skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A huge chunk of startups covered on this site disrupted existing industries and as the web matures MVP becomes less and less useful. The original post here wasn’t a good fit for MVP, and yet we had to come and swat down the proselytizing as it’s so pervasive.

Tesla, Google, and just so many huge companies absolutely aren’t good fits for it. It’s a limiting framework at this point as people seem to have oversubscribed to the philosophy and turned it into religion.
I think you misunderstand the power of a union at Google. If management says no, what are they going to do? Strike? I mean ..hundreds of them, will have zero effect. This Union is nothing more than a paper dragon. Democracy works in government but in a company that you don’t own, why do you think you deserve to make any of the decisions? As Obama said “you didn’t build that” and yet you want to feed at the trough.
Without defending Google management at all, I'll say that everyone who got fired was not at all careful in their activity. Organizing a union is different from doing intentionally disruptive protest activity, and while one can argue that both are morally correct, one is a lot more job-threatening than the other.

The people who are organization the union and signing petitions, but not hacking employer systems or calling their coworkers "Nazis" are still employed and organizing but also less visible to the public.

Much like cyclists facing cars have to learn that it's better to be alive than claim the right of way and be dead, activists need to be smart about taking calculated risks. (And if people are calculating that getting fired is good for their political cause or future career at a like-minded organization, then good for them!)
Well the original example was obviously flawed because if all that's left for the employee to do is literally just press a button, then it would've been automated as well.

In a company like Google the argument that the workforce is effectively just a commodity that could be replaced easily and at will is obviously not applicable. Most of Google engineers are not button pushers.
F* is a great idea for writing libraries that cannot fail. But setting up the environment could be better documented.
No, you’re completely misunderstanding the rule. Because the film industry works on a freelance basis, the union only has bargaining power if it doesn’t exist alongside a non-unionized body of workers who are willing to work for cheaper. By requiring that union members only work unionized jobs, they ensure that no non-union production can ever benefit from any non-union labor. This pushes productions to negotiate terms with the union in order to get talent, and that in turn helps union members get jobs.

It’s not about whether the union likes you or thinks you deserve to work. It’s about whether the production is willing to play by union rules.
Could it be the obvious? Everyone signing on / loading slack clients at the same time?
Maybe we can chat with coworkers here. Is there a Carl around?
Also AWS, yet the AWS status page shows all is well. I wonder if all the down services are due to AWS.
In 49 out 50 cases sure, they are the wrong person, but most people in general are unsuited for leading people and companies. Developers might be worse than average at this, but they are better than average at understanding the technical needs and processes, so perhaps it evens out.
I have issues reaching a lot of sites, especially american.
Both downdetector, hacker news and others loads extremely slow or not at all. Downdetector had a bunch of failed resources for me..
I do not. I have used it to write quite a bit of code, and I generally like it as a language, but I don't consider it a reasonable substitute for Common Lisp or Smalltalk. Factor, on the other hand, is--as far as I know.
We were just joking with the work mates -- SF bought Tableau 2 years ago and haven't ruined it yet, only because it takes them that long to do anything ;)
API with NestJS #23. Implementing in-memory cache to increase the performance
A key value store on top of Route 53
> I think you might misunderstand the goal of a union. It's inherently political, that's the whole point of it.

I think this is disingenuous. It's inherently political, yes, but historically it is the politics of the workplace that a union focuses on. Specifically workplace safety, compensation, and benefits. This mission statement is explicitly dragging larger social activism into the workplace.

> Unions are a historically old and proven way for workers to enact change in workplaces, industries and even entire countries. Code of conducts in open source is a fairly new invention (officially, written down ones at least) with no such track record.

It is the same pattern of dragging social activism into a domain where it is not inherently relevant, and using bureaucracy to force it onto members. One mechanism of doing so being old or new isn't the point.
It is still lying by showing almost services as green with "No issues"

Login/SSO -- No issues
Connections -- Something's not quite right View details
Messaging -- Something's not quite right View details
Link Previews -- No issues
Posts/Files -- No issues
Notifications -- No issues
Calls -- No issues
Search -- No issues
Apps/Integrations/APIs -- No issues
Workspace/Org Administration -- No issues

----

they set everything to "red" 16:40 UTC
So I'll preface that I'm by no means an expert.

The issue can occasionally be the user's email provider but for the most part issues with implementing one-time links will be the site's responsibility/a problem on their end.

As for email occasionally being super slow, Google and Microsoft (to a lesser extent) will tarpit(repeatedly delay the acceptance of emails from a specific address or entire domain) emails arbitrarily. This normally isn't anything meaningfully repeatable and is essentially ~~the algorithm~~ arbitrarily deciding it dislikes some certain email, email address, or server. Those emails will eventually get to their recipient but effectively get frozen in time for a bit before getting delivered.

For normal person to person emails, this boils down to bad luck and occasional inconvenience however for any heavily templated email (like say an email containing one-time links), this means something on the site's side is causing the emails to appear as spam or spam-like to the recipient server. So technically it is the user's email server causing the delay but it's usually due to something in particular on the site's side be it a domain or server configuration or something about the email contents.
Product Talks of 2020
We’re honouring our Top 20 Product Talks of 2020. These talks brought you the best speakers and the most impactful advice. They ignited conversations around the world, and launched countless Product Manager careers.
> Everyone deserves a welcoming environment, free from harassment, bigotry, discrimination, and retaliation regardless of age, caste, class, country of origin, disability, gender race, religion, or sexual orientation.

Until and unless they demonstrate that they intend to protect conservative employees, there's not a chance I would trust them to actually uphold this value.
Great to see Matrix progress. Big fan of Matrix me for sure.

Personal opinion as a frequent conference attendee, I do not like pre-recorded talks.

I see why they are doing it, but I think its at the expense of conference experience.

There will be less motivation to be there to watch when you can view online later.
What is your argument for that? That people will choose better passwords (unique and long) since they don't need to remember them?

The Achille's heel of password managers is if someone accesses your computer (physically or remotely) they can probably access all your accounts. <-- and I've seen this happen (not to me)
> all the employees who produced the perfectly automated factory to negotiate for a share of the profits.

if they were employees, they would've been paid compensation for making such automation. Unless they are a shareholder (either by investing initial capital, or by negotiated compensation in the form of equity), they are absolutely not entitled to any profit from their output.
They had the same issue 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24687957
That's great, but the millennial generation had more births, and given all the deaths that the boomer gen has had since 1946, millennials are a much larger block at this point.
I agree on the general indirection they use. However my answer to the specific question you posed is "no, I'd have no problem". But if it were eg a drug charge, then I wouldn't consider the relevant criminal law to be constitutional (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for starters), and thus the defendant is innocent because there is no crime to have been committed. My judgment wouldn't be to save one sympathetic person from being convicted of what is otherwise a legitimate crime, but rather over the validity of the law itself.

In general they will ask you a bunch of questions to trip up anyone who might be too clever, but they can't ask about jury nullification directly (lest they give anyone else ideas). If you answer in the expected common sense way, and don't boast about your reasoning, it's going to be very hard for them to claim perjury.
Now I'm not super into US politics, partly because it's so polarized today, but which one of these values are against conservative ideals? Seems to be pretty basic human decency, like everyone deserves a voice, welcoming environment, decisions are made democratically and more. Are those really against conservative ideas?

Edit: My comment seems to have spawned replies to unrelated subjects so I'll repeat the question hopefully a bit more clear: What of the values proposed so far in the "Google Union", goes against modern conservative values in the US today?
Restoring old vehicles (trucks / cars) and spearfishing.
To be fair, IRC doesn't do a lot of things Slack does. Where is the logging and audit trails, access control, search, etc.
Do you mean that the career of judges is never affected by politics? I think, e.g., that appointments to SCOTUS are an obvious counterexample.
It would then be another Black Mirror episode, the USS Callister one, where (spoilers:) introvert programmer Matt Damon takes DNA of his colleagues and makes virtual copies of them and imprisons them in his play universe.

Obviously the tech won't be that advanced, but having people have emotional connections to chatbots that they programmed to pretend to be their exes would be... creepy.

On the other hand I can imagine at least one Twitter user who we could put in a virtual playpen and it would benefit mankind.. Virtual Pennsylvania Ave 1600..
> What do the tech elite and robber barons have in common?

I heard Hitler liked dogs, so if you like dogs you're obviously anti-Semitic.

EDIT: The point of this was to show how absurd adjunct comparisons like this are.
Oh man, I appreciate your pragmatism and open-mindness. It is refreshing to see someone advocate for something without trying to "take over the world" and proving others wrong.

Thanks for sharing your experience amd positivity with the world.
Yeah well, people have different priorities.
I don't disagree. But it's kind of a moot point, because the adversarial model of employment is what many people have. Google in particular recently settled a lawsuit about an agreement they had with other tech giants to depress their employees' salaries: https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsu...
I was lucky to get featured in a blog post by a french blogger, who was subscribed to the betalist and noticed my app.
(What is also cool with niche audience, is that they are usually more eager to adopt your product in the early stage and give you feedback, which is great if you are only starting and need some solid feedback from couple people but not from hundreds)
One company going public this week
Given that one of your partners is a "Lean Coach" did you consider to first sell a no-code service. Perhaps one focused on helping/coaching/training companies manage remote meetings effectively.

This service would be admittedly a tough sell, and hard to scale since it would depend on your partner attending many meetings and providing feedback for each one.

But even if you get a few customers, then you have some cashflow and provide a sales channel to slowly start onboarding them on full-code product as you build more features. It will also allow you to quickly identify the most useful features to prioritise, and some features you might have not even thought about.

Lastly, it would give you much more credibility when trying to raise seed funding if you are able to show you sold the no-code version of the service.
Why would it cause a recession? Google and Facebook would report lower numbers, literally every other company on earth would save more money.
> their product would be devalued quickly

which means more people can afford said product. Automation is increasing productivity and output efficiency.
worker to the union: "it was said you would destroy the oppressors, not join them!"
Could just be sloppy, inaccurate writing. But yeah that would be pretty bad.
I'm positive that they have internal monitoring, and probably knew about the issues well before they decided to manually update their status page to reflect the issue. Manually updating the status page does not equal no monitoring, after all.
Sure, but Glimesh are going to be looking at moving away from FTL themselves. See the discussion on this PR: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/3834
I've seen harassment campaigns (which ended in a lawsuit against the chief harasser) over association with someone who associates with a certain group. So even if you're a liberal you can get in trouble for associating with the wrong people or speaking at the wrong conference or promoting the wrong project.
>dump his body in the ocean

Yeah that's a bit crazy if you ask me.
There was also opt-out, even decades ago. You could tell the phone company that you wanted an unlisted number, and you would be excluded from the phone book.
The rubber room story that is trotted out all the time is the exception, not the rule.

The very existence of teachers unions has probably kept tens or even hundreds of thousands of people from being out of work without healthcare during a global pandemic.

In my experience, having a teacher as a spouse, discipline of even union employees is not rare when warranted.
Ask HN: Tool for Online Ad Management
I am mentoring a team that is building a tool for Online Ad management. It is a tool for small and medium businesses who would want to run ads on FB, Insta, Google, Twitter using a single tool.

The idea is to allow SMEs to

- Create & Manage ads on multiple channels using a single platform

- Schedule & Rotate Ads

- Analyze ads performance, ROI, metrics, etc

- Pre-build catalog for ads for multiple industries

- Pre-built strategies for retargeting and ad preferences

- Pre-built integration with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, etc. The idea to is build integration with platforms where most of the SMEs set up their eCommerce stores.

- In the future - offer them optimization tips/strategies for their ads.

I have seen there are already a few tools that do similar work, but they are mostly exorbitant costly or only useful for enterprise customers where you have a marketing team in place.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, how do you feel about the tool. If you have any suggestion or feedback, please let me know
That's not true? Depends on the union and the company and the location.
Some interesting AWS updates from 2020
Yeah, I think there's more of a culture of paid (and therefore mostly closed source apps) on Apple platforms. Whereas anything cross platform is _not_ using Apple languages for the bulk of their code base, and Linux focused/exclusive apps are going to be over represented among open source because people who value open source are more likely to use an open source OS
1. They'll probably spend it on lawyers & negotiation teams.

2. How are those consequences?

3.

> Base is on the newest woke culture? ... Scan their social media?

What? If they are voted in, Google will be required to provide the employee manifest.

5. First, there are unions in numerous industries with lots of firings/seasonal firings. Second, firing is also not as common in big tech anyways.

6. You have a vote? On what to negotiate on?
Bill-a-Bear
I don't get it - isn't 'requiring that union members only work unionized jobs' an example of 'limiting the work their members are carrying out'?

If you're a member of the union, you can't work on productions without certain agreements, yes? Your ability to work on productions you want to work on is... limited... isn't it?
I say this every time Slack is down, but they just seem so shady to me. Nobody can connect right now, and their status site says "100% uptime in the last quarter". Maybe it's close to 100%, but it ain't 100%.

I think we should push for a metric where "up" means 100% of people that want to use the service are able to use the service. If 1% of users can't send messages, then that should count as a full-blown outage and should start counting against whatever SLA they advertise.

The underlying problem here is that apparently everyone lies about uptime, so if you don't, that looks bad to potential customers. I fear that we will have to push for some legal regulation if we want accurate data, and ... people will probably be opposed to that.
I wonder why SSL Client Certificate Authentication hasn't become popularized for the web.

1. Browser visits a site that needs authentication.
2. Browser checks if there's already an existing client cert.
3. If not, browser generates one.
4. Browser uses it in the SSL handshake, resulting in the user being signed in without passwords, cookies, email links, etc.
I’m just enjoying it while it lasts
then wouldn't this happen every monday morning?
1% of 100K people making over $100K/yr is an insanely huge amount of money for a union.

This smells like "1% is the smallest positive number" fallacy on behalf of the owners.

(But that 1% is perhaps/likely only salary not equity.)

Blue collar unions need money to pay bills during a strike, but Googlers don't need that.

A big question to ask is whether Googlers need to pay for union or if they should donate to politicians who would regulate Google.
I can’t argue with you cause I don’t live there. But everywhere I live people complain and say government isn’t doing anything.
Medium sized team on Slack. We'd need to move ~60 full time in-house employees, ~10 remote contractors who aren't on other comms channels, ~20 infrequent freelance contributors who may not check messages often, ~5 custom bots and apps, and ~15 3rd party integrations (of which some won't support any given choice of alternative).

This is not to mention the fact that half our staff aren't hugely technical, so have actively _learnt_ how to use Slack and it's features around notification control (things that may come "naturally" to the tech-savvy crowd on HN), @-things, bots, etc, and they would need to re-learn a new tool that is going to work in a different way.

This would be a substantial effort for us, and we're a small company. Are there ways to materially minimise this cost?
> historically it is the politics of the workplace that a union focuses on

Might be so in the US, but certainly not everywhere. Nor just because it's been so in the US before, doesn't mean it has to be like that. In Spain for example, unions are one of the most active and most likely to actually achieve political change in the country, at least judging by how it's been so far.

Which ones of the announced values you feel is trying to be applied to society at large? The way I'm reading it, all the values are geared towards Google and it's workplace, not going further than that.
Their FAQ[1] says no, but they would like to gauge interest in that feature and to reach-out to their support team.

1. https://help.clubhouse.io/hc/en-us/articles/360036047091-Clu...
It's not about deserve, it's about exercising the power your actually have. Management doesn't do any of the typing. I stop typing they're gonna have to replace me. I guess my retort would be why shouldn't I exercise the power I have? It's not about fair, it's about boots on the ground.

Replacing your workforce is much harder than you make it out to be. All the institutional knowledge, the entire stack, how things fit together, how the tools are built, run, used. All that leaves with you.

You are likely right that this union, at this juncture doesn't have much say. I'm speaking more about unions in general, and this does feel like the thin edge.

IMO this isn't the highest value proposition place to unionize, that would be video games.
>Why is migration so hard?

Why would anyone make it easy
> is it too early to start drinking?

Depends on the timezone you're in, though one could theoretically cite a disparity between physical and mental/emotional/temporal time zones...
I have less of an excuse not to be more personally productive, but I can't help anyone else (easily) if my primary method of communication is down. Not only because it's harder to contact you, but also because it's impossible for you to just ask in a channel and have me notice you.

There's also this perverse incentive to Slack all the things. Lots of CI notifications are sent through it. Some org processes are implemented as workflows. There's been talk of how wonderful it would be to hook up tasking and work tracking to slash commands. I and others often use Slack instead of the 'official' tool to video call each other.

An outage like this is still really disruptive. It's not like everyone realizes what's going on immediately or at the same time; we have backup tools, but our turn radius is pretty wide. Some of us can't even communicate effectively without memes, too, and backup tools don't have a giphy integration.

EDIT: Do your CI integrations fail if Slack can't be contacted? Do those failures fail your pipeline? Whoops!
Video game studios routinely credit everyone, too. Though there's some politics involved (just like in movies) I won't get into.

Could it be... that crediting is part of the industry norms in one case, and not the other? Absolutely nothing to do with unions.
It should work, as long as you're sending it to the server over FTL[1], which is a pretty new and uncommon protocol developed by the now-defunct Mixer.

1. https://github.com/mixer/ftl-sdk
Sounds like the tech industry needs a union rather than just Google employees.
I'm still dreaming of a world where everyone uses IRC through an interface identical to Slack or Discord or whatever, and features like these are implemented.
Simple Inference Server
Tropico, in general, is always being slept on. Tropico 6 is a genre defining game in my opinion. If you're into city building games I highly recommend giving it a chance.
1. Members have agreed to contribute 1%, as stated in the article that you may not have read.

2. Elections

3. The article also answers this question. It’s open to anyone working for Alphabet (besides, if it works like a typical union, management).

4. Not hiring you for your union affiliation would be highly illegal.

5. She worked AT a union? Unions don’t fire people? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you mean she was a member, and that unions prevent companies from firing their members? Even that’s largely not true.

6. Yes, you’ll have to join the Communist Party of America and pledge allegiance to AOC in order to even join the zoom call, of course. Because that’s how unions work

7. No, because it’s voluntary, as you could’ve read in the article that you didn’t read.
FAT32 only supports 4GB files though, so not sure how useful this is for a lot of media usecases.
How to Improve Your Apps Performance Before It Slows Down
yes, abusing internal systems.

imagine using tools explicitly created to facilitate communication and organization between employees but suddenly its abuse when used for organize something other than a potluck