skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Right to work" undermines collective bargaining -- which itself is an attempt to redress the structural imbalance of employer-employee negotiations -- by introducing free-rider incentives to employees.

In short, it's an end-run around Wagner Act protections by preventing unions from mandating "union shop" or "agency shop" conditions of employment, in which employees must either join the union (in a union shop, which is uncommon) or must contribute union dues but do not have to be members of the union (in an agency shop, which is the most common arrangement). So-called "closed shops," in which union membership was a precondition of employment, have been illegal since Taft-Hartley.

The obvious intent here by employers is to create an incentive for employees to "free ride" by enjoying the fruits of union negotiations without having to contribute dues or participate in union actions. More generally, right to work laws are part of larger parcels of anti-union legislation such as WI's Act 10 (https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2011/related/acts/10.pdf), which basically forces unions to hold expensive elections each year in order to continue their existence, resulting in about 50% of the public sector unions in the state folding due to either an inability to afford elections or by failing the electoral test. When coupled with aggressive "union busting" tactics by law firms and security companies, state lawmakers have been extremely successful at helping companies shut down labor organization in many jurisdictions.

(Parenthetically, Governor Walker specifically exempted police and fire unions, and there is some evidence that those public-safety unions that endorsed him have had significant success in negotiating pay raises; although state workers have seen on average a greater than 10% reduction in take-home pay, the Walker-supporting Wisconsin Troopers Association negotiated a 17% pay increase.)
sort of interesting. i expected it to have velocity/inertia, but I think that would make it much more than ~900 bytes
Singapore’s First Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew Dies Aged 91
Hi i'm the co-founder of a social oriented website we launched days ago, i'm outside the US, my friend who is the main founder lives in the bay area!
Is there any way we can have a quick conversation or i can contact you directly? so i show you our product and vision, and more like statistics...etc
> From 2004 to 2007, it really felt like a renaissance in graphics. Far Cry and the UE3 demo in 2004 served to kick it off

HL2 was also massive benchmark in graphics. But probably the most impactful thing that happened in that period was the release of new generation of consoles (X360/PS3). You might also note that almost all early UE3 games were released console-first.
That's a common mantra, but it's not true. The voter base, especially the voter base for primary elections, has a significant effect on the options that are available. If 100% of young people, or even 100% of all people voted in every election, the available options would be vastly different.
Hah, found it myself - pomodoro was working for me years ago (That's why I implemented http://pomodorro.net). However, pomodoro was somehow not fully natural for me, probably because of being not really task oriented, but somehow artificially time oriented...

At some point I realised, the great idea is what I call "do-dids". It's nothing really new, it's just all focus-management ideas in one bucket.

So, Do-Did is something simple. Just plan a task, and do it, and then be happy you did it:

1/ Plan a TODO task(s) during some less-focused time: during a shower, a drive, while making a coffee, during boring meeting, your office-kitchen time. Just plan a task in all the possible ways: what to do in optimistic path (when stuff goes as expected), but also in pessimistic way (when you get stuck in a task).

1.2/ A task should be something achievable, actually a micro-task. Don't plan "building a website". Plan "a hello-world server started", then "added .css/.js file handling", then "first content server to browser"...

2/ Prepare environment: that's tricky... Read all the e-mails (and respond), read the news, prepare the hot coffee, go to toilet. Nothing like that is allowed after you start the do-did (of course in common-sense...).
Now, important for me was to have a "focus maintainer" and "world-insulator". Before I used pomodoro, but now I went back to old-school: I play one CD of well-known music. Not really a CD of course (I actually use mp3+winamp == really old-school).

3/ Do: put on your headphones, play the CD and don't stop until the task or CD is finished. It's up to you what to do if you finish the task (you can start next one or take a break) or the CD before the task (you may need a break, but maybe you can just start next CD).
What matters here for me, is that CD time - 60-80 minutes works really good for me.

3.1/ No distractions. No news, no email, no co-workers... Definitely no facebook !

4/ Did: you did it ! Now do something nice for you (coffee, browse the net, take a walk around, ...)
Tell yourself you did it, think about it for a while (something like scrum's retrospective or sprint's review). The task is done, you can now plan the next stuff - phase #1 again.

Do-Dids work great for me. There is plenty of time for everything. I realised that "planning phase" is very good thing, as then the "Do" phase usually goes quite good.

Do-dids are actually compact/personal version of scrum sprints for me, just happening in parts-of-day basis, instead of weeks.
ImplicitCAD: Powerful, Open-Source, Programmatic CAD
Perhaps we're considering different scenarios. Hobson's choice may possibly apply to unskilled or low skilled jobs. So anything that pays less than $50,000/year in the US.

Above $50k individuals absolutely have the ability to negotiate. And to do so strongly from a position of power. Good help is hard to find. When you're in the 6 figure range negotiating with huge corporations is the best. Small shops are tight on cash. There's not a lot of wiggle room. For huge corporations there's a lot of room to negotiate. Salary, bonuses, paid time off, and more. It's not crazy to negotiate 50% more compensation than their median offer for a given position.
It's not blank, you just can't see it yet.
I'd love to see better information on alternative collective bargaining to unions, which is a loaded word in the U.S. I've never worked as a union member, but my impression from working with them is that they undermine their own success long term by over protecting incumbent members and reducing organizational agility, but do a good job of improving the live of their averages member in the short to midterm.

I've often mused on how to make collective bargaining work better without much success. I wonder if employee owned corporations that function like contractors would be better (the employees start working for the union once the collective bargaining goes into effect.)
No side jacket?

It'd be interesting to see a project like this that uses just the side jackets with the titles to create a "bookshelf poster" that can be laid out wallpaper style.
Thanks for the link! That's going in my bookmarks.

Great game, by the way.
The top 10% are also putting in a lot more hours. Moreover, a good education, which now costs about $150k, is no longer a guarantee of a good job. I have many friends who won't pay off their student loans until they are 40. I have other friends with union jobs but little additional education that have houses and boat. Why should someone be compensated more than those who took the risk to pursue a higher education?
BOY DANCES AWESOME DUBSTEP
A BOY DANCES AWESOME DUBSTEP! YOU SHOULD SEE THAT!
The source code for Microsoft 6502 Basic comes to light
As tech workers, we enjoy the libations of a free market working somewhat close to its ideal, except when it doesn't.

The industry colludes to depress our wages as a whole (Apple/Google anti-poaching agreement and outsourcing).
The industry lobbies to enact legislation that brings our wages down (H1B). The entire system tries to prevent unionization through legislation.

If we look at industries that haven't experienced our continued boom, we can see what the future has in store for us as a whole. Depressed wages that haven't increased, decreased to no benefits and a transition from salaried employee to contract work, jobs dissolved by automation and not many options for finding work.

We need a front to negotiate with the industry as whole as we are already on the chopping block.
> and on balance I'd say an electronic system should be able to do better

Based on what evidence?

Paper fraud requires a physical presence, and the scope is limited to what a person or group of people can achieve.

Breaching electronic systems can happen on the server or client (conversations around the latter are noticeably absent from arguments by e-voting proponents). Breaches can be orchestrated from anywhere, including locations which with no extradition agreement, and can use botnets to scale infinitely.
> if their opinions are incorrect

Yes, for things with objective answers. If somebody is, you know, claiming that Mac OS9 was better than Windows 95 because OS9 had preemptive multitasking and Win95 didn't - then sure, correct them.

When we're in the realm of issues like racial inequality, gender relations, etc - I'd be really cautious about deeming anybody "incorrect."

These are issues that have challenged humankind as long as we've been on this Earth, and we haven't exactly worked out any ironclad solutions yet.
Once upon a time, there was a strong movement/belief that everything belonged in the web browser and operating systems should be no more than a shell to load a web browser, and in fact the web browser should be the one and only tool anybody should ever use, no exceptions.

Your thinking and the article's point shows that attitudes have dramatically shifted.
Interesting. How would you set up a union system that is self improving?

Normally organizations need to compete to survive, with the more ineffectual falling off. You can't necessarily have unions compete for members, because the power of the union is in how many members it has and fractioning them would diminish their authority.
Unions that are well run frequently recognise the realities of business finances, and there are multiple examples of unions that have indeed voted to take a pay cut, if you care to go looking.
To bring a counterpoint, it does not match mine (but I do not live in the USA).

My salary is actually higher that the minimum (established by collective agreement) for my job.
The union just negotiates the lower bound.

If your company values you more than that, they can always pay you more. Or promote you. Nothing stops them to do so.
I'm curious, why a raptor?
I wonder if unions can benefit from the "instant direct democracy" that technology allows but isn't currently used in most governments.
Thanks! And no problem about the link. I'll warn you, though, once you listen to his music, you'll start to hear it everywhere in games. So listen at your own peril :)
I'm guessing my opinion won't be popular here, but I don't see anyone saying anything similar, so I'm going to speak up.

There was once a time where unions were necessary. Personally, I think that time is long past.

Now, I think unions breed mediocrity, and set up situations where you have folks with an attitude of entitlement striking when they don't get every last bit of their way. Walking around with picket signs like as if they are owed everything.

Time to join the real world, with the rest of us. You don't always get what you want.

We had gas prices go way down in the last couple months, then they went all the way back up. I had heard it attributed to refinery workers striking, because some had been laid off. I don't know if that is true, or not, but if it is... it only proves my point.
The link was to a different type of pr0n than I expected.
The 1994 Bill Gates interview is really worth a read if you haven't seen it before: http://web.archive.org/web/20090606130047/http://www.playboy...
The obvious rebuttal is to argue that there is a pattern to picking unicorns, and then argue that a current investor will beat the market this year, and then use the same argument next year.

Note, being a unicorn isn't necessarily a sinker for an argument, it just can't be your only defence (i.e. gravity is the unicorn of theories about why things fall :) )
Do you have any examples? I am not teasing here with you. Seriously I'd like to know what they do since I'm still looking for monitoring solution (currently testing munin).
I'm not. Playboy's articles have always been tremendous. When I was younger I had a t-shirt with a Playboy logo on it and the phrase "I read the articles".

I'm starting to think we need a curation platform for long-form content. Preferably a subscription service that can solve the paywall problem elegantly. I don't use music subscription services because I want to keep the music, purchasing a file makes more sense. But I never save articles, I don't have the time to re-read them. Subscription seems perfect.

How much would I pay for such a service? Potentially a lot. If it could get me past any paywall or even just the most common ones I run into, I might pay a hundred bucks a month for it. I can consume a lot of long-form articles, many many more than I can books or movies. Subscribing to a magazine has too little signal-to-noise, I'm not looking for just any article to read. Nor do I have enough time to read a whole magazine.
I just ordered the LS model because it's what I wanted the new MacBook to be. Good build quality, decent processor, 12", HiDPI display, more than one port, and 12 hours of battery life. I fully intend to install ubuntu the second I get it and boot off that for the life of the machine. My hope is that for everything but vector/raster editing it can replace my 15" MacBook Pro for daily Python dev work.
> how people voted except for the testimony of a computer server

Well, that's not an accurate claim. There are a number of verifiable voting protocols, e.g., Helios https://vote.heliosvoting.org/. This doesn't mean that online voting is ready for mass adoption, but I think you're too quick to dismiss it.
Sounds like a problem with contract selection, honestly. Maybe use an independent [agnostic] party to select vendors for major government contracts?
Funny you used a picture of a PC
you're right, those rich folks really do deserve to extract their employees' value in ever-increasing amounts, because poor people are spoiled or something
If you are the only guy who knows X business process, congratulations! You've got yourself a comfortable trap and not much leverage for a higher pay raise or transfer because you're needed at X forever.

Not all of us are that lucky to have incompetent managers that allow that situation to play out.

But this still ignores the larger problem. Highly skilled workers as a class are still not receiving their fair market rate compensation because we cannot negotiate as a whole.

Your base pay should be much higher than it is and should allow you better opportunities for higher pay in negotiations.
If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.

Yes, but I am more skilled than my colleagues.

Unions inherently negotiate on behalf of the median worker who was employed at the time that the contract negotiations took place. As other people have pointed out, the fact the unions negotiate for current employees rather than future employees contributes to the "screw the new guy" phenomenon; the fact that unions negotiate for the median worker can result in them undervaluing their high-productivity workers.

This is why unions are effective primarily in low-standard-deviation-productivity fields: If the best secretary in the office is 10% more productive than the median, but the union manages to raise the median secretary's income by 20% compared to the market clearing rate, then every secretary benefits. However, if the top software developer is 10x as productive as the median...
I think the problem is that the word unionization encapsulates many different things which should not necessarily be tied together. Collective bargaining, employees having a voice on the running of the business, legal and advisory services provided by someone on your side as opposed to someone with interests diametrically opposed to yours (the CEOs, not the companies), elections of representatives, etc.

As a whole these (as the data conclusively proves) were better for workers and probably the companies as well at the expense of the C-level suits. But it is probably true that some of ideas implemented by unions did work against workers. The solution is not to throw the baby out with the bath water but to analyze and experiment with different union structures which reduce the negative effects and enhance the positive ones.

Unfortunately, Americans have decide to wholesale reject and vilify the only structure that empowers non-owners even slightly which despite all its faults was still better for most Americans, instead of trying to separate the effective ones from the ineffective ones, and are reaping the unequal society they have sowed.

Gotta give credit to our wealthy overlords who have done an impressive job of getting people to vote against their own interests by splitting people along various social dividing lines as well as magnifying limited failures of systems as endemic to them.
Yes,

It's worth saying that deep learning is very powerful at find features but isn't adaptive, requiring careful hand-tuning for a given feature-set.

My question is, at what point does this situation start to resemble the situation of computer-programs and their interfaces, where once a good-enough computer-based solution to a problem arise people are forced to adapt to the solution rather having the solution adapt to them (learning the irrational and counter-intuitive interfaces of X program and then having that knowledge codified as a skill, etc).

I already find myself speaking in a chirpy, robotic view when I am called by the chirpy robotic programs which may sometimes understand me.
Of course, the next step is obvious - work out why the compiler didn't do a four way avx unroll, and then submit a bug fix to clang to make it do that. That way all of your future code benefits from your single micro-optimization.

It's also possible that you find out that if you enable --generate-for-haswell or some other arcane compiler flag, it'll do it for you.
Unions do not negotiate the best deal for the employees, they negotiate the best deal for the union.

One of the terms unions love to have is a requirement that all employees be members of the union.

When you have to pay the union in order to keep your job, the union becomes a tax on your income... and the union has no incentive to treate you right-- as what are you going to do? Quit and go work for another company? That's your only option.

That modern unions attempt to force employees to be members when the employees don't want to-- shows that the unions themselves know they aren't offering an advantage to the employees that the employees would voluntarily choose.

Walmart doesn't force me to buy its hot dogs. Walmart competes with other hot dog providers for my business. (And loses because there is a very good german deli in this town.)
But it's not propaganda. Look how teachers' and police unions across the country have pushed relentlessly to collect unsustainable benefits while completely ignoring the needs of the cities they serve. How police unions are key in protecting bad cops, like unions everywhere protect bad workers. They're functionally no different than the unions that destroyed GM, etc.

I hear unions work okay in Europe. They haven't in the U.S.
Either:

a) Raptors are the cleverest of animals, with an uncanny ability to understand relativity.
b) I am obsessed with Jurassic Park and couldn't pass up a good pun.

So, you know. One of those two.
sry, it's under MIT license. I will fill it up later.'

edit: done
Let me be more clear with my question, since that's just information on the oral tradition in general.

I am looking for a source that the specific rule against putting meat and milk together was given to Moses, or that it's a direct implication of the written Torah.

As far as I have understood it, it's a ruling that the rabbis made once upon a time, and it has since become part of the oral tradition, but it was not originally a rule. This would imply that it is not unimpeachable. For example, you could argue against the two hour buffer zone in your link with modern omnipresent accurate clocks[0].

[0] Yes, time zones, I know, let's not actually argue that point.
People who think the labor movement was the creation of heroic union organizers have a problem to explain: why are unions shrinking now? The best they can do is fall back on the default explanation of people living in fallen civilizations. Our ancestors were giants. The workers of the early twentieth century must have had a moral courage that's lacking today.

In fact there's a simpler explanation. The early twentieth century was just a fast-growing startup overpaying for infrastructure. And we in the present are not a fallen people, who have abandoned whatever mysterious high-minded principles produced the high-paying union job. We simply live in a time when the fast-growing companies overspend on different things.
NK is starving because they're investing all their wealth into their army.
I don't think that the locals in Vancouver have problems getting jobs; they do get absorbed into the industry. (I'm thinking of, say, new graduates from programs at from UBC, SFU, Capilano University, BCIT, ...).

Almost every company I've worked for in a quarter century has participated in the co-op program; we've had bright interns every year, and they all went on to work either for the same company or elsewhere.

Many people are satisfied with that, and have other hobbies outside of work other than going to meets with other programmers. Or those who have programming as a hobby would rather be actually doing that.

Also, people have significant others and families. Geek get-togethers are mostly for single people who don't have a significant other that isn't also a geek.
Unions suffer from the same problem as communist states: they are theoretically superb, but practically cumbersome and prone to abuse.

A successful union should be able to

- Guarantee minimum wages and conditions for all employees.

- Hold management to account on malpractice towards employees.

- Not limit individual employees ability to command higher wages or conditions than the minimum.

- Not limit the ability of companies to make decisions that improve the health of the company.

- Allow employees to be agile in what they need from the company, without calcifying previous agreements.

- Not privilege the employment of union representatives.

In practice good unions hit some of these, but not all. And anti-union folks tend to carp on the ones that they're poor at.

I'd love to see a model for how to unionise that provided all these qualities.

They aren't called 'unions', but there are professional organizations that act as unions and are generally respected: doctors, accountants, etc. They don't hit all my points, but I think, on balance, programmers would benefit from something similar.
I think what differs deep learning from other machine learning techniques is the ability to form a hierarchy of features by itself. I think most of today's successful deep learning systems focus on supervised learning. For me I certainly want to know more about CNN and Caffe, but I also want to learn more about how to apply deep learning to unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. Any paper/course suggestion?
It's the same problem businesses have everywhere, except the good ones know how to weed it out. Same rule applies to unions.
I feel that it's getting more common recently.

…I'm not pointing in any direction… ducks
Amazon giving $100 worth of credits to purchase Android Apps
Electric trains and cars are technologically feasible.