skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"but there are many universities that will fully cover all tuition (and sometimes more) if you are under a certain income threshold. See: University of Texas."

The University of Texas's program is:
1.) Recent
2.) Covers students enrolled at the time the program went into affect. It doesn't cover recently-graduated students.
3.) Only covers Texas residents (meaning it's irrelevant to a conversation about Amazon employees in Alabama)
4.) Only covers tuition, not cost of living. Cost of living, of course, is more than half of total cost of attendance at the University of Texas.

Go ahead. Ask me how I know what it's like to be a low-income student at the University of Texas.

> "You’re also narrowly scoping this to talking about one of the largest and fanciest universities in the state."

I scoped it to one of two public universities near Bessemer, Alabama. UAB isn't the flagship campus, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. By the way, the other public university near Bessemer is the University of Montevallo. It has a cost of attendance of 27,845 per year for in-state students.

> "And of note, Amazon actually pays for up to 95% of tuition/fees for warehouse workers who choose to pursue associates degrees."

Is that generous? Yeah. To some extent. But keep in mind the following:

1.) It only applies to associates degrees.
2.) The yearly payout is $3,000 (for full-time employees, half that for part time)
3.) You have to have worked for a year to be eligible
4.) Amazon only covers certain degrees

You also have to continue working a demanding job with irregular hours. It's not nothing, I agree. But I've worked other non-skilled jobs with much more generous tuition reimbursement packages (including, but not limited to: eligibility for dependents, unrestricted major choice, applicability to four-year degrees, and more generous yearly maximums).

> "This is the kind of stuff that needs to be kept in mind to understand why Bessemer residents don’t all see Amazon as evil."

I never said anything about Amazon being evil, or whether Bessemer residents see Amazon as evil. In fact, if you look at my posting history, I've been very upfront that I am an employee of Amazon.

Further, 'not being evil' and 'providing more then the federal (or state governments)' is a very low bar to cross. It doesn't obviate the need for a union.
My wife bought me a new fitbit for Christmas (mine is getting old, frequently just loses it's charge, etc). It would not allow me to initialize it without syncing to my phone, which had to be running their app. I wound up returning it because I don't _want_ to run their app on my phone.

I even looked into if it might be possible to work around the issue. Turns out, the fitbit, which is advertised as having a GPS, actually uses your phone's GPS. It has one of it's own, but it's apparently absolute garbage; it's inaccurate and it drains the battery extremely fast.

I'm still using my barely functionalit fitbit charge 2.
I have prior experience with a friend deciding to get into shady Internet ripoff stuff. They definitely were ashamed to discuss it with me and ended up trying to lie about it so they wouldn’t lose me as a friend. I don’t contradict that some would be unashamed, but I encourage giving more credence to the human capacity for cognitive dissonance.
The ultimate solution to wealth inequality is to destroy all wealth. Bring it to $0. Everyone's equal. Is that a win? Or is there perhaps more to the story worth considering than inequality? Overall wealth, number of jobs, ability to get hired and promoted...? If you have charts on those things I'd be interested.
Absolutely. For many homeless people, having to move into a hotel room would require some serious downsizing (here's one of the more extreme examples in LA- https://i.redd.it/arq8wlg5qfk61.jpg)
Can vouch for it, it is my favourite option on the Java side, no need to try track down ORMs performance issues.
Or you could, you know, use any kind of backup/restore software, spend like 5 minutes to learn how to use it, and use those many hours invested in learning Nix to watch football and drink beer :-)
Actually these days you can send coloured images with Telegram, it is really really smooth although I don't think the Queen will want to depend on it ;-)
A few extremely vocal customers, and a few extremely vocal employees, mostly in the U.S.

People in other parts of the world seem to be aghast at what's happening in the U.S. because either a) they've tried on these kinds of political systems themselves and fled them in horror or overturned them already, or b) they see it as theater because all of the recommended actions are superficial or actively harmful.

The term "Outrage-Industrial Complex" is so apt here.
> Sorry, are you seriously trying to claim an HSA is better than universal healthcare?

I think it can be. Depends on the details but an HSA comes with a high-deductible plan. This is normally ideal for young people, who are generally healthy and only need insurance for rare catastrophic illness or serious accidents. Normal, routine care (checkups, immunizations, etc.) can be budgeted and paid out of the HSA tax-free. I don't see why that stuff should be "free" for most people, any more than groceries or utilities or housing should be.
That sounds like an incredibly selfish decision; for-profit healthcare is the reality in the United States (where I'm guessing you're from), so why deny others that benefit just because of the system?
That's some solid historical revisionism is action here :-)

That period you mention was definitely due to stagnation, on Sun's part. It wasn't "watch the pioneers as the crash and burn and pick the good parts". It was "we're stuck".
I mean, I've literally done this for the birth year of an actor I went to school with, and had the above insta-revert happen, and watched pages get deleted on notability because the person nominating for deletion hadn't heard of one of the most prestigious literary awards in the UK.

I'm willing to accept that each person's experience is different, perhaps it's just unfortunate, but it seems to marry up with a lot of other self-reported wikipedia experiences I've seen on HN over the last several years.
"and managing hospital bills that would soon follow. The donor network takes over medical costs once a patient officially enters the program, but there was still the matter of the pricey care that preceded it."

It never occurred to me that the American healthcare system is so ruthless that even if someone dies your family has to pay for your care. How absolutely cruel and awful.
VPN by Google One: Technical Security and Privacy Assessment
Mostly it is a matter of making one change to the inputs you control at a time and then seeing what changes. Trial and error, but there typically isn't a lot of error as you quickly see what inputs cause what changes and learn to ignore the other fields. Though if the protocol uses encryption you are probably screwed.

If I wanted to figure out the fields he doesn't understand I'd rig up some sort of stepper motor/servo to the pedals so I can precisely control the input, and then start changing things. Go from 0 - 120 rpm in .5 rpm increments, with a change every 15 seconds. Then go from 0 - 60 (or 90) rpm, but over many different accelerations.

I used to work for a company that made automotive scan tools and we did this all the time with the automakers official scan tools. Even though the auto makers gave us a lot of documentation, what they did and what the docs say they do is different. (We even had a full time employee who worked at GM's offices with access to GM's source code and rights to pass on the algorithms used: and we still found it valuable to do the above to GM scan tools to work out what they really did)
Ah, for the same reason that you pay someone's estate for their land rather than just take it for the good of everyone. We do not consider one's remains the property of one's estate, strictly. We only recognize one's right to interment or alternative disposal to be executed by one's kin etc. I believe this is wrong. I have spent quite a few decades growing me and ownership of this body must rest more strongly with my estate than any other possession I have.

In keeping with that, I intend to retain the right to disposal of this possession as I see fit.

EDIT-response:

user munk-a: I think I am content to have my body treated just as other property that I have owned in my life. If inheritance laws prohibit inheriting property but permit putting it in a never-dying trust, then I will prefer that my body be treated as such. If all property is transferred to the state upon death, then so be it for my body. I am not anti-social. I merely have this one (apparently peculiar) view on ownership of one's body.
If you were in a life-or-death situation, would you accept an organ without paying the donor’s family an appropiate fee?
The issue is X11 as we know it has no developers left. If nobody is around to maintain it, the world will move on, no ramrod necessary. More info: https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server...
Buttons do something.

Links go somewhere.

Don't cross the streams.
Unemployment -> desperation -> crime
This seems like a reasonable change for SpaceX to enact. I am surprised it wasn't already encrypted.
He knew he was committing fraud. He thought he could get away with it.
Most people who are immigrants have almost by definition a better-than-average work ethic. You can see this if you know a bunch of people from country X when you live in country Y (where Y is usually a country "better off" than X), and then you go visit country X. You'll see that the "expats from X" you see while living in Y may be of a higher caliber (e.g. entrepreneurial, in your example), the people who did not expatriate do not often contain the same values.

As someone who lived in the US for a long time and now lives in Europe, I can tell you that all of the Americans I've met over here (who are not vacationing) are incredibly driven and entrepreneurial. They do not at all reflect the average American back in the US (e.g. I don't know a single Trump supporter over here; the Democrats Abroad caucus typically goes far more liberal than any state, supporting Bernie Sanders in 2016 by a very wide margin).
This seems so odd to me, the UK as a country switched to WhatsApp due to there always being a decent % of Android users amongst all groups of friends
Release Radar · March 2021 Edition
For me it's send reliability, delivery/read receipts, and file size limits (the aforementioned video/image/GIF quality).

Those are all surmountable things with chat apps and other third party software, but the beauty of iMessage is that I can make all that work with all my non-technical family members without having to explain anything. I can't get my parents to install something like Discord or Signal.

iMessage also recently introduced threading, and although it's not as good as something like Slack it's nice to have.

Some other nice features include sharing of attachments that MMS doesn't support like PDF files and contact cards.

The next big advantage is that seeing a blue bubble when you type in a phone number or receive a message is a relatively reliable indicator that you're about to talk to a human on a real cell phone and not a bot or spammer.
leolabs' next anticipated contact with SL-8 R/B 12443 is at 21:06UTC https://platform.leolabs.space/catalog/L5136#next-planned-pa...

next anticipated contact with OPS 6182 at 20:00UTC https://platform.leolabs.space/catalog/L11618#next-planned-p...

So what's that, about 90 minutes from now assuming I've got the right info?
If schemes were regulated out of existence, then eventually there would be a huge population of gullible suckers who won’t recognize a Ponzi scheme.

Much like how most American don’t barter anymore for little things so they’re easy pickings at a car dealership. Or if everybody quits drinking alcohol, you’ll know less people who’ve had liver failure, causing next generation to not know the risks, etc
This is exactly why the vote was probably the most pragmatic decision. A vote for unionization would have been brave and symbolic. But why should blue collar people in Alabama have to sabotage their livelihoods to make a point?
I think you just have known precisely what I meant
The contract provisions described regarding these high end unions are doom and gloom though.

Contract provisions that screw over newcomers, and set up additional barriers to entry are not good.

I do not want the tech industry to discriminate against new comers, or developers who don't have a CS degree, or H1Bs more than it is already doing so.

And that is what those kinds of unions do to the industry. They setup barriers to entry to target these groups.
> By every metric, unions provide massive, tangible benefits to most members

Mind citing your source or perhaps one example of a good union? I'm genuinely curious
It is not Amazon's fault but there is nothing legally preventing them from doing better. That is a choice by Amazon. They offer worse health insurance for more money than I have available to me.
I am kinda surprised at that part. Why would the family be responsible for his costs beyond what insurance would cover? It is not their debt.
I signed up to become a donor a few months ago!

I don't know if my organs will be used when I die, but I sure hope so. There's some sort of zen feeling knowing that my death may result in someone's life being saved or made easier. The decision was quite easy to make. That initial talk with my family was a bit of an awkward subject to bring up, but that's about the only unpleasant side to it.
I don't think it is absurd or inconsistent. The UAW works very hard and effectively at ensuring that GM, Ford, and Chrysler hire as few non-union employees as possible. The UAW has monopolized the autoworkers labor market and thus have historically been able to extract great rents from it.

GM, Ford, and Chrysler on the other hand can do practically nothing to prevent a machinist or welder from leaving to work at literally thousands of other companies in dozens of industries across the country that require those skills.
Wow thats fascinating. So there's no way in I imagine... are their trades public?
You conveniently chose one of the wealthiest countries with the highest wages. Here is a more realistic look at monthly min wages across the region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
That link seems to imply they embracing GBM by implementing a backend for it.
I get the spirit and a m familiar with the CAC and general benefits, and using that for all .gov stuff is attractive (taxes, bills, FASFA, etc)

I think you’re glossing over two major implementation factors that need to be part of the discussion from get-go:

* how much CAC use is dependent on fairly specific govt tech infra to be widely deployed, and how will that work for everyone (ever tried to setup a CAC on a civ computer)

* key control, either extremely decentralized like the iPhone (lock yourself out of your passport?), or extremely centralized and the newest honeypot OPM holds (root cert for all e-citizen PKI). US currently doesn’t have the internal cybersec chops to run that at all (closest equivalent is CISA).
If your domain has had HSTS for at least a year (long enough to be recognized by modern browsers) then you should be good. If not, then you'll still need port 80 for redirects.
It's very interesting - sort of like college athletics. Everyone makes good to insane money - except the people taking the big health risks and/or putting in the hours.

A lot of moral outrage at the idea here though usually from folks getting rich off the industry.

There have been proposals to do something like $10 - $20K for a liver. The way to get around the outrage mob is usually to point out the health risks, impacts on life a quality of life etc.

In short, if you were in a car crash and lost a liver, you'd be getting a big pay day for those things.

Normal split is 1/3 or so to hospital, and 2/3 kept by donor network admins I think for the fees they charge for Organ acquisition. Donor Network West in CA does $90M a year or so I think? I'm not sure what annual fees are nationally, I'd expect in the 100's of millions range (this does not include all the costs to actual do the transplant).

That said, any discussion on this type of topic tends to attract of one liner type attacks from the outrage folks - so not usually worth having.

But folks are thinking about how to dramatically increase donor rates because it is so impactful. Other options have been to pay $100 - 500/year you list as a donor etc which would save incredible numbers of lives at what is relatively low cost. I heard one funny idea which was to do this for folks who get M class licenses (motorcycles). The idea was to both scare them about the risks of riding a motorcycles and of course they really are more likely to be a donor per mile riden (I'm a rider, and the stats are actually terrible in contrast to other things people worry about)
EarBuds Washer
What an American sentiment.
There are pros and cons to unionization, but imo not all workers should unionize. Most of my hardcore union friends think I'm "anti union", even though I think some workers should unionize for their own good (I'm looking at you, non-tenured college professors.)

I come from a union town. My grandfather was a union organizer and disowned his sister for crossing a picket line. My mother worked in a union her whole life. My father was a union steward, then halfway through his career entered management and had grievances filed against him. I was - briefly - a dues-paying member of a union as a teenager (IBEW) for my summer job. I have many friends in trade unions (plumbing, electrician, etc.) and I have friends in SAG.

The relatively high standard of living I enjoyed as a child was in large part the result of my parents being in unions.

Sure, mom had to sometimes see less skilled co-workers get promoted before her due to seniority, but she wouldn't have had the good pay, benefits, or job security without the union. That's the trade-off, and for her it was worth it in the long run.

However, the downside of a union encouraging low productivity can be very real.

Case in point - where my father worked, the union was so entrenched that the high seniority factory workers were making as much as local software developers (nothing necessarily wrong with that), but their productivity was far below workers doing the same job in a non-unionized factory being paid far less in another state. When they were asked to increase productivity to meet that level, they balked. For years. Then went on strike. And as a result, at least partly, that business was sold off and a lot of them were laid off.

It's always a set of trade-offs but I think plug-and-play workers should organize. They need to be able to collectively bargain. They just don't have the same individual leverage like say, software developers.

The problem is that we're not in the heyday of unionization anymore. Few industries are unionized nationwide, so companies can just move to another state. Unions don't have the leverage they used to, so organizing can end up being a footgun. That might mean that business has too much of an advantage, not that unionization is bad, but it depends on your worldview. But without unions, it's just always going to be a race to the bottom for unskilled labor. How could it not be?

Trade unions and guilds (like SAG) are a totally different animal.

SAG is great because you work for an ephemeral production, not a company. Game development should definitely adopt this model, because games are really just movies now. You get your benefits through the union when you're not actively working, etc. Not a bad deal, and probably better for the production companies.

Trade unions - they restrict the supply of labor, driving prices up, but they police themselves and maintain quality. I would be uncomfortable hiring a non-union plumber for anything non-trivial.

Anyways, like I said, it's all a set of trade-offs, and those vary depending on the industry.
Why would it lock them in? There are a ton of other free messaging apps
This is Apple's most important support article. Customers who properly disconnect iMessage have no problem with this issue:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201351

Deregistration instructions are here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042
Once it gets too big the chance to get away with it gets really slim. If you steal some millions you can dissapear and If you aren't too stupid no one will find you and after a while everyone will forget you.
But with hundreds of millions you won't bei forgotten and the agencies will put enough manpower in finding you.
There is a lot of mysticism around our bodies once we pass on - and when that happens we've lost all the ability to bask in the honor of our act or receive the appreciation - but our bodies are also quite worthless to ourselves at that point and can be of an immense value to others.

Organ donation is a very sensitive subject since it can be viewed as losing the coherence of all that remains of someone, but the benefits to others can be extreme. This particular story involved someone getting a heart transplant and, while it was surely a loss that this individual died, after they died they enabled another person who had a limited lease on life to get a lot more time out of something that would have decayed in the ground or be cremated.
How true is this "Pee in a bottle" thing? It sounds like a single anecdotal evidence widely used as a prop for arguments. Is there a systemic "pee in a bottle" problem at Amazon? I have a hard time believing this.
Once again, I will ask for (what I believe is) an interesting piece of context ...

How many labs like this one are there in the world ? Are there 20,000 of them ? Are there 7 ?

Of the labs like this one in the world, how many of them are doing GoF research on coronaviruses ? 1200 of them ? 1 of them ?

This won't be conclusive but given the reasonable heuristics that I work with, having a sense of these proportions would go a long way ...
Fractional scaling is kind of the most visible thing today. But to be clear, there’s a lot of benefits to wayland.

Mostly the issues could be hacked around. But let’s be absolutely clear with this: it is hacking around the issue.

Problem: tearing, solvable with double buffering, maybe.

Problem: Xorg runs as root, solvable, there’s ways of making your user have direct control of the frame buffer device.

Problem: Xorg is a network system, and a porous one, meaning it’s possible to intercept keystrokes from any running program. Solvable by running a mini X11 instance for each program.

Problem: Xorg is a network system, meaning it is very inefficient. (Imagine using TCP to talk to your SSD)

Problem: Xorg needs to be backwards compatible, so it can’t dig much into hardware features. Especially as the client may not be on the same machine as the server.

Overall, wayland is a good clean slate, it’s been in development a long time. X11 has major warts and they are hard to clear out.
Whoa. To each their own, I guess. Maybe next time just say it conflicts with your beliefs?
You’re also narrowly scoping this to talking about one of the largest and fanciest universities in the state.
Wow, so low-income students should not aspire to go to schools as 'fancy' as U of Alabama?

Infuriatingly disingenuous argument.
That's why it's called donation.
"Here's exactly how these people should have voted" – legions of San Francisco software engineers making $550K/yr convinced that they know everything about the lives of warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama making $15/hr.