skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
40x would be a lot more fair than what I've seen. Usually it's > 100-1000x in a different stock class(preferred/common).
The Starter version is free unless/until you make revenue. If you're using it at home, hobbyist, for dev until you start actually selling, it's free.

The language clarity is part of the language's beauty, yes, definitely agree. It's very nice to work in.
>> "why are you looking to leave your current job and why does this one interest you"

> So why isn't the question phrased "What are your expectations of how we work here?"

Because it's not the same question at all. I don't know what to expect from
your work practices yet, but (a) you work at a big scale and I'm interested in
that, or (b) you use Erlang/Ada and I'd like to use that professionally, or
(c) you make CNC machines and I'd like to move to writing industrial
hard-realtime code, or a number of similar reasons before you even know what
the company looks like from the inside.
I do similar, use amped headphones at my desk but cheap Bluetooth headphones for working out. I actually enjoy it because I don't have to worry about being careful with the headphones and I get to listen to a more "fun" sound signature for a short while. Chinese audio has really progressed well and it's really impressive what you can get for $30
Parts of the USA. Eagle Mountain, UT has a population of 30,000 and no cable TV. It is just down the road from the NSA building, it isn't like it is in the middle of nowhere. There wasn't much there in 1999. For a city that is very young - nobody wanted to put up money for cable.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Eagle+Mountain,+UT/@40.335...

I'm almost sure the county I live in now doesn't have cable TV anywhere. It costs a lot to roll out a network of anything. I'd guess a power network costs more than cable or fiber.
Tar and Curl Come to Windows
WASM replaces Javascript as the target of other language compilers. If you already use Javascript, WASM won't be much help. But WASM lets you compile C/C++ and with a bit more effort other languages into a bytecode instead of weird looking Javascript, or its more streamlined and still weird form, asm.js.
> rewriting the entire codebase in ActionScript first to take full advantage of GPU acceleration, before porting it into Haxe

So let me get this straight. It was already written in ActionScript. They re-wrote the ActionScript. All of it, then ported it to the Haxe language.

So the purpose of the first "re-write" was... refactoring it to use GPU acceleration in ActionScript? I guess they just hadn't gotten around to that optimization in the first place and used this as an opportunity to do so. But was it strictly speaking, necessary?
One of the reasons I stay away from full time jobs and prefer to freelance where "client" is more interested in my skills to do the job than testing, interviewing and evaluating me based on some weird criterion.
We shouldn't have to go through one of the 2 major parties to contend as a third party candidate. One way to solve this could be putting caps on campaign financing which would level the playing field for smaller 3rd parties. But that would never happen because the major 2 parties make the rules and that would hurt their dominance. By voting for either party we are essentially enabling the either-or system to continue
This type is actually known as a luma waveform histogram:

https://i.imgur.com/Gn4KQTW.png

Source:
https://github.com/epistemex/scopes
North Carolina has the 'triangle' area which has seen huge growth for many years. Texas has Austin, which is probably the closest to SV of any place I've ever been. It looks so much like SV you could probably confuse the two in pictures
Yes, your new employer would need to file a new O-1 petition with USCIS and if it were me, even though subsequent O-1 petitions are usually approved, I wouldn't give notice until the petition is approved. Note however that the O-1 visa in your passport remains valid even if you change employers as long as there is an underlying approved petition through the new employer.
As someone on a TN, can you expound a bit on that?
Well, so far the pro's have been fairly correct.

That doesn't mean there won't be a major correction but again it just sounded disingenuous to me.
I think you have to specialize on a certain industry, not just tech in general. Minnesota has quite a few startups in medical tech and there are big med tech companies there too that buy these startups. Same in Boston. That's an industry SV simply doesn't understand and being in SV is not an advantage. Banking may be a similar case.
Sure but my recollection is that Java was the first major plugin that really took off. Then realmedia and other players came along. It was only in the 00's that I remember Flash taking off.

My memory may be faulty so I'll bow to anyone who has decent sources.
Why XOD Switched from Travis to Circle CI
The postmarketOS [1] project is trying to fix that. It's effectively creating a unified base layer on top of phones without any Android libraries. There are also lots of efforts to add UIs and other packages as well. In addition, there's a handful of devices that have actually been ported to use the mainline kernel.

By no description is it ready for daily-driver use, but there's been a lot of progress for a project less than a year old.

[1] http://postmarketos.org
Why does it need to reload? Why not just have the votey button hyperlink to a dummy fragment URI like "#upvote_comment_1234", and something like a ping attribute [1] to send a request in the background, and a CSS rule like

a.votey:visited { visibility:hidden; }

to hide the button once you've clicked it?

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#...
> The question is have we reached a point where technology and globalization provide such enormous returns to the economies of scale that we can't go back or is all this corporate concentration just due to a lack of government enforcement?

At some point, America decided that only horizontal monopolies counted, not vertical ones.

Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate. Like banning content distributors from buying content creators. Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs. Microsoft got in trouble for trying to vertically integrate its browser into its operating system. But Facebook isn't likewise called to task for treating Facebook live streams differently than others.
Hi Peter,

Thanks for the AMA!

For a Dutch citizen, is it possible for me to work in tech for a YC startup? How difficult is it to get an H1 and what is the best route to go about this?
Isn't histogram an entirely different thing? As far as I know, to make a histogram you'd iterate over all pixels and, for each of them, increment histogram[pixelBrightness]. Here the author is not counting pixels, but exchanging coordinates.
Please, no. It's still peaceful here. Stay in California.
I do know who Luddites where and what the site is about. It was meant as tongue in cheek but I think it just wasn't that funny. Sorry about that.
Genuine question, since you are ruling out online test, homework assignment and whiteboard, what is the proposed alternative to the interview process?
If you don't have an organization in EU, they can't sue you in the U.S. because it's allowed here. It's like the U.S. trying to sue local Amsterdam pot shop because they sell drugs to U.S. residents.
Better make sure to let the residents of MN, WI, and MI know that the only way to access a large body of water is to go to Chicago.
> Wait, aren't IQ tests during hiring illegal in the US?

No. Any filter in hiring that adversely impacts a protected class and is not closely adapted to the work being done is illegal as a violation of the law prohibiting discrimination against the protected class.

The case in which this legal principle was established involved an IQ test being adopted as a direct replacement for an overt policy of racial discrimination, but IQ tests as such are not illegal (indeed, a much more recent case has upheld a police department using such a test and treating a too-high score as a negative factor in hiring.)

Of course, the pervasive mythology that IQ tests are prohibited itself makes them riskier, because an applicant who is turned down is likely to have encountered the myth or talk to someone who has, and seek legal help to challenge an IQ test, where they would be less likely to do so for other tests.
Advice on Building Voice Experiences from Alexa’s Former Head of Product
Incremental linking is something that most C++ toolchains support. Lacking it is currently our biggest pain point with emscripten. I'm very happy to be wrong, but my understanding is that it's hard to add that to emscripten because it's constructed using several different tools that have been chained together. I suspect a lighter-weight WASM-specific compiler backend would make standard C++ compiler features such as incremental linking significantly easier to do. Is that true?
Teaching daughters to be responsible for not getting sexually assaulted implicitly communicates that men are not responsible. It can easily be interpreted as victim-blaming.

That view grows out of our current mental models. Those mental models are the crux of the problem. Protecting yourself from criminal intent in no way absolves the criminal of guilt.

We don't draw that conclusion about any other crime. We don't tell people that thieves are not guilty of a crime if you failed to lock your house. We still encourage people to lock up to protect themselves from robbers while not thinking this somehow makes it your fault if the house gets broken into.

If you run into a bear in the woods and you run from it, it will incite the bear's chase instinct and get you mauled. Teaching people best practices for how to reduce the odds of getting mauled if they run into a bear is not saying it is their fault. Refusing to teach them how to effectively handle it because girls shouldn't know such things means girls will either not go out into the world or they will routinely get mauled. Both of those outcomes are harmful to the lives of girls. Neither one gives girls full lives end par with the guys.

There will always be predators. You will never achieve a perfect world. Not arming women to cope effectively with that reality essentially dooms them to sooner or later get preyed upon.

It also actively teaches them to be prey. But that's a nuanced discussion you are probably not ready for and I am not super awake either, so not really up for anything that challenging.
The ranking criteria is literally everything. To dismiss this as "merely" changing the ranking criteria is a false oversimplification.

If no ranking criteria exists then everyone would literally treat everyone else exactly the same and the world would be a boring and informationless place.

You are welcome to propose non-linear (e.g. multidimensional) ranking criteria however. But even with money, it is not literally the be-all-and-end-all of life, there are many things where you need more than just money, to be able to achieve.
> rich people as a rule don't like crappy weather

All those well-heeled Manhattanites might have something to say about that.
Doesn't a histogram throw away the positional element of the pixel entirely and bin by the number of pixels at a particular brightness? This doesn't seem to do that ...
Is lack of college degree an obstacle for getting a work visa? I’ve been working professionaly in web development area for 10 years but didn’t graduate.
Hmm. The cultural revolution may have attempted to wipe out the traditional Chinese culture, yet this idea is very much aligned with Chinese sensibilities (such as Confucian ideas).
I think talented foreigner employees will always have higher salaries (on average) because 1. it is a true pain in the ass to move countries, and 2. in some countries that's actually a requirement (like the Netherlands, for example).
Nobody's claiming it's flawless. I'm just objecting to the claim that it's untested.
Though I enjoy your example, and see your point, claiming that money is the same as China's social credit score is disingenuous. Money is not entirely centralized, you can spend it as you like, negotiate prices without government interference, and move it between people without the government deeming it acceptable. Other people can make you rich, the government doesn't get to tell them they cannot give you money.

Your analogy dovetails nicely with arguments against cashless societies though, as it would be easy to implement a centralized authority over currency clearing using a social rating system and centralized authority over banks.
I recently discovered that there is a direct path to Green card from a TN visa although it does involve a little more restrictions.

In your experience, what are the pros and cons of pursuing this path compared to transferring to an H1-B first?
The trickiest part is still explaining to others creating a private, self-describing, never-before-used email address, on-the-spot because the old static paradigm of email addresses is so difficult to shake.

Thanks for the feedback, stmw. Have you tried out the service?
>Missing is "your torturous interview process that consists of a worthless online test, a 10 hour homework assignment, and a grueling whole day interview with whiteboard trivia unrelated to your day to day work has a high rate of false negatives".

I simply refuse to do these anymore, which has unfortunately precluded me from FAANG level jobs. They give me panic attacks. It took over a year of searching in SV for me to find my current job because of it. Why is this the only industry in existence with such an accepted process?
The Complexities of Implementing Inline Autocomplete for Content Editables
"no access to large water bodies outside of Chicago area" - source?
Wouldn't diversity be an issue in a place like Ohio? My perception of the Midwest is that it's much more homogeneous and less inviting of minorities than California. Consequently it might be hard to attract diverse talent to relocate there.
I've always loved this book. I still remember the phrase "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND LET NO ONE LEAVE UNSATISFIED!" to this day.

I think it presents an incredibly realistic view of an ETI visiting this planet, especially if life is common in the universe. They don't come for us; hey are just passing through.

I have to wonder, realistically, how modern governments would respond to such a visitation.
I don't see anyone in this thread claiming this is acceptable. What some people are doing/saying is putting it in proportion: compared to things like cutting someone an arm loose (either intentionally, or unintentionally), murder, assault, and robbery this is far less bad. Because there's no permanent damage, and nothing was taken away. The initials even get removed over time. Is it bad? Oh yeah, it is, because the relationship between these 2 is professional and top down (doctor being authority on the matter, patient being sedated). I haven't seen anyone arguing this person shouldn't be punished.

> people grade things into "acceptable" levels of bad behaviour.

So I don't see anyone grading anything into acceptable levels of (bad) behaviour. Putting behaviour in proportion to find adequate punishment is part of the judiciary system which you can find back as working decently since trias politica invention.
The Adobe Flash authoring environment has been rebranded as Adobe Animate now that it can output html/js/canvas content. It’s closed source of course.

Long before that, however, the fairly simple to understand Actionscript 2 was replaced by the more powerful but much more complicated Actionscript 3 and it became a lot less friendly to a new programmer.
NIce distraction while the biggest tax overhaul for a long time is steamrolling over. Maybe we can ask the aliens to pay off our debt.
Right wing propaganda is so strong and coordinated these days that they can develop a new goal and drive a single message repeatedly across multiple platforms for months or years. This attack on Google is a new right wing message developed this year but they just keep hammering at it across all their channels tailoring their argument to the different audiences and continuously building mind share and momentum.
4. Intelligent life has evolved on Earth, alongside (or before) humans, and has mostly managed to cloak itself from human discovery.

Occam's Razor still suggests #3, but #4 is more likely than #1 and #2.
Thank you. That's all really good feedback.
Good News You Are a Bitcoin Millionaire. Bad News You Forgot Your Password
We've reached the point where utility-scale storage is a cost-effective alternative to natural gas peakers. The big story has been the California Puente peaker plant -- https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/battery-storage...

Long story short: NRG wanted to build a natural gas peaker plant, California Energy Commission said "can you do this cost-effectively with storage?", NRG said no, then people realized the "no" was based on 4-year-old battery figures. With updated figures (storage follows a manufacturing curve where the more we build the cheaper it becomes, so prices are dropping every year just as they've done with solar), turns out that yes, storage is a potentially cost-competitive alternative to nat gas peakers.

The application to build the plant is on hold to let the battery folks submit a few bids, I believe, but the econmic trends are clear: you can do peaker plants with storage now (or at least very soon).
This will ensure every web page application can be closed source then right?
These are all excellent questions and yes we help individuals as well as companies and accelerators. My answers to your questions, in order, are as follows: possibly but this can't be considered work, that is, receiving a financial benefit for performing a service or providing a product; possibly; the analysis is the same as your first question; yes, if you provide no service to the company.
I believe this is handled by the concept of the prevailing wage. I'm not suggesting it is well handled but in theory, you do have to earn at the level or higher dictated by the prevailing wage for your position.

If I'm not mistaken, there is an effort to push either this number higher or some other general salary requirement to around $100k/yr. I'm sorry I don't have precise information here.

Having prevailing wages of ~40k in areas where some people are paid >70k is probably a reason why some companies can hire below 'market' prices.
Unless the Midwest replicates California's laws on ownership of IP vis-à-vis employment (i.e. it is illegal for companies to claim employee IP for work done outside of work even via a contract), and that non compete clauses are invalid it's at a huge disadvantage.

Without at least those two the Midwest don't even stand a chance.
The sad, gradual decline of the fade-out in popular music (2014)
Thank you, Peter!
Why eat iodized salt? Wy not just take iodine supplement or just eat kelp? Or iodize some other foods perhaps?

By the way I could never understand why do people add salt to everything, I personally don't like it much. Also, isn't it supposed cause cardiovascular health issues?
New approach promises early warnings of soggy summers
Hi Peter,

Thanks for doing this.

I'm on an H-1B visa and my employment with my current employer ends on the 31st of December. I'm interviewing with other companies and am close to offer from one, but most of my interviews are scheduled for after the holidays. I was wondering if I could:

1. accept the outstanding offer, get my visa transferred, but then accept another offer should I get a better one?
2. How long can I be unemployed for, and still be considered as "maintaining status?"
3. Is it possible to have multiple companies apply for an H-1B transfer at around the same time?

Thanks.
Indian so E-1, E-2 is out. Thanks for the response.
I dunno, there's clearly a bar for "good enough". From the article it's not obvious to me that AWS Rekognition meets that bar (yet). 21% precision with 54% recall isn't the kind of thing that achieves "if you're using AI and your competitors aren't, you're ahead".

I like your framing/sentiment though: it's not about small differences in "betterness", it's about the difference in kind in going from "no ML/AI" => "whoa, it works!".

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not in ML).
This might sound radical, but I think a system of compulsory licensing should be instituted.

It worked for radio and it worked for physical video rental (in fact that's the reason netflix's physical rental catalog has almost every movie while their digital catalog has few and keeps shrinking)
Actually, yes. That PHEV (i3+REX, Volt, PIP, etc) has far more mechanical complexity and parts that can break. A pure BEV ends up being cheaper to maintain (because there's less to maintain).

(Disclaimer: I've put over 40K miles combined on my 2013 LEAF and 2017 Model S).
Hi Peter,

Related to greencard - is it possible to change jobs after receiving just I-140? if so what is the process/ documentation one needs to have.

And big thanks for doing this. We really appreciate your advice.
Non-calendar-based tool to allocate people/resources?
I'm looking for a tool where I can do lightweight project planning. I want to allocate time for the team over the course of a month and quarter, but I don't want to do it as granularly as using a calendar.

I currently use a spreadsheet for this. Each team member has N days in a month, and then we allocate those days to various projects, but not on particular dates.

The spreadsheet has some formulas so you can see what % allocated people are, and what % each type of work gets (Feature Development, Marketing, Support, Unplanned Engineering, Ops Requirement Engineering).

We use this to do OKR planning at the beginning of the quarter, and then from the OKRs we decide on tasks as a team, and then build the spreadsheet as a rough plan for the coming month and quarter.

Is there a SaaS that does this well and lightly, without day-level calendars?
I approve of your rant :)
London's ban on Uber hurts the people who need it the most
https://github.com/koute/stdweb

There's a todomvc example app written in rust with no javascript besides the loader.
Cryptocurrency Dashboard to View AI Trade Signals
I work for a US-based startup from India. The company was started in January 2016 and I joined in June 2016. The company applied for my H1B and I got into the lottery and I gave my interview in September 2017. The CEO of the company I work for is same as the CEO of the previous company I worked for. He left and started a new company and I joined him. It's now 3 months since I gave the interview. USCIS gave me the 221g form. Do you think I have a chance of getting the visa or have you experienced a similar case? Thanks!
Or you'll see FB/others decide the EU isn't worth it over time.

It's interesting how many people here believe that there is no other possibility other than "we get what we want to happen".

Your faith is, IMHO, misplaced.
There are many cases in history where other companies decided it wasn't worth the cost of doing business in certain countries.

Or they just successfully coopted the governments!
I'd have thought he's at least verifying that it's not a fly on the lens. I didn't think that pilots would fly completely blind.
Same in Germany: you can contract to gift something.

Of course, German contract law is very strange and alien to every other legal tradition (except Japan, I think, and that‘s only because they modeled their civil law on ours).
Competitiveness forces candidates to balance playing to the base with not alienating the other side, lest they turn out against you.

In the current system the question is who can be the most conservative/liberal. There is little downside to pushing further because there are more votes there but few people you’ll drive away.