Hacker News Reader

pkkimon An Account of Human Costs: The reservoirs that provide water to New York City

One book I'd recommend for changing your perspective, especially to anyone in the Bay Area, is _Imperial San Francisco_. It ties together early San Francisco's extractive economy with late 19th century American imperialism and industrialization. The author argues that by the 1860s, Northern California and Nevada were already in San Francisco's hinterland, but city leaders sought to bring the entire Pacific basin under the city's dominion. The book covers mining, energy, armaments, and media as well as water. And it asks the same question as this essay: what were the costs, and was it worth it?

pkkimon Logs, Tails, Long Tails (2013)

Bringing it closer to home for many software developers, when we talk about the reliability of a system, we also use a variation on log probability (of success), but we call it "nines:" 99% reliability is two nines, 99.99% is four nines, etc. So nines(x) = -log_10 (1-x)

pkkimon Modeling a Wealth Tax

Thanks for sharing. I don't expect to convince you but I want to make my opposing view clear.

For me the most important benefit of a wealth tax is eroding the wealth of billionaires. This is important because having that much money gives you _power_ in our society comparable to elected officials, but without any comparable accountability. If you have a billion dollars, you can employ two hundred people from your _personal wealth_ at $100k for fifty years each. Or, if you prefer, 2500 people for a four-year term. (This ignores the resources you have influence in deploying in business, though at least in that case there are other stakeholders. It also ignores connections.) This is a great deal of power, comparable to being an elected official, all the more so because elected officials are often constrained by politics. In my view, the existence of such a powerful and unaccountable interest group can only be a threat to democracy. Other commenters have outlined particular ways that this class has achieved its political goals in the USA. The class of billionaires poses such a threat that I would seriously consider giving up the IT revolution of the last fifty years to be rid of it.

pkkimon Factorio and Software Engineering

Nice subtle brag that you're able to both play Factorio and do other productive activity in the same week.

pkkimon The Three Bay Areas (2017)

There are two reasons I'm guessing the author doesn't see himself as part of the working class. 1. He doesn't make fun of the working class like he does to the other two. Either because he doesn't know them well enough to do so, or because he doesn't want to insult them. 2. The UAW locals in the Bay Area represent graduate students, postdocs, and nonprofit workers. No one in "service jobs or government jobs" or "nurses, teachers or craftsmen."

pkkimon Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enterprise markets?

I don't know much about contract negotiation, but for organizing "high touch" doesn't begin to describe it! The labor organizer's job is to convince the worker, who likely and often rightly fears for her job if she actively and publicly supports the union, that it's still the right thing to do. Not only convince intellectually, but psychologically prepare the worker to stick with the union effort in the face of a concerted effort from the employer to defeat it. To do that the organizer needs to ask the right questions, listen carefully, build trust, and finally push, and potentially do this repeatedly with the same person. It is psychologically demanding and not everyone can do it; I tried and I couldn't. A chatbot cannot convince a factory worker with kids to feed that he needs to stick up for his coworkers who in turn will stick up for him. All that said I think there is room in the process for profitable automation, but it's auxiliary to the main work.

If you're interested Jane McAlevey's book Raising Expectations and Raising Hell is a good introduction to union organizing.

pkkimon The Global Implications of “Re-education” Technologies in Northwest China

As the article says, China learned it from the US. In the past, they have justified it by saying that they're just doing the same thing that the US did in its War on Terror. I wish the US could lead on this with moral authority, but in order to credibly do so I think it will have to reckon with its own actions. If we instead simply redouble sanctions enforcement, that _could_ work but from the Chinese perspective it would be humiliating capitulation to force. More likely it would just strengthen the resolve of the CCP to continue on its path in Xinjiang.

pkkimon Shall the West Pass Too? Whispers from Fallen Civilisations

Quite interesting work. My main questions are: What is the West? Which countries? and What do decline and death mean, and what don't they mean?

These, I think, should be established as early as possible, and the ideas of Spengler and Toynbee presented afterwards, with points of similarity and difference with your own definitions highlighted.

Some minor points:

- Section 1.2 begins by discussing a crisis in creativity and the changing relationship between the elites and the masses. But then it switches to a list of "challenges" including aging and growing sovereign debt. This is rather jarring and needs to be reorganized.

- It's very surprising to read that Greek philosophers switched focus from political philosophy to individual virtue once the Macedonians and Romans invaded. All of Plato's dialogues that I've read are about individual virtue. Even the Republic is only fifty percent politics and the rest is about the soul. Aristotle too is very concerned with what the personal virtues are and how they can be cultivated.

pkkimon Tesla to Cut Employees’ Pay as Much as 30% to Curb Costs

Hi, I worked for the UAW campaign to organize Tesla a while back, and I did some of the data analysis for this report. https://uaw.org/report-worksafe-internal-tesla-data-shows-in...

I wish I could answer questions about it but at this point it's been years and I've forgotten basically all the details. I will say though that there were suspicious gaps in Tesla's incident reports of months going by without the slightest incident, from the very beginning of I think April 2015 to the end of the calendar year.

You may dismiss it as biased, since it obviously is, but the methodology of the portions I worked on or saw was honest.

pkkimon At Dynamicland, the Building Is the Computer

I was lucky enough to visit Dynamicland at one point. The computing environment they had set up there was interesting. Programs are stored on a central server, but are executed by putting a printout of the code (with colored dots around the edges serving as a barcode) on a tabletop that has a camera and a projector above it. I/O between programs happens by putting cards next to each other. The programs also affect what the projector displays on the board, but the only persistent state is the presence and position of cards on the table.

pkkimon Socialite Cordelia Scaife May Spent Her Fortune Trying to Keep Immigrants Out

If you want to prevent the formation of a pool of cheap exploitable immigrant labor, there are two ways. The best would be to prevent immigrants from entering, but that's impossible. The second best is to make sure that those who enter have the same freedoms and protections as native born workers, so that unscrupulous employers can't take advantage of them (house cleaners paid below minimum wage, H-1B tech employees paid under the table, chicken processing plants [0]).

0: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/09/poultry-in...

pkkimon My Parents Are Flat Earthers

I have not read Bill Gates' book, but I have heard little dispute that the material conditions of the working class _in the developed world_ have not improved much in the last forty or so years. The "elephant curve" is the best simple depiction I've seen of this: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/09/17/s...

The article goes on to describe why it's not quite so bad as the original graph made it seem, but even the "Alternative" shows the same general pattern.

pkkimon The world split into 7 equal areas of population

s/Ming/Qing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuang_Guandong

During the first two centuries of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, this part of China, the traditional homeland of the ruling Manchus, was, with few exceptions, closed to settlement by Han Chinese civilians, with only certain Manchu Bannermen, Mongol Bannermen, and Chinese Bannermen allowed in.

pkkimon A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game

He also implies he lives with his parents, since he says he cleans for them when they ask.

pkkimon Equifax’s Maddening Unaccountability

You can take a picture of your payment card instead of typing the digits in.

pkkimon The Memories of Plants

Harvesting animals also requires harvesting plants, for animal feed. It takes a lot more plant matter to create 1000 Calories worth of beef than of any plant-based food, probably around ten times more based on the amount of food energy required / food energy provided of meat.

pkkimon Afraid of Makefiles? Don't be

One important tip is that the commands under a target each run sequentially, but in separate shells. So if you went to set env vars, cd, activate a Python virtualenv, etc to affect the next command, you need to make them a single command, like:

  target:
      cd ./dir; ./script.sh

pkkimon Show HN: "What it is like to be a bat." (WebVR piece)

Cool! I especially like the little villages in the valleys.

pkkimon Petrified Forest

The first passage is a weird mixed metaphor. I think the part before the semicolon is relatively straightforward. The force of mind is a plant (though, who ever heard of a plant thriving in adverse soil but not in a prosperous flower bed?). The part after the semicolon refers to the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet, and now the mind is a person whose natural red-cheeked bravery and decisiveness have become pale because of the illness of money.

It is bad writing.

pkkimon Uber faces criminal probe over software used to evade authorities

I used to work at Uber and heard anecdotally that despite the advertising, something like 50% of Uber rides in the Bay Area are done by the top ten percent of drivers. And they do work a lot. So the vast majority might be part time but they don't do most of the work.

pkkimon A PostgreSQL response to Uber [pdf]

As someone who participated in this transition, I don't think that was a part of it. The new database layer took quite a bit of instruction to use properly as well, and there were plenty of people misusing it.

pkkimon The Grim Biology of Being Poor

Everything you're saying is true, and yet, I think that relying mostly on this line of reasoning to justify poverty reduction leads to discounting the importance of supporting disabled people and old people. I think most people believe that just because you cannot work, doesn't mean you deserve a basic but dignified standard of living.

pkkimon Uber is pushing anti-union propaganda to its drivers

There are dedicated anti-union consulting firms that teach their clients the same bag of tricks. The union is a third party, they'll threaten the company's success (this one is hard to do legally, a consultant can help), etc.

pkkimon Uber reportedly tracked Lyft drivers using a program named ‘Hell’

If I were Lyft, I might try to detect what traffic is coming from suspect clients and present an inaccurate view to them to maximize inefficient spending on Uber's part. This seems like it should be easy to do without harming someone in case you inaccurately label someone as illegitimate.

pkkimon Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?

I completely agree! But it is a very difficult problem because the job security of so many individual members of Congress depends on gerrymandering. Obama and former attorney general Eric Holder are working on an initiative related to this, though.

pkkimon Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?

(US centric response)

I'm not sure if this was a rhetorical question...but the answer is that districts are drawn by the ruling party in order to assure its continued dominance. The incentives for these legislators are totally different from Amazon's.

A very interesting example happened in Georgia in the 1990s. The Republicans and the Black Caucus (who are mostly Democrats) worked together to pack black voters into a few concentrated districts. This resulted in both more black Democratic legislators and more Republican legislators.

pkkimon Uber launches 'urgent investigation' into sexual harassment claims

This reminds me of the one-week safety investigation that Tesla promised to undertake after one of their workers published a blog post. http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/02/1903910/

pkkimon Tesla factory worker calls for a union: “We need to stand up for ourselves”

Firing someone because they were involved in union activity is extremely illegal. It happens only when companies are confident there won't be consequences.

pkkimon Tesla factory worker calls for a union: “We need to stand up for ourselves”

Why is this on the third page when there are stories on the second page with fewer points and posted before this one? At least in December 2015, ranking was a function of those two things: https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking...

Update: Page 4 as of a few minutes ago: http://imgur.com/a/M6XuC

pkkimon Tesla factory worker calls for a union: “We need to stand up for ourselves”

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Tesla-employee-speaks...

"Last month, five members of the Assembly wrote a letter to Tesla CEO Elon Musk referring to the confidentiality pledge and expressing concerns that the breadth of the agreement “impermissibly violates protected employee activity under state and federal law, including the right to communicate to each other and the public about wages, working conditions and other issues.” The members asked Tesla to revise the policy."