skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To add to the above post. For people born in India the wait time is estimated to be more than 20+ years, since the queue is going to get longer and longer, and there are only fixed number of people who leave the queue every year. Unless you are on EB1, it is better to basically forget about getting a green card. Talking to my friends from India, the options are:

1) Do a PhD and hope to produce original, well cited research that qualifies you for EB1.

2)Similar to above, but if you are in a research team and can get good papers out that qualify you for EB1.

3)Wait and hope for promotions that qualify you for EB1.

4)Move back to India after a couple of years.

5)Try to move to Europe or Canada. Everyone is kinda fuzzy on this since no one really has clear idea of immigration laws in other countries.

6)Get enough money from some IPO to pay for investment based green card and hope for the best.

This is if you currently qualify for EB2 i.e 5 or more years experience or a Masters from US. I don't even know what is the condition for people in EB3. As one of my friend put it memorably, there is a person whose parent's haven't even met, that will get a green card faster than me, if born anywhere but India, China, Mexico and Philippines.

I know, barring a recession, I'll be in US for the next couple of years, but after getting a family, I think my tolerance for having my residence in the country coupled with my job would drop and I'll look and see if one of the above option works for me. Plus ageism in tech is something I fear as well.

I would love to settle here, but barring a law change, it is right now impossible for me.

EDIT: Separate line numbers for the numbers points.
There isn't automatic conversation trimming? This is a feature Signal added years ago, I'm surprised iMessage doesn't have it. Then again, Apple seems to have the whole iMessage platform in maintenance mode, the biggest updates are emojis, no giphy integration or new features coming out biweekly or anything like that.
> Who has successfully made a webmail front end that they could sell?

FastMail, but they had to put a whole service behind it.
I once flew from Chicago to Dushanbe via Istanbul. My bag was checked and a sticker for it was attached to my boarding pass. While traversing through Turkey, they required both my incoming and outbound boarding passes, and kept that one. So in Dushanbe, they wouldn't give me my bag, since I no longer had the sticker.

I had to wait until every single person was off the plane and had exited with their bags, and there was only one bag left, and me. Then they believed the bag was mine and let me take it.

All of this made me slightly anxious, since I don't speak Tajik, but it worked out, I guess.
It's nice to see that he has found the time to really keep your minds ticking.
More recently isn't this how Saudi Arabia is currently run?
Glad you're enjoying it! We're working on "live editing", which is the ability to see people write their code on their repl in real time. Let me know if you're interested in testing it out early! tim@repl.it :)
3x the comp -> 3x the drain. Pretty easy. Pay more.
This is universal income disguised as a real job?
Honestly I gotta agree with you here, bud. When I was growing up in Canada I had to keep my dreams a secret. If you had any grand goals people thought you were an egomaniacal weirdo. It wasn't until I seriously dated someone here in the US that I realized the difference: as part of the "delving into each others' inner lives" phase of the early relationship, I sheepishly admitted I had dreams of doing some pretty big things. I was greeted with an eye-roll and her saying "everyone wants to do something like that".

Here in the USA it's normal for everyone to have big dreams, and weird if they don't. I think I like it.
For one thing, because the vast majority of what people seem to consider "apps" are still documents (in that their primary purpose is to display formatted text) which use javascript. "webapps" in most cases are not distinct enough to warrant their own separate taxonomy.

Also, because the web incorporates hyperlinks, which means "apps" can link to "documents" and vice versa, which is useful, because you might have an attached blog or FAQ or something.
> Whom are they protecting? Cause it sure is not the average citizen.

But was there ever any indication to the contrary? How did we as Americans convert to the myth that our government, let alone our "intelligence" agencies, have any inclination to protect us or advance our interests? That has never been their practice ever.

Our government spent the better part of a century not only allowing 3.5 million of us to live in slavery, but actively facilitating and promoting it. Even after it finally put an end to this practice de jurie, it immediately allowed us to be enslaved as "prisoners", and today 2 million of us are in that situation.

I don't mean to bring up such generic anarchism here, but I think it's sharply relevant when considering questions like, "why do the CIA and NSA behave the way they do?" They were created and charged to do it. It's their job. We can debate about how best to end that job, but I really don't think it's reasonable to suggest that they ever had some high-minded democratic purpose.
Thanks for that reputable source -- but I'm still missing your implication. Do you mean to say that the NSA is primarily concerned with foreign intelligence rather than combating domestic terrorism? Then why so much domestic spying, the entire point of this conversation thread?

Furthermore, are you trying to tell me you think they've done a good job in their counterintelligence work? Honestly, given what we have observed in the Middle East for decades and what happened in 2016?
My 2017 Macbook Pro is five months old and the A, D, R, and T keys will lift right off with my fingers as I type.

I looked at them with a magnifying glass. The C-clamps that hold them in aren't broken. They just are stretched an extra micronanometer such that they don't hold the spoke anymore. It alone wastes a bunch of my time every minute as I have to fix the keys as I type a line of code, but the anger it provokes is even more distracting.

If I could go back in time five month ago, I would've simply bought a Macbook Air which still has the older keyboard. My previous computer was a 2014 Macbook Air and it's the best computer I've used. The battery lasted longer as well.

Another surprising quirk of the Macbook Pro is how hot it gets. I can't watch Netflix with it perched on my belly in bed like I did for three years with my Air.

It's comical how much I hate this computer. If I wasn't roughing it on minimal expenses in Mexico, I'd sell it and get a new Air. I'm glad I didn't sell my old Air because I guarantee inside of three months I'll be using it over this MBP. It just needs a new battery but there aren't any Apple stores here.
Domestic mass shootings are no where even close to the NSA's mandate.

Intelligence agencies DO NOT trumpet triumphs.

The NSA is not the FBI.

There's no arguments to be made here, there's just ignorance of incontrovertible and uncontroversial facts which can be easily looked up.
> [1] when did this even become a word?

Around 1996-7? Right around the time that HoTMaiL came about.
> I still reminisce about my lowest paying job, my first. It was probably the most enjoyable and satisfying.

Weird. I share this experience. My first tech job was really great, I was constantly doing interesting things, actively making things better for everybody all the time, really like all my colleagues, it was part time, and I made a pittance.
The concept of money is an incredibly corrosive social and mental poison. It forces debates about ethics and social costs/benefits into a value system that's completely artificial and has very obvious and dangerous limitations.
One of the only “free speech zones” on the internet.
BJJ beats everything else when fighting as a sport. Krav Maga practitioners have no problems dispatching BJJ fighters in the real world where there are no rules of illegal contact. That's what the author was differentiating between technique and art. If you think Lisp isn't the programming philosophy that beats everything else then read Paul Graham's article Beating the Averages - http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html.
I certainly benfitted from a hearty and possibly-sinister laugh, as the owner of a T450s.
I see where they're going now that it's pointed out.

The X pattern defines a single point of control where the lines cross, while the 'diamond' pattern creates (roughly) four outer lines of contact and thus for a complex terrain beneath allows for better control in the location on top of that uneven field.
No. Eight hours of soul-crushing boredom every day keeps people in such jobs from doing... anything they want. Like learning stuff that might help them contribute to society in other ways (in a more useful job, maybe).

> Not having a job puts you in a lower social caste

This is a stupid societal expectation that should be fought rather than supported in the way you say.
Right, but what else is the NSA ostensibly carrying out all this domestic espionage for if not to preempt domestic terrorism (which by and large has been dominated by mass shootings in recent years, it's been a bit since we had e.g. a bombing), which by all accounts is at its highest point in recent memory?
How does GDPR relate to NSA surveillance. . .?
Treating your shell as the environment and an editor as just one tool among many is a perfectly internally-consistent approach. Standard, even, considering how many of us do it. I don't claim it's the only workable way. Do us the same courtesy.
My comment was definitely taken out of context, I didn't mean to eat and run out the door. The intent was you need to be well fueled and not depleted.
Legal cannibis is absolutely a conservative opinion in the US. Most conservatives want government to just leave us alone.

Republican authored bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/975/

And Diane Feinstein opposed California’s 2016 legalization.

It’s ridiculous to suggest Democrats are more likely to legalize than Republicans because the facts don’t really support that. It’s much less of an obvious partisan issue. Remember, Democrats controlled the house, senate and White House in 2009-2011 and not a single legalization bill even made it to the floor.
It'll be almost entirely covered by your employer, and that number doesn't show up in the headline salaries they're looking at, anyway.
There's an economic theory that job satisfaction is a kind of compensation. That is, you have to pay people more to do unsatisfying jobs.
How did they survive without Al Gore?
Providing 100% power is clearly not going to work. However, it's vastly lower cost energy than hydrocarbon fuels. Cutting down fuel costs by say 2-5% is still worth a lot of money over 20 years of operations.

I am more curious about the scale of savings and the costs of trying to have a solar on top of the ship.
There was a time when reading email on the web was not a thing [0]. Reading mail on the web - as a new feature - is "webmail".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client)
>Then why so much domestic spying, the entire point of this conversation thread?

Oh yeah, that makes sense. Let's only worry about what other nations are doing, until their agents and activities enter our country. Then we might as well stop bothering. Makes sense.

<Furthermore, are you trying to tell me you think they've done a good job in their counterintelligence work? Honestly, given what we have observed in the Middle East for decades and what happened in 2016?

What are you referring to? Do you have a security clearance? Do you think that other nations aren't constantly attacking our electronic infrastructure and security? What in the world makes you think that you would be aware of any success whatsoever of intelligence gathering in the Middle East? What makes you think that the situation couldn't have gotten much worse that it did?
Same here.

We're a long ways from the days when your machine would come with sendmail running and accepting mail for your FQDN OOTB, though... so it's a little more difficult but certainly not out of reach of anyone who is willing to put into the time and effort to learn how to do it right.

(I plan on moving my mail to a new machine (well. new VMs) over the next few days and I expect to run into nearly no issues doing so. Then again, like rhizome, I've been doing this for ~20 years.)
American Express isn't afraid to drop a large merchant if they're mis-treating customers or not profitable, look at what happened with Costco. Visa/Mastercard/Discover won't go to war, but Amex will with a smile on their face.
Totally agree. I used Google Cloud Functions + Google Cloud Storage to deploy a single function “app”. We replaced a SaaS that was a UI for recurring plan signups over Stripe. It started costing us $500/Mo. I replaced it with 16 hours dev+testing.

It turned out really well and am very happy with it thus far. I expect maintenance to be minimal thanks to serverless.

Though I don’t think it’d work as well for an app with 100+ database tables. Definitely a middle ground in there.
I have a hard time understanding the comparison of aggregate market cap (a valuation) to GDP (an annual output). These seem like two very different quantities, with different units. How do you intend for us to interpret that comparison? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the aggregate revenues of those companies? (I'm not an economist, so I'm not sure those two quantities are comparable either, but they seem closer at least.)
They also outright get rid of questions that people provide good and helpful answers to. I once asked a question about a specific ML technique in regards to implementing in a specific c++ API. Higher ups said that the question was far too broad and against the guidelines, despite receiving at least 5 good answers to my questions before they got to it. They effectively shut up good conversation for the sake of a rule book they probably didn't write.
I'm honestly surprised to find out that it was still being ahipped.

It was the first webmail application offered at a .edu I worked at and that's been 15 years ago. It was -- or so it seemed -- "dead" then.
>but what else is the NSA ostensibly carrying out all this domestic espionage for if not to preempt domestic terrorism

Yeah... foreign terrorism only occurs when foreign entities stand at the border and throw things into our country. LMAO.
Perhaps I was too general. A more accurate statement would be if more than 3-4 languages are listed without any distinction between languages you're good at and languages you've just used, then I become skeptical. And I said skeptical, not that I reject the resume outright. I just find that more often than not those candidates don't actually know more than one or two of those languages very well. Or worse, they don't know any of those language very well. (Not that this is a bad thing! We all have to start somewhere; but listing a lot of languages in such a situation seems dishonest from my point of view).
Apart from VSCode, I'm also not a fan of Electron - but I do understand why people use it.

> When GTK and Qt both provide js api capabilities, what else is there to gain?

It's the HTML5. How would you write an xplat editor with GTK or QT? The obvious answer is to use Scintilla and after some Googling surrounding getting that right, you're successful! Now you want to start innovating the editor, with both the speed and bravery that the VSCode team do. Now you have problems.

As much as I despise HTML5, it does provide a canvas that behaves consistently across platforms (so long as your browser is consistent, which Electron is). I can't see why you'd use it for a music app or so forth, but rendering a text editor is a surprisingly difficult task - it does present genuine benefit in this field.

You could use OpenGL or Vulkan, but then you'd spend your life writing the UI framework and wouldn't have the xplat layer that NodeJS offers.
> After 9/11, nobody wanted privacy or to even talk about privacy.

Yup! And not only did the NSA turn into a monster, but so did the TSA (or more aptly, that monster was created), the biggest theatre troupe on the planet, because that's all it is.

The most eye opening thing happened just recently to cement this in my mind. After the Superbowl parade in Philadelphia this year, I caught a ride from PHL to SFO. Basically everyone else in the world was leaving the same time as me, so there were lines stretched around the airport to get through security. The line for my terminal began in the parking structure.

So you know what they did? Of course you do. They relaxed all the rules and let everyone through metal detectors. Shoes on. Belts on. Liquids? Bring em through. Laptops and tablets, leave them in your bags. That giant invasive scanning machine? What do we have that for anyway? Step on through the metal detector, I don't have time to grope you today. It was the most fun I've had in an airport since 2001.

So let me get this straight. For years, I've been disrobing in public and subjecting myself to groping on the off-chance that someone might have a bomb tucked under their scrotum, yet on the BUSIEST DAY EVER it's okay to throw all those security protocols out the window.... why??

But no one questioned it then, in 2001 and the years thereafter, and no one is questioning it now.

Oh, and for anyone who's wondering, after processing a record number of passengers for that airport with absolutely no security screening, a total of zero (0) airlines were taken down that day.
I think they are.

Canada is importing talent from Hong Kong and Shanghai to work for American and Canadian companies, at salaries that are below market in US tech hubs, but appealing enough for those who wish to move to North America. At the same time, Canada is exporting talent to the US because of those same good-but-not-good-enough salaries.
The irony of this article to me is that the Aeropress paper filters restore the brightness the author found missing when using the mesh filters.
Yes having witnessed it myself, it's tragic the self inflicted wounds Montreal takes, while peoplr still pretend it's a tech hub (only in the tiniest of sense)
Thought question:

Is truly a good idea make the web browser even more powerfull?

If the answer is yes, take in account that make advertisement and privacy-haters more power....
The article isn't true. It was once thought that cordyceps and other parasites control the mind of their hosts but something much more sinister happens; the invaders take control of the nervous system of the creature moving the limbs against the will of the host.

Intuitively, minds are so idiosyncratic that it would be very difficult to generalize a behavior like this.

Citation: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/how-the-...
I got around that by just making another google account specifically for my old cell number turned voice number. I really wanted a 505 area code but knew I'd inevitably miss a site for which I'd need to update the 2FA number, so I just grabbed <my phone number>@gmail.com and ported the number.

It's also been helpful given how many people absolutely refuse to stop calling my old number despite explicitly telling the resistant ones "I have a new number, I _will_ stop checking the old one, and I can't answer calls to it anyway".
That's an excellent question. It depends, to some extent, on the question if a solution with less technical debt would've been possible at all.

Often, the "turds" were either the only thing possible at the time, or the savings there opened up other opportunities. Not always - sometimes the "cost savers" simply insist on digging a grave for the project.

But that's the main distinction - if it's bad and yet lives on, there has to be value in it. No company spends money on something that doesn't provide value. I suppose what you are arguing is that the product doesn't necessarily provide the maximum value possible. But that's a pretty high bar to meet.

There's always a "good enough". In a perfect world, engineering and product "good enough" coincide. If only one is good enough, you get either a badly engineered financial success, or a financially disastrous monument to engineering.

All other things being equal, only the former lives on. And hence, "turds live on" - and make money, and pay paychecks. And if their maintenance costs exceed their revenue, they usually get shut down.

(I'm deliberately ignoring all projects that can afford to ignore money. The rules are different there.)
The language laws thing is not a big deal. People just get on with it.

Montreal is great. I'm here, and if my kids don't go into IT they will work in another sector and will be able to afford to live.

I'd consider SV a death sentence. Who wants to work when you will never achieve financial independence because you'll never own your own land? And if you have a huge mortgage you are your boss's bitch forever.
I agree there's more ambition/drive in the US (Just observed, never having worked there), but there's lots here too. People do start companies.

I think the bay area tends to do a lot more experimentation darwinian style, but I suspect it's because they can (more seed money/angels, etc)
Is there a reason you're being so intentionally mean throughout this thread? Take a deep breath, maybe a quick walk around the block. Your points are being lost because your vitriol is so overpowering.
This one made the rounds just today: http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2018/05/university-of-minneso...

Chronic harassment by a well-known figure in the NMR world at the University of Minnesota - but it's all fine, he continues to be on the payroll. If you don't acknowledge the misconduct the aggrieved employee leaves, and meanwhile you can continue shaking the money tree. There need to be serious financial consequences for the company, and maybe when you go for interviews HR shouldn't insist that the relationship with the previous employer was all sweet-sweetness.
Interesting. I program for a living, love Lisp and my hobbies are playing Jazz guitar and training in Tae Kwon Do (the art, not the sport) where I'm a 2nd Dan. I never considered the similarities between the three things. What's really interesting is the concept of transgression. In the end you don't learn Lisp, Jazz or Tae Kwon Do. You learn techniques and then learn how to create your own art. I've watched many students struggle with that concept through the years with Jazz and Tae Kwon Do. Never thought about that applying to Lisp as well.
The EFF has an implementation guide I found interesting.

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2017/10/do-not-track-implem...
The arXiv links:
- https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263
- https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.06678
>generally well-received

>muh popular opinion

The fact that the writer happened to write something that lots of people enjoyed neither contributes to nor detracts from the fact that this article is full of willfully contrarian edge, befitting a teenager.
> - Aggressively pursue the brightest non-American engineers, who are hesitant to move to USA because of immigration restrictions.

This is an interesting point. I feel like Canada does do this, but it sort of backfires on itself. Something my wife once pointed out is that a lot of immigrant tech talent in Canada is inherently risk averse by virtue of being primarily chinese and indian tech workers, whose cultures are heavily conservative cultures that tend to celebrate social status over risk-taking innovativeness
> NSA [is] just as responsible for dropping the ball on domestic terrorism every other week

Domestic terrorism isn't the NSA's purview. Their job is signals intelligence against the rest of the world.
Sure it's shallow and ill considered, but it's also a not uncommon view among a large part of the population. While a pro NSA voice is not common here, providing lucid counter arguments would allow all of us to view the augments and maybe learn how best to counter these types of assertions in other venues.