MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kelnos | 2025-09-19 22:35:45+00:00
Do startups often hire H-1Bs? I've only worked for a few, but they didn't start hiring H-1Bs until they we're fairly sizeable and had taken on a couple rounds of funding.

Certainly the $100k fee is going to make the application much more expensive (though you can amortize it across 3 or 6 years, right?), but it was already not exactly cheap to deal with the legal costs around H-1B employees.

> Among BigTech, maybe like ~20 companies will be willing to pay this per employee.

I think that's a vast, vast underestimation. Most companies, even not-so-big ones, will continue to pay it. Maybe they'll think twice a bit more for future hires, and try harder to find someone local, which I don't think is a bad thing. Or, of course, this could just represent another factor in downward wage pressure across the board, which is bad.
by trws | 2025-09-19 22:36:12+00:00
The other place it comes up is launchers and resource managers. We actually have a series of old issues and implementation work on flux (large scale resource manager for clusters) working around fork becoming a significant bottleneck in parallel launch. IIRC it showed up when we had ~1gb of memory in use and needed to spawn between 64 and 192 processes per node. That said, we actually didn’t pivot to vfork, we pivoted to posix_spawn for all but the case where we have to change working directory (had to support old glibc without the attr for that in spawn). If you’re interested I think we did some benchmarking with public results I could dredge up.

Anyway, much as I have cases where it matters I guess what I’m saying is I think you’re right that vfork is rarely actually necessary, especially since you’d probably have a much easier time getting a faster and still deterministic spawn if it ever actually becomes a bottleneck for something you care about.
by pluc | 2025-09-19 22:36:27+00:00
I have to disagree. I looked for a long time before I found my last gig (that ended in 2022). I had a LinkedIn and it wasn't much different, it took me months to find something. I still have a linkedin account to look for jobs, but that's it. No connections, no work history. What's relevant is on my resume anyway so I don't see what having a regular linkedin account would do. I deleted it when I found that job because, even as a job seeker, I saw no value in it and as a user, I saw no excuse to defend it.
by reply00r123 | 2025-09-19 22:37:33+00:00
I ran into a guy making double six figures for like the last 7 years at a known public tech company. He was literally doing the most basic DevOps (Terraform). Nothing fancy. Zero ability to program. No willingness or desire to learn programming. He was an H1B. That blew me away. How is it possible that you have a guy in the US for 10 years who never bothered learning to code doing a 200K / year job. The abuse of H1B is crazy. He told me he had "tried to find a job" but "they all require programming." I am not even a tech background and I have learned to program. Completely insane imo. This was stuff you could teach a highschool student, no degree required.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-19 22:38:02+00:00
There are also a number of species of lizards, and one snake, which reproduce exclusively via parthenogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_squamates

In some though not all such species, there are no known male examples _at all_ (though in reptiles some forms of parthenogenesis can produce males).
by pedalpete | 2025-09-19 22:38:17+00:00
That is an amazing breakdown of AD, and I think it will be my go-to for sharing in the future.

Have you seen the research in phase-targeted auditory stimulation, memory, amyloid, and sleep? Do you have thoughts on that?

Acoustic stimulation during sleep predicts long-lasting increases in memory performance and beneficial amyloid response in older adults - https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afad228

Acoustic Stimulation to Improve Slow-Wave Sleep in Alzheimer's Disease: A Multiple Night At-Home Intervention https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2024.07.002
by mrandish | 2025-09-19 22:39:54+00:00
Yeah, I agree. This always seemed pretty obvious to me but it was also obvious that it's nuanced and can be highly variable depending on skin type, medical history, locale, lifestyle and preferences.

But when it comes to things which are very probably "mostly beneficial for most people most of the time - but (obviously) not always beneficial for all the people all the time", there's a reluctance to say anything unless you've got study data to fully support everything you say into "the nines". But the world is full of things that are hard, expensive or impossible to study experimentally with that kind of rigor.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-19 22:39:56+00:00
> Trump was known for "telling it as it is"

AFAICT, the people that promoted him that way often had mutually incompatible interpretations of what he was saying that happened to fit their own biases coming in, which they felt like Trump was agreeing with.

And as the rubber of vague, contradictory, and incoherent statements hit the road of substantive action, that impression became a lot less common.
by rectang | 2025-09-19 22:41:10+00:00
I'm skeptical that entertainment industry workers are thousands of times more irresponsible that their peers in other industries. (Those who consume a lot of political media demonizing the "liberal Hollywood elite" may disagree.)

Care to speculate on how many struggling actors sharing flats are fallen celebrities?

The Will Smiths of Hollywood are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.

The phenomenon at play in “Hollywood standards” poorly reflecting the totality of the Hollywood population are winner-take-all income/attention distribution and cultivation of an illusion of opulence to satisfy audience demand — not licentiousness and depravity amongst entertainment industry personnel.
by ayaros | 2025-09-19 22:41:26+00:00
I just meant I appreciate it as resource for all kinds of information, and as an invaluable backup of the web.

The internet should be a repository of all human knowledge and culture; all information and media should (at least eventually) be free as part of the common heritage of mankind. Sites like Wikipedia and IA are a partial realization of this dream. They aren't perfect, for sure, but we need them, and we need more sites like them. I fear too many take these things for granted.
by Jcowell | 2025-09-19 22:42:00+00:00
> The sentence is convoluted but clearly implies that "this kid" was "one of the MAGA gang".

What? This is crazy “find the authors purpose” gymnastics. The quote does nothing to imply that the kids is Maga or not. It does however directly commentates on “Maga gang”’s actions to try to paint him as anyone other than someone who could be MAGA. Thats the entire point of what was said
by kelnos | 2025-09-19 22:42:17+00:00
> All the H1B's I have worked with are whip smart, hard working, and in general amazing people.

That's surprising; for me, H-1Bs have run the gamut, with a range of talent and ambition that's pretty similar to the range of talent and ambition I see with US-born workers. And I think this is perhaps the problem: your experience should be the norm, if the H-1 visa program is functioning properly, but I don't think that's the case.

Among my friends who have been on H-1Bs, they tend to be high performers, but that's just selection bias at work.
by drivingmenuts | 2025-09-19 22:43:04+00:00
Well, that sucks. The one thing I hate about Linked in is being up-rated on my skills by people who barely know what I do and certainly have never worked with me in any capacity or even discussed my work in any sense beyond "What do you do for a living?".

From where I sit, it's a tool for marketers and recruiters to gather data and it's otherwise completely useless.
by igouy | 2025-09-19 22:43:06+00:00
> do you finish working on one leg first before you move onto some other part?

Depends on the physical process. Are you carving, casting, bolting or welding or using 3d modelling and printing … ?

> trying to stick them together just results in a fragile mess

If it's a physical cake.

If it's software we seamlessly add functionality to each layer as needed.
by g-b-r | 2025-09-19 22:43:14+00:00
> “It’s insanely broad,” Professor Goldsmith said. “This is an open-ended war authorization against an untold number of countries, organizations and persons that the president could deem within its scope.”

> The draft appears to be modeled on the broad authorization that Congress granted President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Like that one, it does not name a specific enemy — empowering the president to decide whom to target — and is not confined to geographical limits.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-09-19 22:43:46+00:00
I am in a unique position to confirm that they are a load of bunk. I have solar urticaria and develop hives in response to UV exposure, directly proportional to how much UV is getting through. I’ve developed hives in minutes while the UV index was supposedly only 4 and gone for relatively too long without erupting in hives the next day even when the UV index was supposedly 10.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-09-19 22:44:02+00:00
I'm in that phase somewhat right now. 30 months in, I'm still kinda unsure what I'd like to do. I know going back to a big enterprise software firm is bit of a last resort at this point, I just cannot convince myself that work is meaningful. Thankfully I'm financially secure (for now, who knows how the global trade shenanigans will actually affect my retirement funds), so there's no urgency to jump headfirst into another job. Yet, despite having plenty to do in terms of side projects, it would be a lie to say I don't feel that I need to do something more meaningful with my time.
by star-glider | 2025-09-19 22:44:11+00:00
Yeah I mean it's literally what the term "open source rugpull" means. Every business will ultimately renege on their open source promises. It's literally against their fiduciary duty to shareholders not to, once they've run out of actual growth ideas. Even if current management is idealistic, eventually, they will be replaced with "real leaders" who know that they need to make money.

But, ideally, it's not that big a deal, because the community (or even newer non-calcified businesses) can fork the last open source branch and continue development.

Unfortunately, with something as complex as an OS, that's incredibly difficult. It does seem regrettably unlikely that, for the foreseeable future, there will be no practically usable open-source phone OSes.
by mgh95 | 2025-09-19 22:44:25+00:00
Business travel from CAN to US has remained stable (see: https://globalnews.ca/video/11436758/business-travel-to-u-s-...). It's leisure that is declining.

Meanwhile, total spending in the US from int'l visitor tourism is up in the US (see: https://www.hotel-online.com/press_releases/release/internat...).

Honestly, I think macro factors -- namely, poor Canadian household finances due to increasing cost of living and declining real incomes in Canada coupled with a strengthening US dollar against the Loonie -- are what are killing tourism from CAN to US right now.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-19 22:44:40+00:00
Value for who? Certainly not the majority of Americans. Depressed wages increase profits, which go to shareholders. Most Americans do not benefit from the H-1B grift. I’ll even argue it hurts US citizens by importing immigrants who aren’t necessary from a labor supply perspective (for those on the visa who are not exceptional talent), who compete for housing with citizens when there is a shortage of millions of housing units.

A few select tech and financial services companies, and their shareholders, benefit the most from the program.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...

https://www.pewresearch.org/?attachment_id=201754
by w10-1 | 2025-09-19 22:44:53+00:00
FWIW I’m Hoping that the combination of AI and ridiculously powerful small devices will finally get us to the point where we can interact with computers primarily through voice. A limiting factor seems to be misunderstanding what’s actually required, and you likely have insight and can build experience there. So if you were able to on your own time, build some small systems and demonstrate effective voice interaction, that might lead to some interesting work, and benefit others. From C#, you might be able to transition easily to Swift and target the Apple ecosystem, which has an a lot more accessibility support, and also has the possibility of becoming an independent developer.
by roenxi | 2025-09-19 22:46:10+00:00
> I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government.

I don't think you're articulating your point clearly here - what billionaires extract from consumers has to go towards funding the government in part, that is what they use to pay their taxes. Otherwise where does the wealth used to pay the taxes come from? Capital only generates a return in a context where there is someone to consume what it produces.

Just to put my view - I'm with you 100% that billionaires are sucking money out of the government. Look at any billionaire and a good chunk of their wealth seems to come from some combination of regulatory capture and government contracts. I'm just not seeing how you square that with "and therefore the government should grow at the same rate of the economy". It seems like a counter-intuitive position to take if you've identified that billionaire wealth is a key justification and the billionaires are very good at extracting money from the government. It seems likely to me that billionaire wealth would scale with the size of government.

The wealth of government is ultimately funded by the middle class. There aren't enough billionaires to carry the load. Eg, Elon Musk's net worth is estimated at $500 billion which isn't enough to cover 1 year of spending of the US military, for example. So he taps out after 1 year and then someone has to find funding for the 2nd year somewhere else. And you'd consume a few more billionaires (none of whom have Musk-level wealth) to cover the parts of the US government that aren't war-related. It wouldn't last long if billionaires have to fund it.
by pluc | 2025-09-19 22:46:28+00:00
I guess my experience hasn't shown value. I think people think of LinkedIn like Facebook - it only works if everyone agrees to stay hostage. I don't like the platform, I don't like that Microsoft is being all Microsofty about your data (have you looked at the new settings lately? That they added without telling anyone? Settings → Data Privacy → Data for Generative AI Improvement) and being a data-aware netizen, fuck linkedin.
by star-glider | 2025-09-19 22:46:37+00:00
They're also literally just not pushing code to AOSP anymore. QPR1 still isn't available. It probably will be, eventually, but this year it's two months late, next year it's six months late, then nine months, then "eventually" and then finally only to OEMs.

I don't think Google looks at any of these forks as threats; they just don't care.
by throw0101a | 2025-09-19 22:48:19+00:00
> I think the skill most people lack is just initiative and risk tolerance. Behind many, if not most, highly successful people, there's often a story of them just trying lots of stuff until something sticks.

Also remember survivorship bias: lots of folks with "initiative and [high?] risk tolerance" fail, but you may not hear about them.

Obligatory:

* https://xkcd.com/1827/
by kelnos | 2025-09-19 22:48:19+00:00
Right. The current problem with H-1B is that we end up with a wide range of talent, ambition, and work ethic among the people brought in on that visa. In my experience, the total mix is not much different from the range you'd find in US-born workers. But we should be granting visas to the best and the brightest to come here.

I wouldn't mind a new policy that would raise the median "quality" of the H-1B visa holder, even if that meant the total number is lower. Sure, Canada and Western Europe can take the mediocre people we'd no longer be granting visas to, but so what.

But this $100k policy is not going to increase the median quality of candidates. I actually don't think it's going to have a huge affect on things; it's just a token effort to "do something" that Trump's base will eat up, and he'll declare it a success even if there's no improvement or it makes things worse.
by leptons | 2025-09-19 22:48:35+00:00
>It's Apple doing the whole "extinguish" thing that Apple pioneered by forbidding other browsers so they can lock people in

FTFY

Without IE we wouldn't have XMLHTTPRequest, something used by practically every web developer in existence today. Innovation happens, and apparently so do walled gardens that outright forbid any competition.

It's one thing to not implement web bluetooth, web midi, and other APIs on your own browser, it's quite another to block anyone else from doing so with their web browsers. The EU thought so too and forced Apple to let other browsers use their own engines. But not in the US yet, until the DOJ completes the case against Apple.
by alya | 2025-09-19 22:49:00+00:00
Zulip's product lead here. We hear from a variety of folks that they've had a good experience with onboarding to Zulip, https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ being a good example. That said, the mental model for using Zulip is a bit different from other chat apps, and I think it helps a lot to approach onboarding with intention.

Making the experience of getting started with Zulip more smooth has been an ongoing priority for the past couple of years, and we've got more in the works. If there are particular aspects of the app that felt too technical, I'd love to get the feedback.
by debo_ | 2025-09-19 22:49:48+00:00
I read the article, and it digs a lot harder into DHH than I think was necessary to make the point, which I still think is a reasonable one.

I was never into Rails (got sucked into Django too early) but I did hang out with the Rails community an awful lot in the beginning.

There was a pretty large migration of diverse communities to Rails in the late 2000s / early 2010s, and they were often of really different mindsets. You had the domain-driven thoughtsworky people, the 37signals-influenced folks, and all sorts of in-betweens and outliers. Rails also influenced how programming communities developed in general; prior to that community, my main "community experiences" involved getting flamed on alt.lang.perl and whatever crusty newsgroups were related to C++.

For a while I was very certain Python had "lost" the web to Rails and Node.

Anyhow, I'm saying all this partially to reflect, and partially because I think there's a great opportunity for another migration. I'm wondering how many of these folks have considered migrating to Elixir; from what I have experienced, the technology is great and has lots of potential, and the community around it feels positive and enterprising.

While I understand that railing (intentional pun) on DHH and Shopify can feel cathartic, at this point it seems helpful to move on for multiple reasons, and the spirit of Elixir feels similar to the spirit of Rails.
by pteetor | 2025-09-19 22:50:11+00:00
All the Python-based functionality of this project can now be handled by the mcptools package[1]. That is, mcptools can field MCP requests and dispatch to R code; no need for an intermediate layer of Python. I wonder if the author knows about mcptools? Or did he start coding before it was available?

[1] https://posit-dev.github.io/mcptools/
by MiscCompFacts | 2025-09-19 22:50:15+00:00
I was laid off at a small tech company mid July and found another job with a friend at another small company in mid September. I thought maybe I wouldn’t find another job for a while, but it took me about 2 months with a very significant (40%) pay cut. I like the company pretty well, but I’m still hoping for something more. We’ll see.
by throw0101a | 2025-09-19 22:50:17+00:00
> The people who succeed the most with fraud are those who tell lies that people want to believe.

Jason Zweig:

There are three ways to make a living: 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

* https://jasonzweig.com/three-ways-to-get-paid/
by bigyabai | 2025-09-19 22:50:36+00:00
The ones in the Russian MOD video are clearly F-16 decoys - you can see the iconic scoop underneath the fairing. I suspect most native Ukrainians would know the MiGs and Sukhois apart from the empennage alone, Russia doesn't exactly have any single-engine fighers with a single vertical stabilizer. It might get mistaken for a Su-24 but I'm not sure what else.
by kcplate | 2025-09-19 22:51:21+00:00
I don’t watch any of these shows, but I have seen videos of the View hosts having to read “Legal Notes” on air, often after commercial breaks to “clarify” or correct things that were just said on the show. Even one video where after the “note” the host attempted to clarify off the cuff even further…only to get an another note again right away to clarify the clarification.

My feeling is if I was a media company, and I had to employ lawyers to legal check conversations in real time on a talk show because my hosts were either so dumb to know when to avoid shooting their mouths off, or couldn’t control themselves…that show better be making a metric shit ton of profit otherwise I’d yank it and put up reruns of House on the Prairie.
by stego-tech | 2025-09-19 22:51:49+00:00
I’d like to jump onto this real quick because of your last bit:

> 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.

Generally, you’re hitting the nail on the head in the immediate. The only reason I landed on my feet after this Big Tech layoff cycle is because I ate a $25k/yr pay cut so I wouldn’t lose the remaining $150k/yr in salary at a new firm.

That being said, the job market is irreparably broken at the moment, because of what you just mentioned about high salary demands. The high demands are due to higher costs, which employers aren’t willing to compensate for in salary. As the cost of everything goes up and labor gets let go, there’s this expectation for salaries to go down due to oversupply. This was correct in the era of the Great Recession, but people in all demographics other than the tippy top are out of breathing room. Everything is too expensive to survive on the subsistence wages being offered, and employers have responded by using AI tooling to automate what should really be a fully-human process (hiring), leading to clogs in the gears of the job cycle.

Ultimately something must give, if the ruling powers don’t want to have riots. Either wages have to go up to meet the increased costs of housing, transport, food, healthcare, education, etc - the basic necessities of life - or those costs have to plummet by orders of magnitude that it’d be market-obliterating.

It’s an easier pill to swallow to pay people more, but the pressure isn’t there to do so yet.

For recruiters like yourself, I’m hoping you’re taking hard looks at the market fundamentals and cost of living, and applying pressure to compensation-makers to raise it upward now while the market is broken, rather than trying to catch up to their wiser competition when something snaps. It's cheaper to pay $20k more today, than $35k + recruiting fees tomorrow.