skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The current H1B system of limited visas has far more demand than there is supply, but it's easier to abuse by certain kinds of firms. For an American company trying to hire someone off the street that is living in the UK, the math is so bad few would try: In the real world, companies tend to only try with people that are already working for them. So if, say, Google had someone working off a UK office, and wanted to move them to the US, it's relatively OK if they don't do well in the lottery that year, because they still have an employee.

The abuse comes from companies built entirely on this: Imagine we are running a contracting company from some cheap country. We have 6000 consultants we'll be able to bill higher from the US. So we ask our US subsidiary to just file said 6000 applications. Only 2000 got accepted? Who cares! those 2000 people get moved to the US, and are now working for us, and then we contract them out to normal Enterprise companies at relatively low rates. It's not hard to claim this is abuse, as ultimately one wants to make applications for anyone with a pulse.

Some commentators are definitely overplaying it, but any way you look at it, the system is not necessarily working all that well, precisely because the cap is relatively low, the number of random Indian contractors that would like to move in is very high, and those intermediary companies are rarely great, but they have a big advantage in the system compared to a small company that just really wants to hire one guy, or wants to keep someone that came in with a student visa, and has been doing practical training.

Unfortunately there are so many competing interests that any kind of sensible immigration reform isn't going to happen, as getting the majority of the house and 2/3rds on the senate to agree on something this contentious is almost impossible, especially when one of the parties has people whose idea of the perfect number of immigrants is zero.
it's average frame rate too

99%ile (or even minimum) would be far more interesting
> AFAIK communication skills are routinely evaluated in those interviews: if you have the best code but can't explain how it works, you won't score highly on them. You should be able to discuss tradeoffs, how you reason, etc.

I want to specifically address this because communication can make or break teams. The kind of communication that you describe - conveying objective information - is not enough to build a well-functioning team. One of the most important questions, IMHO, is how do your teammates disagree with one another, especially on issues that don’t have a clear right answer? If you don’t probe for the answer to that question, then you’re hiring with a huge unknown.

There’s no way to know if Mrs. leetcode master X is a team player based on these kinds of interviews. She could come in and destroy a team with her personality. Granted a socially adept person can fake a pleasant personality during a few hours of interviewing, but the rare great interview processes will at least force a mini disagreement or few and gauge the candidate’s response.
Ubiquiti's U7-Pro has not only already launched, but mine was delivered a few hours ago. There's already reviews up (including YouTube) as well.

If you want MU-MIMO (so 4x4 or more), I'd expect the U7-Enterprise later this year.
This tax was blatantly a shot at CA and NY tech companies from the maga crowd.

Also worth noting that Section 41 offers credits for R&D which helps offset this.

The latest debt ceiling bill has a fix for this, and if that doesn’t go through there are bills in the house and senate to rewind this.
Texas just passed a law providing billions for energy resilience that specifically excluded spending it on renewables.

> The Texas House of Representatives has given its approval to a new bill as a substitute for the Chapter 313 tax break. However, it explicitly excludes renewable energy companies from its provisions
Show HN: A Dark Mode Toggle Without JavaScript
Today I scratched my itch of implementing a dark mode toggle without JacaScript. The implementations I saw typically revolved about adding a 'dark' class to body via JS and then controlling it with JS handlers.

Thanks to `:has()` selector [0], that passed 90% browser compatibility [1], it is possible to avoid JS.

My implementation uses CSS variables combined with a checkbox, `:checked`, and `:has()`. It is simple, yet supports color scheme preference and updates toggle's label based on active mode.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:has

[1]: https://caniuse.com/css-has
Amazon's Just Walk Out technology rolls out to hospitals, with 'badge pay'
Ubiquiti just released the U7-Pro. There's some disappointment though as it only supports 2x2 on the 5 ghz band.
> The tenure system is partially there because it is actually good to give smart people the latitude to screw around and play with problems.

The tenure system doesn't work like most people think it does. It is not "I made it, now I can just do whatever I want without getting fired." You still have publication quotas and you end up having more bureaucratic work. Even with all the admins that schools have hired, there is just more work for professors.

> If academics have to retreat to complexity, nobody will be able to follow…

And? The world in complex. Simplicity is the goal, but it is the simplest description that also adequately explains the thing. That's not going to end up being very simple and there's a reason you see physicists learning very complex mathematics. It should absolutely make sense that complexity takes over as we advance our knowledge as a species because the simple things are easier to understand and are understood first. If things are not getting more complex over time, that's a sign that we are either really fucking dumb (having missed many simple things) or that we simply understand things with higher resolution. Simplicity is for the Luddites (this is literally a key part of that history).
>You can’t put the sewer next to the water supply and expect the two not to mix together.

You can in digital communication because we have cryptography. That's the reason we can have secure https traffic over a really insecure web. The future is probably that almost everything authentic is going to be signed and everything else we'll just assume comes from a bot.
Dashboards are really calls to action hidden in donut charts. I'd rather just see a text message telling me when to start panicking and why.
I wrote that up years ago:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-camaradescom/

Enjoy!
Not everyone is getting laid off from Google. Most people are handed their last paycheck and shown the door.

As for "someone has to pay for it", well we already are. We have the highest per capita healthcare spending in the world, also the highest rate of medical-related bankruptcies in the world and lowest life expectancy in the developed world. We are putting 6-12% of our paycheck into social security and will likely never see a payout when we need it. Different industrial sectors are getting hundreds of billions in subsidies. The military is getting trillions.

The money is there, we just need to have the will to spend it to everyone's benefit. But no, we'd rather set it on fire instead so the wrong people don't accidentally get helped.
> Finally, after weeks that felt like years, the investor agreed to the deal. In the end, he texted me that he was happy with the original deal, he just needed someone to explain the financials to him

Hm, seems like BS. I wonder if he was holding out in the hopes that his recalcitrance would enable the company to negotiate a better acquisition price?
As an individual contributor software engineer, I've worked with offshore developers before and always found the experience unproductive. The problem is always management tells me to help them so they can learn. I don't mind being in a mentor role, but I'm not interested in mentoring a temp contract worker.

Google is a global company. They make money from developing countries, they should have employees in those countries as well. Or else the money flows only back to California.

But they don't want employees in Bangalore. They want indentured servants and poverty wages. 25 years ago, I was told there would be no software developers in America, and yet the number has gone up every year.
Cool to see a variety of non-cloud apps still out there. Main advantage of Abykus seems to be its small size (3MB!) and portable nature compared to LibreOffice Calc.
Then why are you even commenting.
I dislike when people criticize something without being inquisitive or acknowledging the elephant in the room.

What is your alternative? Continue heating the planet through burning oil/NG/coal? Develop solar panels domestically and wait to flip to solar (missing out on benefits in the meantime)? Nuclear?
Macro-scale example of magnetic locking by a spinning magnet analogous to bound states in subatomic particles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5FyFvgxUhE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_state

It reminds me of Feynman's wobble in the article. Which may relate to spin 1/2 particles and/or radioactive decay.

The strong force is empirically measured and I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation of its fundamental mechanism. But nucleons moving near the speed of light are held inside the nucleus by a force of several pounds! So the nuclear force acts like a gravity well but comes from electroweak effects somehow. Loosely that means that there's a centripetal force so strong that if we measure it over years, the odds of seeing a stable nucleus often approach or meet 100%.

I only bring this up because currently there's no way to modulate decay, electron capture, fission or fusion via simple means like temperature or charge. Ideally we should be able to add/remove electromagnetic energy and transmute elements by generating electron/positron pairs from photons (for example). Until we really understand how the strong force works, all the cool sci fi and Iron Man stuff will be confined to research labs.

I've spent my whole life working to make rent instead of working on important problems. What a waste for society to invest education dollars in me so I could subsist on what is largely custodial work. So I think the most important thing we can manifest is getting more leisure time, money and resources into the hands of dreamers.

The second most important thing we can do is pay our success forward. So I don't want to hear about any more billionaires and their pet projects. I want to see visionary goals, labor-saving devices to reduce suffering, automation, UBI, and most importantly people paying it forward by paying their fair share of taxes into democratic societies and having enough faith in the higher power of love to give the people the dignity and means to solve their problems and self-actualize. I mean, that's what the USA used to be until I watched it all fall apart after 9/11 to leave us with whatever all this is.
Was the oil owned by that Greek company or did it actually belong to Iran?

If I send a package via DHL and DHL is found guilty of something and the package is confiscated by the US government in the process, can the US government just sell my stuff?
> what do they even do all day?

Discord has added a bunch of new features over the past couple years. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be very useful features (at least not to me). I still just use it for voice chat during video games.
> On Tuesday, November 7th, Texas voters decisively endorsed Proposition 7, overwhelmingly supporting establishing a one-billion-dollar state-managed energy fund to enhance the infrastructure of natural gas power plants. The primary objective of this fund is to fortify the infrastructure of natural gas power plants throughout the state.

https://www.keatax.com/texas-approves-prop-7-to-support-foss...
> The article calls out event-sourcing and materialized views as a solution.

Yes, I know, and it may well be a good solution to various issues with conventional databases. I just don't see how it's a solution to global mutable state, since there still is global mutable state.

> I don't see a conflicting definition

The article never gives an explicit definition of "global mutable state". It also does not explicitly say that its proposed solution gets rid of global mutable state. The section "Global mutable state is harmful" strongly implies that its proposed solution will somehow get rid of global mutable state, but the article never actually says that it does. It just goes into a bunch of other benefits of event sourcing and materialized views, all of which might well be valid benefits, but none of which amounts to getting rid of global mutable state.

> Unless your argument is that the author is in-denial about benefits of immutability

I can't see into the author's mind, so I don't know if the aspects of the article that I described above were inadvertent, because the author simply hasn't really thought through what "global mutable state" actually means, or whether it's on purpose, to imply a claim about the article's proposed solution that sounds good but isn't actually true, as a marketing tactic.
> This would have to work by individuals or organizations building a good reputation over time, so their specific output is trusted.

So…the current system?
M.2 is a lot of things. You can get USB and SDIO wifi cards in this format, too. Something to be careful about when buying...
Google was amazing at one point in time. In search of profit, it got worse. Maybe Kagi can withstand it, but I don’t see much difference between one company and another.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38957140
Maybe not engineers? Discord quickly morphed from a place where gamers yell at each other into a place where lots of communities and movements exist. Maybe that skyrocketed the need for moderation, lawsuits of people demanding that their former block party co-organizer gets un-admin'ed, abuse reports, etc?
Why is the name of an asset being leaked? Doesn’t this put a target on this guys back and make it less likely for other assets to cooperate?
I have good insurance and I have unpaid medical bills for the following reason:

1. Visited a doctor 4 months ago, got a bill 3 months after the visit, paid it, then got a surprise second bill, which I have put off paying because I need to find time during my work hours to follow up on with the hospital + insurance.

2. Didn’t get bills for some of the visits I made in the last 3 months.

3. Insurance randomly denied claims, so need to follow up with them and the hospital.

4. Despite insurance covering 70-90% on different services, one visit for my spouse cost us thousands. We decided to pay it off as installments instead of one time because we got a really good deal.
Not an expert, so excuse me if this is obvious, but would these integrated graphics be any good for NLP? A GPU with 24GB of video memory costs $2000, you can put one of these in a system with 128 GB or 256 GB of DDR4 or DDR5 and give your neural network training software over 100GB of video memory if you want.

You only have 12 CUs, 768 shading units, 48 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs but huge amounts of cheap memory. I'm not sure where the bottleneck is but at least it won't crash and burn if you ask it to start neural network training routine that requires 100 GB of RAM, and you don't have to take out a second mortgage for a video card with the requisite amount of graphics memory.
Not really, since the APUs themselves are historically quite expensive.
I look lean, not wasted away.

"Protein-deficient vegans" is a joke among omnivores, who assume that anyone not eating meat must be malnourished, and among vegans, who find ignorance of that magnitude hilarious.
Yeah. I got laid off a few months ago and I can’t even get an interview. Never had that problem before.
> How is that an improvement.

True trading a black rectangle for a beige rectangle wouldn't be much of an improvement, but a piece of artwork would be.

Screensavers are nice, but emissive displays always stand out against other, reflective, decor.
Yes. But the Iron Law of systemd is that you should never mention it unless you’re prepared for a tangential argument about systemd and other init systems.
I confirm the issue of delays/freezing of Claws-mail. I really liked the simple UI, but freezing too often, couldn't stand it. I had searched about it, I got some answers that's it's single threaded if I recall well.

Since you mentioned mutt and it's steep learning curve, I recommend you another TUI MTA/mail app. It's nmail (https://github.com/d99kris/nmail). Simple, Pine/Alpine like interface, has great features (for example, saving mails in sqlite - can be viewed offline). Also the developer is active and friendly, in case you find bugs or have any proposals for enhancements.
Rad with templates, Htmx and stateless Smalltalk images by Sebastian Sastre [video]
US inflation increased more than expected in December- 3.4% YoY
I played healer so I could just point my camera at the floor zoomed in as far as possible and suffer the least bad performance possible. And scramble to get back in-game after guaranteed disconnects on big events e.g. every time Nefarion spawned a wave of ads. What a struggle.
I can confirm - it’s both utterly insane, and true. A number of the individual problems have been fixed over the years, but then new ones pop up due to rushed backend integrations.

Microsoft has a similar issue with their ‘personal’ vs ‘work’ logins.

God help you if you try to use the store to buy some things on a work account, or login to some services using a work account.

You will regret it.
You are so right. So Cal has enormous high-def video billboards set to blind. These humorous dot-matrix signs aren't in the same universe of distraction.
Their eng team wasn't particularly large. ~300 was what I last heard.

I don't know how eng grew over that time, but it doesn't strike me as bloated given their scale and user base.
They have been trying a lot of different routes for monetization, and over a pretty short time period. Adding lots of little things to Nitro, more community server monetization features; at one point, Discord was even trying to sell games a la Steam.

I'm sure that last one in particular had quite a lot of headcount associated, and it seems obvious that after they totally shuttered the project, they just reallocated the employees to new stuff.
You're probably used to high latency.
Long story short - I would advise to not go into debt for a top tier CS degree, unless truly passionate.

I am fortunate enough to have been educated in Europe and without any student debt. I can switch careers, without needing to keep income at a level to pay living expenses and loans.
Unfortunately oil is not just an energy source, and it is required for a lot of industrial chemistry that we don't yet have alternatives for.
Check obsidian canvas.
> What can reasonably be done to combat it?

It was enabled by deregulation, so regulation seems important.

That was enabled by more overt bribery of politicians (PACs, super PACs, etc.). So stop the bribes.

That happened simultaneously with changes in how business was depicted by media, whether news or entertainment. So . . . convince the heads of that small handful of companies to change their representations.

And so far that's just the US. All of these things are global.

My point is that just combating the existing problems is akin to whack-a-mole. A new pervasive philosophy will replace neoliberalism, though. Maybe put effort into pushing whichever of those seems best?
There is a Richard Feynman documentary I saw where he talked about his darkest episode of depression (another depression episode).

It was after them testing one of the Atomic bombs when it had been developed.

He described it as follows, he would for example watch see someone building a bridge or doing maintainance, and he would think to himself, "Why is he doing this? Doesn't he know that he is wasting his time, that all this work he is doing is useless?"
lol didn't take long either
He’s dead. He died in a motorcycle accident according to the article.
Well like I said, I don't disagree that there are other more significant things we can do.

> He certainly wins at buzzwords bingo ;)

She :D
The top 10% of americans own ~90% of stocks. I think the top 1% owns somewhere around 45% of those stocks.
This sounds like you're describing a system that is a failure but that the solution is not to fix the system but to give up and do something else. Can we not fix academia? Is the signal of so many people, especially in CS, abandoning academia for industry not as clear of a sign as you can get? I feel crazy because it feels like everyone either does not want to admit the system is broken or will admit it but not want to do anything about it (which maybe is simply fatigue).
Interesting summary from that article:

>Here is how the S174 change impacted some companies, based on what I found in their annual reports:

>Microsoft: $4.8B additional tax paid in 2023. The company generated a $72B profit that year, so this tax increase was manageable. It’s still a very large amount!

>Netflix: around $368M in additional tax paid – also manageable with $4.4B annual profit.

>Google: the tax change was minimal, because Google was voluntarily amortizing software development expenses for most staff, already. This was for all projects that reached “technological feasibility,” which is a milestone products pass before public release.
Do I need to read the entire article to find out what the tutorial is actually aiming to achieve? That's not very helpful to the beginner it's supposed to serve...
Geez, the number of people that don't recognise bash.org quotes saddens me.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230401050146/http://bash.org/?...
Show HN: Xytext – Turn LLM Prompts into Structured API Endpoints
I'm excited to share a tool we've been working on called Xytext. It's designed for developers and data analysts who want to harness the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) without getting bogged down in complexity.

Xytext allows you to create API endpoint functions from simple prompts. Imagine defining input prompts and getting structured, predictable outputs that feel natural and manageable, even in production environments.

Here's what makes Xytext different:

Ease of Use: A straightforward UI to create and manage your functions.
Hosted Function API: Quickly categorize, summarize, and recommend actions for inputs. Think low volume, high complexity (e.g. support tickets, google reviews)
Customizable: Tailor your function logic, input prompts, and output schemas to your needs.

We're looking for early users to try Xytext and provide feedback.

To get started:

Sign up at xytext.com > login
Verify your email, then your account will be activated in a few hours with credits to play around with the system (unfortunately have to put this in place to prevent abuse of the free credits)

Create your first function, test it out, and tell us what you think!

We'd especially love to hear from HN users who have not worked with LLMs before and can provide insights on how Xytext compares to doing things manually or using other tools.

Looking forward to your feedback and questions!
It's both. A few companies have most of the H1B allocations through basically fraud and they hold it over those workers heads because they need a sponsor or lose their visa. https://www.livemint.com/news/world/us-says-some-companies-c...
I don’t assume that people who don’t know how to use weary correctly are that clever, but perhaps you’re just more grammatically optimistic than I am.
There is only so much one can do for people in that situation. They need to close the chapter themselves. Their Stockholm Syndrome [1] is a mix of helplessness and Sunken Cost fallacy [2].

People invest heavily, are encouraged to believe by the power structure, and suffer as they slowly begin to see that they have been beguiled (scammed).

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

[2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost