skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Easily fixed, in theory, by letting people holding H1-B visas switch employers easily. Then they'd make market rate, and there wouldn't be incentive for companies to sponsor them to cut costs and have captive workers.

In practice, it's impossible because Congress isn't going to do anything.
The US says it can stop a North Korean nuke.  How?
A solution to this wholesale import of cheap labor is to rank all the H-1B applications in order of salary, and take the top N. Presto: problem of low-wage imports solved; companies will now be able to find local talent, since they'll have to pay more, and tech workers will make more money. Win, win, win for all.
I've never done illegal drugs, but for years suffered with depression and occasional had "amazingly productive" periods.

After one particularly bad bout of depression, I decided to see a doctor. One of her questions was something to the effect, "Has anyone ever accused you of having been on drugs when you weren't?"

The funny thing is, during one of my previous "amazingly productive" periods, I had a coworker who -point blank- told me she was convinced that I was on drugs. I just felt high on life and told her as much.

The doctor ultimately diagnosed me as bi-polar, and we found a drug that would reduce the depression and not trigger hypermania or manic episodes (apparently a common problem with drugs that treat regular depression is that they can exacerbate bi-polar).

Fast forward a few years and I had to have knee surgery. Thankfully, my mother was taking care of me and knew I had been diagnosed bi-polar, but I'd never had a full blown manic, so she didn't know what that looked like. It took three days for her to realize what was wrong, but almost immediately after the surgery I had slipped into a full-blown manic. In the end, it turned out the pain medication and the bi-polar medication combined were triggering the manic episode.

I've since had to have several other surgeries and have learned that strong pain killers have a tendency to trigger manic episodes in me. In a way I'm lucky, because I've never gotten addicted to any pain killer, and I'm coherent enough to let my providers know whether I need manic-inducing pain killers (i.e. I rather be manic than in that much pain), whether I can take less effective pain killers that don't trigger manic episodes, and when I can just suck up the pain.

So, yes, drugs can trigger episodes, but it isn't necessarily illegal or 'bad' drugs that do so.
How could aliens have the ability to destroy us if they didn't have their own technological civilization?

Manufacturing spacecraft capable of traveling between the stars in any reasonable amount of time, if possible at all, would be an immense industrial undertaking, the pinnacle of not just scientific knowledge but societal complexity in order to coordinate the resources involved. Any alien race capable of doing these things must have also committed the sins that they're smugly damning us for, and to a far greater degree than we have.
The skills shortage issue, in my experience is the inability to find someone with the specific skills and talents for a given job. It is real, as anyone who's tried to hire in certain areas can testify. It is not a strict commodity market where terms like shortage are easy to define. The purpose of the H1B visa is to make it easy for US companies to look for talent wherever in the world it is available without having to open up offices there. It fails to do this in an equitable manner. One can arrive at this conclusion without invoking STEM shortage and implying that foreign workers are somehow deficient.

Frankly the only place where H1B seems to be "misused" is in the outsourcing industry. And that too it is "misused" if you look it from a protectionist perspective.

I've never seen any high skilled jobs going to H1Bs just because it is cheaper. In fact I've seen the opposite: small and mid-size companies hesitating to hire H1Bs because of the uncertainties involved.

Also, PhD glut in bio has nothing to do with H1B! The author misleadingly brings it up because it has the "woah" factor to buttress his argument.

Also can somehow explain to me how it is not protectionism to forge Disney to do something in house while it can be done cheaper by engaging a foreign company like Infosys?
The US can fix most of the H1B problems by just giving them out quarterly based on salary.

This will mostly damage employers abusing the system -- I doubt this hog processor really vitally needs all of these "Manager Trainees" earning 30k.

http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=MANAGER+TRAINEE&city=&...

The whole prevailing wage and government allocation business is just too ripe for abuse. If they're genius visas you can afford large salaries.
Sleep deprivation can trigger hypomania or mania. The one you get really depends on the person (type 1 or type 2 bipolar disorder).
How Provably Fair Games Work
> you can

> a) control the production of the good (or service)

> b) control the interface to the consumer

> Everything else are middlemen and will disappear

You know, (b) is a middleman too.
Nice meditation on one of the defining frameworks of the modern web. I don't see robust front-end frameworks like React as ever really making jQuery redundant – for the non-app, document-paradigm web, these solutions make for over-engineering, while pure JS still leaves (ever fewer, granted) gaps. For certain purposes, jQuery will remain the best fit for some time to come.
I don't really understand the insight with Chaitin's number. It's unknowable, but so are a lot of things. The halting problem already says that there are programs which we can't know if they will halt or not. And before that, Godel showed there are simple logical sentences which are true and unprovable.
> I've never seen any high skilled jobs going to H1Bs just because it is cheaper.

Are you familiar with the Walt Disney Company.
> Mental health seems like it could be a prerequisite for facing the challenges of sincere growth, but not a reason to avoid spirituality.

Going through a severe bipolar episode, basically forced me to rethink my entire life. I'm not saying it has been fun or easy, but I think when it is said and done, I will be stronger for it.
I've always had a dissatisfied opinion about jQuery, I much preferred Mootools. When coffeescript turned up, it seemed to hop on the back of jQuery. Doing a lot of the things Mootools already did and leaving gaps where jQuery was king.

Now I use typescript and no libraries at all. It isn't too difficult to write a utility object that can handle whatever depreciations or abstractions are fluctuating.

If you are writing a library of any kind and expect your clients to install jQuery for the benefit I'd say you've added too much bloat.
Internet-age monopolies are an interesting issue, although I'm not sure what you mean by 'money has a natural monopolizing effect'. Markets with always decreasing average costs are prone to natural monopoly (e.g. fixed line telecommunications).

IMHO, the internet has given rise to a different kind of monopoly: 'network' monopolies. I'm not sure if Amazon could be considered one: sellers don't face high switching costs or high costs associated with selling on multiple Amazon-like platforms at the same time. Neither do consumers. So both sides of the market are fairly price sensitive, and large positive 'same-side' network effects don't appear to be present. In Amazon's case, same-side network effects might actually be negative on both sides of the market (i.e. more consumers means higher demand and therefore higher prices for consumers, more sellers means more competition for sellers and therefore lower prices for sellers).

Android and iOS, and their respective app markets, are probably better examples of network monopolies (and possibly a 'winner-takes-all' market). These kinds of monopolies pose interesting questions for government: Should they regulate? How should they regulate? Do existing anti-trust laws cover these situations?

Wikipedia has some good material, in case you're interested in some further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market
If I knew ANYONE in real life who told me they supported the FBI's position, I would lose all respect for them and if possible cut them out of my life completely. And HN isn't an outlier among Silicon Valley with this opinion. And I would say that people young and old who agree with the FBI's position are the same people that don't care what the NSA is doing b
Real-time Go struct to JavaScript object synchronisation over SSE and WebSockets
Turning an underperforming web studio into a business development beast
Agreed 100%.
Yes ActorDB takes sqlite3.c, takes out the wal.c code and replaces it with calls to LMDB. There is no redo log, LMDB is designed in such a way that it does not require it. It is actually verified as the safest storage engine design out there.
>>Unlike eBay, where each vendor maintains a separate listings page, Amazon tidily groups its Marketplace sellers by item, hiding away the inferior offers, to showcase the best deals up front. (In seller parlance, landing the number-one spot is called "getting the buy box.")

It's a key difference. For example we purchase shipping labels on Amazon and Ebay. On Amazon it's harder to know what you're getting unless you carefully check the marketplace seller you're buying from. The intuitive process of just reordering what worked for you previously from your purchase history doesn't work on Amazon as it does on Ebay. All too often, a different seller now owns the buy box with an inferior product.
Ranking package managers by difficulty of creating packages (1-10, lowest to highest):

1. tarballs (slackware)

2. Ports (FreeBSD)

3. Portage (Gentoo, Calculate Linux)

4. pacman (Arch, Archbang, KaOS, Manjaro, Antergos)

5. building from source (Linux From Scratch, Most old installs eventually turn into this)

6. rpm (Redhat, Mandriva, Scientific Linux, UnitedLinux)

7. deb (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint/LMDE, Hanna Montana Linux)

Why Debian and Redhat-derivatives are the most popular, I'll never understand. I have _way_ less headaches maintaining custom Calculate Linux chromebooks than I ever did with fleets of Redhat or Ubuntu laptops.
i am confused. What do you expected them to be? and why is it relevant?
Tumblr honestly looks like livejournal 2.0. What is their competitive advantage? Network effects? I see it deteriorating within 5 years
I wish someone builds a jQuery-like API for Android. Will definitely back it on KickStarter. Is it going to be React-native?
This article is confusing offshoring with outsourcing, it says of the h1b:

"outsourcing firms that use them to import workers"

And throughout it interchanges offshoring and outsourcing, all the way through its conclusion:

"Overwhelmingly, the H-1B program is working to speed up the offshoring," Hira said, "rather than keeping [jobs] here in the U.S."

What h1b does is keep the jobs in the U.S. staffed by work permit holders, it is the opposite of offshoring.
I have the (unfortunate, given reality) mindset of believing borders are an outmoded fiction, so protectionist arguments never seem very convincing to me. No one has yet made a believable case for Americans being more deserving of employment than any given nationality, and I believe the global federation of skills that happens as a result of various immigration programs is the greater good for the species.
If this is genuinely important to you, don't forget to vote against every politician who supports mass surveillance. Do it in primaries and the general election. Write someone in if you have to, but do it, and don't make excuses about the lesser evil.
Medium updates Terms of Service to enable advertising
Selecting by interface, an idea almost to good to be true
Absolutely. Keep in mind that ActorDB actually requires that you supply the sharding key yourself whenever you do a query. It's not like, say, Elasticsearch, which shards both reads and writes transparently.

Many apps do require large queries that span many "partitions": For example, listing all of a StackOverflow member's contributions across all communities, sorted by time. With ActorDB, you would have to plan for this by denormalizing a bit (biokoda might correct me here): Each community would be an actor with a table of QA items, and each user would also have an actor containing a table listing their own QA items for all communities. Since ActorDB apparently has transactions, you can maintain this duplicate data atomically, though you can't maintain foreign-key constraints across actors.
It's kind of cruel to come later downvote an early commenter, who helped rescue a good article from oblivion and put their name to a quick recommendation.
Was thinking of doing this myself! Awesome.
The Five Steps to Reading 100+ Books a Year
The real issue is that I have a fucking right to have my device be secure against the government. It's funny how you can only make sense of your argument when you get down in the weeds and lose sight of the big picture.
I'm using the definition of "high-skilled" used by the article, which clearly claims Disney used H1B for routine jobs.
>look for talent wherever in the world it is available without having to open up offices there

It's not. Most large companies already have offices over there and could hire those people tomorrow if they wanted to. They bring people into the US with their families to have power over them. A manager without power over skilled people is useless in accomplishing business goals that require those skills. They also are always trying to accomplish personal goals like getting their friends promoted, getting more power generally at the cost of technical people. These types of goals tend to make technical people walk away despite any salary level, hence the need for H1B. Except for body shops, H1B is about power not money or available workforce.
Absolutely, this looks exactly like the stuff that grows out of the walls in our local hospital.
You can actually get very far by not sharding. But it forces you to eventually throw out everything that makes relational databases awesome and turn it into a glorified KV store.
Saying CoffeeScript is simpler than JavaScript is the same as saying:
I am going to make traffic simpler by removing lane delimiters, traffic signaling, lights, street names.
You end up with a "simpler" language, but it is also less safe to use. Python will throw you an error with inconsistent indentation, but that's not the case in CoffeeScript. So any little messing with the whitespace, which is impossible to infer automatically, and you have a bug.

Then, you can massively auto-format JavaScript, use great tools that inference type information from documentation, etc... but with VomitScript, you are pretty much on your own. In fact using an advanced editor and nano will probably make no difference.

"Duh but I want to type less"... NOBODOY CARES about you typing less. If you care about typing less use templates in your editor and autocomplete.
> but luckily it's not needed for most modern web projects, unless you need to support old IE browsers.

I disagree. While I am building our actual app in Angular, our landing page and that still uses jQuery for things such as ajax requests. There's no need to pull in any major framework like Angular for such tasks.

jQuery still has a lot of relevancy in the web.
It's the man's job to run the bureaucracy, not be run by the bureaucracy. Any President who lets himself get run is not qualified to be President.

(Yes, I know this means most recent Presidents and current candidates are not qualified to be President. But does that really shock you?)
To attract the attention of a politician you wave with some money. Why would you even ask?
Which specific skills and talents are in shortage?
...which would suck for the supply chain expert hired at some company's Kentucky logistics center. And yay for the software engineer in SF?
have javascript programmers latched on the Category Theory idea in any way? I know that Functional Programmers have been that a long time ago
I may have turned into a little wimp, but this actually made me a little misty eyed.

Sometimes when I'm working with React or Ember on a large project, and have to do quite a bit of work for a small feature, I fondly remember the days of just banging out a two-liner with JQuery that would do the same thing.
I'd just like to go back and show 15-year-ago me Firebug or Chrome/Firefox's DevTools and inspector. It's pretty stunning how far the tooling has come and what you can do with it.
This is terrible. I'm sorry.
Me too. This is all making me want to switch to iOS.
For one-dimensional problems (Like forward generation of word sequences) there are definite comparisons to be made.

In my experience (having used both nets and markov processes in computational creativity), nets hold more promise for higher-dimensional problems (e.g., 2d image generation).

I'm all for having more toys the toybox though, so I hope work continues on both/all fronts.
Why are you not using containers for sandboxing?
This kind of map actually needs some minimal classification. There are actually flavors between free and open wifi.

For instance, how would you categorize a wifi in an airport which needs you to fill a random form/survey (not paying anything) to access the Internet? Same question if it is then limited to something like 10 minutes (and you then need to pay, or just trick on your macaddr/dhcpname/...)? In these case, you can actually access the Internet for free, but they are extremely annoying.

Note: these kind of wireless network are actually very common in some places
Looks really great - love the web view of WiFi density, and great to see more efforts in this space.

We've built something similar at OpenSignal. Our WifiMapper [1] app on iOS and Android has a database of over 2 million networks, and we're also crowdsourcing a database of passwords and connection speeds.

[1] https://www.wifimapper.com/
The audiobook tip was actually a great one. Haven't thought of that.
Egypt's other uprising: Start-up companies are flourishing
But you can. The H1-B program is designed for all that. The sponsor has to prove they're paying market-ish rate (in practice it's at the low end of market, but close enough). And the employee can quit and go to any company willing to file a little bit of paperwork.

But that's IF you're the kind of worker the H1-B was designed to allow into the USA – someone highly skilled and in demand, with the cultural competence to navigate US society. The hordes of TATA people, I don't know.

The real issue with the H-1B (in my opinion) is that you need to jump to a new employer very quickly if you quit. You can't quit a bad situation and then spend a couple of months trying to get a better one.
20 Years, One Standard: The Story of TCP/IP (2003)
We went from C++ to Go, and started to auto-lose any auctions whose bid requests were in progress during a GC cycle. Go 1.1/1.2 had atrociously long GC pauses (sometimes up to 500ms). You are correct that development efficiency was very important, so losing the auctions was justifiable.
Most of the cost of laying fiber is passing a neighborhood. Fiber provides live and die by their uptake rate--the percentage of the houses they pass that actually subscribe. Build out requirements tank your uptake rate, because in most cities large segments of the population simply cannot afford to subscribe. If the provider is forced to build into those neighborhoods anyway, they have to raise prices everywhere else, which further reduces their uptake rate.

So think about that from a prospective competitor. Maybe 20% of the neighborhoods in say Baltimore would be willing to pay enough for fiber service for it to be worthwhile challenging Comcast in those areas. But if I'm forced to build out everywhere--in a city where a quarter of the population is below the poverty line--there's no chance it makes economic sense for me to do so. I'd have to raise prices so much in profitable neighborhoods that I'd never be able to compete with Comcast.

This is, by the way, why Baltimore city doesn't have FiOS despite being in the heart of Verizon's FiOS area. And it's also why nobody else will build fiber here either, despite the city desperately courting providers.
BTW at least Clang's ASan is capable of detecting CVE-2015-7547 (in https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/address-sanitizer/tt...).
Sure, but a similar argument is made about the revolving door between the SEC and Wall St.

It's worth chewing on the juxtaposition, just to examine your own assumptions.
There could be x visas per state or area, relative to demand for the visa in that area. Then only the top paid workers in that area get them.
I'll start.
1. Deep learning, Neural networks, anything to do with AI.
2. Machine Vision,
3. Genomic Science (CRSPR etc.
4. Robotics/Mechatronics...
and that's just a start.
I work with CouchDB, and it sounds similar: many queries end up being map-reduce functions run across many CouchDB "databases" (partitions) on the same node/cluster.

One of the nice things about this approach, from my CouchDB experience, is that each DB/partition has its own permissions (fully extensible through design-documents shoved into that DB), so instead of needing to carefully write your business layer to ensure that users can only ever query their own data out of a table, you just do all your work for a particular user in a table that only contains stuff that user has a right to access to begin with.

It's a lot like working with S3 buckets, now that I think about it. Buckets containing tables, rather than buckets containing objects.
One can view RNNs as a sort of generalization to markov chains. RNNs have the advantage of a memory, context tracking and are not limited to learning patterns of some specific length. RNNs can apply these advantages to learn subtleties of grammars, balance parenthesis, the proper use of punctuation and other things that a markov chain might never learn (and certainly not memory efficiently). For any given piece of text, RNNs can be said to have gotten closer to understanding what was consumed.

The other question is, are those difficult to learn things truly worth the cost of training and running an RNN? If a fast and simple markov chain serves, as is likely the case in practical settings, then it is better to go with the markov chain. The RNN will still make obvious mistakes, all while correctly using subtle rules that trouble even humans. Unfortunately, this combination is exactly the kind of thing that will leave observers less than impressed: "Yes I know it rambles insensibly but look, it uses punctuation far better than your average forum dweller!" Alas, anyone who has gone through the trouble of making a gourad shaded triangle spin in Mode X and proudly showing their childhood friends, can explain just what sort of reaction to expect.

Eh, so, the moral here is pay attention to cost effectiveness and don't make things any more complicated than they need to be.

Yoav Goldberg treats much the same thing as this blog post but with far more detail and attention to subtlety here: http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/yoavg/d76121dfde2618422139
Frankly your vision is limited to the outsourcing industry. Would it surprise you to learn that many many big companies (GE, Msft, GOOG, FB, pharmas, etc.) that form a large percentage of the US economy also hire people with specific skills (say, 3D computer vision or expertise in pharma processes) who by being educated in the US universities are some of the best in the world? No manager in these companies is thinking about the leverage you're talking about when the person's skill can be a do or die for entire product lines.
Ding ding ding! This guy solved it.
Awake for 12+ days? Doesn't that mean he's broken the world record?
For those without intuition on Fahrenheit degrees; (-13,113)°F = (-25,45)°C.
Agree. And ban outsourcing companies from India from getting H1-Bs. They actually have a special category for them but they bring so many people in that they spill over into H1-B. The people they bring in are from the bottom-of-the barrel colleges in India (I am from there).