skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Hypothetically, if I were, then as an employer I might be more interested in the guy who stuck it out working with the government at Apple.

One of the principal drivers of the positive effect on career prospects is the publicity this sort of public gesture would generate. Sure, all else being equal, many may prefer the engineer that sticks with the company. But all else is not equal. This particular gesture would generate a lot of publicity tied to the engineers eligibility for hire. Sticking with the company ends the story and would not likely garner nearly the same level of personal publicity, if any.

I'm not making any sort of value judgement as to whether this would be an ethically good or bad thing for an Apple security engineer to do. I just don't think they will really be risking much because enough people will view it as an attractive public display of personal integrity that s/he would have her/his pick of jobs. It would also be an ideal opportunity to launch a security consultancy.

The move isn't completely devoid of personal risk, but the risk seems to be overwhelmed by the opportunities that it would generate in my estimation. That is to say, it would be a good bet, and far from a true self sacrifice.
> These 44 companies, the study says, are collectively valued at $168 billion and create an average of roughly 760 jobs per company in the U.S.

$168B divided by 760 employees:
$220M of value created per job.

If there's no error in the numbers, that means that employees at these startups are tremendously underpaid, in spite of probably making above-market salaries.
None of these issues affect my Gentoo box that was first built in 2003. Been upgrading since. Avoided PulseAudio, systemd, use Xfce, stable and boots the same every time. Hardest part was quad monitor setup (Nvidia) - took almost 4h (once a 3yr period)
South Korean government announces nearly $1B in AI funding
Open-Source Retreat meetup
Seems on-topic to me. You can't call Godwin's Law when the discussion is really about Hitler himself, and you can't claim that discussing how voting works is off-topic when the discussion is about how the voting button works.
> As to your question about "unreasonable burden", Apple made something like 50 billion dollars in profit last year. The burden is going to have to get pretty high before it starts to get unreasonable. A couple of hours (or dozens of hours, or hundreds of hours) isn't going to even begin to get there.

Does this mean that "unreasonable burden" is relative? That just seems really weird to me that such a vague clause would be allowed in law. Like who makes that call? (honestly trying to understand the laws here)

Edit: Also consider that pulling off key engineers to do something completely unrelated to helping the company means time away from trying to stay ahead of competition. 1 month is already a huge amount of time when you're trying to stay ahead in one of the most competitive markets (mobiles). Also, a couple hours in court doesn't factor in time away from the office, travel time, and the additional cognitive burden of being in court. This also assumes the court schedules things in a manner that works within Apple's internal schedules. To me, this just sounds like a huge burden to any company in the mobile market.

> I understand that it's a common viewpoint on HN that the courts are ill equipped to make these determinations. Personally I think that viewpoint is vastly overstated, but that's a debate for another day.

I never said the courts were ill equipped to make those determinations. I said a judge wouldn't be able to do it because... well... that's not their expertise. To restate my question more clearly (I hope), how can you safely bring in security experts without compromising the case and guarantees that the courts would be allowing Apple?
I saw a really good presentation on Charlie Rose by one of the main guys who was part of the electric privatization in the Mid-Atlantic States ... months if not years before the California Dereg, and he predicted it chapter and verse.

The Enron story was a great one ( even senior management could not control those traders ) but ... context. And I knew a couple guys from MCI. who had been absorbed by Enron and they weren't a part of that at all.
I'm in government. They gave me a laptop at one point. I gave it back. It's simply not worth having.
I know what you mean but Mary Mallon aka Typhoid Mary was asymptomatic and wasn't coughing over anyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
AI Assistants Are the New Applications
Were they? You could get internet and email on blackberry and nokia phones before the iphone came along. I think what drove iphone sales (besides the apple brand) was the futuristic look of only having one large screen and no physical keyboard.
Besides front and back end, someone who identifies with full-stack should also be proficient at the data layer. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitier_architecture
I think if you weren't ready to leave, you shouldn't have said you were leaving. They would be derelict of duty if upon hearing you say it, they didn't immediately stop any capital flow in your direction.

It's shitty as hell, and I'd like to think I'd never do that, but it's rational, and people tend to choose rationality over morals.
> If you want to expand immigration, a simpler, faster path to permanent residency is essential.

Comprehensive immigration reform was supposed to do that, adopting a more streamlined points system like Canada and Australia, but of course the bill ended up covering amnesty for undocumented immigrants too and the whole thing got shot down.

Unfortunately for most people an H1-B is the best path to a green card, and only once you have a green card are you free to be an entrepreneur etc.
How to Beat Writer's Block
Nope, the H1B visa is THE immigration program. Every university will tell you that.

The route used to go like this: Studying in an American university will get you an F1 visa, which gets you either a first job or an internship. Then, if you are any good, the only sensible way for your employer to retain you is to file for H1B. Back when I did it, it was really easy to get it (as opposed to today's 1/3 lottery). At that point, you can say that you want a green card. Nobody is going to be crazy enough to sponsor someone for a Green Card if they aren't working there already, if just because it's a relatively long process in the best of cases, and many years the worst. So we get H1Bs so that companies will be OK sponsoring us. Once your green card process is pending, the visa stops being limited: You just have to wait as many years as it might take to get to the front of the green card queue. Then you will be approved, and become a permanent resident.

Today, getting the H1B is actually HARDER than getting the green card, but getting one first is pretty much mandatory due to the delays. This is what makes the H1B the main road in. If you look at the employment based green cards handed out every year, a very large percentage comes from H1s, or maybe L1s(which only works in a company that has an international subsidiary)

There are H1Bs that go back home, but they are those that get laid off at the wrong time, so they give up on the green card process.
I know, I know, the idea is incomplete, it needs some tweaks and refinement. It's just there to demonstrate the kind of power, freedom, and creativity we should be expecting to be pointed at crypto-capable open-source projects in the future we're looking at.

As for it being a tremendous amount of work: First, I'd guess that, given the infrastructure they already have, they could probably pull it off with a few dozen people. It's not bigger than, say, Reddit (78 employees?!). Second, have you seen how much effort they're putting into the kind of thing? They already have server cabinets throughout the US that read most of American's internet. IIRC they managed to stick a black box between Google's datacenters that could snoop on people's email while it was flying back and forth between their distributed storage system. Just imagine how much money, physical access, and and reverse-engineering those things took. And not only that, but that was theoretically GCHQ that did them, not the NSA! Foreign soil!

Seriously. The right mindset here isn't that it's "too much effort" or that it "doesn't work that way". We're dealing with something that has in the past demonstrated the ability to do these kinds of things. If you want a good set of tools for getting into the right state of mind for this, we should be treating it sort of like a hostile superintelligence, not any kind of bureaucracy.
So... If one was a great developer through the 90s to today and didn't write C++, C#, Java, or a line of JavaScript, what the hell were they writing? PHP? Perl?

Great developers are great because they love what they do, they're critical thinkers, and they've got an ability to find creative solutions to problems. Great developers are not great because they hate 'the man' and refuse to write code in the languages put forth by 'the bureaucracy'.

Bureaucrats didn't invent any of these languages or technologies. Developers (some of them great) did. You know who guides technology platforms in companies? The developers and the software architects. If Java and C# couldn't get the job done well for writing services and applications, nobody would use them.

If JavaScript wasn't the best we had available to us to create dynamic UIs in the biggest distribution platform in the history of civilization, we'd be using something else.

People that stand on the sidelines bitching about how GREAT PEOPLE don't do that without joining the fray and making it great to work with them often get left behind and forgotten.

Help make it better or get out of the way, but it's not a conspiracy by Big Company bureaucrats to trick us into creating the most engaging applications deployed to the most users easier than we've ever had it.
I know M&A's are known to be unprofitable, so why do they continue to happen? What's going on that we are all missing?
But they'd have more hours to bill if they bothered to make their web pages work with JavaScript disabled!
EasyPost Hiring Sales – Sell the API That Ships Millions
What's the reference?
Obviously, the only genuine advice this forum can give is

1. Don't sign anything.
2. Don't say anything else to them.
3. Quit discussing it publicly.
4. Go directly to a lawyer.

But honestly unless they're completely incompetent they probably hold all the cards. Yet another reason not to trust employee equity.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11309007 and marked it off-topic.
That's an invalid argument. I am indeed saying that they should be removed from security related work because they don't understand people. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that Clinton doesn't understand security. In fact, it sounds like she was advised that she needed a secure BlackBerry, but was denied it but never given a reason.

All that you have shown here is that the people tasked with securing sensitive information failed to do so.

If Clinton becomes President, then she'll be provided with a secure mode of communication, regardless of what the security person thinks of it. So as President, she'll be able to access secret and classified information.
Just when you think "Ok, Twitter has gone pretty low but I'm pretty sure they can't anger their users any more"... they do.
Thereafter, the term was often used as self-critical satire. Debra L. Shultz said that "throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives... used their term 'politically correct' ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts."

Everybody always misses that part.
Why would you ignore them? Some of them were pretty good.
Food doesn't need to have meat to be tasty.
NPR decides it won’t promote its podcasts or NPR One on air
Again, it is probably known - You would need to ask an expert, but I wage there are probably good reasons for having a control group, that we may not be aware of. I think the ethical question you raised is a serious concern in any clinical trial, so I would be very surprised if it is not addressed at any point by the trials's sponsors.
Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1
Perhaps, but only the Chinese bring supercars to campus.
Australia has had this for the last year or so. It's remarkable how far behind the U.S. has fallen on this issue.
"vastly different perspective"

I know it's popular to think that, but just how vastly different is a Canadian immigrant founder from a US one? One of the people highlighted in the report is "Garrett Camp, an immigrant from Canada", who co-founded Uber. What perspective do you think the 8 Canadians on the list of 61 bring to an organization? Might a rural minority US citizen be more likely to contribute more diversity than an urban majority Canadian immigrant?

Certainly Canada is not "on the other side of the world". Most of the Canadian population lives closer to the lower 48 than the Alaskan population, so I don't understand what "by definition makes them better entrepreneurs than nearly any American" as you commented.
> yet it's not controversial at all.

Sadly, it is: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-29/about-100-...

The workers from other states "took errr jaaaawbs"
I found TweetDeck a few years ago and I gave it a permanent place in the top left corner of my desktop on my browsing machine immediately.

It solved all the problems I was having with the web app - huge memory usage mainly.

If there's no alternative on Windows, then I guess I'm going to get a lot more work done.
So you don't get your lottery ticket. My advice is to just move on.

Maybe in the future don't telegraph your intentions so clearly. You practically begged them to fire you.
Fun fact: the E-3 visa is basically an H1-B, but with a separate quota, for Australian citizens only. It was created by Bush to thank Australia for helping the US in the Iraq war.
Agree that Chapel is not new and is great to know about.

I think OP is trying to capture the fact that Chapel is one of the more serious young programming languages that is not being widely advertised yet. Consequently, it would be 'new' to most readers.
"Politically incorrect" now means "something which is slightly edgy, and which I like."
And yet this is what the majority of people in on HN are arguing here. So you have to ask, why is a certain viewpoint laughable when applied to illegal immigrants from South America, but reasonable when applied to H-1B visas?
He's right about the rocket landing being a dumb idea. It takes about 15-20% extra fuel to do that, which is a lot in a first stage.
Not all socialisms are the same. Some work ...fairly well. It should be clear that there's been a big Dutch Disease/Resource Curse problem in Venezuela.

Obviously, the politics didn't help.
This community is divided on some of these issues but it's not fair to say that it "accepts" xenophobia.
This is true, however javascript is a tool that can be useful if you are building something that provides an interactive experience for the user.

In such a scenario, I have to write code somewhere to provide the experience. If I am writing it on the server side I run into several issues.

It uses server resources. For example, let's say the user is looking at a large dataset. They want to sort/search/filter that dataset. Given that they already have the data in their client, it often makes sense to use their resources to sort/search/filter the data. This lightens the load on the server.

User actions suffer from latency talking to the server. Again, if the user already has all the data that they want, not talking to the server can often result in a better user experience. Imagine something like an incremental search. Such a thing might even be impossible to implement server side due to latency issues.

Implementing client side functionality in the server can add to software complexity. Things like keeping track of user state can be handled much more cleanly on the client side.

Very often it makes tremendous sense not to make a "web page" for something that needs a lot of user interaction. Instead you want a stand alone application that gets data (without presentation) from a server. Writing your application in javascript, running it in a browser, using HTML as a presentation layer and using HTTP as your communication protocol is not a stupid way of implementing such an application (and I say this having written these kinds of applications with a variety of different technologies).

If you are writing a web page that is intended to simply present data, then Javascript may very well be unnecessary. For me, though, this does not come anywhere close to 90% of my goals.
"Your" government? This assumes a democracy, no?
> I can guarantee you that the kind of mass immigration central Europe is experiencing right now won't lead to an array of startups.

Perhaps not, but it may mean those people are not blown to a million little pieces by bombs, or tortured to death, or starve to death, or simply decapitated by one of the various actors in the Syrian conflict.

That's "probably" still a win.

And they'll still likely be a net economic positive after a few years when they've adjusted and started working.
Ok. You've succeeded in scaring me. Thanks.
Yes, as a Canadian working in the USA on an H1B, I am painfully aware of this fact.

The point remains: Increasing the number of H1Bs will not have a great impact on the number of founders, especially not in the short term, because the vast majority of them will end up shackled to an employer for years.
No, there is also an ethical concern behind it. We already know the survival rate per months for most cancers so there is no need to have a placebo group anyway. For cancer patients on trial we only want to offer a potential upside (once the drug is confirmed to be safe for use).

Plus, there are some cancers out there with very few working treatments (so no real SoC) - If SoC is not available you would not consider a placebo group anyway.
Gather everything you signed, they signed and go talk to an attorney (google employment contract attorney and call a few) for an hour or two. Don't sign anything or agree to anything via email. The attorney can help you draft a response. It's worth the money (300-500 bucks maybe) just for the education you will get.

Finally, never have a conversation like the one you did two weeks before vesting. Hard lessons are learned in startups and I'm sure this is one you won't easily forget. My email is in a profile if you want to chat about this more. I've been through similar stuff.
IANAL, but you cannot legally work on your own startup if you are on H1B
Seems like the biggest complaints are around performance. I'm assuming Atom (and VS Code, etc) are using asm.js or some other library to get them close to native performance. Anybody have thoughts on that? or am I completely wrong?
Congratulations, you have experience. No, really, chalk this one up to experience and learn from it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11307202 and marked it off-topic.
Insurance companies are strongly incentivized to make the catastrophes they insure against less likely to happen. Car insurance companies are the force for safety engineering in the automotive industry. Property insurance companies audit safes and alarm systems and require that policyholders use good ones. The FDIC is pretty strict about the behavior of its covered banks. Hell, go look at your household appliances and light fixtures - UL is Underwriter's Laboratories.

It makes perfect sense that health insurance companies become the force for healthy lifestyles.

This topic came up for debate recently and the American people chose to stay the course of addressing healthcare through for-profit insurance companies. Why should those companies not act in their self-interest to reduce risk?
I just don't view Apple as an information company like I do Google and Microsoft. Don't feel it mixes all that well with their other verticals. Twitter is a perfect search engine companion.
one wonders why the Googles and Apples and Microsofts and Y Combinators of the world are started here

Maybe social justice -- or at least your idea of it -- isn't the last, best purpose of humanity after all

Woah. Talk about a non-sequitor. What's one thing have to do with the other?
It's utterly off-topic.
> “It’s an independent culture and a rebellious one,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, a venture capitalist who was once an engineering manager at Apple. “If the government tries to compel testimony or action from these engineers, good luck with that.”

Funny to see Jean-Louis's name out of the blue again. He was the creator of BeOS back in the days.
Also an H1-B doesn't exactly let you quit your sponsor and start your own company.
That's a dystopian scenario, given that poor health is often an excuse for discriminating against the unfortunate people who experience it.

Disclosing everything to a trusted employer or health provider is a step we need to be very careful about. It's panopticon territory.
why would you tell them that? Did you have any personal guarantees to pay back or something?
People don't like to be lumped together and stereotyped regardless of how "positive" it is.

Also a lot of immigrants are war refugees or US allies that had to be rescued.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hmong_people#U.S._and_Laotian_...
I see this a lot though from my perspective it's more a trait of very wealthy kids than just the Chinese. Wealthy Indian students as well as Americans generally act like entitled assholes (not always, but more often than the typical student).

I think it's a symptom of a life of privilege, probably having servants to do anything menial and not used to not getting what they want at all times.
Today, sure. 5 years ago, the EB2 and EB3 quotas for all other countries were almost as long, but this changes over time. For instance, in 2007, the line was 5 years after labor certification, so, in practice, about 6 years for everyone.

Nowadays that to get an H1B you need to go through a lottery, the big Indian outsources are increasing their percentage of H1Bs, making the problem both harder for India, and easier for the rest of the world. Instead of waiting 5 or 6 years like I did, now you probably can't stay in the US, but if you can, the green card is easier.

It's a downright bizarre situation.
By "Jay Scaler" do you mean Jay Chaudhry?
You asserted that no one had good options. You're pretty clearly wrong.
Don't want to be an asshole but it really can't be called Deep Learning if it doesn't do backprob. Deep inference, at best.
The paper reads like a bad joke.
Top 20 java interview Questions on Constructors
native americans immigrated over the landbridge, all those year ago, no? ostensibly they're just the first immigrants. :-)
Ugh, just don't. I mean for one thing, the poster is not wrong to point out that college towns often have better/more authentic food (both American and not).

More people with disposable incomes and less time to cook + a large workforce of young adults looking for a part time job = more restaurants and (on average) better food.
You have a seekable filelike interface that is a superset of the base filelike interface.
I will politely disagree. RSA-2048 implemented properly, on its own, has a significant security margin today and it's unlikely that HW advances over the next 25 years will erode that, even at a superbly-funded first-world intelligence agency.

I am not saying that they won't be able to pwn you; just that they won't do so by directly cracking 2k+ RSA.
I'm talking about logical inference on a database of facts in the hopes of representing common sense.

I have no issue with probabilistic state-space search.
What factors do you think contribute to the ability of the US to attract the best?
This is the correct answer. Sorry, OP.
The reply above yours seems to think it's "just" Electron with better JS, but I'm pretty sure Atom doesn't have DirectX acceleration ;)
Commander Data, the android