MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-09-20 00:12:32+00:00
Good news! Native USian developers will no longer be made unemployed by cheap immigrants.

Instead they'll be made unemployed by AI and a crashing tech economy.

But that isn't the point of this. It's leverage - much like the tariffs.

Big companies making significant donations to the Donald Trump Presidential Aggrandisement Fund will receive carve-outs and exclusions.

It's a grift, like everything else done by this benighted administration.
by Izikiel43 | 2025-09-20 00:12:45+00:00
Looks like it:

a) Pursuant to sections 212(f) and 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) and 1185(a), the entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000 — subject to the exceptions set forth in subsection (c) of this section. This restriction shall expire, absent extension, 12 months after the effective date of this proclamation, which shall be 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on September 21, 2025.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-20 00:13:03+00:00
It's not a bad proposal, though raising the salary requirements would be better. This essentially does that though since a company has to account for it in their hiring costs. IOW it costs the company $100K/year to hire a foreigner vs a local, which offsets the low salary that you might be offering that foreigner in order to "save costs" vs hiring local.

However, the unsolved problem is that this could just lead to more offshoring by these same tech companies who are abusing the program now. Not sure if there's any way to stop that.
by happytoexplain | 2025-09-20 00:13:21+00:00
> if you're worried...

> you likely feel...

Thank you for the advice, but I don't worry about that, and I do not have that feeling at all. I don't experience any conflation with xenophobes in my real life. I find them repugnant, and vote against them and speak against them, except where we incidentally align. I am 90% liberal leaning (US liberal).

The fact of experiencing negative things that happen to be related to immigration (or employment/contracting) policy does not make you a xenophobe, generally speaking. Cultures can sometimes clash and economics have concrete effects on the American Dream - it's an unfortunate reality, but it is reality.
by thimabi | 2025-09-20 00:13:50+00:00
I for one find it much, much more fair to have the queue or the lottery systems. If it can be paired with anti-scalper measures such as truly non-transferable tickets or banning resales at a profit, even better.

But of course the problem runs deeper when we consider what you and others have been saying: it’s just too convenient for artists to reap the profits of the current system and have Ticketmaster as their scapegoat.
by HocusLocus | 2025-09-20 00:14:38+00:00
I'm trying to understand Section 174 impact especially because your friend's persistence seems like a good litmus test that positive changes are afoot. Also I have a daughter who will be looking for R&D/R&E EE position when she graduates in 2026.

Needing to amortize expenses over 15 years puts a big damper on anything corps may be excited about today but with less than 100% assurance of in the long run? Restoring the pre-2022 regime for domestic expenses only is for the most part supporting domestic workers? So your friend is back in a more familiar job market... maybe college grads too? Thanks.
by jlaternman | 2025-09-20 00:14:49+00:00
“If it were impossible to download YouTube videos, many organizations would abandon hosting their videos on YouTube for a platform that offered more user flexibility.”

Seems like a bit of a presumptuous proposition. If it were impossible, the web just might be a bit more shit, and the video monopoly would roll on regardless. Most might just come to take for granted videos of personal significance (I downloaded one of my grandpa in WW2 footage, for example, and there was no other version available except the YouTube one) are dependent on YouTube continuing to host them.

Some would, of course, use alternative platforms that offer proper download links, but it's hard to think that would be most, easy to think that would be well under 5% of those uploading videos that should in ways be a kind of permanent archive, or that this loss would really amount to anything to Google, commercially. Maybe not something to poke the bear on?
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-20 00:15:44+00:00
Does your new company need to file paperwork? Have/consult an immigration lawyer? I know our jobs openings we always specified we weren't willing to sponsor because we didn't have the ability to do the overhead. Do you mean we could have hired H1Bs and my management teams were all mistaken?

most of us here have been hiring managers in the bay area so we have been exposed to this. My exposure was you are fairly locked into one company. I had friends who had to go home abruptly when fired. We would have to buy their cars so we could sell them slower at non-fire sale prices for them. But this was late 90s through early 2000s. Maybe it's different.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-09-20 00:16:07+00:00
Guest workers have no long term stake in living in the US unless they win a green card. Six years and they're out. Given this state of affairs, they will be compliant and not demand increasing compensation when they don't have to plan for a future in the US. Get too uppity and you get the boot. The suppression is hidden within this dynamic and sinks the prevailing wage for all workers.
by anondual | 2025-09-20 00:16:40+00:00
A tip about independent projects on a resume. Put yourself as an employee, a hired contractor, or just a technical co-founder. Don't mention that you're the solo or main founder, unless it's a far past project. I've learned the hard way that regardless of what they may say about looking for autonomous, free thinking, resourceful, self-starters, basically all the qualities of an entrepreneur, employers balk at the label. Some will reject a good profile if they don't feel that you'll be around for more than 2 years, even though many of their recent hires are gone shortly after a single year.

List what the technical challenges of the projects were, what its promoters expected, and how you addressed everything. Don't let entrepreneurial merits overshadow technical ones, especially if you're not after a position like product manager in a company that truly understands how to employ entrepreneurs.

Another way to think about it is that the perception that someone else took a risk on you seems more valuable to employers than you being crazy enough, audacious enough, or courageous enough to dare take on life.
by sershe | 2025-09-20 00:17:24+00:00
Weren't there studies showing that 1) some health conditions correlate with low vitamin D level, 2) vitamin D supplements do nothing for these conditions?

Clearly, there's a third variable that causes both. Since we don't understand what the heck it is and I like being in the sun despite being pale (nearly never getting burned, although I did get burned a lot as a teen), I personally call it SUN MAGIC.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-20 00:17:30+00:00
This does nothing to stop the rise of GCCs.

In tech industry, we already began slowing down H1B hiring after COVID, and remote work only exacerbated that trend (I can't justify spending $150k plus an additional 25-35% in withholdings, medical, and benefits when I can hire 2-3 people with a similar outlay in Praha or Bangalore or Tel Aviv).

At least with H1B hiring, there was some incentive for industries like cybersecurity to keep some engineering headcount in the US. Now I have no reason not to completely offshore to Tel Aviv or Praha becuase the talent is there and not in the US.

This H1B change does nothing to solve the pipeline crisis nor does it solve offshoring (though even with a services tax, I'd be hard pressed to find the same ecosystem in the US like I can in Israel or Poland or even India for significant swaths of cybersecurity).

Finally, charging $100k per year per H1B employee means I can now justify a $1-10M investment in building a GCC abroad in CEE or India and availing tax benefits, subsidies, and tax holidays.

All this did is now incentivize me to push my portfolio companies to move hiring almost entirely abroad and choose a couple of high level PMs and EMs on H1Bs who would be open to becoming a Director of PM or Director of Engineering at a GCC abroad.

On top of that, the cream of the crop you want with a brain drain like academics in STEM fields, nurses, and doctors are sponsored on H1Bs.

America has a pipeline and skills problem in a lot of STEM fields and subfields, and coding bootcamp grads aren't going to cut it.

Cutting down on processing abuse by consultancies is something everyone can get behind, but this is literally the stupidest way to approach that problem.
by card_zero | 2025-09-20 00:18:38+00:00
I've never understood the complaints about glare, I don't know what's causing other people to have that experience. They talk about screens as if they were staring at the sun, with apparently no access to a brightness control. It might be some new super-bright screen technology that I haven't encountered yet, or an epidemic of eye sensitivity, I don't know. Can you, uh, shed any light on that?

> white text on a dark-blue background, because it was deemed the most legible.

Was that really the reason, though? Where did they get that idea? I see variety in the 8-bit computers. Many booted into white or green on black, such as the Commodore PET, but the Commodore Vic-20 was blue on white. The ZX81 was black on white, the Amstrad CPC (Color Personal Computer) was green on blue.

I remember that green-screen word processors were sold as reducing eye strain, when really the reason was that green and amber phosphors were cheaper. That's incidental to the inverse video question, but it throws some doubt on the idea that it was more legible. There may have been some technical motivation.

What are you talking about in the final sentence? Photoshop, for instance, didn't have a dark UI, and as you observe, desktop publishing imitated paper, and art programs would fit into that.
by ux266478 | 2025-09-20 00:19:24+00:00
However the radically different architecture of Wayland may necessitate a rewrite well beyond what the maintainers of a window manager feel is easy.

Even accounting for wlroots, you're not exactly just running sed on a glob. And unfortunately, wayland didn't actually fix X's complexity problem. Arcan did, but we're not allowed to have nice things because Redhat has no taste.
by rmonvfer | 2025-09-20 00:20:18+00:00
As an avid Claude Code user, I can tell you with 99% probability, that README is LLM-generated. This exactly the same structure and wording used by Claude (of course, it has some human modification because otherwise I’d filled with emojis)

In my experience, when you work with something like agentic development tools, you describe your goals and give it some constraints like “use modern zig”, “always run tests”… and when you ask it to write a README, it will usually reproduce those constraints more or less verbatim.

The same thing happens with the features section, it reads like instructions for an LLM.

I might be wrong but I spend way too much time using Claude, Gemini, Codex… and IMHO it’s pretty obvious.

But hey, I don’t think it’s a problem! I write a lot of code using LLMs, mostly for learning (and… ejem, some of it might end up in production) and I’ve always found them great tools for learning (supposing you use the appropriate context engineering and make sure the agent has access to updated docs and all of that). For example, I wanted to learn Rust so I half-vibed a GPUI-based chat client for LLMs that works just fine and surprisingly enough, I actually learned and even had some fun.
by marxism | 2025-09-20 00:21:00+00:00
Let me rephrase this. I am feeling empathy for the Blue founder because I am in a similar position to show voice control to people and the overwhelming response is "cool, I'll use it while driving". And similar to people here, I don't like that conclusion. So I think it feels bad for the Blue founder to have people pile onto the driving detail that he likely already agrees with meanwhile people ignore the hardware accomplishment.

To me the point of voice control is walking. I'm thinking of Einstein, Darwin, Thoreau. They believed that physical activity helped stimulate his mind and spark creative thought.

You walk, you think, and occasionally you say something.

But in practice people have been quick to jump to conclusions that surprise me. Such as "the point is to try to kill people".

So I'm merely working backwards to figure out why people want to jump in a car first thing.

And the charitable explanation is the people are just not thinking to carefully and are just excited by seeing a computer respond to voice with a low enough error rate.
by saltcured | 2025-09-20 00:21:42+00:00
Yeah, my class was full of people going into those Bay Area companies you are dismissing as elite or non-representative. There were "always" startups in Silicon Valley, since that's the origin story of those big 90s companies. It didn't start with the dot-com boom. My friends who chased startups were not going after "foo, but on the web!" cliches. They were more esoteric hardware and software products.

There was also a Small World effect where we kept in touch across these various R&D spaces. I don't mean to sound grandiose, but I think my cohort built up a lot of the open source that props up the current web world. I don't quite agree with the article this HN post links to, as I know a lot of that open source was written on salary. It wasn't all hobbyists in moms' basements. Whether we worked in government, university, or corporation, we had figured out ways to work on these things we wanted to work on and release to the world and be paid a wage to do it.

I do feel like our microcosm is dying out. I'm not sure if it is a net change where the tech world is reverting to just the dominant corporate tech you describe, or if there is some replacement microcosm bubbling into existence and I'm just out of the loop now.
by lurking_swe | 2025-09-20 00:22:09+00:00
i hate to be that person that quotes chatgpt, but this seems VERY relevant to your complaint:

“Solar urticaria is a rare condition where the skin reacts to specific wavelengths of light rather than the overall UV intensity. The UV index is a general measure of the total amount of erythema-causing UV radiation (mainly UVB) that can cause sunburn in the average person.

But in solar urticaria, the trigger might be UVA, visible light, or even a narrow band of wavelengths — and the UV index doesn’t capture that nuance.

So it’s not that the forecast is wrong — just that the UV index isn’t designed to reflect the sensitivity profile of solar urticaria.”

In other words, you’re (literally) a special case. :)
by nis0s | 2025-09-20 00:22:36+00:00
If the cost benefit analysis for employers still shows that H1-Bs are cheaper, how will this offset H1-B exploitation? My guess is that this will suppress STEM wages artificially to account for paying a one-time fee for an H1-B, but hiring someone for 1+ years at that suppressed rate will be cheaper. Employers will blame AI for decrease in STEM wages, of course. A complementary solution is to add the $100k fee, and to restrict H1-B per employer per year, or something like that.
by varenc | 2025-09-20 00:22:41+00:00
DRM isn't perfect of course, but it largely works.

Unlike with Youtube videos, you can't just freely pull something off GitHub and crack Widevine level 1 DRM. The tools and extracted secret keys that release groups use to pirate 4K content are protected and not generally available.

This doesn't matter if you want to find something popular enough for a release group to drop in a torrent, but if you have personal access to some bespoke or very obscure content the DRM largely prevents you from downloading it. (especially at level 1, used for 4K, which requires that only a separate hardware video decoder can access the keys)

tl;dr; DRM works in the sense it changes it from 1/100 people can download something (YouTube) to ~1/100000.
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-20 00:23:18+00:00
> And how are “they” planning on determining who is “truly exceptional”?

For example by implementing a $100 000 fee for their H-1B visas, which ensures that companies will only use those visas to contract truly exceptional talent. That's a very small price to pay for a company to be able to hire a person who is among the greatest in the world in her field.
by elmerfud | 2025-09-20 00:24:49+00:00
That has always been the case, where the immigration officer at the border has wide discretion to refuse entry to anyone who is not a citizen. I do agree that prior to now that discretion was very rarely exercised.

It is concerning the number of lies coming out of the administration and the people who willingly believe the lies without question. Especially around deportation of undocumented peoples who are criminals. The vast majority of deportations have not been of undocumented people and they have not been of criminals. If they are criminals they are criminals in the same sense that most US citizens are criminals. Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket or any other kind of minor infraction? That's the excuse they're using now for ICE to revoke status and deport people.

I don't support people illegally entering this country but it is quite shameful that we are deporting people who are using a legal processes to come here, including the asylum process. It's shameful that we are denying people entry based upon arbitrary reasons of them exercising their freedom of speech and differences of opinions. That is what second and third world countries did. The countries we said were ruled by petty dictators.
by ajross | 2025-09-20 00:24:52+00:00
It was a White House announcement of a White House policy relying (apparently) on nothing but executive authority. The attribution is correct.

Obviously there are very serious civic questions here (like under what law the authority to levy that fee was granted! Congress controls taxation, not the president). But so far congress and the courts are uninvolved.

The attribution is colloquial, but correct. It's routine to refer to the executive branch by the president's name.
by balamatom | 2025-09-20 00:25:16+00:00
Ooh, that's one of "fun" ones alright. Can happen if the perceptual validator has encysted the behavioral corrector. (Or vice versa I guess; I just ripped out mine since they were known bad; other story - point is, being unable to examine things too closely is part of the whole predicament) Jail as liminal space makes total sense as the environment for habitual workarounds to fray and the underlying issue to manifest.

Check this out. By directing your attention, you should be able to flip the polarities of either circuit and/or the "cyst" (i.e. the connection your mind makes between the two, before proceeding to disavow it; speculated transmissible). If works anything like a logic gate which determines the content of your spontaneous reaction and/or reflection to contradictory percepts and/or concepts, by messing with its truth table you should be able to switch between selective deafness, a Freudian slip, stuttering, and the one you're currently having.

Source: never sat, just hung out. "You thought radical freedom is the answer? Let's see how you handle being locked up with all other people who thought radical freedom was the answer!" is a pretty fucked up basis for a society and also a thing.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-20 00:25:22+00:00
In 2025, the decision isn't hiring someone on an H1B versus a citizen - the cost is mostly a wash.

The decision is hiring in the US (visa or citizen) versus hiring abroad.

Given that a large number of EMs, PMs, Directors, and even VPs are on some sort of immigration or work visa, this makes it easier to incentivize you as an employer to move some of them back to India or Czechia to open a GCC. This is what has been happening for the past 5 years now.

On top of that, vast swathes of STEM academia are dependent on H1B. You simply aren't going to find enough American citizens with a background in (say) battery chemistry to become a tenure track professor versus from Korea, Japan, or China.

Now you basically created an incentive for large swathes of junior faculty in STEM subfields to return to Asia, leading to a massive reverse brain drain.
by k33n | 2025-09-20 00:26:22+00:00
The idea that Ruby Central is "attacking" its own project -- that it has secured funding for -- for a decade plus, is not really based in reality. Not sure what goes on in their "Github Enterprise", but their vanilla github is pretty transparent. Marty has been doing good work in the repo as of late around the Orgs feature. I rely on rubygems.org, and my fork of rubygems.org on a daily basis.

The project is an objective public-good. It's sad that a former employee is attempting to burn it all down. I guess they thought it was all about them and not the millions of DAU's the platform has served without fail since inception. Contractors will come and go.

What are the OPs contributions even? I don't see a single commit from her handle on the 24 month view (below). Correct me if I'm wrong.

https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/graphs/contributors...
by utrechtNL | 2025-09-20 00:27:04+00:00
Good. Skilled Indians/Chinese/Europeans should go back to their countries, build their own tech and compete with the US.

People are smoking if they think “talents” would still want to stay in the US given this series of policies (i.e. recent cuts/restrictions on science funding, international students, and visas) from Trump government.

This is a good time for EU to build its own digital economy.