MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by the8472 | 2025-09-20 17:27:24+00:00
It's not a signal, no. If you're good at forecasting but don't have a crystal ball then you'll overestimate on some years and underestimates on others, averaging out.

And the budget-burning shows that this encourages making over-estimates and then spending the excess to make the actual numbers match the prediction. It's no different than research based on falsified data at that point.
by djohnston | 2025-09-20 17:27:37+00:00
This dialogue suggests to me you are incapable of conceiving of a high trust society. So much like the people we’re discussing, yes we need to harden the system because of people with your mentality. It might sound crazy but there was a time when we didn’t, and that’s when these immigration systems were designed. Hence the easiest thing to do is simply unplug such low trust societies from access. They are detrimental to the well being of the host.
by wrs | 2025-09-20 17:28:44+00:00
To clarify my comment: the challenge is how to make room to follow this advice as a manager, when your own manager doesn’t share these values. In particular, when visibly bending rules, or spending any time coaching “nonperforming” subordinates, or “showing weakness” by tolerating dissent, is going to look like “bad management” to your manager.

After all, if most managers valued the things in this post, we wouldn’t need the post.
by coliveira | 2025-09-20 17:29:32+00:00
This is another magical thinking we have in our age. AI will do nothing good for education, because to be educated you need to do the hard work of understanding things. This is just the opposite of getting a machine to provide you with quick facts, summaries, and conclusions. In fact I would say that if you introduce AI to classrooms it would be better to take a good number of $100 bills and incinerate, because the end result will be less expensive.
by nis0s | 2025-09-20 17:29:38+00:00
> A CSE major at a decent program in India or the CEE will have studied algorithms, digital signals processing, OS internals, and computer architecture along with the option to take further electives in a specialization of their choice (ML, Security, Systems, HCI, etc). They are much more "well-rounded" for technical roles because they will have dipped their toes in 2-3 technical subfields and did their "data structures" equivalent.

I am sorry but this seems to lack complete awareness of the standards of many U.S. CS and computer engineering programs.
by simonask | 2025-09-20 17:30:07+00:00
“Safety” as defined in the context of the Rust language - the absence of Undefined Behavior - is important 100% of the time. Without it, you are not writing programs in the language you think you are using.

That’s a convoluted way to say that UB is much, much worse than you think. A C program with UB is not a C program, but something else.
by lioeters | 2025-09-20 17:31:33+00:00
> bubblewrap vs. firejail

In case anyone else is curious, I found the following comparison in bubblewrap's repo.

- https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap#related-project-com...

I'm gonna try both and see which one I like. Thanks for this info! You're sure living up to your user name there. (:
by simjnd | 2025-09-20 17:31:53+00:00
Because both comments you quoted did not put words in my mouth like you did. They can laugh in iPhone all they want, they didn't say I expected iPhone performance out of this Linux phone. Same for the other comment, they're expressing their opinions, not projecting it on me.

You're the one being disingenuous, and I'm done exchanging with you.
by mindslight | 2025-09-20 17:33:38+00:00
No, because after the spectacle of human cruelty from the initial implementation has faded, large companies will cozy up to the regime ($$bribes$$) and the per-employee government fees will be waved.

Furthermore as we've seen with "return to office", companies are more concerned with having control than with the bottom line. This new dynamic gives them one more thing to hold over H1Bs heads. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of H1Bs increases.
by asim | 2025-09-20 17:33:48+00:00
It's the most sickening thing I've heard in relation to Ad targeting and exploitation by tech companies in a long time. There is a lot of bad stuff going on but this tops it. And they justified it. They said because its public data in adult accounts its totally fine. This is completely incorrect. They point to the terms and conditions but where is the honour, where is the moral decency. It doesn't exist. People used to say delete Facebook. Now I say boycot Meta.
by ohyoutravel | 2025-09-20 17:34:39+00:00
> Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest, they just end up stalling progress; which Thiel will then point to MAGA as evidence of this.

I haven’t heard this, and I hope I’m not being given enough rope to hang myself either, but this kind of makes sense. MAGA has pretty completely shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will not vote in their own interests, or even the interests of their county, or anyone (as far as I can tell).
by catigula | 2025-09-20 17:35:35+00:00
I don't really know how to answer that, it's a highly fragmented legacy codebase that is responsible for many millions in revenue.

I do know that given my experiences though it's time to sound the alarms as many others have.

We're clearly in an emergency situation, it's frustrating to see this ignored due to various mechanisms some of which are huge geopolitical incentives to pump out propaganda that ai is safe and we shouldn't slam the brakes, which would cause the us to lose to China or vice versa.

Every nation state actor is trying tirelessly to attenuate panic but it's here, its really happening.
by sarchertech | 2025-09-20 17:36:15+00:00
It's wild to watch the zeitgeist among many programmers swap in real time from being against H-1B visas to pro H-1B visas the second Trump goes after them. It is possible for a stopped clock to be right twice a day. Left and right doesn't have to disagree on literally every single thing.

If you're on an H-1B and you get fired or laid off, you have 60 days to find a new job or be deported. That creates an underclass of workers who are willing to put up with much worse working conditions and work longer hours. That drives down working conditions and wages for everyone.

A $100k per year fee doesn't fix that, but it does make them so expensive that they are really only viable for $300k+ positions.
by rayiner | 2025-09-20 17:36:52+00:00
70% of H1Bs are from India: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/20/h-1b-visa-fee-timel.... That’s five times more than China. Are we really to believe that the supermajority of “the best minds of the world” come from a single country? Or is the marketing of H1B quite different from the product Americans are actually receiving.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-20 17:36:58+00:00
> This isn't law so aren't we a few hours from this being put on injunction?

That’s possible; it is also possible that it isn’t. And it is possible that even if it is, we are a few days or weeks away from an appeals court retroactively invalidating the injunction and allowing cancellations of visas based on failure to return when the injunction was in effect, or else “only” with immediate effect when the injunction is lifted.

If you are an employer who wants to keep your H-1B employees, you probably don’t want to gamble unnecessarily with this, you want the employees to act in a way which minimizes your risk.
by llm_nerd | 2025-09-20 17:37:14+00:00
An H1B is a three year visa. The new proclamation itself expires after a year unless it's renewed, but it didn't actually adjust any other rules of the visa to my knowledge.

So the one year seems to be the trial policy of the $100K, but it sounds like it's a single payment per visa, then normal visa policy comes into play.
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2025-09-20 17:38:18+00:00
I assume immigration fees are solely the purview of the executive, is that correct ?

I also would think that if this fee is applied to some countries and not others, it would pass muster since its the same as with tariffs - they don't need to be universal (or uniform).

I am not clear on the mechanics of this though. Is the fee is annual, one-time or renewal; but i suppose this will be cleared up once the EO is released if it hasn't already ?
by fidotron | 2025-09-20 17:38:18+00:00
> Somehow, I have the nagging suspicion that the laws of parliament and it's budgets have more to do with the state of British enterprise than the appointment of a sexually-predatory prince as a trade representative. And that you are well aware of that.

Nope. What kind of culture puts a guy like that as a trade rep? An utterly superficial one, which is what the UK is today, and that is the root problem.

Liz Truss had her stopped-clock-being-right-twice-a-day moment when she asked why it was that all the kids in the country wanted to be pop stars or football players. It's almost like the effort:reward for absolutely anything else just isn't worth it.
by teraflop | 2025-09-20 17:38:28+00:00
Trump has been doing many lawless things that the courts might theoretically put a stop to, but I'm not sure this is one of them. The text of 8 USC 1182(f) seems pretty straightforward:

> Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

It's a stupidly broad law, but Congress passed it, and now they're too dysfunctional to do anything about it. So I guess we're stuck with it.
by sarchertech | 2025-09-20 17:38:52+00:00
>The median salary of someone on H1B is higher than someone not on H1B.

Not within the same job in the same location they aren't.

If you're on an H-1B and you get fired or laid off, you have 60 days to find a new job or be deported. That creates an underclass of workers who are willing to put up with much worse working conditions and work longer hours. That drives down working conditions and wages for everyone.
by WillAdams | 2025-09-20 17:39:25+00:00
There were already a couple of tools in this space for folks to contrast/compare:

inftyeditor: https://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html

ffes: https://www.cs.rit.edu/~rlaz/ffes/

TeXview.app had an option to enter a single character using a graphics tablet or mouse which worked quite well (and allowed me to type up notes for a college professor).
by cubefox | 2025-09-20 17:39:29+00:00
I like the advice about avoiding footnotes. Citing sources is fine. Almost all other footnotes and information from links should either be omitted or incorporated into the main text. They are too disruptive to the flow of reading.

> Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work.

Haha, sure, I will send it to my LLM -- ... I mean "editor." :)
by oreally | 2025-09-20 17:39:46+00:00
It's hilarious that you can assume such a thing just by a couple of words on the internet. Or maybe I'm not a 'software engineer' by your standards because unlike your closed group of SWEs I'm a lot less focused on resume padding and keeping my codebase sane and not exploding in complexity.

I should specify - it's hard in that it's troublesome to have to code switch and do a bunch of recall before working on the thing.

Say you've not worked on this secondary language for a long time, which absolutely happens, and have spend hours of effort to recall it. This takes time that you need not spend on, it's how your memory works.
by Maro | 2025-09-20 17:41:12+00:00
Anybody who has used a touchscreen and spent an extra moment fiddling on the screen, and then had to adjust the steering knows that touchscreens are dangerous. In my cars touchscreens are only for Android Auto, which is managable, all the core driving stuff is traditional knobs and buttons. I'd never buy a fully touchscreen car like a Tesla. Sitting in them for Uber drives is more than enough for me..
by birdman3131 | 2025-09-20 17:41:15+00:00
So I don't personally find text hard to read or very much focus impacting.

However, it is very person dependent. Personally, I am one of the fastest readers I know.

It's also day dependent. I've had days where my ability to focus switch is significantly impaired.

The big issue is that while there are people that touch screens are not going to impair their driving, you can't gear your system to them.

You have to aim it at the lowest common denominator.

Personally, I am a fan of my current vehicle which while being at 2015 because it's one of the police interceptors still has the basic ish radio. And has twist knobs for volume, tune, fan speed and temperature.

And while I probably wouldn't mind having the actual Ford sync stuff, I don't find myself missing it either.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-20 17:41:55+00:00
> It's wild to watch the zeitgeist among many programmers swap in real time from being against H-1B visas to pro H-1B visas the second Trump goes after them.

Trump isn’t going after them, he is converting them into another channel for arbitrary favoritism and graft.

Being against the H-1b as a bad system does not conflict with being against the way Trump is making that system worse.
by suuuuuuuu | 2025-09-20 17:42:39+00:00
This is certainly the case, but it does make it all the more amusing that the myth

> Commas denote a pause in speaking.... Speak the sentence aloud to find pauses.

made its way into this article. Hard to imagine that this particular point, to which I might attribute many of the comma splices I see in scientific writing, actually came from a professional writer.
by immibis | 2025-09-20 17:43:07+00:00
While an X11 window manager just manages windows, a Wayland "window manager" has to also do everything an X11 server does (including X11). It doesn't just manage windows.

There are display-server-as-a-library libraries you can link with, so that you can focus on writing the window management code you actually wanted to write, but you're still responsible for everything you link with, so it's far from trivial.

Also, xmonad re-execs itself to reload its configuration. Good luck with that when it's also your display server...
by jmclnx | 2025-09-20 17:43:15+00:00
>Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

https://cscie2x.dce.harvard.edu/hw/ch01s06.html

systemd seems to violate this at every turn, but sadly they are not the only ones to do that in Linux. I wonder at what point we should start considering Linux to be its own thing instead of "UN*X like".
by yibg | 2025-09-20 17:43:30+00:00
You can take issues with the current (previous) H1B policy and the new one at the same time.

There was abuse of the H1B program, but this new EO also has issues. The biggest one currently is the rollout. There is no guidance, no mechanism to pay the actual fee, no clarity on if it applies retroactively to existing visa holders etc.
by bbminner | 2025-09-20 17:44:18+00:00
Oh, that's the only way to write a good paper - first you write 1.5x pages to figure out what you want to say, and then, with this knowledge, you replace entite confusing paragraphs with short sentences focused on exactly that. When i don't know how to express an idea, i ask myself "-so what idea are you trying to communicate? -well, that XYZ holds -if so, just go ahead write literally that!"
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-20 17:44:23+00:00
It's easy see from your articulation, your conveying thoughts across a long arc you are the real deal. Just from reading your writing I'd put you high on my list.

Keep your head up! What you’re up against isn’t a reflection of your worth but the state of things right now. That doesn't make the situation any better but it does mean it’s not a judgment against you and hopefully knowing that makes it easier to keep your head up high!
by immibis | 2025-09-20 17:44:29+00:00
> If I summon a desktop on screen 1 and it's currently displayed on screen 2, they should swap.

This is due to a limitation of X11 where a window can't be in two places at once. In theory, Wayland compositors can duplicate the desktop (at the cost of, like, not letting applications know their own window coordinates which seems pretty bad).
by ta1243 | 2025-09-20 17:44:56+00:00
> At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people.

I'd completely agree here. It's difficult to blame democratic governments for this though -- throughout the west nobody wants to build enough supply to deal with the problem.

Your second part of landed vs unlanded. Implement a land value tax and distribute it as a universal basic income, and that solves that problem. Nobody wants that either, they think they like it and then come out "oh of course $favoured_group shouldn't pay it"
by llm_nerd | 2025-09-20 17:45:04+00:00
>There is a 0% chance even one company or person will ever pay this fee

All through Trump's second term, and before, people have said things precisely like this. And here we are. At some point we realize that people just make such confident pronouncements because they think it bends reality towards their hopes.

>Only an act of congress can change visa requirements

It isn't a visa requirement. It's a processing fee. As of midnight no H1B will be considered without the fee. It is very real, and it is absolutely going into effect. Now places like Microsoft are panicking in the information gap currently, but the admin has clarified that it only applies to new H1B applicants.

As to the legal limbo, not only won't there be one, the Supreme Court has rubber stamped just about everything this admin has done.

The guy has both houses of congress, the courts, the DOJ, the full apparatus of government...at this point I find it simply amazing that people still dismiss the reality that he basically does whatever he wants.
by pron | 2025-09-20 17:45:09+00:00
Oh, I'm very pro Rust. I think that its use of the borrow checker is inspired and quite spectacular, that we can learn a lot from it. I just don't like it (as a practical programming language). It's not for me and for people who have similar preferences.

I am, however, very much anti claims made by some Rust fans that take an empirical and universal nature and are simply not known to be true (e.g. it is true that the more memory safety guarantees the fewer the vulnerabilities - all else being equal - but it is quite simply logically incorrect to conclude from that that the best way to minimise vulnerabilities is to have more sound safety guarantees).

I think Rust is a fantastic fit for some people who want to do low-level programming, and a pretty bad fit for others (like me). Same goes for Zig or, really, almost any language. Obviously, neither one is inherently or universally superior to the other.

BTW, my enthusiasm for Zig is not because I like all of its design decisions, but mostly because it's so different from most other languages and, in some cases, its decisions run contrary to my personal inclination (e.g. with regards to encapsulation) that I'm fascinated to know how it works out. Rust, on the other hand, is less interesting for me to think about, because aside from the more intensive typechecking (that I'm already familiar with from other languages) the overall experience it offers is quite similar to C++. Maybe I won't like what Zig ends up becoming, but for someone who's seen so many languages, it's really interesting to come across something so fresh.
by danabramov | 2025-09-20 17:46:01+00:00
I actually want to push back a bit on this. I don’t have the context on what the author has done, but proof engineering is a bit different from software engineering. In particular, if you get definitions right and if your plan actually makes sense mathematically (i.e. the proof is possible using your planned breakdown), you have a much more linear sense of progress. You don’t have “last minute surprises” which are only uncovered when the program runs. You do have surprises with modeling (hence my caveats above). But there’s also a much clearer sense that if the “contours” of the proof plan are correct, filling them in is much more parallelizable and more straightforward than with programming.

I think partially this is due to the language being pure (so there’s no surprising side effects, global state, or “time”) and partially due to the “if it typechecks, you’re done” nature of proofs. Also mathematics is (unsurprisingly) composable — more than run-of-the-mill software development.
by eqvinox | 2025-09-20 17:46:35+00:00
> Modern projection headlights can map where the light ends up on the road to illuminate your path while avoiding oncoming traffic.

Ask any EU trucker about this and they will curse you out with the most creative expletives you have heard in your life. At least the existing systems are apparently hot garbage, especially on highways where some oncoming truck headlights might be hidden by the median yet you can still blind the trucker themselves (since they're higher up).
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-20 17:46:43+00:00
Banning executive orders is nonsense; you can’t have an executive branch with a head and prohibit the head from giving direction to the rest of the executive branch.

Executive orders that violate, or direct the violation of, existing law are illegal (or, at least, without legal effect) to the extent they do that, but whether or not a particular order meets that description is frequently a matter of dispute, which can end up in litigation.
by elmerfud | 2025-09-20 17:46:57+00:00
As a startup you wanted to underpay people that you import from overseas? There's a lot about Trump immigration policy that I do not like but this one I think is totally appropriate.

If you read the articles you'll see that even Microsoft is telling people to get back to the US to avoid this fee. Not even big companies want to pay it. You have forgotten what the H1B visa was supposed to be for. It was to bring in experts that could not be sourced to locally. What it's turned into is people paying for cheap labor from overseas to come here. There is lots of locals with lots of experience and knowledge and skills but too many companies are unwilling to pay the wages that they're worth. So they'll bring in subpar people, who are not experts in their field, to do the work. It leads to a mediocre work product as well.

Because honestly, if they were really an expert with domain-specific knowledge that is difficult to source locally an extra hundred thousand dollars is pennies compared to the profit that they would bring.
by simonw | 2025-09-20 17:47:00+00:00
I just tested Notion's AI bot by asking it to make me a new page with the contents of a URL, then confirmed from my server logs that Notion accessed that URL.

It used user-agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/139.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 and connected from an IPv6 address of 2600:1f14:1c1:bf05:50ec::13
by visa-vasanth | 2025-09-20 17:47:11+00:00
>> I thought O-1 was the genius visa

Yes, you have to be a genius to go through a 1yr online remote masters program which is mostly group work and essentially a fee for undercutting others on the queue:

https://www.smu.edu/online/masters/data-science

https://pe.gatech.edu/georgia-tech-online or