skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You can negotiate a higher pay with your employer if you excel, the union provides the bottom from which you can negotiate.

I've never heard of a unionized industry that worked this way. Unions negotiate pay for every worker that belongs to the union. The only way to negotiate for higher pay is to quit your unionized job and take another non-unionized job.
Vector Watch: 30 day battery life and contextual notifications
It's not a myth, some developers really do suck that much.
Nokia N9* handsets run prolog code

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ijxdl/nokias_n9...
All the author had to to was to add '-march=native' or '-march=core-avx2' to the compiler command line: http://goo.gl/H4f62I
Except, even with something like Helios, it becomes, at best "the testimony of the personal computers of each voter, which are also easily hackable". In the extreme, it gives you a system where Intel can probably decide the result of every election.

Edit: However, see the Estonia example at the bottom of this comment thread. I might be convinced that a combination of technology and procedural safeguards can give us an online voting system at least as "secure" as our deeply flawed but functional online banking/credit system.
1. Closed shops are pretty much necessary for Unions to form or persist. It give Unions bargaining power.

2. Unions are democracies, in a functioning democracy what's good for the power structure should be good for the electorate.
I've been on these drugs for at least 10 years and there are no noticeable long term side affects. The only thing you have to worry about is that they do kill your appetite so if you're taking them on a daily basis you'll have to force yourself to eat sometimes or risk being underweight.
Doesn't voting for a board control in the Union allow for this? Like you have 4-5 people in charge but they have to be elected by the body of the Union.
Logic programming shines in any domain where unification is used heavily. An example is writing executable semantics or type inference/checking algorithms. Here's some code I hacked up as an example a few years ago that implements an interpreter and HM type inference for a small functional language: http://pastebin.com/aWBWSwiW
In this commentary thread, I see a lot of opinions about unions, as well as anecdata, but little in the way of actual discussion of the findings that the article is talking about.

I myself lack the economic and statistical knowledge to offer such discussion, but would very much like to read discussion from those who are knowledgeable.
> Unions commoditize workers.

Can't upvote this enough.
There aren't enough free ranges to product the eggs people want. Does everyone want tl pay $1 per egg? The answer is to be less greedy about animal produce.
A Comparison of Log-Structured Merge (LSM) and Fractal Tree Indexing
Ponte Tower [video]
In general, self-improving institutions operate by setting goals, evaluating those goals with metrics and iterating on the underlying model so as to improve those metrics. I know that's a simplistic answer, but I lack the specific understanding of how unions currently work to provide better insight.
The wealthy in the US have successfully lobbied for "Right to Work" legislation and have managed to pump out anti-union propaganda that is being parroted in this thread for decades. This costs money and effort. Why do you suppose they have done this? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because it benefits the individual worker? Or because it allows them to keep a larger share of the output of the economy?

Income inequality is the highest it has been since the beginning of the depression. Real wages have been flat for decades despite large gains in GDP. Is that a sign that workers have excellent leverage in negotiations?

Programmers are in a privileged position right now because there aren't enough of us to fill demand. That will not be the case forever. Look at what has happened with law - people saw the money to be made, flooded the market, and now a law degree doesn't really mean shit unless you're from a Big N school. The majority of programming work is not innovative or challenging - look at how many "I taught myself Javascript Framework 38! Look what I built" posts that flood this site. What do you think the long-term outlook for programming work is going to be like? Are you going to be the special snowflake ninja 10X rockstar in 10 years? Are you going to be happy to have no collective bargaining then?
The theology of debt episode is particularly interesting.

Just a quick quote from the end:

"""The great religious texts utilize the language of debt. They begin by saying, yes, morality is simply a matter of paying one's debts. However, the deeper understanding that these texts offer is that, that is an illusion and that it's the annihilation of debt that is ultimately divine. """
Why put the last phrase in parentheses when removing it would totally alter the meaning?

The only purpose of surgeons is to hack into peoples bodies and mess about with their internal organs (when the person's health would be worse if they did not). See? It's easy to play those games.

Employment isn't a zero sum game. Employees can benefit from a healthy company. Unions should facilitate the growth of a company in ways that do not exploit the workforce.
10x developer is very rare, but I have worked with guys like that - though of course, this depends on tasks. If task is well defined and bounded by a given tool set and rigid rulesets, etc, 10x cannot really be achieved. On the other hand, if there is just a vision of achieving goal X, and the median developer doesn't even know what tools to start with, an outstanding developer is much more than 10x productive than median.

However, in regular development jobs, I have also seen 0.1x developers, and worse. Even guys who definitely do damage if they are given access to the tools. The variation is huge.
One of my biggest personal and professional mistakes so far has been not seeking quality mentorship early enough. The boost in growth you get from having someone actually care about how you are doing is practically incalculable. The bond between master and apprentice is also such a beautiful part of human experience, you definitely want to experience that in your life.
> the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions

He also brought up the United Auto Workers, which is not.
A-380 is over 2.5x the weight of a B-52.
Googlebot is Chrome (2011)
I used it for a while before switching to Vim, than was like 8 or 9 years ago.
I remember throwing DEADJOE files everywhere in my computer :)
It's pretty ironic that the party of small government favors a policy of huge government overreach into the ability of various to enter into contracts with each other. That's all Unions really boil down to: contracts. It's supposed to be what makes this country a superior place to do business, the fact that you can enter into binding contracts which will be enforced. But hey, if you know how to operate the institutionalized bribery system known as campaign finance, you can get the government to rewrite the contract to your advantage, or even deny your counterparty the ability to enter into a binding contract at all.
I think it's time for you to join the real world. Union workers are not entitled. You are coming from a place of entitlement if you think that life is that good for most workers. Union workers are trying to regain some semblance of power in an exploitative relationship. Many employers (all of the most efficient and therefore successful ones) are abusive. Even the hyper-entitled, and therefore hyper-libertarian software engineers are abused by their employers - employers break the law and collude to depress wages, if you want a real example from the news. Employees as a whole in this country are currently getting screwed -- because of a very well funded and long-running campaign by business interests to destroy unions through criminal action, regulatory capture, propaganda, etc. Incidentally it's much easier to convince software engineers to turn on each other and work against their best interests, all it takes is a quick ego stroke -- claim 'no, we're only going to screw over the \bad\ engineers, and you're not one of them... are you?' Fortunately some of them trying to stop it. Complaining about gas prices changing because of those pesky entitled blue collar upstarts acting above their class and demanding to be treated like human beings doesn't particularly endear people to your cause either. There are arguments to be made against unions; none of these are them.
Vanity Fair is another magazine you might not expect to have great articles among the hundreds of pages of Fashion ads

https://longform.org/publications/vanity-fair
this article takes a correlation and proceeds to imply causation from it. There is a correlation between recent rise of inequality in advanced economies and decline in unionization. But, global inequality has decreased over the same period. It's quite probable that the same forces are driving all 3 of these
Yep. It has always amazed me how my peers can assume that their pay should be proportionate to their value in one breath while ranting about unions in the next.

I mean, it's one thing to realize that the supply/demand situation for programmers currently makes unions unnecessary, but it's quite another to slam people in other fields for doing what they have to in order to secure the same damn privilege (getting paid according to value).

The opportunity to make this extremely modest dream a reality is not some kind of right inherent to the free market! It's something we're going to have to fight for once supply/demand equilibrium has been reached.
Why did you pick javascript for this project?
Er. Author missed a crucial point of "just" using PyPy: for me it's over 24x speedup over standard python (if you run it enough times for JIT to warmup). Know your tools
Where does the 50 gallons of water/egg figure come from?

I've got chickens, they don't drink that much water and they don't eat that much food.
Depends on the union. Some allow for negotiation, some have a scale which you can work with.

Bonuses and supplementary pay are usually not determined by unions and are up to you to negotiate in this situation.
I don't think it's the case that people will stay in the same employ for many years like they used to; unionised or not. People expect to change jobs much more often.
Detecting if an image is really an image
In these tests we were able to recover screenshot-like views of entire websites after viewing them in the newest version of chromium, then running the poc on the local system.
That's kind of like saying Harvard is the key to getting a high-paying job. The novice entrepreneurs that build successful relationships with experienced ones are also sending signals that they will succeed before that relationship begins in earnest. The previously successful entrepreneurs are picking winners whose efforts they can magnify.
There probaby an bug in dragscroll then. It is not supposed to break the behaviour on tablets, will test it..
Thanks. Reading the Bear Grylls article now. Their 1pass offering seems brilliant. Will explore more.
Is this what you're referring to?

You shall not cook a kid in its mother's milk. (Exodus 34:26)[0]

The Talmud goes into detail as to how to extrapolate all meat in all milk, but it is considered a biblical prohibition, not rabbinical.

[0] http://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/9895#v=26
Tablets trump paper in Open Source Ebola response
Lee Kuan Yew, Founding Father and First Premier of Singapore, Dies at 91
Laureate Education Sues Domain Name Proxy Service for Trademark Infringement
It depends on the union. Some allow for up negotiation and others have a scale which you can negotiate from.

But bonuses and supplementary pay are up to negotiate for.
If they are using jquery UI, then there is a small fix addon called "touch punch" which repairs it.

A similar approach should work for other libraries. You need to handle the "touch" events in addition to "mousedown" and "mouseup".
write them a dead-tree letter. If they are incorporated then they should have a registered agent for service of process. Send your letter to that person's address, and point out that if jsfiddle doesn't remove the page you would sue them for trademark infringement.

You don't really need to sue; a credible threat to do so is usually all that is necessary.
Show HN: Platform that supports artists to bring their artwork out of the studio
Things aren't going to change until we stop treating such behavior with "respect". You treat it with "respect" and it become a "respectful" thing to do.
"Aaand...a union isn't a "let's all be lazy and wreck businesses" framework; that's a bit of nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades.."

This sounds great in theory, but here is what I've seen in practice:

1) Very difficult to fire someone which almost always leads to a court case. Poor employees should be able to be terminated, for the benefit of everyone, not shuffled around the company wasting money and resources.

2) Unions becoming as powerful or more powerful than many large companies which leads to the same type of corruption. Most Union leaders get millions in bonuses every year, yet we don't see anyone protesting on Wallstreet.

3) Guaranteed raises for unionized employees, even if it means the company will go out of business or can't compete any longer in the market place.

4) Inflated wages. A worker doing a job that requires little education or skill can do should not be paid > $100,000/year. In the 90s, I knew mechanics making $150,000/year working 3 day work-weeks. The unions forced the companies to have 2 people working the job of 1 person.

5) You can't get raises based only on merit. If you want a raise, many other people need to get raises in your department or it just won't happen.

My previous company went to a trade show in Vegas and we rented a booth. We were required to pay $500 for a union guy to unfold a table and another couple thousand to essentially plug in a computer. Why would I want more of this inefficiency?

More examples:

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/vegas-union-bloc...

Ever wonder why the UFC isn't in New York? The Culinary union. When people choose not to be in a union, many unions decide to use under-handed tactics to force a company to support them.

It's just one group looking to have power over another. They generally aren't looking out for your best interest, only to use your status as an employee to have leverage and power over a company.

This is a forum for startups. Do you actually think it would be easy to start a company if you had to go through miles of red tape and essentially a court case to let a poor employee go? It would change the entire startup scene for the worst.

The glut, waste, and inefficiency is why I despise unions. You can tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about, but I've seen it too many times in the last 20 years to believe you.
I don't know much about how most unions work, but at least TV & movie actors and writers, classical musicians, and professional athletes have unions that work as task_queue describes. It's hard for me to imagine a programmer's union that didn't work this way getting off the ground.
VIPER: The Python IoT Design Suite for Arduino, UDOO and Spark
But if your operating costs are more than your revenue (thus, no profit), who is keeping that non-profit afloat?
> The guards gave the Americans a choice: Surrender the undocumented merchandise and enter Austria, or turn back into war-torn Eastern Europe.

What war? This was Hungary in 1994, 4-5 years after a surprisingly peaceful end of communist rule.
"are sustainable due to taxation that is closer to the rates that the US had during its economic rise"

European taxation takes far more from low income people than taxes in the US. The US gets the highest proportion of it's take revenues from the top 10% in the OECD.
Animation Principles for the Web
Based upon the Prospectus Summary (http://www.nicholasfunds.com/NF/Summary.html) the total annual fund operating expenses are 0.73%.

Contrast that with Vanguards S&P 500 fund (http://www.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/p040.pdf) at 0.17% for Investor Shares and 0.05% for Admiral Shares
Show HN: First Review of MakerBot Replicator 5th Generation
yes, if you have a million money managers, 50K of them will beat the market, at a 5% confidence interval

another problem is, what is the proper benchmark? say he beat S&P 500. Ok, but we know that small stocks or value stocks outperform S&P 500. Did he beat a small stocks index? My guess is once you construct a proper benchmark, it becomes even less likely that he really did beat it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superinvestors_of_Graham-an...
whether considered a game could be debatable..

this cern based incremental game is wondrously full of great research that the player discovers through perseverance :

http://particle-clicker.web.cern.ch/particle-clicker/
> If you focus on your own skills - always be coding, always be learning - I think you'll do fine here or elsewhere.

People who just code and learn don't automatically get work. You need a network to get work. Some places make that much harder to acquire. It's good if you're doing well, but we are talking about people potentially wasting years of life in places which make it fundamentally harder for them because they were poorly advised that learning will somehow get you constant work no matter where you are.
> in a functioning democracy what's good for the power structure should be good for the electorate

So basically, you're saying that there is no such thing as a "functioning" democracy.
I'm really believing we need a professional association or guild. With merit-based professional rankings.

I think a big contributor to the problem of programmers being underpaid is that there's no distinction between the clinic assistant and the brain surgeon. We're all just "programmers" or at best "software engineers". If there were an official distinction, then it might be easier to demand higher salaries for the higher skilled positions.
The argument isn't that anyone who beats the market is a lucky unicorn, it's that you can't tell if they're a lucky unicorn or not. Beliefs about beating the market aren't really relevant, the argument would be the same if we were evaluating a cancer treatment which only one person had taken.
Sorry.

http://flownet.com/ron/plisp.html

I'll fix the blog post too.
Thanks for being open about your perspective on the interviewing process, and for taking the time to follow up on these threads.

Do you believe that technical phone pre-screens are ineffective in general? From what I've read Matasano doesn't pre-screen candidates, but provides complementary study materials instead. Is that because the subject matter is specialized? Would you approach hiring web dev roles differently?

From your remarks, it sounds like you would reject the practice of asking open-ended interview questions (e.g. describe your workflow, describe a typical day, describe a recent project) due to interference from the interviewer's bias. What, if any, value do you place on open-ended questions?
Evidently this is highly industry-dependent. My experience is in the US auto industry, where all union workers' pay and benefits are fixed by what the union negotiates with the company. (At least, they were when I worked in that industry.)
> The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs

This is an extremely dangerous myth.

Markets don't care how hard it is to define a job, how hard it is to do a job, or anything else of the sort. They care about supply/demand. If the supply of a certain kind of labor is too high, pay falls until enough people leave to restore supply/demand balance. It's that simple.

Example: chemists. It's an occupation that demands tons of creativity and is very hard to pin down, but the career prospects are shit. Why? We train more of them than industry needs.
Well, the point about that scandal was that what Apple, Google and others were doing was illegal.
In China the middle class would get screwed too much. They might just inflate to spread the pain around making everyone losers.
Why shouldn't this be up to the mouse driver? I used to just use middle-click for this.
Thanks! Now I can play with it on my IIe, too.
>If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.

Only if someone before me hadn't decided them first. And even if I decide them, what about the people who come after me? They're forever beholden to the context that I created the rules under.
I like that idea. Sadly no-one seems to have a database of images of the spines of books. All I'm doing at the moment is pulling the color at (x:5,y:5) from the cover image and using that for the spine. It's not exact but good enough. I think pick either white or black text depending on the color saturation. It's OK in this situation but for generating a poster it'd need to be a lot more refined.
Nothing stops them to do so.

Except the fact that at any given moment, the company only has $X to pay you from, and the union makes it so that they have some amount less: $X - n.
it doesn't work in FF 27.x, but it's a good idea though, integration must be quite good. In the meantime and if integration is not an issue, you could try vim-anywhere which is a more general way to get vim well anywhere =)

https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere

http://sprunge.us/hiFY (personal revision, posix sh)
Ask HN: Cool developer and/or startup meetups/co-working spaces in NYC?
Hi HN-NYC I'm a node/rails/ios freelance developer from Austria and it's my first time in this great city - I'd love to meet and/or work with interesting devs/product people over the next couple of weeks.

I already checked meetup.com but was wondering if working at any of the many co-working spaces wouldn't even make more sense (also I'd reckon not every gathering is listed on meetup.com).

I would be very grateful for recommendations on where to find the most interesting communities (currently I plan on working at http://harlemgarage.com tomorrow).

Thanks!
When I was in elementary school and used to do this many years ago, the best way to connect a Mac Plus to the web was to use a Mac new enough to support Ethernet but old enough to support MacIP, and use IPNetRouter (http://www.sustworks.com/site/downloads_classic.html) to bridge TCP/IP over Ethernet to MacIP over LocalTalk, then use a serial cable (or the old PhoneNet adapters) between the two computers. That requires more old hardware to act as a bridge, but yields a blazing fast 230 kbps network connection.
There was a "Splinter Cell Classic Trilogy" HD re-release for PS3, but it was technically hit-or-miss. Chaos Theory got the best treatment and graphically it's still great. However, neither Pandora Tomorrow nor Chaos Theory remakes have the multiplayer component.
follow up: http://blog.higg.im/2015/03/22/the-futility-of-building-full...
Try putting as much effort into correcting your own mistakes as you do into correcting others. Being correct but in a biased way is practically equivalent to being wrong.
Why Removing Dumb Infrastructure Is Helping Startups Succeed
A tale of two systems
The New Tech Disruption: Murdering Businesses and Haunting Their Corpses
The report I'd love to see is one that determines whether there are any unusual characteristics among outperforming fund managers that cannot be explained by chance.

For example, I'd love to see: the percent of fund managers who quote Warren Buffett that outperform over five- and 10-year periods; the percent of fund managers who are significant investors in their own funds that outperform the indices over five- and 10-year periods; and so on.
Agreed.

The setting to turn that off permanently is really only a couple of clicks away. "Grown-ups" know how to find it easily. Others are better off not being able to do it without understanding how it works.
Or send patches who the main developer doesn't agree with, you'll waste your time.