skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's hard to understand why people are blaming the companies for playing by the rules of a system that is clearly dysfunctional.

They weren't playing by the rules, that's the point. The problem is no agency really had the authority to do anything about it (i.e., the rules were mostly in practice unenforceable.) It was essentially one of the many, many "good faith" type of laws we have in the US, where the government simply assumes that, because laws and rules exist, they will be followed, and there's a very high bar for action to be taken against lawbreakers. Whether you ascribe that to malice or incompetence on the part of our lawmakers is up to you.

From the GAO report on H1Bs:

> Under the law, in certifying employers’ initial requests for H-1B workers, Labor is limited to ensuring that the employer’s application form has no obvious errors or omissions. It does not have the authority to verify whether information provided by employers on labor conditions, such as wages to be paid, is correct. Moreover, some of this same information is reviewed again by INS during its assessment of employer requests for workers. Further, Labor has limited authority to ensure that employers are actually complying with the law’s requirements after the H-1B workers are employed in the United States. Unlike under other labor laws it enforces, Labor generally cannot initiate enforcement actions (such as conducting investigations and subpoenaing employer records), even if it believes employers are violating the law. [2]

Keep this in mind when people tell you there's no such thing as H1B abuse because the rules say they're required to pay the prevailing wage, or that they have to try to hire Americans first. For decades there have been virtually no consequences for flagrantly violating the rules. If it was especially egregious then you might face a lawsuit...but since you're a corporation with deep pockets and then people suing you are generally laid-off employees, that's a small risk, and you probably end up settling. [1] Keep in mind that no matter how much people cheerlead H1B, this [3] is the day-to-day reality: Americans being fired and their work being contracted out to these massive H1B firms on the cheap.

I'm not against a visa allowing companies to hire talent they really can't get in the US, but that is not at all the reality of the H1B program as it exists today, and thousands of people have suffered for it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/us/lawsuit-claims-disney-...

[2] http://www.gao.gov/new.items/he00157.pdf

[3] http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-201502...
I agree with you. I put more the emphasis on the optimality of the solutions because that was the feedback from the recruiter. During the interviews, I made sure to talk through the problems indeed. That is a whole skill in itself.
Agreed. This reflects the worst on the actually skilled Indians who get lumped in with the rest.
Not mentioned - the Fed raised interest rates in December and March. With some signaling that this could continue. This has impacts across all of Venture Capital, but particularly late stage... And especially capital-intensive business, which seem to be the prominent examples here.
> Conversely, a free market is free for monopolies to form;

Which will make it non free. Free market requires mechanisms of preventing monopolies by its definition.
> I get real tired of web soft boys coming into native and complaining about how complicated it is on the metal.

I've done a lot of native development, real native development, not this fluffy Java stuff and Android is still overly complicated in both design and tooling.

My needs as a developer on Android are far from cool and that shouldn't be unnecessarily hard -- but it is.
Making the market "monopoly and oligopoly free" by regulation, as a synopsis.
I'm becoming convinced that the only way to get into Google is to get in as an intern or new grad if OP studied for 6 months and still didn't get an offer.

It doesn't seem that way at other top companies like FB, Amazon and MS from the people I've talked to.
The "right" people were benefiting from the previous state of affairs.

Unfortunately I think the phrase about USA political parties, "there are no longer ideologies, only interests" applies.
I had the same experience with Amazon--dinged with no feedback.

Normally I'm a sucker for irony, but when they sent me an auto email a few weeks later asking _me_ for feedback (ie, a survey on the hiring process), I didn't find it immediately funny.
> Do you honestly think every tax bracket pays the same effective rate as the middle class?

Are you talking to me? Because I didn't say that. What I said is that the rich pay for most for government services, which means that per person, they pay WAY MORE than their fair share. Elon Musk will be paying nearly half a billion dollars in income tax this year, what did YOU contribute? How much would you need to sacrifice in your life to pay a tenth of what he paid this year alone?
People that use Unroll.me grant it access to their Gmail account for its newsletter bundling feature. However Gmail permissions aren't fine-grained about only allowing them access to certain senders so Unroll.me has access to all email. While they are in your email, they sneakingly check everything in your inbox, even senders that you have not rolled up, and share "anonymized" data. This is my hunch of what they're doing given the input / output they have, but none of us can really know exactly without seeing the code. They're also tweeting a lot today trying to convince people that they scan one's inbox in good conscious.
For those interested in evidence-based nutrition, I highly recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/

P.S. Dr. Greger's book is a great resource as well. He does a really good job of checking and referencing quality articles from peer-reviewed journals while looking at the balance of the evidence: https://nutritionfacts.org/book/
My understanding of what happened to OpenSolaris after Sun/Oracle abandoned/closed the project is:
Illumos develops the base/core for open source OpenSolaris based derivative distributions of which OmniOS is one of about 11 or so.

It seems to me, unfortunately, that since there are so many OpenSolaris descendant distros, and that Linux can only barely sustain 3 large commercially supported general purpose distros (Redhat, Ubuntu & Suse, but please correct if I am wrong), that there has to be some amount of consolidation that needs to/will take place if OpenSolaris/Illumon is to survive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos#Current_distributions
Part of the issue here is defining "market" and their scope. MS has a monopoly on desktops, but how much impact does that have with people increasingly shifting off the desktop? How do you define Facebook's market? If it's "social media" does that include blogging? twitter? email?
Self-Transcendence Correlates with Brain Function Impairment [pdf]
I believe Google lets you view all apps with access to your account. Check that, change your password, and you should be good.
> That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks like. What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this behaviour.

I've joked for years that the end stage of capitalism is "one company selling you oxygen".

Turns out someone else had that idea back in the 1920's and there is a 'sci-fi' book based on the premise.
This is an excellent piece that explains a lot about how we got into the situation we're in. Another quote:

By the late 1970s, the populist Brandeisian anti-monopoly tradition—protecting communities by breaking up concentrations of power—had been air-brushed out of the debate. And in doing so, America’s fundamental political vision transformed: from protecting citizen sovereignty to maximizing consumer welfare.
Uber is such a morally bankrupt company. Why is NYT trying to frame it in a good light?
These companies not only abuse visa they abuse humans. They should be put to trial for paying around 4800 USD per annum at entry level.
If I'm reading you right, you're worried about e.g. some crackpot calling himself a doctor who rubs moonstones on an infection to make the evil spirits go away. An unfortunate consequence of "anyone can start a medical practice" is that the crackpot would be allowed to operate, but the negative aspects could be mitigated by:

* Somebody starting a "Yelp for doctors"

* The government could give some approval stamp to doctors using all the existing restrictions, and you could always ask a doctor "Are you XYZ-approved?" It would be a very serious crime for a moonstone-carrying crackpot to lie about his governmental approval, and his status could be verified on a government website. People who solely use government-approved doctors would still benefit, since licensed doctors would still be competing against unlicensed doctors, so there'd be a limit to how much the government policy could distort the market.

* People who repair your sidewalk or furnace often advertise "licensed, bonded, and insured". A furnace can burn your house down, which seems a similar risk to medical malpractice. You could ask your doctor if he's licensed by the government, has put his personal capital into a bond, and is insured.
http://archive.is/E7RPB
Kind of reminds me of the "motte and bailey"[0]. The misleading but technically accurate claim gets all the play and all the reaction. The author goes on Twitter and says "golly gee I didn't mean for you take it like that, all I really meant was [much weaker claim that wouldn't have gotten all this attention in the first place]."

The correction bounces around but never takes hold the way the initial claim does and people quietly go on believing their initial interpretation. Sad.

[0] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey
I agree with the noise of the process. Actually, the whole experience was a good one for me, maybe I didn't express it in the post? Anyway, I got a job in Amazon UK at the end, so not too bad.
That's the proverbial 10x developer---not all the gains are in pure coding speed, but also in making fewer bad turns.
This starts with:

[..] the archetypes that inhabit
organizations (Sociopaths, Losers, Clueless)

...which is quite clueless itself, and mean-spirited to boot. I guess it plays well with the libertarian every-man-for-himself fantasy.
Their Summit keynote positioned this as an Oracle killer.

I'm on board if they've worked the data losing kinks out of their migration service.
There are people that want to buy telegraph service?
You don't think medallion taxi drivers are not contractors also? Ask you next taxi driver how much he is paying to rent his taxi and how it all works. Maybe he'll be an employee, but more likely he will be paying a flat fee of $3000/month to the medallion owner and doesn't make money for himself until he's paid off that debt. And that is in my small hometown of 300k people.
I used to be a very conservative religious person. I had a whole package of beliefs that were ingrained into me from birth, and I grew into them and claimed them as my own. I thought that homosexuality was very damaging to society. I thought that human caused climate change was either fake or that there was nothing to worry about even if it were true. I did not believe that humans evolved, or at least I was somewhat conflicted about that. I thought that creationism belonged in schools. At one point in my early twenties I even listened to Rush Limbaugh and agreed with him (I cringe every time I remember that). I knew so many things, and I was happy to know them.

I also liked to think analytically and enjoyed the intellectual stimulation I got from certain online forums (this one included). I liked how people would trade counterarguments and keep each other honest by pointing out bad thinking or logical fallacies. When someone would argue against something I believed in, I would argue back. From their perspective, my mind was not being changed and they were wasting their time, but from my perspective, the things they would call me out on stuck with me. I tried to avoid falling into logical fallacies and bad arguments because I knew I'd be called out on them. This restricted the ways I had to justify my beliefs, so that made it challenging. Then at church I noticed that nobody was being held to these standards at all, and fallacious reasoning was being let fly freely and constantly. I experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance during that point in my life which ultimately led to deeper investigation and study. I give a lot of credit to honest online debaters who pushed back on my ideas and kept me honest about the substance of my arguments.
You seem insistent on having some side-thread argument with me for some reason.

> once you remove two bottlenecks...

The article we're both commenting on goes to great length to point this out. I don't know why you're trying to convince me or anyone else of this.

Yes, in a network library malloc overhead isn't usually a worthwhile thing to worry about, but libcurl is hardly just any random library.

> libc is not the OS, it's the standard library for C.

I'm not trying to convince you that you should consider libc part of the OS.

I was merely clarifying that in the context of my comment, which you replied to assuming I just meant the kernel, that I was talking about the C library as well.

FWIW lots of people use "Operating System" to mean the set of software you get by default. OpenBSD, GNU, OSX, Android etc. definitely consider libc to be part of the OS, and Android probably considers its java class library part of the base OS. If everyone meant "the kernel" by "the OS" we'd just say "the kernel".

You don't have to agree with that, but correcting people on that point is about as futile as trying to convince people that your use of "hacker" is correct.
I've got an office in Bangalore. I have not interviewed a single person from the big outsourcing agencies who had real talent. Bangalore is packed with talent but they all cost at least 3* more what the outsourcing agencies are paying.
AHCA, Obamacare is definitely better than before, it guarantees open access to many who didn't have it before. A good thing.

But it didn't go far enough. It played in to the corporate healthcare system demands by not offering a competitive public option. The so called Blue Dog democrats blocked that, which is such a shame.

Far better than anything the Republicans have put on the table. The problem is that we basically have one sane party which is backed by corporate interests, and another party backed by the same or similar corporate interests which plays off fear for support.

I believe the only fix to this is to weaken party entrenchment, and have ranked choice voting in place; but who in these two parties would actually support that?

[Edit: typo]
A Practical Introduction to PyQt's Undo/Redo Framework
External? So change the SD card and it's gone?
I'm curious, why fair distribution?

Better question, if there are 100 visas allowed, and 80 experts needed for software, and 50 experts needed for bio, then how do you compare software experts vs bio experts? What metric do you use to justify someone is more of an expert overall? It is apples and oranges.

Arguably, the most effective justification is that experts in X are compensated higher, therefore they must extract more value for the US economy, than experts in Y. A simple sort on minimum-guaranteed-salary seems best.

However, this stops being the case if we have no cap. But a limitless H1B systems is not a likely reality.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Yes, regulations aren't perfect. Yes, regulatory capture is a problem. Neither of those things is a reason to not have regulations.

>>that corrupting it with noise will have negligable effect on efficiency and technological development

What really hurts efficiency and technological development is monopolies. A company that is a monopoly has very little reason to innovate. We see this all over America with Internet Service Providers. They only improve their service levels if they fear competition (like what happened with Google Fiber).
I don't know where the RAM requirement come from. I've been compiling shellcheck on VPS's with less than a gig RAM for a year and never hit a memory issue.
If a key problem is the need to build every app for multiple platforms, why wouldn't an abstraction layer be a valid approach?

Sure there have been some failed attempts in the past but why not encourage RN? Clearly it's working for many applications and being actively developed.
We are always do afraid of destroying big corporations because of the associated jobs. However, if there was a demanded that those companies were filling then other companies will take their place and grow to fill that demand. Companies that get frequently replaced by innovative competitors and get seriously punished for misbehavior rather than just getting off with a small find would make for a much more competitive economy and a more desirable society.
Yes, ecosystems change constantly. An ecosystem is a state and the state changes as its components change.

The fact that this is news to you is a clue that perhaps you know less about this subject than you think you do.
That assumes one's goal is to go into soul sucking middle management at a large tech company. For many of us, that is not our goal.
It looks like Branch uses an ensemble of techniques for matching, but one (perhaps the main) is just a browser cookie, so it happens outside of a third party native app. Based on the recent notes on that page, it sounds like Apple isn't too fond of their approach.

https://dev.branch.io/getting-started/matching-accuracy/over...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SiabeNR_q0U
Why is manual regression testing still happening in 2017?
It's true that I don't use Python or Java (although I have used it in the past - wasn't a big fan, and now C# seems so mch more powerful) and do use Typescript and (unfortunately!) Javascript. Python is something I do want to get into though, just to find out for myself.

There are some great .NET libraries for working with RabbitMQ, such as EasyNetQ, Chinchilla and more recently I'm loving RawRabbit. There are also good libraries for working with ElasticSearch, and I use Marten a lot for using Postgres as a document store (great library).

The place I work is indeed an MS shop, but we're all open minded and use other stuff occasionally at work, and quite often outside of work. Maybe we're in the minority there too though; I know plenty .NET devs who do have tunnel vision, but I suppose you get that across al languages.
Many apps request "always" level of location tracking. Apple allows you to opt-out of location tracking for any app. Granted, this renders Uber a bit harder to use as you have to enter a pickup address, but you can still use the app.
And how much they are payed by their customers for essentially warm bodies and churning crappy Java code
Because you don't want any phone in the world to be allowed to access any bank account in the world by just giving a name and password.

Fingerprinting is a form of 2 factor authentication, it's easy to perform and it's relatively efficient against fraud.
"My voice is my passport. Verify me."

The flaw of this authentication mechanism was detailed in popular culture many decades ago.
algorithmia.com, it has codebounty where you can pose your problem
Meh, just try again in a year. High variance.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14179387 and marked it off-topic.
This is behind many (maybe most) of our problems in America. For example, this is the biggest source of what's wrong with our healthcare system.

Businesses have built up "moats" throughout the system, leading to high prices and poor service. This is the source of the "cost disease" that makes our healthcare too expensive.

Competition is part of the very foundation of capitalism. Without it, capitalism itself doesn't work. So we better figure out some answers.
This is a completely different scenario than an average app. Curl is used in cars and other embedded devices. This things matter for this scale.

>"RAM is cheap"

Memory is cheap on servers and desktops. SSD can be treated as slow RAM.
If by "right" you mean a wealthy, unified bloc of Democrats and Republicans, then yes.
No feedback has been the norm, in my experience. Can be frustrating when the company asks you to invest 4+ weeks on phone screens, take-home projects, and in-person interviews, and then emails you a form letter rejection and cuts contact.
You are spot on.
As an Indian who's been working in IT for over a decade now, I concur. I am a software engineer and many people are surprised to see that I have not moved to a managerial role. Software Engineering is severely underrated and I have been on the receiving end of the dump work as you put it. It was frustrating to see the rampant nepotism and the rat-race to get to the US. I spent many a sleepless nights to gather the requirements from a US developer only to have the credit seized and see manager exploit us even more. With these new guidelines the so-called Onsite leads/managers are getting their comeuppance.
Certainly activity is higher amongst teams that deal with higher wealth individuals, so your question about specific people is broadly correct.
To get into what? Bypass biometric ID systems that are common in telephone banking systems. Audio was recorded in high fidelity via smartphones from customers and then manually pieced together in an audio editor and played back down the phone to a biometric system in order to bypass detection. As an adjunct, certain banks in the U.K. have microphones hidden in the counters of physical branches that cross reference your voice with known patterns such is the prevalence of such systems.
In regard to secret words, it was a team working within the bank that shared information to crack words. High value CS teams are traditionally very small to keep "the personal touch". CS teams never get access to the full secret word. They get prompted with which questions to ask and what response to expect, so therefore gluing small answers together is the trick.
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017 – MIT Technology Review
Yeah, they're going to be hearing from Square Enix's lawyers.
Perhaps not the best explanation but this the gist, as given by Scala's creator in an interview https://youtu.be/p_GdT_tTV4M

> It's harder then it looks, because .NET has a very rich type system which happens to be not the Scala type system. In fact, it's very hard to map some of the parts of the Scala types like higher-kinded types...so it's a difficult task, much more difficult than JS or LLVM. LLVM is likely going to be the third target [after JVM and JS] because there we don't need to fight a type system which is foreign to us, which is what the .NET one is.
If the notes only discuss discrete valued RVs there is no problem. This looks like the case since from greping for "continuous" there are few results: https://github.com/ermongroup/cs228-notes/search?l=Markdown&...
For those of you not familiar with what a "2.7" means on the Google hiring scale, the rough scale is:

1 - I will resign if Google hires this person.
2 - I don't think this person should be hired, but I could be convinced otherwise.
3 - I think this person should be hired, but I could be convinced otherwise.
4 - This person should definitely be hired.

(interviewers can use decimal scores)
Attackers who have commit access to your repository can do a lot of bad things quite easily.
If var starts with a '-' then you'll get surprises.
It does, yes, but it's also not secure if an adversary has two versions of a file (they can partially decrypt it, I believe).
Use the proper tool for the job, that I agree with. For most sysadmin tasks, that is shell scripts. Yes you have to be aware of the warts, as with any language or framework.

I would no more want to do system administration with Python than I would want to write a web application server in bash.