skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've read easily over 100 articles and forum discussions on this topic, and it's rare to encounter someone who believes the main problem we have is political.

I too believe this overlooked dimension is the most important, and have some ideas for your consideration that I hope may strengthen this perspective.

1. "...You can't fight unemployment and inequality and try to reduce emissions" - I would argue that this is an obvious complication, but I don't believe that it is an impossibility, under current conditions. It seems to me that the net amount of productivity and wealth on the planet is overwhelmingly sufficient to satisfy this issue on a material basis, but the problem is more so distribution of wealth and technology (and all the obvious complications that come along with that, of course). If this wasn't the case, then I would agree that your "can't" assertion would be correct, but luckily this seems to not be the case.

2. It is true that the problem is political, but I would argue that there are lower levels of abstraction that more accurately communicate the essence of the problem:

2a. Politics inherently derives from public consensus, even in authoritarian states (if to a lesser degree). From anything I've seen, there is nothing remotely approaching public consensus on climate change, both what to do about it, or even whether it's a real thing. It seems to me that the science is conclusive enough that consensus should be much higher than it is, so what might explain this anomaly?

2c. Public consensus inherently derives from human psychology, and I see very little evidence that humans think primarily in a logical manner, in groups or on an individual basis. In fact, there is ample evidence, both anecdotal and clinical, suggesting they do the very opposite of that.

[Politics] --> [Public Concensus] --> [Human Psychology]

I believe (speculatively, of course) that these ideas better describe the reality of the situation we find ourselves in, but I see next to no discussion on it. I'd very much like for these ideas to get into the mainstream for discussion, but other than beating them like a dead horse on HN and elsewhere, I'm not sure how this can be accomplished.

It's encouraging to encounter someone else who seems to notice this aspect of the problem, so at the very least it may be useful to try to discuss and improve the overall idea, in hopes that the message might eventually become strong enough to get some traction in the zeitgeist.

EDIT:

Two academics I've found who work most closely in this domain are Jonathan Haidt [1] and Daniel Kahneman [2], any suggestions of others to look into are appreciated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman
Perhaps the Sawyer paper from 1973? https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
Putting adware into a browser extension that is already just adware (pops up messages on sites the employer doesn't want you to visit) is not a security risk.
She wasn’t being fired for “unionizing”. She was being fired for abusing her access.
I think the hidden danger in this model, which I think about a lot, is that doing philanthropy is shown as an activity you can’t afford to do until you are very wealthy.

The trick is to do good for the world long, long before then. You shouldn’t need to be wealthy to volunteer a few hours a month..

Before anyone judges me negatively, I say this as someone who has spent the vast majority of my lifetime trying to “climb a ladder” only to want to get to a point where I can give my resources away for free to help others. But I have never figured out how, and then one day it just struck me, why can’t I jump to level 6 now without the money, and maybe that might just be what’s wrong with the money driven world somehow, or at least my understanding of it.

I feel like if I could understand how to not care/worry about the money then I could free up the mind and energy to do something better for the world, and I want to.

And then I realize the counterpoint that we have to work within the rules of the system, too, and the system is much more cruel and demanding than I wish it was.
Because people never like to pay more for something that was free... Also makes accounting mad
She’s young and probably a bit naive. I think it’s absolutely a reprimand-worthy offence, and I certainly understand that a security engineer maybe shouldn’t inject code like she did, but that’s why there are reviewers, but they ok’d it. I don’t think it’s something she should have been fired over. I made dumb mistakes early in my career too, after all.

Should she have done it? No, absolutely not. Not like that anyway. Should she have been reprimanded? Yes definitely. Should she have been fired? I don’t think so personally, not for a first time mistake at least (we don’t know if she did other things previously or not, of course)
Teamviewer it the only reliable enterprise solution I've found so far
Could you please stop letting fascists post freely on your website?
> Analysis through an engine becomes tough, for example, because it might produce a line which hinges on castling at some point in the future (this restriction is obviously lifted once both players have moved their kings)

This is only true for the brief period until someone modifies an engine to train on the new ruleset.
> The particular popup looks pretty official and scary

It's warning of a legal obligation. Is that not enough of an "endorsement"? And it only pops up if you visit the website of a consulting firm that some say has breached these obligations in the past. It's hard to think of a better way of targeting this warning.
>> Why would any sane person be against unions?

> Because they, like any other organization, tend to become corrupt and exercise their power to the benefit of the "party insiders", at the expense of the everyday member. And I, for one, don't feel any need to have my pay rate negotiated based on some group average or least common denominator. And union dues.

Going to work without a union is like going to court without a lawyer. Are there incompetent lawyers? Does it cost money to hire a lawyer? Of course, but that doesn't mean it isn't a stupid idea to try to represent yourself pro se.

I'd join a union if one were available to me, then I'd work in it to make sure it was well-run and effective.
In addition to what the sibling comments to this one said, Message DB solves a different problem than what queues solve. Message DB is a good fit in a microservice-based architecture, and the "micro" in "microservice" comes from concept of Dumb Pipes / Smart Endpoints (https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html#SmartEn...). Message DB is a "dumb pipe," whereas queues and brokers fit into the "smart pipe" side of the divide.

Message DB is a message store, a database optimized for storing message data. The database doesn't track the status of anything---that responsibility falls to consumers of the data.

Message queues are fine pieces of technology when what you need is a message queue. Message DB, on the other hand, is used for event-sourced systems. "Event-sourced" in turn differs from merely "event-based." Since I've started building event-sourced systems, I haven't run across the need for message queues, but ymmv, and of course, like all humans, I too have my own hammer/nail biases.
An Open Source Sitemap API for Every Domain
Rather than banning castling outright, what if opposite wing castling was the only type of castling allowed? That should also make draws more unlikely.
Hollywood might not be the best example of unions' effectiveness, given the revelations of the Me Too movement.

Have you considered using the AMA or similar in your examples instead?
>“We dismissed an employee who abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement, adding that it was “a serious violation.”

This doesn't sounds like privileged access, it sounds more like they have issues with their pipeline. If all what it takes for code to get in Production(even if it's internal), is at least two approvals, I think that's a bigger problem.
I agree with all your comments about the non-linearity that is extremely obvious in chess is not captured in the current engines everyone uses, which does lead to all the draw's we are seeing. I'm interested in your results from your engines when they're complete!
> the US, with the most guns per head in the world, has the highest rate of deaths from firearms, while Japan, which has the lowest rate of gun ownership, has the least.

Well, duh. I bet more people die from falling down stairs in multi-level houses than in single level.
Microsoft will support you, but for a hefty cost.
The market has vehicles for this, e.g. purchasing rights to the helium while leaving it underground. Perhaps that's not what the law allows for, however.
Indeed. And there are a ton of comments here saying it's OK because "she went through the standard approval process, which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes."

But that doesn't mean it was OK. It just means the co-workers might have greenlit it without taking a close look, or were misled as to what they were approving, or that they were approving it because the code was correct technically, and approval isn't about judging the code's product purpose.

If this tool was NOT meant to be used as the equivalent of "posters on the wall" and she modified it, regardless of co-worker code approval, it DOES seem to be an abuse of privileges.

If her manager had given her the OK, then she's in the right. Otherwise, I have a hard time seeing how this isn't abuse of one's position.
>but at Google that was also the approval standard for deploying such an extension...I don't really see how Google could be in the right here though.

I don't see how Google isn't in the right here. The approval process for this security tool was designed to minimize red-tape and maximize contributions because the goal was security, and the assumption was that the lax process wouldn't be abused. The clear intent of the tool is not to push the political agenda. It was there to warn about security-related issues while browsing. She abused the process and deserved to be reprimanded.

Here's an example .. like most companies we have a wiki that anybody can edit. The intent is to get contributions from everybody around product-related issues (e.g. debugging a particular problem, how to configure the product for a specific use-case). Nobody polices usage of this wiki, and the wiki has no specific access controls to bar any individual from editing any page. Certainly though if someone started putting in notes at the top of some of the pages to push a political agenda that would be an abuse of the process, wouldn't you say?
Employers show zero loyalty towards their employees the world over so to have any form of loyalty back is to misunderstand the situation entirely. Money exchanges hands for time working. It is a contract just as the company wants it.

Anybody who thinks there is more to it than that has misunderstood the way any medium to large company operates. Small businesses however can and do show employee loyalty but that is due to the owner's inexperience, it will likely get beat out of them when the reality of a very fluid workplace kicks in. Jobs for life have been gone for a good while.
I wish education was cheaper. All the college content I consumed is available for free now on the internet.

Our society needs to recognize that only a certain percentage of people ever want to go to college, and that is okay. No need to put people in debt and set them up for failure.
F1 hybrids are the first generation (filial-1) offspring of two homozygous parents, both of which breed true for certain genetic factors.

The F1 hybrid is a uniformly heterozygous cross. They will be a consistent and uniform mix of desired genetic factors, much like clones, but all siblings of parents that are themselves like clones.

The F2 generation will be less consistent. The genes will recombine such that the desired high-producing mix of genes will not be present in all offspring. By the F3 generation, it will almost be back to the diversity of a genetically unmanaged population. Harvest times will spread out, such that by the time the slowest plants mature, the fastest ones may already be spoiling or eaten by birds.

F2 seed can be sold and planted the next season, at a lower price, but the yield will be lower than with F1 seed. F3 seed is not economically viable to sell for planting, as the farmers that habitually save seed probably already have F3 or greater from their last crop, or an heirloom cultivar.
up for me (NL)
I'm firmly in the camp that CO2 has little to nothing to do with the temperature of the planet.

Fact 1: The earth has been warming since the last ice age.

Fact 2: Solar output has increased recently

Fact 3: Water vapor accounts for almost all of the greenhouse effect. A planet that was already warming is going to continue to warm unless the energy input is changed.

Speculative: Some people believe the data has been manipulated intentionally to show a larger increase in temperature than what is actually taking place. This was 'climate gate'.

Finally, CO2 is the least of our worries. The real problem is toxic chemical pollution. Industrialized society is polluting our water and our food with toxic chemicals, slowly killing us all.
Differential Diagnosis
One avenue that I think hasn't been fully explored/exhausted yet is false advertising regulation. Calling your product "news" carries a an entirely reasonable expectation that the product is free of falsehoods. (I'm not getting into bias, just absence of lies)

What would happen if we made that term (or synonyms like "journalism") protected advertising terms, so that you're required to either live up to it, or call yourself something else?

Another idea under this hypothetical law would be to have retractions/corrections carry the exact same amount of publicization as the original story. In other words, if you spend 10 minutes during primetime talking about something that turned out to be a lie, you get to spend 10 minutes on primetime about how you screwed up. You lie on a front page article that was up for a week? Your correction features in the same place for a week.
Trends UX designers should know for 2020
I wouldn’t put it past the TV makers to aggressively evade firewalls, latch on to public WiFi or include a secret cellular modem that they bury in the finest of fine print.
I have a suspicion given a bunch of things happening there (of which I have only outsider knowledge, mind you) that they're already well into a transition to a more boring bigco stance & structure, and are just letting their reputational momentum carry them until people notice rather than coming out and saying that. Starting to push comp downward would be in line with that.
Why is 1password unlikely to be acquired? I’m sure its owners would like to be billionaires just like everyone else. They’ve already accepted VC funding, and VCs definitely want to be billionaires.
Here is one article talking about subway construction costs in NY.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

It's not just unions, but here is a taste:

There are “nippers” to watch material being moved around and “hog house tenders” to supervise the break room. Each crane must have an “oiler,” a relic of a time when they needed frequent lubrication. Standby electricians and plumbers are to be on hand at all times, as is at least one “master mechanic.” Generators and elevators must have their own operators, even though they are automatic. An extra person is required to be present for all concrete pumping, steam fitting, sheet metal work and other tasks.

In New York, “underground construction employs approximately four times the number of personnel as in similar jobs in Asia, Australia, or Europe,” according to an internal report by Arup, a consulting firm that worked on the Second Avenue subway and many similar projects around the world.
Unions are a big, big reason stuff is SO expensive in NY. They have to have 4 times as many employees doing construction as in Europe, for instance.

Europe doesn't have this problem because they have good unions. We can't have those in America. I really don't know why, but that's just how it is.
I agree. This article does not mention that your life and upbringing play a major role on how you think about money. I know many folks that are well off but they are still frugal. They care about the cost of groceries, the cost of restaurants, etc. They don't need to but they choose to. They lived the majority of their lives without this kind of comfort -- some behavior cannot be changed when it is learned and repeated over time. The value of money has become a part of their values. I admire it to a certain extent. Even if they win the lotto they would probably donate most to a good cause and continue to nickel and dime.
> The Bowman case has come about after the 75-year-old farmer bought soybeans from a grain elevator near his farm in Indiana and used them to plant a late-season second crop. He then used some of the resulting seeds to replant such crops in subsequent years.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
McDonald's Christmas gift offers to loyal customers
make -p

the main problem is that make itself doesn't support a concept of "hidden files". also a problem is that GNU make comes with lots of implicit rules, so you really need something like make -R -r -p for this to remotely work.
discussion a few months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828
Unfortunately 1password is the only one that doesn't give me headaches while using it cross-platform. I wish I could use an open alternative with an equal UX.
Why bite the hand that feeds you?

Why the struggle, why the strain?
Why make trouble, why make scenes?
Why go against the grain, why swim upstream?
It ain't, it ain't, it ain't no use
You're bound, you're bound, you're bound to lose
What's done, what's done, what's done is done
That's the way the river runs

So why get wet?
Why break a sweat?
Why waste your precious breath?
Why beat your handsome brow?
Nothing changes, nothing changes, nothing changes
Anyhow
Company management does not typically go out of its way to disseminate right-to-unionize speech. They are legally prevented from stifling such speech. And apparently, their alleged labor violations were serious enough that the NLRB mandated as part of their settlement that Google must post more material informing workers of their right to unionize [0].

But my overall point is not that I think her alteration was appropriate (given the context of the tool). But that her mistake could reasonably be seen as one made in good faith, especially because the content itself does not outright violate company policy or labor law. In other words: approved content, unapproved venue. The question is: that's a fireable offense?

So why do you keep likening it to hypotheticals that would reasonably violate standard policy and procedure, such as conspiring with your manager to spend $53K on a Mac Pro that you use at home? Or injecting via browser notification a "political_message_you_dont_agree_with"?

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/googles-settlement-on-speech...
SEC eyes oversight as investors pour cash into “socially responsible” funds
Chrome Remote Desktop.
Funny little anecdote: When I was at a hackathon, I was sending my team members, over WhatsApp the hosted ngrok link each time I accidentally closed the tunnel. The WApp microbrowser didn't store cookies and as such would get stuck in the redirect loop from the index (yeah, yeah, it was a hackathon). This would lead to my WhatsApp Web client crashing before the message was even sent. It would only happen when I sent my badly programmed auto-login URL, and no time else, so I'm quite confident it was aggressively failing when it didn't manage to get the information it needed and straight up crashed the web client.
Works for me in Italy
Yep. The price has risen every year since the acquisition with no new major features to speak of. I imagine it will rise even more under new management.

I'm perfectly willing to switch to Bitwarden, although I will miss the ability to securely share logins with my girlfriend's LP account.
I'm stunned by the number of people who think that reviewing a PR is just a matter of checking the code works and looks clean.

Does nobody ask what the code is for and why you're doing it? I mean, I don't expect people to require detailed specs before approving, but a quick "what's this code for, and why are you doing it?" before addressing the details.

Surely that's the bare minimum, isn't it?
Sorry I did not make it clear. What I meant the automation tool is something like Autohotkey. Let's say I made a private software XAuto (like Autohotkey) many many years ago with tons of efforts, and then I wrote a XAuto script (like an Autohotkey script) to automate my work. Do I have to give both of the XAuto script and the XAuto software to my employer?
Used this algorithm in a capstone for my Bachelor's. Had a blast tuning and tweaking it to work in my very raw OpenGL application.

May he rest in peace. I'm glad I've had the opportunity to peek inside his mind in some small way.
Well those industries are not comparable. One random example - our flexibility to change jobs in IT is almost unheard-of. We can literally spin the globe and go work almost anywhere. The only hurdles are immigration rules and possible language barrier. Most of Hollywood jobs would struggle in most places.

Another personal view - as somebody from Europe, I really don't feel any need for any unions. I am not trembling from fear that I will get fired. If I will, there will be good reasons (my poor performance or employer getting into financial troubles). For me, that's a good trade-off for extra pay and interesting work. When I was consulting, I had nano-fraction of current job security, but again it was offset by salary. Again, fair deal for me and for employer too.

Another reason - anytime I even remotely interfered with Union people in my previous jobs, they literally reeked of internal politic games, keeping their comfy jobs as safe as possible. You get this kind of folks in any company, even in my current one, although we don't have unions. They try different ways (ie managing pension fund or other 'political' positions that require little work but add friction to firing process). Needless to say they are never stellar performance workers.

This all obviously doesn't say anything about Google or generally SV culture, my experience is local to 3 European states only, and cca 6 companies.

We in IT are vastly overpaid compared to any other engineering degree holders. Not complaining, but its a fact. Just talk to other engineering folks. High salaries and positions can be achieved quickly, not over 30 years of gradual rise of staying within same company.

If/once market saturates and salaries go down significantly, there might be more need for unions. But most folks are not there I think.
To be reasonably fair Lets Encrypt makes it easy. I even have a $5 a year shared hosting account that gives me Lets Encrypt SSL certs through cpanel. I can't imagine this feature is unique only to this one random shared hosting provider.
Seeing intermittent issues in India as well.
Use Pass (https://www.passwordstore.org/) to generate and store passwords locally, GNU Privacy Guard (https://gnupg.org/) to encrypt them, and then use git (https://git-scm.com/) to backup and sync your encrypted passwords on all your devices in a distributed way.

Pass is an open source project by the guy who made WireGuard (https://www.wireguard.com/), and there are open source apps for iOS and Android too, which you can build yourself for maximum security.

Setting this all up is not exactly easy, but once you get it going it's very easy to use, secure, and convenient.