skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's unions and unions. I don't have a problem with such organizations as representatives of working people's collective interests, but the relationship between unions and business in the US can be terribly adversarial such that 'collective bargaining' often ends up looking more like mutual attrition.

It might be that historically the diversity of the US is partly responsible; where there is wide social and cultural variation among both employers and employees then the establishment of a consensus about what working conditions are fair and reasonable becomes more difficult. If you've grown up and started your career in an atmosphere of tough working conditions and demanding expectations, then as an employer you're going to have similar expectations of the people you hire. To someone who has grown up in a more collaborative or cooperative situation designed to insulate colleagues from external pressures, the demanding productivity goals of the former context may seem irrational or oppressive. Perhaps there is some correlation with the variety of household income situation experienced growing up - marginal (waged) or fixed (salaried) economic inputs are likely to influence perceptions of appropriate output.
most police work nowadays is mouse and cat play. I can foresee them still using those devices but just not using them as a proof in court.

example. you put gps and track some narcotics dealer to a place where they exchange the stuff. you caught everyone. you go in front of the judge, he asks you: how did you know where to find them, do you tracked them by gps [just adding here i know this wont play this way], - no, judge, we just had anonymous tip coming through our hot line.

make sense?
But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country.

Actually no. In anything, the socialist states were infamous for people not-working-that-much. The Kronstadt Rebellion and Solidarity had nothing to do with "refusing to work", and all to do with fighting the state power for more freedom.

That said, it's not either corporate capitalism (as described in the article) or USSR. There are plenty of options in between, starting with respect for workers as human beings, and regulations that ensure that treating people as mere cogs is not an option to gain a competitive advantage with. Kind of like we abolished slavery -- we can also abolish unpaid overtime and treating employees like shit. Take a look at Europe. And, no, the reason US has a slightly more advanced economy than, say, Sweden, is not due to harsh working conditions. It's has more to do with human capital, a large unified market PLUS tons of military might abused to ensure cheap oil and resources.

Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers have jobs than not.

Having a job at those conditions or not is not the only two options --we only make them to be. It's like you're saying "it's better than 4000 slaves have an owner to feed them than not".

It is horribly oppressive for a software engineer to imagine a job where you have to come in on time, but now remember your frustration at closed stores or unavailable phone support/customer service.

Yes, people have been taught to behave like spoiled children, and expect others to work for them 24/7. To the detriment of their own working conditions, because you are a consumer for a few hours at most, but you are an employee most of your day.
Why do you think the symbols had to be obfuscated?
This is just astonishing. Many congratulations!
Completely agree, but with this limited use case it should be easy to provide a tool to abstract away the complexity and give them easy access to the very few features they need.
It wouldn't make a difference. These are jobs that will be largely lost to automation as robots are increasingly able to perform these functions.

I doubt anyone would be surprised if Amazon is investing in such technology.
Help build a game influenced by Minecraft, SimCity, The Sims, and Lego (YC S11)
In principle I agree that C is a more appropriate choice in many situations, but I think his pure hatred for C++ is kind of funny.
NPR’s new guidelines for using social networks: ‘Respect their cultures’
Selling apps in bulk
Vodafone & Visa Form Mobile Payment Partnership
All Your Devices Can Be Hacked (Video)
Is the answer cars, cheap land, big houses?
Linting the hell out of your Ruby classes with Pelusa
Ze Frank is back… on Kickstarter
Yeah, generally the people are asking for 10-30% more than they're getting now (in pay, or slower pace, or better conditions), which is a whole lot less inefficiency than converting things to union rules.

The threat of unionization, combined with PR issues with customers learning about how workers are treated, will probably cause companies to fix these issues pretty soon.
Penalties for bad faith DMCA takedowns have ranged from awarding lawyer's fees, &c, to the folks whose content was taken down, to having the party that issued the takedown issue a public apology and take a class on copyright law. It's also perjury, so criminal sanction is an option, though I don't know how likely that is to succeed, or how often it's been pursued.
Wow, that's truly incredible. I didn't realize anyone had reached this point. I'm excited to see this stuff progress, but I can't help but wonder what sort of social problems this might create as the unskilled jobs of an economy are slowly chipped away at. This sort of work surely creates more jobs in tech sectors and in maintenance, but skills learned in boxing are not transferable to any of the jobs that might be created by this.
RIM Approves 'Adult' BlackBerry Apps
The presumption is that a piece of wireframe-sketching software that a consultant has brought on their laptop is not going to cost enough to be worth talking about.
It is probably supporting itself with the other 95 people just as much considering it isn't free for those people (unless of course they are under the year free subscribtion for students that he was offering).

There would also be revenue from the advertisements in the magazine.

This idea really survives because there is a market for curated content presented in a visually pleasing manner.
I think we're missing the point here. Taking the side of the customer of git, I'm happy. I type things on a CLI with git and things happen pretty fast. I'm happy. I don't care whether you wrote it with C, C++ or Haskell. It works. It works just fine. To Linus's point, I've never used, or even heard of someone using Monotone. That must say _something_.
Mike Daisey's book, 21 Dog Years, briefly discussed conditions at Amazon's warehouses even though cube farm hell was the focus of the book. I don't have the book, anymore, but, going from memory, Daisey's account matches those of the author of the Mother Jones article.

http://www.amazon.com/21-Dog-Years-Doing-Amazon-com/dp/07432....

That's right; it's an Amazon link. Ironic, I know.
The opposite of net neutrality? AT&T to let app-makers pay for user data
Indeed. 4000 people @ 11/hr for a month? even without overtime that's 1.7 million. The automation can't be nearly that expensive.
I don't know C++. The accepted response does not start off well.

"C++ is a complex language, and if you don't learn it properly, it's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot. And that is also why you shouldn't listen to most non-C++ programmers hate towards C++. Most of the time, they didn't learn the language properly, so they're not really able to judge the language"

What does that mean? It sounds like, that without some significant amount of knowledge, you can't understand it's benefits.

Thinking of the languages I know, I think the things they are trying to improve are apparent with a basic knowledge of the language.
Great summary of A: how open source is very important to differentiating yourself during an interview and, B: why I myself love working on open source projects.
I've heard it said here that apparently Apple doesn't pay dividends on its stock, so that stock wouldn't be costing them money. Im a stockmarket newbie - what tangible benefits would Apple get from a buyback if they're already not paying dividends?
That and my own stupidity.
This feels like it was written by a guy who wrote a popular OS and has had people kissing his ass for 15 years. Basically the coding version of a diva musician.
Ok, I did work for Bolivia for a time, and our Bolivian office closed for siesta, as did our main customer (the La Paz city council).

Same for a more rural area of Mexico (Toluca surroundings), they also did siestas there.

Googling a bit, acording to Time magazine, siesta was struck down in Mexico in 1944, so it's more a myth than reality now I guess (probably subsists in some more rural areas).

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,850501,00.h...

My impression was that siesta still persisted in some countries, but that it tends to disappear as they conform to western work hours, and, as the Time article states, it does involve four commutes instead of two, so it's not workable in urban areas (btw, people who siesta still work the same amount of hours, I'm not saying they work less).
A few things you should know about EC2
Clickable: http://beta.whatispolymath.com.

Curation is huge, especially as the number of available resources continues to increase. In the past few months I've either used or thought about using:

http://teamtreehouse.com

http://www.udemy.com/

http://www.udacity.com/

http://www.lynda.com/

http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php

http://www.codecademy.com/

http://tutsplus.com/

Edit: Forgot http://www.codeschool.com/

...and probably half a dozen more that I can't think of off the top of my head.

I've just been using a google doc to stay organized, but this looks like it would work a lot better, and I would love to see some comparisons between equivalent courses on different sites.
What I Learned By Never Eating Alone
Oh.. I thought that this was going to be an actual version of Ocaml that was practical in the real world, rather than a book.
Just to play devil's advocate: this does force people to be more mindful of their commits. This is a good thing. Each commit should be a cohesive, logical change to the codebase. Such that if the change is later undesired, simply reverting one commit should completely remove it. This is very good practice for when you use git at your day job. In this scenarios, your 'watchers' are your coworkers, and they will rightfully get upset if you clog the repo with a bazillion haphazard commits.
I'm curious. How many folks here have used OCaml for production work? I'd just like to get an idea of the numbers.

Edit: By 'production work' I meant built things that are being used by other people.
Thanks for defining what you mean by exploitation. Now, exploitation can only exist in a market where workers have no choice but to accept the conditions of a single employer. This is typically the case when you are a slave for someone else and you have lost your freedom completely.

However, the have-nots (who are willing to work) can probably find several occupations, from different employers. They will have some range of choice concerning the salaries, the conditions and so on. Maybe not a large choice, but some choice. And one thing is clear: the less minimum wage there is, the more choice of occupations there will be, since there will be more employers generating occupations where profit can be made, since you lower the costs of labor at first.

Those occupations would not exist if it is easier or more profitable for people to stay on welfare.

And as it has been demonstrated in so many cases/countries, the longer one stays on welfare, the most likely one is not going to look for a job, welfare is actually a promoter of misery in the long term, especially for those who are at the very bottom, since they get no real incentive of getting out of it.

In a sense, politicians are guilty of exploitation as well, based on your definition. They take advantage of some voters' misery to promise them continuous welfare for which they are not responsible to pay for, and they further their own goals by getting rich in the process.

But, to come back on "exploitation" again. You are considering that is is a zero-sum game, basically. One, the exploiter, is gaining something while the exploited is losing. But economics almost never work that way. Both employer and employee have something to gain out of it. Both profit from the situation. The Employer makes money, can extend his business and ends up needing more people in his payroll. The Employee makes enough money to survive, has an occupation and has a social activity within society - they build relationship/reputation and somehow experience. They may not be making much monetary profit, but they are still gaining something out of it.

Please do not forget that all people who lived before us had to go through misery before reaching nowadays' living standards. If you come back a hundred years ago, then you may well consider that everyone then was being "exploited", but that is not how they would see themselves at the time.
It's not just an hour to learn. There's also the time to set up tools and environment. It's added complexity up front, and that alone is enough to turn people off because there is nothing so wrong with javascript to warrant the effort.

If you know javascript well and are familiar with it's many gotchas and you know how to use your text editor well with javascript, the coffeescript really doesn't add more than it detracts.
Theoretically, fewer public shares means that the value should go up (basic supply and demand curve). Apple could then sell their shares at the higher price and effectively earn a return (the reality of how this would happen is more complex--but it all adds up to this basic premise).
> needs to get the performance gain that C has over C++

With RTTI and Exceptions disabled you should be able to get almost identical performance with C and C++. In some cases C++ compiler has additional information that can allow it to produce faster code as well.
Interesting concept. After spending the last week at Startup Riot and LessConf, intensely socializing with several hundred people, I'm not convinced this would have helped much. The one thing that stands out is taking a photo of the person, though I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable handing my phone to a stranger (nor would they).

I still hand business cards to people, but only after 2-3 minutes of conversation and only as a means to prevent having to spell my name and email/twitter in a crowded, noisy environment. I collect all of the cards I get and batch process them later, following folks on twitter, adding contacts, etc. This systems works much better for me and seems more efficient than typing into my phone.
Why is this guy being downvoted? If automation were so imminent, then why weren't the robots brought in five or ten years earlier? Why did business interests work so hard for China to get "most favored nation" trading status during the Clinton administration? Why do people go on and on about the human capital of China (iPhone factories and so forth) if not for the assembly-line grunt work?
"We wrote a Naive Bayes Classifier for http://linktamer.com/ that learns what news articles you find interesting."

I did something similar using dbacl.[1]

Unfortunately, I never got around to releasing the code. However, it worked alright. The main problem was in the hassle it took to continuously train and retrain the classifier as my interests changed.

This is the main difference between articles you actually want to read and spam: spam is pretty much always going to remain spam. Your interests are never really going to change to the point that something you thought was spam one day would no longer be spam the next. But with articles, what you might have found uninteresting one day may become interesting the next. And what you thought was fascinating one day may become boring the next.

Thus, the need for continual training and re-training for spam is much less than it is for news articles and the like.

Because of this, the classification/reclassification process for news articles should be made as simple, quick and painless as possible. Otherwise it'll just be too much trouble to keep doing it day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year.

[1] - http://www.lbreyer.com/dbacl.html
Am I the only one who see's the whole "meet someone, and fill out a profile (or have them fill out a profile)" to be a major source of friction?
I've used Monotone. It's pretty horrible if you ask me.
Placeholder so I can check it out later ;)
Yet another app I'd buy immediately if there were an Android version...
+1 for the idea of calling it tower.coffee instead of tower.js
85$
you got this info from an intern who got this information from a talk from some guy other than the CEO/CFO?
If I understand what proponents of C++ say, C++ is supposed to be suited best for medium-level programming where abstraction is helpful but low-level constructs and speed are still helpful. It's supposed to give you many of the benefits of higher level languages while still giving you high performance. It's intended to be widely portable but still easily hook into special OS-specific facilities.

This description sounds like an excellent language for git to me. And in fact, while I don't like C++ much in general, if properly managed, I think a project like git could do well if written in C++.
Big Data for Everyone: Using Microsoft’s Familiar BI Tools with Hadoop
People have been saying this for a long time. Automated picking has been around for years. When Amazon bought the large e-commerce place I worked for, the first thing they did was turn off the automated picking and replace it with people. When its cheaper and more simple to use robots, people will use robots.
I worked at a company developing the warehouse management software. This was back in the mid '90s, but we didn't have a single customer that ran his warehouse like the one in the article. Picking is a crappy job, and everyone knows it, so pickers weren't expected to move too fast. If you showed up to work for a few weeks as a picker you'd get promoted to another position. Most of the people who got hired were ex-cons and drug addicts, so only about one in three lasted more than a day or two.

I don't know if the industry as a whole has changed, or if the place the author worked is far on the bad end of the spectrum.
You've managed to cover so much that is wrong with our current political system in so few words that I can't even down vote you, It's simply impressive.

The job of the government, and in this case, the senate, is to represent the populous, in this case the state, not play special party to any particular organization.

Accuweather has fewer than 500 employees many of whom are not even in Pennsylvania, meanwhile Pennsylvania has a population of almost 13 million.

So why exactly is it that you think it is 'just', 'correct' or any other possible form of 'right' for this senator to support this company for any other reason than it being in the best interests of his _true_ constituents? That is, the people he represents that are not in the, at most, ~.0035% of his states population that work at accuweather?
I wrote a pretty well-received guide for exactly what you're doing here: http://gun.io/blog/how-to-hire-a-programmer/

If you're already a technical person, you're probably 75% of the way there. The rest of the challenge is defining a scope early on in the project.

I realize it's not very tactful to plug my own product here, but I run http://gun.io , which I think is exactly the right place to find the type of person you're looking for. We specialize in short-term gigs from the open source community, and there are thousands of talented open source programmers there waiting for new gigs to be posted.

Shoot me an email if you'd like to know more! rich@gun.io
Would be nice to have a "company wall". So companies can actually proof that they've got plenty of rock-star developers. Would be a nice way of attracting more talent.
Check out the Amazon's revenue growth curve image here: http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/1/1128818_132745...

Now guess when Prime launched. Yes, 2005, the beginning of the hockey stick growth.

Prime has been a huge success for Amazon - more like a stroke of genius.

Thanks,
Mehul
It almost impossible to get 100% of the cocaine out of the leaves and the coke you drink everyday probably has small traces of cocaine in it.
A difference between this curated magazine and other publishers that balk at putting content online for the reason you state is that the information used here by HNM was already published by the time of print. Content is expensive, depreciates after publish time and the majority of its value is realized within moments of publication.

Here the content (though here not design) is cheap and its co-branding with Hacker News is free. It's a great model for new business models that skirt content creation or bolt-on groups inside big publishers, but I don't think it's too valuable a comparison when dealing with publishers whose key differentiation is a particular editorial slant on content creation.
Guess I'm near a distribution center then as I generally find that free super saver shipping, which is supposed to take 5-8 days, ends up being two day. Definitely hinders my urge to go Prime.
I disagree with post almost entirely. This idea of "like" validation is flawed. Your true validation is recognition from the community, a "watcher" doesn't equate to a pat on the back, anymore than a "like" does. It's an inconsequential empty token. We need to get away from this notion of a like means anything more than an twitch response to something. It doesn't mean a person will ever return to your page if the project (or page or whatever) ever does anything again. Gaming the like/watch system is so easy, folks typically know this is hardly an indicator of usefulness except in rare circumstances.

My $.02.
Go-powered web-services with Rails
That's not the point of his comment. It's labeled javascript when it is actually coffeescript. Call it tower.coffee, not tower.js.

If I can't fork and contribute to the project in javascript, but instead have to set up my environment for coffee script to contribute, then it's not javascript.

This isn't just about readability and comprehension, it's about contribution as well.

If the compiled javascript is bundled in there and I can read it, fair enough. If you can't accept patches and code contributions in javascript, then that's not javascript.
Can you be too experienced to learn
So what's impractical about Ocaml? I just looked at it and it looks cool, but I haven't tried it for anything.

If they actually have event driven programming that seems like a big step over most functional languages, where I/O is kind of an afterthought.

Steve Yegge wrote some points about Ocaml quite awhile ago. http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ocaml He says it is quite fast and I've seen that in other places.

The thing I don't like about competing with C/C++ in "fast" is that those languages invariably are memory hogs. They hide that in the benchmarks.

Anyone know if you have control over memory layout in Ocaml? Or if you can reason about it like you can in C/C++?
More ads and I wouldn't even have to read the article! Popup's and unders included!