skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With a union backing them up individuals can more easily:

- Get better at salary negotiation and interviews through having union training
- Share how much they earn with other workers, even distributing statistics, reinforcing salary negotiation power and the ability for workers to ensure that businesses doesn't engage in illegal wage fixing
- Have union back up when HR are being a pest to protect the company
- Ensure that fair severance is distributed when an individual is let go
- Negotiate on-call scheduling as a group
- Negotiate all other parts of their contract, for example removing pesky no competes
- Engage in lobbying

Individuals, even ones with great competence within their field of expertise, have a lot less information regarding the game they're playing with other companies. Unions can help with that.

Note: You can still be in a union without having your workplace be 'unionized' or having a collective agreement with the union. You can still engage in salary negotiations individually, and you may still skip out on being in the workplace's union.
And those 20% won't even be compensated 2-3x higher under a union: likely just in lockstep with their years of service. A union might figure out a couple of tiers within the payscale for specialized or managerial work, but I expect those to be gamed as well by shrewd but mediocre people.

Following up on what you say, the main reason for unions is to help labor extract more of the wealth they create. While I'm sure there are lots of people here who think devs should make more of it, they live pretty comfortably. It'd be like saying doctors should unionize to get a lockstep salary from the hospitals where they work. There might be some marginal benefits to it, no doubt, but they don't as a class seem any more interested in it than devs do.
How does this differ from them building a mountain of cards on top of your API?

The schema used by the public API doesn't have to match the database layout itself. E.g. views can be used for this.

A lot of APIs are quite straightforward mappings typically from REST/GraphQL to a database, often via some sort of ORM or other abstaction. These extra layers mostly amount to needless complexity, more surface of bugs, lots of busywork and worse API usability.
> Isn't this kinda redundant? science-fiction is already fiction, it's in the name.

This is nit-picking the specific example rather than engaging with the GP's point. There are definitely genres that span the fiction/non-fiction divide (like romance, horror, politics, judaica, and many more). Interestingly, hierarchical systems used by libraries tend to ignore genre. The Dewey Decimal system doesn't classify literature by genre but instead by language, though some overarching genres (drama vs poetry) are treated as subcategories of language (e.g., German poetry is 831, French poetry is 841), but only for major European languages.
This is an odd take for something that is decidedly pro consumer. Like what's the downside to having businesses have to plan for their product having to last less than a decade in the market?
There are several existing options:

- Windows: Simplewall (uses native WPF for filtering), Portmaster (interactive firewall, uses custom kernel extension).

- macOS: LuLu or Little Snitch (they all use a native filtering API, which unfortunately is not perfect: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/6/3.html).

- Linux: OpenSnitch, denying network permission to Flatpak apps.

- Android: Rethink, NetGuard; GrapheneOS has app network permission natively.

iOS is the only OS where no application firewall is available, although if you don't use Wi-Fi, you can block apps from using cellular data.
Likely the terrible/slacking developers
The Million Dollar Homepage was a big deal back then. I remember seeing it on the news a bunch. It likely got a ton of traffic and every website was trying to capitalize on the hype.
Because Union agreements can bind pay to non meritocratic ways such as time spent in the role or when a higher position opens up. Those top players will rise to the top easier in an open market. It's the same with waitstaff in a tip-based system. The bottom half wants fair wages while the top 20% will leave because they know they can earn without those rules in place.
Efficient Coding Hypothesis
Listening.io | $140k to $200k | Full-time | 0.5% to 1.5% equity | Senior Software Engineer | San Francisco (Hybrid)

Listening turns textbooks and research papers into audio, so students can listen on the go.

We're VC backed and growing like a rocket ship

We're looking for a senior engineer. Primary programming language is Python. Experience with machine learning a plus but not required.

The role involves:

- Improving our PDF extraction functions

- Integrating text-to-audio APIs

- Managing AWS server infrastructure

- Deploying machine learning models

- General backend: performance, reliability, observability, etc.

We move fast and ship things quickly. The code you write will be in users' hands in days. The team is highly technical, no middle management, self-directed.

We meet in SF 2x a week, work from home the rest of the time.

Please contact: derek@listening.io. Please include a cover letter and resume, and why you're interested in the role.
Gavin and I discussed McKinsey's article[0]. Having worked as a management consultant and marketer, he explained how metrics are often weaponized to appeal to executives. I suggested he write about it, leading to this post.

[0] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
>As you point out, there is a difference between the median performer

But I didn't say that, and I don't agree.

I think the 90th percentile never causes delays on a particular station, while the median may cause a few per hour, and the 10th percentile might delay every 2nd or 3rd cycle.

There are tangible costs associated with those levels of performance.
Ads are the problem not for those who click on ads and feel excellent about it, but for those who don't and get unwanted content shoved down their throats. If the "higher probablity" from your comment is tiny, which it is, then the latter group is roughly the same as that exposed to generic (and equally unwanted) ads.

That is, profiling does very little for the vast majority users, but at a cost of massive privacy issues. Trying to look at one without considering the other is disingenuous at best.
>how's into much more detail,

Goes into. Odd autocorrect I noticed too late to edit, but will annoy me if I don't address it.
These are two words for the same concept.
Your wife is your brother?
Become an aircraft mechanic. You can support research planes or helicopters for organizations like BAS or similiar.
Honestly I’ve been using blender to make precision parts to be 3d printed for years now, and while it doesn’t have all of the shortcuts of something like onshape, with a digital caliper and proper scale settings you can make basically anything you want. It also has a new plug-in called cad sketcher: https://www.cadsketcher.com/ for filling in some of those gaps.
GNOME is primarily about making Free Software that is highly accessible. The desktop and GTK toolkit both predate OSX, so I'm not really sure what the purpose of the comparison is.
I would love something like this, if my gooseneck tablet holder works ok with it. But I have never spent more than $1200 on a laptop, unlikely to gi much higher.
CWA is a big part of the tech unionization effort today: https://code-cwa.org/
Is there a replaceable capacitor in a MacBook?

https://www.ifixit.com/News/62674/m2-macbook-air-teardown-ap...

https://www.ifixit.com/News/54122/macbook-pro-2021-teardown
Oh yeah I never use them. I did notice McDonalds does try to push you to their app on their ordering kiosks, and they removed some kiosks to make it more difficult to order in person. But I didn't cave in :) I generally hate apps, I'm a real computer guy.
I think "mostly looks fine" is the crux here.

I also believe this is only the case for Wayland, so X11 users may be out of luck here. Actual fractional support would require breaking API compatibility, which is why integer scaling+downscaling is necessary.
I agree that things like RSUs are generally included, but the 50k of benefits does not include RSUs. The closest this they talk about is the pension plan, which they quote as 23k.

Looks like UPS quotes above 95k avg, and 42$/hr avg after 4 years. I have no idea how that compares to average tech salary, but I agree that it is good money.

That last thing worth mentioning, also from UPS' site is that almost half of their full-time drivers have been at the company for >15 years. That's a long time.

[0]: https://about.ups.com/us/en/our-company/great-employer/real-...
Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little?

Actors are unionized.
I agree, us non-capitalists took more of the cake back then.
Category theory was not a response to any limitations of set theory, but rather a collection of new abstractions, still grounded in set theory (originally anyway). The first paper introducing these abstractions was by Eilenberg and Mac Lane [1], who formalized for the first time the idea of natural functions between mathematical objects.

For a long time prior to E&M, mathematicians had used an informal notion of “natural” or “canonical” mapping, which meant something like one special mapping out of several available ones. Especially important is the idea of natural isomorphisms. Just knowing that two objects are isomorphic is often not good enough to prove results about them because you have to make a choice about which isomorphism of several you’re using, and you might have to make such an arbitrary choice about infinitely many pairs of objects all at once. Having a canonical choice solves this problem.

Prior to E&M, mathematicians couldn’t formalize this idea of canonical choice. They would hand wave about how natural their choice of isomorphism was and how this allowed them to avoid making arbitrary choices. Then E&M defined categories, functors, and natural transformations to formalize this idea of naturality. Their motivation was algebraic topology, but the abstractions they defined turned out to be extremely broadly useful across all much of mathematics.

[1] https://www.ams.org/journals/tran/1945-058-00/S0002-9947-194...
A friend of mine just did two stints down there -- first at a coastal base, and then again at the actual pole station. She's a nurse practitioner and decided a couple years ago to make hay while the sun was shining so to speak, since she was single and had no kids, so she started doing travel gigs.

One of them was waaay down at the tip of South America, doing health checks and COVID screening for folks headed to Antarctica. She got along well with everyone, and someone had to bow out of a posting at the coastal station, so she got asked. She did well there, and got the offer for the post at the south pole.

The pictures she sent back were AMAZING.
The article you linked to doesn't explain plainly how the cataloging system works. Going to Wikipedia[1] makes it a little more intelligible, but honestly it still sounds pretty complicated.

If a cataloging system is difficult to explain in plain and simple terms, it will be tough to advocate for it with other people. I might put in the effort but how can I quickly convince others to do so?

Johnny Decimal is pretty simple in comparison, it's 4 bullet points:

- A JD number is two numbers with a dot in between: XX.YY

- First digit of first number: a broad category

- Second digit of first number: a sub-category

- The second number is incremented each time you create a new folder (which you want to be careful about!)

Once you've explained that and you show a basic folder structure, people will understand how it's used, at least. That's where it performs better than your system.

It's probably fine if it's tough to define, but it has to be simple to teach.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Classifica...
I'm not hungry therefore nobody is hungry.
They actually are, unless the 10x engineer thinks good customer service agents, customer deployment engineers, assistants, etc. somehow are not worth having. Usually, the product is way more than just some software engineering piece.
I'd be inclined to agree with you, but it's hard to me to believe that all these kids went to college (or got some type of computer training) only by working with their phones/tablets.
I think the earliest you can reproduce the layout is probably somewhere around 1997, which was when HTML4 was standardised. Earlier than that the block model was really primitive, and didn't support things like arbitrary margins and padding. Mosaic didn't even support arbitrary block elements like <div>. From 1993 to 1998 things were developing really rapidly, with the state of the art advancing so much each year. It must have been a really exciting time to be involved!
You have to make almost the exact same choices when you rely on fequentist tools. The main difference is they’re pre-made during the development of the tool, so you don’t get insight into what they are without studying the theory behind the test.
Do I have the same relationship to capital? A miner’s relationship to capital seems pretty plausibly adversarial to me: capital buys a bunch of tools and shafts and scaffolding, asks miners to use them to pull coal out of the ground, then pays the miners a fraction of what the coal sells for. My relationship with capital is that rich investors send money to my company’s bank account and they forward it directly to my bank account.
But you already enjoy many benefits already brought about by unions that you did not pay dues for, like weekends off, ending child labor, 40 hr work week, 8 hr work day, benefits around health care, unemployment and more.
Despite reading the article, I don't understand how the security exploits would get on your phone.

This isnt some iMessage that is pre-installed that is full of 0 click exploits. This is FOSS that has been tried and tested for a few decades. Sure there might be some cases where someone didn't update software for an exploit, but you'd still need to have that specific software, and I imagine that you'd need to chain a few to make it useful.

I can't see how a Linux phone is more dangerous than an iPhone. (aside from social engineering scams)
Stack Machine
> The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers, but often get paid only 2-3x as much.

If you want to see what happens in a collective bargaining system you can come to Sweden. Here the best engineers make about 1.25x what the worst make. Also, everybody makes a lot less than in the US.

> 20% of the field, with 80% of the negotiating power…

In a free market those 20% have 80% of the negotiating power, true. But in a union they only have 20% of the votes. So what will happen? See above.
Well, a big part of my job is trying not to move other people's cheeses. In other words, keeping the major version of the software I maintain at "1".
Tables? What are tables?

Posted from NCSA Mosaic
What was the easiest and the most frustrating part?
Yes. He's a member of the Screen Actors Guild. He stopped shooting MI:8 in solidarity with the union.
This is true; I myself have had a below-inflation pay rise and some colleagues made redundant. I'm still paid more than 95% of people in my country.

What that highlights is just how bad the inequality curve really is, that the 0.1% right on one edge have exceptional power to make decisions which make the rest worse off.

What this means is that any tech union is going to have to extend a bit of solidarity out to lower paid and ""lower skilled"" people against whom we have traditionally been snobbish, in order to be successful. See the Hollywood millionares out donating to the rest of their picket lines, for example.

You can't just look "up" the curve at your salary getting ever higher. You have to look "down" as well, without contempt.

> "anyone is replaceable," is still true

Was it Napoleon who said "the graveyards are full of irreplaceable men"? Also true.
> This is why I spend a lot of think wondering what could a union even do for me?

I mean the same thing it does for Tom Cruise.

You're really thinking about this the wrong way. Companies all the time join trade groups and pay membership fees to coordinate their efforts. Are you going to argue that companies are making a fiscally irresponsible decision?

A union is strictly the same thing as a trade group except its membership is labor and not management.
Do you have domain expertise in hardware design and supply chains to judge this issue competently, carefully weighing the pros and cons, or did you consult your gut?
> When I star a repo I don't get notified when anyone opens a new issue.

You can customize your repository notifications in a granular way, including subscribing to issues (Watch > Custom > Issues), discussions, releases, etc.

This is the primary method I use to track OSS releases. More in the GitHub docs:

https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/managing-subs...
Tech Companies Update Terms That Allow Them to Use Customer Data for AI Training
Any suggestions for geolocating datacenter IPs, even very roughly? I'm analysing traceroute data, and while I have known start and end locations, it's the bit in the middle I'm interested in.

I can infer certain details from airport codes in node hostnames, for example.

It would also be possible - I guess - to infer locations based on average RTT times, presuming a given node's not having a bad day.

Anyone have any other ideas?

Edit: A couple of troublesome example IPs are 193.142.125.129, 129.250.6.113, and 129.250.3.250. They come up in a UK traceroute - and I believe they're in London - but geolocate all over the world.
It’s not necessarily true that nobody would see your ad, part of the novelty was just mousing over little square to see what was there. This was also in the early days of the web when such things actually were novel.
I was once a card carrying member of the CWA, communication workers union, I was an apprentice studying telecoms and systems engineer. They helped me out during my dumb teenager gets caught drunk driving days. Instead of getting the boot, I got counselling for my drinking issues and sent on driver training courses. If I didn’t have the union behind me who knows…
Linux phones maybe are “less secure” in the broadest sense, but what's the point of having a secure phone OS if:

- the firmware is full of holes and receive no patch after a short period of time.

- the phone itself come with a spyware included (the google apps).
Virtual desktops on demand with thin clients.

Sometimes because you want users to be able to change workstations, sometimes because you want a highly specific environment outside of the user's control (it can reset on each connection), sometimes because you want nothing to be kept locally. Eg, the country somebody works in is untrustworthy, so they access everything somewhere remote and safe.
Really? The bible is the source of bigotry and death for thousands? A vit dramatic no? The bible does not implore anyone to violence. But it is a convenient scapegoat for those with ill will
1Password browser extension adds passkeys support
Public exposure to BPA exceeds acceptable health safety levels
I found it an interesting omission that the author completely failed to discuss H1B. There will be no tech union for the same reasons there is are no corporate unions for white collar labor. A significant amount of the core population are capitalists who are angling for middle management and executive roles, and/or founder roles, and the companies source competent intellectual labor internationally. There is often no reason the demand cannot go offshore, and value of offshore talent doesn't just come from labor arbitrage anymore.
It will change if it becomes harder for companies to hire and fire people, or become less competitive.
Others have chimed in as well, but I'll mention that we've been live with our product, for all users, for several months now doing RAG with OpenAI vector embeddings stored in Redis.

We then just fetch up to the vectors related to a customer's schema in memory (largest is ~200MB) and run cosine similarity in a few ms in Go (handwritten, ~25 lines of code), and then we've got out top N things to place in our prompt.

Primitive? You betcha. Works extremely well for our entire customer base? Yup. You definitely don't need a Vector DB unless you have an enormous amount of vectors. For us it means having to run our own Redis clusters, but we know how to do that, and so we don't need to involve another vendor.
Step 1: Download Geolocation Data

Unless you think CSV is a database?
Oh, that's an interesting way in...working almost in Antarctica (Tierra del Fuego?) and being an obvious person to fill in for someone that had to cancel.
HTML was essentially always rigorously defined through a SGML DTD. XHTML also conforms to a DTD which additionally conforms to XML which is itself a restricted subset of SGML. SGML offers huge flexibility, for example with regard to implicitly closing tags or redefining all kinds of aspects; you could easily replace the angle brackets with whatever you want and have your HTML document look like

(START div)Hello (START b)world\b/!\div/

why ever you would want this.

But despite all the flexibility offered by SGML and because probably nobody implemented HTML parsing by using a SGML parser, we ended up with malformed HTML documents who's interpretation was essentially defined by whatever the ad hoc HTML parser implementations in browser did.

HTML5 finally abandoned the idea of basing HTML on SGML and a DTD and instead essentially formalized the status quo of HTML parsing and put it into the specification. At least this is my understanding as a non-web developer who gets to work with HTML only occasionally.
I know exactly why. Back in the heyday of blogs, around 2010, I was SO fired up every day thinking today would be the day I'd strike it rich.

I placed a very small ad featuring my blog's URL in the back pages of The New Yorker: it cost $500 or so.

I figured you never know who might see it and visit.

For perspective: at peak popularity back then I got about 10,000 visitors/15,000 page views DAILY.

Nowadays I get an average of 500 page views daily.
First, that means there is an open, two-sided market and, second, citation needed that that is really the case. Btw., employers can and do also pay based on non-meritocratic KPIs (but depends on your definition of that term).
The whois data for IP is not accurate.
It's weird to me that video game companies apparently have this much lobbying power but all the other consumer electronics corporations don't. Are they really much richer than all the others combined?
It's fun to look back on these things with the context of system dynamics. We can grade the quality of models and predictions to help figure out where we're headed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVOTPAxrrP4
I also enjoy miners union that influences politics in my country in ways I don't like.
Why not. If there is no ambiguity you save characeters (few bytes, but for each page) and thus pages will load faster even on slow connections. Also if you write HTML by hand (something not a lot of people does these days, but for example for my site I do) it's less characters to type and it's simpler.
PostgreSQL 16
It's very well defined on the homepage:

> Create a Linux or Windows compressor comp.exe of size S1 that compresses enwik9 to archive.exe of size S2 such that S:=S1+S2 < L

So obviously your suggestion does not work.
> U2F/FIDO etc keys are only supported by a subset of websites.

But a growing number. https://passkeys.directory/ is a good place to check.

Ask for it. MFA via SMS/email/etc was not very common 10 years ago, but it is now. That's due in part to people asking for it.