skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think another big benefit of Rust for systems is that you can explicitly mark functions/traits as unsafe if they require some preconditions to work correctly or if the trait must guarantee something that can't be checked by the compiler. That's a big benefit over C++ where the best you can do is documentation since the warnings in the documentation don't appear at the call site unlike how using an unsafe API requires an unsafe block/another unsafe function.
Similar to floatrock's proposol [1] of turning reviews upside down... Imagine being able to track broken-ness (when, how, why) in the field across all products of the same model. And doing so for each product you own. "Default reviews" [2] is one way to do it. Pull requests welcome.

1 upside down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24710832

2 default reviews - https://gist.github.com/iL3D/59df64947d42828d848ebfc1651a312...
a) for that kind of money, and lack of features, it better go fast (cornering, meh, not so much).

b) You are commenting on an article that talks about a Tesla loosing its roof. That's a new one on me, and I'd thought I'd seen it all back when I was an auto mechanic.
I never tried Metaplace but it reminded me of The Palace which I did spent many hours of my youth on. It would be interesting to see if these 2d chats have work-place benefits over the current Slack/IRC experiences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)
> A union is just an organization which represents the interests of workers.

A union isn't just that, though is it?

It's also a beast in its own right, with its own politics and power struggles and debates and meetings and people taking a paycheck from your union dues.

A union doesn't even necessarily act in your interests. It acts in the interests of the majority of members, who may be out to actively harm your interests. And versus its own survival a union is never going to put your interests first. Why would it?

> If we don't want BS work rules, we don't have to have them.

Right but what if your colleagues what these BS work rules? What if you're junior and they want pay by seniority?
There is a trade off. Encryption everywhere protects the clients from the network. That's great for most usage but it's a negative if it's your local network and you want to have more control over clients using it.

Right now it's possible to selectively block client activity on your network (your smart TV snooping or showing ads) but that's going to get much harder in the future. You'll have to chose all or none when it comes to clients.
You don't need to know the exact odds to understand that it's higher. I think that's the main takeaway of making it a 1,000 door problem. It makes it intuitive that the correct solution is to switch. The exact probability doesn't matter.
It's the ideal of maximum personal freedom.

Anything that infringes upon personal freedom in any way is seen as a negative.

This is not a tech ideal so much as a capable person's ideal, because capable people are by definition surrounded by people less capable than they are and often dream of nothing more than to rise above them, through merit and hard work.

Merit and hard work gets you places in tech, hence anyone remotely capable is mostly satisfied with the status quo.
Thanks. Even though I'm on the left, I appreciate David's conservative writing and his policy solutions to prevent another Trump. I'm a little confused about the downvotes, but it seems you've been through worse.
I think it's pretty clear that Spotify employees protesting Joe Rogan over trans issues is just typical, bourgeousie tartuffery.

They're making more than most people on the planet, profiting egregiously off of artists. Notice how they don't loudly protest that, or say, renounce their jobs/focus on something less evil.

They just make a stink about someone talking freely, which happens to offend their bourgeousie, liberal sensibilities.

It's incredibly self-centered and authoritarian.
> I would rather see more laws universally protecting intellectual workers like e.g. non-enforcability of non-compete clauses and alikes.

How exactly do you see something like this coming to fruition without labor organization? There’s no way federal law like this happens without some sort of coordinated effort to compel congress to pass such a law.
> Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0

I'm sorry but that is not true at all.
How would a tech union help in that case?
'No Code' Platform Unqork Secures $207M in Series C Funding
If you just want to see the plane, and not have an epileptic episode, then don't watch "the best part" video, watch the "XB-1 up close" clip from further down the page instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bRx2dpooCQ&feature=youtu.be
I guess that depends on how you define "space"
Yeah. And the SAG rules aren't unreasonable IMO. But a union is not replacing the existing rules of your workplace, it's a second group of people who can add rules.
Is there any evidence airlines would pay for this? Pre-covid, the dominant trend over decades has been for cheaper, cheaper, cheaper flights.

Hardly anyone pays for first class, but will they pay three to four times as much to arrive a few hours earlier?
> tech workers are paid well and we get to sit in comfortable chairs in air-conditioned offices all day long

One should definitely be thankful for the blessings and privileges one gets, but painting it in those terms overlooks that tech workers still have a lot of grievances. Maybe they're not as important as ones experienced by workers in other industries, but they're still valid. After all, we see articles on burnout and psychological stresses on HN every week.

> If management is not trying to fleece workers, why add the process of a union?

In addition to the general improving labor conditions issues that get brought up, I think unions could be interesting experiment in tech. The tech industry portrays itself as cutting-edge, progressive (not necessarily politically, but as a cultural outlook), empowering. Yet I've definitely seen situations where there was just constant alienation between employees and management over the latter's business decisions and product prioritizations. In those cases, what leverage can workers hold over management, besides just leave?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535292
Those are indeed fascinating, but what could be more interesting than the relation between consciousness and the Universe? Maybe you're preference is for the more solid ground of confirmed science, which is understandable, maybe you didn't have the patience to follow his thinking, which is ok too, but why go the extra step and caricature his arguments like this?
> If the Supreme Court does not find in favor of Oracle, it could undermine the basis for copyright law entirely.

If the Supreme Court does not find in favor of Google, it most likely will do so by finding that the trial jury acted reasonably (not necessarily correctly -- because the litigants have a Constitutional right to a jury trial, judges or appellate courts aren't Constitutionally, or under the Rules of Civil Procedure, supposed to substitute their judgement of correctness as long as a jury could reasonably conclude as it did from the evidence) that Google's use was Fair Use, and that the CAFC was wrong to negate the jury verdict and act as the jury itself.

Now, sure, the Court could reach Google's copyrightability argument on APIs, but its a stretch to assume it would.

And even if it did, ruling that APIs are functional elements not subject to copyright for that reason would not "undermine the basis of copyright law entirely". It might weaken the basis for copyright applied to computer programs entirely, but that's a very different thing.

> if the unique expression of those Java APIs are not protectable by copyright

In order for use to be "fair use", the thing used must, in fact, be protectable by copyright.
Your music argument is plausible, but the journalism one doesn't hold water: if there were no copyright, it would only take one paywall subscriber to copy the contents to a paywall-free site (e.g. wsj.com -> freewsjarticles.com), and poof: journalists aren't making money anymore.
> Why is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive?

All human achievement is fundamentally agonistic.

The really bewildering thing is how so many people who clawed their way to the top apparently forgot about the competition it took to get there.
This is a step forward. I've been pushing for more language safety for what, decades, and it's good to see Stanford teaching it. It's important that students understand ownership concepts, because they exist in C, but the language doesn't give you any help in dealing with ownership. For years, I've been saying about C that the big questions are "how big is it?", "who deletes it?", and "who locks it?". Rust addresses all of those. So teaching Rust is useful to get students thinking in the right direction. Even if they get stuck maintaining old C code.

Looking ahead, new students are going to have to deal in future with huge numbers of CPU cores. So they need to deal with large numbers of threads. That's very hard to do well. This class addresses not just safety, but performance. That's good.

This is so far ahead of what I got from Stanford in 1985.

(I have some arguments with the Rust people, mostly around over-use of "unsafe" and too much language churn, but they're doing great work.)
I've played this game before, but it ends up being really difficult to estimate the cost of a bug. E.g. what's the cost of not upgrading <libraryX> from v1.2.0 to v1.5.0? Or a theoretical security bug that you think is going to be quite hard to hit, but would be ruinous if it was exploited? Is that bug 0.001% or 0.01% likely to be triggered?

In practice it's impossible to get accurate ROI estimates for large chunks of the work you do. So being honest about that and using an approximation often doesn't cost you any appreciable accuracy -- and you will definitely spend less time trying to figure out how to precisely cost your bugs.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of using ROI as a lens for prioritizing bugs, I've just never seen anyone make a credible estimate that's more accurate than the nearest order-of-magnitude.

I'm sure this is much easier the bigger you get; Google can estimate how many clicks are lost due to a bug, and clicks are of known value, so you can make a case for this bug being worth $Xm. But for startups I think this is unfeasible because you're working with such small sample sizes.
Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.

Yet doctors and lawyers and pilots have strong unions in all but name. What do you suppose they know that we don’t?

Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.

I’m sorry but this is just naive. Preferred stock and dilution make shares owned by rank-and-file employees nothing more than a rounding error these days. It was different back in the 90s when all the myths around stock options were formed but those days are long gone.
probability of winning if you switch is 1 - (1 / n) aka (n-1)/n.

probability of winning if you don't is 1 / n.

By switching, you are simply betting that your original guess of 1/n was wrong.
Yes it's different. Another part of Benchmarklandia is where researchers make custom algorithms for the same dataset. Benchmarks targeting MNIST is a great example. :)
Social changes probably, you just don't have the time.

At 30 I took a year off, went to school to learn a new language which I never had any contact with. After one year I started to work in tech again only communicating using the language I started learning a year ago.

After 2-3 years I had no communication issues at all anymore, working with dozens of people.

The article focuses on native grammar skill and that is a problem I have. Every language has grammar (and vocabulary) which is rarely used. I struggle with some of the rarely used but more advanced grammar. I know that I could master it if I studied for 3-6 more months full time but I just don't see the benefit of investing that time. My time is better spent working.

I have been thinking about doing it all over again for a while now. Mandarin should be an interesting challenge.
> If they can't, see, that's what union can do (at least try to negotiate) for you.

But we already have democratically elected representatives that can also do this for us. For instance in California, non-competes are already basically not enforceable thanks to legislative action.

As another example, see the lawsuits a few years ago that were ruled in favor of workers for wage fixing at Google and Apple.

The structures are already in place give these sorts of reasonable protections, why add another bureaucratic, big, slow, expensive, greedy organization into the mix when we can use the processes we already have? (If the argument is that government is not responsive enough, that's a problem for many other reasons too, let's fix it).
I think because without Reddit every result is an affiliate blog trying to sell the product. Reddit feels like the reviews come from real people.
But "making it compatible with the JVM" would involve implementing the Java standard library, right? Recognizing terms like "java.lang.String" or "java.lang.Math.max" and doing the right thing? To do that, aren't you creating a copy of the Java API?
I’m not sure I understand the point. This is to somehow make developers want to fix bugs, rather than build features, right? It seems like an odd way to go about it, but kudos to them if they’re all enjoying it.

The problem will come when some bright spark decides this should be linked to compensation, and then the metric will be gamed to death and become a rope to hang people with
The lead architect of the PS5 said that NVMe drives will need to be a bit faster than the built-in SSD to make up for the fact that they don't have the optimizations that Sony has for the built-in controller. Essentially only the highest performance PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives will be fast enough for the PS5.
But what's the upside of specifically using the format of a Bitcoin transaction here, as opposed to (for example) using a signed HTTP message (a la https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-message-...)?

Addressing the points in your link:

> 1. Decentralized Authentication

First: Bitcoin wallet addresses are temporary keys, not identities. "Authenticating" against one isn't really appropriate, no more than it'd make sense to authenticate a user as the owner of a specific dollar bill.

Second: even if you wanted that, there's no reason you should need to encapsulate HTTP in a weird wrapper to accommodate it. A variety of schemes already exist for signing HTTP requests within the bounds of HTTP. Most of them even support ECDSA signatures.

> 2. Monetize through Bitcoin payment

Signing a message which isn't a valid Bitcoin transaction with a wallet private key doesn't turn that message into a transaction. Conversely, there's no way to make a Bitcoin transaction conditional on the completion of an off-chain operation.

> 3. Programmable HTTP requests

Do you have any examples of what a realistic use case for this would be? Keep in mind that the signed nature of a request doesn't guarantee that the request is processed in the requested manner.

> 4. Data portability

First: as noted previously, there are already plenty of non-proprietary schemes for signing HTTP requests.

Second: this entire point presumes that making HTTP requests publicly logged and visible is a benefit, which doesn't make any sense.
Yep, because we've built an economy based on idiotic fiduciary duty instead of duty to technologically advance the civilization.

Myopic focus is exactly what the system rewards.
So are tech workers treated better at kick starter than they are at, say, google or amazon, or even treated better than they were at Kickstarter pre-union? The only thing in the article I could really find was:

> Employees who are still with the company say that because of the union, management has been more receptive to worker grievances, especially now during the pandemic. Employees were able to ensure that staff who got laid off received severance packages and are currently in the process of hammering out a collective bargaining agreement.

But it isn't clear to me that employees who were laid off wouldn't receive severance packages if it wasn't for the union.
Surely they'd ordered the convertible option
Most of the subtlety of the problem lies in this small sentence in the Side Notes:
"He deliberately chooses to show you goats."

This is not made as explicit in the standard formulation
"the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat."

Which could be read as "which happens to have a goat".

It's the ambiguity in Monte's door opening strategy that leads to different answers.
I see what you're getting at, but you're missing that not everyone can be a specialist at libinput development, someone might spend his day developing software for 3D rendering, someone else is a data scientist, a third one designs websites. It makes more sense that each one spends his time doing what he does well instead of spending 4 hours figuring out how to modify libinput.
I think you’re still missing the point. “H1B friendly” or no, the same number of H1B visas are going to be awarded. The application pool is massively oversaturated. A bunch of large and high-paying companies have been lobbying for this change because it will increase the odds that they can bring in their own hires at the expense of hires by low-wage companies. This is going to shift the distribution of H1B workers from a mix of high and low wages to just high wages, but it’s a 1:1 replacement of low-wage workers with high-wage workers. Each slot that might have once gone to an Infosys employee who is now going to be offshored is going to be snapped up by Apple or Google or Microsoft to bring to the US a star foreign employee who is currently stuck working out of an office in their native country or in Canada or another company with more open immigration policy.
Some do stand a bit outside center, to lure the kicker to pick one side. You can’t do that by a long distance, though. The goal is 8 yards wide, so if you move a yard from the center, one goal post is 5 yards away. That leaves too large an opening.

Luckily, you don’t have to do it by a large distance. https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/Imperceptibly_off-ce...:

“We asked whether a goalkeeper can, by standing marginally left or right of goal center, bias a penalty taker implicitly to kick to the side with greater area, thus allowing the goalkeeper to dive in that direction to make a save. We show that the penalty taker is unlikely to be mindful that the goalkeeper is off center, but nevertheless can identify the side with greater area and will be more likely to direct the penalty kick to that side than to the other side.”

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...:

“implicit influences of the goalkeeper’s position on goal side selection were overridden by the (conscious) perception of the direction of the goalkeeper’s dive, but only if the penalty takers deliberately monitored the goalkeeper’s action and the goalkeeper committed early enough for penalty takers to respond. In all other combinations of penalty kick and goalkeeper strategies more than 60% of the kicks were directed to the side of the goal with more space”
If you are going to factor in your time spent researching and building then you should also factor in a PC’s superior versatility and upgradeability, catalog, cheaper games in general and no fees for online services. (That alone ends up being many hundreds of dollars over the lifetime of a console, if you need it.)

In the long run a PC is usually going to cost you less than a console even if it costs much more up front.
I like this phraseology. How to make the answer intuitive is the objective, and underlining that you're choosing two doors, one of which is going to be wrong, really helps.
Great idea and decent implementation. The concept sounds great and I hope the site grows.

Also I'll put in a little plug here for /r/BuyItForLife/ -- great subreddit for talking/sharing about products that aren't engineered with planned obsolescence in mind.
Why? Anything you want to do on a textual preprocessor you can also do on an AST rewriter (like ocaml ppx or rust macros).
If you're unhappy with a direction of an organization, you may feel a moment of sadness, but then you can go and find likeminded people unhappy with the direction of the group and found a new one. fwiw, I don't see many comments in that thread calling for labor unions.
That's what I dont understand about all the other explanations trying to "simplify" the situation. Just ask people, would you prefer 1 door or 2 doors. I've never understood how expanding it to 100 or 1000 doors is simplier than asking "which is better odds 1/3rds or 2/3rds."

I also dont believe the original intent of the question was ever meant to be ambiguous with regard to whether he had knowledge of the goat door or whether he chose at random. The intent was for him to have prior knowledge or impeccable luck, and the wordsmithing of the question came later as, in my opinion, a failed rebuttal to the simplicity of the question. The question might have been worded to not be immediately obvious, but it was not intended to have different correct outcomes depending on interpretation.
Lots of people (on HN and elsewhere) define "startup" to mean exclusively "SV ideal, VC funded, growth at all cost" companies.

Companies that actually make profits but will never go public for a billion dollars are derided as "lifestyle" businesses.
808303studio – TR-808 drum machine and TB-303 synth emulator platform
you fine both bank and client for that behavior, and use the same might to pressure change that we've used against multiple small countries. it's not that hard policy-wise, but political will is certainly harder to muster.
Certain what came before doesn't have to be what follows. Just that if the majority of unions people know are "bad" then the general view of unions will be negative too. Also it may be a bit of a hint on which way a particular union is more likely to turn out.
Olive – September 2020 Update
Along the same lines, as adults, we often take these corrections personally (perhaps as a matter of habit) and therefore avoid situations where they may occur (conversation groups for new speakers, explicitly asking native speakers to correct you etc).
Sync Your Systems
Or an signed HTTP message, cf.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-message-...
Naval Ravikant has a healthy way of thinking about this.

If you are envious or jealous of someone's accomplishments or wealth, you must realize that it's impossible to be in that individual's position without taking onboard all the baggage that comes with it. Sure, Warren Buffet is rich, but would you like to swap with him and be 90 years old? Sure, that engineer is getting promoted faster than you, but do you also want their mental health issues?

It's a pernicious fiction to only imagine swapping a single characteristic (their success) and forgetting or not knowing about all the ways in which you're better off (fitness, friends, family, mental health, age).
The thing that you seem to be missing is that you need labor organization to achieve those things en masse. The current 40 hour workweek we enjoy and the weekends we have off are because of the organized labor movement in the US.

If your choices are between working for one of several capital-owned tech conglomerates, or accepting their money for the runway to compete in the current business climate, can you really call that an even playing field?

The second and third order effects of labor unions are class consciousness, something that the people on this forum seem to constantly miss.