skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. I read an article last week about a guy who got fired for "unnecessary motion." (will update this comment with a link if I can dig it up.)

Here's a story about a patent on a wristband that enables this kind of tracking:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/31/amazon-wa...

It is humanly possible. As a teenager, I worked at UPS, where I was expected to stack boxes real-life-Tetris-style into a van at a rate of 45 per minute. They could get as heavy as 30 lbs. I actually got to enjoy it after a while (biceps!), but I could never get the hang of memorizing the zip codes (every truck has a list of 1-30 that we were expected to memorize instantly).
It seems the simple solution for Microsoft is to just stand up a data center in Germany again. The simple solution for the rest of the software world is to let people choose where their data is stored. I wrote about this earlier today: https://blog.graphitedocs.com/the-simple-way-to-remain-gdpr-...
Working as a "turker" on Mechanical Turk, or as a Tasker on Taskrabbit, or as a Lyft/Uber driver, all have one thing in common: the switching cost to/from that particular job is almost zero.

In my view, this is why you can get paid less than what you deserve, but that option is still attractive to you.

In other words, if you have 34 minutes between things, one of the few paying things you can do is MTurk, even if it doesn't pay well.
In particular, they have the google.com domain. That is literally their most valuable asset.
Show HN: Osgood – A secure, fast, and simple JavaScript server platform
And then what? Amazon will continue to do the bare minimum to appease these signals periodically.

It is not the duty of consumers to provide a social safety net for workers. This is precisely where government should step in. If you really give a shit about the people working at Amazon, write to your congressman/congresswoman and voice your support for social programs that would positively impact them.
> This is not a monopoly in the standard sense, and since anyone can crawl the web and build their own index Google isn't hindering anyone from competing.

It's close. It's as close to a monopoly as MS was with IE built into Windows 98 - while you can find and use alternatives, it's on you to do this, and Google is the default all over the place.

Remember, too, how much power this gives Google - the top five search results for a keyword are intensely powerful, for everything from directing commerce to a particular site, to controlling news narratives, and more. Companies pay millions for SEO "professionals" and software like Moz / Stat to ensure they're in the top rankings. The latter in turn need to defeat google's anti-bot stuff to get search results, so they're in their own arms race...

The whole ecosystem is dirty and gross and gives too much power to too few people with too much money. It'd be fine if the average consumer was conscious of this and could reasonably make the choice to use a different engine, but this is highly controlled as well - think of the Google donations to Mozilla that they may not be able to live without.
What are the costs close to, and what are the costs of distribution if you did it yourself? Feel free to break it down into cost of business across n countries, cost of storage and bandwidth, some bare-minimum listing fee somewhere to at least enable theoretical discovery, and ignore all the other services the platforms provide.

I mentioned probable economies of scale in a cousin comment, but I don't think they offer all that much. Do you have a % in mind that you intuitively think could be knocked off from the stores of Valve, GOG, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Salesforce App Exchange, and Amazon Appstore, all taking around 30% before you get into the fine print?
The Chinese Influence Effort Hiding in Plain Sight
Why? My comment is based on fact.
Why our ancestors drilled holes in each other's skulls
As automation keeps on improving and productivity gets more centralized will there be a shortage of jobs?

The above poster makes a fair point that this is work well suited to automation. In the broader sense with retail closing and Amazon taking market share, centralizing productivity (i.e. reducing retail jobs to fewer picker jobs), and then automating those fewer jobs away entirely, are we going to have a hole in society where those jobs once existed?

I genuinely have no idea how society would work if you simply eliminated 20% of jobs tomorrow. Mass poverty? Artificially created jobs? A larger rich/poor divide?
I think there's a whole lot of ground between worshipping CEOs and pointing out that managing a large organization is an actual skill that is not particularly common.
> it's hard to get people to work on something soul-consuming. But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation.

I would argue that the best innovations tend to also be "soul-consuming". If it were easy, someone else would have innovated in that area earlier, right?
I guess it already is being done. US citizens must also be benefitting from stuff like GDPR. It does not sound sensible for companies to implement it and then wilfully exclude US citizens. I think often times companies will just comply with all data protection rules globally for everyone.
https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/william-shoc...

This is specifically about academia and publishing, but I don't think that's all that different from a lot of development practice. It presents a useful way to think about engineer productivity that doesn't get caught up in meaningless slogans.
Are they actually productive for 72 hours per week (9am-9pm 6 days per week) though? At some point wouldn't the burnout make them only as productive as someone working maybe 50 hours per week but with time to learn and relax?

But also, if 996 includes things like studying to become a better programmer, taking breaks to get coffee, etc. then maybe a lot of us on HN are working 996, if we include our own time we spend learning.
You have money, then it becomes very easy
The person is probably most familiar with their former products and can both advocate on merit (i.e., they happen to know about obscure features that no-one knows about for other options) and is more comfortable for them. Knowing people (and being their former boss) probably helps them out, too, which makes it easier to pull things towards their former projects).

But yeah - it doesn't seem like this should happen as often as it does.
100 years ago? Index funds aren't that old.
Yeah, I ditched them this afternoon. I had Airmail on both iOS and macOS, but their Exchange/O365 support has been bad for some time and this was the last straw. I’m sorry, I cannot justify paying monthly for an email client. It was also pretty uncouth to not grandfather existing customers.

Btw, anyone switching away should also remember to revoke any access they might have granted to the app in Google Account.
If people expected Amazon to make a loss long-term then its share price would drop to zero immediately, taking most of Bezos' wealth with it.
I already understand that you think I'm wrong to make this comparison, but I still don't understand why. Why does it matter that airplanes and cars have many differences (of course they do)? If you die in a crash, you're just as dead.

The reason I'm talking about car safety is that driving or riding in a car is probably the most risky thing that most people do all the time. And yet, we accept the risk. So this seems like a good baseline for what should be considered an acceptable risk.

So I can understand not wanting to encourage airlines you don't like. I also understand wanting to encourage airlines to be safer, because improving safety is a good thing to do.

But that's different from not flying in a certain kind of airplane because you think you might die, while meanwhile taking other risks that are much worse. That's just inconsistent. We're all inconsistent sometimes, but it seems weird to object so strongly to someone pointing it out.
I think it's quite possibly the only way regardless of how your product compares to Steam. Steam has huge platform lock-in as well as other inherent advantages as an incumbent monopoly. Your platform can be better in every way and people will still use Steam because that's where all their games are and where all their friends are. The history of computing is full of better products that failed to beat lock-in. See, for example, the insane lengths we've gone to keep computers compatible with the 8086 instruction set.

People also ignore that Steam built itself up on exclusives too. Heck, Valve bought Turtle Rock Software a few months before Left 4 Dead's release to get an exclusive lock on the Left 4 Dead franchise in perpetuity, then froze the original developers out. But somehow gamers are more scandalized by Epic paying developers to release on Epic's platform a few months before Steam, despite that being less predatory in every possible way.
China has a very high savings rate and often a dearth of investment opportunities for that money (a bubbly real estate market or a insider trading heavy stock market), education abroad can provide pretty good returns comparatively.
Jeff's net worth isn't in cash. It's going to be affected much more strangely than your analysis suggests. If Amazon has to raise its labor costs that much, Wall Street will react in a way that is difficult to predict the magnitude, but easy to predict the direction.

Normally I'd suggest analyzing that 13.2B in terms of the profits of the company, which for instance last Jan 2019 was ~$3 billion, which if projected out for the year means you'd be proposing a pay raise larger than the profit margin for the company, which is definitely going to affect the stock price. But Amazon is a weird case where most people think that they can just turn on the spigots anytime they really want to just make money, so it's maybe not the easiest analysis.

But for most companies, they make less profit than people think, especially if they're looking at revenue numbers, and a lot of people tend to suggest things that would make a 6% profitable company (not a terribly uncommon number) become a -25% profitable company or something. Even if you tip all executive compensation back into profit, that doesn't usually do much for these large companies.
What university? Also, Master's degrees are aimed at a lot of international students.
The price for the 1.5 was truely ridiculous. It would be interesting to know how many they sold.
> But it could also just be a coincidence.

It's not Prime Day, and there's bad press about Google. It's Prime Day, and there's still bad press about Google. Prime Day is over, and there will continue to be bad press about Google.

The word I'd go for isn't "coincidence." It's something more like Captain Obvious.
The article does discuss increasing salaries in China.

The issue with the pace of development bring quicker doesn't just come down to labor rights. Shenzhen is the world's biggest electronics manufacturing hub, so it can be easier to iterate quickly with manufacturers there. The article does indeed interview someone who complains about Americans supposedly not working long enough hours, but that's actually a pretty widespread view in China about Westerners.
But what does that look like on a per-capita basis?
Ask HN: Internet was the coolest thing in the past, but what about now?
Before internet gave me some thrill. There were so many things to explore, services to build, strangers to talk and so on. Today, however, I feel that internet is a bit bloated. Many apps, too much influence of tech giants (google, fb) and so on. I wonder what's the coolest thing out there, not yet mature, but that gives this thrill of possibilities. I wonder whether it's internet of things that will change how things work. Imagine a change from filling forms on websites to be based on our behavior instead. I used to think that blockchain could be this source of possibilities, but it's a very controversial topic. I would love to hear your opinions. Thank you in advance.
Those are called "broetry" posts. I believe LinkedIn implemented some changes to reduce exposure on these, but I still see them regularly.
Let me guess, 0%? :-)
The president is asking the congresswomen to go back.
The OP specifically was condemning ignorant reactionaries. Responding with "but skepticism is good" is a defense of ignorant reactionaries. Otherwise, it's the responder's responsibility to enlist further clarification instead of what can only be interpreted as dismissal + "/s" snark.

I mean, we all can agree with "healthy skepticism is good." So was their post just an in-passing reminder unrelated to this thread? I charitably interpreted their post to be a response to the comment they replied to rather than an independent platitude.
I agree with your general point, I just think that it doesn't make sense to pump money into this endeavour until there's clean drinking water for everyone. Once there's wealth to spend, space is a nice goal. On the other hand I do not personally care about the fate of millions impoverished Indians and wouldn't mind sacrificing their lives towards the goal of space exploration. All I'm saying is that the priorities here may be perceived as being wrong.
Corporate heavyweights no.. but super smart people on the forums https://forum.nim-lang.org/ and its creator https://github.com/Araq
The End of Libra?
I'm not sure about other fields, but most theses in computer science these days are usually a stitch-up of your papers + some glue text/backstory. I.e. 80% of your thesis is already in LaTeX format. Org Mode only adds complexity to your workflow.
Indefinitely posting while hiring only once every six months is actually the poster child of the problem. If it really takes six months to find someone to fit the role, you might want to take a look at your hiring process because as you must be rejecting (or ignoring the applications) a lot of great, qualified people.

IMHO if someone did take the time to publish the metrics of companies who perpetually post the same positions, it would be a fair counter balance.
“And if any appear never to assume the chair, but always to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about. As to what we call the masses, and common men;—there are no common men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them! But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy until he has produced his private ray unto the concave sphere, and beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6312/6312-h/6312-h.htm)

It seems to me that no person is in a position to judge whether another has found the thing that they should be shaping their life around. As much as we like to assume they are, humans aren’t rational creatures and activities that appear completely pointless from the outside can be incredibly meaningful to the one doing them.
There's not really any debate. The MAX ignored very basic controls lessons that were learned and institutionalized, as you say, over 50 years ago.
Build an Instagram Clone with Ionic: Part 4 – Testing Your Ionic Application
I wish interfaces were more straight up about their intentions and made it easier to implement account level partitions. For work I love Google's magic tracking effects, but at 1 am, hell no.
Speaking as someone who is now married with a kid who worked a whole lot when I was younger, I'd advise the opposite for the OP. Work as much as you can, and ideally get your employer (or customers) to pay you as much as possible for that work. Save that money, and invest it well.

Because you won't be able to do that when you have kids. The period from 0-5 years old is just brutal on all of time, attention, and finances. Having a financial cushion is pretty critical if, for example, you get hit with $50K in hospital bills while also needing to figure out daycare and baby supplies and your wife is spending 6-8 hours/day nursing and you're both sleeping 3-4 hours/night. Many new parent problems can be solved with money, and most of the rest are a lot easier if you're not worried how to get the money.
I agree that steam's existence has done wonders for gaming, and I'm also happy with their work on linux gaming
(and never mind some cheap sale games)

But that doesn't mean that steam today is the best experience for gaming, and I would probably go so far as to argue that their hold on gaming is harmful to the industry, the largest issue imo being their large take of sales.
It's a little more like, "If you assume nothing is more complicated or costly than anything else, then any set of examples you see could just as easily be generated adversarially to trick you as not."
Romantic, unforgettable, and a great conversation starter, but from a practical point of view it's very worrying to travel on dangerous roads in an antique car with a long list of mechanical shortcomings.
Before you can do this you need to have accumulated wealth that you can spend. It's not a coincidence that the industrial revolution started where it did.
Same for steam engines: it turns out Watt spent most of his effort on getting components manufactured and having the associated manufacturing processes developed. The basic idea of the steam engine had been around for a long time prior. You can ask the same question of Romans and electricity. They had all the necessary tech: glass for insulators, acid for batteries, metallurgy for wire etc.
this has become one of those HN threads that just keeps on giving. thanks for recommendations for publii lektor, googpress, staticgen and hexopress, and the parent article on import doc.

There is a geshtalt emerging in this space that makes me hopeful and curious to see where it leads?
GLORIOUS VARIATIONAL BAYES
Why would you rely on google spying instead of your own browser history?
The University of Texas at Arlington - but I've heard that with only a handful of exceptions, this is nearly the case nationally.
I donate money, food and my wife's time (time I would otherwise enjoy for myself instead of babysitting two kids)

The food is part of my pantry management. We don't eat too many canned goods, so we regularly donate it after a few months (well before expiration). We keep canned food for, among other reasons, emergencies.

Also, we buy - and therefore donate - very high quality food. Mr. NationalPost might not taste the difference, but in our family, we do. Am I any better than the poor that I get to eat the fancy stuff?

The donation of food has an aesthetic appeal - I'm literally giving sustenance and therefore life to the less fortunate. When I donate money I give the mere possibility of sustenance. Assuming the charity is honest.

I would not donate more money if I didn't donate food. I'm not homo economicus and the increased money signal from purchasing less canned goods doesn't tug on my donation levers. I.e. I don't take partial derivatives of my (woe me, undefined!) elasticity and demand functions.

I even keep wool Costco socks in my car to give out to panhandlers in the winter. Surely the $15/pack could have been put to better use! But imagine the joy of a panhandler receiving a small package from a more fortunate.

Hopper was full of it when he posted this a few years ago. He's full of it today.
Went looking for some smart-ass pull request (tongue in cheek) and was gladly surprised there were some! Alas, just proof reading changes and such.
Hah, tried that. The local post office will just deliver it to your mailbox again, and again, and again. My record is 3 times for a real piece of mail addressed to someone who used to live where I live. After that I just recycled it.
> I don't see how we can compare Bach to someone toiling away on a better business software in any reasonable way.

As long as a domain has virtually infinite solutions, it will inherently imply creativity and quality.

Even on systems with easy logical problems, as long as the architectural complexity is high enough (I guess we start from the tenths of thousands of lines?), surely there will be people who design better, safer and faster (and that will also learn faster).

So they will be definitely recognizable (whether it's "2x", "10x" or "100x"). On the other hand, people with such skills very likely won't work on those systems :-)

Einstein worked at a patent office, where he'd do in a short time what would require other clerks a full day of work. He was the equivalent of a "10x engineer"; he didn't work there for a very long time :-)
Is it unreasonable of Google not to want to use a royalty free codec that's controlled by the MPAA?
Keep on projecting. Let me guess, you show up on time and kiss upper managements ass. You believe in patents. As far as I am concerned Hacker News is not for corporate drones like yourself. That's me disparaging you.
I can tell you that this line does not work at Apple.
If I ever questioned Apple's weirdly bureaucratic ways of doing things my manager would yell at me "I don't give a fuck what you did at Google!".
People were saying the same thing during the multi-protocol days (x.25, DECNet, AppleTalk, Novell IPX...) They couldn't be bothered to learn this crazy Internet thing. IPv6 is the future.
Parent is making the reasonable assumption that laptops are mainly dumb terminals with batteries, but takes an unreasonable step in stating that’s the only thing they are good for.
Our church foodbank gives away all the fixings along with a coupon to get a turkey at the local grocery store.
See "The Solution", where he argues for Win32 as a truly open standard, as explicitly opposed to UWP and Android, which he considers to be closed.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/microsoft...
Are CEOs highly compensated because of scarcity or artificial scarcity? How would one tell the two apart? Answer the second question, apply it to the first, and I think even if we don't find an answer to your original question we would be in a better place.

Personally, I don't know. It does seem to be a lot of 'who you know' over 'what you know' at that level. Some special knowledge, but nothing that couldn't be taught with a 4 year degree. But it would be foolish of me to think I fully understand all that is needed. So I'm left wondering which is the case.
Everything on orbit and on the ground is production product.

When you are several billion euros in, have 24 satellites on orbit, and have been broadcasting with the 'Valid' bit set for 2 years you aren't really in 'beta' as we use it.

They have been in production mode in all but name. Given the life/safety implications, there are some rather rigid qualification checks that have to be done to be 'fully certified'. That's what's been going on.
Probably why Baidu is such a terrible search engine.
Ask HN: How is Landen’s Pagespeed Insights score so high?
Most websites built on Landen tend to cross 60 on mobile scores on Pagespeed Insights while other website builders sites struggle to get past 35.
Any ideas?
Why do people always make the"legality" argument. Just because something is legal, doesn't mean something is right. The Holocaust was quite legal, at the time.

Putting people in concentration camps and letting them die there (ICE) should not be legal. This does not even touch on whether deportations should be.
If i had to point to a specific technical factor, it's pneumatic tires.
Well, if you only quote the part of his post that is so vague that it is completely meaningless, sure. It doesn’t imply that (or anything really).

Do you have a plausible interpretation of his comments that is not consistent with my characterization?
CLISP should build from source, it seems to be getting built fine by Joyent pkgsrc bulk builds. Their build of SBCL is failing in C code [1], maybe a Solaris expert could fix this.

The usual reason that SBCL stops building is that something has changed in the OS.

[1] http://us-east.manta.joyent.com/pkgsrc/public/reports/upstre...