skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yesterday I finished a job in Cheltenham, England. The post was 50 weeks long. The commute to and back from work came to around two and a half to three hours. Often I would feel physically sick on the bus due to insufficient rest. I would go to work even though I felt unwell. This includes dealing with a trapped ulnar nerve which means my arm and shoulder ache all day, and is aggravated by using a laptop.

I pushed myself too hard, but this can occur when you are expected to work till you drop dead from exhaustion. This is what my first supervisor expected of me, because she thought I was a low life piece of shit. I had hardly any experience in insurance, especially claims which a lot of people in the building considered to be the sharp end of the business. Administration on a new claim was estimated on average to take around 90 minutes, it took me a day and a half. I was furnished with written procedure notes (about 40 pages worth), a laptop with no mouse and told to get on with it. I didn't consider this to be unfair, because this is the attitude I have experienced in most of my jobs. I had been in my new role for two days when I was given this task. All the thanks I got was a casual remark from my supervisor "Well, that's our Christmas bonus gone isn't it."

I was often shouted at in the office. Being an open plan space this behaviour was witnessed by about 80 other people. If my queries were not understood at first, the response I would get is "WHAT?!". When the day ended and the office was mostly empty, my supervisor's behaviour became very hostile.

The experience was incredibly stressful. My ulnar nerve issue worsened, so now it feels like I have a knife stuck in my little finger. Also I became so nervous about making a mistake (because my mistakes were over emphasised) that I worked at a rate about 4 times slower than my colleagues. Trust in my proof reading ability was lost, so I would check every single lexicon in a letter of correspondence and rereading my work nearly a dozen times. Some people would recognise this as OCD. I was considered incapable of performing my role, a bit offensive I might add.

I have a suspicion that I was treated like this partially because I am genetically male. My hope is to get a new job in the company's call center, and occasionally I would dress as a woman (or most of the time). I would like to see how I am treated by my ex supervisor/torturer while wearing a skirt, and how someone who is quite religious reacts to someone slowly coming out as transgender. I recently referred to her as a "fucking bitch" in a conversation with one of my other work colleagues. I regret that a lot, because (s)he isn't a real woman, and I'm more of a woman than she'll ever be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_immigration_referendum,_...
> Most of the US has a low cost of living compared to eg Switzerland. In most of eg Texas - most of the US actually - you can live well on $50,000 to $60,000 per year.

You won't get >4 weeks paid vacation in "most of eg Texas", or actually affordable healthcare, or paid maternity leave (let alone multiple month worth) and post-leave work-hour arrangements, or a "sacred lunchtime", or the ability to work flexible hours without being looked at like a loser (unless you're self-employed maybe), or 80% salary unemployment, or the ability to live without owning a car.

A privileged few may get those. Not "most of eg Texas", not by a very, very long shot.
Well until a few weeks ago you where limited to 65k rows in mac excel.

Having struggled with OSX an apples obvious abandoning of any professional us other than a one man band designer - I hate apple hardware with a vengeance.
The term "politics" is not as all-covering as it may seem at first. It refers to the process of people and human groups reconciling conflicting interests.
Again, I don't see why it can't scale. Whether you've got 50 blocks of city employing a specific social structure or 500 blocks at a ground level its the same.

Granted mega cities add a level of complexity, but on a very broad level I don't see why people here thing you can't scale a system employed by a 8m country to say 80m. Its just more of the same.
I love how we went from "The USA has awesome parts too, like Marin!" to "well you've got to be rich to live in them" to "well you don't have to be rich to live in Waco!"
What If Twitter...?
internal politics are just about everywhere. at the office, at your favorite bowling league, at the fishing competition.
So why not pass a law for that?

If the french and european governments really wanted more than piss off Google, that's what they'd do. They don't want to protect citizens, they just want Google's head on the mantelpiece, and Apple's and Facebook's...
Yes you are right in the scientific approach.

What's more, NLP was not really developed. The techniques have been copied - or "stolen" - from other approaches, starting with Gestalt therapy. Therefore it's not a simple coincidence that you encounter similar techniques elsewhere.

Also, does NLP really need to bring novel ideas for it to be recognized? It does not promise anything like that, because that is not it's goal. NLP is about stealing what works to extend its "toolbox". That is also one of the points why it is considered being a pseudo science, "copying what works" is not scientific. In my opinion, not focusing on science is a major flaw of NLP. Therefore I hope that the NLP research organisation or others will change that.

Also, like you said, it is also possible that there are flaws in the copies, i.e. by making wrong conclusion from the observations. I would find it interesting to compare the NLP versions with the scientific versions to find the differences and maybe correct one or the other model after running some tests.

Btw. Do you know if depression or PTSD therapy based on the "scientific" psychoanalysis does yield results today?
Then it should be a logical extension that APIs are analogous to the relationships between political platforms, which is the premise of the article. Along similar lines, consider that people talk about APIs as "contracts". More generally, the article makes the point that APIs are more social than technical.

Terminology aside, I think it's reasonable to note that the interface boundaries between software have noticeable non-technical aspects that the interfaces within software do not.
I imagine Binary groups being a great big cost sink would be the main thing.

It's sad, because the most barebones mid 1990's 3-panel Usenet client is still an infinitely better reading experience for discussion than all current web forums.
"Now that I’m back, I’m angry that my own country isn’t providing more for its people."

If you want Switzerland in the U.S. there is only one option: break the U.S. up into distinct, smaller countries that are able to foster a common culture that can be relied upon to solve the prisoners dilemma inherent in all social welfare schemes.

A side benefit for our friends abroad: maybe we'll stop bombing the shit out of the rest of the world.
20 days paid vacation is the legal EU baseline, FWIW. Most of europe is at or above 5 weeks when you include legal holidays.
> Healthcare is usually part of compensation packages in America.

For certain jobs. Many don't provide healthcare.

> Things like free tuition are paid for by much higher rates.

Higher rates in higher income brackets. Not across the board.
Practical memory safety for C (2011) [pdf]
Just up and leave? Y'know, its possible to work these things out without something so extreme.
Many people commenting here are talking about the use of the term "political". Another way to look at it: APIs are fundamentally a social or community thing, more so than a technical thing. "politics" applies here more in the sense of "interpersonal politics" often used to describe any non-purely-technical social process.
Yes a webforum with an NNTP gateway would be very nice. I remember vBulletin had some functionality like this and I hope Discourse will implement it.
NNTP is very nice for archiving and it's distributed. Maybe we should do twitter and discussions over blockchains... when NNTP servers get out of vogue. There is a stackoverflow dump for local use by the way.
Firstly, while 50k is far from "mega rich", only 50% of households in Texas earn more than that, so it still excludes a lot of people (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48000.html).

Beyond that the differentiators are working hours/flexibility and healthcare. A household in Texas might have quite a good life in many respects with an income of 60k/year, but do they get 6 weeks off, flexible working hours (useful if you have kids), and paid maternity/paternity leave that lasts more than a few weeks? In the US if you want/need that extra time away from work you might need to take time of work or go part time, causing a drop in income and perhaps company sponsored healthcare, but in many European these things are available by default to fulltime employees.
Ya, MtGox had people's savings in it. I really feel sorry for them and hope Mark's arrest and trial give them some justice even though they won't be made financially whole again.

http://www.dailydot.com/business/bitcoin-crash-i-lost-everyt...
> The reason Switzerland can live like this

Oh bullshit, all of the points enumerated in the article save for average salary (which clearly isn't the article's focus) are equally applicable throughout western and northern europe, except maybe in the UK.
not totally true, you are not taxed up to 100k while working abroad. see "Foreign Earned Income Exclusion".
Of course you would! Anyone in their right minds would. I still don't understand why the USA has such a lousy healthcare system[1] and why people don't demand something more appropriate.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386032/
How do you conclude that all enclaves are exclaves? A connected state that is entirely surrounded by another state is a counter-example.
Incomes taxes or all taxes?
England has a national health service.

So that NHS has two options:

1) put someone through a fast. (Cheap - about £1000 per week). Then provide some talking therapy for some time.

2) amputating a leg. (Just the amputation is going to be between £8,000 and £16,000), followed by considerable physiotherapy and prosthetic legs.

Here the NHS wants the cheapest effective option, not the more expensive option.

If starvation works you should probably send the evidence to NICE.
I'm a little surprised by the negative reaction. You people don't derive pleasure from working... from the process of building things, from molding reality? I damn sure do. But then again... I'm an American.
Presumably you mean the reverse (meant to upvote); the GP post seems pretty good.
Me too. Why not call it PythonC?
also check out couch potato investor
> Why are you running the service? Respect? Trying to establish a lock in?

Maybe I hacked it together on a rainy weekend.
No offence to his guy but he seems woefully under qualified. A CEO that doesn't have accounting report to him... makes less than 50K/year. Does anyone know what valued he thought he brought to the table?
There are plenty of errors in her article. Like when she used Romney as an example of low taxes for the rich. She conviently failed to mention it was because he gave a HUGE chunk of it to charity.
Doctors and small practice lawyers work 80%... School employees get summers off...
> almost anything as political decisions

"Everything is political."

That's kind of the point - if there is debate, we use politics (debate, argument, various decision-making methods such as voting) as the means to solve it.

Your potluck example is exactly the point. It is a political decision to have a potluck vs the host providing the food (which can have a variety of consequences in some situations). The very nature of an API is to make that kind of choice.
Wow you cherry-picked 3 examples (see confirmation bias) and thought stuff like that happens to every single person in America pulled over by a cop (in a nation of 300M+)?
Video editor for iOS
There was a recent video or article posted here discussing the poor interaction between Nagle's Algorithm/Delayed ACK/TCP slow-start and how it results in increased latency, especially for the first few packets.

From a first read it sounds like the decisions made in both BSD and Linux could also be adding to the latency problem for the first initial packets.

Have OSes checked how their TCP backlog implementation affects the various congestion control algorithms being used?
I believe they have it right. For example, the Vatican is an enclave -- entirely surrounded by Italy -- but not an exclave, as it is itself contiguous.
Not to Godwin, but, the Swiss supported plenty of money stolen by Nazi government.

Much of the money being "protected from corrupt government" was obtained through corrupt activity.
Not all. Look at D. If the entire territory of a state is an enclave, then it's not an exclave of anywhere.

e.g. the Vatican City.
I came to this conclusion recently as well. There are certainly use cases where JS et al are appropriate but otherwise the style of 99 is much more pleasant.
Yes, I agree they should play by the same rules as us or pull even more stuff. A NSA proponent worded situation nicely: "most countries make espionage against them illegal while making espionage for them legal and even funded in form of intelligence agencies." That's the game. Better play it or competition wins.
The vast majority of Americans simply do not have that choice. They can't go to their boss and say, "hey boss, I want to take a 10% pay cut and get an extra 2 weeks off." American work culture simply doesn't allow that.
Spam mostly, and other forms of abuse. But mostly spam.
Coining a phrase is every tech pundit's ultimate dream.

I refer to this as "cementing the drive."
99% of technical co-founders couldn't build a working operating system either. It's a very different set of skills from building a web or mobile app, and requires a lot of knowledge of how hardware works - interrupts, memory protection, device drivers, etc.
You don't, but Datapipeline is no less, a royal pain in the ass to use..
Among other things I am responsible for my employer's REST API. I don't really see where an API is inherently political. It could be, if you're trying to get lots of different organizations to buy into it as a quasi standard (OAuth?), but most APIs I encounter simply provide a decent separation of concerns so external users can do what they need to do without knowing what's happening on the other side.

There's also the time and money aspect to it. The API isn't usually the top priority for most companies, so the API usually ends up somewhere between a crude interface and a mirror image of what's in the packaged product.

In most cases, its definitely a "don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough" situation.
You can get insurance in your home country that includes airlifting back to that place.
Apart form the bit where for long periods swiss mercenaries where feared and much more prone to war crimes than the Italian condotta
Why Is Smalltalk Dead
We needed killfiles well before September began. (Go read the net.legends FAQ.) And Perl wasn't a great language before 4, in 1993, and didn't attain anywhere near peak popularity until 5.
I had a 2-week temporary gig at another place (was going perm, but I got a much better offer from the current gig at the last minute).

They used Hipchat, and it was neat - my coworkers there greeted me with inline memes. Having to use a proprietary client sucked, though.
The Most Important Movie of 2015 Is a VR Cartoon
Well, sorta. Yeah, spam was a big problem. The other problem is that there WERE moderated groups, and the original intent when creating moderated groups was that moderators would act like adults. They largely did not, and even if they did, they were usually strongly opinionated and would moderate according to those opinions.
> SIP? SIP is terrible, it's an attempt at replicating the telco model of separate control plane vs talk channel of a traditional telephone company.

Good point and I agree, but it solves problem of direct communication between users (NAT traversal). It would be great if SIP had plain and simple GET method (without need for session/dialog).

> This doesn't follow either. If I host a webpage on my personal computer, I can host the js/css in exactly the same way.

How can I get your js/css from outside, if you are behind NAT? STUN? NAT traversal is already part of standard SIP infrastructure.

Sorry on stubbornness, just trying to brainstorm a little.
Still strange when a country actively rejects a stretch of land.
Nicaragua Canal: A Giant Project  with Huge Environmental Costs
technically she was right though about his tax rate, it was low because most of his income came from long term cap gains investments
What is that lack of understanding?
But that comparison is flawed too; I don't know about Switzerland, but e.g. both Canada and Israel have effective single payer healthcare systems, which cost half as much per capita as in the US, and deliver higher life expectancy with 100% coverage and no medical bankruptcies.

It's too complex to summarize it with just one number per country.
Exactly. Even with rules preventing most of it, esp industrial espionage, you still need spy agencies to peak at other side to make sure they follow the rules. That's what US claims they do. They did in fact catch numerous attempts to steal big contracts with bribery.

So, the game will continue to exist one way or another. And if public sector had total openness, they'd just use private contractors as they already do for some covert and especially criminal ops.
This isn't the actual AMA, click the link at the top to get to it.
I'm puzzled by the pushback this is getting. There are many questions about APIs which are purely technical:

What does this API do? Can I invoke it using my preferred language? What performance characteristics does it have? Is it synchronous or asynchronous?

To that we can add questions about types, latency, protocols, and so on.

But there are plenty of non-technical questions: can I rely on this service to continue operating in the future? Can I be sued for using it, or for using it in certain ways? Can I build a commercial service using the API or the data it provides? If the API provides me with data that is incorrect, or illegal (containing copyrighted material, say), who is liable? What likelihood is there that the people running the service will degrade or shut down the service, demand increased payment for access to it, or offer preferential access to my competitors? Who owns, controls or distributes any data that I share via my invocations of the API? And what happens if or when the answers to any of these questions change, and how can I influence the direction of those changes?

Whether you call these 'political' questions or not is a matter of semantics. I think they're political in the sense that they're about the people running the service, rather than the technology itself. They're about who controls it, who decides the direction of its evolution, and what constraints they operate under. Those questions will depend on business, ethical, regulatory and philosophical considerations, and I don't think it's unreasonable to describe those as being 'political'.
> Maybe I hacked it together on a rainy weekend.

But why are you running it? What are your incentives? This is what I was writing about. Programmers, for some unknown reason, try very hard not to express their political interests and try to disguise them using technical lingo.
It turns out things are different for different people.
Most of the US financial industry is a parasite, yet I don't hear much complaining about that.
I was going to reply to another comment, but then my response became much more general. So this is more of a general response to those comments that disagree with the original article.

In the case of web APIs, there is always a determination made as to where the limit of the host's responsibility lies. If the API exposes more functionality, it costs more to implement and maintain, and the responsibility is on the host, not on the client. If an API is shrunk, then the host shifts the responsibility to the client. In many other fields, changes in an API spec might be called a turf war, not separation of concerns.

A personal anecdote: I currently (not for long though) support and extend a large enterprise application that is licensed by my organization, but is hosted at the licensor's data center. For the last decade or so, this application has been extended with in-process plug-ins/modules that use internally exposed Java APIs and have an internally exposed JSP tag library for UI extension. The complexity of the plug-in system, and the incredibly varied effects it has on customer deployments, has become untenable for the licensor (apparently). So as this enterprise software provider transitions their products to a multi-tenant microservices model (as opposed to the current silo'd monolith we have now), the Java APIs will be gradually phased out, in favor of REST services. Of course, this means that clients will be responsible for maintaining their own server for each extension service (as opposed to the "free" in process hosting previously provided) and will also be responsible for their own UI (including accessibility and mobile concerns), even though it can be iframed in the new UI.

Long story short, this has a lot of the extension developers...upset. Basically they've had an entire integration and extension platform that is now being mostly (if slowly) closed off to them to shift several responsibilities across the border between the licensor and licensee. There are (very good) technical justifications for changing the framework this way, but they sit alongside the political and economic justifications.
I am actually a freelancer, my example was not of my current situation. But while I was employed it was very hard (I didn't manage to get it despite trying for a while) to get a job as a developer for less than full time regardless of salary.

Anyway that wasn't the point, my point was that stating your particular preference doesn't really add much to the conversation.
Labour laws in Switzerland demand a 15 minute break for >5.5h working days, 30 minutes for >7h and 60 minutes for >9h. [0]

This is mostly to protect the employees and depending on the sector, people are pretty flexible about that. Lot of people I know just eat a sandwich at the desk and leave earlier in the evening.

After compulsory taxes and insurances, a swiss household has on average 70.9% of their income left for spending. [1]

[0] https://www.admin.ch/opc/de/classified-compilation/19640049/...

[1] http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/themen/20/02/bla...
They provided a place for the jews in nazi germany to move their money outside of germany. But if I was Jewish and in Nazi Germany I would have done the same, as my Catholic great-grandparents did by moving their money from Germany to Switzerland when the Nazis came to power.

It's unfortunate that most of their Jewish customers were killed by the Nazis. They also accepted deposits from the Nazis, but I can understand their attitude of not taking sides. In the end you want a neutral party like that, no matter what side you're on.
Explicación Geobiologica Del Foco Tonal de San Lorenzo En  México
The US was like this some years earlier. Those were the prosperous years where everyone was capable of achieving the American dream. Then the tax cuts for industries came into effect and the middle class bore the blunt of it and dwindled. The wealthy are able to avoid this since they can afford to pay an army of lawyers to channel their wealth through loopholes. A social safety net is essential for progress. There are quite a few examples of entrepreneurs who were able to make it because they were not starving to death. Also going bankrupt due to ailments is ridiculous! The tension brewing up in various parts of the country is a sign of the inequality and corruptness in the system. And the solution is not to split the country but to fix the broken system.