skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster.

I am such a person. For most workers, you're right that a union will probably increase wages. But for me, it will do the opposite. In most jobs I have worked, I ended up paid significantly more than counterparts in the same job. I usually was better at my job and put in more hours, so this was warranted. And for promotions, I don't see how this is wrong: most every union of which I'm aware ends using seniority as a factor in promotions, which I generally resent.

I never liked the mandatory nature of unions, either. If they're that good for workers, quit trying to force the whole company to join. I also hate the idea of being forced to strike.

As far as my interests are concerned, a union would end up taking money and promotions from me and giving it to others. So, I will always vote against them. If one shows up at my workplace, I will probably move because someone else offers better terms of employment.
The default mode when operating with data is to assume there’s no causation. Doing otherwise creates room for too many misconceptions and erroneous interpretations.
And before that, Stanisław Lem's novels.
Qt LTS repositories going comercial-only, starting tomorrow
FAT32 also has a 4 Go file size limit (think large video/VM files, DVD/Blu-ray images…)
I read it as a commentary on where the US could hypothetically end up if one just lets morals to erode slowly without bounds.

Obviously comparing in terms of absolute metrics is not going to be very similar since US and China are very different countries, but at the same time, if the hypothetical came to pass, it wouldn't be the first time in history that a "modern", "powerful" country fell into ruin.
A consideration I see is the tradeoff between security and convenience.

Where email appears as a push notification on an imap idle configured email account, email can be far more unreliable, even with the best transactional email services.
Overdose deaths are up 40%, to 81,000 in 2020:

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...

Suicides and homicides also up. Given that these deaths will occur for people with a typical age of 40, vs 80 for COVID, substantially more years of life have been lost from lockdown (which seems to have achieved little anyway), than from COVID.
As someone who is from the west every time I mention the potential depravity of China it’s met with denial or question - even sometimes here.
Because the UI for managing client certificates is terrible, with no real support for distributing a cert to multiple endpoints unless you're in an enterprise environment with device management, or issuing smart cards and readers. I do think there's legs in client certs for enterprise authentication, but for consumer products it's a non-starter.
As other posters have mentioned, offshore is significantly more economical for a number of reasons (stronger, more consistent wind; large tracts of available area for large-scale farms; the capability to build turbines much taller where they can access stronger winds) - so instead I'll mention another problem facing offshore turbines other than corrosion: the air.

It turns out that offshore, the air contains a lot of minerals and water droplets that make it much more abrasive than the air over land. This is a particular problem for turbine blades, as their leading edge is moving through the air at a significant speed: enough to gradually ablate away the leading edge material! Consequently, offshore turbine blades need to be replaced more often than onshore turbine blades. This is one of the reasons that larger turbines are more economical: fewer larger turbines mean fewer, larger blades that need to be periodically replaced.
Serious question:
If I'm interested in getting a better understanding of the physics of semiconductors (starting around "atoms have protons and electrons" and ending around "...therefore an NPN transistor should act as a switch in this setup and a current source in this setup"), where would be a good, Spears-less place to learn this?
The main problem with a hundred meter long blade is going to be finding somewhere to put it. Maybe they'll end up as artificial reefs or polders. Or maybe in the intervening 20+ years somebody will develop a technique for recycling glass-epoxy composites.
First, thank you for writing this, It's really cool to see others entrepreneurs sharing their experience, I believe this post here will help you a lot, I agree with many opinions here, the main thing would be the MVP opinion, you are focusing too much on secondary features(like PDF export) and could not finish the primary feature I guess (if yes you should launch it).

I am a developer and entrepreneur, I have sold a SAAS product 3 years ago and will sold my other SAAS this year(much bigger), I built entirely my SAAS products.

As almost everybody here said you are being too perfectionist, I would suggest you focus on the main feature, the feature that was mentioned when you had the interest of that first customers, make sure this features works well and launch it, then improve it.

After you have your first 2 or 3 clients you will see your motivation go higher, all the team will be motivated, also, these customers will ask for critical things that you forgot, but when they suggest things you have to be critical and think if the feature will benefit multiple customers, not just the guy who asked, doing this in 3 months you gonna have a good product.

I really would suggest you stop writing tests in this moment, takes time and probably in the future the code will change, which will require 2x work, but if you think you are fast doing this is okay.

Another thing I would suggest is just comment features that are not finished and you think are not part of the primary feature, don't try to finish those things, just comment it out, if some customer asks for this in future you finish it.

My approach is a bit radical, but I learned this way, customers will ask for stuff that matters at some point, if they think the primary feature is good enough, and for you to know if is good enough, you need to launch it, just make sure it works ;).
Getting workflows re-established, any integrations you had developed or otherwise come to depend on may not work, you will probably lose history, etc.

Plus, it will just take a long time to get everyone on board and using the replacement system. My department is slowly plodding towards using Teams over Slack, but there are enough hold-outs (my sub-department being one of them) that it still doesn't have wide-spread adoption.
Show HN: Visualising Co-Occurrence of Publishers and Genres in Video Game Sales
I'm the opposite. Back when in my early teens, friends and I would attempt to hijack opposing groups' channels via takeovers during net-splits (and ofcourse having the same done to us). What a time to be alive.
Isn't the problem with this that it means your account is tied to your browser install? Eg, you'd need to copy the cert to another machine to sign in, would need to ensure it's backed up, etc.
Scryfall.com (a Magic the Gathering search engine and deck building site) does this and the experience is very nice. I'd have to check, but the session Scryfall uses feels pretty long. I rarely, if ever have to authenticate again on the same browser/machine. This would likely be more annoying if I had to do it every day.
Pretty much every politician ever has used manipulative language to try to make themselves sound better than they are. It's why abortion activists call themselves pro-life/pro-choice. To take their words at face value is incredibly naive. For example, the line about "economic justice" almost certainly means the authors believe the company should be used as a propaganda vehicle for socialism/communism. And the line about a "welcoming environment" is an outright lie as shown by these same employees' bullying and harassment of numerous wrong-thinking employees (James Damore and Miles Taylor come to mind as a few examples).
BadEconomics: Putting $400M of Bitcoin on your company balance sheet
Can't ruin something that's already ruined.
Training, integration with proprietary internal systems, sheer momentum in the employee base, justifying or even creating a metric to show cost savings of a migration effort, business processes that rely on a specific feature of existing infrastructure needing to be met, the uncertainty of new vs the certain and known instability of something you have....

If you had a small shop with a dozen tech-savvy people and Slack became a problem which was used exclusively for quick business chats, you could probably push a change to another chat platform the next day. You might struggle when you have thousands of employees, some that needed training to use Slack and still aren't that proficient.
It's possible to make this argument about Afghanistan, but Iraq was completely unrelated to 9/11.
Hey thats protestantism for you...
What's your opinion of trade unions in Norway, which seem to me like they work quite well for everyone?
The Kerala state government is doing an initiative to map Kerala in OSM, school-college students volunteer to map many places. It's been almost running for an year now : https://mapathonkeralam.in/

Many people doesn't know about OsmAnd yet, I've been using it full time now. For some places, OSM is more informative than gmaps and vice-versa. The data is increasing day by day, so it's a win-win for every OSM based app here. [OSM was used extensively during Kerala floods 2018 : https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2018_Kerala_Floods,_Indi... which prompted the government to take initiative such as Mapathon Keralam.
Off tangent: Why are there so many apps that name their apps with the following structure {insert word} + "ly"
Idea feedback requested: “State machines as a service”
I frequently run into the problem of "lifecycle management" for various entities. In short, when some "thing" is created in our system e.g. an "order", "user" etc... a semi-automated song and dance commences between customer service, customers, and community members, over the course of days or weeks...

For example:

- Order lifecycle: New, Awaiting Shipment, Pending cancellation, Awaiting Review, Disputed, etc... The problem isn't defining the states, but rather defining who could make a transition and when.

- Listing lifecycle management: Pending Review, Closed, Sold, Banned, Open, etc... Once again the complexity arises when we try to define which transition is allowed by which user, and at what point.

- Community membership management: Awaiting confirmation, Active, Probation, Banned

My idea was to create a low-code platform where you can easily design and deploy state machines. The goal would be that once you define the entity lifecycle (the state machine), You could just send us an API request anytime a new entity was created in your system, and we would handle involving the key people needed at the right times, sending notifications, status updates, etc...

An example: https://imgur.com/a/mr5Pdss

The above represents an order's lifecycle. Once deployed, you could send an "order" to this service to kickoff execution:

1) Purchased - sends a notification to customer service that a new order was purchased. The "Customer Service" role (“C”), can take the action "confirm availability", which when taken, transitions the entity into state "Confirming Availability".

2) Confirm availability - Whoever is assigned to the "warehouse" role (“W”) would receive a notification that the order is in this state, and once they confirmed availability, could either take the action "available" or "unavailable" transiting to the order to the appropriate state.

etc…

Does any of this make sense, or have I gone off the deep end?
It would be really, drastically lovely if that were to happen. For bonus points, encrypt the client certs with a master password and sync between a user's devices.
Coding, which funnily enough is what I did for money.

I've only got a three month garden leave and I thought I'd spend it playing golf and reading, but it turns out I want to write code.
The 'personal agenda' refers to the fact that it is unclear whether these values represent the opinion of an overwhelming majority at Google.

Some of these statements are _actually_ controversial. (Without saying whether I personally agree with them or not -- I am saying that they are far from being universally accepted.)

Examples:

> All aspects of our work should be transparent, including the freedom to decline to work on projects that don’t align with our values.

Not sure how the company should approach this exactly. I'll bring up some extreme (and maybe stupid) examples. Let's say Google wants to monetize the Google search page even more, while employees working in the UX team disagree with this direction. Should Google be able to let them go (in case there's no other UX role in the company) or not?

> Our decisions are made democratically, not just by electing our leaders who set the agenda, but by actively and continuously listening to what workers believe is important.

This approach of corporate decision making practically doesn't exist anywhere, and there's not much proof that it'd work, so I consider this controversial.

> Social and economic justice are paramount to achieving just outcomes. We will prioritize the needs of the worst off. Neutrality never helps the victim.

Google had a massive impact on the world by creating the search engine and broadening access to information to people around the world. Should it have other social missions as well? What should those be? What happens if the company's core mission (organizing the world's information) becomes at odds with other social mission(s)?

Normally the leaders of the company are responsible for making decisions here.

> Everyone deserves a welcoming environment

I think this is something most people would agree with, if there weren't many examples of people abusing these policies.

> We prioritize society and the environment instead of maximizing profits at all costs. We can make money without doing evil.

Sure, no reason to not agree with this sentence. Question is: how is this actionable? Who is going to decide what's evil, what's worth it? By default the executives do, that's their job.
It isn't about the employee choosing to do a shitty job because the pay is low. It is about the super talented, smart, ambitious person never going into the field in the first place because the pay is shitty.
Perhaps it is a large number of people checking into channels that are backlogged with lots of bot message notifications.
Vacation days compensation for being on call
Graphics Studies Compilation
You think Uber's marketing people are extreme outliers compared to the typical large company?
Nice of you to ignore the majority of the world's population who have been up and working long before America woke up.
Me too. However it won't let me open DMs to certain people.
We are already on our way to full blown censorship. Cancel culture et al is effectively the beginning of the same outcome. Censorship starts with chilling effects
Slow death of Google as the company we know it today is not a bad thing.
MyCred – Bitcoin Files for Bankruptcy
It does not offer the full experience. It has no breakloop and no ability to browse and edit the live running environment. It has no ability to rummage around inside the dynamic environment of a suspended function call, much less to redefine the suspended function or the types of its parameters, nor to restart the suspended call. Indeed, the JVM makes some of that stuff really inconvenient to do.

You cannot do everything from the Clojure repl in the way you can from a Common Lisp repl or from a Smalltalk worksheet.

I don't know that the Clojure language design forbids it; you might, for example, implement Clojure on top of a Lisp or Smalltalk environment and hook up their tools to Clojure through its interop. That might work, and ruricolist has been working on such an implementation called Cloture:

https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture

But existing Clojure implementations don't have the full set of tools.
I cannot get to slack in my phone or in the browser.

I wonder if this is because I haven't used the phone app in a few days, so I was already logged out, but you and others were still logged in?
In practice, as we've seen numerous times with CoC squabbles, being known to harbor certain political attitudes that are well within the American Overton window will create allegations that you're make people feel unsafe.

For example, if one posts "All Lives Matter" on social media they could easily fall afoul of a "welcoming environment" provision.
Agreed with Tropico - great tongue in cheek setting and feel. For whatever reason though, which I can't quite put my finger on, the gameplay in T6 just feels worse to me than T4/5, as if its been dumbed down
Are you not proving my point by bringing the conversation back to "how will unionization impact engineers"?

> Before going all-in on unions, consider if you’re ready to start making it harder for Googlers to get fired or make it more difficult for someone to get promoted based on their work rather than seniority (number of years worked).

There _are_ issues around Google employees being terminated unfairly -- mostly around those who dare to speak out (most recently and notably, Dr. Gebru).

While I do think that poor performers should be fired regardless of seniority, I also think that the current process for identifying and removing poor performers is both inefficient and, frankly, cruel.

After receiving poor performance ratings, an engineer may have responsibilities slashed (thereby making it more difficult to demonstrate level-appropriate impact) and put onto a performance improvement plan (to demonstrate impact, but also siloed from the rest of the team). To add insult to injury, due to performance ratings, the engineer will have compensation slashed to effectively the salary band for a lower level. If the engineer does not meet the lofty goals by the end of the 3-month period, management may offer an ultimatum: take this severance package and voluntarily resign, or go through the review that you most likely will fail, and get nothing when you're fired.

Meanwhile, it can take two performance cycles (i.e. a full year) to identify and remove poor performers, during which time said poor performer can drag down an entire team.

It is already a meme at Google that the easiest way to achieve L+1 (i.e. get promoted) is to leave and re-apply at a higher level after a year or two at a different company. While I don't advocate promoting primarily based on seniority, I _do_ think Google does need to invest more on building up leadership by promoting from within, rather than encouraging people who want to break into senior leadership to leave Google.
Same, but when I go to view the message it hangs.
You might appreciate matrix.org / element.io if you haven’t seen them yet
I don't think that's true, just that fraud is different on those platforms. I suspect it depends on how you define fraud but certainly if a platform tells me I'm bidding to show adverts to customers who match criteria X, then I expect them to match that criteria.

Unfortunately, that's frequently not the case.

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...
I will never understand why they don't schedule the talks with gaps in between them.
Several IRC servers do have support for authentication and access control (and audit trails as well I suppose).

Only centralized history/logging and search would need to be bolted on if needed.
In the non-centralized case your IRC client takes care of all of that.
We just had a thread about the abusive conditions at apple. A union could help address that behavior.
I'm a Carl. I'm also looking for a coworker who was trying to contact me. If it's about last saturday, I promise nothing really happened between me and her, but I'm sure she already told you.
> Also, bit flips in the non-ECC memory are _the_ cause of the "bitrot" phenomenon. That is when you write out X to a storage device, but you get Y when you read it back. A common explanation is that the corruption happens _at rest_. However all drives from the last 30+ years have FEC support, so in reality the only way a bit rot can happen is if the data is damaged _in transit_, while in RAM, on the way to/from the storage media.

Problems can definitely happen in the IO controller, RAID controller, cable, and disk controller. AFAIK all of these were seen and motivations for the existence of ZFS. One of their biggest insistence was that drives are universally lying bastards and should not be trusted any further than they can be thrown.
What a crazy story! I suspected this was, under the surface, the tale of a douchey foreign archaeologist pissing off the locals, but no. Ruth Shady Solis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Shady) is Peruvian, and teaches at the National University of San Marcos in Lima.

The "family of squatters" who bring in a backhoe kind of sounds like Ammon Bundy's clan.
Democracy in the US is seen by some people as the rule of the majority, therefore infringes personal rights and freedom.

Prioritizing the environment? Straight from the radical liberal left playbook. It means allowing my children die of hunger because I can’t find a job so a dolphin survives.
> We’re still investigating the ongoing connectivity issues with Slack. There's no additional information to share just yet, but we’ll follow up in 30 minutes. Thanks for bearing with us.

Seems to be working intermittently, however.
You'll have a nice beta test to observe in 2021, as people who don't take a vaccine will be phased out from the society. Restricting payments seems like a good way to do it.
Technology as force multiplier. If your job was generating energy directly, you'd struggle to manage more than 100W continuous and quickly get bored of pedalling.
The lies and propaganda are nothing new. The name of the game has always been to build the constituency for your issue by hook or crook. Absolute truth was never a requirement, only majority opinion. And Joe Schmoe's tweets are absolutely a part of the power structure of the country. They are the drops of water that form the wave. I have worked on policy and advocacy in Washington and seen it all in motion. Individuals, groups, states, companies, professions and each of their dollars in a mad scramble. In all its chaos, I believe our system continues to work as intended.

I would much rather be called a pragmatist than a patriot.
Thanks for sharing this.

Given that the coral microbiome has a complex composition, I'd be curious to see how this could offer consistency in measuring coral health across different species.
Out of the Matrix: Early Days of the Web
If it is not entitlement, it is greed. I don't say greed is wrong or should be forbidden, just that they should be honest about it.
I think they meant put through a metal detector? Assange was put on suicide watch (whether justifiedly or not I do not know) so presumably they're checking for weapons he could harm himself with, still seems like overkill though.
Perhaps one the main reasons is that a large number of people use multiple devices or even multiple browsers on the same device. Not sure how SSL client certificate authentication accommodates that.
Down for me in both the client and the website. :P

Reminds me of the fact their home page redirects endlessly when JavaScript is disabled.
You might like irccloud; it's a web client (similar to slack) and bouncer, with support for image uploads, has a decent app, preserving history and I think it supports search too.
My thought was everyones local cache was expired and it's re-syncing everyone. Supposedly they run vitess for mysql sharding, and that could mean they're getting slammed by a lot of scatter or cross shard queries they can normally handle.