skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> but damn does it feel like it will only get shittier and shittier to be poor in this country.

I'm not sure how much of the outside world you have experience, but I can tell you categorically it's already much, much worse to be poor in the USA than any other developed country.

Poorer people in the USA are desperate, it's no wonder there's so much crime and so many people in prison compared to other developed countries.
> I was fooled into joining because I met with a data scientist and an "experienced web developer" without actually looking at their code.

Is it typical to be able to look at a company's code before signing up? After having a similar experience, I wish I could make that a standard part of my interviewing process. (Brief backstory: I would never in 1000 years have taken my first development job if I had seen the code first, but HR and the carefully selected engineers who could tell positive stories gave me a false impression of what was going on.)
I think your first paragraph is a result of you viewing this from the perspective of someone knowledgeable about technology. The vast majority of people using Android phones get their apps exclusively from the Play Store and assume Android is exactly the same as iOS in that way.
That is because almost all of the giant Redwood and Giant Sequoia trees in the Pacific Northwest were destroyed by logging by the start of the 1920s. Darius and Tabitha May Kinsey's Kinsey, Photographer: A Half Century of Negatives is a book of Darius Kinsey's photographs of logging camps in Washington and Oregon in the 19th century. The camps were inland and there are many photographs of the giant trees growing in the mountains. The giant tree forests did not stop at the US border, and BC had the same logging boom in the 19th century. It is disingenuous to claim that new growth coniferous and Boreal forest is the only thing BC has ever had, when most of the BC giant tree forests were destroyed only a few generations ago.
I think quite a lot of companies are visa reliant. Amazon's H-1B issuance is up 78%.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/13/h-1b-use-skyrocketed-...

Meanwhile there are a bunch of northeast restaurants and crab houses who can't get H-2B seasonal workers at all, and very much need them - they're not getting Americans to do that work.
http://www.wboc.com/story/38923157/empty-crab-houses-look-to...

Seems like a disproportionate increase on the one hand, and disproportionate decrease on the other hand.
Eh, I dunno. My Data Manager [1] (owned by Mobidia / App Annie) is still going strong. It along with other VPN-based apps are a major source of user-level app usage and engagement data being sold to large corporations and investors. In-app analytics libraries are another source (which are heavily fragmented since they only can track apps they're packaged with) but it's going to be a lot more difficult for Apple to regulate those.

Until Apple starts banning all of these types of apps and libraries (which their recently updated policies indicate they just might [2]), I view this as more of a strategic play against Facebook as opposed to in the best interest of users.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-data-manager-track-your/i...

[2] http://www.integrity-research.com/new-apple-policies-threate...
Non-paywall coverage on The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/22/17771298/facebook-onavo-p...

"Onavo, which began as an Israeli analytics startup focused on helping users monitor their data usage, was acquired by Facebook in 2013. Its VPN provider then became a data collection tool for Facebook to monitor smartphone users’ behavior outside its core apps, helping inform Facebook’s live video strategy, competition from other social apps, and its decision to acquire companies including WhatsApp."

Geez, man. That is evil. Especially since most users don't know the difference between "security" and "privacy", and probably assume that it would have the exact opposite effect.
Thanks. We took a crack at fitting it in 80 chars.

Submitted title was "H-1B visa-reliant Cisco secured visas for foreign workers instead of US citizens"
worked fine for me. CloudFlare can sometimes have issues contacting the webservers.
You would be saving the lives of millions of krill but sealing the fate of related millions of barnacles and whale lice...
Are you the same ImaCake who once used to play Soldat, Minecraft also, cats?
There is basically an unlimited supply of people that like to write novels, make programming languages, play soccer, or make video games.

There is an unlimited supply of people who say they would like to write novels, make programming languages, play soccer [professionally], or make video games. The supply of people who have the drive and patience to complete a novel or programming language or video game for free or on spec is arguably much smaller. The same is also true of open source libraries. There may be an effectively unlimited supply of GitHub repositories containing new JavaScript frameworks and template languages, but the majority of them haven't gotten very far past the README file. And, we haven't even addressed the question of whether they have the skill and talent to make a good novel or programming language or video game or open source library.

Having said all that, I think the original article is on point in at least one crucial respect: all of these cited kinds of work require a huge investment of time, and it's very hard to sustain that investment without money. This is why I always get very frustrated with the particular kind of pseudo-libertarian who blithely asserts that artists and writers don't need to be fairly compensated for their work, because clearly they'd keep doing it solely out of the love of creation. In reality, artists and writers--and open source programmers--aren't likely to put in "second job" level hours without compensation indefinitely. They're going to have a family, or develop more relaxing hobbies, or possibly just get frustrated by the ongoing effort.

I don't know if "business innovations" can solve this problem, but I think it's worth looking for more ways for developers (and writers and artists and...) to bring in some kind of stable recurring revenue.
How to build a digital nation in Catalonia
Ask HN: Is OpenAI research the latest wargames? Why not vs. climate change?
OpenAI released their latest algo baselines to the general public yesterday. Their AI is also playing top Dota 2 human teams at The International from later this day. My question as a member of the general public is pretty simple: are these the latest wargames instalments (you know, the Matthew Broderick kool-aid from his 1983 film and so on)? Is it possible to make these AIs play army vs army other than synthetic army vs synthetic army? AIs playing Civilization by Sid Meier is fascinating enough and Youtube is full of demos, but real-life scenarios? At the very least, the weakest links in real plans would be discovered. If so, why not let these latest AIs play vs climate change, for example? Just interested in HNers tech wisdom. Thanks.
What would "smogs" be considered in the local cloud computing world?
The fact that China has a history of authoritarian imposition of cultural reforms on the Han ethnic majority themselves.
I am not onboard with the idea that humans need to be happy 100% of the time.

I am going to be unhappy, even frustrated trying to improve things or create new things (as an artist or engineer). Healthy unhappiness, as I see it, is required for evolution/human-advancement.
Grass aint greener anywhere else. Prioritize learning, get better, increase the level of job in your range, get better job, loop until manager or self employed (at which point you'll have nobody to blame for your tech debt but you!)
What a weird comment. There are a huge number of fields where you simply can't avoid "insisting" on universities. Try being a particle physicist outside a university lab. Try being any kind of medical professional without going to med school. Try being a lawyer with going to law school.
Redis: This is not the license change you are looking for
Seems like a very appropriate use of technology to me?

If they can get "good enough" results using Linux and running with technologies that the average developer is more likely to know, is it worth the investment in running a RTOS? Especially given running a RTOS will make any higher level app integration more difficult?

The benefit of running with Linux outweighs the risk of "lettuce on the floor", imo. Yes, there's probably overhead in terms of clock cycles, but there's also probably dramatically less overhead in terms of developer resources.. and when you're running off commodity hardware you can guess which overhead will cost more!
and if you really hate ads, install AdNauseum. It "clicks" the ads and can add noise to your consumer profiles.

https://adnauseam.io/
Rightly or wrongly, in much of the US parents consider private schools (elementary/middle/high schools) the only option.
I’m confused by “hollowed out Maslows pyramid of needs”
A Bankrate[1] survey found that only 37% of respondents could cover a <=$1,000 emergency with savings (note: savings, not a "saving's account"). They did, however, add that another 23% could cover the expense by spending less on other things.

Given that, I'd say a large percentage of Americans do not have plenty of emergency cash. That's not to say most of America is "one paycheck away from the street" like the parent comment quoted...

[1]: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/survey-how-american...
Ask HN: Best way to set up single domain for multiple projects?
I plan on creating a personal website and attaching several small-scale projects to it. The projects use different backend frameworks. Ideally, they would all share the same domain and hosting service. I also want to be able to easily add new projects to the site. What is a good way to implement these needs?
Real GDP per capita covers this. Inflation encompasses cost of living. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA Missing a breakdown by quartile, but it's the right metric
Just to be clear, some whales only recover very slowly. The blue whale is still considered Endangered, or the North Atlantic Right Whale (many more, probably - I am not a whale expert, just an enthusiastic Wikipedia reader). And while they are slowly recovering, we are still changing their habitat (climate change, noise pollution, etc., being run over by large ships is a common cause of death for large whales) in ways that make it harder for them to recover.

But the situation is not totally hopeless, which at least feels like a large improvement from the depressing atmosphere I grew up in.
Ok, this doesn't make sense. Maybe APPL, but there is no way Google is that dependent on app store fees.

"If app store commissions fell to a blended rate of 5 percent to 15 percent, that would knock up to 21 percent off Apple’s earnings, before interest and tax, by fiscal 2020, Macquarie estimated. Google could lose up to 20 percent by the same measure, according to the brokerage firm. The technology giants are expected to earn more than $50 billion each, before interest and tax, in 2020, according to analyst forecast data compiled by Bloomberg.
Static and strong typing not only helps eliminate a whole class of bugs, there are also automated, guaranteed safe types of refactors that you can do with static, strongly typed languages.
The language used in the post just feels so mechanical, like "black people are great because they've contributed to culture a lot, and we want to get involved with more culture, so it's a good reason to get together with black people".

Maybe I'm alone in reading it this way, but it comes across as treating black people as this "other" that can only be approached through "culture" and not as neighbors, friends, and people you know and work with.
Only successful applications have the pleasure of getting old.
> bought by non-tech savvy PIs.

I'd hope that's not just viewed as an opportunity exploit information assymetry by tech/IT services firms.

I do believe, however, that scientific computing needs are similar enough to general computing needs that this won't be widespread (or at least not for long). It would also mean that it would make sense for a lab services provider to offer generic IT except as a pass-through for convenience (subject to cost-saving disintermediation).

IOW, I doubt you're that special, but that's a good thing!
Rating the food, or rating the service? Rating them together is nonsensical.
We are the 1%... :-)

Specifically, I do this in Melbourne, Australia where it's free and legal to park a motorcycle on the pavement (aka sidewalk). A 2012 study found that we make up almost exactly 1% of all commuters: http://atrf.info/papers/2013/2013_rose_delbosc.pdf
Securing visas for (and hiring) foreign workers instead of citizens, in itself, is not criminal or wrong -- and absolutely the thing to do when the foreign employees bring skills not available locally.

The problem is when this process is used to save on salaries, favoring foreigners over locals on the basis of being able to pay foreigners less only. The article alleges (without evidence!†) that this is what happened.

Better headline: Cisco pays visa-holding employees less.

This proposed headline, IMO, is more likely to evoke the rational response (Cisco must pay its visa-holding employees a higher salary), rather than the irrational one (dey turk ur jerbs). Perhaps that's why it was not used.

† An average salary of $130K cited in the article matches the average salary of a good software engineer in the area. More needs to be said for the statement against Cisco to have any merit, in my opinion.
Wow I upset some people. Sorry, I won't talk smack about the moon anymore.
Lenovo Thinkpad P1 (2018)
You don’t need anybody’s permission to gradually add tests and improve the code base little by little. Don’t ask for permission, just make it a little better every day.
This is the relevant pair of paragraphs from the article:

>As a simple example, image a forecasting model that attempts to predict how many Waffle Fries (or replace with your favorite Chick-fil-A product) should be cooked over every minute of the day. The forecast is created by an analytics process running in the cloud that uses transaction-level sales data from many restaurants. This forecast can most certainly be produced with a little work. Unfortunately, it is not accurate enough to actually drive food production. Sales in Chick-fil-A restaurants are prone to many traffic spikes and are significantly affected by local events (traffic, sports, weather, etc.).

>However, if we were to collect data from our point-of-sale system’s keystrokes in real-time to understand current demand, add data from the fryers about work in progress inventory, and then micro-adjust the initial forecast in-restaurant, we would be able to get a much more accurate picture of what we should cook at any given moment. This data can then be used to give a much more intelligent display to a restaurant team member that is responsible for cooking fries (for example), or perhaps to drive cooking automation in the future.
If 1) there's a solid engineering case to be made that this code is bad, 2) the code does something that's important, and 3) the company doesn't want to fix it, then you can be confident that the company also isn't interested in investing in the things that you as an employee would want them to be. I would expect work in general to be unenriching, raises to be smaller than at other places, and other benefits to be not as good. This could be an early sign that spending time with this employer is bad for your professional growth.

Edit: definitely kick the tires a bit by seeing if this situation is typical for the company, or if it's an outlier.
I promise to try ^__^
Got it, thanks swaggyBoatswain.
Only some whales are recovered. Lets not forget that other went extinct "yesterday", and some big whales didn't recover after fourty years of work. Is not so simple.
> In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner.

Has that really changed?

A manufacturing business in my area is currently hiring everyone who shows up to an interview. They pay they are offering isn't wonderful (at least if you concept of money has been warped by the IT industry), but you should expect to make around $40,000 per year to start. Perusing the real estate listings, I see a three bed, two bath detached home near to that business listed at $139,000.

Rule of thumb says you shouldn't spend more than three times your income on housing, but many suggest you can go as high as five times income. We're at 3.4 times income. It's not ideal, but it seems doable, especially if you want to live like it is the 1940s. The cost of cell phone each month can easily apply $50-100 more to your mortgage payment each month instead.

I will point out that our example job is one that you can walk into and start today. If you take a little more care and look around and risk a few rejections before finding work, there are plenty of jobs that pay considerably more. In those cases, one person buying a home should not be an issue whatsoever. A $45,000 income would provide the necessary amount for the three times income rule of thumb to buy this home in question.
Thanks. I figured it was like defcon.

I’m now imagining a place full of sharks with smaller fish swimming around waiting for their credit cards to get caught in a net.
Google’s Dragonfly in China Faces Stiff Competition
Einstein and Feynman ushered me into grad school, reality ushered me out (2016)
im assuming you mean hard "a" like lay-tech. ive heard that too.
Really cool buildings. I had never heard of this at all, and I even lived near one of the buildings apparently. Thanks for posting!
It was just an example. Fwiw netflix uses a bit of freebsd - but I also believe they contribute back to the community.
Why don't you spend 20 minutes reading my article that has a false premise?

-NY Times
> It's not a marketplace, it's a public library.

That’s the problem: we all take this particular public library for granted, but there isn’t a sustainable model for paying the librarians. Then a librarian tries a creative way to continue serving us without starving, and we tell them “you’re just doing it for fun, if you wanted to make money you shouldn’t have been a librarian!”. This is an ignorant response, because it places on the librarian’s shoulders the responsibility for solving a problem that concerns all of us - because we all benefit from open-source more than we contribute to it. That’s not sustainable.
Apple quickly and efficiently banned all VPN-based ad blocking apps as they do not follow allowed uses of the VPN apis as per App Store guidelines.

VPN-based data collection apps could just as easily be cleaned up if there was the will to do so.
People eat at restaurants for different reasons. Even if my food took an hour if the quality was high enough then I would be happy. That's part of what's missing, having a single score for all types of diners doesn't makes sense.
If someone is still confused after reading these, ask yourself:
Will the profit I gain from leaving this alone allow me to replace the entire module in a larger refactor later?
> Also fair, but I'd expect the private prisons to be the ones to sue states.

Maybe, but at the moment the LEO/correctional officer unions are the ones actively lobbying to prevent laws like these from passing in the first place.
I think it is a good trait that you care enough about your work to feel this much frustration. Change though, is often hard to achieve because people tend to be stubborn. To provide more useful feedback I think you should mention what is expected from you at work. Are you supposed to be working on new features in this project or just maintainence?

Regardless of the exact situation, there should always be a way for you to work on your craft. It sounds like you are doing a lot of refactoring now and that could be quite rewarding, even without tests. If you find yourself trying hard to improve the environment and feel like it is to no avail and that no one is listening, while simultaneously feeling like you can’t leave the job in the short term, you might want to think about how to take advantage of the dead time at work to learn new things or do other activities that improve your skills.
"...a few people here (and other threads) have asked why we didn't create a new proprietary license..."

But, you did create a new proprietary license. That's what ${ANY_OPEN_SOURCE_LICENSE} + COMMONS_CLAUSE is.

All this is is a proprietary fork of Redis. It's no different than if someone else -- someone other than Redis Labs -- had done it. What's unusual here is just the reluctance on Redis Labs' part to call it what it is. I think a lot of the surprise and blowback across the Net is simply because of the strange unwillingness on Redis Labs' part to call this by its right name and own it.
1. take the initiative, fix what you can, quickly and quietly.
2. practice emotional detachment
3. think of the work as manual labour
4. re/read people-ware
5. this isn't personal
6. if you're good at it, see 1.
7. if you're not, look for the next job, where you can write code from scratch
8. what is the problem, really
Do you just want a house in a old neighborhood or an affordable one in an old neighborhood? San Diego has quite a few of the former.
>
This has gotten piles better in the last 3 months at Schipol at least. US passports now go through the automated EU lanes

That was not my experience the last two times I passed through AMS this summer.
Με «όπλο» το Καραϊσκάκης ο Ολυμπιακός
I'd read that book.
“Persuasive design” to get us hooked. Psychologists say it’s unethical
Fireflies' glow tells bats they taste awful
Where would employers see online?
I think they have it flipped
http://luna.pos.to/whale/icr_pub_pall_t1_3.html

According to these figures (apparently originally from Gallup: text here http://luna.pos.to/whale/icr_pub_pall.html), only 26.3% of Americans would agree that "non-endangered whales can be killed for human food."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#Unite...

According to this page, vegetarianism is at an all-time high in the US at 3.4%.

Assuming every single vegetarian takes the anti-whaling stance that still leaves you with the other 73% looking inconsistent.
> Maybe it's because of time pressure, but they don't necessarily control every person moving between Schengen countries.

Oh, trust me, that I'm very much aware of. Brown people and others who look Arab or Muslim are selected and checked much more frequently.
There's also:

from __future__ import braces

and

import antigravity