MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freetime2 | 2025-09-19 22:13:51+00:00
I don't really agree that they answered the question directly. The OP asks:

> Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years? How are you coping?

I view the first question as actually being more of a selector trying to narrow down the discussion to people who are in the same boat and are currently unemployed for 2+ years. So not applicable to the parent. And they don't even attempt to answer the second question.

Of course anyone is free to comment on HN, and discussions in comments frequently go off topic. And I do think that 14 months is a long enough time to be able to empathize with with the OP is going through.

But I guess what I personally would like to have seen is some acknowledgement that "I know the question was directed at people who are unemployed for 2+ years, but..." and trying to answer the OPs question of how to cope. And also some acknowledgement that a job at Microsoft, while maybe not a good fit for the parent, is actually quite a privilege.
by ReverieFish | 2025-09-19 22:14:04+00:00
Left my job on the East Coast in 2023 when my F1-OPT expired. Returned to my home country to recuperate, focus on my mental and physical health, shrug off the perpetual anxiety, etc. Married my now wife who was still building her career in the US, moved back here, and I'm waiting on my work authorisation. Can't say I'm too chuffed about being here right now, but c'est la vie.
by analog31 | 2025-09-19 22:14:57+00:00
I think that early on, people started using Python because they liked the language, before they used it for numerical computation. Many people were satisfied with an installation of Matlab, C, or whatever, on their desks. But they started using Python as a scripting language, before asking: Wouldn't it be nice if we could use Python for everything?

For instance in my own case, my first use of Python was outside of mainstream scientific computing. I needed something to install on lab computers, for data acquisition and automation. And it needed to be free because my employer was under a spending freeze after the 2008 financial meltdown. Oh, and I also wanted something for hobby projects, that would be equally at home on Windows or Linux.

So I think the quality of the language came first.
by jjcm | 2025-09-19 22:14:57+00:00
Possibly a more extreme one, but I got citizenship elsewhere.

Australia taxes more, make no mistake, and the earning potential is less. Living in Australia though was the biggest improvement to quality life I've ever had. I've lived in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, SF, Portland, Seattle, Honolulu, and Sydney, and Sydney is #1 by such a large margin it shocked me.

My taxes went to funding public transportation that works. They funded government services like ServiceNSW that made me shocked how bad the DMV experiences were in the states. There's nationalized healthcare where I no longer had to worry if my friends could afford healthcare. The government has plenty of its own issues, but none of them felt as on the edge of the event horizon as US politics do.

I felt safe in Australia. With how things are again, I'm so glad I hold a passport with a kangaroo.
by malux85 | 2025-09-19 22:15:02+00:00
Yeah this is how I practiced Postgres hot standby and read replicas,

It was also how I learned to setup a Hadoop cluster, and a Cassandra cluster (this was 10 years ago when these technologies were hot)

Having knowledge of these systems and being able to talk about how I set them up and simulated recovery directly got me jobs that 2x and then 3x my salary, I would highly recommend all medium skilled developers setup systems like this and get practicing if you want to get up into the next level
by runako | 2025-09-19 22:15:32+00:00
The median income in San Francisco is $69k. In New York City, it's $41k. Median household incomes are ~2x those numbers.

A $120k job in any region of the country is 'high income'. You are feeling a different effect, which is that we have designed our country such that even high income people often do not feel economically secure.
by Yizahi | 2025-09-19 22:16:00+00:00
I mean that the recipes for this sauce on the internet have pear as an ingredient and LLM also assumed this, but there was no pear present on a table, so LLM didn't take into account visual data and assumed pear is there too. Which is funny since it was the whole point of the presentation, querying LLM for whatever text in text or voice only mode is nothing new today.
by JaggerFoo | 2025-09-19 22:16:13+00:00
I wonder if there are any studies of professional chefs and their long-term health. I see video after video of chefs cooking in close proximity to oil cooked food, wood burning setups (BBQ), waiting for cooking oil to smoke, even smoking while cooking, etc.

If there should be a cohort that would be the canary in the coal mine, it would be professional chefs, who day-in and day-out cook for a living over several hours per day. Yet, I have not heard of any studies raising alarms for the profession.

Cheers
by bottlepalm | 2025-09-19 22:16:15+00:00
Good, but this still doesn't fix the flood of OPT workers (baby h1b's) that are crowding out Americans from getting jobs. I know, my company put out reqs for full stack devs, got hundreds of OPT candidates and are hiring them instead of domestic workers. You can't even discriminate against them as that'd be illegal. Good job America. They all have advanced US degrees, paying little for undergrad in India, while Americans are bankrupt from their undergrad. Unable to compete. The fact that they'll accept lower wages so they can upgrade to h1b's later is icing on the cake.
by kelnos | 2025-09-19 22:16:20+00:00
Out of curiosity, why do you believe that's the case?

I think there are certainly abuses of the system, but we should be focusing on stamping out that abuse, not just generally "slowing it down". A $100k price tag is not going to affect abuse all that much; yes, it will make it less profitable, but probably not to the point where it will fix anything.

As a US-born citizen working in the US, I would rather work with a smart, motivated person from another country than a mediocre person from the US. The problem is that there are a lot of non-exceptional people being brought in on these visas, so let's focus on stopping that as much as we can. And while there are plenty of exceptional people who are US citizens, there are also many more who are mediocre or worse; we should be importing talent in order to raise that average.
by rdtsc | 2025-09-19 22:16:26+00:00
Wonder if this is a coincidence that the other major discussion item on the front page is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45305845 (Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says) with the large majority seemingly disagreeing with the policy and sort encouraging ramping up H-1Bs and such since it's generally great for the country. But then I see a lot of young grads and unemployed laid off folks and am trying to figure out if and how the two issues are related.

Are people who look for jobs asking for too much money? They are not qualified enough and US just has no other way but to go for H-1B workers? It's hard to believe that.

Are companies playing various shenanigans with legal loopholes? I heard recently there was a database someone created of "hidden" jobs these companies post, where nobody would be likely to see them so they can turn around to Uncle Sam and say "oh well, looks like nobody wants to work here, we'll just have to go for H-1Bs".
by jonstaab | 2025-09-19 22:16:41+00:00
My point is that question is sort of a category error. It's like asking what type of business the internet is for, or what the use case of smart phones is.

Here are a few things built on nostr, with specific use cases:

primal.net is a twitter-like client with bitcoin micropayments and long-form articles (also see coracle.social, nosotros.app, jumble.social, Amethyst, Damus, yakihonne.com and many others); zap.stream is a twitch-like client for live streaming; flotilla.social and chachi.chat are group chat clients; dtan.xyz is a client for torrenting on nostr; satlantis.io is sort of a travel ratings thing; zap.cooking is a recipe website; yakbak.app is for voice messages; nutstash.app is a cashu wallet built on nostr; cashumints.space lists cashu mints that advertise themselves on nostr.

What's neat is that all these clients can do things the way they want to, but remain interoperable, which means that new developers can create an app and immediately have access to all existing nostr users and their social graph.
by sgc | 2025-09-19 22:17:11+00:00
There used to be a much stronger push for education in the US. Perhaps if companies could not "just hire from overseas" or "just outsource" there would be a longer term growth strategy that would focus more on the education of the US population (not just training for this or that job).

It did seem in the past that there was much more of an all-hands-on-deck attitude towards education throughout US corporate activities, more broadly focused on the general fields the various companies valued the most. I suspect this fall off is very real, but don't actually know if that is just my impression or if there is a concrete effect from modern economic structures.

It's an important enough question it should definitely be studied and taken into account in policy.

However I can't agree with your conclusion that "Immigration helps the countries [sic] top-line metrics, but it rarely helps the citizens inside the country". That requires meta studies that I have never seen to prove it is so. I could cautiously accept that "some types of immigration rarely help corresponding sections of the local population" much more than such a blanket judgement. Overall, it is just not true that economics is zero sum. It doesn't have to be. An entire people can in fact flourish.
by mikhmha | 2025-09-19 22:17:16+00:00
I'm hitting 2 years of unemployment in a month. Its somewhat intentional, the day after I became unemployed (I quit) I started to learn Elixir and began work on building a MMO-type game (this was unplanned). Why? Because I like distributed systems programming. I didn't expect to still be working on it 2 years later. Honestly there was no plan or expectation. I got sucked into this project and it was better than having to look for a job. Its fulfilling and intellectually stimulating. The game has public playtests and I have some interested players.

But now I'm hitting 2 years and the money is starting to dry up so I need to find work again. I always thought working on this type of project would be a win-win for finding work again, but it hasn't helped much. It may even be a hinderance. Employers/Recruiters don't take it seriously or see it as some exotic work experience. I try to tell them - Distributed Systems...the concepts are the same wherever you go. No dice. I'm on the younger side and have 3 years of professional experience at a payments startup doing backend + devops + AWS. Sometimes I wonder if I screwed myself out of the job market. I'm seen as a Junior Dev with a 2 year work experience gap.

I cope by staying in shape. I have a good routine and I even got into swimming over the past year! I think if it wasn't for these activities I would've fell into despair some time ago.
by trhway | 2025-09-19 22:17:36+00:00
Not necessarily. Territorial war requires people. Defense from kinetic strikes on key objects concentrated on smallish territory requires mostly high-tech - radars and missiles - and that would be much easier for a very rich high-tech US corporation.

An example - Starlink antenna, sub-$500, a phased array which actually is like a half or a third of such an array on a modern fighter jet where it cost several millions. Musk naturally couldn't go the way of a million-per-antenna, so he had to develop and source it on his own. The same with anti-missile defense - if/when NVDA gets to it to defend the TSMC fabs, NVDA would produce such defense systems orders of magnitude cheaper, and that defense would work much better than the modern military systems.
by carrja99 | 2025-09-19 22:17:47+00:00
> In a good headspace now, right after the first year was feeling lost on where to go next.

Glad to hear. I had a similar experience, people act like "being in transition" where you are unsure what is next is solveable in a month, maybe three months. After that first year I still felt so unsure what I was supposed to do.
by conartist6 | 2025-09-19 22:19:30+00:00
If you already have an immigration status that allows you to work in the US then you're free to advocate for your worth by engaging with the job market. If a company has to sponsor you for an H1B though you'll be locked to one employer, and that lack of options is what means they don't need to give you market rates.

But yes, as far as I know companies would usually offer an H1B applicant lower salary. They know the candidate will need visa sponsorship because the candidate has to say up front (usually in the first conversation) if they are authorized to work in the US. If the companies know they will have to undertake costly sponsorship, and as far as I know employment law leaves them quite free to offer a lower salary: foreign nationals are not a protected class so salary discrimination on the basis of who will need visa sponsorship is just to be expected in the current system...
by r0m4n0 | 2025-09-19 22:19:46+00:00
I work for a big tech company that was already hiring a ton in Canada, I have to imagine this is going to add massive amounts of fuel to the flames. Are they just going to accept that offshoring is the next best alternative? And by offshoring, I mean, immigrants moving to Canada and working for American companies because their work visas are better
by xp84 | 2025-09-19 22:20:10+00:00
Are you suggesting that those companies don't know they're hiring H-1B workers? It just sort of happens to them?

If they offer below-market (for American workers) salaries and get no sufficiently-qualified domestic candidates, as they're required to promise they do, it's no surprise to anyone that they're hiring a ton of H-1Bs. They want that because they want to pay less.

I don't blame them for doing what's fiscally advantageous for the shareholders up till now -- but I think I'll be glad to see this change implemented, if it is, because I know companies write on those forms "domestic talent not found" when they know the truth is "domestic talent not available at the wages we'd like to pay".
by seec | 2025-09-19 22:20:32+00:00
Not the person who asked either but I appreciate the effort.

My sentiment is very similar.

To the science part I will add that, at least, it has some explanatory power that is useful. It's finding checks out and makes many areas of our life better and more confortable. No religion can come close to the benefits of science, especially when you consider that humanity was actually doing science before it was even called that (in a cruder way but nonetheless).

Religion is systematically about imposing the morals and superiority of one group upon the others while offering very little in return. It has been the justification for plenty of domination and suffering and that alone should tell you that something is wrong.

If God existed, he would have killed the religious zealots creating the suffering or at the very least prevented their actions.
by nickstambaugh | 2025-09-19 22:20:46+00:00
There are heroes and villains, many different story lines about betrayal & triumphant comebacks from injury or a losing streak, etc. There is also an entire business side to it, where sports teams don't compete solely on the field, but also in business. They compete for market share to sell more jerseys or for talent to get the best players; That's always been the most fascinating to me personally.
by laurencerowe | 2025-09-19 22:21:33+00:00
While the permanent residence process is clearly broken for people from India and China, I don't think it's accurate to characterise H1B workers as indentured servants. The paperwork for changing jobs on an H1B is fairly easy and is not subject to the H1B lottery.

Cap-exempt H1B holders working for universities are restricted to switching only to other cap-exempt employers, but even then I never felt I had to work 60+ hours a week.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-09-19 22:22:11+00:00
Quit big tech after a decade in the industry about 30 months ago. At the time it was supposed to be a "break" because I was badly disillusioned with the meaningfulness of what I was doing, and in some ways where the industry had shifted over that time period. But then, we looked over our finances as a no-kids household with a combined 35-years of work in the tech industry (which of course is a very fortunate situation to be in) and decided we can retire.

So that's where I'm at right now. I've spent this time picking up new hobbies (currently 3D modelling, branching out to add some electronics elements right now), programming board game probability aids for fun, learning some university level courses from my partner and teaching her some myself, getting more active (my last month has been the best physical shape I've been in since university).

My personal project list keeps growing, so I have plenty to tackle and "keep me busy". Though I do want to move on from toy personal stuff to more meaty stuff in the near future. Yet, figuring out the exact nature of that is a work in progress currently.
by EGreg | 2025-09-19 22:22:30+00:00
“The only way around it is for the government to…”

This isnt the only way at all

As a technologically literate libertarian, I will say that word HN hates: “blockchain”.

Yes, a lot that you think you need to place trust in large institutions for, can now be done with smart contracts.

Take for example the idea of not allowing secondary sales. You simply say that the ERC-20 token cannot be sent to any address other than the official ones you bought from. You can get a refund but that’s it. And just like that - no scalping!

Now if you want to maximize the amount for the venue, you do price discovery. You make a “bonding curve” (like an auction) whereby tickets in a section go up in price the more people buy them (or not — have whatever monotonically increasing curve you want). And people can get a refund if they return the ticket. You pay out after the concert, and take your cut, and all of it is guaranteed, with no middleman. You (the artist and the platform and the venue) keep the windfall.

No need to attract speculators who buy tickets and then expect to get a larger amount later.
by AlexandrB | 2025-09-19 22:23:30+00:00
> It’s a catch 22: if you are a sports team and only sell $1000 tickets you might sell out the show but you alienate your core base who buy lots of other stuff like shirts and caps and beer.

That core base is also the taxpayers that fund your next stadium. If you get too greedy you'll be paying for it out of pocket.
by mothballed | 2025-09-19 22:23:43+00:00
For it to be illegal you have to prove intent.

The incentives ensure that it will happen with zero intent, and probably without the people doing it even realize they're doing it. It's not illegal to see someone, think of them as a 'sucker' but not even realize why, then lowball them, which is far more likely than for a person to actually consciously confront themselves they may be a racist.

In any case, even if they know it's illegal, it's not so easy to enforce, the fact that people get successfully sued or jailed a small fraction of the time isn't going to be some solace.

The only way to actually solve it is to remove the incentive in place, namely either the market pressure to get the best developer at the cheapest price or the vulnerability of being an immigrant.
by pedalpete | 2025-09-19 22:23:45+00:00
There is a growing body of research showing that increasing slow-wave activity during sleep can improve outcomes, including sleep quality[1], memory, and correlations with amyloid response[2].

Sadly, our latest grant application did not receive funding, but we are supporting other clinical researchers with our technology. Our technology is based on more than a decade of research with 50+ published, peer reviewed studies.

We focus on sleep directly rather than the disease, which means people do not have to wait years for regulatory approvals before they can feel day-to-day benefits.

For those curious about learning more, our approach and links to additional research are on our website https://affectablesleep.com .

Mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s changes in sleep https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2024.07.002

Slow-wave activity, memory, and amyloid response https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afad228
by xp84 | 2025-09-19 22:24:33+00:00
I don't think there's an H1B category for online political edgelords anyway -- we have enough of those already on both sides of the political spectrum, so I don't think anyone cares if that type of person is afraid to come here. If anything, maybe it's better to have less of that kind of thing so we can focus on getting things done instead of political partisanship?
by kelnos | 2025-09-19 22:24:50+00:00
The H-1 program started as a "correction" to the tightening of immigration rules as a whole over time.

Consider that, in 1905, my great-grandfather got on a boat in Italy, sailed across the Atlantic, arrived in New York, went through a very simple immigration process on-site, and at that point was legal to live and work in the US for as long as he wanted. He eventually naturalized as a US citizen in 1920, only needing to prove his residency and present the record of his legal entrance 15 years prior.

We're a long way from that state of affairs now. The H-1 program was developed because we weren't getting enough of an influx of skilled work due to the reduction in immigration caused by new, more-restrictive immigration laws enacted over the prior decades.
by ajross | 2025-09-19 22:25:18+00:00
Whoa whoa whoa, that's (1) not correct[1], but (2) shameless goalpost motion in any case.

The whole premise of your original contention was that we should measure like-profession salaries to see whether or not there is an effect. Then when no effect was shown, you switched it up in favor of an argument that (again, incorrectly) predicts that such an effect can't be shown at all. That's not good faith discussion.

[1] Immigrant labor is arriving, by definition, in a pre-existing market. If immigrants can't be hired more cheaply than existing labor, by definition they can't be pulling wages down.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-19 22:25:24+00:00
Almost 2 years for me but I've hardly applied anywhere in that time. I'm disgusted at what the field has become and can't see myself working in it again.

I saw this coming for a long time and kept my lifestyle simple and expenses low so that I'd be able to retire early. I'm happy to work again if I can find something reasonable but I'm not going to kill myself anymore faking my way through some "agile" AI/ad-tech company job.
by simonw | 2025-09-19 22:25:24+00:00
This describes httpjail, a new Rust sandbox proxy tool: https://github.com/coder/httpjail

It works for any process, not just Claude Code. I got it working with Codex CLI like this:

httpjail --js "r.host === 'chatgpt.com'" -- codex

After installing it using Cargo (and Homebrew):

brew upgrade rust cargo install httpjail

I wrote more notes about it here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/19/httpjail/
by pizlonator | 2025-09-19 22:25:31+00:00
Yeah, I'll have to come up with a decent way of allowing this, at some point.

But see https://fil-c.org/runtime

It's really about creating an FFI for Fil-C, because Fil-C has its own calling convention and symbol mangling. It could be a lot of work.

And, worst case, it ends up being a footgun
by atombender | 2025-09-19 22:25:33+00:00
Those are not political appointments, and have no bearing on Norway's status as a democracy. Those military roles are largely symbolic. While nominally "commander in chief", this isn't the same way the U.S. president is CiC; the de facto head of the armed forces is not the king, but the chief of defense.

As head of state, the king has a very limited role in political affairs.