skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am perfectly aware that we live in deeply partisan times.
Partisan in not just political ideologies but also in ways we see the world and our place in it. At times, it seems all middle ground has vanished. But that discussion is for another time.

Unionizing is a contentious issue not just for the employers but also for the consumers, especially when you look at how unions - in the industries and sectors where they have a stranglehold on affairs - seem to always serve the interests of just the union members and in no particular way improve the experience of the consumers.

As a disinterested observer, I ask this in good faith :

Are there documented cases of industries or even governmental sectors where unionizing - whether in America or abroad, say France - has proved immensely beneficial to the consumers and patrons?

Are they not just self-serving instruments and political vote banks?

I am yet to find a single heavily-unionized entity proving to enhance my experience as a consumer.
Dang explains HN moderation and current thinking
I recommend Quirks & Quarks[1]. It's been on the air in Canada for a long time and has a big back catalog as a result.

[1]http://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks
No. Blanket rejection of the existence of licenses – "There's absolutely no justification for requiring a licence" – is not useful at all. There are, objectively, justifications for requiring a license.
If you want a light touch regulation from the government about this, you might want to figure out a simple way to let riders know about the licensing and bonding of the taxi and/or driver. And presuming that forces all taxis to have insurance, the information asymmetry problem is solved because the insurance company will have much more information about safety.

To be clear, there is certainly information asymmetry around the insurance and bonding levels of a cab. And it's way too expensive to investigate before getting in the cab. It would be cheaper to just hire a car service.
Exactly, my house, not yours. That's why I'm responsible for choosing a reputable electrician, not you.
It could work this way. Wiring not done by a licensed electrician then you pay triple for insurance. No insurance no mortgage. Now you can have your house burn down and it is a total loss. Hell NH drivers don't need insurance. Live free or die.

Edit: Actually I just remembered you can wire your own house in NH, but it still has to be inspected. They are not totally crazy.
Thanks. Apparently a chilled furnace can take months to "rake out." I bet that's a slow, manual process of heating up some bits with a hand oxygen lance, gradually nibbling until the passages and so forth are cleared.

By chance, does know the name of those giant drill-like things in The Deer Hunter iron works? Is that also an oxy lance of some sort?
Merry Christmas everyone :) Got lots of good advice from HN this year. Hope I can implement them in 2015.
I wrote a novel and three feature-length screenplays commuting in Swiss trains. Now I'm in London and my commute is slightly shorter but not as useful :(
Yes, or http://lhorie.github.io/mithril

Which is (mostly) monolithic, but rather small. Feels like a simple wrapper.
"Public Domain", he keeps using that term, I don't think it means what he thinks it means. It only sort of applies here. Something actually being Public Domain has extremely wide repercussions. A Public Domain work exists without any copyright or intellectual property laws applying to it, none.

For a work to be really Public Domain, only happens under a bunch of specific circumstances that really do not apply here (such as the copyright holder having been dead for a number of years).

You can't really slap a license on something and have it be Public Domain, because that means relinquishing any and all intellectual property rights related to the work. Including personal and moral rights. From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Dedicating_works...

> ## Dedicating works to the public domain

> Few if any legal systems have a process for reliably donating works to the public domain. They may even prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights. An alternative is for copyright holders to issue a licence which irrevocably grants as many rights as possible to the general public, e.g., the CC0 licence from Creative Commons.

Note the last remark about Creative Commons' CC0 license. It's about the closest you can get to actually releasing your work to the Public Domain, worldwide (check the Creative Commons website for info about some legal hurdles why you can't "just release something to the Public Domain"). It's not something that happens by accident.

Now obviously the author doesn't have this particular specific meaning in mind, instead rather something else. Except, it would probably help the discussion a lot of he'd use the proper term and accurately defines what he is trying to say.

It seems to be some kind of confusion or collision between the (obviously and pretty straightforwardly copyrighted/licensed) actual written code he released under the BSD License, and his intellectual property rights over the (more nebulous concept of) the algorithm that is described in this code. I'm not at all sure if you can even obtain copyright over the latter. Actually no, I am pretty sure that you cannot. Copyright is very explicitly defined over a work, not an idea, and the work is the actual written code that was released under the BSD License.
Thanks guys, your comments make sense.

By the way my product does cater to the technical crowd - basically we give out 5 free components for websites every 7 days - http://buildwithcards.com/

Let's see how it goes!
There's two major types of furnaces: blast (coal) and induction (electrical).
Agreed that there's a much wider issue to examine, because taxi services could really use an overhaul. Though I don't agree that the London case is particularly boring. The London taxi racket argued that Uber was violating the rules on minicab services not having taximeters (and that's a legitimately arguable point). That's how this sort of thing gets resolved; either we decide "yes, that rule is outdated, let's change it" or "no, we've got that rule for a reason which is still valid, Uber needs to change."
I do not want to sound flippant, just really practical, as I'm also in China (not Beijing) but sometimes have a somewhat long commute. Would it be possible to have a conversation =to argue time in the taxi, with laptop open and on a mobile connection was morning emailing time, and get the taxi charged to the company if it is a regular thing.

I just do shift based on core hours I need to be in the office, as does everyone in the company.
This. I'd also add:

4. World is more armed than ever. Ability to destroy life any times over.

5. Tech is in the hands of a few corporations, mass surveillance and political repression, censorship is a fact of life in many countries. As it grows more powerful, it'll give bad people more power to control, suppress and oppress.

6. Pollution, urbanisation, exploitation of nature - a lot of species face extinction within the next 50 years. Disconnect from nature grows worldwide, that leads to all sorts of physical and psychological ailments in people.

[4]: http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/2014/nuclear_May_20...

[5]: ?

[6]: http://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-life-a-status-report...
Unionizing wasn't such a contentious issue when employers were working their employees to death and paying them in credit to be used at the company store.
Children flying alone
Oxygen on a stick.
Are they being abridged in any way?

If I offer you a ride to the airport for ten bucks,should the state prosecute me criminally? Or is that true only if I use the I Internet to do it? What if I post in an online forum?

The state can certainly require me to purchase insurance to own a vehicle. Clearly in the public's interest. Perhaps that insurance should cover riders. Great discussion. But this is simply crony capitalism. There may be risk, but there is no crime here. At all.
Sorry Google, No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA Doesn’t Stop Bots
Are you suggesting that the bottom 90% of households are predominately headed by under-40 year-olds?

According to payscale.com, among those with college degrees or higher, pay for men stops growing about age 48; for women, about 39. (See http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap )

In your defence, there is this: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/20... ; in which Joseph Mason, Moyse/LBA Chair of Banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that the demographics of income and wealth inequality will go away with the Baby Boomers. However, that article doesn't go into or cite any real analysis.

A contrary opinion by Phillip Longman in 2008 (at http://newamerica.net/files/Longman-Remarks.pdf) actually goes into more detail on baby boomers and money: Could it really be that a typical household headed by a person in their 50s has disposable income of over $85,000 dollars? ... [Sure] enough, [the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey] shows average household income numbers for that cohort in the range of $85,000. ... The medium income numbers were much, much lower. For example, in 2006, according the Census Bureau, households headed by a person 45-54 had an average income $85,812. But the medium income of such households was some $20,000 less. The difference between average and medium works out to about 25 percent. ... Income inequality, let alone wealth inequality, in this generation is extremely high. Its average income includes the earnings of Bill Gates and countless other baby boom billionaires, plus a very large new class of McMansion-owning minor millionaires. Because of very high income inequality within the baby boom generation, medium income statistics tell us a much more accurate story than do average income stats about how the “typical” baby boomer lives.

Age could easily explain the apparent "wealth inequality", but not so much in regards to "income inequality". Yet "income inequality" can easily be shown to be a factor towards "wealth inequality". According to Pew Research (see http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/17/wealth-gap-u...): The wealth gap between America’s high income group and everyone else has reached record high levels since the economic recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-09, with a clear trajectory of increasing wealth for the upper-income families and no wealth growth for the middle- and lower-income families. In 2013, the median wealth of the nation’s upper-income families ($639,400) was nearly seven times the median wealth of middle-income families ($96,500) - the widest wealth gap seen in 30 years when the Federal Reserve began collecting these data.

My suggestion: Let's stop conflating the issues of "wealth inequality" and "income inequality". The real crux of the matter is in the "income inequality". There's been wage stagnation for decades despite productivity gains. In America anyway, the tax code is rigged against earned income in favor of unearned income. Overall, it is better to be "wealthy" than to be "gainfully employed".
I'd say

web sites are content centric and made for consuming it.

web apps are interaction centric and made to "do" something.
The underlying problem is to figure out what you really want. Yes, I've felt that feeling of uneasiness in "wasting" time a lot, especially as I moved into jobs which significantly increased the monetary value of my time. But one thing I did know was that I did not value money as much as I valued the time I spent meeting people, being outdoors, reading books or just thinking about things.

Another lesson that self-help books give out a lot is that if you don't decide the course of your life, others will do so for you. I suspect that most people take money as a proxy for success and happiness and hence keep desiring more of it. Ironically, our consumerist environment makes us spend even more as we earn more...making us want to earn even more.

Anyways, this is simply hypothesis. I can't say that I've figured out things, but I do think I am on the right path.
I don't understand how the steak can be 1600 calories? It would either have to be fried or a huge steak, no?
Reducing Cyclomatic Complexity in Your Objective-C Code
Share any link you want. Without censorship
Spelling feedback is bike-shedding. The content is fine.
How do you figure 3000?
If we think (EDIT: or know) jurors are dumb enough to be swayed by superimposing the word "GUILTY" over a mugshot, what's the point of jury trials?

All of this sound and fury about PowerPoint seems like a bunch of melodrama. We live in a visual age. Normal people do not routinely attend live theater or listen to lectures anymore.

On the other hand, if you're reading it, it's for you. Maybe the point of the article was to get me to be irked about arbitrary courtroom rules. If so, mission accomplished.

EDIT: I added an edit above, clearly marked, to allow you to respond on the interesting points (why jury trials? when are images unfair?) and ignore topics that are less interesting to me, such as "how much is everyone else a mindless sheep?"
Frameworks and libraries let you try different ways of doing things, if they work out they make it into the browser, like document.querySelector()
In a lot of shops, some old crusty box is used until it fails. It could be running xp or win2k.

At least that was how an ivy-league's student housing maintance shop and also a nuclear engineering service shop were run.
>> Given that at the end of the process they're both dead, the amount of pain felt ends up being irrelevant.

If I understand this correctly, you were saying that the animals' deaths essentially render their suffering irrelevant. It seems to logically follow that if everything is dead "at the end of the process" then there's no suffering that we need ever care about.

I don't honestly think you hold that position, but it's at least consistent with your earlier post, so it'd be nice to know where your logic breaks from mine.
It's not just Germans. Anyone that isn't primarily in software has this phenomenon. Mobile phone makers, for example, are a disaster, and it's only having a whip wielded by a software company with some power over them that prevents it becoming a complete train wreck.

In my experience the most dangerous are engineers in other domains that learned just enough programming to get the job done but can't understand the giant holes they've created and not run into.
Arguing that personal liability laws already exist and can enforce this system is technically true. But you first have to concede that a cash settlement is potentially worth brain damage, loss of vision, loss of limbs, loss of family members, etc.

Therefore a potential liability lawsuit will result in no net economic gain, but restoring what you already had (I.E.: How much is your SO's life actually worth to you?). If you don't concede this fact, then every single instance of the situation correcting itself, I.E.: Crash and law suit, will result in a net loss to the community GDP and private loss of money. The service can have no economic value what so ever to the seller, or purchaser on a macro scale, its just becomes Russian Roulette as a service.

The issue with Randian Objectivism is it normalizes human death to solve micro economic problems.
I had this exact same problem a while back so I made this extremely simple reporting tool [1]. Basically you just give it one or more SQL queries and it displays them as tables on a new webpage. (You can also add charts and things through javascript.)

It may be too simple for what you need, but it works great for me.

[1] https://github.com/gregpinero/django-mr_reports
How did you get public subsidy into discussion anyway?

I have posted a simple question. What if large asset control inequality is inevitable? Is bringing down the wealthy, so that a new class of wealthy takes over and possibly destroying large means of the assets in process benefit society?

Thus far that is the biggest outcome generated by previous attempts at decreasing inequality.
JavaScript, among all the languages out there, is the most ripe for "abuse". It can be used in so many ways, I don't know how you don't use a framework.
Good to know that I'm not the only architect in HN. I completely agree with you.
The US doesn’t have a good way of determining who’s poor
You generally want some guarantees before you consume the service.

Most would agree it is suboptimal if the first point you can assess the quality of your taxi service is after being raped and dumped out of town (or waking up deaf because your doctor was an alcoholic, which happened to someone I know; the doctor was of course struck off).

As to whether other systems like Yelp or Facebook are substitutes for the licensing process -- well, that is a reasonable argument to put forward. It's not the usual one we hear on HN though, which is just libertarian free-market-uber-alles ranting. One complaint I would have about using Yelp or Facebook is that they are private companies, and thus not accountable to the public in the way that government licensing services are.
This is the key question for me too.

Nowadays a blue collar worker (at least here in EU) has better living conditions than the wealthiest and more powerful mere hundred years ago.

Nowadays nobody has to die because of bad teeth and everybody has access to cheap and effective education and through that to other means of production.
Coca-Cola Disconnects Voice Mail at Headquarters
IF you don't like Ubers pricing or safety mechanisms take a different taxi. That IS the point. More competition is always better. You don't need mother government to control everything and make the whole world "fair". Grow up and take responsibility for yourself. If there's room for competition there will be cheaper and "safer" alternatived.

Are there cases of uber driver on passenger violence and if so how do they compare to licensed taxi driver on passenger violence statistically? This just feels like fear mo getting from the anxiety ridden to though.

I honestly don't understand how you can be on a news site for start ups and be against fair competition.
It's a good thing you know everything and your actions never have consequences on others. Fire never spreads, the free market will solve all problems, and the earth is flat.
>The drivers need to unionize and break Uber's back before Uber replaces them all with self-driving cars. It shouldn't be too hard for them to organize, since they all have smartphones and they all end up dissatisfied when Uber cuts their rates.

As a consumer who would much rather ride in a self-driving car than with a human driver, this notion pains my heart. Using unions to halt the progress of technology hurts us all.

I'm crossing my fingers you were being sarcastic. This is a tech community, after all.
I read so many reports of Yosemite being faster that I was beginning to think I was the only one who was disappointed.

I have an older machine (2010 Mac Pro tower), but it's been upgraded to 16GB RAM and an SSD over the years. I experienced an initial degradation in UI performance with Mavericks, but after the first OS update it was as fast as ever. Yosemite comes out, and now it takes over second to switch between Safari tabs on an otherwise idle machine. I had hoped that like Mavericks, this would be resolved in the first OS update, but no such luck. I enabled the "reduce transparency" option (this was recommended to speed up the UI) but it didn't help.

My mid-2012 MBr doesn't seem to suffer from this. I wonder if Apple just didn't consider video cards in older hardware. Not an unreasonable thing to do, but I'd have preferred a "sorry, this machine can't run the latest OS" message instead.
Yes I believe this is so.

What I understood is as a 'hack' is the system could be taken advantage of (by doing the transaction in BTC) (for your own Stripe account by your own BTC wallet) and refund it if the price moves against you or allow it to convert (BTC->USD) if the price has moved in your favour. Since you get the USD from BTC yourself you have a sort of 'hedge'/call option to reverse it (premium being the initial conversion fees).

If the volatility is such that its more than the fees (in this case BTC is 'free' during the Beta) it can be taken advantage of - The refund & near zero fees being a mechanism of a one way bet.

I suppose this can be done already with credit cards and foreign currency purchases (if you have your own stripe account). Though the fees of 2.9%+ are significantly more than the volatility involved.
Sure, if you never want a drive warranty. Because they'll probably end up blaming your OS for trashing the flash.
I work as a security analyst (though not a threat researcher for any major firm or anything like that), and I agree with this completely. Starting on day 1, when possible links to NK were mentioned in the media, all of my coworkers dismissed it and I had to convince them that NK's involvement was definitely feasible.

Even if one assumes that the vast majority of their whole cyberwarfare division is unskilled and incompetent, which could very well be true, you only need a core group of 5-10 good people to pull off attacks like these. It's also possible the people they're working with aren't of NK nationality or aren't living there.
Your London example is poor: Uber is free to operate in London.

Uber drivers who want to be hailed from the street or use a meter need to i) use the correct meter; ii) use a wheelchair accessible vehicle; iii) "do the knowledge".

Uner drivers have an alternitive. They could operate as minicabs. That allows them to use the app for booking; they don't need to have wheelchair accessible vehicles and they don't need to do the knowledge. But it does mean that they can't use a meter for pricing - they need to be able to agree a price before they journey starts.

"Things that control or store money" (payphones, vending machines, ticket machines, taxi meters, gambling and TOTE machines) are all high profile targets for criminal gangs and for people wishing to commit fraud. It's probably a good thing that a limited range of taxi meters is allowed to be used, although the current system of assessing and approving meters is probably sub-optimal.
Guest lecturer Russ Cox... nice!
It's not entirely subjective.
your "progress of technology" is based off of the exploitation of the lower class. I'd much rather our resources be allocated in a way that doesn't force people to work 3 jobs.
Personally I think the FBI is probably correct in their assessment, but I can understand the public's skepticism when you look at the Iraq WMD debacle.
I think a big part of the problem of "contributing to open source" has become GitHub itself. On the one hand, it's a great product that's done tons to promote FOSS, but it's created a world where we can't "contribute to open source" without permission from a gatekeeper maintainer. It's all so centralized and bottlenecked. I understand it's matter of human nature and commercial incentives that keeps things this way, but it still seems so suboptimal as far as the software itself is concerned.

I imagine that in the future we will have a "Google for code", where algorithms dynamically find us the optimal code for doing X from around the internet without X being a single privileged master branch temple on GitHub.
We could easily ditch nuclear altogether if we could find an efficient way to store power.