MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-09-19 22:25:40+00:00
> The rarity of left-wing political violence is well established. Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute compiled a list that provides a helpful overview of the types of political killing that have occurred in the United States in the past 50 years.... Inevitably, the categorization of individual killers is debatable. (Was the Unabomber a leftist? ... “If we had been having a conversation about political violence in the 1960s or 1970s,” the political scientist Thomas Zeitzoff told me, “we would be talking about leftist political violence.” But in the early ’80s, the left-wing killers sat out a round, and the right-wingers ascended. The Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols ensured that, in the ’90s, the right had a kind of proprietary hold on political violence...

Individual categorizations are indeed difficult in many cases. If it's questionable to describe Kaczynski as leftist, it's also questionable to describe the OKC bombers as rightist. I'm inherently skeptical of any of the headline claims coming from studies on this. The data is thankfully scarce enough for any real trends to be dominated by noise. For that matter, it isn't even clear what metrics to use. As pointed out, if it's "number of deaths" than basically nothing matters next to 9/11.

The idea that the 50 years is a long time frame for this is hard to square with so many popular political insults hailing from longer ago than that.

> Logan... says that, recently, the left is much more associated with property crime and nonlethal violence.... “Lethal violence does occur, but to a much lower degree than among the right-wing or religious.”

Property crime, especially arson, can and does end up with deaths anyway. The George Floyd protests caused at least 19 deaths, along with the ten-figure property damage.
by nixosbestos | 2025-09-19 22:26:03+00:00
My friend, so much self-work, you should be proud. Contentedness comes from within. If you think about it, do you really want your worth to be determined by your career? Really? After beating the vices, investing in yourself? I'm proud of you.

There is no "accomplishment". Get off twitter and instagram, and seek contentedness. Everything else is creative self-deceit or comparison games on a rubric that is artificial and asinine.

No one actually cares about your title. Or rather, you probably know that them validating your title isn't really what's going to matter to you? Or is it? Why?

I say this with love, I spent a lot of time (albeit voluntarily) unemployed asking myself such questions. Good luck.
by nosefurhairdo | 2025-09-19 22:26:17+00:00
Microsoft is not an abusive employer. Most people today or at any point in human history would envy the typical Microsoft job. Pretty much all large tech companies are similar in this respect. If your employer is actually abusing you in some way you should contact a lawyer. If you simply have a distaste for your employer you should seek alternative employment.

The defeatist "all corps are evil" mentality will not do you any good.
by strken | 2025-09-19 22:26:32+00:00
I can read upside down, but it's an acquired skill. I can't read at a 90 degree angle without difficulty, although I could probably learn to.

It's not that I don't see the map from the other side, it's that when it's the right way up I see all the extra information I have about it. For example, I bet an eye tracker would show me focusing on Western Europe, Central Asia, Australia, and the US. When the map is flipped, I see it closer to how it really is because I can ignore those preconceived ideas more easily. I don't see e.g. the Iberian peninsula as represented by a land mass, I see the actual land mass, and can concentrate on its size and distance more easily.

This is really interesting!
by rxhanson | 2025-09-19 22:26:34+00:00
Without knowing about Jef Raskin's ideas, I implemented something really similar to one of them in one of my Mac apps, Superkey. This idea in the Canon Cat was that you hold down a key and type text that you want to select anywhere in a document, then let go to select it - typically faster than reaching for a mouse or hitting arrow keys. In the Canon Cat it was an additional key (the leap key), below the space bar.

For the implementation in Superkey, you can select a key to use for this, like caps lock. The way I use it is I hold the caps lock key and type text, then the app uses OCR and optionally the macOS Accessibility API to search for matching text. Releasing the key or hitting enter will click (or double or triple click, etc) on a match.

Raskin's idea was of course more text-editing focused, and tapping on the leap keys will also move the cursor. I typically use Superkey to navigate UIs quickly, kind of as though UIs all have keyboard shortcut navigation. There are also limitations that Superkey faces, like not having access to offscreen parts of a document.
by DaveZale | 2025-09-19 22:26:46+00:00
I saw this in my specialized science field too, in California a couple of decades ago. Real wages for that work have dropped 5 fold at least, partly due to automation, but I saw labs that were 100% immigrants, many H1Bs. Not complaining, just observing. were H1Bs necessary though? No. Many US born in that field found themselves jobless upon graduation. It was all about cheap labor
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-19 22:27:20+00:00
The petit bourgeoisie and the haut bourgeoisie are both capitalist classes, though the petit bourgeoisie is a hybrid capitalist class (in the traditional formulation, dependent on ability to apply their own labor to their capital in order to live without liquidating capital [0]) rather than a pure capitalist classs like the haut bourgeiosie. And while the petit bourgeoisie is a “middle” class in the sense of being situated between the proletariat and the haut bourgeoisie, both bourgeois classes are “upper” classes in the sense that in capitalist society they together represent an elite minority of the population, most of which working class.

The sense in which they are a “middle class is quite distinct from the usual American sense of “middle class” which is usually an income-defined band centered around median income which is overwhelming part of the working class in the scheme in which the petit bourgeoisie are the “middle class”.

[0] But I think most people who use the scheme now would recognize more diversity, including the form probably most common to modern white-collar professionals, where rather than applying their own labor to their own capital, a lot of the petit bourgeiosie both rents labor out to other capitalists in the manner typical of the proletariat and has capital to which rented labor is applied in the manner of the haut bourgeoisie, with both being significant to their interaction with the economy (distinguishing them from workers with incidental capital holdings or capitalists who incidentally have a “paid job” which they could take or leave without meaningfully impacting their lifestyle or overall engagement in the economy.)
by laurencerowe | 2025-09-19 22:28:40+00:00
> If a company has to sponsor you for an H1B though you'll be locked to one employer, and that lack of options is what means they don't need to give you market rates.

You're not locked into one employer on an H1B. Once you are here it is possible to switch jobs relatively easily since you do not need to go through the lottery again.

> as far as I know employment law leaves them quite free to offer a lower salary

"The H-1B employer must pay its H-1B worker(s) at least the “required” wage which is the higher of the prevailing wage or the employer’s actual wage (in-house wage) for similarly employed workers."

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62g-h1b-require...
by qntmfred | 2025-09-19 22:28:52+00:00
I got laid off in august 2023. I had seen it coming for a few months, as I had in the previous year been promoted to lead an engineering team for another company at the PE group I worked for and it quickly became clear they were going to consolidate the product lines at the two companies and my group's CTO lost the political battle.

I was a bit concerned at the time as the previous couple quarters had seen a LOT of tech layoffs and I had also already seen a lot of anxiety in the industry about the changing supply/demand landscape. I ended up getting a new job I was excited about in less than a month, which I was very much not expecting when I began job searching. Unfortunately I may have been too quick to jump into the first thing that came along - after 2 months of onboarding I was out of a job again, as the team lead role I was hired for suddenly didn't have a team to lead and not much use for me without one. Oh well.

I took the holidays off and figured I'd spend some time playing with all the emerging AI capabilities. I figured I'd hack on some fun stuff for a few months, see if I could build a product business around it, and go from there. I ended up building something along the lines of Windows Recall, but when Microsoft announced it in May 24 and I saw the reception, that was the end of that.

I started job searching again, but then my wife got diagnosed with cancer and I decided to extend my time off to focus on her treatment. Fortunately treatment went about as well as we could hope and this summer she went back to work again.

So I've been applying again over the last few months. Initially I focused on local jobs as I've been mostly remote since 2018 and frankly miss the office environment. I got 3 final round interviews in the first month of applying and got ghosted by all 3. That was unexpected and frustrating. And for one job, in my last interview round with a VP, he said he wanted me to come back in a few weeks to interview for a more senior role instead. Which I did, and then they ghosted me. I don't necessarily mind not getting the job (I'm awesome but hey I get there might be better fits out there for particular role requirements) but I don't get the unprofessionalism that has seemingly become so common these days.

Now I'm starting to focus on remote jobs again as well, but it's tough constantly seeing day old job posts on linkedin with 100+ applications already.

So as for coping, I'm doing alright all things considered. Definitely didn't expect to go this long without a 9-5, and I know I'm fortunate to have been able to absorb it financially. Most importantly, I'm grateful that I spent the last year+ making sure my wife was taken care of. And of course that experience really puts into perspective the importance of how we spend our days, while we still have them. I will say that I'm disappointed (with myself) I haven't been able to launch a viable business during this time, but that's how it goes sometimes. I'm looking forward to 2026.
by rectang | 2025-09-19 22:29:11+00:00
> You can argue how well that’s worked out for us

The elephant in the room is that many of these highly successful people who have brought great economic advantage to the US over the years happen to have brown skin.

As for why this policy is being adopted: sometimes an elephant is just an elephant. The huge price increase hurts brown people (mostly), and possibly curbs immigration. It will play well with a certain segment of Americans.

There are many subtleties to the H1-B visa debate, but I don’t think they are at play in this policy change.
by mgh95 | 2025-09-19 22:29:12+00:00
The CV info you posted basically says upper management. I'm seeing increasingly that companies centralize management in an office (either city satellites or a hq) and permit developers to either work remote within the geographic region with occasional onsites. I don't know of anybody that would permit a manager (much less someone that is a sr. manager) to be remote which is why I asked.
by tyg13 | 2025-09-19 22:29:18+00:00
I weep for a world that is increasingly dominated by corporations, filled with people who are insistent (probably correctly) that they are being taken advantage of, doing the bare minimum, all resulting in an awful experience for everyone. Behind every support ticket that you just can't seem to get resolved, every horrible experience trying to use some product seemingly designed to drive you insane, behind every hare-brained decision that makes your life miserable for seemingly no reason, there's an apathetic worker who's taken your mindset. The impact of your efforts doesn't just affect your employer. We all work together to create the world. What kind of world do you want to live in?

I would hope there to be a healthy medium between "pulling all nighters" and "Do bare minimum" -- perhaps somewhere where we all try to do our best, but don't push ourselves too hard for no reason? I mean, that's more reasonable than imagining we'll one day overthrow our corporate overlords. Probably, I'm naive and idealistic. But I can't help but feel like the result of apathy is not satisfaction.
by bluSCALE4 | 2025-09-19 22:29:32+00:00
This is sort of what I'm afraid of. I reflect on a lot of people I worked with in the past that are a little older than I am now and things were rough. They'd basically try and find side work and make a living off of it but nearly all of them returned to the workforce. Now, jobs are scarce so I'm really thinking that a career change might be in order. With self driving cars posed to take out a chunk of low skilled jobs and with the self imposed AI that will likely cost 25% of IT job shrinkage, the future looks really grim.

Crass's song from the 1981 Systematic Death last verse seems prophetic, "They'd almost paid the mortgage when the system dropped its bomb".
by ChocolateGod | 2025-09-19 22:30:24+00:00
> bespoke `async` / `await` implementations for SL in Lua already.

I did see these as well as some eventloop-like wrappers, but it's cool to have a built in implementation would be great so each script doesn't need to ship it.

How do you plan on migrating data from Mono's VM to Luau? Off the top of my head I can't think of any method that would be 100% reliable.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-09-19 22:30:36+00:00
"I reply and they almost invariably never respond, presumably because they look more closely and see the large gap in employment."

Ive long thought about this problem. I think the issue is we dont have an objective mechanism to understand ones capability. Because thats really what matters.

Two people can have the same YOE, but how do you know which is more capable? Interviews are a terrible way to guage this, but is the present day mechanism thats used.
by mancerayder | 2025-09-19 22:31:13+00:00
A lot of the H1B's in the software industry definitely match the description you stated - talented folks coming from places which (I'll add) have superior education systems. The problem isn't immigration, it's the undercutting of wages and the fact that these H1's (who we ALL work with) are trapped, working with fear and under pressure, due to the leverage the employer has.

H1B program == leverage over the H1B workers due to the employment tie-in to residence, leverage over other non-H1B workers as well, due to the wider talent pool at LOWER wages.

I don't know whether Trump is doing is good, but the H1B program helps Owners more than it helps Workers.
by kelnos | 2025-09-19 22:31:25+00:00
And the requirements for O-1 aren't even that difficult. I know people who are frankly not exceptional (not mediocre either, though, of course), but have worked with lawyers to systematically fulfill the requirements of the O-1 visa. It does take time to do, and I assume the legal assistance isn't cheap, but I think a lot of people on H-1Bs who don't even consider it, could do it.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-09-19 22:31:27+00:00
As someone coming on 30 months of retirement, I'm consciously shifting away from toy projects to projects where I commit to a more polished deliverable.

It helps with commitment and pursuing a deeper learning of the activity instead of doing quick and dirty stuff in my experience. Just don't expect it (or aim for it) to be a steam top-seller, my aim is usually to have at least one other stranger get some amount of value out of what I produce.

Not to say there isn't a place for quick and dirty projects, of course. Bespoke 3D models to fix things around the house are my current favourite category for that.
by pluc | 2025-09-19 22:31:27+00:00
That's something that I've really wondered about too, since I can't count the number of people I hooked up with jobs I asked myself why the pendulum wasn't swinging back. I relocated "to the countryside" a few years ago and lost my big city tech network, where I was very active and even central. Not being on social media means I have very few ways to reach back out these days.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-19 22:31:34+00:00
Oh, no, is someone being mean to the big company? :(

This is absolutely notable, and everyone should be concerned about it. Not so much the potential fakery, but the extreme deficiency of the actual product, which has had the GDP of a small country squandered on it. Like, there is a problem here, and it will have real-world fallout once the wheels fall off.
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2025-09-19 22:32:38+00:00
How do you go from unemployed for 3 years straight to upper management? Were you already in a similar position in the past? I would think 3 years unemployed may not look good to people who don’t share your personal views (no judgement, I think if you’ve been unemployed for 3 years it shows good financial planning, I just doubt my conservative family would see it the same)
by bubblethink | 2025-09-19 22:32:41+00:00
This is a net positive action for the following reasons: The chuds have been clamoring for this for a long time. You can see every past thread on HN all the way back to the December blowup on twitter with Elon. At the same time, the economy is lagging and the admin's more direct measures to drum up support from the base such as chaining and deporting Koreans at the Hyundai factory are tanking future prospects for the economy and are causing diplomatic headaches. This current announcement gives the admin a way out by throwing some meat at the base before the midterms while knowing that this won't pass muster as they don't have the authority.
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-19 22:32:45+00:00
That’s just the thing - it never was on the meta level.

The tech startup scene was a thing between the mid 90s and 2000 with the first dot com boom and even most of them outside of the hardware companies like Sun, Cisco, Intel and software at Netscape were not doing cutting edge for the time development. The startups were throwing dumb (or some premature) things at the wall with no business plan backed by VC money. The people at startups were definitely there for the money. No one had a “passion” to deliver pet food or groceries (Webvan) or early web advertising.

Tech before the mid 90s were programmers building software on mainframes mostly doing boring things.

You had the dark days between 2001-2008 before mobile, web apps, SaaS and high speed internet took off where all most people really could find were boring enterprise jobs. Back then, I was living in Atlanta and the dot com bust didn’t affect the local market at all. The banks, the airlines, the credit card processing companies were hiring boring Microsoft devs and Java devs like crazy.

I’ve just seen too often where 90% of the devs who spend their career at boring old enterprises don’t have any idea what it’s like for those who are in the top 10% working at BigTech and adjacent while at the same time those 10% can’t fathom the fact that there are “Dark Matter developers” living their lives in tier 2 cities with their big houses in the burbs treating a job as just a job and most people always have.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

I’ve been on both sides (and now in the middle doing strategy cloud consulting). I had my first house built in 2003 for $170K and even my second house built in the “good school system” in the burbs of Atlanta in 2016 for $335K. We moved and downsized three years ago.
by imiric | 2025-09-19 22:32:49+00:00
Everyone's life experiences and the way we process them are different, which builds our understanding of the world around us in very unique ways. It's not unimaginable for someone to have a worldview as GP's.

Instead of labeling or patronizing them, a bit of tact and compassion go a long way. Otherwise you're just confirming what they're predisposed to think.
by mjsir911 | 2025-09-19 22:32:59+00:00
I made a bunch of friends in the local rave & queer community, helped start organizations including founding a hackerspace, met the love of my life, and now am part of a very healthy community that has been helping me cope and get through this shitty tech sector hiring slump.

Taking breaks has been very good for my soul, and I've quieted the fear of instability with surrounding myself with people who I know will be there for me when things get rough.

It's surprising how cheaply you can survive when push comes to shove and you have to make concessions, live with roommates, live in small housing, going to the foodbank or getting on food stamps.

Although, runway is slowly dwindling and am unsure what's next for my future. I'm not too worried, though.
by mancerayder | 2025-09-19 22:33:09+00:00
Your second paragraph doesn't follow the first. 90-118K might feel like a lot to you, or to many, but it doesn't mean that those wages aren't dragged DOWN. If you live in SF, NYC, Seattle or other HCOL areas, 90-118K is definitely not HIGH. And software jobs pay WAY more than that. H1's definitely are paid BELOW the prevailing wage for the same job, in the same area. So compare apples to apples.
by xp84 | 2025-09-19 22:33:36+00:00
A hugely overlooked point. If FAANG etc want talented people, and couldn't hire H1Bs, they might have more of an incentive to try to influence education and to train people with aptitude but lacking learnable skills.

As of now, both the K12 system and college education seem in freefall in terms of quality and applicability to careers. No doubt those companies will devote their money to lobbying to keep hiring H1Bs instead of training the talent they need here, since they're just profit-optimizing functions, rather than humans with morals.
by Wurdan | 2025-09-19 22:33:37+00:00
The thing is pitching your salary lower doesn’t always make you more attractive as a candidate. If you’re going in lower than market rate then many recruiters start wondering about your past performance, confidence, etc.

As a hiring manager in a big company, salary isn’t really much of a consideration for me. The company has salary bands per role that I have very little control over. If a candidate is above that band and unwilling to come down, then I probably won’t even hear from our recruiters that that person applied. So in our process, somebody wouldn’t accidentally price themselves out of an opportunity.

So it’s possible that job seekers are making themselves uncompetitive via high salary demands, but I have my doubts whether its a major factor.
by ChocolateGod | 2025-09-19 22:33:48+00:00
The amount of heavily custom scripted HUDs required to do things in Second Life seems pretty insane last time I checked it, one for a head, one for a body, one for animations etc. I'm surprised the viewer doesn't have a way to "dock HUDs" where they can be activated/deactivated with one click when not in use in viewer managed regions.
by richardlblair | 2025-09-19 22:34:09+00:00
The fact you're being questioned about this is insane.

There used to be a 0% chance of being tossed on a plane and deported somewhere else in the world when visiting the US. That chance is now non-zero, which is an unacceptable level of risk for many.

That and everything else going on. There's a reason Canadians have stopped traveling down south...
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-09-19 22:35:19+00:00
FOLKS PLEASE BE CAREFUL DON'T OPEN OLD TELEVISIONS UNLESS YOU GENUINELY UNDERSTAND THE RISK.

Just touching the insides can kill you worst case and that can be days or longer after it was switched off. Sometimes the chassis itself is live.

This is not like fiddling inside a computer where you tend to be pretty safe.

So if you value your life, sure play with old televisions - without opening them.