skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I love how I’m supposed to think a middle man acting on my behalf will somehow be better than me acting on my own behalf.

Because you do not think that when employees get together as a single negotiating entity they have more negotiating power? I mean, I understand you don't like unions but I am sure you understand the principle of balance of power.

> Unions are compulsory in blue states (non-right-to-work). They are also political entities funding specific candidates, parties, and causes which means union dues is compelled political speech. It’s crazy.

In those states you can ask to only pay the part of the dues that concern bargaining activities.
Why hasn't the market responded to demand for N95s? It's been almost 2yrs now and we're all still stuck using those blue surgical masks (which are mandatory in hospitals here in Ontaro, Canada) or whatever random stuff people buy, at best K95.

Are there some grueling regulatory rules in place or has no just bothered?

They just be getting pushed for mass production like the vaccines.
A cost of a nanny (on the books) or a full time 8am-6pm-ish day care 5 days a week in SF/NYC/Seattle

There aren't even that many options for parents, many under 5 day care companies won't do 10 hour days. Lots of "2s programs" which means 3 hours 3 times a week where I am.
*drools*
I switched to the iPhone 13 when it launched and have been giving Apple Maps a chance. I have experienced more frustration with Apple Maps vs Google Maps. It seems to always think I am slightly farther back on the road than I really am, which is a huge negative for any map app.
No. But it is useful and solves a lot of problems for me.

It's pretty easy to see who you and the interviewer know in common. That way we can get references and pass the interviews more easily. I'm very experienced and at my level, if I didn't have references it would be unacceptable. LinkedIn lets people instantly see who we both know so they can ask about me and get a reliable answer.

I do the same when I'm hiring. It helps with my confidence level.
One obvious difference is that plants evolved with animals (or influenced the evolution of animals) via an express food-providing mechanism. To eat the leaves or the fruit of a plant does not necessarily kill it; in fact, one could say that the plants evolved these parts in a symbiotic relationship with their animal eaters/caretakers. It's certainly possible to destroy a plant by eating it obviously, but how many examples of plants can you think of where it provides a detachable, replenishable food product?

Animals do not have similar food-providing mechanisms. When you eat an animal, or part of an animal, it'd dead. It doesn't grow back. It wasn't designed to.

All nutrition comes from plants (or the microbiology around them). All protein comes from plants. Anyone who equates the barbary of eating animals with eating plants is choosing to deceive themselves and others.
I've had to "upgrade" a couple to utf8, and varchar(255) bites me all the time.
There are a number of facets to this problem.

My own personal experience has been that learning existing math is not very hard and quite fun (YMMV of course and it also depends on how much pre-requisite knowledge is required to even approach the topic)

Once you've acquired the tools, applying them to solve actual engineering problems, also relatively easy (depending on the problem of course) and very fun.

However, solving math problems is a completely different game, and this is where (again for me), the discipline is the most frustrating.

Solving a math problem is like finding a path out of a dense forest, and some people seem to have a "natural compass" guiding them towards it.

For me (born w/o much of a compass), it's always felt like I have to recursively try all possible paths until I find the one that gets me there. Needless to say, if the forest is dense and thick enough, that's a completely hopeless endeavor.

For example, reading the proof to a theorem, assuming it uses tools, concepts and facts you're familiar enough with and does not take giant leaps (the infamous "from here it obviously follow that ...") is easy and can be fun.

But when I get to the QED, I'm always left wondering how the guy who first proved it effing found the path in the first place.

It's borderline disheartening.
And, related:
Fail-safe systems fail by failing to fail safe.
I think by contractors they meant all non-employees. Temps, vendors, etc. Google has over 100,000 of these and they do not all "know the deal" about how much worse their compensation / conditions will be compared to full time employees.
Brave started in 2015 on Gecko, using Graphene (FirefoxOS multiprocess/sandboxed app framework). We switched by end of year due to too many gaps (HTML5 DRM was a big one) and incompatibilities (mobile, mostly). Big spreadsheet, most rows netted out negative for Gecko. No way to change now, and a worse bet now based on Mozilla fundamentals.
You can if it's an average and you're not being overly literal about it. Don't break out a stopwatch and assume you're safe if you run out of the room before the average time is up.
Today's unions DO suck. In that they're becoming scarce and have grown largely ineffective at shielding workers from employer abuse. (Thanks in no small part to red tape introduced at the behest of corporate lobbyists.) And now that the corporations have beaten worker advocates into a useless bloody pulp they want them removed altogether so that they may exploit their workers with fewer constraints. Google, Amazon et al can fuck ALL THE WAY off.
Chrome will limit access to private networks, citing security reasons
The “selfish and myopic” people I know in states that don’t have mask mandates have happy kids who go to school and can look at each other’s faces and grow as humans.

Here in NYC we have woman yelling at kids to keep their masks on and they are in and out of school on a whim.

Who is being selfish and myopic?
Yeah, the company I work for has a COLA, and when inflation was 3% we got 3%, for a few years. Now that inflation is higher, they just suspended the COLA - we don't even get the 3%.

Soooooo, here I am on Hacker News posting during work hours!
Inflation in the sense that money is losing purchasing power, is always happening. It often doesn't perfectly reflect in consumer prices because business are hopefully becoming more efficient at some rate.

Exactly. This article is about consumer prices, and yet this discussion became about inflation. Even I conflated the two. I should have said "perceived inflation" or just "prices". Regardless, we're saying the same thing. As I illustrated with my own example from my business, I'm raising prices right now because:

1. I need to: all my vendors are raising their prices and I need to pay my employees more.

2. I am able to do so without consequences. My clients are all raising their prices too, in order to cover rising costs from their vendors (including me) and employees.

I'm perfectly willing to concede that inflation's always been happening (I'm not much of an economist) but that it took COVID to bring about a chain reaction of price increases that ordinary folks experience as "inflation".
Go figure the top comments on this thread echo how companies talk about unions.

“Oh unions can be good but those Americans don’t know their downsides…”

Or

“Unions are great but it’s awful people can be forced to join them!”

I’m just saying Google’s money was well spent.
I'm not sure how that would help? If you had a flywheel and you didn't need the energy, what do you do with it? At least without a flywheel, you can easily stop the turbine.

Also, any flywheel that would add significant difference would probably weigh hundreds of tonnes, which would make construction massively more expensive and difficult.
I'm sorry. My experience is that my MSSE made me look at software development in a different way and definitely gave me a much wider view of what was in front of me. Then again, my only out of pocket cost was parking, since my employer reimbursed everything except that.

Stuff like Project Management, Quality Control and even formal real-time system analysis are probably not concepts I would have learned on my own. Coming from an EE background, it definitely gave me a leg up. Not to mention the class discussions with people from widely varying software niches give really useful perspectives from outside your own little bubble.
And my point is the ROI would be moot if there wasn't a massive inflation of tuition to pay for things like water parks and sports arenas. If the tuition was in-line with previous generations, the ROI would mainly only be calculated with the labor opportunity lost while in college.
LinkedIn has been a great tool for me and was instrumental in getting my latest job. What started as an answer to a call for technical writers ended up in a full time job in my industry (web hosting) with people I'd never have known otherwise. So yeah. Why not? Sure, there are downsides to LinkedIn, but get what you want out of it, ignore the rest.
I’ve talked to my non-engineering family about how I switch jobs and they have a hard time understanding since it’s just so different than their experience with the job market. “Don’t you need to stay put so you have more seniority?” The concept of being in-demand and getting 20-50% pay raises every few years is insane to them. Me too, admittedly.
> one of the top contenders to watch is Form energy, which has a rust-based battery.

Form is still in the cell prototyping stage, as best I can tell - maybe not even that. There's zero information on their website about where they are in the development process or really anything substantial about their design.

ESS on the other hand has a design they've had out testing in the field for a couple years ( https://essinc.com/ess-inc-to-deliver-two-energy-warehouse-s... is one such location) and has been shipping actual product: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211115006337/en/ESS... and they've been pretty open about their design, though some of their old whitepapers have been removed from the site.

Competition in the market is certainly a good thing, but Form needs to do more than just have a shiny website, a screengrab of a zoom employee meeting, and a blog with 'industry insight' posts (because they have nothing to show for tech/product.)
> He hasn't made Wordle a business, so he has no business to lose.

Harm is not limited to business and finance. It's just as harmful when good, charitable works are subverted by companies looking for profit. If nothing else, consumers are harmed by having the superior free version hidden away, crowded out by the ad- and spyware-infested apps.

What those developers are doing is like charging an entrance fee to a public park, knowing many won't realize the park is free. But the park isn't a business, so there's no harm...
Sometimes, but not necessarily always. I'm in UCU, the UK academics' union. We're quite often on the same side as the students, and not on the same side as the government. We get substantial support from students' unions on the basis that 'your working conditions are our learning conditions'. Casualisation, for example, is seen as substantially damaging good quality teaching for pretty small financial gains - but teaching is not in practice seen as a major priority by government or senior university managers.

We don't represent the public. Whether we're working on behalf of the public depends on whether you think the government's position represents 'the public', and which part of the public you're most interested in. (The interests of childless taxpayers who don't believe in the importance of university education are not well represented by lecturers and their unions, surprisingly enough...)

I think what I'm saying is that some of the conflicts between unions and management are zero-sum, but others are not. And while public sector unions can narrowly represent a producer interest, that certainly isn't true of all situations.
Personally I am a lot more interested in the experiences and views of those who have been failed by the current system, rather than those who have found success within it.
Yeah a large pressure vessel is basically a bomb. No matter how many layers of protection you add on the technology always wants to go too a rapid critical failure. Using statistics and layers of protection you can always show it to be safe to handle anything but when you get to such low probability your models be always be off and variables that you think are independent are actually linked (bad maintenance practices being one)
Good round up (as others have pointed out, missing AGS).

I think it is important to add that different engines have varying success in actually producing commercial games. AGS is famous exactly because it has produced many, many successful games, often by solo developers. It is being challenged because it is so very old.

This is sort of the way people will not try a JS web framework for a major project till others have worked out the kinks.
No, I work in a US union that I'm very happy with. I have personally seen action on the ground preventing unfair discipline by management, passing people up for raises over personal vendettas, baseline quality of life stuff. I suspect that most people in a union in the US are quite happy with it.
Not GP, but I hadn't thought of this! That would be a great side effect of using the GPL now that I think about it.
> Database systems have subtle bugs and oddities, and you can avoid a lot of bugs by avoiding database systems.

Wat? That is... not a great takeaway from this experience. "Oh, this library had bug reported in it! I know, that means I should just write my own, because clearly they're all buggy and my software is always perfect."
Have you looked at the study itself? From the abstract: “Mask distribution and promotion was a scalable and effective method to reduce symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections.”

The existence of “debate” doesn’t mean anything. Anti-maskers are always going to dispute studies like this, no matter how clear the evidence
Mullvad and similar providers often colocate or rent servers from multiple local hosting providers. A group of servers going down for them would not be a big deal. Network boot is not difficult/expensive. Many of their servers are using 10Gbit uplinks+ so I take it they get pretty good deals for bandwidth. It isn't like Amazon or other cloud providers that charge an arm/leg for egress.

The point of not using local disks is again fairly straightforward, to show that they do not have a stateful storage medium to write logs to. Whether it significantly helps or not is beside the point, they have determined that it helps provide assurance to their customers and additionally showcases a feature for auditors.

Network booting loads the OS into RAM, so even if there was a network outage they'd have to restart the severs to cause a problem. From what I know of most VPN solutions though, again a network outage would only affect the group of servers at that data center which isn't their entire operation.
It was pretty rough last decade as well.
I never found a job via LinkedIn. I found a job via GitHub but I mainly found jobs in my personal network.

At first they were cheap startups, then they turned into better paying companies.

The jobs I get offered on LinkedIn are mostly paying less than 50% of what I'm making via personal contacts. A few can get to 90% of what I'm making.

I tolerate LinkedIn because I'm too lazy to have a CV and because it's nice to gauge how the market is changing by looking at their salary ranges. I also add everyone and ignore them if they're selling services / jobs I'm not interested in.
Sure, you just prepend mb_ to all php string calls >:)
Not a statistics expert by any measure (I'm sure many people here are) - but doesn't effect size play a role here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5878948/

If N95 masks in a virus laden environment are akin to parachutes when falling from an airplane - that's great news. I'm super happy to be educated on this given my unbroken record of never having been indoor in 18+ months without one. Happy to know that it's been making an absolute difference.
A lot of people look at these and think "that doesn't seem like it'd be remotely worth it for something that size" but it's really hard to explain just how badly California has painted itself into a corner on distant generation, huge variance between excess renewable capacity and peak load, and transmission congestion. The numbers don't make sense to people.

Pretty much all the solar plants we're putting in now have combined battery storage systems either for voltage support or "peaker" sales opportunities. In some places (like literal islands) it's about capacity smoothing or resilience, but the driving force behind all the investment is the US western interconnect with arbitrage opportunism starting to make real money and looking to make much, much more over the next decade.

If government-sachs is betting on this, they've probably got an even more pessimistic take on the CAISO market than I do.
For most people in lower wage jobs, the ability to switch job and vote with their feet is a lot more complicated than it is for tech workers. The balance of power is firmly on the employer side, yes even today with labor shortages. I'm sure you read about those amazon workers being blown up by tornados being denied the ability to go home. "They could have switched jobs!" shouldn't be the default answer.

So yes, pros and cons with unions, but let's not forget where the balance of power is right now.
> what am I missing?

Capitalism.

See the other post today on Google hiring anti-union consultants.
I would agree, the UX is really clunky. Apple Maps used to be a complete joke but I tried it out a year or so ago after they did a big push to update it. For driving it is really good, for public transport or biking it is very city dependent. However, outside of North America I think Google maps is still superior.
Because, one of them bought the competition, while other just built it themselves. (well, ignoring YT)
It was malicious about as much as flash no longer working, or nest thermostats.
Is that why their software is so good? Is that why they have better work life balance and higher pay?
Could be markdown, json, or edn right now. Ideally an api integration to other tools (Roam, Notion, etc.) to preserve as much structure as possible, but I understand that’s a long shot.
Bad abstractions tie together components that shouldn't have been tied together.

Too many bad abstractions are how you quickly end up with that "Bad code base" that you believe is difficult to change - Things are wrong because they're tied together in ways that don't actually make sense, and changing code to support refactoring one use-case creates a wave of cascading changes to other places those abstractions are touched/consumed. If you miss one, or forget an edge case, or have a skimpy test suite - suddenly that refactoring you're so keen on is what's introducing new things that are "wrong" - because they shouldn't have been tied together but were, and you don't understand or remember all of the edge cases.

Basically - My rebuttal is this: It's very easy to refactor a codebase with duplication and introduce an abstraction for the current behavior. It's very HARD to refactor a codebase riddled with abstractions that shouldn't be there.

This means that by default - abstractions should only be introduced very carefully. Refactoring is fine, but you're paying more to refactor a bad abstraction than to refactor duplication. Good programmers understand that most of their value isn't in what their code looks like - it's in what it does for the users. Duplication can feel dirty, and it tends to trigger a "puzzle game" mentality in a lot of programmers, who want to fit the pieces together to make it pretty. AVOID THIS INSTINCT.
What's the point of going through all this trouble when all content available on Netflix can be obtained more easily without silly restrictions?
> N95 masks fit very tightly, come in different shapes and sizes to fit different people, and will leave imprint marks on a persons face. This is beyond what the general public is really willing to go through, so they’re really not used many places outside of medical settings, and it’s not really realistic to have them properly fit tested by the general public.

That's not true. They're extremely common in construction for dealing with dust and paint aerosols. I wouldn't be surprise if that's the application they were actually developed for.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I had a bunch because I always use one when I sand or spraypaint.
> But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics."

We definitely talk about corporations in this way. All the time, in fact!
The difference is clear between states that require masks everywhere and states that don’t. Masks have no effect if they are mandated or not. My state has had every single new wave occur while already mandating masks.
Referring to the standard 'www' in www.example.com as a sub-domain may be a colloquialism, and it's probably fine in colloquial speech among non-experts. People to whom the distinction matters (eg, the people configuring DNS servers, etc.) will know and understand the more technical distinction.

Anyway, the meat of the answer - at least to the way I interpret this - is contained here (from the Wikipedia "Subdomain" page)

According to RFC 1034, "a domain is a subdomain of another domain if it is contained within that domain". Based on that definition, a host cannot be a subdomain, only a domain can be a subdomain. A subdomain will also have a separate zone file with a SOA record (Start of Authority).

So technically, no, if it has an A or CNAME record and points to a host, it's not a subdomain, it's a host.

Where I guess it gets confusing, and I'm not even sure if this is possible, is if you have something like:

a.shop.example.com --> points to some host A

b.shop.example.com --> points to some host B

shop.example.com --> points to some host Q

Is "shop" both a host AND a subdomain in that case? Assuming DNS even lets you do that. I dunno... never had a reason to think about it before.

EDIT: Yeah, looks like you can have the case where a given name is both a host and a sub-domain. See:

https://serverfault.com/questions/950698/use-same-dns-name-b...
Maybe this is a cynical take - but we used https://pgloader.io/ a few years ago to migrate to Postgres, and have never been happier. MySQL has a lot of stupid decisions like this.