skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's another half of this phenomenon that seems to get ignored. Yes, allowing remote work greatly increases a company's supply of potential employees.

However, if more and more companies offer remote work as an option, that means employees now have a greatly increased supply of companies competing for them as well.

The software engineer living in Ohio who doesn't have the option/ability to move to a tech hub like SF or NYC would've typically had to make due with the small pool of positions available to them locally, meaning less leverage for salary.

If more companies allow remote however, they can now work at any of those, and the local companies will suddenly be forced to compete for talent.
I forget the exact numbers, but something like 60% of California's freshwater supply is stored in the Sierra snowpack, and the current models are projecting that California will get more rain overall but vanishingly little snow.

California politically tends to be completely opposed to building new reservoirs, and a large amount of seasonal northern California rainfall ultimately gets routed out to the San Francisco Bay through storm drainage.

The other barrel of this particular footgun is that agriculture is still California's biggest industry and they require an absolutely enormous amount of water. This is already causing strain on state politics, because the central valley keeps demanding more water from northern California, which doesn't want to give up more of it, and southern California has just about drained the Colorado river, and restrictions on water rights are the single biggest driving force behind all the "State of Jefferson" signs you see in the rural northern counties.

I love California but the water situation is about to bite them really hard. "About to", of course, still being a decade or two out, but there don't seem to be any reasonable solutions to this intractable situation on the horizon.
Other useful numbers:

Days in a year: 365.2425 (exactly, under Gregorian calendar)

Days in a month: 30.44 (approximation, a twelveth of the above)
> This sounds like it was written by someone who hasn't worked with...

Every broad article I've seen like this speaks about 'software' as if it is a monolithic career path. The lives of web programmers, embedded engineers, AI researchers, ERP programmers(etc, etc) are all quite different. Most of the articles I've see on programming/software engineering don't capture the things I've experienced over my 23 years as a programmer.
For C++, I use cppreference.com and stackoverflow almost exlusively
Doesn’t The Matrix explore this idea?
> I'd love to know what Orwell would say about requiring an extra click

He would say probably something along these lines: "The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of … any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion."

Your "click to read" today is the "buried in page 12 in pt-6 font" of the past. Same train of thought.
> "Terrorism is growing in the city and activities which harm national security, such as ‘Hong Kong independence’, become more rampant," Secretary for Security John Lee said in a statement.

Well, at least the CCP is consistent.
Looks more like a baseless accusation than wondering
I have utilized this approach, but on Reddit instead of HN. I launched a tool I was working on and got my very first users from Reddit who were passionate about the topic. Now, those users are evangelists and they've helped spread the word to their communities which has lead recent numbers hovering around 2k WAU.
Third Row Podcast – George Hotz – Autonomous Driving
Too late to become a nomad, I’m a middle-aged divorcee with kids; but as soon as the little devils are of adult age, I’ll likely say bye to England and fuck off back to Italy, probably the South-East - where the weather is nice, the beaches are sandy, and life is fairly cheap.
If you prefer to use Lisp with a more conventional syntax, check out "readable Lisp:
https://readable.sourceforge.io/

It has three levels of notation, depending on what you want. There is even a quick lisp library.
why should studying in US be an advantage? The h1b specifically targets experienced specialists. If you're looking at European immigrants they often highly trained but don't have the financial ability or financial risk tolerance to study in the US.
> I personally think if big tech wants to hire in the US and still pay lower $ than they currently do, the only lever they have left to pull is the interviewing format / bar.

The fact that big tech has not yet changed the format of the interview I believe shows that this convergence has not yet happened. This system is designed with tolerance for false negatives (qualified grads who will be rejected). At some point if these companies had a true demand for more graduates, they would revise the way they evaluated candidates to limit the number of qualified rejections.
Conference calls are a thing phones can do, at absolute worst.
Humans are putting ongoing pressure to all environments.

We need to stop with the bringing it back to how they were BS. It can't happen.

Environments need energy and water to thrive amoungst other things.

It's hard to see dams being bad overall. Yes it might harm certain things. But we need to start looking the bigger picture. Not little factoids like bringing back wolves.

I find India's push on johads perhaps a little off topic but perhaps not. Be need to start keeping fresh water on or in the land.

http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/india-ra...
Doesn't include the secret and top secret partitions.
“Run in the opposite direction of the explosions.”

If you’re into this kind of thing try reading Simple Rules by Donald Sull & Kathleen Eisenhardt.
>Only with SaaS most of us aren't needed to "solve more complex problems". The SaaS team can already solve them and sell them...

They solve some problems and create other.
Yes but it wasn't about a virus, this was about control.

https://mobile.twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/12636624552...
(Such as a loop.)
Maybe not if you demand the optimum dollar.

Instead, consider the set of jobs offering at least half of a FB salary. Choose the one that seems most delightful and liveable. It probably won't be Facebook.

(How? Cut your spending to the bone. There's more to life than money.)
According to the summary https://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/document...

* The bill would restore Congress’s original intent for the H-1B and L-1 visa programs.

* The bill requires employers to make a good faith effort to recruit and hire American workers before
bringing in foreign workers and prohibits employers from replacing American workers with H-1B
and L-1 workers or giving preference to H-1B visa holders when they are filling open positions. It
modifies existing H-1B wage requirements, and for the first time establishes wage requirements for
L-1 workers. This will prevent employers from using the H-1B and L-1 programs as sources of
cheap labor and encourage the hiring of qualified American workers.

* The bill prohibits employers from outsourcing H-1B and L-1 visa holders to other sites unless the employer obtains a waiver which is available only in limited circumstances when the rights of American workers are protected.

* The bill gives more authority to the Departments of Homeland Security and Labor to investigate
fraud and abuse in the H-1B and L-1 programs. It requires the two departments to audit employers
and share information so that visa petitions are more effectively scrutinized.

* The bill would crack down on outsourcing companies by prohibiting companies from hiring H-1B
employees if they employ more than 50 people and more than 50 percent of their employees are H1B and L-1 visa holders.

* The bill creates a new H-1B visa allocation system that gives top
priority to workers who have earned advanced science, technology, engineering or mathematics
(STEM) degrees from U.S. institutions.

* The bill increases penalties on those who violate the law, and provides visa holders with a list of
rights before they enter the U.S. so that they are better protected against mistreatment or
underpayment of wages.
Have you looked into using DALI [1] to do augmentation on GPU? They've gotten some nice speedups for computer vision that way.

[1] https://devblogs.nvidia.com/fast-ai-data-preprocessing-with-...
That's not to mention using hydroelectric reservoirs from dams to store energy, which is absolutely fundamental in the mainstream "100% renewable" plans you may have heard of. For example, a lot of Green New Deal stuff largely draws from Mark Jacobsen (the Stanford prof who sued the scientists who published a critique of his plan in 2017). His plan depends on increasing hydroelectric capacity by something like 10x in the USA (albeit, he claims, just by adding turbines to existing dams, though that may be a challenge).
How is what I said inconsistent with that?
LDraw is an open standard for Lego CAD programs
From the list, only GC was in early Java. GC was popularized by Lisp (was added in the 60s?) and other FP languages like ML (had gc from the start in 1973) decades before.
There's already a massive GC backlog for some countries (India, for example). In some distant future where backlog is cleared, fewer number of H1B/L1 visas could mean faster GC. Until then, this won't have any real impact on GC timelines.
At huge financial institutions, software improvements do not usually improve revenue. At the very best, if you’re lucky, they might (although not provably) improve the derivative of revenue or cut some costs. And at most banks, revenue projections are fragile and magical, making revenue’s derivatives are volatile and doubly magical. In that context, try explaining to a non-technical director and his or her director, why the system “needs” fixing, when it generated consistent profits for the last decade, and why the risks of instability are worth it.

So, banks are understandably the epitome of risk-averse. Why make changes to the current system, when (1) the current system works, (2) almost nobody fully understands how or why the whole system works and (3) it generates revenue that’s 1000x the salaries of the engineers employed to keep it running?

It’s not an environment where the dividends of innovation are typically worth the risk: besides, from the bank’s corporate perspective, there’s a whole startup industry (fintech) that exists to do the innovating “for you”.

In short, it’s a division of labor, but it’s not a very transparent one to the unannointed, and it’s very frustrating to be on the “wrong side”. Superficially, they have tons of money: think about all the interesting problems they could solve with that money!! But of course, nothing is that simple.
These were not ICU patients.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/14/...

https://nypost.com/2020/05/02/nyc-hotels-meant-for-recoverin...

https://www.amny.com/coronavirus/brooklyn-field-hospital-shu...
I've been hearing this same thing since the 80's when my friend's dad questioned why I would want to become a programmer when eventually computers would be able to program themselves.

The complexity just keeps ratcheting up.
Homelesnes can be cured only by treating housing as a basic human right. There are plenty of examples of this globally so it's a fact, not a theory or a political fad.

If you prefer more equal ownership of capital there is nothing wrong with that.

But that is completely orthogonal to solving 'the problem' of homelessness. Please don't confuse the two issues.
I’m not going to do that.

I will say though, that such astronomical salaries are only really the norm in Silicon Valley. And with that salary, you have to deal with the entire lifestyle that goes along with it.

Money isn’t everything, which many programmers recognise.
Show HN: A high performance CSV splitter in Rust
My weekend project to learn Rust was to create a command line CSV splitter. Feedback appreciated!
There are very few programmers making that kind of money, relatively speaking.

SV salaries are a statistical outlier in the global market.
Astartes
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cheems
I've known a number of homeless people with serious mental illnesses who were both much happier and saner once they had an apartment (and, crucially, were helped with getting there).
If it’s not algebricaly proven don’t call it an ‘identity’... even if a calculator were to confirm it to some arbitrary number of digits, that’d just be a more-or-less accurate approximation. ‘Identity’ denotes a far more profound relationship and the term should be reserved for use in such cases.
I'm not sure if this bill goes in the right direction.

I know many people on the H-1B and this is the problems that I see personally:

* if you are not married, you have to get married or break up (I personally decided to get married, even though I do not believe in marriage)

* your spouse cannot work. Many of my friends have had their spouse not working for years, and going crazy.

* they cannot change job easily, they can't even quit if they're burning out to take some rest time, some of my friends feel like they are basically slaves of their current company

* if they get fired (which happened to one of my friend who works at Uber a few days ago) then their life goes to hell

* they are hard to come by (I applied twice and didn't get it, had to leave the US and wait for a year and a half for a greencard to be able to come back)
An employee is being paid. Is that a specific exemption?

I don't know what they count as advertising per se but if endorsement via private message counts then the FTC's page[0] calls this out as "position with the company":

"Connections between an endorser and the company that are unclear or unexpected to a customer also must be disclosed, whether they have to do with a financial arrangement for a favorable endorsement, a position with the company, or stock ownership."

[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/adv...
I also have another reason why I feel like download and off-line-only video is important:

Privacy.

Streaming services have increasingly terrifying and inescapable telemetry. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Google - all of them collect extremely telling things about us due to when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them, the collective profiling of us based on what we download in general...and many other things we don't even know about.

After listening to Shoshana Zuboff's audiobook 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' - the most important book I have ever read on technology - I am very aware of this. The data companies don't want us to be aware of what they're doing to us.

I'm not condoning piracy, and I believe content creators should be fairly compensated for their hard work - but unless there's a convenient way to be able to consume content in my own open-source local software such as MPV, all offline, and in full privacy without being spied on, I refuse to legitimise the alternative.

I realise there's still blu-ray and DVD, but not always - many releases are web only, now. I'd even pay a premium more for such non-DRM content...your move, Hollywood.

It was never natural to have people watch and profile us when we're already paying money to watch personal entertainment, on this massive global scale.
Honestly a lot of the arguments about “importing cheap labour” are economically shallow and ignore the benefits that immigration has for the overall economy.

I recommend this book for a really detailed exploration: https://www.smbc-comics.com/openborders/
In my opinion, the author is a bit disconnected from the reality of software.

We've clearly learned a few things during the last five decades, our abstractions are better today but progress has been mostly slow, painful, and linear.

A lot of the gains we're seeing are built on top of the tremendous progress made by the hardware guys, we've been free-riding for a long time.

I think that a few bullshit jobs might be exposed/compromised by the transition to remote work, and that includes managers, but not people doing creative work.
Just a small bit of polite anecdata, but I've fled IRC partly due to some pretty extreme quality-of-service problems - and these were on the major servers and communities that were really the only raison d'etre for using it in the first place - things like Freenode and stuff.

Basically we had a lot of cases of silent failure where messages would completely fail to go through, and this led to some pretty nasty social awkwardness, because there was no indication the service wasn't being 100% reliable. I only ever discovered it after several years, when I had a bouncer logged in from a rather different network address, and it was pretty terrifying how much was getting dropped (sometimes up to 10% of messages - although usually it was "periodic" failures where a whole conversation would essentially be dead for one side. I observed this over several months, and it was just mindblowing.

It was the silent failure that was the most insidious thing - there was absolutely no indication things weren't working perfectly, and it was only after we discovered this that we had the horrible realization that all of those communication problems we had in the past were not because individual "people" were bad communicators (or were ignoring you, being rude, etc), but because they genuinely weren't receiving entire paragraphs of text. At random, with no indication anything was dropped.

There are a lot of other extreme frustrations we had with IRC, but this "hidden QoS problem" was the last straw. A lot of the work we were trying to coordinate on it (gamedev stuff) involves more than just text, and just trying to share images across the thing constantly felt like being a second-class citizen (manually uploading something to an FTP when even AIM/MSN could transfer stuff no problem with a copy-paste). The fact that I was forced to use it for over a decade ... I've lost thousands of manhours of my life fighting with it when almost any modern tech stack would have avoiding those particular wastes of time, and that's just something I can't forgive. As irrational as it may be to do so - I can't help but hate it. :(
I loved NYC in many ways. But it's unforgiving. If you make a single mistake, or if anything bad happens to you, you'll be crushed. Lucky enough if you even have the dough to hire a U-Haul to hump your stuff back to the real world.

NYC is great. But keep everything you care about in three suitcases, and be ready to haul ass at a moment's notice. And for heaven's sake, don't sign a lease, much less a mortgage.
Already being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23295975
People are paid by utility, but it isn't the only factor. You don't pay a line cook to be a surgeon. Utility is obviously the dominant factor.

> A remote worker in Phoenix doesn't have as many options as a remote worker in NYC when it comes to switching jobs a getting a high salary. So the company pays the NYC dev more since they need to pay more in order to retain that person.

So the premise of this is that these people are working remotely... why wouldn't the Phoenix person have the same opportunities to switch jobs as the NYC person if both are able to work remotely? That's kinda rejecting the premise of the scenario.
IRC for ops people, everyone else... email?
Here's an example where Disney replaced their IT workers with people on H1B

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
In the 70s, was great. Now overrun by Googlers.
related: bank fraud detection might be port-scanning your local network. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/07/halifax_bank_ports_...
My intuition points to Kalai being right. If that's the case, I believe the greatest contribution of Quantum Computing will be advancing our understanding of QM and Thermodynamics. Are we trying to build a modern version of Maxwell's Daemon?

edit: I really don't want to discredit the QC effort. Prove or disprove, there is a lot to learn.
Maybe "slow" is a misnomer or misleading. By slow we're talking about local services which stop at every station. When you relocate fast trains onto another line, those local services benefit considerably. Ultimately you get more local services running, which alleviates the sardine-style travel we currently endure.
The bill gives more authority to the Departments of Homeland Security...

Yeah. Right, no more jurisdiction to DHS on labor matters.
Don’t have the links handy, but here are some of the ones I find handy:

* Kinja Deals
* Blog Hackaday
* Krebs on Security
* TechCrunch
* The Verge
* Wired News

I’m boring I know
We been hearing about Threadripper a lot. How well this works for Windows? Does it make CPU bound ML/DL/data science computation better? Any good benchmarks in this area to look at?
WFH might be simpler for tax purposes since you don't have imputed income from free lunches and such.
The GitHub flavor of git essentially has two parts:

Repository (i.e., minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings), and branch (i.e., master)

In this case, someone merged eliabieri/big-list-of-naughty-strings at master to minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings at master via a pull request [1].

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings/com...
Seems to be the most evolved of alternatives suggested. Thanks!!
The most salient part of this essay was the last section. Remote-first is forming in a way to break tech labor power. Employees will be less able to bond, and their personal conversations will be easier to spy upon. This will drastically inhibit collectivization. WFH may have some upside, but there’s a huge downside looming.

> Remote-First, Collective-Last

> Lastly, let’s talk about the impact of remote-first on labor. Many months, before the virus hit, a CEO friend of mine “jokingly” told me that he believed all the “remote” buzz was as much about reducing the collective power of the employees as it was about saving a dime on salaries. He personally did not want his company to go full-remote but was under some pressure from investors to consider it. We were both hammered at the time, and I didn’t put too much thought into it, but it feels right the more I think about it.
Yeah they are not looking to improve the experience for the visa holder. It's about incentivizing companies to hire within the USA. Many other places allow for girlfriends to move without marriage and also allows them to work. It might be a feature that they have the friction on H1-B users rather than a bug.
Why should that be the goal? Why $300k? That’s an enormous amount of money.

Also, the labour market is far wider than just India.

> As soon as that guy realises he's worth $300k, he'll go get it on the open market and you'll need to find a new sucker.

That’s an incredibly patronising take. I know that many programmers take higher relative income and freedom in lieu of a higher absolute income and the lifestyle typically associated with it.

Of course those people would rather take the $300k if they could work anywhere. That’s obvious. But who is offering that? Not FAANG, evidently.
If you're interested in a brief 'story' of caffeine - its roots and history leading up to its role in society today, check out Michael Pollan's 'Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World' audiobook.

It's a short listen (by audiobook standards at least) and explores the the 'good', the 'bad' and everything in between of caffeine and coffee, often using himself as a lab rat to test theories that he comes across in his research.