educaysean

When did I make this claim? I hate seeing these snarky takes on HN. Lots of things take away agency from the working class: like employer-centric insurance system, complex and regressive taxes, etc.

But you already knew these things and you also knew that the topic on hand was about unions. God forbid anyone say anything critical about THAT. If you have a point to make, get right to it instead of hiding behind snark.

Edit: nevermind guy. I can see others have already tried. Cheers.

I think we reached a good point for the conversation. You're correct in your assessment: I do place a lot of faith and values in empowering individual freedom and agency, so any brush with authoritarian entities usually leave me grumpy. I hope for humanities sake that public opinion of unions in America never devolve into something like that of HOAs.

Thanks for engaging, and have a good one.

I assume you're writing this from the viewpoint that I consider unions to be ineffective or evil, even. I am not.

I share your concerns regarding the owners whose powers often go unchecked in corporate America, and I completely agree that we're reaching dangerous levels.

But I'm not speaking in hypotheticals. No, the anecdote I brought up is, in fact, the least hypothetical thing in this conversation thread. My wife examined the union pamphlet that was handed to her, decided that the union did not represent her needs adequately, but was told she'd still need to pay the union dues. This is not enabling her agency whatsoever, and actively made her conditions worse by heaping on unwanted taxes that she felt was also priced disproportionately. Yet she had no voice in this matter.

Organize a union, yes - you have my full support. Represent whichever needs your union deems to be important, yup - I'm behind it. Fight the greedy owners, great. But don't extort money from those who made the active decision to not be a part of the union. This is an active intrusion of her agency, and a real event that I brought up because I didn't think think it was fair. The fact that workers are already being exploited by greedy corporations does not excuse bad union behaviors, period.

Why is it bad? It's bad because it takes away freedom and agency from the working class, and workers rights is something I care about.

Thanks for the article; it was a fun read. I actually had the privilege of working for a start up that was spun up in Denmark before it packed up everything and moved to the US. Because the CEO and a bunch of senior folks were Danish, they adopted what we called the Danish benefits: 6 weeks of vacation + multiple personal holidays. I miss it sorely, despite my current workplace offering "unlimited PTO" ugh.

Reading the article really reinforced how Denmark (most Scandinavian nations, actually) has a strong worker-first culture. I agree with you in that I don't ever see this scenario playing out in the US, for various reasons.

Counterintuitive to what? Do you have stories or facts you want to share that argue unions in US are actually comparatively weaker than their European counterparts?

The only thing you illustrated was that you were personally astonished by OP's comment, but I don't think that carries as much weight as you think it does.

Yup, this is just as important in my view. Tangentially related: one of the places my wife worked at had a union that "pretty much everyone joins" because they charge union fees from every worker regardless of whether they join the union or not. I don't understand how they could mandate something like that, and the idea didn't sit well with me. It's a classic case of taxation without representation!

I can't speak for whether the OP is in violation of any laws or not. I am, however, very curious about the identity of this competitor bank. Yeah, I get why they might be suspicious of OP given his initial access, but my god that company sounds like it's being run by a bunch of incompetent hotheads. They have seem to have absolutely no idea how to investigate a security breach let alone run a finance company.

Note to OP: if things don't go your way with the lawsuit, do the society a favor and let the world know who these guys are so we can all steer clear.

Why did you immediately jump to a malicious scenario? Is that what you imagine curious people do?

> At Stripe, my current project is to implement a speculative approach to testing and merging changes, this will allow us to scale merges to hundreds of commits per hour while keeping the main branch green.

I don't know how to interpret this sentence. What does the author mean when they say "implement a speculative approach"? Is this something that other monorepo orgs can also adopt? Or is it specific to Stripe?

Merge conflicts seem like an area with heavy potential for headaches that arises from the use of monorepo, and I wish the author would've shared deeper insights here.

I think it's more of the latter. The shapes are not there to help him do arithmetic in a more efficient way. The shapes are there just because that's how numbers are represented in the author's brain.

I experienced similar things growing up. For my case, it was usually colors. Each number was associated with a specific shade of color, but in my case it was less about the numbers themselves; it was more contextual. Eg. The number four represented different colors depending on whether it was describing the time of day, the number of floors on a building, or amount in currency.

I had brought this up in my youth only to be met with derision and threatened with being labeled "abnormal" by the authority figures, so I worked to suppress and hide this aspect. (South Korean society had a lot of backwards ideas in the 90s).

I opened it with a skeptical eye and walked away completely impressed. Despite the odd dissonances that pop up at intervals, many of the palettes produced are not only trendy and pleasing but also unexpected and creative in some ways.

Huge kudos!

This feels like a rather uncharitable interpretation. Entering into in an exclusive relationship with someone means you have come out ahead of other potential "competitors" and are able to claim the reward: access to the elevated relationship with the said individual, and not necessarily the individual themselves.

Do you also take issue with the phrases like "How to win his heart" or "You need to win her over"?

Your comment is not factually incorrect, but it takes a lot of logical leaps. Let's say: if all other things were equal, would you want to hire a candidate who has worked with just 1 programming language throughout her career or someone with experience on 5 different programming languages?

It's probably correct to answer "the person with 5", but does it automatically prove that "# of languages under the belt" is a great metric for evaluating engineering prospects?

We can come up with all kinds of justification for the current state of engineering interviews, but most everyone conducting the intervews know that our methods are extremely primitive and are thirsty for a better path forward.

Why is the Hacker News title editorialized? I believe the convention is to use the original title of the linked article. Removing the "how" from the sentence changes the tone by quite a margin.

What mandate? It's a product designed to be used by living, breathing people and people tend have various preferences. Do people requesting darker skinned models somehow upset you more than people who request red haired models?

This perspective resonates strongly with me. If I'd read this comment two years ago I would've brushed it aside as an overly cynical take but it rings true to my ears now.

In the last two years I've joined and left a bay area tech company that was operating exactly as you described: a maintenance mode org that lost all its former glory and the execs were happy to sit and see the hamster wheel churn; slowly squeezing out whatever is left of the market. Even with strong quarterly marks and plenty of time to piss away I couldn't endure the overwhelming boredom and purposelessness of it all and had no option but to resign.

I think perhaps I was too hopeful and optimistic back then. If I'd understood early on that it was by design that nothing ever got done, I would've optimized for getting the most time/happiness out of it. Live and learn I guess.

It's not an America vs. China struggle as you put it. The "rest of the folk" around the world are not content with China's deliberate attempt to conceal, twist, and even completely rewrite the history either.

Yes, America has enjoyed its massive worldwide influence over the past few decades and it has definitely gotten away with abusing it's power at times. Much of it was because the flow of information wasn't as free back than as it is today, but it was also because America, for all its faults, really did at least try and do a lot of good as a "self-appointed world leader".

My opinions aren't exactly unbiased having grown up in South Korea (recipient of lots of good will from the US), but the situation isn't simply that America has lost its edge over China and is complaining - it's more that Chinese government is really aggressive in promoting their agenda and are much more willing to sacrifice certain ideals (freedom of expression, etc) to get there. I can say this as a person who have attended a secret Christian worship meeting in China: Say what you will about the US, but it's not China.

Upwork is a red herring in this case. As frustrating as it may be that Upwork wasn't more helpful in resolving this case, the current state of affairs is as follows:

1. The author (freelancer) did $12.5k amount of work that he wasn't compensated for

2. The owner of the CC that was "accidentally" charged $12.5k received all their money back through bank dispute

3. Upwork was able to claim their cut for the $12.5k worth of transaction that occurred between the author and Robin

4. Robin received $12.5k amount of work without paying a dime

Robin needs to pay the author back the $12.5k he is owed. If Upwork isn't willing to help reclaim the debt, he needs to sue Robin directly for the amount. It's very strange how much good will the author is willing to show towards Robin given how Robin is the only entity in the story who got away with all the spoils without paying a thing.

Money can be a dirty thing if we assign wrong values to it. This is the same with relationships, religion, fame, and even family. Thinking that money is inherently dirty isn't any more right than thinking money will solve all problems.

Publicity stunts aren't inherently bad, especially if it's for unselfish reasons. It looks like this person wanted to take this opportunity to make a statement about the Mormon church and its stance on LGBTQ. I say kudos.

For me weed is not really something that actively aids in problem-solving or brainstorming, but rather acts as more of a motivation booster. When it's 11pm and I have a handful of less-demanding tasks to slog through, that's where I've found weed to be a lot of help. It helps make otherwise routine tasks more engaging. It even gives me sufficient motivation to actively refactor and improve parts of codebase that I might've otherwise ignored or ticketed away in the backlog.

If you already knew that there was an app out there, maybe don't use absolutist sounding phrases like "they'll never know" just to come back and make defensive edits about how nobody out there knows about its existence when you yourself obviously knew about it.

Your argument isn't very convincing. AirTags are one of the few location tracker that the public can recognize by sight and identify its use. This makes AirTags much less effective for use by malicious actors than other generic black-plastic case electronics.

I have a hard time trying to justify the Yahoo / SF comparison the article tries to establish. Yes I see the surface-level similarities; Yahoo was the leading website until it wasn't, and SF was the leading tech hub until one day it won't be.

How does the relationship evolve beyond that? The symptoms of a once-giant slowly losing its lead will be similar no matter which industry or entity you look at. You could probably force similar parallels about Blockbuster, Brittany Spears, the Soviet Union or even GM.

The author never bothers to develop any meaningful connection between the the reasons for their decline. They seem to hint at the fact that maybe hubris played a part - but it's all extremely unclear and I'm not going to read into it anymore than I need to.

In the end it's yet just another "SF ain't the hot thing anymore" article with a sensationalized title.

I'm curious - which specific laws have you found to be "impossible not to break"?

This was a fun reading with useful information, but I'm not at all impressed by the "capitalism is the root problem" tone behind the article. Yes, our society could do a better job with educating the public in terms of their privacy options, but capitalism isn't a system that rewards greed above all else. It's a system that transparently reflects the motivation of our population at large.

You can scoff at all these companies today that are going carbon neutral as just "following the money" or whatever, but that's the entire point of capitalism. If something matters to most of us deeply, then we'll vote with our wallets. Eg. If most of us were so sick of how our mobile phones are apying on us, companies like Purism would be raking in billions. The truth is that most of us would rather have fancy cameras with fun case options. Capitalism isn't forcing our hands, we are the ones making choices - capitalism just reflects it.

Completely agreed with this. If you make a feature less useful than before of course it will be engaged with less.

A radical approach in the similar vein would be to just turn off half your infra and add a ton of latency to YouTube. That would similarly solve the "dislike attacking behavior" altogether at the cost of having your existing users hate your product, with the added bonus of server cost savings.

I rarely engage with YT recommended videos so I can't verify the accuracy of your claims. Either way, however, it sounds like reworking their recommendations algorithm would be a more reasonable way to deal with this issue than simply hiding the like/dislike ratio. How is this change going to meaningfully affect which videos show up as recommended?

Can you please elaborate? You have a way to compare a raw metric (counts) against a ratio (like vs. dislike) that yields useful insights as to whether the like vs. dislike ratio was the product of brigading?