skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People should be able to contract with each other flexibly, without swallowing big cookie-cutter compensation/benefit templates dictated by the state, herding people into 20th-century interest-groups.

If the legislature of the State of California wants some of its citizens to get certain "benefits", it can and should provide them directly, not hold other voluntary activity hostage unless it subsidizes their list-of-goodies.

Uber/Lyft tried other accommodations with their haters, & arguably conformed with the laws as they existed. Then, a clumsy bit of legislation (AB5) from a legislator with an implacably anti-Uber/Lyft agenda outlawed what had been legal, for both Uber/Lyft & a bunch of other freelancer-centric industries, destroying lots of work for Californians.

Those on the warpath against Uber/Lyft have since added exemptions for other industries that they like. The exemptions now include:

* (in AB5) Doctors, dentists, insurance agents, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and hairstylists

* (since) Fine artists, Freelance writers, Still photographers, Photojournalists, Freelance editors, Newspaper cartoonists, Translators, Copy Editors, Producers, Cartographers, Musicians with single-engagement live performances, Musicians involved in sound recordings or musical compositions, Insurance inspectors, Real estate appraisers, Manufactured housing salespersons, Youth sports coaches, Landscape architects, Professional foresters

I think drivers deserve the same freedom to flexibly contract as those other dozens of professions. I wish Prop 22 were simpler, but it's better than AB5, so I'm an enthusiastic "Yes".
> this [this fast and loose style] interrupts more productive work and deters deep thinking

This doesn't mesh with how I feel toward Slack. Slack itself is the thing that's disrupting my productivity and deterring deeper thinking by pinging me all the time. When I open Slack, the vast majority of the time, I'm looking to express my point as clearly AND concisely as possible so I can get back to doing whatever it was, which is 99% of time more important. As a result I use (or don't use) grammatical conventions, capitalization, and emoji depending on the context of my message and what will allow me to get my entire message across the fastest, and hopefully correctly.

If I'm messaging the person I've pairing with all day, or if I'm coordinating with my team about who will pick up a story, I'm much less likely to give my message all the proper formatting. These people what I'm like and how I tend to communicate, and so I can rely on that prior knowledge to "cut corners" here and there. I'm also much, much more likely to use emoji because I can communicate my intentions and my "intonation" nearly instantly, without having to sit there and worry about wordsmithing my whole message.

That being said, if I'm message in a large public channel that perhaps has multiple teams or belongs to a team I don't normally interact with, I'll spend much more time wordsmithing and editing to make sure I'm following proper conventions - mostly for the sake of clarity.

It does make some very salient points (think about how others could misinterpret your message, expand acronyms/use them sparingly, write to your audience, etc.) but I think they bought a little bit too much into the "Slack has replaced email" argument. For me, the main benefit of Slack over email is the lowered barrier to entry to starting a conversation and the ability to keeping it flowing, and part of achieving that is being okay with lowering the standards of communication.
Racist? Not sure what you mean.
It's what happens when you become powerful. The world is mostly just a few powerful actors playing games with each other, using the not-so-powerful as pawns. The powerless occasionally get angry about that, but it's not like they can do anything about it, because that's what it means to be powerless. Understand that it's not personal, though - big companies and governments are not specifically targeting you when they do something that harms you, they just don't know (or care) that you exist. You're just collateral damage in the games between the big players.

Embrace that and you actually have a chance of real freedom. Being invisible is both a boon and a detriment; you occasionally get stomped on for no apparent reason, but it also means that the big players are unlikely to know (or care about) the moves that you do make.
> exempt all drivers from getting basic benefits like health insurance

I've yet to hear a solid argument for why something as personal & private as health insurance should be decided by my employer. Expanding this to gig workers (who typically work multiple jobs) seems like madness to me.

I would be far more interested in seeing California lead the country in designing a better model than attempting to shoe horn contract work into an outdated system.
Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn [1] is a pretty solid style guide for technical writing.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Effective-Cases-Alistair-Cock...
It's almost as if what you describe as mockery of Christianity is largely punching up at a secure and itself mildly- to significantly-onerous institution in the United States and that defense of Islamic people is an example of punching-down xenophobia aimed at individuals that's dressed thinly as "criticism of the religion".

If Christians were targeted by violence on American streets after 9/11 (as they were--along with, you know, completely unrelated Sikhs), "the left" would say that's wrong, too. And the reason that the status quo with regards to anti-Islam sentiment is what it is is because Americans in a whole lot of places genuinely haven't progressed much beyond that mindset.

There's a difference of kind here.
Good for you. Now expand that time frame from 300 years to 400 million years.

How unusual is our climate change in a geological time frame?
Wait, how does that even work? You can make a law that says the law can't be repealed by a majority vote? They're not proposing an amendment to the state constitution are they?

(Excuse me if I'm not quite so read up on this topic—I don't live in California.)
Fun aside, on most mobile platforms, hitting the space key twice will generally enter a period followed by a space.
There is slight overlap but for personal use Discord is far better (family, friends, gaming). It's fun to have a Discord family room where people can drop comments and share stuff as opposed to Facebook using that data for their evil machinations.
Extreme Dumping Wing WLAN Platform?
I'm hearing scary things from our reseller- has anyone heard similar?
I surmised as much. Favouritism is another word for the same.

The problem with intellect is its need for reductionism. I understand there are strong feelings "supporting" the narratives as well, even if they don't really generalize to everyone.

The Middle Way looks more attractive than ever.
There was one company I saw that had a one click integration as part of their onboarding flow, just forgot to grab the example. It's very clever, and a great way to expose the product to multiple people within your organization (think Slack integration).
Would the state offer benefits in proportion to the number of hours worked as a contractor?
> The Foundation is completely controlled by Brian Acton, who is the sole "member" of the nonprofit

It doesn't seem unusual to have a single member nonprofit. However, is it a usual thing to loan to your own nonprofit foundation at 0%? Without a plan to generate positive cashflow into the foundation, would he forgive this loan to offset future taxes?

Genuinely curious.
Donald
It would be definitely illegal if Uber drivers were employees. As of now I bet it is not illegal.
Uber works by making drivers responsible over their time. By making Uber responsible for the drivers time they need to change their business model to that of a normal taxi service where they have more control over the drivers, since being responsible for something you don't have control over isn't a position you want to be in. And when they have to work as a normal taxi service then there is no point to Uber, they can't survive as a taxi service so they just have to pull out.
> famous sci fi author

If it's the same author I found based on a cursory search from your profile, then "famous" is a bit of a stretch.

> Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places

I got a similar feeling reading about Chris Paolini. Homeschooled, raised in a remote place. Fed a lot of his early life experiences, particularly travel, into his novels but felt alienated from other kids.
I'd be surprised if that part passed legal muster. It's like trying to backdoor a constitutional change in how laws are passed.
I heard a guy died getting struck by lightning once. I am _never_ leaving my house during a storm again.
I actually remember this being a thing back in 2015-16 when they first launched and before the "boom" happened. Back then it was only possible when you actually got an invite from somebody to join a server though, if I remember correctly.

But back then there was no official way to browse more or less public servers, which is the case now. I guess to join those it might be good enough in their eyes to just create a temporary account to let users test the waters and hopefully later convert into a proper account.
There’s a lot of “No bystanders, you’re with us or you’re against us” among the woke elite these days. On every issue.

Pushing companies to hire diversely is good. Makes them more ethical and less biased.

Pushing companies to add “black lives matter” banners on their corporate landing pages ... eh that’s got nothing to do with ethics.
>Deplatforming from the big services helps create a moat around them by creating a huge population of obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers who will descend upon any newer or smaller challenger like those clouds of moose killing black flies up North.

In many cases these smaller sites were created specifically to cater to those "obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers" as a "free speech/censorship resistant" alternative to the mainstream. BitChute's selling point is serving content which would be banned on YouTube - obviously that's what they get. If they or similar sites are victims of anything, it's their own success.
>But I don’t see how a company telling their employees to vote yes on 22 is any different from an activist group telling people to vote no.

Well the company pays you every month and the activist group doesn't so I guess that's a big difference.
Aha - so you're using CR's to denote end of sentences rather than periods, which would be an interesting evolution for the (written) language.

Grouping related thoughts / points as sentences within a single paragraph still feels more right to me than trying to over-succinctify potentially complex concepts into tiny paragraphs.
Here's the foundation's Form 990 from 2018: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/82450...
To say good isn't subjective is to say there is some part of the universe at some fundamental level that defines good. That's the claim that requires evidence.

Show me the "good particle" and then we'll talk. Until then I can only rationally assume something doesn't exist until proven otherwise.
I'm sorry, I'm clearly missing something. When were companies last not engaged in political lobbying for their own interests?
> Do you only think about eating, drinking, sleeping and exercise?

We need more than that.

We need breathing, pissing, shitting, fighting, and sex.
Paranormal Hardware
We should fight for a system where people can actually be paid enough to live from ONE JOB. (This solves all kinds of other problems, like freeing up time so people can finally live more relaxed lives and invest in themselves, including in their own health.)

Yet we live in a society where multiple jobs are often required just to survive. And in that scenario, it is strange to require “your employer” to give you benefits because you only need one of them to do so. If you have two healthcare plans, one is “wasted”. It probably makes more sense for each of your employers to somehow cover 50% of the plan cost.

I doubt Uber/Lyft even want to pay partial benefits though, since their whole profitability seems to be defined in terms of drivers being taken advantage of.
IIRC MS has even had to block their own updates from their own Surface devices to prevent bricking. Contrast that GNU/Linux which a majority of desktop users probably run on hardware that wasn’t designed for it — I know I do because I’ve seen plenty of BSODs after updates which took orders of magnitude longer than installing GNU on the same hardware which ran the latter flawlessly.
No state is able to afford healthcare (including mental) and/or UBI because benefit recipients would end up flooding into the state, and payers would probably end up leaving if the costs got too high, especially if they had an alternative such as other states not offering those benefits.
> ran 2 campaigns with different groups of friends

Wait what? Am I missing something? You made your friends pay to play with you?
They talk about that - if they're approaching the limit they'd make changes to produce more IDs.

The network has a built in governing body that can do things like that (and they would since restricting access isn't the goal).
A California ballot proposition is indeed one to amend the state constitution.
> 2. we're turning off our apps in California

In places where Uber/Lyft are absent, other apps quickly fill their place. All they have is network effects - they're not nearly as irreplaceable as they'd like you to think.
Mostly https://docs.crowdcast.io/en/articles/1935406-how-to-use-you...

But use Camera Live v11. (Newer versions hit some problems with Catalina)

And tweak CamTwist settings to do 720p 30fps. Browsers won't acknowledge CamTwist new/changed virtual cameras until you restart them.
>Recognize that gig jobs are going to become more of a thing in various ways

Is that a law of nature or something? An interesting way seeing ideology at work is when people start framing policy choice as the natural state of things.

To what degree gig work permeates the economy is entirely in the hands of the lawmakers of California, and if they care about the long term accumulation of human capital they better nip it in the bud right now.

I completely and entirely disagree with the idea that taxpayers are supposed to be on the hook for ever increasing benefits. Promote the creation of firms that are able to take stakeholder interests into account and invest into stable long-term employment rather than trying to make Snowcrash a reality.
In 2020, you can learn enough about programming in a 6 week bootcamp to be an effectively contributor at many companies. I'm not sure it was so easy in 1995. That said, I think the variability of free software has greatly expanded. There's piles and piles of poorly written garbage in package repositories now like npm, pypi, maven, rubygems, etc since it's so easy to publish code.

I think it's also worth noting a lot of popular OSS and FSF still has massive commercial interests backing it. Maybe Linux is free but that doesn't change all the huge companies pouring massive amounts of money into it (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, etc)

When this article was created, there was hardly a concept of SaaS like there is now but look how popular Github is vs Gitlab
I think you reversed the support and opposition numbers by mistake.
I live in WI and I don’t think anyone is fooled at this point. If there is a minimum amount needed to keep a lie going until an election, they didn’t hit the target.
Odd, I'm not seeing that. I don't have an ad-blocker, and I explicitly turned off Firefox's enhanced tracking protection in case that was the cause.
Sure, some are better than others. But even the supposed best are so bad that it makes no difference. You're likely assuming reputation from decades ago rather than the modern state of the media. The hallowed names no longer matter, they're all the same and have been emptied of almost all talent and integrity. Add in the rise of social media, clickbait, impression counts, and ever-dropping attention

The problems with the media "tops the list" for me before they can claim to be fact-checking anyone else.
Free utilities with well-defined success criteria (cat, tac, head, tail, ls, rm, cd, etc.) are generally rock solid. And there are some examples of excellent desktop software (Firefox, KeePass.?.?, GNOME Terminal). However, many GUI applications have the kind of decade-old bugs and UX which means I really can't recommend any of them, and I only use them because I don't trust the intentions of their closed source equivalents.

- Calc seems to have fewer graphing options and mathematical functions than the last Excel I used back in 2009.

- Thunderbird keeps randomly losing emails when dragging and dropping things between folders, and incoming email filters only work some of the time.

- GNOME Evolution doesn't seem to be able to save draft emails while offline, so I just have to hope that I get online to send it before GNOME desktop has one of its moments. Weekly recurring calendar entries seem to be split up into daily recurring ones in recent versions. Search is interminably slow compared to any other client, including Thunderbird.

- Darktable has absolutely oodles of features, but I can't tell what anything does except by trial and error. F1 doesn't seem to do anything other than scroll to the currently selected folder, and there's no help to be seen. "Collect images" keeps reverting the view to unordered "film roll", which is useless with a big collection. The devs refuse to add file handling code[1]. It's currently using 400+% CPU while not showing anything happening.

[1] https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files
Uber will have to redo its software systems to account for the concept of full time drivers. This is why they will turn off the app, it takes time to make changes to comply with the new law.

Regarding your other point, why do you think employers should be the providers of healthcare in the first place? This isn't the way it works in most countries.
I think I understand, but to bring the point home: it's not clear to me that selling cars is, in fact, neutral: they're environmentally destructive (both to manufacture and over the long tail), contribute to unsustainable housing patterns (suburbanization), and are the lynchpin in some of the US's most callous urban development decisions in the last century[1].

This doesn't make an engineer who works at a car startup a bad person. It's just an admonishment to maybe be a little more cognizant of the bigger picture that we're all a part of.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/04/new-york-sou...
diffr (yet another diff highlighting tool)
My kids reading has really accelerated from playing Roblox. I mean they did read before but they’ve really taken off since. They use Siri to dictate and I surmise they read what she prints. It’s amazing.
> Being left-handed, or being poor = no

That's not true. Intersectionality takes those things into account, it's just that in US law those traits are not illegal to use discriminately. They should be, but they're not protected classes.

> Disability = generally yes, but not autism, because reasons.

That's also not true, being neurotypical is acknowledged as a factor that makes your life easier. Since autism is included in the definition of disability under US law, it is also a protected class.
Why should we have to expend mental effort to even acknowledge that it still exists,

So why are you expending mental energy on it? Why does any of this matter to LO people at this point? LO has everything now, if you believe the prevailing narrative: the nicer, newer, shinier office suite, the developer mind-share, the press adoration, etc., etc. But somehow that isn't enough. It feels like one of those deals where somebody gets divorced and gets EVERYTHING they wanted, but their former spouse gets to keep the dog that they picked out, took care of, and loved... and the one who got everything burns with righteous hatred over the fact that their spouse got the one thing they cared about. Not because they want the dog (hell, they hated that stupid dog)... no, they just can't share any happiness, or warmth, or love. The other person must be miserable, for some reason.

I don't think anyone has been willing to answer that in a clear, understandable, objectively irrefutable way.

Nobody is asking you to spend any mental energy on this. Somebody on the LO side chose to engage on this subject, chose to write this "open letter" and chose to continue spewing spite, hatred, and indignation. If you want an "answer" maybe ask a different question: why do the LO people refuse to let go and move on?
Moral Machine – Human Perspectives on Machine Ethics
Assuming Hunter was happy with being the family punching bag. The messages released so far can be interpreted that he resented being the pity party of the biden namesake.
Having your name tied to your publically available code is a strong insentive to make it look good
> Mission focus produces social good: Working in a single direction on a strong, well-considered mission is the best way to make a socially positive impact.

Facebook seems like the obvious counter example to this.

The whole statement seems to be: "Trust the business, we know it's going to be good. Ignore the larger societal issues we might be causing."
Long time signal user here, threema looks very interesting and seems to be trucking along quite well
The New Yorker's house style is to use a dieresis to indicate when adjacent vowels do not form a diphthong. There's a syllable-break in between the Os of "coöperate", as opposed to between the Os of "chicken coop", so it gets a special marker.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28diacritic%29#Engl...

"proffer" is also a perfectly legitimate word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proffer
Existing HPC projects (aka "supercomputers") show that money is available for hardware-intensive research projects (perhaps the lesson here is that the US needs an AI/ML focused National Lab), and as far as the cost of creating a bespoke cluster for a single project, I think that running it full bore for a project and then selling it off ASAP would avoid most of the downsides you've mentioned.

Again, I have a feeling that big-budget render farms have trod this path before.
Well, if drivers were considered employees, then they'd be protected from their employer retaliating against them for political activity:

> But two sections of the California Labor Code (sections 1101 and 1102) specify that private employers may not do any of the following:
>
> 1. Make, adopt or enforce any rule or policy forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or running for public office;
> 2. Make, adopt or enforce any rule or policy that tends to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees;5 or
> 3. Use the threat of job loss to coerce, influence or attempt to coerce or influence employees to take or refrain from taking any particular course of political activity.6

https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/harassment/political-reta...

Good thing we passed a law that forces Uber/Lyft to treat their drivers as employees.
Your criticism of this study is that is is conducted on too small of plots (6 experiment groups on 12 acres = 2 acres per group) to be scaled up to real farms. However the real farms to which you sell synthetic fertilizer or fertilizer financial products in Subsaharan Africa are of similar sizes?