skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the east bay (primarily - Contra Costa County, but there was an offshoot (maybe two) down towards Dublin/San Ramon), there was a multi-line chat BBS known as Popnet. The main office was in Walnut Creek, socials were a regular thing, online chat and games were an important part of socializing. It was custom written software by the father/son team. If I recall rightly, they even had an online version of Diplomacy (the board game). I still have friends from that era.

It's interesting to see Dementia was based off of WWIV. The WWIV BBS software was well written and easy to update/customize/modify. TML, Innerdot, and others were amongst those that ran it in the 80s to early 90s.

Interestingly enough, I actually feel like the BBS days did more to foster social interaction than "social networks" now. They were (unless warez sites) hyper local. In the east bay, we had regular pick up tackle football games (going from several a year in the early days on 1/x year in the 2000s) that ran for around (maybe more than) 20 years. Many of those involved are still friends.
Is this interview new or was it released as part of the book?
> A dynamic type is probably just implemented as a tagged bit of data, surely

A dynamic "type" is really just `object` whose methods are looked up at run time. It's not tagged data at all. See [1] for more info, specifically the example(s) at the bottom, as the reflection code is what gets executed at run (albeit with caching so that methods aren't looked up all the time).

`dynamic` is a complex feature that enables multiple dispatch as a side-effect, but only because it allows a whole lot more.

[1]: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/Articles/2011/02/01/Underst...

> what arguments could you pass in to the statically typed function that would cause the use of dynamic to bite you in the ass

public void Output(int value);
public void Output(Person person);
...
dynamic aValue = "Some String";
Output(aValue);

Compiles, because the actual resolving of which overload to call is done at runtime, not at compile time. And at runtime, there is no overload that accepts a string.
Well, as he pointed out, American uses the same regional carrier to operate flights on that route. That sounds like a contractor to me.
Right. Something about hardware and OS staying stable long enough so that people could focus on creating new interesting software -- instead of just trying to keep up with ever changing APIs and constantly searching StackOverflow for ready made solutions.

Sometimes severe constraints drive the really beautiful solutions.
Show HN: Headcache: note-taking program with markdown, search, external editing
You mean it's a giant advertisement for ML and its powerful pattern matching?
FB currently has more than 300 openings. If you're qualified, please apply :)
Isn't that illegal? Didn't ever talk to a lawyer about that?
> I've found the DLR is just as fast... with a much lower overhead

Can you expand on this? I would not have expected that it would be faster than compiled expressions.
Why Bill O'Reilly was really fired
I wish I had been able to preserve those door games I wrote...
>The result of monopoly pricing is that consumer surplus is reduced and producer surplus is increased; the reason we care as a society, though [..] is deadweight loss.

>Facebook may have a monopoly in social networking, and while that may be a problem for Snap or any other would be networks, Facebook would surely argue that the lack of deadweight loss means that society as a whole shouldn’t be too bothered.

Traditionally, the main issue with monopoly has been about suppressing competition and innovation, not about prices. Price analysis was at most an afterthought. Here's e.g. Woodrow Wilson [1] campaigning against monopoly in 1913 (he later created the FTC and signed the Clayton Act):

"Our purpose is the restoration of freedom. We purpose to prevent private monopoly by law, to see to it that the methods by which monopolies have been built up are legally made impossible. We design that the limitations on private enterprise shall be removed, so that the next generation of youngsters, as they come along, will not have to become proteges of benevolent trusts, but will be free to go about making their own lives what they will"

"Monopoly means the atrophy of enterprise. If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it"

[1] https://archive.org/details/newfreedomcallfo00wils
I have no problem with that really. There are thousands of H1B's that are much more talented than 95% of American software engineers and they tend to be at the unicorns and the well paying big companies like FB/Google
They've written articles about themselves on their regular website before, though under one of their blogs.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...
From what I understand, the CEO had a previous company that repackaged, setup & sold custom social network software to companies. He made decent money while it was hot and is using that to fund this endeavor. I guess you can't really blame him if he is self funding. I don't feel right about calling them out by name. I hope it works out for them in the long run.
If the world was a perfect place, sure. But it's not, and there's borders, immigration rules, and nationalism/patriotism on top of that.
It's relatively impolite to tell someone what they meant
The American economy is running on fumes and wishful thinking. Various industries have had to cut costs, try to carry on, and try to conceal the inherent and inevitable crappiness. This is how United does it.
Facebook must be going out of the way to reject Americans, and insist on hiring H1Bs for their openings. They probably pay low wages and the people who can get past their interviews must be thanking their gods they got out of shitty life back home and happily work as indentured servants at low pay.

Edit: About the big corporate job part, sorry about that. If you're looking, I'm happy to put you in touch with engineers at Fb (and a couple of other companies).
Tribe.net finally appears to be dead
> I've had a big corporate job where they had us train our h1b and then laid us off

This is indeed ridiculous. But how often does that happen? More specifically, how many companies go to the trouble of hiring H1B workers in lieu of local workers and then make the current workers train the replacements?

if the worker being trained was actually a contractor for one of those big indian IT companies, then it makes more sense.
Sorry, this is just vanilla redshift.
Charity begins at home.
Why is SEO Important?
As of maybe a month or so ago, tribe.net was still struggling along. Maybe a little new content, but interesting to go back and look at things.

I knew a sys admin type that was helping keep it going (years ago). I recall an investor group was trying to reboot the site (I talked with them about it). But, now, it appears to be finally be gone.
Unfortunately I do not yet know very much about Rust, but I wasn't referring to the specifics, but to the point that every programming language seems to have quirks and hidden rules.
I am talking about what value you could pass into the multiple dispatch code in the article I linked to. I know you can cause run time type errors using dynamic in general, but in the code I linked it was very well contained and water tight.

Dynamically typed languages usually represent objects as something like a struct with an int tag to represent the type, and a void pointer for its value. The actual reflection going on in the code I posted for multiple dispatch would surely be nothing more than an int comparison - same as what Ocaml probably does.
I would say that invading the territory of other nations and annexing it counts as involving yourself in the affairs of other nations. Historically, the US didn't want to interfere in Europe, absolutely, but it stuck its fingers in pretty much every other pie, excluding sub-Saharan Africa.

I mean, how do you characterise sending warships to scare Japan into opening up for trade in 1868 as 'isolationism'?
I can't shake the feeling that virtually every product decision at Google is made by an engineer.
Only if you group by occupation. Unless translators are paid the same as Bay Area software engineer.
I've always found the answer to this to be - thinly, superficially, and with poor dead prose.

I've never understood how they managed to cultivate the image they seem to have created.
> We've got Americans who need jobs.

Well, that's all nice and stuff but you're wrong. Firstly, if you're good at your job, you wouldn't need to be concerned. Secondly, you weren't concerned when all those manufacturing and blue collar jobs went to Mexico. What about when all those chemical plants and electronics/assembly/everything else moved to China? No sir, you weren't concerned at all. In fact, you enjoyed the lower prices that brought you. You didn't care about those factory workers in Flint. Why should your job be any different? Why shouldn't corporations be allowed to do whatever they need to do to deliver better shareholder profits and lower prices to their customers? America needs profits, not jobs! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp6-VLpWgRo
I mean not really hard data but UCSF did it at least.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/03/after-pink-slips-ucsf-...
I disagree. I have three kids, five and under, who are often at home while I'm also working from home. The key is credible boundaries. I actually have my workspace in the walk-in closet attached to the master bath. I lock the door, still have access to the facilities and water, and I'm good to do for as long as I want, and until I decide to emerge. My wife and kids know I don't respond to anything short of apocalypse and leave me alone. I think the setup is crucial, as is being clear about your boundaries and sticking to them with great discipline. It can be done. I do it two days a week, and those two days are way more productive than the three in the office.
I was originally very happy to hear pattern matching was coming to C#, but I don't think it is actually that useful a feature without discriminated unions/sum types too.
Oh yes, a lot of good it will do you, blocking ads after they infect you with malware. Let many starve; I'm not willing to risk it for the hunger of people that cannot find a sustainable business model other than advertisement garbage.
Facebook does have a PAC which many of its executives contribute to:

https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?cycle=2016&strI...
Which "every programming language" are those?
Go to the website of practically every tech company, and you'll find at least 3 open positions for coders. They're looking for qualified people to fill them.
https://pipecourse.com/
MasterCard adds fingerprint sensors to payment cards
Apparently Azure has been sneaking these features in over the past year or so... I do .NET dev on a daily basis on self-hosted infrastructure and was aware of VSTS and such, but after looking at it now I can safely say that back in early 2016, Azure was nothing like what I'm seeing now.

Back then the Dashboard was a steaming pile of Javascript and the TFS / VSTS split had just started. The new Portal appears to be much faster and it looks like they have much better docs:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/apps/aspnet/as...

(Thanks for the heads up)
That will be all right.

The point here is FB and microsoft are using the H1B law to hire creative workers.

While Tata and infosys are abusing the law to hire cheap workers.

So if FB and Microsoft hires more H1B, then it is better.
IMO it could be a dangerous move for them, especially if they mostly block their competitor's ads and land themselves in an antitrust lawsuit or something similar.
Not to mention that technology has always been a bigger displacer of jobs than immigration. H1B allows 65K immigrants per year. Much more than that is displaced by self-driving cars, warehouse automation, etc.
> The only reason for the difference in speeds between these languages is due to the quality of their interpreters, not the languages themselves.

That's not entirely true; there've been fairly good write-ups on particular elements of language semantics for which support inhibits VM performance; for instance, there were particularly good write-ups a while back by the JRuby team (Charles Nutter, specifically, IIRC) on Ruby semantics that are problematic in that respect.

Obviously, that doesn't mean that the level of investment by major firms in the interpreters doesn't have an impact, and Node is definitely riding high on Google's investment in making V8 speedy for Chrome. But language differences do matter.
> The edit/refresh cycle starts to slow

IDEA and Eclipse compile your code as you write it. And with Hotswap, you don't even need to redeploy anything. They also all offer REPL's that are much more sophisticated than anything Javascript has to offer.

I think you haven't used a JVM language and its ecosystem in a very long time.
> The obvious way to make H1B work for the high end software engineers is to approve applicants based on highest paid applicant first, instead of via a random lottery.

This would grant a massive advantage to companies like Google and Facebook over smaller companies, and more generally to geographic locales and parts of the industry with higher pay. In terms of economic and competitive impact for those companies and for Silicon Valley, it's hard to think of anything that could have greater impact. They already have an inherent advantage when it comes to hiring due to their financial firepower.
I miss the ANSI art scene. I remember 800# access that would live and die on the daily. That and phone bills.
I think a lot of that is baloney. Not all apps require the same degree of rigor. In fact most require quite little. If a library is widely used, that's a pretty good indication it's "safe".
Not sure, however we were contacted by a lawyer about a year and a half later, and some of the other employees had organized. at the time, another developer and I decided it was to risky to have the "hey, I sued my last employer!" badge on our career so we passed.
It doesn't make sense in context for a local municipality or government. Surely they exist to serve their constituents, which support them with taxes.

Likewise for a country, which exists to serve their constituents. It's not about being better or more important.
> Your thesis seemed to be that phone service was worse and more expensive due to AT&T being broken up, no?

I have no idea. What I can say is, relative to other countries and taking account of new technologies largely invented by pre-breakup AT&T, there's no clear improvement.

> You seem to be saying that competitive pressure has no effect on prices.

What competitive pressure? A national monopoly was broken up into local monopolies with hardly any more competition. In fact, our local-level cartels make things harder for new competitors than Ma Bell ever could; they have agreements (mostly enforced as part of the AT&T breakup) to share their easements and physical plant with each other as if they were all still part of the same company, but newcomers like Google Fiber have no access, and can be effectively held to ransom on a street-to-street and even building-to-building basis.

> I don't think that many people dropped their landlines for cell phones in the 80's, or even the 90's.

Not many people bought color TVs in the 1960s. Did their availability make black and white TVs cheaper? Hollywood movies better, or at least more spectacular? Not many people traveled by air back then, but did jet airliners make cars better and cheaper? I think the answers are obvious.

> I find it difficult to believe that fewer or no competitors would lead to the same or lower cell phone bills.

Maybe, maybe not. China Mobile is a monopoly but way less expensive than US providers. Europe is an oligopoly like the US but generally less expensive.
Your evidence for that is...?
Linux doesn't support it? My Comcast router has a /64 given to it by Comcast and all my linux boxes connected to it work like a charm.. although I haven't been able to get my dd-wrt router to pass them on yet.
> Both it and dart vm are limited to relatively small memory footprints (think 1GB) which just isn't good for some workloads and problems.

This hasn't been true for a while now.

node --max-old-space-size=8192 server.js

See also http://prestonparry.com/articles/IncreaseNodeJSMemorySize/
You just took me back to the 80s. Stale chips and cracks screens(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlVmPU6dh1M) from downloading games till 4 AM in the morning on a 1200 baud modem with friends. What an outstanding looking BBS! Thanks.
A Mathematical Thought on Learning
> Once you get the hang of promises, you are capable of doing concurrent asynchronous tasks in a manner that would be significantly more difficult in any other language.

FYI, anyone who has worked with Elixir or Erlang views these sort of statements about Node as completely ridiculous. The only languages right now that are making a serious effort to bring real concurrency to modern programming are Go and Elixir. Node with its single threadedness and global heap doesn't come close, since those are fundamental problems with JS. The papering over the defienct language concepts with attempts like promises don't address these issues at all.
Tror inte det blir brunch på stan på söndag
Actually you do get them all at once I believe! The current mechanism is a lottery which is executed in early April. It could be replaced with an auction as you propose.
But that violates the narrative they're pushing, that 'passion' should matter more than money. Another clever way they keep dev salaries down.
> Is that not common?

It probably depends on what stage the company is in. My employer relatively recently went public, but we only have one choice of provider.
Yes I do.

Increasing the supply should fix the problem but there are so many other factors at play in the Australian housing market. Tax concessions, foreign investment, wage stagnation, youth unemployment make it a very hostile market for many people. It's all too big to fail and prices need to go up to keep everyone's super from devaluing.

Investment in the education system won't lead to big change without deregulation of university either, something which is very unpopular.

UBI plus the policy you suggest would lead to a system where people can pay once and never have to work.

As Atlassian said, the problem with innovation isn't the money, it's the government which is only now just catching up with the new way business is happening.

>In the same way, preventing monoculture is a simple case of directly subsidizing people's visas/PR/citizenship on various grounds, humanitarian or otherwise, under my scheme.

If we still can't even select uni entrants based on those holistic measures what chance do we have of selecting migrants?
I thought the whole premise of capitalism is that jobs will be paid what they are worth according to supply and demand.

If the wages go up because there is more demand (or it's a job that people are unwilling to do), you will be amazed how quickly more devs will appear.

Putting the band aid of cheap workers from overseas will not fix the problem either.
It is, but there was also a certain amount of vanity to it. If you had the cash, you were the dude. You could watch as an entire region's (or even entire countries') mail flowed through your system. You probably walked down into your office and watched your busy Fido server (or servers) and a sweet stack of USR Courier external modems blinking away (you never wasted time on cheap gear) and when you participated in group mailing lists, you probably signed your e-mails with a sig that said something like "Bob Smith, Southern Star, 1:10/2", your address being a coveted and sweet, low-digit number. You were respected for your technical mastery of the system and in the very political world of Fido, few would challenge you.

I dreamed of running a big Fido hub. Sadly, Fido vanished before I reached the income level where I could have a bank of phone lines making long-distance calls all day and not worry about it. Just running a single phone line was an expensive challenge for me as a young kid. It took a lot of bussing tables at a hamburger joint.
> Firstly, if you're good at your job, you wouldn't need to be concerned.

You sound young. When you get older you'll find out that ability is only tangentially related to keeping one's job.
> H1B allows 65K immigrants per year.

H-1B allows zero immigrants per year, because it's a non-immigrant visa.
The Rise and Fall of the Amateur New York Subway Riding Committee
So, we are not trying to make the word, a better place, just to "make America great again"? Good luck with that.
If you love BBS art, be sure to check out https://artpacks.org
Happened to me last year, too. And it's not just big companies. In my case it was a firm with only about 30 employees. But outsourcing (in my case to India) has become so easy that companies of almost any size can do it.
Maybe they consider being able to work for substantially below market wages a "special skill". I can do a lot of things across both hardware and software but the one thing I'm really bad at is working on someone else's problem for peanuts.
I've answered this elsewhere in these comments.
The current problem is that companies are unwilling to pay what they need to to get what they want.

I understand your point about there not being enough senior devs locally, but I'm still iffy about that being true. I would accept that argument if the wages had doubled in the past few years or so, but that hasn't happened. The companies aren't trying hard enough.
You can get people to literally haul garbage for a living if you give them a good salary, health care, and decent job security.

I don't buy the whole "native workers don't want to do this" argument. Employers don't want to pay enough to entice native workers.
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Agreed, but the distinction you draw between kex and keys doesn't exist on the slide, which was my point. I could have worded that better.

The slide I referred to mentioned the instantiations, not all of which provide pfs.
I researched the "Bison goring" bit and found out this happens quite often:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/2...

Happened at least 5 times in 2015:

http://www.yellowstonepark.com/teen-gored-bison/

Apparently they hit you when you turn your back to them and they will toss you in the air. Sometimes more than once.

> On June 2, an Australian man was taking photos within five feet of a 2,000-pound bison in the same area when the bull suddenly charged him, hooking him with its horns and tossing him into the air several times. Incredibly, the man lived.

Not surprised people ignore the warnings about staying back 25 meters. At Algonquin park in Ontario, Canada we came across a giant male moose and everyone was staying well back. Then a Chinese tourist family walked right up to it within a few feet to take a photo. A man attempted yelling at them to stay back but they ignored the warning. Nothing happened but it really bothered me, mostly because they entirely disrespected the animal.
SREs are a tool to turn N ops engineers paid X each into 1 SRE paid 2X and N manual laborers paid X/4 each.

This doesn't make the role bad. But it's important to remember that the role exists as a cost savings to the org, not because it's an inherently better way to run a technical infrastructure.