skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> While I've heard that H1Bs are brought over to depress wages, although there is no data to back that up.

Then why would Disney fired experienced workers to H1Bs? Where the H1Bs that the experienced workers actually trained, more experienced? Clearly not. There is no universe where it could be argued that Disney had a shortage of skilled workers given that they fired the very skilled workers they claimed a shortage of.

> My company interviews hundreds of people, settling for 'good enough' and yet struggles to fill many open positions.

You know how you don't struggle to fill open positions? You raise the salary offered, improve the benefits, the working conditions. Netflix doesn't have a shortage of workers, but Cisco might. Compare the pay differences between those two companies and you'll quickly understand what "shortage" really means. I find it extremely hard to believe there's a shortage of entry level sysadmins, yet you'll find plenty of H1Bs working sysadmin jobs while experienced Americans sit on the sidelines because their salary requirements are too high (meaning, they expect something more than $75k per year in the Bay Area.) That doesn't define a shortage -- those workers do exist but H1B is cheaper.

Of course, there are outliers like those ultra-genius Nobel winner-level people -- however, there's an "O" visa for that category of extraordinary high achiever. Your average H1B is not particularly extraordinary. I've never in my life met anyone working for Infosys that I'd trust to program an alarm clock, let alone trust with mission critical code. However, I've also worked with a few extraordinary H1Bs -- people far smarter than I'll ever be -- but those are certainly the exception in terms of statistics of the visa.
Clarification in case any H1B holders are reading: you absolutely can transfer your H1B visa, though I think a break of more than 30 days would be a violation.

The trick is when you H1B employer also offers to sponsor your green card. That isn't transferrable, and if you're from certain countries (like India) it can take up to ten years to get one.
The most interesting part of the article is the seemingly perverse economic response where the government cut subsidies and then the prices _fell_.

Is this an actual known pattern or just a strange side effect of this situation?
I keep running into this assumption that everybody loves somewhere with a pleasant climate. Or at least somewhere cool. In summer, many Southern cities are extremely hot and humid; you couldn't pay most people enough to walk or bike. We like our AC, thank you very much. Maybe better public transit would help, but we don't even like walking the last mile.

It's a good plan, but this is the "San Francisco Bubble": assuming what works for you works for everyone else. Another good example is electric scooters.

Many people live in situations where, if they walked or biked, even for the last mile, they would have to shower literally every time they moved a mile or more. I also read a very astute comment pointing out that biking is not good for hauling kids, moving groceries, etc. The best solution for kids is probably a stroller, whic means now you have to walk rather than bike.

Lastly, speed. Outside of peak traffic, no comparison. I lived in Houston for a while; it could take an hour and a half to drive from one end of the city to the other in usual traffic. Walking or biking, it would probably be something like six and twelve, respectively. Only one city has been truly constrained; NYC. You can't just make everybody move into a little urban core and expect they won't leave. Can't fit that many people.

For reference, Oslo has population 600k. Greater Houston Area is estimated to top 10m by 2040.
I disagree with the education claims. This article is mostly talking about engineers in the computer science/engineering field.

Tangent: I feel like those on work visas in the comments here are already outside of the norm that I receive resumes for and I honestly feel for their situation, hope they can stay so long as they choose to, and are paid fairly. Everyone deserves to be treated as equal humans and I feel like this is forgotten all too often.

The United States education system, while it does fail regularly, has taught most educated persons to question and be creative, yet also deliver quality. This is super desirable in this field.

I’ve reviewed a few hundred resumes, and at least a hundred on-site interviews, and I’m still trying to hold out hope for the h1b system yet am continually disappointed at the quality of candidates I’m being fed by the “approved” contract houses at the absurdly ridiculous company I work for. Faked resumes are the norm, as well as listing the fact that a dev has “Implemented UI Table View” as an Android candidate or the equivalent opposite for iOS candidates.
(50% of the team I’ve hired are on work visas currently. The one contract house in question occasionally has a dev.)

The contract houses almost wholly refuse to source local talent. At first I thought it was a fluke. From one contract house - I’ve only ever been given two local devs and every other dev has been h1b. I get complaints that our hiring process is too strict because the dev can’t build a rest client app in an hour and a half, or write a method that parses a string and returns a double and an int.

Meanwhile, there are local devs I went to school with, and know of their skill level, who are looking for work.

I don’t think the education system has failed in this case - I think contractor culture of corps and contract house greed has failed us all. Also, the requirements of bachelor’s or master’s degrees has exacerbated the problem with the ridiculous cost of those degrees depending on the US schools chosen.
If companies want to profit off local talent, then open up dev shops in other countries. China is the only country that’s potentially prohibitive of this practice depending on your business.

Also, which fields are you mentioning that require foreign “specialist” work that can’t pay these wages? They could apparently pay those wages in 1989. This program was setup to supply the US with skilled workers it urgently needed paying them an equivalent minimum of $121k in today’s money ($60k in 1989, which remains unchanged today).
That's all kinds of stupid. You might retain some cash in the meantime and feel better about "sticking it to the man," but the reality is you entered into an agreement and from both legal and corporate perspectives, you're defaulting and committing fraud. Is it right? No, not at all. Do I hate that it works this way? Absolutely. But sticking your head in the sand and pretending everything is fine is a great way to get screwed. Enjoy it while it lasts; it's only a matter of time before you defraud the wrong corporation who will bend you over a barrel and show you the 50 states. I've worked in my fair share of customer service and customer loyalty departments before and I've talked to enough people who had no idea their debt had been sold to a collections agency to even pretend that your approach is the right approach.
That sounds like a great improvement to the process!
Here's a simpler proposal: anyone from anywhere can come here and take any job. If you leave your job, voluntarily or not, you have 90 days (up from the current grace period of 60 and strict rule of 0) to find another job. If you've been here for a few years you can apply for citizenship, independent of your employer.

The primary objection to this is crowding out the labor market, to which I'd say: protectionism doesn't work. If there are people in another country willing to do the same job for cheaper, the invisible hand will figure out how to move the jobs there, perhaps through competition. Fighting the free market isn't going to work: figure out how to work within it. (For instance, offer a UBI for citizens only.)
The process could (and probably should) be adjusted, but the intent of h-1b is clear that it is to fill positions that are not fillable with local talent at prevailing wages.

If companies aren't really looking for local talent, or aren't really paying prevailing wages, they have been defrauding the government, and hurting the labor market. When large scale abusers of h-1b are prevented from getting future visas, it gives room for other companies to use the visas, and hopefully they follow the rules.
Currently Top Talent in those countries want to move abroad to earn more and have a better standard of living. If they see no way out, they have stay in their countries and then US companies will have access to top talent for cheaper.

For example, US is the best destination for doing a Ph.D. currently and ph.D. students then work in US. If US stops them from working here, they will go back work and form competitors.

China has already shown that this is achievable.
I'm curious about your thoughts on this article:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...

excerpt:

>That study was a key link in a chain of evidence leading to an entirely different view of the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification. In this alternative account, American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market.

Given this view of H1-Bs and general immigration policy it seems quite obvious that they are not intended to have the same salaries as citizens, but rather to be used as a cudgel to keep the citizens in line and not be able to demand higher wages.

I want to be clear, I'm not arguing against your position of what might be fair or moral. I'm certainly not going to argue against equal pay for equal work. I just wanted to add some context along the lines of... I think it's working as intended.
> They allow US companies to sell stuff in India

Barely. Have you seen Indian tariffs?
Indeed, "spouse" would be a better fit here.
I see a lot of unrealistic threats. India not wanting to trade with America? Ya, who is that going to hurt more...
One big problem with restricting to salaries above 150k is that you’ve disqualified anyone who may be early in their career. Not many who are below a mid-level career role will get that kind of salary.

What does that affect? All undergraduate students coming to the U.S. who spend $$$ on a 4 year college degree here and then try to find a job. You’ve just wiped that demographic out because they won’t get 150k salary.

Why would they be inclined to come to the US and spend all that money on an education here? They won’t.

And if the best talent doesn’t come here to compete intellectually with Americans in a classroom then Americans lose.

H1Bs comprise a big chunk of people who come here, get an education here, prove their competence and make the American economy grow.

You won’t get them to come here with a high salary cap like 150k.
This is a great article. I read the jepsen crdb analysis long ago, but never understood exactly what was wrong. This describes it (and defends) really well.
I have all those benefits already. The zero point includes inference, lint, design review, spec review, code review, and TDD -- and you can't leave those out safely because 80% of bugs are not type errors.
For the most part Wikileaks seems to avoid posting negative info about Russia, or against Russian interests.
There's another oft-ignored dimension to why some not-so-well-connected Chinese do not return home, that doesn't always surface in these discussions.

It boils down to favoritism and nepotism that is rife back home. This probably doesn't get much airtime since its hard to even grasp for people in Western societies. The closest that comes to mind is the Italian concept of Raccomandazione - the practice of using social connections to gain an upper hand in employment and in other aspects of public life in general [1] [2]. The Chinese-origin UK lady in the video explains this in the Chinese context.[3]

I'm sure the Indian context is much the same in substance if not in the degree, to which this factor plays a role in determining why they rather not return.

[1]
Raccomandazione (Italy) - Global Informality Project

http://in-formality.com/wiki/index.php?title=Raccomandazione...

[2]
Italy's culture threatens its economic future - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/italys-culture-threatens-its-...

[3]
Why Chinese people choose to stay in the UK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRk3qoVcDxY
Maybe parents should have a separate login for their kids that doesn't have the CC info saved?

Leaving that saved in the browser is awful close to authorization since there are reasonable, low-effort steps that could be followed by a non-technical user to prevent it from happening.

It's like leaving your card on the kitchen counter and being upset when they order pizza.
That might be better for the world. Maybe if everyone wasn’t moving to America, they’d make their own countries better... spread the love out.

I’d be fine with a few less tech companies. Life would go on. I care more about the impact on American workers and as I’ve said, bringing in severely underpaid workers that they can abuse isn’t really going to help.

Yeah, China is really somewhere people are desperate to get into... the air and freedom! /yawn...
If you see tens of millions of people doing something you think is stupid you might want to reconsider who the stupid one is.

For all that India, China and other developing countries are getting better they’re nothing like the US, South Korea or Western Europe[1]. And all those people who invested in skills who leave were motivated by the possibility of leaving. People study things that will let them leave. Some of them do, some don’t. The Philippines has huge numbers of qualified and experienced nurses not despite the prospect of migration but because of it[2]. If you think working in developing countries could be highly lucrative I encourage you to try it. The people who know more about those countries than you are not particularly inclined to do so or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

[1] Personal experience. Neither of Shanghai or Mumbai is near being Western Europe but Shanghai is at worst at Poland’s level.

[2]https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/12/no...
Show HN: Crowdfund Cloud Resources with Kubernetes and Stripe
When you find a comment to be as objectionable as that one was, your best bet is to downvote it and flag it.

You won't see the "flag" link when viewing the comment in the thread. Click the "nn minutes/hours ago" link and then you will find the flag option.
A single parking spot is roughly equivalent to a large room in a flat. Parking spots are about 10m^2 each. Buildings have between three and five stories. At the relatively cheap rent prices here in Berlin, a parking spot should cost its user about 400€/month.
This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Anti-vaccine advocates appointed to Minnesota autism council
> You won’t get them to come here with a high salary cap like 150k.

That's not the purpose of the H1B visa. The purpose is to fill shortage areas with temporary workers; it's not some kind of college recruitment program.
You know the thing I don't get about this is, Mark says that he didn't plan to build a global company and wants to connect the world and serve people and all of that, but he could do that right now. All the things that people don't like about Facebook, he could get flatout rid of it. If he really cares about making the world a better place and cut some profits, that can happen right now.

I find it comical that Mark thinks targeted ads are even the controversial part. We have children gambling their parents money away, data landing in the hands of Russian psyops campaigns, political violence in the developing world being organised etc..

If targeted advertisement was the most concerning thing coming out of Facebook that'd be a great improvement. And yet they're not even able to get rid of 'friendly fraud'.
This is crazy, how on earth do you have the patience and persistence to work on something like this??? It took five - six years?
If you can’t find applicants, you’re just not paying enough. Pay more.
No one forced you to be here. Also, the quota problem affects only India and China, partly because there's a massive imbalance of inflow specifically from those two countries.
There's always Canada. Sure, salaries may not be as high as the US, but if you have an advanced degree from a US university, you are welcome there.
Different things are obvious to different people!
The BBB is an absolute joke; you buy your ratings. As someone who's had direct contact with the BBB in a corporate context, I can say with absolute honesty and surety that the ONLY criteria that decides a corporation's BBB score is whether or not they paid the annual BBB administration fee. Ask around, talk to your friends who have had direct access- they'll confirm what I'm saying 100%. Filing a complaint with the BBB does precisely dick and angrily saying "well, I guess I'll go file a complaint with the BBB as soon as I'm off the phone with you" when on the phone trying to cancel a service serves only to make the rep you're talking to mute their microphone so they can laugh out loud at you. You think the rep you're talking to gives a flying lawnmower about your little BBB complaint? If you do, I own a bridge in California that I'd love to sell you.
Reddit, Run. Carl Miller (tls)
We just have a different term—-we call it the old boy network: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_boy_network
Can we bypass "hellbanned" if we go through duck.com with !g
Indeed. Discovering interesting new things is one of the main purposes of HN.
You should stop feeling so sorry for yourselves. And I'm in the same boat as you, been in this country for 16 years, and on H-1 for 12. I understand it is hard, esp because the system is broken, but as many people said, it is your choice to stay despite this.
I am not saying people from around the world are trying to get into china.

People of chinese origin have already started to go back and people from china believe they are better in China then is US. They have kept their highest talent and have used them to compete with US in spaces in which US held monopoly for an extremely long time.

If other countries get better, US's heigmony over the world will be challenged again and again. US's attracting/sucking talent from around the world keeps US at the top. People have a net positive outlook of US. people want to be in US.

If they start seeing US as nothing but an colonial like power, trying to take advantage, then America will lose a lot of its soft power.
Profile: Jensen Huang. Is This His Last Year as Nvidia CEO? [video]
Amusing promo shots from ‘Tron’
This sounds extremely specific. Do you know where I can find a formula describing this weighting mechanism or modeling light and camera and lenses in general? Thanks!
I had not seen that before. I will fix the mistake.
Posted this elsewhere, but as a former H1B here's what should be done to end abuse:

1. Award a fixed pool of H1Bs to qualified applicants with the highest wage in the offer (and monitor that this wage is in fact being paid). This should be easy to pass if your representatives in congress are in fact _your_ representatives. The president will sign this immediately, since he was the one who proposed it in the first place.

2. Establish at least 6 month grace period if the H1B person leaves the sponsoring company to go work elsewhere. Currently if you leave (or are laid off/fired) you have to GTFO within 2 weeks, so people endure abuse and low wages for years until they get a green card.

There. There's your solution. No need to do anything else, guaranteed to work. It should not be possible to hire foreign workers into entry level positions at all.
Except they do give you a way to contact them. They ALWAYS give you a way to contact them. The fact that you can't follow their cancelation process all the way through is on you, not them, and that's exactly how the courts treat it after your account becomes delinquent and is sent to collections.
cash?
I'd argue that care is directed in the direction of the uninsured, of course, but depending on your state's creditor laws, they are still the rock squeezed for blood as the last resort. The cost is minimal for the hospital to shovel their stale patient receivables off to a collections company on a schedule.
That might be a relevant point in some cities, mainly New York. But in the DC metro area, only a tiny fraction of commuters take rail to begin with, in part because Metro is geared to getting people in and out of DC while most jobs in the area are outside DC. I’ve always found it very odd that folks who work ordinary jobs in the suburbs subsidize the relatively high income professionals that work in DC and can afford to live near a Metro stop.
The primary objection to that idea is the complete destruction of your country's culture.
> I wonder why Go is working where the others went away from it?

Quite frankly, because Go developers don't learn from other's mistakes and reinvent square wheels.

Kernel threads will always be better and faster than usermode threads.

This is because any inefficiency in threading comes from the scheduler. Your usermode scheduler will always necessarily be slower and worse; it just makes so much sense to put your scheduling code where your context switching and process isolation code already is.

Sure, you can get a short-term gain by iterating fast and testing code if kernel developers are too slow and/or unwilling; but then eventually your code will get merged into the kernel anyways once you're done. So really usermode threads are only good as a rapid prototyping tool, not something for serious use.
I've seen this happen for a handful of functions, but implementation correctness proofs for general applications are far beyond the expressive capabilities of TypeScript.
Complexity concerns rain on the multicloud parade
Postgres used to have time travel -- it is relatively easy feature to build on a MVCC storage -- but it was deprecated in 6.2 and then removed [1]. Performance was one reason listed, as was space usage.

It's easy to see why. For example, modern Postgres versions will in some cases reclaim dead tuples for new data, thus "cheating" by bypassing MVCC. If Postgres had to support time travel, such optimizations wouldn't be possible.

I seem to remember developers talking about adding time travel back now that the codebase is better (and better understood) and it could be redesigned around current techniques. It's a cool feature to have.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/6.3/c0503.htm
Why is it not okay to discriminate on the basis of your skin color at birth but okay to discriminate on the basis of which side of a border you were born in? Surely, there would a lot of outrage in HN if someone said - "Granted that H1-Black visas should ostensibly be filled only for positions where it is difficult to find qualified whites"?
>> Badger provides better performance than RocksDB, both in terms of reads and writes.

> It's not that simple. It's never that simple.

Yeah. The post that is linked[0] within that quote has a "Benchmarks" section, but it looks like they're either 100% reads or 100% writes. Most real workloads aren't like that.

[0] https://blog.dgraph.io/post/badger/#benchmarks
what if you need two clients to connect to the same process
Sort of like "it should not be possible to hire black workers into entry level positions at all"?