skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for doing this. I have started working in the US with L1B visa in March but because of the pandemic and the US-Canada border closure I have not been able to move there officially. My L1B was issued in a US-Canada land border (basically flagpoled - took the visa and came back) and my company is fine working remotely since we will be working from home for the rest of the year anyway.

However I need to get a SSN and so far from the SSA website they are issued only through a physical appointment. I have called up a few SSA offices and they all told me they are closed right now and don’t take any appointments. They will let me know when they start scheduling appointments and at that point I will have to go to their office and attend the interview physically.

My questions are:

1) assuming the border remains closed for a while and I have no means of going there while the current EO is in force, is there an alternative way of getting SSN you know of?

2) If it comes to that and there is no way of getting SSN without going there physically - the EO doesn’t impact existing L1Bs but my situation is a bit complex since there was never a stamp in my visa. They just issued I140 and an entry seal in the passport (as is done for all land entries through Canada I suppose). The EO does specifically mention having to have the visa stamp for me to be allowed to enter. How strict do you think the enforcement is going to be and do you think I will be allowed to enter if I attempt when they schedule the interview for SSN? Are the CBP officers enforcing the EO as verbatim or there is room for interpretation for someone who already has L1B but no visa stamps?
Well, you wouldn't catch Trump using a word like 'proprietary' (it has five whole syllables!) but yeah, stylistically they weren't a million miles from each other.
Idiomatic Clojure is slower than JS, but you can make Clojure somewhat close to Java by writing Java with parenthesis(lots of interop from Clojure). One of the devs of Datomic brag about how it was only 200KLOC of Clojure, but if you extract the datomic tar, the lib dir has probably more that 2Million LOC of open source Java libs.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the immigration rules of other countries.
You don’t have “one person, one vote” anyway. Rural states are over-represented in the Senate and Electoral College by design, without considering gerrymandering and other disenfranchisement tactics.
> outsourcing all your technology means you will struggle to iterate and improve that technology.

Internally, we consider outsourcing the same as pausing all forward momentum on the outsourced components.

It's just a reduction in current cost with an understanding that there will no new features and very little maintenance.
The Titanic is famous because of the hubris involved; it was the biggest, fastest, most luxurious ocean liner ever, that sunk basically just because its captain was trying for the Blue Riband on its maiden voyage (also, a lot of rich and famous people died). The Lusitania is famous because it was a hospital ship attacked during wartime and was used to drum up support for allies entering the war (it was a major factor in the US entering).

For whatever reason we don't really care about normal civilians dying en masse during peacetime accidents. So many people died in the General Slocum disaster that it wiped out the Little Germany neighborhood of New York:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum
Can someone "on the left" please shed some light on how they reconcile the following three beliefs?

1. Jobs should be handed out on merit.
2. Protected class X has been educationally disadvantaged.
3. Representation of class X in the workplace must
match their representation in the society.

It would seem that one out of three has to be given up, and meritocracy is an obvious choice, as the article suggests.
In a free democracy, it actually kind of does. As long as it is done peacefully and with willingness to engage in open dialogue. The ability to influence the powerful and rich requires being able to force their hand to have discussions. Without it, the democracy crumbles. And despite the irritation it may cause you or I, peacefully shutting down transit is one of the levers that doesn't require that power/money.
> can easily contribute 99% or more of what is perceived as success in our society.

This is false in two ways:

- Luck is not sufficient.

- Luck plays a larger part the larger the success is.

A moderately successful upper middle class person has achieved their position more through merit than Bill Gates has. As we go up the success hierarchy, luck plays more and more of a part.

If you don't keep these facts in mind, you will draw morally incorrect conclusions.
>Disclaimer: I don't mean to make sweeping assumptions etc. This post is based on around 15 years experience working with outsourced devs in Indian, across multiple companies. Plainly a country the size of India has plenty of excellent developers.

You're by no means the only one. TCS and Infosys are 2 others that I've seen engage in exactly this kind of activity. "manage the config files" haha.. thanks for the laugh.
End GOAL: My 83 year old goal
When it comes to some products, especially the more expensive ones like televisions, certain retailers will get custom SKUs. The products will have a feature added or removed or be in a slightly different color.

The idea is to short circuit the price match guarantees that they heavily promote.
Oh I'm certainly aware in fact that is probably the seminal issue of the idea of merit -- it's not an objective quality.

Applied to a small system of homogeneous groups it's probably fine, as applied to society it falls apart.
Why using Facebook in 2020 means supporting Trump
Another problem is a lack of viable way to do a power cycle for PCIe/USB devices. This clears up a lot of errors.

The functionality used to exist for USB devices, but MS started removing the ability to do it in the API and now more manufacturers have dropped it.
> Garbage trucks don't show up every morning, do they?

I'd say at least half of the mornings they do. One day the one which takes generic garbage, another day it's glass (obviously, the most noisy), another day it's plastic, then mixed garbage again etc. That's about 20 minutes of loud beeping + garbage noise. But that's fairly quiet if the windows are well-shut.
My friend, I'm very sorry to hear this. It seems like you are under a lot of pressure to be the financial backbone of your family. Without any knowledge of your circumstances, is there a way to have a frank discussion with some members to ask for their support? We tend to focus on thinking the soltuion to our money problems is getting more money/wealth. That is objectively true, but it might be at the risk of your mental and physical health. If you can get additional support from your family to contribute financially, please have that honest conversation and tell them how you are feeling.

Creating a winning startup is like the lottery. Lots of things have to go in your favor. It might be best, given the pressure you are feeling, to stay with the slow and steady market gains you are experiencing, as when we are under pressure we make bad stock market gambles.

I would also take a solid look at your budget/spending and see if you can cut anything at all. You'd be surprised with what you can cut out of your life.

Again, I am sympathetic to your pain and feel it myself.
> That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc.

Do you think that someone in the United States that is not in one of these subgroups have the same opportunities to get the education, the spare income, the credit, the community that even has the prep classes?

It looks like you’re suffering from survivorship bias, when in fact you should be looking at averages. Assuming individual talent is uniformly distributed across groups, you’d expect to see success uniformly distributes, but it’s not.
You see this everywhere in the world. I've worked with a huge number of Americans who went to school for anything but computing, would rather be doing anything but computing, but realized that a six-week crash course in web development would literally quadruple their salary. Many of them go on to embrace computing, many of them turn out to be good developers, and some even become passionate, but they all start out by abandoning their dreams and chasing the quick buck.

Tech and finance eat all the smart people. There are unlimited tech jobs, but only so many jobs for physicists, chemists, professional musicians, teachers, lawyers, etc. And the vast majority of them pay a lot less than tech and finance.
May I ask where that was? That sounds like a good deal to me, to be honest with you - I don't mind getting my hands dirty - it breaks up the monotony of development sometimes.
Amazing that your comment promoting illegal activity is at the very top of the thread. I wonder if Peter Roberts would be under any ethical obligation to report this to the authorities?
> It's mainly just the west coast where home prices have ballooned (in the US at least).

And the Northeast, which is apparently more expensive per sq foot than the West, according to your source.
It's at the very least debatable. It always has been, viz the entire Internet smart people brigade trotting out the "It's not a democracy, it's a republic" trope.

But even if we set this aside, we can certainly question if an institution like the electoral college doesn't deliberately move power from the people to the ruling group.

We can question if the extreme form of gerrymandering we practice around here doesn't remove power from the people.

We can debate Citizens United.

We can debate the existence of blatantly partisan media, and the monoculture of media owners.

We can debate a regime that has clearly abandoned ethical delineations, and that values loyalty over competence.

All of these, individually, chip away at democracy. The question is if together they've chipped away enough that we aren't one any more. (My current assessment is that we still have a small window to turn this around, but it's closing. It's open wider than in Hungary, it's less wide open than in Germany or France)
Thank you Peter, and thank for doing this!!!
I had to deal with people who couldn't grasp the concept of bitwise masking and shifts to pack/extract fields from an integer. This was for a wire protocol that needed to conserve space to minimize server costs. Their solution was to have all booleans in their own field which ended up burning five bytes each in our serialization format. I just gave up and let them do what they wanted since nobody on my side seemed to care.
Just write tests and suddenly refactoring is possible without static typing. Those tests will also cover type checking concerns implicitly.
Same here. NeXT was way cooler than any old Power Mac in a pretty box.
Perfectly fine — I’m only arguing for the sake of discussion. When I have gone on no-information binges, I included HN in them. Over time, I realized HN upsets (upsets may not be the right word — maybe mentally clouds or distracts?) me a considerable amount less. The links I look at are informative and inspire creativity; the discussions push me towards explaining my thoughts carefully rather than resorting to status games, false sense of superiority, and mob rule. HN is news, and as such, it is addicting and sometimes does upset me depending on the subject matter and how many people take on views that oppose mine, but I still think it’s an order of magnitude less so than things like Twitter.
It was far much worse, now the major consultancies are on rapid re-skilling drive, also they have made significant changes to their pricing strategy to their clients and are not just based on head count.

But the criticism of technological obsolescence cannot be just levelled against these consultancies alone, much like how almost every electronics hardware was(is) is manufactured in China due to cheap labour costs, so was the reason behind extraordinary growth of Indian IT services and so it all comes down to 'What the client wants'.

But when their client suddenly wanted to catch up on the AI/ML/Analytics bandwagon, these consultancies understood the need to revamp their skilling strategy. That said, it's not like these consultancies never innovate they have dabbled with large in-house products ranging from cloud to automation and some have been fairly successful e.g. TCS ignio, their (AI in air-quotes) automation product[1].

End of the day, they get the job done for their clients which includes almost every major Bank, Retail, Pharmacy to even Aerospace industry like Boeing (Only green card holders/US citizens are employed), Automobile - Ferrari, Cyber Security etc. also saving huge amount of money for them in the process.

[1]https://digitate.com/ignio-aiops/ (Warning: Marketing fluff).
Holy shit, this sums it up so well...
This is my biggest uncertainty with a vegetarian diet as well. Algae oil seems like the best bet but has much less DHA than fish oil, is more expensive and doesn't have as many studies yet from what I can tell.
> But would you really want to continue working for a company/culture so incapable of enduring free thought?

In this economy? Hell yes.
I recently purchased a open box Apple Pencil from BestBuy. When I got it, it didn’t work. I realized the pencil s/n didn’t match the box and looked up the manufacture date. It was several years old and the battery must’ve been shot. Someone had bought a new pencil and used the box to return their old pencil and BestBuy must not have checked.

BestBuy gave me a new one, no hassle. But then crazily enough, the brand new Apple Pencil didn’t work either. Bad luck! They were out of stock at that point so they just gave me a refund.

Anyway, I know this is a risk with open box. A friend just purchased a brand new Garmin Fenix via Amazon. When she opened the Garmin box, nothing was inside! Amazon refunded her. She purchased it from REI instead.
The housing situation is one giant prisoners dilemma loose-loose, nobody wants to loose out. I've long believed that houses/land are overpriced but I've recently (Just prior to Covid) become a home owner because I needed somewhere to live and the mortgage repayments are cheaper than rent here. It could have been a spectacularly bad move.
Society's only protagonist is the individual
Thank you! I was going to ask the same question.

Also, once the business set up..what if it generated profit as h1bs are not allowed to get paid by other entities..
Some googling turns up https://github.com/PrincessAkira/road-to-yuzu-without-switch, which doesn't require access to a switch. Disclaimer: haven't tried this myself.
Not necessarily. Take a look at this implementation https://aosabook.org/en/500L/an-archaeology-inspired-databas...

There you can only retrieve the top layer and don't have to scan all historic data, it's only in-memory though.
The biggest issue with the idea of justice is defining what's "just".

That doesn't make it a bad ideal though.
It looks really cool and useful, but is it ethical? I find it a bit creepy that someone could watch me use a site.
Attention hijacking, turns into subtle micro-habits, then turns into routines, backed by the most powerful computers in the world and most likely AI.

Internet + Smartphones + Apps
There are a decent number of branches, one of which is "fix/auth" which has commits from two months ago (but most are much older as you mention).

Not saying this necessarily means this project is alive and well, but just noting!
You're both describing a 'market for lemons'.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
> Following pg's example, let us consider the following classic debate topic: "is slavery good?" A plantation owner might find themselves tickled by a lively discussion on the subject, replete with a cornucopia of Enlightenment principles and classical liberalism and such.

Historically, the Southern states (which were politically dominated by slaveholders) outlawed all abolitionist literature because they feared that free discussion of ideas would undermine the system.

> It is perhaps telling that slavery was not abolished through free inquiry or the discussion of ideas.

90% of the work was done through free inquiry and discourse, ranging from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to the publishing of books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The attempts to solve the problem violently (e.g. John Brown at Harper’s Ferry) failed.

It was only when the slave states refused to accept the outcome of a free election and started the civil war that violence became necessary.

> The debate is over, and the actual free-thinkers have moved on.

You’ve cherry-picked a specific example that fits that narrative.
That's a fair point, and I agree there is value in just identifying flaws. The flip side though is that it's easy to find flaws in any system since there's a large surface area - and the author is not just pointing out flaws, but saying the system is wrong. At the very least, I'd argue that we should hold people to at least trying to quantify the flaws they see in the system, especially when making such strong claims about it. Otherwise, how do we affect change?
> Almost none of them had an upbringing, background or base passion for technology or IT in general.

> The bigger problem with this is that the IT systems are not as well defined or a closed system

This is the big issue. At the end of the day creating truly good usable software is both an art and a science. Data structures, algos and theory, but also thinking outside the box, asking inquisitive questions, challenging product and design.

This doesn't lend itself easily to mass export. Also, culturally, I've found that the West has a different way of thinking about things. In India, questioning your superiors is not something that is done often, but in the West it's common to challenge your boss on ideas.
IIRC, if you're a seller, you have to pay extra to not have your goods co-mingled with the "same" product from other companies. It would appear that seagate didn't do that.
I remember staying with a friend who was a grad student at Stanford at the time for the 1989 TUG Meeting. He had one of these on his desk (he had been contracted by NeXT to do NeXTTeX). I just remember how blazingly fast and slick everything about that computer was. At the same time, it was super expensive ($6500 for the original NeXT computer) and originally only offered to students and educational institutions. Steve Jobs apparently answered a question about what business people who wanted a NeXT should do if they wanted one with, "Enroll."
No, but on native systems you don't get Bootcamp Utilities installed, which makes the two setups rather different stories. A choice was made not to give Windows reduced capabilities, despite making sure that Windows gets augmented to work with your specific machine's hardware.
It's ironic that he describes social media as an own goal but there isn't the introspection accompanying it that would lead to the obvious point you've made so well.

Everyone in SV wants to be "up and to the right" in every quadrant map of anything. How comforting to simplify life to those terms, to exceptional winners and conventional deadweight. But if society takes your myopic vision and resulting creation and then eats itself and all its democratic institutions, to paraphrase Prinicpal Skinner:

"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the users who are wrong."
The bay area might have the most programmers, but there are still tons of programmer jobs outside of it. 80% of programmers don't live in california [0]. Almost every fortune 500 company has some software developers so there are jobs in every decent size metropolitan area. A lot of the big companies also have satellite offices you can work at. I just moved from Seattle to Chicago and it only cost me 4% of my salary and I've already had 5 recruiters ping me on linkedin since I moved here a few weeks ago.

[0]: https://dqydj.com/number-of-developers-in-america-and-per-st...
Sounds like bullshit. I've worked at Google, and I spoke up loudly while I was there. I've spoken up while at other employers, too. We can't simply let ourselves be muzzled by corporate accusations of thoughtcrime.

When we say the slogan, "it is hard to get somebody to realize something when their salary depends on it," we are talking about cognitive impediments to understanding. We aren't talking about the lying that corporate spokespeople carry out.

Which far-right state agrees with the idea of less state brutality? Could you name one? I'm only able to think of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bhutan, and Thailand, and they all have quite a bit of state-sponsored brutality, in their own different ways.
I would love to hear where you got the idea:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/from-our-experts/early-herd-immu...
>In Norway, we basically just learn of USA that it’s the country that turns the tide of war whenever it enters

Well, even that's not true. See: Vietnam.
So the government creates a lot of bullshit jobs when neccessary.
Are you implying that because something is illegal, it is also unethical?
I didn't even think about the international date line.
>It’s so unconventional that almost every Fortune 500 corporation has done so in unison.

For literally the first time in history, and most of the Fortune 500 "speaking out" is just empty words without any real action. Look how progressive Amazon is, putting the BLM banner on their homepage for a couple weeks. Meanwhile Bezos is still perpetuating awful working conditions that disproportionately impact his POC employees.

I'm in my 30s and rules in my life are not set by my peers. They're set by the older generations who overwhelmingly feel and act like "Fuck you, got mine". My life is overwhelmingly dictated by the rich and powerful and privileged, everywhere from where I live and how I live to where I work and how I work. I have very little say in how my life works, and it's rare that I ever see someone my age having any impact on that.

Also, people (and university students) don't live in a bubble. It is absolutely independently minded to grow up around parents and teachers that all have the same beliefs and then to be able to form your own beliefs that diverge largely from theirs. Just because you have people around you that made the same step doesn't make you conformist.
Yes, that's true. For example, handling soft bounces correctly. That's when SMTP doesn't give an error, but you later get an email indicating a delivery failure. At large volumes, you really need to handle those emails correctly to stay off of blacklists.

Similar, you should have caps on the number of simultaneous outbound SMTP connections to the same domain. And things like knowing which failures are temporary, which are permanent, and when to automatically unsubscribe an email. (after X temp failures over X time period, etc).
Difference is, a lot of these people wouldn't get jobs as junior devs in the west, and if they did, there just wouldn't be so many "natural" opportunities to move into management. Whereas in India, the big outsourcing firms need such a large quantity of people every year, that thousands upon thousands are hired and placed in junior dev or test roles. And because these orgs are so large, there are many layers of middle management, and plenty of opportunities.
Genetic impact of colonial-era slave trade revealed in DNA study
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