lordxenu's comments

Pretty cool, although most game engines/libraries lack a native gui system. Does this provide some way of building retro guis, like for game menus or settings? If not, will it in the future?

I agree with you, however it's not easy to force government to act in the common people's interests either. You can say voting, but it's getting harder and harder to find any honest representatives to do work in good faith.

Take this example, the people voted that DC tipped workers should get a higher minimum wage, but now it's being repealed by the DC city council:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-council-...

How do you get the data from banks? Are you scraping the webpage after the user logs in? Not many banks I know of have public apis.

I've never done any contracting, so I don't know how it works. Are you a contractor for the SEC? If so, is this a short-term contract for the SEC project, or is this full-time at "Aretecinc"? If full-time, what happens after the SEC project is done?

Do you guys, by any chance, have relocation reimbursement?

This seems like a scam, or at best a marketing lie. Voice recognition is still an experimental field that's very difficult to get right. Even today's professional voice recognition software requires some voice training. There's no way this thing can accurately pick up speech in a random environment.

And given that most voice recognition software require some decent hardware (think your phone or your pc). I doubt it's gonna fit into that tiny earpiece with today's hardware specs.

What's to stop Trump or Hilary from revoking these "union-friendly" when they come into office? They'll have 4 or 8 years to dismantle it again. I guess at that point maybe people will be really angry, but right now we have thousands of engineers and other startup employees that just got screwed over big time. What can be done to help them at this moment?

If targeting "right to work" is the first step, then perhaps we can organize something around abolishing that. If abolishing is too difficult, then perhaps modifying it so that "right to work" only applies to companies that have less than $1 million but have safeguards in place to ensure fair layoff packages, but companies with more than $1 million must allow unions. That way, small companies don't have to worry about unions and when they're big enough, they'll have the money and the lawyers to deal with it.

Waiting is a loser's game. With another recession, the government will do just enough to keep people content, but not go that extra length to solidify those protections. With changing seats of power over time (re-elections), there's no guarantee that the next set of people in power won't dismantle protections... causing the cycle to repeat... causing us to wait for another recession... and so forth.

Not sure if this matters to you, but keep in mind that there is a chance that "Open Source" projects can become closed source, taking all of the user's work with them. Users don't get as much protections as one would get from a free licensed project.

ie, there's a difference between "free software" and "open source".

I always see comments like this, that states some data about unions and decreasing wages and rights, etc.

While I agree, I almost never see anyone going one step further and saying what can be done about it. "Call your representatives!" says many, but this is a mainly passive action that depends too much on faith in the incorruptibility of our representatives. We can continue to do this, but we need a more powerful and active direction.

With the tech bubble collapsing and people losing their jobs (especially with what's currently happening in Silicon Valley), I think maybe it is time for a dedicated union for both engineers (us) and other employees. That is, some kind of active effort designed to spearhead these principles. How can this happen? HN readers are smart; we can organize ourselves, can't we?

A lot of these comments have stated the surface level of what is happening. That is, these companies have failed based on bad business tactics/marketshare, over-valuation, etc... And that the employees being laid off are just the tech-bubble fallout, but will be okay 'because jobs are aplenty' or that they'll just have to reapply themselves in some other job sector.

However, what we don't see is the terms of the layoff that the employees are forced into. Generally, employees don't have a say in what they get in their layoff package, and many times it is not a fair amount in comparison to the work they do and in comparison to what management is getting. In addition, employees generally have to sign a legal document that prevents them from defaming the work practices/management/etc of the company. Either they sign and get their package, or they get nothing at all. I'm basing this on accounts from personal friends who have worked in startups, and although I'm speaking from an anecdotal point of view, I don't see what other data points we can draw from given that no one is allowed to speak out legally.

The bottom line is, we will always be screwed over since we lack basic worker protections. We can talk about bad management and how that can be solved, but ultimately I think each and every one of us need to collectively force a set of protections for workers. Either through law or by forming a strong collective. Until then, this cycle will continue.