skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.

This is theoretically true for a lot of things such as pay by seniority but it isn't true for everything. In the bad old days some people used union requirements as a way of keeping minorities out of certain industries. Laws were passed to fix this, but those same laws sometimes mean that if your coworker is incompetent then even if management and most union members want them gone then the union is still obligated to fight to let your coworker keep their job.

It can be hard to talk about unions in general when unions in the US and Sweden and Japan end up working so differently.
Very interesting. In step 4, after you have accomplished your goal what can I do that completely resets/reboots my brain? If I have been coding for 60 minutes, and I choose to spend the next 20 minutes as my break is there a recommended activity that completely rejuvenates? I am open to listening to music, exercise, watching videos, a snack etc. However, I rarely feel refreshed at the end of this break and dread going back to work again. Appreciate your thoughts on this.
What about a double sided version where the inside contains something of value? Perhaps a called out spot for a flash drive containing the book, or a QR code to the book/amazon page/etc, or perhaps a little "guest log" so people could open it up and rate the book? Would be an interesting experiment/art thing

In fact, if you did what the others down below suggested (the Amazon Kindle scraper) then the inside could automatically contain when you purchased the book which would be kind of cool
If they do their job, they negotiate the minimum wage and benefits. Nothing prevents you from getting more than that if you're skilled, but it does in fact prevent the new guy from being screwed over if done properly.
You say that now, just you wait until supply of programmers catch up.
That’s the idea, but it’s a profit making exercise for these companies. In all, they charge far, far more than the up front cost.

Not to mention, they’ll charge based on an annual fee for every year the engines are in service. And if there’s anything the original B52 taught us, it’s that avionic hardware is in service for far, far longer than we estimate when we buy it.
I esp. like the actual competition (2014)
http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_5.html
about surveillance information leakage.

The 2014 Challenge: PiuPiu and the National Security Letter

The PiuPiu oversharing site allows users to create PiuPiu accounts and post 140-character messages. The federal government wants PiuPiu to surveil user activity on the site, by archiving any posts that match certain patterns outlined in a national security letter. Subject to the nondisclosure constraints of the letter, PiuPiu may not inform anyone of the surveillance request.

The underhanded goal is this: write surveil() in such a way that the act of surveillance is subtly leaked to the user or to the outside world. PiuPiu can not reveal the act of surveillance, but your function is technically able to edit the Piu or user structure during scanning. Find a way to alter that data (this alone is a bit of a challenge, since you are not supposed to alter the data, just scan it) in such a way that an informed outsider can tell if someone is being archived. The leakage should be subtle enough that it is not easily noticed.

I would do that with TR39, unicode confusables.
Delphi Automotive attempts to cross U.S. with self-driving car
Consider for a second that maybe they aren't voting against their own interests.

My interest is not in having some jackhole thug whose primary skill is breaking kneecaps going around and negotiating my salary, thank you very much.

With unions you always have the principle-agent problem. The union is going to negotiate for its best interest, not necessarily the employees and certainly not a specific employees. There's a long history of these kinds of union abuses. This is why the unions in america are closely associated iwht the mob (that and the fact that the mob is what started the unions in america.)
> Time to join the real world, with the rest of us. You don't always get what you want.

"You're right sir, I don't deserve paid vacation or maternity leave. Yes sir, I don't deserve to work the 40 hours a week you pay for me. I'll get right to it, sir. How high do you want me to jump, sir?"

Rugged individualist Americans standing up for their right to not have any leverage in negotiation with their betters, always a sight to see.

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

Because real incomes for the majority have been flat in the US for the decades despite GDP increasing, income inequality increasing, and hours worked increasing?
The reason to use intrinsics and inline assembly (actually, the latter is pretty rare these days, intrinsics being much more common) isn't only about beating the compiler.

When you're relying on the compiler to vectorize, you run the risk of a subtle, innocuous change to the code breaking the vectorization -- and this will happen a lot. Also, when you target multiple compilers, it's very difficult to get reliable performance across all of them, unless you do the vectorizing yourself.

Not to mention, compilers tend to do great on simple test cases like these, but totally barf as soon as the loop becomes more complex (Try adding some conditionals to the loops some time... It's not that these loops can't be vectorized, it's just that the compiler doesn't know how).

To get the best performance out of vectorization, it's mostly about organizing the data so that it can be easily vectorized. If you've gone through this work, it's fairly pointless not to take the extra effort to guarantee that you're getting the performance you expect.
I remember playing this years ago and couldn't progress past the last few levels. Is there a cheat to skip levels or unlock them, I don't want to replay everything?

Nevermind... I just finished it.

The colors always bugged me, why does the color sometimes become black when I'm traveling towards it when it should become brighter? Perhaps because the game only simulates the frequency and we can only see a narrow spectra so it makes sense it is black on both ends.

Also the closing doors don't seem to work properly, or it is just my perception.
Glyphosate (Roundup) probably causes cancer, say WHO+Lancet [pdf]
The interview is a tool to quickly evaluate the candidate. Not every candidate reaches the point where they could be even considered being a person I'll "be working together with for years". There're more than one candidate at any given time and I still have my day job to do.

I don't know what does this say to a candidate, but I surely hope they're mature enough to understand that there's nothing personal about it. They will be treated with dignity and courteously during the whole process, but that's all I can promise.
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Virginia school suspends an 11-year-old over a leaf that wasn't marijuana
You can look up the related papers about playing Atari with deep learning just released recently, that one is a reinforcement learning one.

When deep learning first started, it was actually very unsupervised focused with stacked autoencoders and DBMs, the most well known paper around that time would probably be the youtube cat recognizing paper from Google/ Stanford [0]. A lot of the "early" works (from around 2006-2010) is unsupervised learning as well, just look up Geoff Hinton paper around that time.

[0]:http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... .
Good points. I'm not sure how HL2 slipped my mind.

In addition to graphics, HL2 was more or less the game that ushered in truly modern physics. Even today, some AAA games don't have physics systems as good. Likewise for facial animation.

There was also Doom 3 that year, though arguably it lacked the same level of fidelity. However, it was really ahead of its time in the years leading up to release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj3dPyk7hPI
(Doom 3 at MacWorld 2001)
I actually hired two best performers at my previous company this way. The amount of people interviewed total is about 30.
Was posting to suggest exactly that, it's also what Python calls it (https://docs.python.org/2/library/functools.html#functools.p...), and a "partially evaluted / filled out" function basically encapsulated the whole concept.
Yeah, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this is totally wrong under US law.
According Wikipedia, in the U.S., once a union is certified at an employer that union is the only entity that can "negotiate conditions of employment." That means that employees are at best highly restricted in their ability to negotiate individually with a unionized employer.
I'm sure you've seen this, but to those who want to get a start on a curated resource of longform articles, I've always liked the aptly named http://longform.org
the primary function of unions is to improve working conditions and increase wages for its members. the improved working conditions are welcome in developing nations, but the increased wages come at a cost, for unions can only ensure higher wages by limiting the number of jobs available. furthermore, unions must define a set of criteria for the acceptance of new union members that discriminates for reasons wholly irrelevant to employers.
I have tried using Renderscrip in a large scale application (+1 million daily users) with a min API = 7. It is in fact available through the support library from API 8.
However :
-The Gaussian Blur Intrinsic is buggy on some terminals ! The implementation of Gaussian Blur in the Nexus 10 makes a mistake in a division (1000 instead of 1024 or the reverse), so we have very visible artefacts on this terminal. It might have been solved with the Lollipop ROM though.
-Using Renderscript on old terminal has proved to be a real pain in the ass. Since we have a large userbase, we also encounter some fairly exotic terminals. If I remember well, some Wikio phones (low cost chinese phones, but validated by Google) crashes as soon as you try to invoke Renderscript in a native thread (so you don't have any way to recover from this exception).

In the end, we removed Renderscript and replaced it by a custom blur implementation. In our case RS was not used for real time blur rendering, just blurring of a downloaded images, so the computation time is not vital.

I might have tried to reintroduce Renderscript later on, at least for the latest API levels but now that blurring does not fit anymore in Android's design language, we will just remove the blurred views from our app.
hooray go Seattle!
Not everyone surfs the web with Lynx. Whilst I understand the need for websites to stand the test of time and be "curlable", there are still many 'appy' websites out there that fall back to plain HTML when we need it. I'm a big fan of archival services like Pinboard which I have been running now for 3-4 years under an archival account ― it has terabytes of raw HTML data that I can peruse at any time and do a full text search for any page. The bulk of those pages are very JS dense pages that somehow, through some wizardry on the site's backend; have managed to preserve some text for me to read. GoogleBot struggled with this not so long ago, but can now crawl fragmented URIs with a hashbang in them, as if the page was a normal HTML page. I suspect GoogleBot is a stripped down Chrome that renders the page and does a scrape. Infact GoogleBot has been proven to execute JS. SEO and search aside, there is (hopefully) some server black magic that detects browsers like Lynx and then serves us some 'neckbeard text'. Webapps which are not doing that are probably not worth your time anyway.Also noteworthy:

http://christianheilmann.com/2011/12/06/that-javascript-not-...

Also, there are great proposals by the W3C to get webapps working without the need for JS. A lot of the behavior you see now in webapps could be done with simple HTML tags.
This is not completely accurate. Deep learning at the moment simply means the use of "deep" architectures in neural networks. Graphical models, standard Bayesian hierarchical models, and the likes all form hierarchies of features as well and are commonly practiced.
I note that the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions. It's worth considering that public-sector and private-sector unions are different beasts. For one thing, private-sector unions are facing off against corporations - both trying to maximize their own value, and so one might hope a balance is achieved. In the public-sector, unions are trying to maximize their own value, but the government is (hypothetically) trying to maximize public good, so it's not really a fair balance.

Private-sector unions have been hugely helpful in the US. This article touches on it in an interesting way: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/nicholas-kristof-t...
Reading your last paragraph, I just wished more people were researching ways to fix this situation, and to come up with new economic models to replace standard capitalism. It would probably be the least bullshit job of all :)
We are in the current YC batch. Focusing on scheduling the medical world (Enterprise B2B). Have 15 trials right now.

Shoot me an email (in my profile).

https://reschedulemed.com
I agree with you, but I don't for a second think unions will change that.

Unions won't eliminate the problem of non-technical people running engineering departments and deciding salaries-- they will simply put a non-technical union negotiator in there.

This will make it worse because companies do actually compete not to lose engineering talent right now... but if your only option is another union shop where you'll make exactly the same wage, you become a commodity.

Unions commoditize workers.

http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap20p4.html
There's really no high, there's basically 0 recreational benefit to vyvanse (at least at the dosage I take).
>Look how teachers' and police unions across the country have pushed relentlessly to collect unsustainable benefits

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

The kind of benefits that teachers and the police ask for are universal in western Europe, and are sustainable due to taxation that is closer to the rates that the US had during its economic rise, rather than the rates during its current fall.
Also check ntop out -- it has similar traffic reports, but no such fancy multibox support last time I looked.

That's more a job for SNMP clients anyway. Actually, just look at Nagios/Icinga :) It's a very mature and well-rooted infrastructure monitoring solution.
I'm not familiar with US unions generally or the ones you bring p, but if they get unreasonable concessions then their situation may be a type of survivor bias. The only unions that are left are the very tough ones?

In countries where labour is generally covered by collective bargaining frameworks and enjoys public support, there's a lot of consensus seeking about the unionization ground rules between job market players (labour unions, employer unions, legislature).
My friend worked at place with unions in Ireland:

* Safety was 'important', every year they checked that chairs and screens are ergonomically positioned. However lab vent contamination with poison was swept under rag.

* Monthly union membership fee 50 euro. This was 'optional', but most people paid to avoid problems.

* union had huge income surplus. It was used to send union leaders to 'seminars' on exotic locations.

* in case of strike, union would not compensate first three days (except officials who were organizing the strike). All strikes very under 3 days. Basically extra holiday.

* that place had 10 HR persons on 120 personnel. My company had 1 HR for 110 people.

* People with permanent contracts were untouchable.

* 70% people worked on 6 month contracts extended for YEARS.

* This company spend fifty year budget on huge unnecessary building. There were no money left to hire people
Doesn't scandals such as the Non-poaching case between Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, etc. reveal that even high-skilled workers aren't immune to the tricks of corporate management?
This idea resembles the election of brigadirs (work brigade leaders) in a kolkhoz. It requires that the production is collectivised/nationalised, or at least that the private ownership is nominal in nature, because owner cannot effectively direct work.

It did work to some extent in agriculture prior to mechanisation, when much of the work was manual, but it is hard to see how this would be possible e.g. in high-tech industry, where even the fundamental nature of "capital" and "means of production" are different.
Vyvanse was similar but with far less negative side effects. I used to get headaches and felt generally unpleasant on adderall.
Although the study (or summary) heavily implies that the decline in unionizing causes greater income inequality, the standard correlation-is-not-causation caveat still applies.

In particular, there's a plausible argument that greater automation is a confounding variable, insofar that (a) easy-to-automate jobs tend to be more unionized than hard-to-automate jobs and (b) automation leads to outsized rewards for relatively small groups of people (investors, owners, inventors, etc.)

That's not to say unions don't matter, but I'm curious if there's any research that attempts to distinguish between unionization and new technological developments.
10x developer is a myth, but a fun one that makes you feel warm and fuzzy if you believe it.

You can negotiate a higher pay with your employer if you excel, the union provides the bottom from which you can negotiate.

Unfortunately, right now, that bottom is below our what our fair market-rate earnings would be.
Not necessarily true. Ideally you want things like vote encryption and confirmation code generation to occur in the client, where they can be verified by the voters themselves. Otherwise, who is to say the election server itself is not compromised or outright designed to manipulate results. Of course, this is only useful paired with a voting protocol that allows verifying that your own vote was counted, while obscuring its association with any individual voter. See [1].

This is helpful even if only a tiny fraction of voters do verify it, say by running a browser extension that checksums the downloaded Javascript. Because of birthday paradox like results, if votes are verifiable, and a small percentage of voters properly verify their votes, then the chances that the server can modify the election results significantly (e.g. by shipping malicious javascript to some users) without being caught, are actually fairly small.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec08/tech/full_papers/...

p.s. Of course, an issue with this system is that voters voting on a compromised computer might have their votes hijacked anyways (which is true of any remote voting protocol I know), and that verification codes aid in things like vote selling (some solutions exist, using verification code decoys and the like).
You have no idea what I go through when not on my job, you obviously don't understand how ADHD works.

Also I've been taking these drugs for almost my entire life so I think I'm a better judge of what I need to do my job than you.
Could not agree more about Amon Tobin's score. Not every game needs a perfect score, but when done right it adds so much to the ambiance. Reaching out to an innovator of his talent was a bold move that paid off.
RIP Lee Kuan Yew
Mike, actually I totally empathize with your feeling towards the whiteboard questions. I would probably be flabbergasted myself if offered a live coding session. Whiteboard is much more forgiving in the interview setting, in my opinion. When I'm interviewing, I keep stressing the fact that I don't care about correct syntax, coding style and whatever have you when you are doing whiteboard - only idea counts. I also leave them for about 20 minutes to give them space to think. Not sure if that helps, but I've not seen people having problems after such intro.

"Non-job projects" != "test projects". I do have non-job projects and showcase them when interviewing, but I would not take a test project as part of the interview process, unless I have really good reasons to do so.
I'd enjoy it more if it ended with a link to a P-Lisp disk image. After all that buildup, that lack is a real letdown.
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Ultimately all you can do is gently guide the world toward secular humanism, as people raised under the irrational tribalism of any religion struggle to writhe out of the pit they were born in. Calling out the faults of one flavor of religion is silly.
Amon Tobin's score opened an entirely new genre of music for me, and it really set the tone of the game beautifully. Chaos Theory the game intermingling with the soundtrack (and then getting the soundtrack and listening on its own, and then spreading out to his other albums and other similar artists) remain one of my favourite experiences in gaming.
This is especially more funny when you consider corporate influence in politics, along with the influence of money. Corporations and the rich have a disproportionate influence yet it would be audacious to ever propose workers having a vote in these matters.

Owners of corporations are of course delighted when employees are fractured, unable to coalesce to wage battles for greater equality and say in decision-making and sharing profits.
I guess this depends on local legislation. It is possible that in some places the law/collective agreement says that you cannot pay more.
I've never had to change my dosage of vyvanse for the past 4 years and have 0 withdrawal symptoms (I don't take them on the weekends or holidays, i've stopped for over 3 weeks before with 0 withdrawal symptoms).
>Not limit the ability of companies to make decisions that improve the health of the company.

The only purpose of unions is to limit the ability of companies to make decisions that improve the health of the company (at the expense of the people who work for it.)
"This Old House" is exactly the intent of the reference. The old Matasano Blog had two ongoing series of posts "This Old Vulnerability" and "This New Vulnerability". The former was used for discussions of older vulnerabilities, while the latter was used for discussing new vulns.

One such example (from 2007) was ported over to our relaunched blog. http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2007/7/27/this-new-vulne...
> 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.

As an analogy: "The modern government attempt to force citizens to pay taxes when the citizens don't want to-- shows that the governments themselves know that they aren't offering an advantage to the citizens that the citizens would voluntarily choose."

It shows some someone is a screw up. It could be the union, demanding benefits when they don't deserve them; it could be the employees who don't want to pay and would still benefit from the unions negotiating for them.
Very unfocused, I can't spend more than 5-10 minutes on any single task without getting distracted. It is almost impossible to get "in the zone" without my medication.
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Adderall worked well but gave my headaches and some other minor side effects, my doctor recommended Vyvanse and it worked pretty much the same without the headaches. It does not affect my sleep at all.
Also try thebrowser.com

Mostly free, but if you subscribe you will get lots more (great) mostly long-form articles, and in cases where the article would normally be behind a paywall, they will do a special version for thebrowser's paying customers.