skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More skilled workers? My father has worked in management for 20 years at our city's municipal public transit system, and can very honestly state the union keeps the lowest skilled and least deserving employed. Petty in-house suits vs management because they want them to work, or suing management because management picks up a wrench and tries to help out the motor pool. Or suits among each other because someone did another's job. The insanity goes on.

The union sucks worker's pay (not optional btw in most places, even if you don't want it). They don't help anyone, only spur in-fighting. Argue for and provide yearly wage increases regardless of work performance (even during years when the company takes massive losses due to market turndown).

How about we check and see how much the union rep's are taking home per year? Probably an awful lot more than the workers they are "representing" (not to mention it's the worker's money the rep is pocketing). It's simply a scheme now-days.

More anecdotal evidence? How about the Raley's Supermarket worker union? I've known several people who have worked there in different capacities. Raley's, the company, will terminate an individual's employment if they do not agree with, sign up with, and pay mandatory dues to the worker union. Why? Well that's because that is the agreement the worker's union strong-armed the management union into years ago (probably because it means any non-mgnt employee now is obligated to pay a portion of their hard earned paycheck directly to the union). What does the Raley's worker union fight for and represent their members for? Better hours? Nope. Better pay? Yep, yearly mandatory increases regardless of performance, and regardless of how the company as-a-whole is doing.

More anecdotal evidence! How about the forced shutdown of Hostess which left 30,000 workers without any job, pension or benefits! The Teamsters (the Teamsters!) at least had the sense to strike a deal with Hostess mgmt, but the Baker's union did not care about anything other than more money (even though Hostess was on the verge of bankruptcy!). Well, without a deal to freeze all pay increases for two measly years, Hostess was left with no choice but to close up shop and leave 30,000 employees out in the cold. Fat lot of good the unions did here.

Ya, unions are a relic of the past. Sorry, no sane person will work 20 hours a day for $0.50 an hour, even without a union "representing them". There is no point to unions anymore, especially in a competitive marketplace. Competition will always trump standardization.
How Do Teachers Use the Internet?
Tell HN: Splain – A JavaScript QA Newsletter
Something I've noticed recently is that it's difficult to find simple explanations on the internet, especially if it's within a specific domain like programming.

I've created Splain, a curated email newsletter that seeks to answer questions sent in by users as simply as possible. It'll serve to give you a way to pick up bits of different javascript concepts and node every day.

It'll be focused on javascript for now and may expand in the future.

This list is for you if:

1. You are interested in javascript at any level (beginner, intermediate, advanced) and want to learn more.

2. You have questions about javascript concepts.

3. You develop web applications, client side or server side with node.js.

4. You want to share your knowledge with others.

5. You want super detailed and indepth explanations of javascript concepts.

This list is not for you if:

1. Don't like receiving email.

2. Don't want to occasionally participate by sending in questions or answers.

3. Think you are a ninja, rockstar, pirate javascript hacker.

4. Expect to be taught javascript step by step in order from the beginning to the advanced.

Here's a sample of what you would receive: http://us6.campaign-archive1.com/?u=34a4baf2553b3c37fd4004a2b&id=94a2b0a2ef

Here's the link to sign up if you're interested: http://eepurl.com/4VLgj

Any feedback welcome.

Thanks,

- Chris
It says if you open the case it auto self destructs.
http://swamij.com/podcast/11MinuteMeditation24.mp3

is a useful guided 11minute meditation for both beginners and intermediate practitioners.
Meditation requires that we first calm our body, then make breath serene and then we can focus on mind and go inward.
I've found http://swamij.com a very useful resource in understanding the breadth and depth of real menaing and practices of Yoga meditation.
Calculate Your Startup Idea's Potential – How to Develop an App Business
Posts without URLs get penalized, so you'd be better off making a post that points to the GitHub page and adding the above text as a comment in the thread. Or we can edit this post to use the url, if you want, and you can add the comment then.
I just tried a few chapters of it, and I think that this is a good idea and it was well executed - to an extent. I'm not the target audience for this exercise because I only have a little experience with programming, but a problem I can see arising is that the user ends up just looking specifically for the errors and paying attention to nothing else (At least that's what happened for me). It also feels like too much of a middle ground between having absolutely no coding knowledge and being completely competent in what you are doing, which I don't think you were going for. The issues were just too simple and easy to fix for the common passerby. Instead of having to change one word to fix the issue, have them write a small snippet of code that you'd have to know from experience. This, I think, would be more effective in teaching the user real world coding knowledge even if they knew what they were doing.

Other than that, I found it extremely satisfying to fix the code and watch it change the game right in front of me. You have a great idea here, it just needs to be refined a bit. Good luck!
Last I heard in the news, one of the main reasons these busses exist is because FB employees don't want to / don't feel safe bussing it to work with the normal 9 to 5ers.

And honestly I don't see why they shouldn't have a private bus. FB employees worked their asses off their whole life in school and learning to code etc.
I like this idea a lot. A little story makes building a game feel like a game itself :)
But the NSA has unlimited funds, created by the tax payers they spy on. So why not make it easy, save us all a lot of money </sarcasm>.
It so crazy that we are talking about people that require the consent of their governed... On second though maybe outside of our bubble they have that consent and we have to bow to that majority.
Wow, your lucky. I dream of going to Canada. Thank you for the advise.
"I'm not sure if the landlords are as savvy as you think."

Some of them are. Saeed Amidi, the rug dealer behind Medallion Rug Gallery in Palo Alto is famous for this. He demands some equity in startups leasing his properties. Google's first office was in his space. PayPal's first office was in his space above the bike shop. Facebook's first office too. Also Foursquare, Danger, and others not as successful. Amidi is now a venture capitalist, but he still has the rug stores.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/oct/14/welco...
"I think the crux of the issue is that $20 an hour is not enough to live anywhere near SF in those areas. Combined with the split shift, this means that basically 16 hours a day of these people's lives are booked."

So don't live there!

It's not like there isn't a huge country here.

If people go take jobs elsewhere, the price people are willing to pay to get people to take these jobs here will go up.

If not there is a glut of people willing to take these jobs at almost any price, in which case, honestly, you can't solve this problem (and it is likely we will, in the not too distant future, soon have too many people for all possible jobs that people are needed for)

This idea that people have a magical right to simultaneously live wherever they want, and get paid enough to live comfortably there is somewhat ridiculous and impossible to fulfill. There will always be places that are more expensive due to demand. It's not like this is the first time in history (even of the US!) this has ever happened. What happens is people go instead where they can afford to live. Then either pay goes up to attract people to the high demand area, or it becomes less in demand.

If i could not afford to live in the bay area with what the bay area was willing to pay me, i would move somewhere cheaper.

There are plenty of jobs in the US that are ready for the taking, pay reasonable rates, and are in places that are affordable. People often just consider themselves too good to take them.
It's not FB's job to ensure bus drivers can buy houses in the main city.

If the bus drivers are so stubborn to live in the bay, there is plenty of very affordable living spaces (homes, condo's, and the like) all right outside the main city in the suburbs.

Irregardless, let's not all weaponize against a company simply because said company has money and bus drivers don't. $20 an hour is pretty darn good for a relatively low-skilled job.
That it physically destroys the chips if you open the case? Or (optionally) if you unplug the SATA cable?
Anyone know why it got yanked from eBay? are there more of these floating around that might pop up if so what would they go for?
Isn't that effectively mutation then? You have an ID with information related to that ID that changes, or what we would call mutable fields in the object world. Anyways, this is why I don't play with declarative programming models anymore: I would wind up hacking in necessary things like identity and mutation in very weird ways. This is why I decided instead to try applying declarative time semantics to an imperative programming model.

Your solution is quite similar to mine: all blocks that continue in after clauses underneath an event are indexed by the event instance (we memoize event instances so they have identifiers). One problem that we had to deal with is the discrete nature of an event handling context; it made sense to have an additional clause that continues after the event (to create an object like a new user) vs. code that executes discretely (like a physics step). The former gets indexed by the event instance, the latter is shared across all event instances (so you can't really create an object in anything other than a top-level block of event-after block).
> I have a really hard time understanding the union's position. The problem is stated by the CEO of the contracting company very clearly

I think it boils down to this. The union's position is not thoroughly explained, while the author seems to have very good access to the contracting company's CEO.

That the CEO has poor opinion of union's request and present facts in a positive light for his company is a given. Now we need the other side's arguments explained first hand.
>every high end device (comparable to the iPhone) released from about last month onward has at least 2 GB of ram

Which doesn't contradict what he said at all.
Performance of ngFilter and Parse
Interesting tool. Would be great if you could send from here as well, after all that is 50% of email.

Loved the examples you gave on the about us page, well said.
Assuming you watch the movie once, it's 2 hours no matter how long it was available for.
How much more capital is really needed to operate these busses at a fixed schedule with specific stops and allow anyone to use them for a fee? Uber for public transport if you will.
Trolls 2.0
This is easy to implement using cryptography. E.g. when firechat assigns a username, they sign your certificate for said username using their key.

Then, when sending messages, they have to be signed with your key (or outright encrypted), and the receiver verifies the key is correctly signed using firechat's key.
> If it's really a problem for the employees, isn't that where the free labor market would allow them to quit their job and look for something more in tune with their preferences?

A free labor market would certainly allow workers to unionize to leverage their power and pursue their own capitalist goals by whatever means the market allows them. A free labor market should recognize the workers as important actors in that market. I'm not sure why unions seem like such an appalling idea to capitalist idealists.
No, actually they're nowhere near being the most popular or produced.
Sending might be a problem because of massive spam abuse and maybe getting blacklisted in consequence. What do you think?
Maybe in something like a "common business-oriented language"? Which startup do I invest in?
Here, let me help those under 40.

"That's one skanky UI. There's no way Apple is shipping that!"

Yeah, just substitute with nasty.
I think it's incredibly interesting that Apple is one of but a handful of companies that seems to enjoy a steady proliferation and preservation of its past company lore, both in the popular media and amongst technologists. People take a great deal of interest in the historical artifacts this company produces; for an outsider, it really stands out as unusual.

I can only think of a few other companies that manage this feat. Nintendo's history seems to be rather frequently circulated (and I don't follow video gaming blogs, though I do occasionally play their games). Intel, Compaq, and IBM also see historical items published, but it's mostly concerning events that predate the 90's, a time when these companies were either much more visible or had a more prominent role. I've not seen much published about the past two decades of history for any other tech company at the same level as Apple.

The histories of other companies seem to be given a much more technical treatment: hardware schematics, design constraints, sourcing problems, blow-by-blow accounts, etc. That might just be because many of the Apple anecdotes are published as "fluff" for non-technologists; Apple also sees its share of technical history published, too.

Maybe I'm just blind to everything else or I'm biased in a particular way, but it certainly feels like we're telling a particular narrative here. If I were a future historian looking back, this might cloud my perspective. Everything seems to be about Apple. Am I wrong?
Their work schedule (6:10-11:10 AM and 5:15-9:45 PM) makes it very hard to live too far away from their workplace.
These companies don't pay taxes only the employees do. So giving back in by improving infrastructure would be beneficial to all.

I don't think there is a law that forbids privately owned public transportation. They may need to be licences and follow certain laws but that should not stop someone from "disrupting" a broken system.
There is a new, 20th-anniversary edition available now in print and ebook versions:

http://www.wisdompubs.org/book/mindfulness-plain-english
I don't understand. What is the "other way"? Are there posts claiming that other political/philosophical ideologies (I guess one that is "opposite" to feminism) result in feats of systems programming? If so, the only reason I haven't asked is that I've never seen them. This is in fact the first article I've seen online making a "political ideology X => programming feat Y" assertion.

I have, on one occasion, asked someone in person a similar question about his Objectivist principles. His justification was about as weak as the one given here.

Last time you claimed I never asked questions the "other way" on a different topic, I pointed out explicitly cases where I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372354
Why not "disrupt" by starting a private "public" transport.
Wow, thanks for telling your story.
> The union would do what unions always do--shift some of the economic surplus that the company is currently enjoying (paying less for the bus service than the value it provides) to the workers.

One thing worth mentioning here: if prices are determined by the free market they can serve as a valuable signal to increase or decrease supply in response to demand. It may well be that in the future these bus drivers could serve a more useful purpose elsewhere in society, but the signal to do that would be dampened by artificially high wages to bus drivers. Price signals are the reason our society is relatively efficient compared to, say, the Soviet Union.

In conclusion, I think OP is right, if these bus drivers don't like the compensation they're getting they should look for work somewhere else, just like the rest of us.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/InformationandPrices.html
Yeah. Though I have no cash to support myself right now. All I have is the internet and the community. I only have 1 year left to graduate due to circumstances, I wasn't able to continue.
What? We do, of course, know that cooperation was attempted -- and San Mateo screwed us all. They're why bart doesn't come to palo alto. See eg the original map [1].

Half or more of the problem with all bay area public transport is that lots of the peninsula actively likes not having working public transit. I live in Belmont and I'm an active voter. Mayoral / council campaigns here don't outright say "no public transit ever" but if you read between the lines its there. Lots of people move to the peninsula to have their house in the suburbs (turning nimby the second the deed changes names), and public transit or dense housing is not desired.

Of course, bitching about 101 or 280 doesn't stop just because they actively subvert the only way to fix our transportation fiasco.

I do have a solution, though: it's time to give up on the bay area. I figure I can start a company in Tahoe and draw amazing engineers. Live in Tahoe and get 20 snow-days a year doesn't sell every engineer, but it definitely sells a handful of great ones. That's the idea, anyhow...

[1] http://www.sonic.net/~mly/www.geolith.com/bart/figure1.html
It is fundamentally oppressive and undemocratic to deny free men the chance to voluntary come together to collectively set the prices for the services they're selling.

This collective bargaining is called price-fixing.*

This isn't a clear-cut issue of rights that can be settled on principle. Workers have been given the right to collectively fix prices through unions not because it's a fundamental freedom, but because it has been recognised that employees negotiate from a position of relative weakness to their employer.
I'm not saying I don't want both :)

All I'm saying: If budget is the issue, I'm all for kindergarten. If it's not an issue, make everything free.
http://video.mit.edu/search/?q=6.004+Computation+Structures
No more than zeroizing the key would.
Coastermelt – open source firmware to burn non-bluray data on a BD-R
Had christianity spread that far east at that point in time?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia#History
Moving is not as easy as you make out to be. People choose to live in a place for other reason than just monetary: their family might be in SF, they might have been born there etc. You can't just turn your face and say, "Hey this is how the market works. Deal with it". Because when the number of people disgruntled with this system reaches a certain point, bad things will happen.
It's not that simple. There are gigantic forces involved: government officials at several levels, unions, etc.
These companies definitely pay property taxes for their buildings to the city/county.
Congrats on downvoting a legitimate reply. If this is what people around here do once they get this ability I shouldn't even bother writing anything. And it is still people behaving as a child when they should pay for education that will further their careers. I hope they have fun using overhead projectors that are already 40 years old for the next couple of decades!
And? You somehow think that justifies what? $50 an hour? when is enough, enough? Loo, my father works for the city municipal public transit system (has now for 20 years), but these are bus drivers - it is a low skilled job with a fast revolving door.
Yes, this. Excellent point.

Also: This is the same Apple that put the Stocks app on everyone's iPhone.
Nice story, I'am only the RoR programmer in the company and others doing codeigniter. I already asked for another RoR programmer to help me manage 3 colleges. Though they(new employees) ended up not knowing RoR instead do CI.
I see you're getting downvoted, but you are absolutely right. If the wages for job X in location Y are too low to be affordable, people will either relocate or find a new job, causing the wages for job X in location Y to increase. I don't see a good reason to interfere with this process.
Portal speed run glitches explained by a portal dev
Ok, you can, but I just like well defined terms as it makes it easier to know what you are discussing.

Feminism is very broad already, a good example being the conflict between those who advocate for equality in political representation and those who advocate for working towards a utopian matriarchy.

I just think it is confusing and weakens the argument being made by overstating it, to make the definition broader still.
Disclosure: I don't work in the tech sector. I agree with you that I doubt that the budgets of tech company's transit benefits probably wouldn't make a significant impact in the effectiveness of public transit (or even get the same amount of bang for the buck).

A problem with many of the initial transit offset arguments was that they didn't take into account that given the presence of the buses how many people chose to live in communities farther way from their work, when absent the buses, they would have moved closer. This and other externalities.

Regarding "the media is obsessed with viewing private buses as a symbol of privilege" is because it is a symbol of privilege -- Unless you want to make the argument that it's a symbol of disadvantage. Someone who has a personal driver is more privileged than someone taking a private bus than someone taking a private car than someone taking a public bus than some poor chap who has to bike or walk everywhere.

The reason why the media and much of the non-tech public has disdain for the buses is that it creates two cities. One set of people has access to travel means A and B and the second set just has access to B. The last time that sort of forced social sorting was prevalent in the United States was in the 1960's when there were White and Colored water fountains. These are the connotations the general public thinks about consciously or subconsciously.
I would just kill for this to be a local and native application. This is literally what I've been collecting myself to build. A note-taking app that automatically generates a timeline/agenda. I might just use this, but I never stick to web based interfaces like this.
Here's my attempt using the "ring of xor" technique posted elsewhere: https://imgur.com/xGHmN9c

It follows the hex structure of the other gates (inputs down and diagonally up, outputs up and diagonally down). It's got a radius 4 (the 5th blocks being the example inputs and outputs) but I think you could probably do better with some judicious bit trickery in the middle.

Edit: Radius 3: https://i.imgur.com/BaI6YLj - I wonder if 2 is possible?
Yes, it's almost the same
If you read my original comment, I'm not in favor of this attitude/weaponization anyways...
What the Mission to Mars Shows About India’s Innovators
If anyone can do it, it would be these companies which have more capital than god. :)
That probably won't work on its own, but as part of a nutritious breakfast...

First thing I'd try: LN₂ over the case entry sensors followed by that fun expandy foam stuff.

It probably wouldn't work first time, but next try I'd know where to short/aim. Or shortcut that with X/gamma so I have a drill point.
So basically you're saying that if a family has lived in an area for many years (possibly several generations), and are gradually being priced out of the ability to exist and work, they should just move on somewhere else, breaking long established ties with friends and family?

That's pretty harsh and selfish outlook about the lives and welfare of working families who will never see anywhere near the six figure salaries being earned by FB, Google et al engineers.