skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Instead of telling people "hey go drive around endlessly in SF, hours from where you live. Also, you get no benefits" we can choose to bolster those local economies or we can choose to force companies to provide benefits. Either one of those options will make their lives better. We have chosen the latter

Well, no. Prop 22 would force companies to provide benefits, and the rideshare companies themselves are behind it. What was actually chosen was to just put drivers out of work altogether until November at the earliest, because the government deemed that the current compromise was not good enough.
Rideshares have their own cost and reliability problems for riders.

No one is saying taxi services are fine as-is, in addition to rideshare ride being artificially cheap thanks to VC money subsidizing costs, they did offer real user experience improvements. But the rideshare services have also shirked a lot of duties and created new externalized costs for others to bear.
> also concealed it from many other Uber employees, including top management — with one exception. According to the complaint, Uber's CEO at the time, Travis Kalanick.

So, COO kept in the dark. Is "Need-to-Know basis only" standard corporate cover-up practice?
I wouldn't expect Assange going voluntarily to Swedden. I can be wrong, of course
> One thing fairly unusual (if not unique) about software is that the designing and the building generally happen "simultaneously", or in tandem, or in very tight iterations. We design software as we build it, and we build it as we design it.

I actually had something about that but cut it for some reason.

I'd like to point out that while the manifesto is about software, a lot of the ideas (beyond the manifesto itself and influencing the manifesto) come from other disciplines. Mary and Tom Poppendieck, for example, are major proponents of Lean Software Development, whose ideas are a translation from the world of physical manufacturing. Many of the DevOps ideas (not necessarily how it's played out) come from Eli Goldratt and his Theory of Constraints.

An interesting thing about both Lean and ToC is that neither is terribly prescriptive. They're actually generalized concepts that can apply to almost any kind of system and (mostly) lack prescriptive text saying, "Thou shalt do...". Compare that to much of the Big-A Agile movement which is inflexible, ironically, and often very prescriptive. Perhaps not down to the specific tool that should be used, but often to the specific methods that should be used (Scrum: Thou shalt have 1-4 weeks Sprints; Thou shalt have time boxed meetings of this nature; SAFe: Thou shalt have a massive meeting every 6 months in the format we describe in this chapter).

Ok, that's a bit unfair to Scrum, it's actually more flexible than that. But I'll happily burn my books on SAFe (picked up for a previous job).

Many of the other ideas for Agile are born out of Systems Engineering which had already dealt with Waterfall. You had the V model (an improvement, but still many of the flaws if taken too literally, over Waterfall) which makes V&V run concurrent to design and development and encourages feedback loops. In many ways this is akin to TDD. Incremental and iterative development processes, which are fundamentally no different from Scrum except Scrum pushes you to much shorter times and has a stricter structure. Evolutionary development which is really close to what many, if not most, agile proponents endorse (MVP, then add on features and modify the base as needed). None of that came from software (specifically), it came from developing physical and (in their parlance) cyber-physical systems.
I hope they keep the building or make it an option. This is the sort of creativity that seems to only happen by accident. It makes the game better for some people, they enjoy the fun backstory and challenge of navigating around and landing on it.
> AB5 was written to impose a 20th century employment model to a 21st century situation.

Why should employees give up rights just because it's the 21st century? Make no mistake, that's Uber/Lyft's entire advantage over traditional taxis: skirting hard-won employment regulation to lower costs at the expense of workers.
Recognize that more reasonable solutions exist, for example,
modifying AB5 exempting anyone pulling in >$50K ($25/hour for any hour available or logging into the app).

Propositions, being like an unchangeable binary library, are 'take-it-or-leave-it' laws.
From the affadavit:

Records further indicate Uber’s management team, with the sole exception of Uber’s C.E.O. at the time, had no contemporaneous knowledge of the details of the data breach and had no role in the decision to treat the breach under the Bug Bounty program.

Does this suggest that Travis might be guilty as well?
https://github.com/Mayank0255/Resume-Bot
> ...Uber drivers reported earning $13.47 per hour, which means that on average, drivers report that their car is costing them over $6 per hour to operate.

If you were to drive full time, that would get you about 27k/year, which is about the average income that a taxi driver makes. Rideshare companies are asking you to take more personal financial risk than you might as a taxi driver, but giving you more flexibility.

Still 27k/year is not much money really anywhere in the country. I think this is a symptom of some major underlying problems with our economy rather than an indictment of the rideshare industry. If we can't afford to pay drivers a living wage to do their work, then the people who are using these services aren't as well off as they think they are.
Hey. It's really neat. Would you be willing to share any insight you have?

I don't know much about PeerTube. I assume your server is along the lines of an anchor / primary peer that guarantees there's always 1 seed. Is that right? If so, is there a way to turn off the peer-to-peer capabilities and to use it like a more traditional video hosting platform?

> It makes more sense for someone just starting out to host their own content, than a creator who is entrenched in the YouTube world.

I've thought about that concept for (literally) at least 2 years and I've always wanted to build a how-to website that helps creators do what they can to mitigate the risks of being de-platformed, etc.. Have you thought at all about ways to use YouTube to externalize costs initially, but with a plan to eventually migrate premium users to a platform where you'd get a better business relationship? I think Linus Tech Tips has the right idea with FloatPlane where they cater to creators that are already popular and help them syphon those creators' premium users away from YouTube.

Do you think there's any way a completely new creator could start out with extremely low ongoing costs? ~€60 a month is too expensive for high school kids and I think that's about the only age where you'd (possibly) have a chance to start capturing the market in terms of mindshare. Even by then, it might be too late. A lot of really young kids have YouTube channels and are already captured by Google. By the time they're in high school they've already got a half decade of "investment" into YouTube.

Any thoughts on that?
Some person with a legitimate concern about how this effected their disabled sister is not "hilarious".
that doesn’t read “needs to be dismantled” at all
That's really missing the point. Recommendation engines are a lot more dumb than you are thinking. They don't understand the content at all. They only know that thousands of users that watched the same videos as you in the past also watched this other new video, so you might like it as well.

A recommendation engine that works solely based on your own watch history would require a totally different approach using algorithms that are years/decades/forever away from existing.
How did that go before Uber showed up?
Taxi drivers pay the company for a shift upfront and absorb the risk on not getting enough rides to break even. And they are independent contractors without benefits.

So yeah, what parent was talking about doesn't exist.
Greg Egan's earlier book Permutation City is a pretty interesting exploration of this concept in fiction.
True Story: Before Uber and Lyft, a nice guy, who worked at a company in my building in SF, got so desperate to hail a cab he stepped off the curb to attract the cab's attention, and got killed by a Muni bus.
> people set their own hours. they are contractors not employees

Millions of employees in the US have flexible schedules and work part-time.
So while this dispute is ongoing, Revlon has an extra 175M of someone else's money that could be brought into play during their bankruptcy- so they actually have an incentive to declare early?
While yes the SE is 100% deterministic, no outcome of an experiment is predetermined beyond giving probabilities. That's part of the mystery, where to insert the probability. Is it subjective or objective?
HAHAHA. OMG - as one who doesn't drive, and took taxis in the Bay area (South Bay - Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Redwood City) for 7 years (2003 - 2010) - pretty much everywhere - let me tell you that taxis on the Peninsula are the most poorly managed, poorly responsive, and incredibly bad service imaginable. Fully 30-40% of taxis just never show up when you call them. That number gets even higher after 9:00 PM if you are down near Fremont. . Taxis took an absolute minimum of 30 minutes to arrive - I never understood how that was possible given they worked on a zone reservation system, and I presumed you would check into the zone you were geographically present in. The drivers were, as a class - horrible. They wouldn't last a month on Uber - neither their vehicles, nor the drivers themselves - they'd be rated out immediately.

I think the mistake that Uber and Lyft are making here is just not charging market rates that will let their drivers make a good living. If it turns out that costs 50% more than a taxi - fine. People then have a choice of Public Transit, Taxis, or Uber/Lyft. Their race to the bottom and attempt to price each other out of the market is what led us here.

Where they erred originally is trying to build a business model that didn't provide a good living to their key employees - and lets face it, Uber/Lyft drivers are employees.
It's not editorialized. "Those 5 stocks are up 37% on average while the S&P 500 is up 2%, and the remaining 495 stocks are down 5%."

5/500 = 1%.
All 'democracy' is bad. People should just decide for themselves and not for others and not enforce their opinions ("laws") on others using government force.
Most taxi's are 1099 as well... Almost 100% outside of the major cities. So no. This is going to backfire hard on the legislature. They should have done their jobs and created a new class. But nope. They went for the headlines.
Arn, a library for working with AWS ARNs
While cocaine is illegal and most voters still think it should be illegal, no voters think that calling a cab with an app should be illegal (at least provided the driver is compensated fairly).
Of course the statement I'm going to say aligns with my politics, but it's unfortunate how often government intervention ends up being net negative compared to complete inaction.
Tree is a more natural data structure for s-expressions.
4chan bans screencaps from Netflix film “Cuties”
>I decided that reading anything from other times and cultures is just too regressive to be worth it. . . What can [they] tell us about human nature

Are you serious? You don't think there is any insight into human nature in the works of anyone, ever, except the exact values of the culture you happen to live in at this particular point in time?

Edit: ugh, I had to go look at your other comments to tell if this was sarcasm. It seems it was, and satire and reality have converged too much for me to differentiate.
I want to start by saying that I generally agree with everything you’ve said.

I think this tendency to conflate the most extreme faction with the whole is a new, modern problem. People have always done this to some degree, the extremism of modern media (and social media) allow for regular exposure to fringe views that would otherwise be invisible to most people. And, the effect is twofold: 1) people tend to conflate the worst part of a faction with the whole faction, and 2) having witnessed the same phenomenon on the other side, people are more ready to either ignore or integrate extremism from their own side. It is also likely that this extremism of their own side is easily ignored because they know from personal experience that it’s not representative.

I think we’re living in an age where radicalism is mainstream.
Stocks are a bad estimator of the current economy, they’re a good estimator for the general expectations for the future economy.
It is a lot of unfair. So gig workers need to be taken advantage of so the parent commenter’s sister can have a more convenient mode of transportation? Why should they bear the burden of a city that doesn’t provide people with disabilities appropriate options?
Why not let the market decide? If drivers are so unhappy why not just seek some alternative form of work? Uber/Lyft do not force anyone to hop online.
A taxi could simply turn its light off.
I believe the parent implication is that he aligns with CF's way of doing business in regards to disclosure of security issues.
This argument that local laws can't be followed because "what would other jurisdictions do" doesn't seem to apply to authoritarian places like China who impose pretty onerous requirements for operation (like state ownership).

There is another option for Uber/Lyft - to let drivers set their prices and/or routes. Of course, that would make them less of a unicorn and more of a utility and that would crater their valuation.
Note that you will only have 1g of polonium, but dispersed in 1T of lead, which is less toxic, but not really environmentally friendly.
One would have expected a narrative published in the last decade could have featured a more felicitously named phlebotinum.
Same here, but maybe the goal of his side project is to learn and not ship a product.

In any case, you're not wrong, but I assume most people writing a game in C as opposed to leveraging a tool like Unity are more interested in diving in and learning something new rather than shiping something.
The title is different from the title on the article, so it is editorialized.
"I guess they're not happy [1] but want to be independent contractors still [2]."

Any normal employee or freelancer is not happy, but still goes to the job because there are bills to pay. It is normal to want things to be always better but low skill jobs are not going to be goldmines no matter what the regulation says.
We don't support democracy because it always produces the "right' answer, we support it because the alternative is authoritarian rule and violence.

Far better to have the consent of the governed, even when imperfect.
It's not a pivot. I literally mentioned double dipping in my parent comment. At any rate, unless you are a salaried worker, you have to have a schedule so that minimum wage can be computed.
This is why healthcare benefits shouldn't be tied with employment. IMO, that's the biggest thing contractors are missing out on by not being traditional employees. It's not like being an employee in the US gives you much more legal protection than being a contractor due to "at-will" employment laws. Universal healthcare decouples this critical service from employment, making _everyone_ more able to work flexibly.
It was the City of Austin that scared off Uber and Lyft for a time not the state. Lots of West coasters came to Austin and brought their political problems with them. The City of Austin is CA lite basically.
yeah the proposal from the original comment also seems more designed to “teach” the billionaire by making him sit next to a disabled person instead of helping the wheelchair bound person. all out of some sort of sense of justice
>"Either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!)"

There are plenty of commercial banks that have underwritten loans for taxi medallions and built up a significant portfolio Just in NY for example - North Fork Bank, Capital One, Provident and Signature Bank, See:

https://www.autofinancenews.net/allposts/finance/loss-mitiga...

https://nyrej.com/print/18823

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200117005338/en/Sig...
Agile is the wrong model for building something that must fly or you die. The opposite of much of the software we build where a quick prototype in front of real users gives you far better information than any amount of internal brainstorming.
> So its disingenuous to characterize the state as obstructing progress when its clearly done the opposite.

If by progress you mean increase poverty then we agree. Otherwise I didn’t talk about “progress” one way or another.

> If Texas was even moderately liberal/centrist and enacted commonsense policies (Medicaid expansion, State taxes to fund healthcare education etc) it would do a LOT better.

Maybe. Or maybe Texas would do worse and their poverty rate would grow to match California!

California is able to pass all kinds of bills and spend all kinds of money because it is a very very wealthy state. Did California policies directly cause that wealth or is Hollywood + Silicon Valley a matter of luck? Or perhaps out of California’s thousands of policies only a couple (such as non-compete) had a significant influence on their economic bounty.
Probably because you're not commenting as much on this thread.
Aila Solar Powered Boat
I think even the Deb + Ian naming is still a fairly unknown piece of knowledge.
That depends on how many horrible ideas make their way from phone to desktop.
Hadn't heard about R-Lipoic Acid until now. I couldn't find much as far as clinical studies. I read the WebMD page[0] but if you have any better sources please share!

[0] https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-767/alpha-l...
So basically "if you are poor you can't use Uber/Lyft you would exploit yourself out of desperation. Go find a different job that pays a living wage/benefits. If you are middle class and already making enough to live on, that's cool you can use Uber/Lyft to supplement your income since you won't abuse yourself trying to make the platform sustain you."
If you're into this sort of thing, we write about nerdery like this every week in The Orbital Index :)
Upwork sent around a "Don't worry about AB5" email but I'm not taking chances. Just ended everything with Cali contractors.
Sounds like you're not describing what most people would imagine when they hear "shaming a person". You're aiming for some dark-arts psychological jujitsu.

Even if possible, even if maneuvers like this might work on some people, it is likely harder to pull off something like this consistently (thus creating damage along the way), than to just be up-front-and-honest about the good.

People in general want to come to their own conclusions, and not be told what to do. Telling them "do this" can back fire. Having a discussion, where you inquire about their point of view, and structure a conversation as a collaborative exploration, I think, is better.

Peter Singer's drowning child example is a brilliant argument, and I think one everyone ought to hear about. But I'm unsure if "shame" is what it evokes. It raises an incongruity that people then have to reconcile. And if you're kind and encouraging, providing opportunities for them to become better people (by their own light), they will more-likely do it. If they are shamed, they might end up doing mental gymnastics to conclude that "any argument that makes good people I see around me into bad people is a mistaken argument".

I'm happy to discuss this more. As you can guess it's one of my favorite topics.
If you take a look at surveys on the subject, nobody likes buses, and everyone loves the idea of trains, though they have more mixed feelings on the implementations. Buses are generally viewed as transportation for the poor and the young; I don't see how we can change that.

I think the 'solution' is to replace buses with smaller and more efficient urban mobility solutions; buses are not that efficient (as they spend most of their time driving around almost empty), so this is the lowest-hanging fruit anyway. If I knew how to create these solutions, I would be working on them right now, but I think some combination(s) of car-sharing, high efficiency vehicles, self-driving technologies, and electric bicycles will eventually replace buses.
"Egypt was the place that Alexander the Great went

He was so shocked at the mountains with black faces

Shot up they nose to impose..."

Is that a reference to the Great Sphinx of Giza?

If so... it doesn't appear that Alexander the Great had anything to do with it.

Am I missing something?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza#Missing_n...

Edit: attempting to format the quote
Yeah, there are many reasons that people like driving for Uber and/or Lyft, and it's very closed-minded to say that the market can't exist if it doesn't fully and completely replace a "real job" for all of its drivers, up to and including full-time employment with attached benefit packages.

I've had friends who've done it just because they enjoy meeting people who are coming into town and hearing their stories, telling them about the area, etc. Many of the rides I've taken, upon talking to the driver, they'll say they do it because it gets them out of the house and they can work whenever they want. Very few of the people were trying to use it to replace a conventional employment situation.

We should all be grateful that the state is rescuing all of these people from the exploitative habits of these unprofitable companies, I guess.
This is the time to release the open source version of these services that let individuals set their own rate and communicate with openness.

Wasn’t this a proposed example application of ethereum?
Uber, Lyft granted emergency stay in California
Why don't disgruntled app developers just pull their apps from the app stores? Everyone is using custom launchers on Android these days anyway, lets show big tec how much customers want to use custom launchers.
Governments spying on their people has been happening for decades and there is little evidence of any significant benefit for society, while the potential for abuse is obviously huge.

By comparison wearing masks to slow down infection rates of viruses/diseases that spread via nose/mouth secretions has centuries of evidence backing it up and the government doesn't really gain anything by enforcing the use of masks in places like supermarkets. Maybe it can artificially increase demand to benefit some mask manufacturers but that's it.

Do you still think it's hypocrisy?
Freelance writers, both bloggers as well as longform investigative journalists.
I'm not trying to prove anything, just exploring. Anyways, I'm talking about the result. I also don't know enough about CA employe law to make any claims, which I don't think I did.
Python Projects for Beginners
I missed Webpack 5 — going to look at it over the weekend! What are the headline updates?
Sounds like horrible monopolistic practices, they should open it up
The earlier thread, before this new information came up, is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24224882 and still ongoing.
> They include no James Tiptree Jr (a woman […]

Also a marmalade brand. She borrowed her pen name from a jar of Tiptree's Jam. :)

Agreed on the missing women (Le Guin is there though). I've recently started with Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, and haven't regretted it.
Former Chief Security Officer for Uber Charged with Obstruction of Justice
Underpaid day laborers could walk off the job site any time they wanted to and go to another site the next day...
Not obvious, but entirely plausible. I'd be curious to see what a more sustainable pricing would look like on the consumer's end.
Useful Fortinet Ha Commands