skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except in the UK you have Transfer of Undertakings and Protection of Employment (TUPE[1]) to protect you from being handed a 'new' contract on acquisition. You must not have worse terms than with your previous employer.

That's a nice theory, but in practice we also have lawyers who specialise in dealing with M&A situations and minimising the impact of TUPE. I've been in a situation that looks like a textbook example of what TUPE was intended to cover, yet one of the first things the acquiring company's lawyers did was seek to limit its effects, apparently quite successfully.

As you pointed out, any protection you get under TUPE tends to be for only a relatively short period anyway. It might be enough to stop you getting completely screwed over on the day the acquisition goes through, but ultimately if the new employer or their management team are not the same kind of people you used to work with, you're probably still better off getting out early.

Incidentally, this is also a good argument for not signing a dubious contract even if you know and trust the current employer and management team. In the event of a change in control of the business, the incoming leadership get to keep the same terms by default; that is considered reasonable since you already worked under them before. So just because a nice employer doesn't exploit some contractual advantage today, you should never assume the new face of that employer won't do so tomorrow.
Three Schemes to Revolutionize Nuclear Power
What you are missing is that they must be paid the prevailing wage for the occupation, not the prevailing wage for the company. This is an important distinction.

Many large and profitable companies find themselves in the position of systematically paying high wages for objectively mediocre employees, a situation that accreted over time. They may not have always been overpaid, just that over time their value and performance has become decoupled from their wages. If you've ever worked at old behemoth companies, they often have entire divisions full of employees that could be accurately described this way but the business is profitable enough overall to absorb paying large groups of people that do not produce much value. This is a management failure to the extent they allowed value and talent to become decoupled from wages over time.

So how does a company correct this so that pay more accurately reflects talent and value created? Asking employees to take a pay cut to reflect their market value is not feasible, particularly if the company is profitable. In these cases, paying the "prevailing wage" to H1b employees to do the same job on a wholesale basis is actually cheaper than the status quo and much easier than suddenly requiring existing employees to have pay that reflects their market value when the entire business unit is systematically overpaying for value.

Outsourcing of business units is often about clearing out deadwood divisions where few people have performed to their wage in ages. It is an unfortunate and real problem. It isn't just overseas either, I've seen this done entirely within the US many times. There is no easy way to re-couple wages and performance for a big organization when they have been allowed to drift apart for years so most companies opt for a complete reboot.
While that might appeal to some people (competition, etc), I think it would seriously weaken Uber from the perspective of marketing. Consistency of experience or pricing has been a huge driver for many businesses (Walmart, McDonalds, etc).
The problem with 80-90% accurate results is that I'm never sure whether the results I'm seeing right now would have been better if I had opened Google for it - as a lot of times the answers are not in black and white to even claim they're "accurate". You are never sure without checking both results which one was more relevant. That uncertainty is stressful for me, so for now, sticking with Google.
Angular team wants to learn what they can from the good folks at React
64-bit ints coming along with SIMD in ES7^H2016.
Yep absolutely. Maybe perfectly standardized packages aren't possible, but they should (I think?) be able to offer "pretty similar" packages to all employees.
" Therefore, this risk is transferred to either drivers (who are on average mot equipped to handle this risk) or insurance companies (who pass the costs on to their entire insurance pool) and not borne directly by Uber nor its customer base. "

This is really revolting to me. And outlines what my intuition feels is wrong with most SV 'disruption'. Its just so immature. While I don't agree with your later sentiments, the risk shifting is dead on.
That's a very very interesting argument to be made.
"Its unexpected given the background of many of the players"

Why's that? Professional athletes are some of the most disciplined and hardworking people in existence.
So for now, the idea is to write C++, compile it to ASM.js, translate it into WebAssembly, GZIP it, transmit it, unGZIP it, then run a polyfill to translate the WebAssembly into ASM.js?

This sounds absurd. I can't even get through getting Clang, LLVM, and Emscripten built from source as it is, it's such a house-of-cards with configuration and dependency settings. Have any of you tried building Chromium from scratch? I have, on three separate occasions, as I'd like to try to contribute to WebVR. End result: fewer gigs of free space on my hard drive and no Chromium from source.

Part of that is my impatience: I'm used to C# and Java, where dependencies are always dynamically linked, the namespacing keeps everything from colliding, and the semantics are very easy to follow. But even Node's braindead NPM dependency manager would be better than the hoops they make you jump through to build open-source C++ projects. I mean, I just don't get how someone could have at any point said "yes, this is a good path, we should continue with this" for all these custom build systems in the wild on these projects.

I could be way off. I'm only just reading the FAQ now and I'm not entirely sure I understand what has actually been made versus what has been planned. There seems to be a lot of talk about supporting other languages than C++, but that's what they said about ASM.js, and where did that go? Is anyone using ASM.js in production who is not Archive.org and their arcade emulator?

I don't know... I really, really want to like the web browser as a platform. It has its flaws, but it's the least painful solution of all of the completely-cross-platform options. But it's hard. Getting harder. Hard enough I'm starting to wonder if it'd be smarter to develop better deployment strategies for an existing, better programming language than to try to develop better programming languages for the browser's existing, better deployment strategy.

This telephone game being played by translator tools and configuration management tools and polyfills and frameworks and... the list goes on! This thing we consider "modern" web development is getting way out of hand. JS's strength used to be that all you needed was a text editor. Everyone--both users and developers--can already use it and run it.

If it's just one tool, I'll get over it. But stringing these rickety, half-implemented tools together into a chain of codependent systems is unacceptable. It just feels like they're foisting their inability to finish and properly deploy their work on us. Vagrant recipes are nice, but they should be a convenience, not a necessity.

Sorry. Good for them. Just finish something already.
Can we please have .NET, C++ and Windows on the same unit to avoid the usual issues among them (e.g. Longhorn)?
>>> The word overweight means to have excess fat, specifically.

Dictionary definition "above a weight considered normal or desirable."

The WHO definition "a BMI greater than or equal to 25 is overweight"

Not sure what definition you use, most gym-heads are technically overweight.

But discussing semantics is not the topic here.
Reuters and Techcrunch may have jumped the gun here. This ruling only applies to a single driver. Reuters has updated their headline accordingly now: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/17/us-uber-california...

Uber's response:

"Reuters’ original headline was not accurate. The California Labor Commission’s ruling is non-binding and applies to a single driver. Indeed it is contrary to a previous ruling by the same commission, which concluded in 2012 that the driver ‘performed services as an independent contractor, and not as a bona fide employee.’ Five other states have also come to the same conclusion. It’s important to remember that the number one reason drivers choose to use Uber is because they have complete flexibility and control. The majority of them can and do choose to earn their living from multiple sources, including other ride sharing companies.'

– Uber spokeswoman
Wouldn't they then just simply split off the technology arm into it's own entity, incorporate it, re-brand it and continue on as usual?
> The bottom line is that when two parties enter into a contract voluntarily, that should be the end of the matter.

That is a very black and white view; real life has a certain nuance that just isn't captured by blanket statements like this.

You'll miss things if you limit yourself to a single level of abstraction: while it makes sense to the two parties to look at it like that, there is also a larger-scale, societal interest that certain sorts of contracts not be allowed. Thus, society makes rules about contracts and employment. For example, we ban slavery, indentured servitude, and child labor because as a society, we've determined that those are exploitive (even if you can get children who would willingly work for you, or people who would sell themselves to you).

These sorts of laws are what make us a society. For an example of a what happens without them, take a look at Somalia.
I've been hearing for years about how the javascript community is constantly rehashing things from the mainframe world or the desktop world. I haven't really been programming long enough to see it happen, though, (my first programming book was along the lines of "how to AJAX").

Could you be so kind as to mention some examples of javascript libraries or techniques that are recycling failed concepts from past decades?
"Yeah, it's a new and interesting situation."

No, it really isn't. There isn't anything special about them, unless you're one of those people that believes a patent should be granted for an existing process simply because now it says, "on a computer".
Were Windows and Office ever part of the same org? I don't believe so - at least in this century. In fact, my understanding is that the antitrust consent decree required a separation between the OS and applications orgs.
Exatcly. And thats the case is many other countries.
>>Is reality invented or discovered?

discovered, this is a tautology

>> Is math invented or discovered?

invented

>> Was automata theory invented or discovered?

invented

>>OK well then is the quicksort algorithm invented or discovered?

invented, unless you believe that humans do quicksort intuitively. In which case it wasn't invented by you, personally.

>>Is LISP invented or discovered?

invented

>>Is my code invented or discovered?

invented
By "a more full-featured API" do you mean that Pepper has more features than the Web APIs? If so, then it's not polyfillable (and the solution is to add more features to the Web APIs). Or if you mean that PNaCl has more features than asm.js, then the solution is to add those features to JavaScript.

I'm glad that asm.js is the starting baseline for this work, because its exact semantics are standardized via ECMA-262. All that has to be done to define its behavior precisely is to create a new syntax for it. LLVM bitcode, by contrast, has a lot of undefined behavior. You could try to spec a subset of it, but why go to that trouble when TC-39 has already done the work for you?
No, Uber's biggest liability is their management not understanding the law, as this ruling demonstrates.
If you try to create laws prohibiting hate speech, you can get around them by creating idioms. So your laws have to account for context, and that's not something laws are able to do effectively. In fact, the less vague your laws are, the less able they are to account for context.
Any idea how this will end up working in practice? If it will actually require linking to an external .wasm file, that'll break the way we're currently using asm.js.

I'd like to see something that works more or less to the effect of:

const wasmCode = new Uint8Array(...);

if (typeof executeWasm !== 'undefined') {
executeWasm(wasmCode);
}
else {
compileToAsmjs(wasmCode);
}
Why would you name your product to sound like "paperweight"? What's next, Apple iBrick?
You're thinking too small. There are places where a 30% rise in the cost of rice means people starving en masse. And riots, because this prospect does not please said people. Major yield improvements mean stable food supplies for much of the third world.

You're not wrong about the lack of advances in genetics arriving in markets. What I think you've overlooked is that between attacks on the business models that make such advances possible and the political cover that such attacks bring to the "DON'T EAT THE SCIENCE" people... this isn't likely to change. So please, don't complain about the lack of advances in genetics until you're prepared to stop giving cover to the Luddites ranting about frankenfoods. Proposing a different - and practical and workable - business model that allows for the commercial development of GMOs without abusing copyright would be a great way to go about this.

Also: look up Golden Rice. More nutritious foods have been made. And the lock-in angle addressed. Yet the stuff is still not widely grown.

Your reading of food deserts is naive, however. Junk food isn't just cheap in money. It's cheap in time, infrastructure, and required knowledge. A burger from McD's is cheap, hot, and instantly edible. Even the cheapest of Healthy Fresh Green Things requires time to cook, facilities to cook in, equipment to cook, the knowledge to cook, and a place to store the results.

You cannot just put Healthy Fresh Green Things in food deserts and get results. People have tried, and the stuff rots on store shelves.
They're trying that in SF. It's called Flywheel. And it's more expensive than Uber and not as good of an experience, because you have no power to rate down poor drivers.
Prepare for the onslaught of new (and old) languages targeting the web.

While this is welcome news, I am also torn. The possibilities are pretty amazing. Think seamless isomorphic apps in any language that can target WebAssembly and has a virtual dom implementation.

However, it finally seems like JS is getting some of its core problems solved and is getting usable. I wonder if it might have short term productivity loss as the churn ramps up to new levels with a million different choices of language/platform.

Either way, it will be an interesting time... and a time to keep up or risk being left behind.
There are a few key aspects where web APIs will want to differ between JavaScript and WebAssembly, though. For instance, some APIs really do need 32-bit and 64-bit integers, not floating-point, and the APIs should be specified as accepting and returning values of those types. An API tailored to JavaScript would have to specify how to encode such a number into what JavaScript can express.

Ditto for data structures (with actual layout, not JavaScript "bag of key-value properties" objects).

Ultimately, I'm hoping new web APIs will be specified as a WebAssembly ABI, without taking JavaScript into account; the JavaScript interface to those APIs can be responsible for questions like "how do I call a function specified as taking a 64-bit unsigned integer?".
No browser is going to implement JS in Web Assembly anytime soon. You have no idea how tight the performance margins are on SunSpider and the V8 benchmarks, for example. The entire compilation pipeline has to be lightning fast; adding another IR will kill you.

Web sites move to new technology at a glacial pace. You're posting this comment on a Web site that, by and large, hasn't even adopted CSS 1.0 for layout yet.
I'm on the Google Cloud Platform team; I do have customers with production container workloads and want to see a wide range of open-source options to offer them.
> 50 year old lady with limited tech experience also saw through that flaw.

It has been my experience that these are the people most likely to snuff out UI flaws whether they know it or not.
Statement On California Labor Commission Ruling
I wasn't suggesting that beginners not use books (or other "guidance"). Only that there are personality traits that are more useful to a beginner than detailed explication in any piece of writing.
Beekeeping analogy: both über and lyft are hives. The California Labor Commission's ruling does more to preserve hives in general (and thus the well-being of bees (drivers) as a whole), rather than any specific hive. Yeah, it's making things a little harder on one specific hive right now, but maybe this just means more hives will be popping up. It's the right call.

The phenomenon in nature is for bees to switch hives if theirs is in demise. "Any worker bee that is bringing in food is welcomed." [source: http://www.beemaster.com/forum/index.php?topic=8374.0]
The farmers can subcontract, they can hire extra hands and don't have to do the work themselves.
The ability to quit doesn't mean a thing. Everyone, regardless of whether they're an IC or an employee, technically has the ability to quit.
Isn't reading books a good way to build fundamentals? I don't think reading a book necessarily precludes you from working on the exercises in that book, which would indeed be a great way to build your understanding of a language. This is the way I approach learning new languages - working through a tutorial, or, indeed, a book. Giving someone the advice, "Hey, just go write some JavaScript," probably isn't great if they don't know any JavaScript.
And remember the nightmare of lazy Java class loading, or huge SWF apps with distract-the-user loading splash screens?

The Web evolved to do incremental/progressive rendering, it's one of the best aspects. Undumping a frozen Dart heap was a goal to speed up gmail, but over long thin pipes (my "LTE", most of the time), incremental/progressive wins.

Sure, games come in big packages and good ones are worth the download time. For most other apps, small is beautiful. iOS app update still sucks, not just because semi-automatic.
I've driven for Uber (and Lyft) and have NEVER heard of a policy like this or heard of such a thing happening.
I think this is the core of the problem. If H-1B were actually being applied as the law is written, I don't think anyone would have a problem with it, at all. Unfortunately, it appears that the government is doing almost nothing to prevent abuse, probably because of lobbying from tech firms.

You are right, though, the practice of using the visa program to replace existing workers with lower cost alternatives which they must train is clearly not allowed.
Agreed. Another issue I find irritating is that Siri speaks the directions way too late, like as I'm passing my exit or crossing an intersection that I was supposed to turn in.
You've never had two jobs at the same time? Thats life for a lot of people
I'm glad someone pointed this out. Companies constantly change identities, in particular for employment, and if there was punishments imposed for an entity, they'd just split it into many smaller entities and let them get punished.
I don't remember the Longhorn problems being due to any friction between the developer division and the Windows org.

Rather, mostly Microsoft bit off more than it could chew, and somewhat the perf of .NET on the average machine of the day wasn't up to snuff. If I recall correctly, there were also issues with managed-native interop that really threw a wrench into the works when developing the new (.NET-based) shell.

EDIT: There could also have been issues due to the antitrust consent decree - but that's speculation - I don't remember the details of the decree. If that is the case, then parent comment could be correct.
Not just Bayer, the whole IG Farben conglomerate.
> Unemployment isn't the result of H1B, it's the result of Americans lacking the necessary skills.

No, the workers had the skills and were doing the job. Its the result of a company wanting those same skills cheaper. Unemployment is the result.

> I'm not saying not to pay the market rate, I'm saying there's no market. There are 10 people with the skills I need in the country. All of them are at megacorps and being paid $200k, which is the same I'd offer. I'm just a small company, I can't compete with a megacorp.

If there are truly only 10 people who can do what you need then that is what the H1B program was for. If the skill is valuable maybe you need to figure out other incentives than salary.
That seems a minor punishment.
If they can't abide by the rules that the state have set for them - in this case, what seems to be a fairly reasonable a ruling saying that their 'contractors' are actually employees - and they can't make profit with those changes, then their company should die, or reform. That's basically all it comes down to. If their company is downsized as a result, well, you can blame them for unsustainable business that didn't actually work when the alarm finally rang, and their inability to respond.

If your friends want a startup that will help them get downtown to pound beers faster, and Uber dies, don't worry - someone else who can _actually do the job_ and abide by the rules will almost certainly be there. And the Uber employees who get canned? They might actually

The amount of doublethink people have here about "bad actors will get pushed out of the market for better ones" while simultaneously defending shitty business practices, or conveniently ignoring that bad actor principle when their oh-so-favorite business gets a slap, is pretty astonishing. But given most people on HN seem to only want to "disrupt" the wallets of other so theirs can get fatter through acquihire buy-out plans for their ephemeral startups, I guess it's not surprising.
You're misunderstanding what people are upset about. The whole situation feels unfair and heartless. The employees had been doing a good job and they weren't given the option to take a pay cut to keep there jobs, instead they were given the option to quit or to work for a few months training their replacement. That kind of situation sounds horrible.

The people who are replacing them can't move around as freely in the job market as normal individuals, so they're willing to work for less than someone who didn't have that restriction. And the program they're using to come over here wasn't established to replace jobs, so it being used like this seems unfair.
Cheery o' good sir! An apt analysis if I've seen one yet.
Heh it actually had zero capacity, or rather functionality. You could successfully move gigabytes of data onto the thing and when probed it would report back that it had like a 58 GB partition, but then you could not access any of those files. It was using some sort of custom controller to mimic a legit file system but I don't recall the complete details, just that there was definitely no flash memory chip on the PCB. I have it stashed away somewhere, I should dig it up do another analysis.
Although that doesn't necessarily mean that Apple the company is involved, no?
o.o it's intuitive imo. !g - google, !yf - yahoo finance, !cb - crunchbase, !news - google news, !yt - youtube. Sometimes I just try an abbreviation that makes sense and lo I'm correct.

Plus I make ddg my default browser so I do just go to the address bar put `!yt cats` and get youtube cat videos.
I've been in situations where I was desperate enough to do it by hand. 20+ builds and manual tests later, I found a really nasty bug in some 3rd party code that manifested with the most bizarre repro that had no obvious connection even in hindsight, and symptoms involving cleanly exit(3)ing out of the program from a totally unrelated bit of code.