skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So don't wade through random books. Get recommendations from other people and read only the ones that are highly recommended.

Here are a few books that I see at the top of the lists almost every time this topic comes up:

The Mythical Man-Month

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

Code Complete
They don't provide the phone for free. They charge a weekly fee for use of the phone.
Thanks for the breakdown. Sounds like a solid explanation. I wonder what other states/nations will do. This could affect the business model of Uber dramatically by increasing their costs and liabilities.
Out of all those,

>Uber alone sets prices

is the killer one. I guess the only solution to that would be to make it more of a market where drivers could choose their rate to compete.
None of the claims you just made are correct.

You did not link to scientific evidence, you linked to articles on the Internet.
The New Kindle Paperwhite Is Perfect for Picky Readers
>This is a good ruling for workers,

Is it? If this were to remain, the large majority of the drivers will not have a position to fill. It will not be viable.

>That is, Uber has realized significant margin gains by pushing all risk of carrying passengers and car maintenance onto its drivers

No one has 'pushed' anything. Drivers are consensually agreeing to drive because the pay they receive values their time.

>Therefore, this risk is transferred to either drivers (who are on average mot equipped to handle this risk)

How are they not equipped?

>Now, what society is really missing out on is an opportunity or reason to transition from employer-based benefits to government or society-based benefits. This ruling will postpone a public discussion on the role of employer-based insurance and benefits.

What society needs is less people forcing them to do what others think is best.
A warning for people who value their time.
> Isn't this true for all languages in one form or another? Go and Rust have "panics" Any code might fail exceptionally, stack overflows and out of memory conditions come to mind as relatively common ones.

The concern does not make sense in Rust, Rust's panics can not be caught and will kill the current thread.

> The difference here is that C# treats more kinds of things exceptionally than Rust or Go.

Or it treats exceptions much less exceptionally than they do (Python being even further along on that axis), a C# exception is at best "uncommon".

> This seems to have more to do with Rust and Go ability to more easily return multiple types from a method/function

Rust doesn't use MRV for results, Result is a single struct (technically an enumerated type which can contain either a "valid result" or an "error result", not both).

> I belive Objective-C did some kind of null lifting where sending messages to null objects don't throw.

Not in the sense you think, Objective-C's nil is simply a black-hole, messages send to it don't do anything and return nil. It's possible (though not probably not recommended) to opt Smalltalk or Ruby[0] into this behaviour, because nil is a standard object not a magical special value (and both languages have open classes).

[0] http://blog.rubyenrails.nl/articles/2008/02/29/our-daily-met...
IF they financially survive the back pay, etc, then numerous policy changes around pages 8 to 10 or so of my scanned copy of the judgement can be applied to mostly patch around the issues.

The requirements that uber enforces on its (now) employees would pretty much have to be wiped to make it more of a contractor relationship than an employee relationship. No more banning 2-door cars or 11 year old cars, no more banning tips, no more auto-filtering out all less than perfect records, drivers would have to negotiate fares not uber, no more background checks. Basically uber does a traditional hiring process without actually hiring, whereas they'd have to move to a traditional contracting relationship. Uber forbids contracting relationships in their ToS, its specifically forbidden to hire a subcontractor. Clauses like that really set off labor boards and the IRS about "fake" contracting.

Specifically, uber would have to let the end user decide not to accept a ride in my new 2-door Yaris or my wife's 2004 Prius rather than denying for me. Also if riders consistently give me 1 star because of my HN posting habits or whatever, they'd have to let the riders decide to not accept me rather than autofiltering out all sub 4.6 or whatever grade-inflated score they use. They couldn't run a background check on me to join the service, MAYBE they could get away with running it and putting the result semi-anonymously online for the rider to make a judgement. They would have to let me set the minimum fare I'd demand, which actually sounds pretty nice for drivers rather than existing "yes/no" take it or leave it, and tips would have to be permitted.

Possibly they could spawn off a "union" or professional organization that only allows members to join that passed a background check and then only allow members to advertise themselves as part of the union. Like my roofing contractor or my unionized electrician.

There's a widely held belief, that is completely wrong, that a contractor is just an employee who is treated like dirt in exchange for more money than an employee gets; essentially a gambling relationship. The actual legal position is considerably more complicated and is not concerned with popular beliefs.
Firefox supports something similar, if you for example visit IMDb you can add their search via the Firefox search box and then add a keyword of your choice to use the search in the address bar.

Both Firefox and Chrome use OpenSearch (http://www.opensearch.org/Home) to achieve this.
The user-replaceable part is standard fare, but I've never heard about the forced upgrading part. That sounds pretty crazy. I guess if you follow the LGPL and allow a user to swap out the library you're covered, since they say "or". Maybe it's "LPGL or release updates until you die"?
You're in luck. Those comments certainly are within the source file:

http://underscorejs.org/underscore.js
What's a waste of time? A Multi platform product? Based on what are you saying this?
They've known about this for years, don't think it's a high priority for them to ever change it.

What I suggest is moving non-commercial personal projects over to github so there's at least some activity showing.
I wouldn't think so. In AirBnb, the hosts retain control over availability, pricing and make decisions. In addition, while you use AirBnb to book, you book from a person (moral or physical) directly.

In essence, AirBnb is just a broker.

With Uber, you don't rent Wissam's driving services for 20 minutes or hire Samantha to pick you up at SFO. You hire Uber and they dispatch a faceless anonymous cog.
> This could affect the business model of Uber dramatically by increasing their costs and liabilities.

All those costs are precisely why Uber wanted contractors instead of employees. The real problem is that hiring actual employees is way more costly and risky than hiring contractors.
I personally am so over this argument. Sure, that is roughly a fact about the time in which it was designed... but that was 20 years ago. Since then there has been a team of some of the best programmers in the world maintaining and advancing the language.
That's only California. If the IRS comes to the same conclusion, they'll owe all of that nationwide.
Fetch and SRI show that useful humanoids are on the horizon
It seems to me that they don't actually WANT anyone to use it, and definitely not modifying the code... Really makes you wonder why they bothered to make it open source and LGPL licensed
Here's California's guidance to taxi companies on how to classify workers.

http://www.edd.ca.gov/pdf_pub_ctr/de231tc.pdf [PDF]

Cites precedent in Santa Cruz Transportation v. Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. Here's what's relevant to Uber:

1) Drivers could be terminated if they did not maintain good relations with the public.

2) The company required the drivers to account for the
fares they received.

3) The work did not require the expertise of a skilled
professional.

4) The drivers depended on the company’s dispatcher
for their livelihood.

5) The drivers did not set their own rates, but were paid
according to the number and distance of fares they
carried.

6) There was no evidence of entrepreneurial
risk.

7) The customers called the company and the company
arranged for the performance of the services.

8) The drivers did not advertise their services.

9) The driver’s work was part of the regular business of
the taxicab company.
Mapbox raises $52M Series B
hey, Luke here :)

if anyone is interested in trying out Flocker we have a really cool new online tutorial system where you can have root on a 3-node flocker cluster for 3 hours to kick the tyres for free.

there are 200 VMs lined up so hey hacker news here's a challenge, see if you can use them all up :D

https://clusterhq.com/flocker/try-flocker/

cheers,
Luke
My absolute favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_%28software%29

Also read the book. Way more epic than Game of Thrones. ;)
IIRC, the particular formatting in the document is required by ECMA and the ES6 committee can't do much about it.
Show HN: Guitar Tuner web app with Polymer
The first of which is probably to appeal and stall as long and as far as the law allows.
*employees
The issue is this:

Things will go wrong. Some subset of things that can go wrong are things you want to do something about (e.g. file doesn't exist -- maybe prompt the user for a different file). The remainder are things you don't want to deal with (e.g. out of memory -- in most cases this is very rare so you're ok to just crash).

You want to arrange your program in such a way that you must deal with the errors you want to deal with. Your code won't compile if you don't. That is what this technique brings.

More here (though you probably won't understand many of the terms if you haven't used a modern FP-inspired language before): http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/02/23/designing-fail-fa...
> when requested by either a customer, or Live Networks, Inc. - upgrade it as soon as possible to use the latest version of the LIVE555 library code

This is not a requirement of the LGPL, the rest is. A user must be able to replace a LGPL portion of a program. Dynamic linking is the way this is usually accomplished.
Ask HN: Does your startup provide stock options to customer service?
Does your startup provide stock options to customer service staff? We obviously do to engineers and managers, but we're having some debate about customer service. Our company is about 25 professionals and 35 customer service, and we just closed a large Series A. Do you do the same 4 year monthly vesting with a 1 year cliff for everyone? Do you know if Google, AWS, and other big companies offer options for customer service staff?

Finally, in terms of managing paperwork, vesting schedules, etc. what SaaS platform do you recommend?

(Sorry for the throwaway account, but I needed to be able to ask this question anonymously.)
I don't think "but for" is legal jargon or has any special meaning in law, apart from the normal English meaning.
Exactly. Independent contractors set their own pricing. If Uber would allow the drivers to set their rates and then "hire" who they felt was best for them (and then markup the price to the customer for their own profit) only then would the drivers be in control of payment.

This is how every other independent contractor works.
I used to use it a lot. It's still probably the only Linux distro I'm happy with.
That'd be great :-)
But isn't ũbers thing is that they are not taxis? Supposedly this has great benefits for Uber and nebulous consequences for their drivers.
In my own opinion, the only reason Uber drivers are contractors is because it's cheaper for Uber, there is no other real reason behind this one. Their internal policies regarding drivers are acting like they are employees anyway, they don't even decide of their price. Otherwise where is the limit between employee and contractor ? Just every company you see could switch all their employees as contractors to reduce their costs.
No. AirBnB, from my understanding, doesn't require AirBnB users to provide X features. If AirBnB required users to offer high-speed internet, a personal TV, and a separate way in and out, then you start going down the path Uber went, which is part of what caught Uber up here.

For Uber to fall into AirBnB status, you'd be able to rate drivers, and drivers could request to pick you up, and you'd choose a driver amongst those available. That's not what happens. Uber would have less control.

There is much more involved here, but the decision is fairly easy reading.
That's still all on one machine; Dokku can't automatically schedule & distribute containers/processes across a cluster of hosts like Empire & others can.
If you're doing anything non trivial you're going to outgrow one machine pretty soon :)
Nope, the article shows otherwise. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9732231

4-6 are madly different for airbnb than Uber:

4) Uber alone sets prices, and tipping is discouraged, so there is no mechanism for driver (as "contractor") to set prices.
5) Plaintiff driver only provided her time and car. "Plaintiff's work did not entail any 'managerial' skills that could affect profit or loss."
6) Drivers cannot subcontract (presumably negating Uber's position as a "lead generation" tool for contractors).

AirBnB is facing an entirely different challenge - residential vs commercial zoning, hotel taxes, impact on the normal rent market, etc. I'm seeing laws coming up either seeking to regulate & tax them as hotels, or outright ban them as in santa monica: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/13/406587575/... Clearly a residential rental market isn't sustainable when you can easily earn at least double with short term rentals.
It's a pervasive, persistent problem. It's exceedingly common to talk with coworkers, or people at a meetup, who assume a bunch of domain knowledge for their domain, and are dismissive when you don't know that knowledge. And then you find they aren't aware of some other domain. The worst is when the same ideas are used in different domains under different names. There is often no level-setting, either. Compare statistics, machine-learning, and CS language about the same topic.

The 'for-dummy' books are only a tiny sliver, and it's often hard to tell from skimming a book (or from the ToC on Amazon) what a particular book's target is.
I've inspected such a machine thoroughly on one occasion and was able to determine that the machine switched the penny for a dummy before performing the flatten and stamp operation.
Taxis also have set prices, though I think that Uber would want avoid that line of reasoning.
Actually, the citizens of California enacted the laws; the bureaucrats are just enforcing them. Uber has the right to appeal if they feel the bureaucrats are enforcing the laws incorrectly. The judicial branch reviews Uber's complaint and will decide one way or the other.

Democracy; it's a pretty nifty system.
And how can you trust those third party repos? That's the hard part. At least FreeBSD's way guarantees your packages are built from source code that matches the checksum of what upstream has released. If it doesn't match because of a compromise or upstream re-rolled their tarball it is discovered very, very quickly.
A franchisee exercises management control that can affect profit and loss, can subcontract work performed,etc. The lack of these features are among the things cited as making uver drivers employees rather than contractors, so I don't get how you can say that this ruling would make McD franchisees employees.
> Alternatively I send a wire transfer to a US bank, now I have to pay a fee (around about £25 flat fee plus a % on the exchange rate conversion from USD to GBP, or I send it in GBP and let the receiver worry about converting it to USD). The wire transfer takes 5 days to acheive what was achieved using bitcoin in a matter of minutes.

Right, but that's you as a small timer. Try holding a minimum balance of $250k in your Citibank account (which would be feasible for coinbase), and see what rates they give you for international transfers at that point. Hint: cents, not dollars, per transaction.
"... and they routinely sacrificed personal time and freedoms to help make your experience in the parks what it was". Never do this unless its a startup you own. You get paid for X to do Y hours and nothing more. Anything more is volunteer work for a for-profit employer.
What state is this in?
Fetch Robotics Secures $20M Series A Funding from SoftBank
What's the policy mean here? Does it include some actions, such as do migration if a zone is out of service?
I'm trying exceptionally hard to put myself in pro-nuclear shoes, but I can't see the point of eminent domain, government insurance, and substantial construction times/delays when solar is already cheaper than nuclear.

I vote with my wallet; I put 6+ figures into SolarCity SolarBonds, I ride my legislators hard (showing up in person at their office to advocate for solar and wind tax credits), etc. If you believe in nuclear, I encourage you to do the same sort of activities.
A Closer Look at Fractals: Part II
It's also a fairly short read. I cull media mercilessly, but this was easy enough to just read, in full.
A variable in algebra is exactly what you consider a constant in a programming language. If I say "x = 5" in algebra,that means "x represents the value 5" (and I can substitute one for the other anywhere). The variable x can't suddenly represent the value 6 halfway through my calculations. Variables in Racket and Erlang work exactly as in algebra: single-assignment binding.
Just throwing a hypothetical out there. What if this sticks and the drivers decide to organize with a union and collectively bargain a living wage, benefits, etc?

What would be the value of Uber (and related businesses)? Would it stay in business even? How many VC's would lose fortunes over Uber going nearly to 0? Would this be the popping of what some suspect is a private equity bubble as the effects of this ripple throughout?

Regardless, it would be a very different business with a very different valuation.
I usually don't comment on immigration policies because I'm a US citizen and have never been an immigrant worker, however I dont believe this affects the long term success or failure of the H1B visa program and nor should it. We do exist in a global economy and you must therefore compete globally. If a company feels that they can get equal talent to mine in another country for cheaper costs then so be it; I didn't do a good enough job selling my talent or showing why Im worth my rate. Its also the company's loss if they chose to lay me off; I know what Im worth and Ill go find what Im worth. Even without the H1B visa program, companies will still do this; whether or not the company can employ the employee on US soil or not. This is in no way threatening to my way of life or makes me fear for my future career prospects. It sucks that Disney did this to their employees, but companies are no longer loyal to their people and haven't been for a long time; you should act accordingly and not show any loyalty to a company that shows you none.
If one has knowledge others can benefit from, one doesn't need to be "ordained ... an authority" to write about it.

If one cannot find a mentor to tell you this is good Javascript and this is bad Javascript, then books can fill that void.

Writing code without any guidance can only get a developer so far. He needs examples of good solid idiomatic code to progress. A good book, often by "just a guy", can provide that.
Its frequently an issue of dispute, though some of the items cited for Uber drivers don't apply -- e.g., the Uber no-tipping rule -- so the cases are not precisely analogous.
I'd say for a lot of people, especially those with an OO background, the best way would be to start using TypeScript.

Am I over-simplifying?

Thanks.
Found the American libertarian. You hit all the talking points in a few sentences; now that's efficiency the government can only dream of!
Is there any way around this other than signing up for an account?
You're correct that it doesn't have some wildly divergent meaning from plain English, but it is in fact a legal phrase that has a lot of history and specific meaning behind it:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/but-for_test

http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=113

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/%22But+for%22+...
Hell, no. CRISPR has the benefit of specificity, but the kit must be delivered to the cell by live virus, which can cause problems (heavy immune response), especially if you are infecting with a high enough titer to affect a majority of cells.
the "upgrade it as soon as possible" part is an extra requirement
Doesn't using DDG with Chrome negate the privacy benefits? Doesn't Chrome just report everything you do within the browser to Google anyway? I always just assume so while I'm using it.
I thought it somewhat audacious to refer to that as "modernity". I prefer to think of it as a path that some people, not everybody, have taken.
Relevant podcast (one of my favs): http://www.bootstrappedwithkids.com
"I'm sharing news about it because this experience has taught me the H-1b Visa program needs to change to protect others in the future."

It's surprising to me that Disney was able to replace its local workforce by foreigners via H-1b visas, since I always thought that companies making use of this type of visa were required to prove that they would not be able to find an employee with the required qualifications in the US? Firing an employee to replace him with an H-1b holder seems to completely contradict this requirement.

Also, reading the visa requirements it seems that the company would be forced to pay an H-1b employee a salary which is equivalent to that payed to a "normal" employee performing the same function, so there does not seem to be a huge financial benefit in this either.

Can anyone explain this?
I don't follow the argument that the driver can't affect profit and loss. Every driver can decide when and where to drive, and these two factors have a considerable impact on the income.
Indeed. Personally I'm used to think in functional ways: map, fold, function composition, immutability... I'd like to be good at Haskell but I'm always having lots of pain dealing with it, because I never see the end of the learning curve.

I've found JS to be a nice middle land where I can get productive functionally without too much hassle. It's like a good friend who understands my way of thinking without being in the way too much. Underscore.js hits the sweet spot for me: _.chain(...).map(...).filter(...).value() is verbose but surprinsingly readable. I'm not a fan of Python map() syntactically, and I absolutely hate C++11's std::transform.
I'm not clear (or arguing the point) about how this is specific to H-1B. Companies routinely lay off older, more expensive workers to get cheaper, younger employees. It's not what companies should do, but they do it all of the time.

And then there's this, where apparently Disney cancelled the layoffs:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/in-turnabout-disney-...

Which I don't see how that's entirely possible given that the article posted by OP specifically states that many employees were already let go in January.

I can only speculate that the January layoffs were executed, and over the past week it was discovered that the 'replacement contractors' weren't the cheap magic rocket that Disney expected. That, too, happens in companies all of the time.
The LGPL requires that end users are able to replace LGPL libraries with new builds. The App Store creates a bit of an issue, but it's possible to update app libraries if your phone is jailbroken. You might also be able to modify and re-sign, but I'm not sure.

The LGPL doesn't require the developer to use a new version or provide updates at anyone's request.