your cryptocurrency data making up your buys, sells, trades, air drops, forks, mined coins, exchanges, swaps, and received cryptocurrencies into one platform so that you can build out an accurate tax profile containing all necessary data.

No. The solution is or HAS TO BE a change in the law to simply taxing cryptocurrency trades/investment. The currenct solution which has been backdported from the stock market is completely unworkable for the cryptocurrency world.

There needs to be a much simpler solution, like say taxing 15%-20% of the money whenever you transfer money from crypto into USD, or even the reverse (from USD into cryptocurrency) if the government believes the former is too game-able. Heck, from the government's point of view, the latter may even be preferable to what exists now, because they could see it as a disincentive to buy crypto.

And yes, of course there will be ways to bypass these taxing system, just like for anything else, including the current system.
Where we see shapes, AI sees textures
Perhaps this makes me a terrible person, but I sometimes half hope to see things like this go through. The people of Alaska asked for this, and it will be interesting to see if they like getting what they asked for. The main reason it's only "half-hope" rather than fully hoping is that the damage from this will still affect people who didn't vote in favor of it. Those kids at the university deserve a better education than they'll get presuming the cut is allowed to stand.

Alternately, if I'm wrong about the value of austerity, and these deep cuts do allow the economy of Alaska to grow, that would also be interesting to learn. Previous recent experiments in this approach, particularly Kansas', don't seem to encourage much hope. But I'd be a fool to believe that you can take budgetary changes and trailing economic results in isolation. The system is far more complicated than that.
ATM machine
Yes, I mostly agree here. But even with that manual handholding, it's no different from current, mostly-supervised AI approaches. Even if you think of Eurisko as a very clever optimiser when posed problems in a certain way, it clearly delivered some interesting results. Also, you _can_ find the source code for large parts of Eurisko if you look hard enough, I believe.

Cyc never seemed in the least bit interesting to me, tbh. Even today several "we taught our AI common sense!" articles have hit HN, and it's still not _really_ true.
It'd be nice if dissenting opinions came with elaboration to continue the discussion instead of shut it down.
bcrypt is a password hashing algorithm. It's totally fine, but newer better ones exist (scrypt and now Argon2). libsodium provides them.
Ask HN: Employers, experience with hiring Coding Bootcamp grads?
I agree. The typography and page layout are gorgeous.
One could say the west as a society got a severe depression/mental illness: shrinking population, religious belief in imminent climate catastrophe, exaggerated shame for colonial period, fear of changing "natural state" of the earth in the slightest are evidence of that.
“In other cases, highly compensated engineers may see themselves as independent operators who have plenty of leverage on their own and thus do not need to join a union effort.”

This is definitely my feeling. When I can just open up LinkedIn and browse all the unsolicited interview requests I get, I don’t end up feeling like I really need a union to protect my current job - I can always just leave and go somewhere else if I’m unhappy.

That said, if someone asked me to vote for it I might do that, but I wouldn’t put the effort into organizing myself.
I make Automated Trading Strategy that adapt to ever-changing market conditions
For years I've been asking myself the question: how to create automated strategy that adapt to ever-changing market conditions.

One day, slouched on my couch, I watched a fascinating documentary about the evolution of living beings. Between wakefulness and sleep, a crazy idea came to my mind! And if my automated strategies had the same adaptive abilities as those of living beings:

- Reproduction, mutation
- Desires: Hunger, Libido
- Lifespan, Incubation duration,Hibernation duration
...

At the given moment, a strategy is composed of a population of bots, up to 200 000 bots, the most profitable bots (at the given moment) are more likely to survive and reproduce.

https://ozzo.io

I would like to know your ideas and your reactions on the project
It's possible, but with adaptive probabilities, the cost for never using a feature is pretty negligible (roughly O(log N) bits of overhead to learn that the probability is ~zero, where N is the number of times you code the symbol... and potentially even smaller depending on your initial probability).

Intra paint was not defeated because of the cost of entropy coding "don't use feature X here", it was defeated because due to "lapping and block size alignment issues, we cannot just turn it on and off when we want" (last paragraph of the "Pretty Images" section).
- Japan runs at 100V, the lowest and therefore safest voltage in the world. At least when it comes to electrocution. I suppose that it is also the reason why in Europe, where the standard voltage goes up to 240V, electrical safety is much more strict.

- As it is already mentioned, Japan is backwards in several domains and that may just be one of these. That's despite their technological advance in others.

- I have a feeling that there are more "perfect electricians" in Japan than anywhere else, because of their culture.

- Some 2-prong devices are perfectly safe because they are double insulated. This is also called Class II and the symbol for it is a square inside another square.
This feels really short sighted, all for an increased annual payout to residents that won't cover the cost of sending students to higher education.
News Rejection Is Mostly Media’s Fault
When your only reliable way to get a pay bump is switching jobs adopting any system that ties pay to tenure seems awfully synonymous with pulling up the ladder behind one's self.
The petition doesn't say they shouldn't be allowed. It just suggests the people developing such modes must provide the means to decode them.
DH by itself protects against passive attackers, but most "snoopers" aren't passive. To securely exchange keys over an untrusted network, you usually want an authenticated key exchange, which is more complicated than DH.
Could be wrong, but I first learned of this from watching Amazon's Man in High Castle TV series.
Just to keep things straight... The Lisp machine isn't me and I don't know anyone working on one. As for the IBM 1401, I can't take credit for getting it working; I joined the team later and help keep it running. Currently I'm working on an IBM 360/50 microcode emulator and reverse-engineering an early FPGA chip.
The UK has free public health care but maybe introducing a price for a doctors or hospital visit would help lessen this problem?

One could introduce a fee of say 20 pound pr. visit. Something that is low enough that anyone in UK could pay it but also high enough to remind people that what they are consuming is finite resource.
The only acceptable Windows 9x variant (ME included) was Windows 98 SE.
Indeed, that book influenced me deeply. It helped me to further blend together the meditation practice with the physical/bjj practice. It's among my top three books.
I'm happy to see the reference to it here on HN :)
> The people of Alaska asked for this

Well, kind of. I know this is more of a meta-question about government and democracy, etc., but this was a unilateral action by one elected official:

> Gov. Mike J. Dunleavy shocked the state last month by using a veto to cut much deeper, taking away $130 million more from the system that gave him his master’s degree.
Samsung ripped off my hobby project and published it under a different license
I wrote a tiny JVM a while ago and it has been licensed by a few companies for their internal use, but then Samsung ripped it off, republished it on github under a different license (against my license's terms) and even were nice enough to taunt me with "uJVM extensively uses sample code provided by uJ. Developers of uJVM would like to express their gratitude for invaluable info provided by Dmitry Grinberg." Their code is a copy of mine with a few renames ("uJ"->"uJVM"). Especially the code of the jvm core, the heap code, etc. They added some comments, but in some places those are wrong since they did not understand how the code worked. What do to?

https://github.com/Samsung/uJVM
http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=12.%20uJ%20-%20a%20micro%20JVM
That link alone only help insiders ... As it is a static image.

There used to be a player to play it like a movie, I just found this:

http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/mobile/
There has to be a balance of power between labor and management. When management has too much power, that power will be abused. When labor has too much power, that power will be abused.

Unions make sense when labor doesn't have any power. Do programmers have enough power? I'd say yes. Maybe not across the board but -- in general -- yes. We aren't coal miners, that's for sure.
My knowledge is a decade or so out of date, but encrypted transmissions have been allowed in the past, so long as the key for decrypting the payloads was available on request (much like how GNU says source code must be available).

For example, you can transmit video over amateur bands, even though the signal could be considered to be encrypted if you don't have the standard for decoding the signal.
The only holdouts left for C are UNIX clones and embedded.

C++ and managed languages have taken over everything else.
The problem is that Sanders is in a democratic primary. If people in the circle of democratic party thinking aren't valid sources for reporting on a democratic political candidate, who is? Clinton was the party nominee -- all of the players will have done something connected to that campaign.

The democratic party is a big-tent and demands consensus. When all of these connected folks eyeroll at the guy, it hints that he would have trouble governing. An "out-there outsider guy" persona works for the GOP because the GOP is a political machine party... some state senator from North Dakota would kill kittens on TV if instructed to.
Comment review: you have to put a line space [extra blank line] in order for HN not to collapse the text into a single line.

- first

- second

instead of

-first
-second

https://ibb.co/jLtZTFS - image shows editor pre-submission ;o)

HN should use [limited] markdown or something IMO.
In my opinion, unions are very valuable in cases where employees cannot effectively realize market value for their skillset.

This can happen for a number of reasons:

1. In cases of specialized skills (like working at a factory where you've trained on a particular machine).
2. In cases of natural or artificial monopolies (like working for a federal government).
3. In cases where companies and workers incentives are misaligned (like that of a construction worker).

Probably more that I'm missing.

I don't see how the current software engineer market meets this condition.

There are more open software engineering jobs than there are software engineers. If my employer mistreats me, I'll leave and go to a different company, and likely I can find a job just as good very easily.

I'm not sure how a union would benefit me personally.
According to Google Bluetooth requires location, because it van be used to find your location. So there is some reasoning behind this decisions, although I wwould be mutch happier with something like: Location (Bluetooth), location (GPS), location (WiFi)

>A location permission is required because Bluetooth scans can be used to gather information about the location of the user. This information may come from the user's own devices, as well as Bluetooth beacons in use at locations such as shops and transit facilities.

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/blue...
If it weren't for the crushing boredom of the suburbs when I was a child, I might not have learned how to program computers. I would never have thought so much about spaceships. The original Star Wars trilogy wouldn't have been nearly as cool to discover.

I also play traditional music, though boredom wasn't part of my discovering that. However, silence was a big part of traditional music, in the past. You need empty space if you're going to approach something with a fresh, receptive mind and heart. When something is so common that it becomes an ubiquitous commodity, we tend to tune it out and become desensitized. It's this way for all kinds of culture and media. If you're not familiar enough with the really great parts of traditional musics, then think of media around sex. Or, for that matter, video games.

The transition from boredom to fascination to determination has been a start of many significant parts of my life.
And you don't think server rendering has a cost? Running a very rich UI client side allows for tens of thousands of users per server, your suggestion reduces that to dozens or a couple hundred. Meaning many times more servers... more servers to configure, support, orchestrate, pay for. Meanwhile the clients are idle resources that could have been used.

If you are the one paying for the servers, and you want to pay for 10x+ the servers to support your app, feel free.