skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the UK we have large unions that represent the individuals regardless where they work. I’ve not heard of company-specific unions here, although I’ve not looked for them either. Presumably companies must still recognise the unions.

Is it more common in the US to have company-specific unions? Are the large “independent” unions present at all?

I would assume that being larger and independent of an employer would make them more useful to their members.

Watching, casually, the news of Bandcamp’s and Moog’s unions over the last year, I couldn’t shake the feeling they wouldn’t work out as they’d be too small and likely their leadership inexperienced.
Err... interesting, maybe -- useful? I don't see why.

There are a near infinite number of function approximators to choose from, and theory-building science has little use for any. Empirical, or heuristic, science already uses much faster and arbitrarily accurate ones.
Consistency has many different axes though. Maybe when I was 7 or something I was really keen to the difference between Wendy's fries and McDonald's fries, but now I only care if fries are good or not, and no fast food restaurant has consistently good anything because you can't do food at this scale and have consistently good food. The assembly line generates 30 weird chicken nuggets every 1000 and no one's checking. This is what I mean by "it's not consistency": at the scale of these chains the (underpaid, mistreated) workers' eyes glaze over and metrics like "% fecal matter" start popping up
Or you simply can have a database of all websites' SSL certificates[0] and compare it to the website you are accessing or in this case, compare it to the website that buys ad placement.

[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-an-ssl-certi...
I found this list really helpful to understand:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/what_is_ultra-processed_...
Bee Bearding
Except everyone who going for a job in games industry knows about it. It's not like people going for those 40 hours and unknowingly getting into modern slavery in a basement with their documents taken away.

There just too many people who want to make games and budgets are limited while competition is high. There is very few companies that are highly profitable, but majority of people wouldn't want to work for them.

Is it still shitty offer? Yes, but it's people's choice to work there.
Can you prosecute Google for spreading viruses and helping criminals?
My first touchtone phone. Groundbreaking.

https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/6408581692554721319.jpg
Good luck living in rural Poland (anywhere outside 3 major cities) without a car. Same goes for most European countries
There is also an hybrid of work and play where you put way too much work into a marginally useful feature because it's fun.

I run a content website for a living. There are off-the-shelf tools for that.

6 years in, it runs on its own static site generator. It was a blast to build. I also spent a month or two writing a German tax calculator because there were no nice ones. Surprisingly, it became the most popular page on the website. Likewise, my citizen office's appointment finder garnered a lot of positive press.

If I were minmaxing this website as a job, it would be one long pitch for various products. Or perhaps an endless series of keyword-targeted posts.

Instead it's a playground for my ideas. These long detours on pleasant roads yielded a website that has some magic to it. It's a lot more to me than just a job.
It's not how the language "works", it's what the language offers.

When all you have is a hash table, or when all you have is an object, you get to refer to keys and properties uniformly - because they are the same thing. When you have both, you refer to them differently - because they're different. That's it. There are some languages where objects and hash tables use the same syntax for access even though they're different things, but... you probably never used any of them, and certainly none of them is in the Top 20 on TIOBE.

I'll kick the venerable HN guidelines aside for a second and mention this: you're being heavily downvoted, all your comments in this thread are in various shades of gray, and many people offer many different arguments as to why you're wrong. Yet, you're undaunted and continue posting - I don't want to break the guidelines that much, but honestly, it reads like trolling. You don't engage with the arguments, you're just repeating the same thesis over and over again, without citing evidence. Why?
We did some video meetings (or online sport sessions) during corona, and our toddler always wanted to play around with the computer.
Thanks! Yes, we are focusing on big digital because that's where the big cost problem is. Also, the kind of block based design we are proposing requires a standardized interface. Th standard interface för analog is "a wire".:-). What kind of analog did you have in mind?
As one of the early Epiphany owners, thanks for keeping things exciting.
Airlines Profit from the Trend Toward Premium Cabins
Yes, such an eye-opening post!
Learned that by coding with a friend I considered a terrible coder.

I worked with him on a lot of fun projects, because we get along well, and he really doesn't know what he is doing, copy / pasting all other the place, no archi, no design, bad naming... Half of the time he's not sure what the code is really doing.

And it works.

I noticed how in the end he accomplished more than I did. He didn't sweat the small stuff, he worked more, way more, as well. He didn't write unit tests, but he always tested everything manually again and again by playing with the result like a kid.

In the end I embraced the idea.

I wanted to code a contact software because all the ones I tried didn't do what I wanted. I didn't, I just used django-admin and called it a day instead of trying to craft some slick UI. I've been using that terrible stack of forms for 10 years, and it did the job.

I needed a cli for totp years before any existed, I just fired Python and dumped, in clear text, the seeds in TOML. Took me half a decade to add encryption to it, because symlinking the file from a veracrypt container was sufficient and required little work.

2 months ago I wanted a timer to top up a time budget when I do sport, and consume it when I play video games (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...). I just splatted a wall of tailwind regurgitated by chatgpt and pupetted by HTMX. Turns out it was just enough. I show that to my friends that were asking me wtf I was doing with this, and 4 people asked me an account, one a trial for doctors for addiction programs (!). Don't even have a register form, I hard coded them :)

Wish I told my young self to stop being so obsessed with doing things right or even working on important problems. I never managed to reach "right" in my entire life anyway.
They are profitable, this is just an attempt to get more money.
The strains in 2020 were by far the most dangerous, both due to the inherent virulence of the strains and the much lower levels of pre-existing immunity in those who were infected compared to more recent times.

COVID seems to have become a conflict line between the left and the right, where the left wants it to be seen as more dangerous to justify the government shutdowns of businesses and restrictions on freedom of movement and association, and the right wants to expose those government controls as unjustified and disproportionate.
And I reverse engineered enough of its protocol and made an unofficial macOS app: https://github.com/grishka/NearDrop
In opposition to what the author thinks, I do think that the appeal was viewed by a human (probably from an outsourced agency somewhere far away) who simply didn't have 1) the capacity to understand what the author is selling 2) time enough to read the appeal, research and understand the problem and 3) possibly sufficient control over the English language
TLDR: A Meta ads reviewer or AI thought he was selling Pythons and Pandas when that's just the name of the programming language he teaches. Then made worse by Meta not having any real appeal process.
And also that the union employees were identical to others -- which is kinda demonstrably false. People who self-select as union leaders are likely to be different from the other employees in various relevant ways.

Modelling any of these assumptions yields an arbitrary probability of your own choosing.
Poor pay.
I don't think anyone is too worried about the layoffs, but these look like targeted layoffs, reinforcing the notion that union members / representatives are troublesome.

At the very least, for the sake of optics, they shouldn't have fired the union reps. Not all of them anyway.
> FF installs plugins without your consent. Brave installs software which can circumvent security Controls without your consent.

I've never heard about this, can you elaborate? Are you talking about the Pocket stuff that comes built-in?
Don’t forget:

- inability to milk a cow

- inability to chisel messages on a stone tablet

- inability to navigate the seas using only the stars

- inability to light a lantern without spilling the oil

- inability to decipher a message sent via smoke signals

- inability to troubleshoot a malfunctioning sundial

- inability to sharpen a quill
Copyright in the specific image sure, but not the graph itself. Someone else could do the same thing and make their own graph image.
Defining Open Hardware
In the UK, many IT roles can join the Communication Workers Union[0]

[0]: https://www.cwu.org/
How is turning an exchange about the merits of going to Mars or the quality of a VC-slash-startup-guru-blogger output into cheap psychologizing and ad hominems serving you?

Do you think you come out as balanced and happy by doing this?

Do you regularly think anybody that thinks differently than you, or doesn't gulp down whatever snake-oil the "succesful" sell, is problematic, unhappy, unsuccesful, unbalanced, and should "change their mind"?

Do you think that only business guru admirers or grind culture entrepreneurs are "happy"? Do you think only techno-optimists dreaming of strongmen like Musk and Bezos giving them Mars colonies are "balanced"? (And do you think either groups are anywhere close to a balanced person, as opposed merely naive and happy-go-lucky victims of Californian Ideology?)

How long have you been thinking like that?
>Have they shot themselves in the foot though? As long as the money they save ... then a few false positives is fine for them.

Yeah, I've made this point before, just today in fact about a Netflix discussion (and I like to bring it up with Microsoft too when people complain about Windows...), and agree: it seems like these companies can get away with some horrifically stupid and customer-hostile behavior while remaining very profitable and dominant. Of course, unlike Netflix, Facebook isn't primarily funded by its users, but rather by advertisers (who are other businesses, not consumers), so I'm not sure if that's better or worse here; it might be worse for Meta. I guess time will tell: bad publicity like this isn't going to help them.

>but I imagine that most people here already have plenty of reasons to dislike them.

True, but again, most people here aren't customers of Facebook, they're just users.
> Think that's called Erlang.

No, it's not.

As someone who programmed Erlang both professionally and published academically at Erlang venues for a long time, no.

These optimizations "for runtime" are not well supported by Erlang (i.e., cluster performance changes dramatically when behavioral characteristics of message passing switch from local to remote to remote cluster very quickly) and were long discussed in Waldo's paper back in the 90s, dynamic relocation is not supported well (i.e., unless you use global, which falls apart quickly under network anomalies, of which I, and several others, wrote paper(s) about), and the runtime hardly provides any information on introspection on cluster performance.

Sadly, distributed Erlang had the edge on programming distributed systems almost 20 years before they became pervasive, but has since been left to atrophy and hasn't seen any real innovation in quite a long time.
It will start with the new houses... The builders have to sell, so new house prices will drop first. Then when existing home owners see the prices of new houses dropping, they will rush onto the market and try and get out before everyone else does.

People need to consider however, if they sell, they also need to take into account the mortgage rate they will be able to obtain. They may be on a significantly lower interest rate than they can obtain now, so even if houses prices drop, they may not end up in a better financial position.
Show HN: Chrome Extension to Render Selected Text as AI Art
Maybe also related to the decline of enthousiasts walking around with a big DSLR/mirrorless camera. If you only use your phone to take pictures that don't need big adjustments you probably aren't going to your desktop to further refine them.
Isn't this a statistical catch-22? If being in a union increases the odds of getting fired… well, then there's nothing to discuss because that's illegal. And if it should decrease it because of fear of legal retaliation, wouldn't that make it less likely that this happened randomly.

This feels like the wrong conclusion to draw (especially the second part), but I suck at statistics so someone please explain where I'm off.
Lumia 930. I really liked Metro UI. Also it was pretty solid device.
So - I'm not a Java programmer, but I do a lot of C# in Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio Code and JetBrains Rider (which is built on the InteliJ engine), so I guess I have a unique perspective. Rider is hands down better at refactoring and generally having features "out of the box". Visual Studio 2022 is pretty buggy recently, especially for mobile, which is the bulk of what I do recently. VSCode is okay... got better recently (the C# Plugin is now a full on full Microsoft first party offering), but VSCode is still less like an IDE, more like a code editor.

I guess VSCode seems to march to its own drum and some of how it integrates things is really clunky still. I spent a long time ignoring JetBrains, but once I started to use Rider (and Android Studio) I realised how much better they were in general.

With Android development (which to be fair I mainly do on the side), I remember Eclipse being reasonably hard to get set up. That might have just been with how immature the Android tooling was back then. But from the very first version of Android Studio, it all seemed coherent. And with all the built in refactoring and tooling there is now, it is really a full circle and you don't exactly need anything else.

Edit: it is also worth pointing out that adding Resharper to VS2022 makes it a lot nicer, but in my book that is basically the same as using Rider because then most of the refactoring is taken away from the Microsoft IDE's engine and goes though the same/similar path as it does in Rider (as Rider uses the Resharper Engine too.)
How does one prove the other? Companies already have the same rights as a human, and bots are heading in the same direction
Ah, the battle of Wolf 359! Were somehow Starfleet failed to evacuate civilians from the exploration ships they sent into battle! Completely reasonable, if you ask me.
IT doesn’t traditionally gafe unions in the USA. Teachers are unionized here and are one of the most powerful political forces. They are also a likely reason why so many people here don’t like unions.
I forgot which company I used, but part of their deal was that you had the ability to delete your DNA data. Which I guess would’ve come in handy for a lot of people with 23andme. If you had chosen to do so of course.
Have a look at RAW Power from Gentleman Coders. It's the closest thing I've found to Aperture. https://www.gentlemencoders.com
I had the exact same thing happen to me, only I have never run any ads on Facebook. Got the ominous "you are suspended from running ads on Meta", which was very confusing since I've never run a single ad on any of their platforms, appealed out of curiosity and was met with the "you're banned forever" canned response. Crappy AI making stupid, arbitrary decisions.
Nearby Share isn't locked down and, in fact, works just fine with zero Google involvement. Google only needs to be involved for limited device visibility and all the phone number stuff that entails.

Here's the protocol docs — both devices just tell each other that they're "unable" to do "paired key encryption" and the connection continues: https://github.com/grishka/NearDrop/blob/master/PROTOCOL.md
This is a joke, right? I appreciate a good joke.
Discovery has different modes, plus, it's not something only YouTube can have. That's to say, it would work for YouTube, but only to a point.

Plus, the recommendations engine itself is a limitation. I been using YouTube for years before knowing the existence of YouTubers such as Casey Neistat, Mr Beast and SomeOrdinaryGamers. Even through they are popular and talked the topic that I'm interested in, YouTube never pushed them to me, instead, I manually discovered them through the trending page, what an irony.
OpenAI and the rest of the companies doing a lot of their activity and business out on the open should not be the primary worry when it comes to AI.

Rather think about what NSA,CIA,Pentagon and similar organizations are
doing in private that we will never hear about.
(unless Snowden two comes along)

Whatever ethical guidelien and assurances and limits that are imposed on consumer / business related AIs is godo, but it won't impact the intelligence and military systems.
Do you put your seatbelt on when driving? I do. Not because I expect to be in a situation where I'll need it, but because if said extremely rare situation happens, I'll be happy I did; the consequence:probability ratio is just too big, as my life (and that of my family if I had one) has a value of ∞.

Having a weapon on yourself in preparing for the worst case scenario. "Hope for the best and plan for the worst", you know.
AirDrop uses Bluetooth for local device discovery and then attempts a send over the following protocols:

1. local IP network, if available

2. ad hoc WiFi, if possible

3. the Bluetooth connection

4. fallback via Apple's servers (newest iOS only)

It's primary advantage is its ability to negotiate over a number of different interfaces and protocols, as needed.
I don't listen to many audio books, but I've bookmarked https://www.downpour.com/ as a DRM-free alternative.
I like Chomsky, and I agree with most of what you say. He is matter-of-fact, maybe cynical, but I wouldn't say pessimistic. He's trying to present the truth (or specifically, the truth of how those in power gain and maintain power). That's his role in trying to build a better world. I recall him saying somewhere (but I can't seem to find it now) that he's a bad organizer, so I think he sees his role as shining a light for others to use.

I like listening to him speak more, tbh. He can come across as a rambling old man with disjointed thoughts. Then, after going off for 10 minutes, he brings it back. The world is complicated, and Chomsky has a very firm grasp on how complicated it all is, and in order to explain a point, he often has to untangle a large web of relationships and history. Sometimes exhausting, but also kind exhilarating. He refuses to short snappy news bits because he knows a statement that challenges the status quo needs strong evidence and explanation, and that necessarily requires a longer form (he discusses that point in Manufacturing Consent).

I'd also recommend Manufacturing Consent.
Reminds me of an acquaintance who had their Instagram account taken over. Support is just… crickets.
It's truly pathetic how Congress and the media are giving the Biden administration a free pass on refusing to acknowledge that the endless interest-rate hikes AREN'T WORKING.

The old models aren't holding up today, because the problem isn't money supply. It's monopoly and oligopoly. We have four meat suppliers, who are now making record profits after whining about a "labor shortage."

We have a national crisis after ONE baby-formula factory is shut down for health-code violations.

We have what, three suppliers of high-speed Internet, and we're way behind the rest of the civilized worled.

And on and on. This "inflation" is straight-up ripping off of the public by huge corporations, abetted by our "representatives."
I noticed years ago that if I started by doing everyting correctly (naming my project etc) it would likely be doomed.

After I started letting my projects have the names my IDE assignes until they have proven themselves to be interesting my success rate seems to have increased.

I think this is related to the same underlying thing you describe.
This feels the same like google blocking me from using adwords; it said we definitely violated something they didn't specify and were banned for life. We sold productivity desktop software b2b. Not porn or animal abuse or guns or whatever.
Agree mostly with that, but the issue is that in certain occupations where you have a high transitivity of professionals, monopoly of work, high income, and some sort of power law in terms of outcomes, and asymmetric info that can be on the weak side of the negotiation that can generate high payouts an union does not help so much.

For instance, blue-collar professions do not have much of these, so being out of any agreement would be a huge disadvantage for the worker; for technology in general (talking here about software engineers specifically, I do not know other workers in tech) an union would be beneficial but not critical since this professional has some of the attributes described above.
Academics have tried to make this a reality for years. I suggest revisiting Waldo's "A Note on Distributed Computing" and working forwards from there. If you want to go back further, look at Argus, Emerald, and the original Hermes (from DEC.)
Yeah, that's poor design to have to manually align with hardcoded chars (and is especially tedious when editing tables, where you would need to scan the whole table several times (for each column) to find the widest and add a space, then redo that manual action on table edits) when we're taking about a feature that allows automatic alignment

(not sure how escape sequences help in the editor, that would still be extra manual chars inserted into each column?)

I think a better approach would be for the editor to zero tabs in semantic locations like function(arguments)

The tabstops aren't mechanical limitations in apps, the allow you to manually adjust the offset, which works great, eg, for comments (set all comments at a tabstop at column 80 even for not-contiguous blocks of code, where elastic tabstops wouldn't work, although proper design would also need semantic awareness not to conflict)
I really like your 3rd point here because, yeah, I don't think we'd have the efficient supply chains we do now without huge chains to ensure profitability. I think you have to say that's been a huge boon to efficiency.

But I also think it's generally bad and weird. Like how many people know that between the major orange juice brands the only difference is the different perfume they use in the concoction? Supply chains are incentivized to deliver huge loads of essentially crap that breaks constantly so demand stays high, or food that's totally loaded with fat/sugar/salt so you eat way more. Plus like, where does that profit go (not the 99% right)?
> Teachers are unionized here and are one of the most powerful political forces.

This does not seem compatible with all the stories I've heard about underpaid teachers having to buy material for their students out of their own pocket. I'm sure it somehow ends up both being true in a twisted way, but it still sounds strange.