skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter acquires Whetlab (Bayesian hyperparameter optimization)
Just ask the other person to repeat.
First the other guy probably know he does not speak very good english, second even between 2 native speaker someone can miss something and ask to repeat, this is very common and not rude at all imo.
Transport automation is indeed coming. This is even worse for Uber as their main asset right now is their network of drivers. When transport automation is mainstream (still pretty far away) these services will create a race to the bottom as the barrier to entry is very low. Bigger wallets than Uber can price them out.
Time to jump ship, as if they've made this feint, you can be sure they will at some point follow through.

I mean, would you trust the guy who only beat you up a little bit to not do it again?
> Saddling Uber with a 100 billion dollar tax bill will get them a bankruptcy proceeding and $0.

OTOH, it will also discourage future violations of the same kind, because people don't generally start businesses to lose the time and resources poured into it just for the joy of denying the IRS taxes. So, even though it may not be optimal on a narrow view, it may be desirable on a longer view. Corporate tax evasion is motivated by profit, and as long as it is more profitable to break the law and make a partial settlement later, businesses will be encouraged to do it. It if it is catastrophically not profitable to do that, the incentives are different.
AT&T hit with $100M fine for its ‘unlimited’ data plans
Ouch, they ran a father's day promotion for all of last week in the UK where they sold the Paperwhite with £10 discount and then they announce a new model just before Father's day. I wonder how many geek dads will get a disappointing gift on Sunday.
Webassembly AST semantics
At best reschedules tech worker layoffs. Likely the bleed them out slower to avoid layoff reporting laws.
Are you being serious? They intentionally don't host a source repo. What could be more hostile to a potential new developer.
> high levels of job demand

But then there are the normal boom/bust cycles. Tech workers were largely immune to the last bust, but that isn't historically the case.
Could this ruling be used to argue that the farmers in poultry raising contracts with Tyson, Poultry House, etc to raise chickens owned by Tyson are also employees?

1) Chicken farmers own and provide equipment that (2) the parent company requires and has set standards.

3) The contractee chooses farmers based on some criteria(not certain, but I would assume it's fairly extensive).

4) Contractee sets prices; the farmers do compete with each other for the best pay based on quality, but the farmers do not set prices. Chicken quality could be seen as equivalent to Uber's pay based on hours/distance driven.

5)Chicken farmers do possess skills that influence Tyson's profit or loss, so this point differs.

6)I'm very much doubt that the farmers can subcontract.

7) The chicken farmers are vital to the contractee's business; the profit of Tyson and other companies that use poultry contracts depends primarily on the supply and quality of the chickens raised by the contracted farmers.

Overall, Uber drivers and contracted chicken farmers seem fairly similar though the chicken farmers may conform slightly more to the traditional contractor role.
> JS isn't going anywhere

Sure it is. Step 1: get all browsers to support WebAssembly, so that sites can drop the polyfills. Step 2 (specifically noted in the article): make WebAssembly more full-featured than JavaScript, ignoring the ability to polyfill it because browsers have native support. Step 3 (potentially doable before 2): implement JavaScript in WebAssembly, so it becomes just one of many possible languages, and its implementation is no longer beholden to browser quirks.

That'll make JavaScript a better language for its proponents (latest ECMAScript features everywhere), and entirely avoidable for people who prefer other languages.
As a Brit, IMO both are perfectly acceptable in English prose. It isn't unusual to say "October the 4th" as opposed to "the 4th of October".
I went a massive life extension technology reading binge a few months back, IMHO it is, right now, possible to extend human life indefinitely.
An infinite number of theories of causality can be applied to any situation. This is why much of human thought, and some brands of political theory and law assume the ideal of "free will". To determine the actual "cause" of any event in the way you would like to interpret it, you would have to be omniscient.
Disney is not an IT company, and IT is not their core competency. Why shouldn't they outsource it like any other business function?
This is the biggest problem with the H1B visa system. It's essentially a system that primarily benefits outsourcing shops by giving them a kind of deportation leverage over their employees.

We should remove the sponsorship restriction and simply allow foreign workers who earn a minimum threshold. This is how Singapore does it. It might be 50k. It might be 70k. It might depend on geography and/or a market rate.

Want to control the flow of immigration for certain jobs? Simply raise or lower the thresholds.

I want to live in a country based on merit based principals that attracts the smartest and most hardworking people from around the world and to provide them the opportunities to start their businesses here.

I don't want to live in a country that schemes with immigration lawyers to rig a system that screws over foreigners and citizens alike for the benefit consulting firms that like to exploit workers.

We all lose when we allow class based systems to fester in our society.
I concur. I'll usually start with a few apps, then broad ideas, then negate the whole thing by saying any future ideas and/or projects.
> I would also recommend that beginners/early programmers learn 1 programming language really well

That's a dangerous approach. The first language is very hard to learn, because, well, it's your first. And when you stick to one language, you easily conflate the syntax and the semantics.

So when you learn a second language, you have to unlearn the syntax of the first, in addition to learn the genuinely different concepts. Distinguishing the similar stuff in new clothes from the actual new stuff is hard. Simply put, learning the second languages will be very hard as well.

Now your programmer has two data point, and knows with their gut that learning a new programming language is hard. This sets expectation, an will make it harder to learn additional languages. It will take some time to realise learning a new language, besides a few insane exceptions like C++, is not that hard.

> ignore the din of people on the internet who claim to effortlessly, expertly jump among 10 languages as part of their day-to-day.

Jumping from language to language may not be that easy. But one can certainly be an expert at 20 programming languages. Once you see the commonalities, there isn't much to learn. Really, a good course in programming languages is enough to get you started. The hard part is memorising 20 big programming frameworks, with all their warts, special cases and so on. Still, if you know the concepts, learning the vocabulary takes little time.
Just out of curiosity, are your ideas and inventions at all related to the industry your employer is in?

I went down the road of lawyering up while I was at IBM, I was young and it was effectively a waste of money as IBM simply had no interest at all in just about any of the ideas I ever had. My manager at the time even said as much, "if you're not competing with us, we really don't care and won't steal your ideas." Worse, they knew the drill, more than one time they simply said, "these are our terms, list off your inventions, we're not going to rewrite this document.."

If your ideas are in the same realm, it seems like a larger ethical question, personally, I don't moonlight doing what I get paid to do during the day, it's just messy and I do personally believe it is not honoring the employment contract, but that's just my opinion. If they aren't related to their industry, then what's the downside of claiming the ideas? It's a two way street, they will know about the ideas but you will have told them with some degree of confidentiality being understood.
Many people work for multiple companies, that's nothing new. Computers are just tools not some magical pixie dust.
Because if you don't let them come in and compete fairly, your employer is going to bring them anyways, at half of your salary, and let you go with a kick in the ass.

Those are not your jobs, those are jobs for the take. If you don't like the situation maybe you should consider aligning your interest with the people that is in the same boat with you, not necessarily with the ones who happen to share your nationality.
It's not the only factor but it is one. I guess it ultimately depends on the country / state / court.

Others factors generally include things like how you get paid (do you bill the client, or are you on payroll?) or the nature of your work (projects and deliverables, or day-to-day operations, etc).

Of course many of these things favour classifying Uber drivers as contractors, but there's enough of a gray zone for a court to rule they are full-time employees.
Interesting and not something I'd have expected from apple. That actually brings up an interesting question... How many miles of roads are in the us? Europe? How many of these vans will they deploy?
>>L-1s are actually the problem.

Your problem is opportunity hungry people in developing nations who will do anything for whatever salary offered.

Every thing else is a side effect of this. Do you think cutting down on L1 visas will change anything at all? In an era of communication being super cheap, and means of collaboration getting better and better, you can regulate as much visas as you want, those jobs will continue to be outsourced. The cost benefit is simply too enormous.
Thoughtful Nature feature on the subject: http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-the-disruptor-1.17673
> All-new typesetting engine lays out words just as the author intended for beautiful rendering of pages. With improved character spacing and the addition of hyphenation, justification, kerning, ligatures, and drop cap support, our best-in-class typography helps you read faster with less eyestrain.

Finally.

And I say that un-ironically. Would've switched to a Kobo just for this if it weren't for the Kindle store.

Any news for if the Voyage will get a software upgrade? I only got one a few months ago and it'd be a shame for it to be obsoleted by a cheaper product so soon after it was launched.

Edit: Nice to see in-line translate too.
But sometime in the future, you can have China build a burger flipping robot.
Control is the key factor when determining a 1099 vs W2 employee. FedEx has been doing this for many years...which is why they just got fined a shit-ton. I think Uber drivers will just unionize within the near future causing all of their future driving 'employees' to get paid more - thus cutting profits - resulting in either a new business model which is again bending the new rules, or back to the way things were in the good ol' yellow cab.
Both exceptions and results are important for software architecture. The lack of the former leads to an oversimplification of interfaces in languages with only the latter. The author hit upon an example that is probably better written using results. But guess what? A C# programmer would write it that way too. See the TryParse methods found all over the C# standard library. On the other hand, what would a Rust programmer do to handle an out of memory situation? That would be too pervasive with the result approach so it has been culled from all interfaces. Also, nullable reference types are a separate issue.
I think you're confused about what a free market is. Uber is competing against other ride sharing services, and Uber cannot set the price of those services.
Its unexpected given the background of many of the players, but their are some really impressive entrepreneurs and businessmen among the NBA-alumni. It seems theres not much middle ground after their playing days are done, they either go bankrupt or have fairly successful business careers.

Magic Johnson
Shaquille Oneil
Junior Bridgeman
Jamal Mashburn

And plenty of other http://www.complex.com/sports/2015/06/nba-players-who-are-al...
So you have full control and it's up to you to choose whether you pay more for the being insured and ride with a plate or pay less and ride Uber.

Why do you want government and politicians to enter the game?
I really hate this idea that there is anything you can put your signature to which is "standard" or "a formality."

I can absolutely 100% guarantee you that if there ends up being a legal dispute here, anything and everything signed by the employee will be used against them to the extent possible. Nothing is going to be "a formality" in that case, which is the only case where it really matters.

"Standard" is just another way of saying, "we hope you don't try to negotiate anything, because that would be inconvenient."

Both are ways of trying to make an already lopsided transaction even more unfair.

My response to "standard" would be, it may be standard for you but it's not standard for me, so I'm going to check it out, and if I want changes I'll suggest them. If you're inflexible on making changes, then I guess we won't sign. My response to "formality" would be, if it's important then it matters, and if it's not important let's just take it out.

It's really funny how these things suddenly change if you challenge them. Stuff that's "just a formality" suddenly becomes super important if you try to remove it. Stuff that's "standard and cannot be changed" is suddenly completely negotiable if you tell them you'll walk if it's not changed.
Uber and Lyft are operating a model that clearly works for customers. And yet they rightly face legal issues.

The thing that perplexes me is that existing taxi companies, who are licensed and otherwise compliant with the law, don't adopt the best parts of Uber and Lyft?

Why can't I call a black cab in London the way I call a ride from Uber?
So tell all their customers, who love it, to go pound sand (or pay 2x or 3x more), and the drivers to sit at home... This doesn't seem like a good solution.
Honestly? Most employees just sign the damn thing.

Sure, I understand that.

This is why I favour regulation/legislation to protect employees who don't understand or won't be aware of the implications. As with consumer protection legislation, you often have a substantial imbalance in power between an employer and an employee, starting with the fact that the employer is usually the one writing the first cut of the employment contract and it often gets treated like a standard form contract in practice. I think it is therefore reasonable to limit the amount of sneaky things that are enforceable if they're included in the small print on page 74.

This is also why I recommend everyone in our industry (and most others) to have any proposed employment contract reviewed by an actual lawyer before agreeing to it.
You do the needful, of course.
Good point, on the surface the big world problems seem more straight forward because they're technically less complex. But they are much more than technical problems. Social, geopolitical etc...
> I'd set Uber's value at less than one billion if this happened.

I think that would be a bit of an overreaction.
Why?
The company is not a person, it does not need you to survive and if you are not happy you should do something about it because when you'll become useless you can count on the company to get rid of you asap.
Many people work for multiple jobs at once. I've been a receptionist who codes for someone else at the same time, and I've been a crowd manager while doing email for my other job. Both were time sheet W2 employee relationships.

This isn't about computers whatsoever. This is about the requirements and business relationship between Uber and Uber drivers. The relationship does not allow Uber drivers to subcontract, negotiate prices, and had control over profit and loss. Uber drivers are employees.
5 steps to becoming a quality Docker contributor
If you delete the suggestion by hitting Shift-Delete while it's highlighted.
Many taxi companies are actually dispatching outfits that license their branding. If you want to drive with their branding and receive their dispatch services and customers, you abide by their rules and pricing. You're an independent contractor, not an employee.

How is that different than Uber?
Why You Should Call the Old Dads in Your Network
If the ruling holds, Uber is finished. It will have to play by the rules set by the same rules any taxi company has to follow.
> No, you shouldn't. What are you going to do any differently with that than you would FileIsLockedException or NetworkIsDownException or HarddriveIsCorruptException? You wouldn't do anything differently. Show the user the ErrorMessage in the dialog and allow them to restart whatever operation was in affect. Let them choose a shorter path, close Excel, plug their Ethernet cable back in, or whatever.

I don't think this approach works in general. Server software, at least, needs to automatically handle all these different failure modes in potentially unique ways.
Dates back to one of the ALGOL dialects, actually.
I mean, the roofer is likely a employee of a roofing company. You pay 1 check to the roofing company, and they do payroll for the roofers. Not many people hire 10 roofers 1 by 1.

Coder is a better question. I think the argument is that they have a lot more freedom in what they do... i.e. pick their own libraries etc.
For me the biggest problem with Apple Maps on iOS is usability, not data.

The first thing I've ever seen anyone do when they start a route on Apple Maps is pinching to zoom out. No, you need to use the overview button. Wait, where's the overview button? You need to tap the map to show the button, and then tap the button and it shows the whole route. After that you have to zoom back in to see what's coming up next in the route.
If a country like the US were to open its floodgates to foreign workers most jobs, top to bottom, will be displaced by cheaper labor and wages would fall precipitously in the course of only a few years. Prices for durable goods, housing and land generally would not. The only question to ask is who exactly is served by this kind of policy? Rest assured not you, the worker.
This is the entity that controls Disney entertainment parks. I can see how in-house software engineering is important for some of their entities like Pixar, for Disneyland/Disneyworld it's hardly core competence.
>It's amazing how far away bureaucrats can tell others what's best for them.

It is absolutely amazing how people of today totally ignore history and historical context. It has been years and years of struggles to enact labors laws to give employees some very small amount of power in the extremely unequal employee/employer relationship. You're acting like the time of The Jungle and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire were the good old days until pesky governments got involved and ruined everything.

The US, comparatively, has labor laws that don't give much power to the employee (see: at-will employment).
Git bisect is only available for git and (at least) subversion has no comparable command, so unless you are willing to force everybody to use git (and that may not be bad) you aren't guaranteed to get anything useful out of it.

Heck git allows you to edit the history pretty widely, right (I have only limited experience with git myself)? So in this case he could maintain a separate upstream repository which only contains the releases, with all the intermediate commits sanitized.
I've heard a lot of termination notices from Uber, but that doesn't sound right. Are you sure he wasn't turning down rides from outside of surge? Uber doesn't like it if you have a low acceptance rate. If anything, Uber wants you to work when there's surge to help drive prices down. Also sometimes Uber just makes shit up when the real reason for termination is something else. (Low rating, safety)
Open source licensing important for future of Internet of Things
"When love, comes around, it picks you up, might let you down, just know, it might hurt, so adjust a little bit"
Nashville through the eyes of Instagram
That depends on the cost of actually compiling with employment law. Once they are no longer avoiding costs by illegally ignoring regulations and laws their profits might vanish.
Biggest issue in this business is minimal control.

Accounts get banned? Trades get reversed? Hackers using your site to liquidate game items?

Outta luck.
Initial Release of Street View was 8 years ago
Barrier to entry absolutely is not low with transport automation, and network effect will prevail. Rest assured Uber will happily ditch their drivers for computers at the first possible opportunity. They are investing heavily in this in fact.

Uber's biggest asset is the installed customer base. Uber's drivers are technically their biggest liability... as this ruling well demonstrates!
That's like saying Apple was 10 years late to the mobile phone game. If I have learned anything in my lifetime is that it doesn't matter how early you get started, newer and better technology will make incumbents obsolote. I'm sure Apple's street view is nothing like that of Google, but better.
> I will say my only understanding of 1099 vs employee has always been "Does the worker have a set schedule" If the answer was yes, they are a employee- If no, a contractor.

Fast food workers, retail workers and such? They're hourly employees, but employees nonetheless.
Moving Wikipedia from Computer to Many, Many Bookshelves
> WebAssembly has so far been a joint effort among Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and a few other folks

Is Apple participating?
No. I have no problem with outsourcing, or foreign labor. I've lead such efforts myself. I'm not a xenophobe. I've not in favor of scrapping H-1B Visas. It's easy for you to dismiss it by tossing labels. I'm not even angry or anti-Disney; I'm smart enough to see it for what it is. I've been in IT and a developer for a long time. I've seen it all. I didn't know how badly the H-1B system was being used to create labor forces for the maintenance of services instead of what it's for - bringing in hard to obtain talent, until I encountered it. Jobs are being lost to this, highly talented jobs, by the thousands, and it's not suppose to. It's suppose to augment your staff. Almost overnight 3/4ths of our office building were speaking a different language. Even if you don't see any of it that way; do you really think you'd approve if you had a good review, a raise, and then were told you're being replaced and you have to train your replacement or they're going to keep the severance you're entitled to by corporate policies? I don't think anyone sees that as professional or acceptable.
Uber cannot be applauded enough for sidestepping the legalized monopoly and bribery of "plates" or "medallions".
Comment about Bill Gates's wealth is blatantly wrong. He was not worth only $5bn at the time he quit, but an order of magnitude more.
Ask HN: Independent contractor software engineers
The recent Uber court ruling got me thinking, what constitutes independent contractor in the software world? What is your experience in being classified this way, or hiring people this way?

Let's assume all replies are for entertainment, not for advice, and discuss the law without everyone saying to talk to your lawyer.