MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by w10-1 | 2025-09-19 23:01:30+00:00
This should increase political donations, cryptocurrency bribe purchases, and social compliance among tech companies dependent on H1B, whether it becomes policy or not. For that reason, you can expect no resolution before the mid-term elections, and a corresponding race to secure H1B’s before any policy change.

It’s too bad policy won’t actually track economic needs or fairness; it’s mainly to drive the expansion of the political franchise.
by kelnos | 2025-09-19 23:01:42+00:00
This isn't about what makes sense. This is about finding a punchy number that sounds big and makes Trump's base happy. "$100k fee (that covers 3/6 years)" sounds more impressive than "$33k per year" or "$17k per year", so that's what they went with.

Ultimately this isn't going to do anything to reform the H-1B program; this is just trump "doing something", which he'll claim as a success (and his base will eat up), even if it does nothing or makes things worse.
by stanford_labrat | 2025-09-19 23:01:45+00:00
yup, anecdotally the majority of postdocs these days are internationals who are willing to work 60+ hour weeks on $50k a year, for the infinitesimal chance to land a R1 tenure-track faculty position. americans have no interest in getting a phd and then subjecting themselves to this kind of indentured servitude.
by scotty79 | 2025-09-19 23:01:48+00:00
> Otherwise where does the wealth used to pay the taxes come from?

Consumers.

> Capital only generates a return in a context where there is someone to consume what it produces.

Exactly. If you don't tax the return sufficiently it amplifies the capital (lands in th pockets of billionaires in other words).

> 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.

What billionaires extract from the government in terms of subsidies and such is nothing compared to what they get as a result of tax cuts and being undertaxed in general.

Basically we should tax billionaires more. Government getting richer because of that is just a side effect.

Government growing with the size of the economy is not a goal. It's a gauge showing us that billionaires are adequately taxed.

I'm using term "billionaires" loosely. 10 hecto-millionaires are fine too as a replacement for one billionaire.

Again the goal is not to fund the government. It's to remove power from unelected oligarchs.
by mancerayder | 2025-09-19 23:01:50+00:00
You think immigration in Western Europe is easy? It depends where, for one thing. It's getting more onerous and there are pressures to make it more so. How good is your French? More importantly, how might a 60K Euro/yr salary feel when you're paying 2-2500 a month in rent to be near work ?

Canadian salaries are also notoriously low in tech.
by adamgamble | 2025-09-19 23:01:55+00:00
I have met both DHH and Tobi in person several times, and although I don’t know them well they have always been warm, kind, and pleasant to be around. Their contributions to the engineering community have been almost immeasurable. So what you disagree with them personally. Who cares? Do you like ruby? Do you like rails? Are you able to build a career doing something you love? Is that not enough?

If you disagree with things he’s done with Rails that’s one thing. But I would strongly suggest you reconsider the notion that he should be removed from leadership on Rails because of all his personal beliefs.

He’s writing a web framework man (along with thousands of other people who may or not agree with him), he’s not directing your personal life. You should strongly reconsider this blog post. One day, the same sort of ire you’re pointing at him will be pointed at you for no reason other than people disagree with you.
by card_zero | 2025-09-19 23:03:07+00:00
You do not own it, you only rent it is the crucial point, but it's buried inside a distracting outer point.

The distracting outer point is "Build what you Can’t Ship", which has limits, and is just another iteration of the old don't sell out idea about art. It's like saying "be an outsider artist". That's not a good goal. It's all very well spending years writing a book in secret - supposedly without a thought for the audience - but if you accidentally wrote it in a private language that nobody can ever read, or made it unrelatable or incoherent, then that's not creative brilliance, it just isn't any good. Without pandering to popularity, you should still write for some audience, and if you're making art at all, imagining an audience is inherent to that. Similarly if your software only runs on your own machine, or (referencing a recent HN post) you perhaps spent years writing an adventure game in QBasic for the love of it, but accidently made it 64-bit so nobody can run it on DosBox, well, that's suboptimal.

So another point is that writing for a niche market is a fine attitude. On the other hand all this you only rent it stuff makes the niches smaller and more obscure, and that's a bad thing. You want a comfortably-sized niche where there's a medium-sized audience, so you get some attention in return for being subject to only some pressure to perform and conform.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-09-19 23:03:08+00:00
I appreciate the feedback. I often fail to anticipate how my words will be heard until it's too late.

FWIW, the main points I was trying to convey are:

1) Even 14 months was really hard me.

2) Only because I had a 401(k) to tap did I avoid disaster.

3) Even after long unemployment there can, in some cases, be a path back to a reasonable career.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-19 23:03:38+00:00
>Programmers would be more effective if they spend more time at the drawing board

Would they, though? As you've correctly pointed out, design goals in software engineering get shifted by decision-makers because its cheaper than in civil engineering. The whole point of the ToP article is pointing out that software engineers have to account for possible future radical changes that in other branches of engineering are at most exceedingly rare. Any time you spend on initial planning beyond a bird's eye view may be time wasted.
by RandomBacon | 2025-09-19 23:03:48+00:00
Librem-5-sitting-in-my-closet owner here.

I haven't watched that video, but I've seen the comments from unhappy people over the years.

I don't know if we'll ever get the full story, but I imagine it was either that or go insolvent. I'm guessing they tied up all the preorder money, and the delays put them between a rock and a hard place.

They handled it poorly, but I think they're on top of everything now.
by prewett | 2025-09-19 23:03:54+00:00
This not to say that Ticketmaster is not scummy (and the article elucidates some of their scumminess). But this seems like partly a consequence of "ticket stabilization". As is commonly cited on HN, rent "stabilization" distorts the market and leads to all kinds of problems, like lack of available apartments and people living where they do not want to live because it's financially infeasible/unattractive to move to where they want to be. Clearly ticket prices are too cheap, or the scalpers could not make any money. As one would expect, selling under market value creates arbitrage traders.

It's totally Ticketmaster scumminess if transfer fees are ridiculous (see pavel_lishin's post). Likewise if Ticketmaster has difference standards for Big Scalp versus retail scalping. But the existence of scalpers (arbitrage traders) is inevitable if a) tickets are underpriced and b) tickets are transferable. You'd have apartment scalpers for rent-stabilized apartments if leases were transferable (which they are not).

When demand (concert-goers) greatly outstrips supply (seats), you have three options: long queues (the historical socialist approach) or lotteries (the egalitarian approach), high prices (the market economy approach), or corruption (the current approach). There is no realistic solution that makes everyone happy, but you can choose the kind of unhappiness you get. There is a strong case to be made that the artists do not want to be seen as greedy merchants, so they underprice their tickets and offload the anger onto Ticketmaster (see kevinsync's post).
by cogman10 | 2025-09-19 23:04:14+00:00
I'm from Idaho and grew up in rural Idaho. My mother was a nurse for such a hospital.

Rural hospitals are lucky to have any doctor on staff let alone a cardiologist. They are mostly staffed by nurses for quick patch-up work and life flights to major medical centers.

H1B doesn't solve the problem of poor communities getting poor healthcare. Frankly, it costs too much to become a doctor which limits where doctors can be employed. Plenty would like to work rural, but not with $500,000 in student loans. And no, that's no joke. I have a nephew going to medical school in Idaho and that's what his loans are.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-09-19 23:04:18+00:00
Yes, so when I see a distributed system that does not tell me explicitly whether or not it is sacrificing consistency or availability, I get suspicious.

Or has mechanisms for tuning on a request basis what you want to prioritize: consistency or availability, and those depend on specific mechanisms for reads and writes.

If I don't see a distributed system that explains such things, then I'm assuming that they made a lot of bad assumptions.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-09-19 23:04:36+00:00
No need to cause all this drama and taking a piss.

It’s a lot easier to stir up trouble than it is to take responsibility and create something better.

You can fork Rails, create whatever system you want for the leadership and strictly control that there is no rudeness. (from your point of view)

Have a better vision for the code and where it will go next.

Create something much better than any rude anti-intellectual right winger can do.

Right?
by observationist | 2025-09-19 23:04:41+00:00
Mozilla is toast. It basically exists as a tax writeoff for Google at this point, and serves no recognizable purpose beyond that, and maybe nostalgia.

How MBAs aren't synonymous with leeches by this point is the most amazing ongoing PR campaign in history. They do nothing but suck and suck and suck, and they keep sucking, and they will never stop sucking until their host dies, and then they just move on.
by hamstergene | 2025-09-19 23:04:55+00:00
Locals have always been allowed to quit the new job on day 1, and it has never been a crisis for employers.

A company that is confident it is offering worthy salary and career should have no extra reason to worry a foreign worker will quit during first week, than that a local worker would do the same thing.

The only difference a fee would make under such conditions is that locals become cheaper to hire, which is the point.
by aaaAAAaaa_aaa | 2025-09-19 23:05:36+00:00
Are you saying this in defense of DHH? If I were trans, I would feel pretty damn unwelcome about contributing to (or even using) a project whose BDFL is posting in support of a "comedian" who says:

> If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.

And that's a tweet that DHH agrees with enough to link to in https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 with the following commentary:

> Most recently, five officers(!) came to arrest comedian Graham Linehan for illicit tweets. When much of the media reports a story like this, it's often without citing the specific words in question, such that the reader might imagine something far worse than what was actually said. So you should actually read the three tweets that landed Linehan in jail, and earned him a legal restraining order against using X. It's grotesque.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-09-19 23:05:43+00:00
ultimately, i agree with your final point. and i would be a real boastful idiot to claim that one predefined, prescribed economic system is going to bring about utopia; i just fundamentally do not want to engage with ideologies that promote profit or self-interest (when that self-interest becomes harmful to others) because to me, those are thought-terminating ideologies.

i don't have any answers. i'm just sad about the world all the time. and maybe i get worked up too easily but we are definitely in the midst of a very weird and terrible inflection point in american history (let alone the rest of the world).
by pixelmonkey | 2025-09-19 23:06:11+00:00
I just did a small programming side project with a friend in Elixir and I was pretty impressed with the language, especially how it approaches functional programming, concurrency, parallelism, and “programming in the large” (e.g. networked systems and clusters).

I still think there’d be some sort of mental hurdle for me to consider using it for a project of the kinds described on WeUseElixir (vs my go-to language of Python).

But simply toying around with a concrete example of a concrete “word count” program scaled up to multi-core and multi-node made me “get” Elixir a lot more.

Also, I highly recommend this podcast interview with the author of “Elixir in Action.” He does a really nice job describing what makes Erlang and Elixir unique vs other commonly used backend programming languages.

https://se-radio.net/2018/08/se-radio-336-sasa-juric-on-elix...
by stego-tech | 2025-09-19 23:06:12+00:00
You've got every right to resent it if he's not at least maintaining the household and providing a better home life for the two of you in lieu of additional income.

There's no shame in being a homemaker, and heck, I'd do it myself if I had a partner that could provide for the two of us. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, landscaping, repairs, upkeep, finances...I like the appeal, but that's because I like the job of a homemaker. It might be worth broaching that topic with your partner, see if maybe they can begin contributing in that sense. You're less likely to resent someone who has a home-cooked meal for you when you get home most nights of the week, or the laundry being washed, folded, and ironed.

And if they balk at such a notion, well...there's more data for you to act upon in your relationship. Either way, you'll feel like you're moving forward instead of stuck in place.

Just an eRando's two cents. YMMV, take with a grain of salt, etc.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-19 23:07:00+00:00
> I'm not coping terribly well. I think what is most distressing is that I am observing a decline in my capacity. I feel mentally sluggish. I frustrate more easily. I tire more easily. Probably most worryingly to me I get spikes of aggression that lead to combative outbursts. I feel less empathetic, even mildly sadistic at times. Very hard to control the envy and the average person I interact with evokes envy.

This is textbook major depressive disorder. I know you probably don't want to hear that, but you're basically describing a classic case of depressive symptoms.

> Employment is secondary, and it follows from having a social network and being embedded in a social context.

I'm sorry, but viewing these two things as connected or expecting one to follow the other isn't helpful. We all need a social life and we all need employment, but tying the two of those together isn't healthy. It's important to have a social life outside of work. It's important to have a job that isn't equivalent to your social life.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-09-19 23:07:10+00:00
> ... and ever since I have had a completely different outlook on life that is, sadly, not quite compatible with modern life.

I hear you. For about two years I got to live in a rural area, on the sea side, 45 minutes drive from the closest highway. 5000 people villages was a 15 minutes drive.

Chopping wood to then heat the house, having animals pass in front of me while I'd be reading HN under the porch before going to bed.

Walking just for the sake of walking from the house to the sea and then back.

Heny Thoreau: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Full quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2690-i-went-to-the-woods-be...

That and the quote about cities being about mystification.

(3 minutes elapsed)

Ah, found it (first read it for someone posted here on HN btw):

Thomas Merton's Raids On The Unspeakable: "I am alien to the noises of cities, of people, to the greed of machinery that does not sleep, the hum of power that eats up the night. Where rain, sunlight and darkness are contemned, I cannot sleep. I do not trust anything that has been fabricated to replace the climate of woods or prairies. I can have no confidence in places where the air is first fouled and then cleansed, where the water is first made deadly and then made safe with other poisons. There is nothing in the world of buildings that is not fabricated, and if a tree gets in among the apartment houses by mistake it is taught to grow chemically. It is given a precise reason for existing. They put a sign on it saying it is for health, beauty, perspective; that it is for peace, for prosperity; that it was planted by the mayor’s daughter. All of this is mystification. The city itself lives on its own myth. Instead of waking up and silently existing, the city people prefer a stubborn and fabricated dream; they do not care to be a part of the night, or to be merely of the world. They have constructed a world outside the world, against the world, a world of mechanical fictions which contemn nature and seek only to use it up, thus preventing it from renewing itself and man."

Thankfully I still go to that place where I used to live, several times a year. Sky is so clear I can many stars.

Once my kid shall turn 18, I plan to go back live there.

I don't think us humans were meant to be stacked in cities and high-rises like ants. It's just like communism: great theory but wrong species.

> I have to choose if I want to spend time with my family or going with the gym

Wife does her gym at home: proper stuff in gym gear. Mostly just simple exercises: no crazy gear besides a few weights. No driving to the gym so twice the time saved. No need to shower at the gym or seat all sweaty in the car.

She does 20 or 30 minutes each day.
by jameshart | 2025-09-19 23:07:19+00:00
Overall the US economy employs about 800,000 software engineers, with 200,000 or so of them being H1B holders.

Now you can argue you would prefer that those 200,000 jobs go to Americans, but on the scale of the overall economy, it really doesn’t matter. What’s far more important is the massive impact those 800,000 software engineers have on the rest of the economy. Four million IT jobs, the entire finance and healthcare and retail industries that are propped up on technology built by those people; whole technology companies like Uber or doordash that create entirely new labor markets.

Risk 25% of that capacity on the idea that we would rather have those industries built solely on domestically-grown engineering talent? Why would that be a good tradeoff?
by gregw2 | 2025-09-19 23:07:20+00:00
re: "Nobody gets paid to do that"

There should be at least some large-company corporate incentive to measure "Bugs vs features"; the former is OpEx and the latter is CapEx, right?

(I've been at places where Finance and IT aligned to put 3 mandatory radio-button questions in JIRA which Finance used to then approximate development expenditure as CapEx vs OpEx. You were also invited as a manager to override the resulting percentages for your team once every period)
by qingcharles | 2025-09-19 23:07:26+00:00
For a long time my only "monitor" when I was a kid was a 12" B+W TV for my ZX Spectrum. For the day of my birthday when I got it I was allowed to hook it up to the family 14" color TV, but after that it was back to the B+W for the next couple of years!

(funnily enough, when I finally got a PC years later, the only monitor I could afford was a Philips monochrome VGA -- I guess they now sell for multiples of the original retail price? https://www.ebay.com/itm/176945464730)
by nosianu | 2025-09-19 23:07:32+00:00
> If they submit multiple applications, it does not up chances for that candidate in any way.

I believe the parent commenter's argument is that they instead play the game with multiple people. The increased chance is not per person, but achieved by using more people, each with their own chance.

I don't know if they do this, I merely find the argument itself intriguing with the shift in perspective, and that you as the reader has to keep track of the change in context from the individual one level up.
by leakycap | 2025-09-19 23:07:46+00:00
Correct. I don't believe she had a cellphone in Steamboat Willy where she called the law firm being advertised here, hence the legal question.

Can I use "Steamboat Willy" to have Mickey/Minnie from that era act as my spokesperson? I doubt it.

If these lawyers felt they had obvious legal rights here, do you think they'd be asking for clarification?
by RealityVoid | 2025-09-19 23:07:58+00:00
If you see near, but you don't see far, that's myopic. Even you agree with this in your post. Therefore, I don't see where the confusion comes from.

You can argue you only care about the now and, sure, if that's all you care about, who am I to say your priorities are wrong?

I do think that you're wrong though, I think it doesn't make you better off neither now nor in the following years. But, again, who the heck am I to tell you how to run your country. I guess we'll see how this plays out.
by karmakaze | 2025-09-19 23:08:31+00:00
I finally figured out how to make the Music app look like iTunes with column browser, track listing, and no huge space wasted with album art. I used to have my tracks meticulously rated with 1-5 stars but they got lost copying the files to numerous newer Macs.

Also long lost is Front Row and the Apple remote that used to come with Macs.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-19 23:08:42+00:00
ADHD isn't a condition which spontaneously appears mid-life following an obvious difficult event like losing one's job for an extended period.

The comment was clear that these symptoms appeared after the job loss. It's a match for the symptoms of a depressive episode (which can and does appear after a difficult life situation) but not ADHD.

Suggesting that the commenter seek out stimulant medication is not good advice.
by chainingsolid | 2025-09-19 23:09:21+00:00
To be fair, when I bought my Pinephone, I got the convergence one despite being unsure if I'd be able to use it as a daily driver. The price diff isn't much and well, I would rather have the slightly better specs. And I would assume most made the same choice. So I doubt there's much pressure to stock the lower spec model PP.
by bell-cot | 2025-09-19 23:10:28+00:00
> scientists have estimated the animals consume between 5 to 10 percent of their body weight (about 40 kilos) in fruit each day

That's equivalent to a 60 kilo human eating 3 to 6 kg of food every day.

Plausible hypothesis - the chimps have developed a taste for alcohol mostly because of its higher calorie density - 7 calories/g. Vs. 4 cal/g for sugars and starches.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-09-19 23:12:15+00:00
> gaol

The only time I've ever seen "jail" spelled this way was in Elden Ring, and I had to look it up to see how it's supposed to be pronounced to learn that it's an Old English way of spelling "jail" and is pronounced like "jail".

Curious if you've been playing a lot of Elden Ring or if there's another reason you chose this spelling.