Unless I'm missing something obvious, striking is the only leverage a union has. If striking is illegal, what's their leverage?
1,945 karma · joined February 17, 2013
Tech founder, blogger, writer and the unfortunate guy that was fired by a machine
https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me
email me at first name @ my website domain
But once these mandates became law, corporations used the arguments of "why do we need unions if the law already protects workers?" This and following Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers changed the image of unions. They were now corrupt middlemen that charged you a fee to be part of the club.
And it worked. Trying to form a union is now news instead of being the natural course of things. I wager that most people in the tech side of Amazon have a hard time grasping why their coworkers are trying to unionize. (we get paid well, what's the fuss all about?)
I hope they vote in their interest, but I'm doubtful it will pass (I hope I'm wrong). These laws that are supposed to protect workers are enforced by the company's HR department[1]. The problem is that HR will side with the company before siding with any employee.
I think we need to start looking into reforming HR and making it a public service.
One thing that can be improved is the way the history is populated. Right now, every time a search is performed, a new entry is added to history. I was thinking how to spell Cauliflower as I was typing, now I have to press the back button for each character I typed. It will make more sense to only add a history entry when the input is blurred - onblur()
My process of writing anything goes through this tool. I write in a plain text file to avoid distraction. Then run it through this app to simplify the writing and make it more legible. Then I pass it through scribens, another tool in my pipeline to catch mistakes. Since I can never find someone to read and edit my work, I convert it to audio and using a TTS reader.
It drastically improves my writing.
I wanna say I'm disappointed, but I'd be lying. I'm happy that A.I. cannot detect us black people. I'll need to do something about that left ear though.
My experience is that customers will always want more features than they initially ask for. That's why I make sure to tell them my hourly rate, then give them an estimate. For example, I can say $5000 for a 1 month project. Here I'll break down the average time I will work a week as a courtesy.
This helps me justify charging them again when we are at month 3 and the project is not done. I learned this the hard way, charging a flat fee and continue to work long after I had spent all my earnings.
I'm pretty sure all the developer did was:
echo json_encode($queryResult);
[1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/how-much-do-you-charge-for-your-wor...
I had written the article to post on my blog. But a couple years ago I've had many journalist contact me about my previous story linked in the article. So I called in those favors and BBC was first to respond :)
First, a little over a week ago we were having a similar discussion here [1] and I promised I'd post my article about it. This is the article.
Second, I want people to understand that this is a complex issue and the solution might/should be as complex. It's not a case of, OK let's hire 20 more black people and it's over. The reality is that, well first you have to find them, and then you have to see if they qualify for a job you are actually hiring for.
But one thing that anyone one here can do is get up from their chair and look around the office, you immediately notice that black people aren't there. This is what this article is doing. It's asking why?
Every anecdote I brought up about treatment is something that happened to me on multiple occasions. Now I'm getting hundreds of emails with people saying "you pulled the words out of my mouth." And some examples sound innocent enough and could be interpreted in many ways. But like Joel Spolsky once said, "it's the tiny little frustration that add up"[2] and at some point you are angry and don't even know why.
This is a call to be more understanding and for all of us to be aware of the challenges black people face. I don't have a solution to end racism, and I don't pretend I do. But when we all understand each other a little better, racism tend to start fading away.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23544856 [2]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/10/controlling-your-e...
Edit: typo and my mistake, this post is not flagged as of writing.
> "They never even asked him any questions before arresting him. They never asked him if he had an alibi. They never asked if he had a red Cardinals hat. They never asked him where he was that day," said lawyer Phil Mayor with the ACLU of Michigan.
When I was fired by an automated system, no one asked if I had done something wrong. They asked me to leave. If they had just checked his alibi, he would have been cleared. But the machine said it was him, so case closed.
Not too long ago, I wrote a comment here about this [1]:
> The trouble is not that the AI can be wrong, it's that we will rely on its answers to make decisions.
> When the facial recognition software combines your facial expression and your name, while you are walking under the bridge late at night, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and you are black; your terrorist score is at 52%. A police car is dispatched.
Most of us here can be excited about Facial Recognition technology but still know that it's not something to be deployed in the field. It's by no means ready. We might even consider the moral ethics before building it as a toy.
But that's not how it is being sold to law enforcement or other entities. It's _Reduce crime in your cities. Catch criminals in ways never thought possible. Catch terrorists before they blow up anything._ It is sold as an ultimate decision maker.
The issue was that to block Telegram they had banned a few IP blocks, around 10 million ips[1]. These blocks were used in both Digital Ocean and AWS. So if your website or service used any of these blocks, it wouldn't be available in russia.
You nailed it. At times, I definitely felt like I had become my own worst critique. Before I make a commit, I feel the weight of an invisible black committee that I represent and speak on behalf of.
> Hope life is more boring now!
Oh, how I wish!
But to tell you the truth, I don't want to start over. The devil you know...
At first he is embarrassed. But the more he thinks about it, the more he gets pissed at the chaplain for being present when he embarrassed himself. And when he remembers that the chaplain is only his subordinate, he gets furious. The chaplain suffers the colonel's wrath because...
For me, working in tech feels like being the chaplain.
But when it happens over and over and over, you can't help but feel frustrated. You realize that people natural instinct is to think you are the subordinate. One second your are on stage at Techcrunch (I was in 2017), where you have clearly introduced yourself. You get off-stage, they greet your colleague and ask him the questions as if he was on stage.
I was often in the interview room waiting for my interviewer, only to have him show up, and tell me I must be in the wrong room. A simple "Hey are you XYZ?" could have avoided this frustration.
I've written an article about my experience working as a black developer, I'll post it here in the near future. You wouldn't believe how lonely it is. In my team of 150 people, we were two black people.
When users consume this data, they become Google customers, not Wikipedia users. Even my little website has seen a 30% drop in traffic, but I appear in much more snippets. Those users get their information and never visit my blog at all. This creates loyal google users [1], not loyal < insert blog/business name here> followers
If you are interested, I did a live recording of building a blog from scratch [1]. From the content, to a decent framework to run it. This is more of a purpose oriented framework where you build the features you need.
[1]: https://idiallo.com/video/website-from-scratch-part-1-conten...
I haven't written about it yet, but I'll add it to my list for this year.
At some point, my fee was $40 an hour. I freelanced through a 3rd party who found gigs for me, and took their cuts. One day, I found out that they charged these companies $100 in some cases, while I was still only getting $40.
If that's how much I was worth, then it would be perfectly reasonable for me to charge just as much.
If you want more details, here is the full story: https://idiallo.com/blog/how-much-do-you-charge-for-your-wor...
The day after I announced publicly I'm writing a book, my wife announced she was pregnant. I still continued writing but the motivation of the first day was halfed. Two weeks later, she told me it was twins, I quickly decided to get a stable job. I still wrote in the evening and weekends.
The kids came earlier then expected, and we had to spend 2 months in the NICU. Writing took a backseat. It turned into a day or two a week. When the kids finally came home... If I could get a paragraph in every week I was lucky.
At one year old, I check the last modified date on the files and it says a month ago. The quarantine helped me get a few paragraph here and there every night. But a good part of my routine has been reading the book to remember what it was about.
I'm really impressed with how Bob Nystrom managed to get 200k words in with life fiercely trying to get in the way.
Your first book was amazing, and I can't wait to get this one too in my hands.
It was a small simple application. It took no longer than a week to migrate to mysql. Unfortunately, we had a long term contract with Oracle. It didn't matter that we weren't using their db anymore, we still had 10 more years to go.
The strength of the Oracles and IBMs of the world is not in technology. It's in sales.
Just like the article implies, if it requires any tweaking and configuration, most people won't/can't do it.
Most desktop computers today are a magnitude more powerful then the small VMs we rent on the cloud. While you go on with your day, your desktop computer can be put to work in Your service.