skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> While a union that represents workers interests is a good thing, I think it would be dangerous to give even a part of google to people with ideological fervor.

On a practical level, a union that concentrates just on its members interests, is not able to concentrate on its members interests. Just as one person can be crushed by a company, a union at one company can be crushed by an industry. The UAW organized GM, then Chrysler then Ford (one of the weapon carrying workers in the GM strike was Larry Page's grandfather). This kind of thing is necessary for the survival of one union. If FedEx is not unionized (it is not), that weakens the union at UPS.

The AI researcher said there were racist aspects of Google AI, IIRC. Whatever the specifics of that case, unions do not prosper over the long run with a racial divide. There are numerous cases of jobs traditionally done by black men replaced by white scabs, or vice versa. It is why Bernie Sanders wants less immigration, despite the disapproval of upper middle class liberals to his right - too many unassimilated Latin American workers can be played against native workers in a divide and rule sense.
Or you could just do a search on Facebook?!

I don't know if it still works, but some time ago I used that to find the real name of someone just using their phone number. However, that person wasn't really trying to keep their identity secret.
Case in point, Fan Bingbing
Got a tax problem then gone from July 2018 then back at late October 2018.
She's just lay low to avoid extra scrutiny
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_Bingbing
Just call it what it is, greed. Why is it greedy if company owners want to make money, but "good and social" if workers want to make money?

I don't think the "earnings per employee" metric entitles employees to anything.
Is reading in chunks more effective than reading word by word?
It's also incredibly unfair to credit people not really related to the actual product. Should the names of all the employees of some bookstore in Wyoming be in the credits for Harry Potter books?

The credits for God of War PS4 were 28 minutes long listing pretty much every employ of Sony in all countries down to caterers.

Personally I find that insulting and unfair to the actual creative team that made the game.
That assumes the user can click the link on the phone. The reason a user might be "using a shared/public computer out of necessity" might be because the user does not at that moment have working Internet on the phone. For instance, the user might be outside the home area without a roaming agreement, or the user might be out of prepaid credits on the phone.
Management is a cartel. I can't negotiate my pay directly with my manager.
Any effective union will need an ideology to rile people up. That's not what's bad about unions.

The first thing they would do if they have any power is kick out immigrants.
> Why do the major trade blocks ignore these actions? USA, EU...

Careful now ... I know of several people who were banned from HN for being critical of China ...

EDIT: I suspect this post will be gone soon.
I personally am very happy with my job, and when I raise any kind of grievance it is listened to. If I were unhappy, I’d go to another company. So I just don’t see what I’d get out of it personally.
The workers do benefit, they get paid a salary and get RSUs (whose value increases with stock price). Very large amounts of both depending on the role by both US and world standards. If they want to then they can invest that income into company stock and become shareholders. Then they benefit in perpetuity based on how much they invested.

edit: And this union includes part time cleaning staff which while vital to the functioning of a company hardly generate revolutionary ideas except in movies.
Amnesty at least have some credibility.
There was no wage fixing. This was a non recruiting agreement that had an imputed effect of reducing wages.
What I found curious is the equation

money not gained = money lost

To me that sounds like the perfect mentality for a burnout.

I would think that you used your time (i.e. opportunity) not for monetary but personal gains (i.e. experience).

Ideally you would have turned that experience into money again, but just because that didn't happen doesn't mean you didn't gain anything.
Bitcoin exchanges are being drained of actual BTC
It's mirrored an overall change in the culture. The left has become much more critical and sensitive, while the right has entered Satanic Panic 2.0 and decided that anything remotely edgy is evidence of Satanic baby eating and sees pedophilia absolutely everywhere.

20-30 years ago it was perfectly acceptable to make incredibly lewd or offensive jokes or have your band LARP as Satanists. The culture was far more tolerant of coarseness and taboo-breaking.

Here's an example that would drive the present-day left and right bonkers if it was released today:

https://www.metrolyrics.com/my-sharona-lyrics-the-knack.html
> engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better"

While I generally agree with the sentiment of your comment, I would like to point out that the above is only true for green card holders. There are a lot of H1B/L1B workers stuck at bad teams with high amounts of pressure/stress and incompetent or downright abusive managers.

For them, leaving the company isn't an option because it means leaving the country and leaving a life-changing amount of money on the table and denying their children the advantage of growing up in the US.

You might argue they can switch teams, which is technically true, but this can complicate and delay the green card process, and vindictive managers often smear engineers with HR because people bailing on them makes them look bad. At Amazon for example, particularly bad managers will PIP an engineer to block them from transferring teams.

So while in general engineers are treated well and can choose where they want to work, I think we should also show some solidarity with our friends who don't have the same options that we do.
Traditional unions target specific job role at specific locations, where you only need people in that job at that location to vote for unionization. It seems like a lofty goal to try to unionize the whole company in one go, when you don't have a track record of successes at a small scale you can point to as reasons that this union is a good idea on a large scale.
Sounds rational till GOOGLE treats all its employees as PARTNERS
That's true of all bitcoin power sources though. Its all trading Earth's resources for imaginary points. Only a human could conceive such a thing was desirable.
>So you want someone who can tell you what the yet-to-be-negotiated contract with your employer will look like?

In broad strokes, yes.

Here's an analogy: I know it's not implemented yet, but I want the design doc and market research, not just the elevator pitch.
That's not the legal or economic definition of a cartel.
Yes, but you need fewer of them for the same generating capacity.

So instead of having to maintain 10 1.4MW turbines, you only need to maintain 1 14MW turbine.
*> Baraitser sided with US prosecutors on pretty much all of their arguments. It was the barbaric nature of the US penal system that saved Assange.

Another interpretation is, the judge tried as much as s/he could to prevent extradition while "saving face" (either preventing a political conflict, or even saving themselves from assassination!)
Unions will only help the rest & vest culture. I worked at Google and trust me there is so much fat that can be trimmed there. Especially the ones who have been there for 7+ years..

With unions it will get harder to fire them and at the same time they will need to be compensated equally.

Software is not a profession where output is proportional to work hours like blue collar jobs. This will demoralize engineers to work smarter & harder.
Especially with the multi class share structure with different voting rights.

And talking of employees shares lobbying for changes to the taxation of those to make it fairer would be an good thing for unions to lobby for
He is more likely assembling iphones in a remote factory in China right now.
Yeah right. "Cancel culture" would never, ever, ask for firing people. Or remove them from schools. Or harass them in real life. Everything stays civilized on twitter and the rest is alt-right propaganda.
Off-topic:

Why on Earth does gridwatch.co.uk not work in Firefox?!

Other sites that do:
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ (this is the one I've seen linked more often over the years)
http://grid.iamkate.com/
The trillions in Capital Outflows over the last two decades that found its way into real estate all over the west (Vancouver, Toronto, London, NYC, etc) is a good indicator of how the rich feel about their Government in China. Everything you have can disappear in an instant unless you took steps to protect it (move your money out into hard assets). Cross the CPP and there are no second chances.

Jack Ma is finished.
All of that capital was produced by labor, except what fraction of the value derives from raw natural resources pre-extraction.

So it is absolutely a fair framing to state "why shouldn't workers seek to capture as much of their labor as possible?". If their labor produces capital which produces profits, why are those profits not fair game to bargain over?

In your example, it wouldn't make sense to pay the one remaining employee all of the profits, but it would have made perfect sense for all the employees who produced the perfectly automated factory to negotiate for a share of the profits.
Last time I checked, the charges are related to Assange's alleged involvement in one or more accounts of hacking, not regarding the subsequent public release of the obtained documents.
A Simplified Checklist for Technical Backlog Refinement
>> I thought Judge Baraitser was a compliant puppet

Maybe this judgement will make people think a bit more deeply before jumping to ludicrous conspiracy theories in future. In the UK at least judge's are for the most part demonstrably non-political.
And they weed you out of the jury pool if you admit to knowing of its existence. And of course you can't lie when asked, as that's perjury.
Looks like a job for a fuzzer.
Probably hobbies, a small farm, and some sort of limited charity/volunteering.
Looks very useful, since I usually can't remember to tag individual pages, but can usually remember the domain. This would drastically reduce my cognitive load.

That being said, I must be that guy and ask: Will there be a Firefox add-on?
> and based on a review it’s horrible to drive:

Not really a surprise. The design of the car is close to 40 years old, even before you take into account the age of the car itself and all the junk piled on for the purpose of looking good on screen.
Also the previous commentator doesn't understand what collective means here.
If I didn’t want to join the union, would I face consequences?
I think his advice is a little more valuable than that. I've seen plenty of grad students who just work on whatever their advisor is interested in and don't think about the future. Periodically re-assessing to figure out what will be important in the near future could be helpful to them.
Why can this be patented? I mean I also had this idea long ago and it's not anywhere novel.
Brexit stops Brooks England sales of ‘Made in Britain’ saddles to UK shoppers
It's complicated, because it started out as "smash the state and let democracy reassert itself". Everyone involved in the room had such a broken mental model of what the Iraqi population was like. American politicians have been getting drunk off the rhetoric of democracy for some time, and we typically forget that most governments are precariously balanced between multiple competing socioeconomic elements with eternal and unending grudges between one another. In the case of Iraq, what started as "invade and impose democracy" quickly progressed into policing sectarian violence as America inherited Saddam's problems.
Trademark law does not stop you saying "my product is better than X". It only stops you saying "my product is X".
>Unlike the Soviet Union China doesn't represent an existential threat to the USA or EU, largely as a matter of geography.

That is categorically untrue. The model of government and economic success of China is the biggest existential threat to western hegemony, much bigger than the USSR. China is well in the process of building a strong military with greater capabilities than Russia and once this is complete, the world order will undoubtedly change unless something is done about it now.

The only reason we don't see more noise on this is because a lot of people depend on trade with China for their wealth, which was never the case during the cold war with the USSR.

The state department was fully aware of the Chinese threat, hence why the TPP was proposed as a measure of containment. Too bad that play was ruined and replaced with ineffective populist measures that sound good on AM radio and internet forums, but are actually counterproductive in practice.
Here’s a 2011 HN post describing that claim about an unscalable feature in more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370291

(That was linked from http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-l... but I had to fix the link, since it went to apps.ycombinator.com which must have been the HN URL at the time. Maybe dang can update DNS to make those old links redirect? Everything after the host was still correct.)
I think Cox is the odd one out, as he's probably actually better known as a physicist than a musician these days.

There's also Tom Lehrer, of course.
Most of the unions that we have here are public service/trades/transportation related and if I'm honest, the results have been very mixed. We used to have more manufacturing related unions, but with the direction manufacturing jobs have gone in the U.S. they're mostly just gone.

The public service unions (e.g. firefighters, police etc.) seem to do a good job to protect their workers on one hand and keep them fairly paid and serviced, but on the other hand provide a powerful force to keep abusive police employed and fight things like police cameras and other actions that protect the population.

The public transportation unions are widely seen as abject failures, providing protection for overpaid, highly underperforming, employees. There's been numerous investigations about failures in things like our local municipal rail systems and why they're such an abomination of service, and outside of funding issues, the fingers usually get pointed in the direction of essentially unfireable and frankly lazy employees.

The trade unions seem to do a good job. Plumbers, electricians, etc. generally seem to be competent, and paid well, and have good relations between employers, customers, and workers.

There's also a large number of public sector unions here. At one end the usual postal workers, teachers etc. and everything seems to run pretty well there. On the other end are the infuriating government maintenance/labor unions who won't let you move a waste bin to the other side of your desk without causing a problem.

Despite all this, unions are not a major factor of life for most of the people in my area. I actually only know one or two people who're union members personally. Despite this, I live in one of the highest average income areas in the country. But I also recognize that for many people this environment prices them out of livable housing and food, and unions can help bolster their pay to make living in this area reasonable for them.

I'm somewhat at a loss as to what better work conditions Google employees are looking for. They're among the most highly paid employees on the planet with absolutely incredible work conditions. If I had to wager, in exchange for whatever protections these employees are seeking, the tradeoff will be the erosion and removal of most of the perks that make Google a desirable place to work for. On the other hand, with Google leadership's behavior the last few years, they've kind of brought this on themselves so, small violins all around.
I think it’s important to consider that the plight of the worker is important both to the individual directly and to understand the motivations of employees.

Thinking that benefit to employees isn’t relevant because they don’t exist for purposes of the argument will leave out many interesting possible solutions.

I don’t think the goal is to maximize for a single company as it’s possible to maximize for the system that has both the company, other companies, and other workers.
No actually what unions do is make sure that any "firing" is done fairly and with the law and not used to harass or discriminate.
The excerpt speaks for the "quality" of this kind of journalism: headline says

> "Britain faces green energy disaster as lack of wind triggers new blackout warning"

Actual quote says:

> National Grid said the margin notice “highlights that we would like a greater safety cushion between power demand and available supply” but “does not signal that blackouts are imminent”.

In short: yes, regenerative or "green" energy requires a different approach, including overprovisioning, short term storage, and stand-by power stations (e.g. natural gas-powered ones) in order to work reliably.

That's not news, however, that's a well known fact. Plus both wind and solar can be predicted fairly well over the short term and a more intelligent grid could be used to adjust demand accordingly to also help with this.

It's an issue, sure, but not a show-stopper.
I'm no expert, but I guess if you disengage the load the turbine blades would accelerate until the internal heat losses to friction matched the energy input from the wind. In other words, they'd spin very quickly, probably far in excess of their design speed, meaning at best that they would wear out much more quickly, or I guess more likely RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly), causing them to be considerably more dangerous.
The only citation can be experience, especially since it's so heavily dependent on the specifics of the situation.

If the refactored mini-function captures something very discrete, like popping an item off of a queue, then of course it's a big win. You'll often ask yourself what the hell the original developer was thinking spilling all these details into an unrelated context.

But if that chunk of code only really makes sense in the context of that function, then moving it into a separate function might not do anything except force future readers to flick back and forth between between the various helper functions and the top-level coordinating function. Have you honestly never had that experience? If so, maybe you're lucky enough to have never worked on a code base containing that mistake.

The only true rule is never to blindly follow rules! Feel free to bear good practices in mind, but always make a new, independent assessment for each situation where you might apply it. For the rule about refactoring into smaller functions, think about whether future readers are indeed going to be able to (confidently) avoid looking at the implementation of those smaller functions, because their meaning is so clear from their signature, or if you're just adding extra navigation and mental work. Sometimes it will go one way, maybe even mostly it will go that way, but sometimes not.
Right, Snowden and Manning sit on a similar spectrum in terms of unauthorized copying of classified documents. Snowden, seemed to have foreknowledge of an actual crime or at least the government failing to follow a reasonable person’s expectation of it following a given law.
The South African Covid Strain Requires a ~Zero Covid Strategy
When the company has numerous legal or illegal but usually unpunished methods to suppress the discussion, it can be very difficult to conduct the negotiations between employees necessary for the concise plan/contract you request.

Voting in a union is actually voting first that you opt in to a collective bargaining agreement, then negotiating the terms of the agreement among members. Later, negotiations are had with the company.

Your POV is common to many that will accept much less with certainty rather than working through a decent amount of uncertainty for the prospect of a whole lot more.
> Typically that means higher salaries, better work conditions, more benefits, and similar things.

Nominally but it just isn't so. The strongest bargain an employee has is a competitor. What makes G salaries high is that there are other companies competing for the same talent.

The fundamental way unions increase wages is by constricting supply: by being part of the hiring process and blocking people, or by putting conditions that make people that would otherwise be eligible to work. In the end unions end up being very ineffective, and their administration cost ends up not worth it, thus the only way to get any leverage is with the law.

If unions had their way, it would be illegal to drive a lyft. Whoops, that happened.
If I were a Union rep in a tech company, the first thing I would do is kick out immigrants. Easiest way to increase wages for (remaining) tech workers.
> Do people who don't publish their views not filled with ideological fervor?

I mean, that's pretty much exactly what fervour means? We'd never say "Joe is a fervent supporter of X!" if Joe never talked about X.
World of Warcraft: Corrupted Blood (Pandemic)
Splitting hairs over the difference between political thought and ideology is ridiculous in my opinion.
Most automotive workers in Japan are unionized, so that sounds more a problem with comparable executive decision making than anything to do with labor organizing.
Direct link: https://alphabetworkersunion.org/press/releases/2021-01-04-c...
> Part of the reason for public employee unions is to protect the members specifically from political interference.

That’s one side of the coin. The other side is to be a large enough entity to influence elections and then “negotiate” with those you helped get elected. Is it any wonder that states with large public service unions are in debt (even with high taxes) and have unsustainable pension obligations?

I’m not blaming a party here either. Democrats and Republicans tend to align with teachers and police respectively here and it creates the same problem.

It’s why public employees should never be allowed to unionize. FDR himself expressed this of all people. It’s an inevitable path to corruption. We can’t expect a reasonable “collective bargaining” when both sides of the negotiations are in bed.
That certainly sucks, and I'm absolutely against violence in strikes. Of any kind.

But have you considered that perhaps without the union, that strike would have been even worse? Those workers likely decided to do those things on their own, not with union involvement. If they'd been striking without a union to rein them in, things might have been worse.

Of course, it's possible there would have been other problems, especially for the non-union workers.

I'm fairly anti-union, but there are definitely times when I see them as a necessity. My working conditions are not such that I think a union is necessary or even desirable, but mine workers are one situation where I think that unions do their jobs.