skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't a software developer, I was a machinist manufacturing things that can't easily be offshored or exported, so that wasn't so much a concern.

The disparity between unionized and non-unionized workers in that industry is pretty high. You've got unionized workers starting at $35/h and upwards beyond $50/hour, with included benefits. I've seen non-unionized jobs advertised for as low as $14/h to start with the cap being $25-maybe $30 if you're lucky, without the benefits. The unionized job will also typically be limited to 40h/week.

There was no limit on the amount of hours I would have to work. I would regularly be expected to work 50-60 hour weeks, if I got sick, I kept working, if I hurt myself, I kept working, the level of work would always be beyond what the number of staff employed were physically capable of doing.

The way I see it, a lot of people fought over the decades so workers could have a reasonable standard of living while not having to endure ridiculous conditions. Unions were at the fore in the fight for this.

Businesses have shown time and time again that they're willing to pay as little for as much labour as possible. When it comes down to it, while workers are replaceable to an extent, they are what brings a business profit and to most businesses, they're valued among the least worthwhile of its assets. Unions force businesses to care about employees and though, I know this isn't really a crowd who can relate, but if you don't own a business and you are employed by someone, then unions have your best interests in mind.

They're probably some of the very few entities in this world that do.
If web site caters to EU customers, just rent it from the EU datacenter, no need for a cloud. A Hetzner server costs $100/month, an equivalent amount of cloud resources will run you into thousands.
Much of the degradation comes from keeping the battery at full charge for long periods of time. Apple improves long-term battery life by lying about battery percentages and only charging once the battery gets below 90-95%. There's even a new option to only charge to 80%.

I get the same behavior in Linux with TLP.[1] I run "tlp setcharge 75 80" and my battery only charges to 80% (and only starts charging if it goes below 75%). If I think I might need power for a longer time, I can run "tlp fullcharge" and wait for it to fully charge.

TLP remembers these settings across reboots so I don't have to think about it.

1. https://linrunner.de/tlp/
There's a world of difference between releasing contributions under the same copyright (i.e. if you're contributing to a GPL'd project, release your code under the same GPL license) and assigning copyright to the FSF. I think that's the turn-off for many. It isn't a matter of 'what would you even do with' the contribution, it's a matter of recognition and making it much harder to change the licensing terms down the road.

For those who just want to bury their head in the sand and pretend copyright doesn't exist, they will be the first to complain when the code that they wrote is taken private and commercialized (i.e. look at the licenses this has been an issue for)... making code 'public domain' allows for that.
> corporate higher-ups making millions a year from ever-rising executive salaries

Yes, the vast majority of corporate executive wealth is delivered through stock compensation vs cash compensation. Executive compensation can be in the millions of dollars per year, but that's nearly always in stock options[1]. The marginal income tax rate variation between WW2 and Reagan would not have changed this.

Also, the scary wealth disparity numbers you see floating around are typically attributed to the growth in wealth of BILLIONAIRES (usually ultra paper rich founders). Put simply, the GDP has grown at historic rates over the last 40 years, and the gains from that have gone to the founder-class. Most non-founder executives aren't billionaires.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/02/05/465747726/-682...
There was an old fellow called Hugger,

Who was captain and mate of a fishing smack;

When a yacht crossed his bows,

He said: “My word!

It’s an awfully good thing it wasn’t a liner.”
Lib dems are always an insignificant bit-part.

They got 7.4% of the votes at the last election and 1.9% of the seats. Smaller parties like the green party do even worse.

By design.
I'm not sure there's enough of the MDL environment around to actually get it running. The effort is here: https://muddlers.org/
No Yeast at the Store? No Problem. It’s Everywhere in Your Home
Is there a point. The flaunt all laws and regulation so easily. We might just declare Amazon above law (both criminal and tax).
Whether intended or not, there's an undercurrent of "you're all so dumb for using Python" (or Ruby, or PHP, or other similarly performant language) here. I want to surface that and question it a bit.

It's totally reasonable for a company to choose the Python/Gunicorn option if they already have a bunch of people who know Python and they don't need to serve tons of requests per second.

Even if they do need to serve tons of requests per second, it's totally reasonable for them to still choose Python/Gunicorn if the cost of the additional servers is less than the cost of having to support multiple languages. Or if they get a lot of value from libraries that are unique to the Python ecosystem. Or if they care more about quickly iterating on features than driving down server costs.

I agree that there's a point where it stops making sense, and there are plenty of engineers who don't recognize when they're past that point because they keep doubling down on sunk costs and things they're familiar with. But let's not be too quick to assume people are in that camp when we don't know all the tradeoffs they're facing.
The posted article is hardly "data" (at most, one poorly defined data point) and most of the questions here are pointing to how little information the article offers from which to draw conclusions-- for instance, what does "sheltering in place" mean? Where were these people? When were they leaving their houses? etc.

What data are you referring to that suggest shelter in place orders could be having only a marginal effect?
That's kind of the point, though? A lot of people make fun of Ballmer for using that as a repetitive mantra, but a point often to a mantra, to repeating it to yourself and others, is to remind yourself it is a value you hold, and one that you maybe aren't great at, but should continue to strive towards/get better on. Current Microsoft likely wouldn't have gotten better at "developers, developers, developers" if Ballmer hadn't been shouting that to the rooftops as a core company value, and trying to drive the company to be better at it. The irony that Microsoft got much better at it in part by ignoring some of Ballmer's other past paranoia/NIH/"home-team-ism" probably wouldn't be lost on Ballmer himself either, it always seemed like he kept repeating the mantra as a reminder for himself too to not get caught up in what seemed best to shareholders or to Windows when that wasn't best for developers. He wasn't always successful, but holding a value/ideal doesn't make you perfect, it gives you a goal towards it.
why tho? In real life if you're in need of handling millions of users per second, I bet you're already part of FAANG, at which point you simply open offices in each country and deploy local servers.
> “Much of this comes down to what you do to protect yourself. Everything is closed down, government has done everything it could, society has done everything it could. Now it’s up to you,” Cuomo said.

"Personal responsibility" is a great cover for not taking the pandemic seriously in February.
Well, perhaps just a micron or two...
Because it’s based around facts, hence an honest heart, and benevolence, hence a good heart. If a person looks into the Resurrection and whether it happened, they will inevitably become a Bible believing Christian, and when they ask where the Bible came from and who has the right interpretation of it, they will become Catholic.
The use of "energy" when the author meant "power" is the point of confusion here. That's the unit/thing disagreement I'm referring to.
You’ve named and fed it. Now what to do with all that extra sourdough starter?
Canadian Provinces are more powerful than US States, because not only do they have jurisdiction on whatever isn't explicitly delegated to the Federal government, but there are many topics that the Federal government cannot ever touch. In practice, Canadian Provinces are much more powerful and have much more power than US States, because much of the funding that US states are reliant on comes from the Federal government, mainly because the US Federal government is allowed to do things that the states already do and thus to require the funding for it, which means that many state programs are in fact funded by the Federal government. This means that the Federal government, if it disagrees with a decision of a State, can cripple it by withdrawing funding. This is not the case for Canadian Provinces. Finally, in the US, there are (many) areas of dual authority, where both the Federal government and the State government has authority over an issue. This is very rare in Canada, where the Federal government only exerts dual authority in cases where either the Province fails to uphold a mandate (because Federal decisions, instead of being directly enforced, are often mandated then implemented by the Provinces, while this is much rarer in the US), or when it was originally an explicitly Federal prerogative that the Feds decided to share. Another huge difference is that US States have no authority on interstate matters such as commerce and travel, whereas Canadian provinces are allowed to tax goods from another province, or even to close borders between two provinces (although this is rarely used, it is a power exercised in times when it matters).

So essentially, de jure States and Provinces are more or less equal in autonomy, but in practice Provinces have much more sovereignty.

The economies of scale that make public healthcare work require you to either control the market or a significant portion of it in order to strong arm the suppliers, A few US states such as California might be able to, but the Federal government would very likely interfere.
honestly, with lsp-mode, it's pretty dang close to vscode, at least for the languages I care about. and the benefits of evil + a fully configurable editor are too much to pass up. a drop-in replacement for newcomers? no way. but if a powerful environment is valuable for you, like say if you spend a lot of time in an IDE and the shell, emacs's ability to integrate those things and a lot more is too good to pass up.
Any non-paywall links for this stuff?
How does Thinkpad compare to the trackpad of mac nowadays?

The only thing that makes me use mac is the trackpad and retina. I have 15" late 2015 mbp, so far the best mbp out there w/o the butterfly keyboard.

Im still considering to go back to thinkpad for my next laptop since i had t42p, t60 before.
Another anecdote:

I do some contracting work for a British company, and had some extremely unrealistic deadlines looming in late February.

For this reason, I was keenly watching their government's announcements at the time and was amazed as weeks went by and my country's restrictions got tighter and tighter while the UK didn't budge.

Now, in May, it's not exactly apples to apples but they're now the hardest hit (deaths-wise) in Europe, and my country has dropped down below 1000 active cases (and decreasing some 50/day).

You could probably substitute my country for almost any other early mover and the UK for almost any other late mover and arrive at the same result. Even across different pandemics.

"Moving", here, means locking down.

Given that, my personal biases lead me to think that lockdowns probably work. I have to acknowledge that there's a moderately high bar set for data which disproves this thesis, because it's just so damned intuitive.

This doesn't meet that bar.
Ruby on Rails: A May of WTFs
They could indeed bankroll it, but I don't know that they would have the bargaining power to make it cost-effective.
You can use keyboard for all of those things in VS Code, just by the way :)

(On the team)
Wow. Just wow, man.
Again this isn't a problem with hooks. You could easily connect a redux store and reducer to some component low in the hierarchy with it's own state. Or use a class based component with some state. A developer can introduce random state anywhere and it has nothing to do with hooks themselves. If you can't trust your team to make the right decisions about where to place state, then you need to provide more guidance.

I also disagree about the big re-write. Converting a hook's data/state to come from a prop instead is a very simple change.
> That assumes everything that is of consideration is already priced into compensation, which is not. Wasn’t it several years ago one of them had its workers a walkout against sexual harassment, forced arbitration, manager retaliation etc?

That doesn't mean it's not priced in. Companies with conditions like that still need to attract employees somehow. When they get a reputation like that they either have to fix it or provide more of something else to compensate for it. Markets don't require unions to function.

> They would be in for a nasty surprise as Europe is more unionized that US.

That's why they don't do it now. If there were more unions in the US, that's no longer a relative disadvantage for the company, which then is a problem for the US workers who just lost their advantage and thereby their jobs.

> That assumes software engineers are fungible, which is not as much as it appears (at least there is a high cost to “funge” them en masse). Going to your manager with a competitor’s job offer is not an uncommon way to get a raise or promotion.

Replacing software engineers isn't free. There is a transition cost. But the transition cost isn't infinite, and it acts as a hard cap on what the union could get out of the company. And from it you immediately have to extract all the overhead costs the company has to incur in dealing with the union to begin with. Which are often difficult to predict ahead of time, so companies may choose to cut their losses immediately rather than risk even higher costs later.
It takes about 5 minutes to obtain the API keys from the Android app to be able to build it. It was also a pretty well-documented process to get the Android app to build (unlike some Android "open source" projects that seem to be designed to be impossible to actually build!)

Open sourcing the app was actually planned all along - when Matt Hancock announced the app several weeks ago [1], he said it would be open sourced at the time.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/12/uk-app-to-t...
"it's a feature"
Just as your comment was aiming to narrowly point out a logical fallacy in the parent comment, I'm pointing out a flaw in your own: I disagree with your claim that investing in security practices is just theater, and that more concrete efforts in the same direction are irrelevant. The concrete efforts are Bayesian evidence that the newer investments are more than theater.
We are going in circles. Without knowing anything about the lineage of an element with this class it is not possible to say.

Conceptually an element with this class will have a width of 80% of its parent or 200px whichever is larger. Hypothetically a simple parent with a width of 400px would result in this element having a width of (0.8 X 400) 320px as 320px is larger than 200px

What do you think this does if not that?
> Even if they do need to serve tons of requests per second, it's totally reasonable for them to still choose Python/Gunicorn if the cost of the additional servers is less than the cost of having to support multiple languages.

How hard is it to get up to speed on any other tech stack? ASP.NET Core is extremely fast and the learning curve is close to none, for example.

If someone was able to wrap his head around backend development with Python I'm pretty sure they have the mental fortitude to onboard a tech stack that doesn't suffer from major performance problems.
Sure, but in practice the actual tax rate for the upper echelon of the world right now is much, much lower than that for common people or for the upper echelon back in WW2.
It is because of the license. GTK's license is LGPLv2.1 or later[0]. The important part is later, It means you can update it automatically to any later version, especially if the new license is not compatible with the previous version. Qt does not offer their software with a similar license.

[0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/tree/master#licensing-t...
Ctrl+F "Ubuntu" - No results.

Seems to be using parts of code from Ubuntu, but that doesn't mean it is Ubuntu.
Indeed. Why reinvent the wrench?

Ffmpeg is just awesome. Incredibly powerful with a huge community of people sharing tips on its use for a huge variety of use-cases.
While it's nice that macOS has this out-of-the-box, you can make all the key-bindings to their macOS equivelants using Karabiner-Elements. If it did go away, we'd be fine.
Nearly 20 million people. Sweden seemed to do okay with their health system, with half that.
> How about eliminating medical bankruptcy? A lot of Americans I know are underinsured (can't afford any more) and one serious medical event away from bankruptcy. The amounts I've heard it cost for just an ambulance ride are insane.

Yeah this is definitely a worthwhile policy solution. Universal catastrophic coverage would also be a pretty solid compromise, especially since that would essentially be "single payer" for financially ruinous treatments. Ambulance ride costs are indeed insane, and something that even municipal cities can (and should) operate for free just like fire departments.

> Or if that's too ambitious, how about just knowing that insurance isn't going to deny coverage just because I went to the wrong clinic/hospital? Nevermind that if I've been in an accident I'm not exactly going to be able to choose where I go.

Yup, also a great solution. I work at a claims processor and have processed claims myself — the current system is asinine. Simply ensuring that all providers charge the same rate to all patients, and for that charge to be transparent upfront can probably go a long way to improving the status quo.
cool, thanks! matte or glossy?
There is still the issue of software. Lots of programs that professionals use on a daily basis don't run on Linux and don't have good alternatives that do. Plus, macOS is much better designed and integrated (if that means anything to you), and generally more stable[0].

[0]: This seems to be less true every year, both because desktop Linux is becoming more stable over time, and because macOS seems to get buggier with every release. Still, as someone that uses both operating systems on a regular basis, my MacBook Pro is still marginally more stable than my Linux desktop machine on average.
Onça, Jaguar or Tiger, Do You Need One as a Pet?
Did the NHS have any good reasons why they weren't going to work with Google and Apple (who surely have more expertise for this)?

Why not work on a single open source iOS + Android app that is shared and used in all countries so we can get cross border tracing?

If governments are concerned about Google and Apple getting access to data, what's the argument against the above where each country uses their own servers to store tracing data?
Internet access on an old Casio calculator [video]
definitely. i agree with all of that. i have high hopes for remacs.
I wish somehow engineers could stop being told what to do. They should be saying what should happen.. right?
Ha Ha Ha. Your comment is just as biased in the opposite direction. There's not enough data in this article to show anything except the data itself. You certainly can't say anything about the shelter in place orders from this but there you go saying it anyway.

We're living in a hyper-partizan country right now and everything published about this virus is going to be taken by both parties as a way to support their case and attack the other. Until there's another civil war or the country decides to break into smaller nations this is only going to get worse.
I would like to see more partners too, but for me it was enough to get started. I'm not particularly worried about the NYT or the WSJ having enough money. It's the smaller sites that I'm aiming to support by using Scroll.
But why would you get into unpleasant endeavors if they are not gratifying and you already have everything you need to live a basic life? This is ideology.
Duo is great, very underappreciated in the US. The video call quality in intermittent networks seems hands down the best for me (we use at work when slack or zoom have issues).
The least populous state in the US (Wyoming) has more people than Iceland, which is more than able to exert bargaining power in a cost-effective way.
They did some demos of improved github mobule support for phone based reviews in the Github satellite stream.
> The average scientist’s acquaintance with philosophy tends to be of the passing variety. This is a great pity.

This is not a "deep pity" but proof that modern society has progressed beyond the sophistry of the humanities.
The tool most prominently featured in this article, coworker.org, launched in 2013.

One thing labor has plenty of is apps. It makes things more efficient for us, but what's needed more than anything to organize is workers willing to take risks and stand together.
Oh, wow, I vaguely remember running across eDonkey at one point. I don't think I ever realized it could handle that kind of load. I was in a position to mostly stick with Apache for various non technical reason basically for long enough that eventually Apache got to the point that it could handle the traffic I needed to deal with especially with a CDN in front of it.
This is a great concept! I'm not surprised to see you getting flak for building on Airtable, but as a "real developer" leaning heavily on low/no code lately I wanted to share how well it's worked for our open source team over the last few months.

In terms of scale, it has supported dozens of editors, hundreds of public submissions, and several thousand rows of data. We have also successfully scripted a number of use cases using the API for workflows that can be automated.

The biggest benefits from my perspective are:

1. Minimal overhead for schema changes. We have been able to overhaul our schema on more than one occasion with no intervention from developers up front. We let the content team shape the data in a way that makes sense then update our client code to fit

2. The UI is obvious to technical and non-technical users alike. Who doesn't know how to use a spreadsheet?

3. No-code workflows are trivial to prototype and launch with blocks and forms.

Is it going to work forever? No, we're already moving the more stable+dynamic tables into a SQL database. But I'm sure that we've saved dozens if not hundreds of hours of time in our frequent iterations these first few months. I'm sure we'll keep using Airtable for new features.

[0]: https://climatescape.org/
[1]: https://github.com/climatescape/climatescape.org
Sadly there is only a glossy option for the 4k panel.
I live near a wind-farm and I think they are ugly. Rolling hills spiked with giant windmills instead of natural rolling hills. A true shame. I'm not opposed to to renewable energy and I doubt all the impending down-voters have installed two solar systems on two different houses, as I have.
> He wasn't personally the target by any of the orders that the people he was wronged by

I study WW2, especially the Pacific.

Trust me, that war was taken very personally, especially by infantry.

(The next time you watch a documentary on Saipan or Tarawa, note the American rifles are pointed at the ground, since the enemy was coming up through cave networks behind lines. Talk about close quarters fighting!)