skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you're saying that if we control for skill and experience H-1B programmers don't make less, but their overall average wage is less.

That means that we are hiring H-1B workers who are less skilled than the average US worker. How is that any better?
This works less well when you have only 4 people. I've worked on both kinds of teams and done extensive training and have often pushed to hire people who want to learn over people who know.

Most times, the premise of a start up is that 2-4 people with well developed non overlapping skills get together and build something with each being such an integral part that they are worth a good chunk of equity. Perhaps 5/6 is a CS person that you train as OPs / Dev on the side. But most companies don't have the time or man power until the team gets into the double digits.

On the other hand, if you want to build a pipeline to solve tomorrows hiring problems, go out and interview unskilled people that want to do the job you have. There's some wash out but generally you can make a pretty good batch of people. I've done this in a couple places and it can be very rewarding not to mention as they start to develop and move out to other teams they are often willing to spend some time giving back to the program that helped them up on the ladder. Which means that you have more eyes and hands helping develop people and more time for coffee.
Halifax have a credit card that does exactly this.
There are lots of other tablets. The Fire Tablet team has a finite amount of developer time to build features for their target users. Encryption is clearly not a feature they feel it's worth working on.

With security features it's probably better to drop them rather than implement them poorly.
Except when you consider the poor state of our inner city public schools.
Oddly enough Skype got bad under Microsoft's ownership too
The Anonymous App Achieving What Yik Yak Can’t
This project has been discontinued. But fear not, a new scala-native is on the way, Denys Shabalin a phd student at EPFL is working on completely new implementation of scala-native. His previous work, scala offheap, a way to use off-heap memory on the JVM with type- and memory-safety is very impressive.
Because they bought it and as with everything they buy, they milk it until its dead.
Some context:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin...
The issues that Scala and C++ have are far beyond just "having generics". Classical (ML-style) generics are an incredibly simple feature, much more so than, say, built-in channels.
Kotlin and Ceylon
Yeah why should startups get to avoid paying market prices. If you want to subsidize starups do it directly, don't assist then in depressing wages.
UWP apps are subject to a host of limitations, including not being able to turn off V-sync, (currently) no SLI or Crossfire support, no .exe file for use with Steam, and no custom mouse and keyboard bindings. Game files are also locked down, which prevents modding.
Yep, exactly this. You can generally find the add-on cards available, but most don't like them for replacement and quantity in a box reasons. They also don't fit in some of today's high density, multi node server chassis.

SFF-8639 (or U.2 as the branding is) is the way forward.
CEO pay is generally not correlated with performance: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-07-22/for-ceos-cor... . Most likely it's based on a hodgepodge of past performance, convention, social connections, and emotional factors within the company's board.
"The United States faces a global competitiveness crisis that, if not addressed, will put our nation at a strategic disadvantage for decades to come. In just a few years, there will be 1.8 million jobs unfilled in our nation"

would love to see the data behind this as it seems unlikely to me. what i see is many american companies offshoring large swaths of their software development efforts to foreign satellite offices, or outright replacing in-house IT development with SaaS solutions. from my perspective, i have a hard time imagining some confluence of events resulting in "1.8 million jobs unfilled" here in the US any time soon.
Agree. Especially when you actually open "Skype for Business" it says "Microsoft Lync" at the top. It's a mess.
> As someone who grew up in a single mother home, with many friends in the same boat, anecdotally I can say that it is not preferable in any way.

I've never been there. But from my outside perspective, I would think that it might be preferable to abuse, though maybe not preferable to almost anything else.

> I would say that high investment dual parenting has been the most effective method of raising successful and productive children.

I think that "high investment" is an important note. Even in dual parenting situations, the temptation is to want parenting to be low-investment. (I'm a parent; I definitely struggled with that.)
So much speculation in the article and in the comments.

I won't pretend I'm across the whole doomsday prophesy implied, but... a lot of the reason (not 100%, but a lot of the reason) why many gamers own a Windows PC is for Steam.

Okay, so I have no data to back that up except... lots of my younger cousins and nephews and their friends who beg their parents (and me) for a new graphics card so they can run this or that game. They are ALL on Steam, it's in their blood. They might do a bit of homework and multimedia stuff on their Windows boxes, but Steam is a major application, not least of because the social integration and features that run very deep within the Steam network.

Microsoft trying to ruin that party will be like Google trying to convince everyone Google Buzz is the social platform of the future. Barely a pebble in the pond rippled from that attempt, and Microsoft are no strangers to the art of pebble-throwing.
In my experiments, I did not explicitly set any executable bits using the corresponding `chmod`. Also, you can see in the Cygwin screenshot that neither `test` nor `test.exe has executable bit set in the archive.
>By the way: please don't post Arbital pages as Hacker News links, at least not yet.
The authors cite some EM side-channel attacks in the paper (eg [0,1])

[0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/561.pdf
[1]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/727.pdf
interesting that there's an encoder built in as well.

wonder if they will start offloading youtube video compression onto client machines pre-upload.
They are kind of fun. I enjoy the problems in "Cracking the coding interview". In fact, preparing for a google interview (no offer) actually reminded me of why I like programming so much. You need to think deeply and creatively about interesting problems, rather than spending all day trying to figure out how to fix "errno 64: gcc header missing"…

My misgiving about these interviews is that they are really exams, without the examiner/examinee accord that I think slowly evolved over time, in institutions that are exam-heavy, to provide balance and fairness to both sides. Think about exams at a university: most (but not all) of the time, formal exams come with a number of rights for the person taking the test. It must be consistent, it must be graded fairly, it can't be capricious, it must be related to the coursework, if you fail, you have the right to know why you didn't pass, you get feedback, you get a lasting credential, you have a "study path", and you have a grievance process if you feel things were biased, unfair, or inappropriate.

I understand that companies are tight lipped because of liability issues, this means applicants take a high stress five hour exam, but with nearly no feedback. Supposedly there are numerical scores in a database about candidates, but they are not allowed to know what those scores are.

Unfortunately, I do think this amounts to an exam without the rights that evolved over time to make sure the process wasn't excessively abusive to people who sit for exams.

Lastly - I tend to agree that a company is free to set up what hiring process it likes, within limits. If a month long paid audition/consulting gig is how they'd like to do this, and they accept that this means they will lose out on people with stable jobs (often people with children or other dependents), that's fine. But what do you think about companies that do this but then start complaining to congress that there is a terrible shortage of workers? Should we take them seriously?
One nerd's opinion: Akka-http (and Spray, from which it came) is a building block, not a web framework. It would be semi-reasonable to build a web framework using akka-http, but suicidal to use it to build web services directly. It would be like writing a web service directly on top of TCP -- there's value in abstracting all that crap away so that the developer can focus on the actual problem space, rather than the transport.

If I were to suggest alternative web frameworks for Scala devs, I'd point to Play Framework (full) or Scalatra (lightweight). Personally I jumped languages and VMs to the Elixir community, where I am having a dandy time writing asynchronous web APIs using the Phoenix Framework.

[1] https://www.playframework.com/
[2] http://www.scalatra.org/
[3] http://www.phoenixframework.org/
Yep, I interviewed with a small startup in the ABQ/Denver area and they asked if I could build a project over the week with their platform. "You know, don't spend more than 8 hours or so on it, you can just do it over a weekend and then maybe take some notes on any bad documentation or ideas you have"...

Luckily I had many other interviews to go to, I didn't waste my time on their project. I'm sure a lot of people in Albuquerque would have though.
The Github and mailing list shows no activity for >3 years. Either the idea did not work out or all they had was just idea and nobody came forward to pickup and develop working software.

In any case Scala seems to have large following among those who love JVM and Java ecosystem libraries.
Nice. It would be even nicer if it was possible to have a WiFi connection on wlan0 and masquerade that to the soft AP. I take a WRTnode with me when I travel as it's so often useful to have a router between my many devices and hotel WiFi, but I can think of a bunch of other things a Pi3 could do for my (like Kodi for watching videos).
I've had to do that. Doesn't matter that I've been lead programmer on multiple projects and lead teams in developing apps that (at the time) the interviewer could download, play around with, and see my name in the credits...

Nope, we aren't even going to ask you anything about that, or let you open up your iPad and show us, here's a whiteboard, start writing up a recursive permutation algorithm (only ever had to do this in programming interviews) because we want to prove you know how to do recursive stuff (and then tell us why you should almost never use recursive solutions in our apps), oh, and how about a red-black tree (algorithms class ran out of time to cover, unneeded since), or how about coding this specific sort (heap, merge, whatever) that you'd almost never use in actuality because there are tried and true libraries that are already more efficient than you'd ever be doing it from scratch?

Ugh. Fine, you can do your test, but please don't ignore my prior experience or act like you haven't even given a cursory glance at my resume, or even worse, make a dismissive comment when I talk about it during the interview. It really is insulting. And yet half the interviews I've been in have been like this.
Management and Organization at Medium
Maybe the solution would be to pay 25% extra during the audition. In that case, it is something I would be willing to do.
Ghost Town JavaScript - a JavaScript Remake of the Commodore C16 Game
It's bad news when Tim Sweeney decries the very existence of your platform.
Actually, many companies have said outright that they do hire H1Bs specifically to cut costs, and other studies, including by the CIS have found just that.
Not trying to nitpick, but don't most people running MySQL with innodb set O_DIRECT?
Well, it's only for a few weeks and only when you are looking to change jobs, and you get paid. I'd wager that many, if not most, people wouldn't mind picking up a little extra income on the side from time to time.
> Look at ICQ, Microsoft instant messenger, etc. It seems as though slack like tools get eclipsed every 5-10 years as a new generation comes along with a new favorite tool.

Unlike ICQ, MSN, AIM, YIM, etc., Slack is explicitly intended for companies and businesses to use as a work tool. There are some OSS communities that use it as well, but Slack very clearly discourages that use case.

The "stickiness" of work tools is higher than consumer-oriented applications in general, but especially for something like Slack, which is focusing on integrating other productivity features or products[0], I don't think ICQ is a great pattern of what we should expect.

[0] as we've seen by their announcement just this week
The whole point of the reaction is that with UWP Windows will cease to be an open platform.
But it is the exception.
Waahwooh Computer Teaching Tech Site: DESCRIPTION OF DATA AND ITS TYPES
Mobile App Economics in 2016 – Not Looking So Hot
Just read: http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/2/11140928/app-store-economy-apple-android-pixite-bankruptcy

Reminds me of my own situation and the action I look a few weeks back: Charge, more, like, way more, for my apps.

Example: I recently upped the price of my excellent podcast app (SkipCast) from Free to $24.00. The result: I've made more in the last 2 weeks than the first 6 months when I was at $2.99. Sure downloads are waaaay down, but each sale is worth so much more.

The argument is simple: as app developers we're absolutely screwing ourselves by living in the delusion that what we'll have enough volume to stay afloat at such low prices.

The core problem, as far as I see it, is the app store's search system is incredibly inflexible when it comes to the top three spots, the only ones that have a prayer of making any money. Mix in that in some categories (including mine), there's a feedback loop of the same app being perpetually featured and thus, the only one that get downloads, and we've got a recipe for disaster.

So, you do something else to set yourself apart: charge so much that if someone does scroll down far enough to see you, they'll take pause and wonder why you cost so much.

Free is poison, and completely unsustainable for all but the luckiest.

It's a complex issue but one thing I'm absolutely sure of: I'm sure as hell not giving my hard work away for $1.99 anymore. I may not make any money, but at least I'll do down with dignity : )

*Small update for readability.
20k ? Can you not just generate that much by consulting on the side? Thats what I am doing. But then I have no choice as I am old , unattractive and have an accent.
IRC is my favorite, but IRC is bad for company, because you have to manage your own IRC server (you don't want to host your company stuff on freenode, do you). Also, IRC doesn't come with any integration with third party tools. Unless you have a very willing hacker willing to build the integration from scratch, IRC is bad. Not that you would never find a use case to write custom bot on Slack for your need, but I imagine tools like Jira, Jenkins are already created and are well maintained.
Fast compile times let you use Go as a scripting language, which has been key to its adoption from the python/ruby community.

Fast compile times also let you run your test suite every time you hit ctrl + s.

Fast compile times also let you run tools like gomft without feeling like it is slowing you down.

I agree that fast programs are essential and (ideally) not mutually exclusive with fast compile times.
EdDSA is not fundamentally more sidechannel resistant; sidechannel resistance is a function of the implementation.

EdDSA's authors make a reasonable argument that it takes less work with their parameters to make a timing sidechannel free implementation which is also fast (at least for secret key operations); but "less work" isn't really the problem when comparing to a grotesquely vulnerable implementation, especially where it would be perfectly acceptable to take a slowdown implied by an especially simple way of making the operation constant time.

It would be more accurate to say that so far EdDSA has had a more conscientious implementation culture around it. But I think that won't last if too many people misunderstand sidechannel resistance as automatic there (even now one can go to lists of ed25519 implementations and get linked, without warning, to implementations which are not sidechannel resistant at all).
Heard this one before.

Studying comp sci in the mid to late 90s, my classes were full of people who didn't have a passion for programming but knew the jobs paid well, presumably because demand outstripped supply.

What followed was a seeming glut of applicants for unexciting "low-end" jobs - writing Java at insurance companies, for example - then they all disappeared. And here we are today.

Am I remembering this wrong? This was my anecdotal experience from far outside of SV.
Any regular distro is quite usable for it. Valve just made a console UI. For desktop gaming it isn't useful really.
Oh, that's easy to fix!

Sleep deprivation only gives you the munchies at first.

Just sleep so little that you actually feel sick, and food no longer seems appealing! For added effect, drink so much coffee to stay awake that your stomach hurts.

Not that I am currently doing this or anything.

(Never again.)
A warranty is a guarantee. I used the word "guarantee" as well. It's the right word to use.

Seriously, what do you think a guarantee is?
Well that's great, I was condescending him this whole time!
This data is from 2005! A lot has changed since.

I can't quickly google the date it changed (before of after 2005?) but during the first bubble of 1999-2001, H1B holders were beholden to their employers as they were not allowed to look for another position or switch companies. The only official choice was to leave the country. This made employees virtual slaves to their employers (I was one of them) and was a great way to ensure artificially depressed wages (no competition => no risk of them leaving => so no reason to pay them a competitive wage).

I suspect, no data here, that this situation has changed a little. H1B wages may still be on the lower end of the spectrum, but that would be mostly driven by the (IMHO absolutely crazy) development of 60%+ of H1B visas going to body shops. This should change. Quotas for the Tatas. Give lone wolf applicants a chance again to come to the US and make this a better place.

PS One thing many critics of the H1B program forget: H1B holders pay into the social security system, but unless they reach the required 40 points, they have no right to collect. The only way reach 40 points is to work here 10 years (4 points per year) but the max H1B duration overall is 6. Unless they get a greencard, through marriage or company sponsorship, they only add to the coffers without the chance of collecting.
I agree and I like generics, but I think it's hard to argue that generics have never made a complicated project more complicated.
Whereever the user wants it to.

I think GPs is opining on user attitudes more than they are saying anything about what they should be able to do with their tablets.

If people buying $50 tablets don't care about FDE, it not being available isn't going to have much impact in the market.
Congratulations!

Your first kids? I have 2 little girls and I find they help me focus the time I have to be productive. Having said that, I had a friend with twins and every time I saw her she looked like she hadn't slept in days. "Relentless" was her description. Good luck :-)
What's a better option in your view? Interviews suck and seem hopelessly broken.
I wouldn't trust a site like that even to correctly cite studies. The "Infamous Fatherless People" list is beyond the pale.

Anecdotally, I have the exact opposite experience.

That said, the question is, it's preferable to what?

I think there's some cognitive dissonance in listing all the ways mothers mess with the relationships between children and fathers (false abuse reports, preventing visitation, etc) and then suggesting that a two parent household would be preferable. Considering the messed-up relationship the two parents obviously have in those cases, would it really?
I'm sure the valuation cap will be low, and maybe SAFEs with a discount too. It's corporate payday lending.

Not necessarily saying it's bad. Payday lending to poor consumers is scummy because you're addicting them to high interest debt, but corporate finance is different. A SAFE is not debt -- at least not to an individual -- and this might rescue a few good companies with a high enough probability that it would be worth it to the investors, founders, and economy as a whole. You're gonna take some dilution but if you believe in your venture and persevere then... well... as they say it's better to own 1% of success than 100% of failure. :)
We are in the middle of such migration. More providers are supporting it, dual stack is on almost every major OS by default and they prefer IPv6 when possible.

Eventually all your traffic will be IPv6 and you wouldn't have noticed. Unless you have to migrate IPv4 only devices, in that case you'll be tired of hearing about it :)
> ICQ, Microsoft instant messenger ... slack like tools...

I think people too often overlook Slack's integrations. Yes, Slack is "just" chat or "just" a glorified IRC. Or is it?

I don't know how long it would take me to integrate my Stripe, Github, Trello, and Zendesk streams into IRC to the point where I could set it and forget it. I think for business users at least, using this type of setup _effectively_ could make it hard to move away.
> Why get so uppity

Please don't be uncivil.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224877 and marked it off-topic.
For me Skype has been great for years. Sure the Windows Store version was unusable but switching back to the regular version fixed issues for me. I saw it used at my last workplace to great savings - they used it to speak to their offshore person for free. We switched to Slack there but Skype continued to be used for voice communications.

Microsoft also owns GroupMe (www.groupme.com) and that solution has been pretty cool as well. I was surprised to find how focused Microsoft has quietly become on messaging products.
A trial period means uncertainty.

More specifically, this is another way for an employer to move the risk of hiring back onto the employee. It's the employee who is going to need to leave their current position for an 'audition'. This is going to put the employee at a disadvantage during negotiations because the employee will likely not have as strong a position compared to have an existing job to fall back on.

So unless the 'best' are already unemployed, then this helps the employer reduce their risk, and improve their bargaining power during offer negotiations.

As a thought experiment, if you were trying to hire one of the 'best', during negotiations would you prefer if that person was currently employed or currently unemployed? As an employee, I'm glad that generally my BATNA includes staying at my current position (at a minimum).
A small clarification: this an older project that is not directly related to my upcoming ScalaDays talk [1]. More updates to come in next few months, stay tuned.

[1] http://event.scaladays.org/scaladays-nyc-2016#!#schedulePopu...
Twenty years ago that was the subject you studied to get a job programming. Its probably still the name in many universities.
I only feel bad for this person because of how heavily invested they were in their job. People really need to have something outside of work to focus on.
Agreed that it's weird. IME, Microsoft is always best when they have healthy competition. They only get crappy when they are the monopoly, so why is it different for skype?