skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It seems to me that the H1-B was more a response to young Americans not entering various fields than the other way around."

I think it may be a self-reinforcing cycle. A short term "shortage" may prompt the visa program, but this may suppress the increase in wages that would attract more US citizens to the field. Which can lead to greater shortages, more visas, and so forth. Enough iterations of this process and you get exactly what you have described - a "shortage" that is endemic to the entire field.

While I appreciate your response, I do think you weaken your argument by talking about shortages without discussing wages. The argument that someone tried to pay "market rate" doesn't resonate much with me either - if there's a shortage, you'd expect wages to go up, sometimes dramatically. I see no reason for the government to step in and prevent this.

We also probably disagree about "artificially" limiting the supply. Most of what we call "engineering" in the US is not subject to regulatory capture, like law or medicine. Anyone can hang out a shingle as a software developer. And by creating very specific visa programs for STEM fields while leaving other fields controlled either by regulatory capture or the simple requirement of current US residency rights while vastly expanding the pool of engineers through visa programs, we may be "artificially" increasing the supply of STEM workers relative to the rest of the workforce.

Lastly, I agree with you that it makes no sense to kick people who have gotten degrees in the US out of the country. Terrible idea. But we should ask why US citizens have abandoned these fields to the degree that they have. Some people will claim that it is educational failures, especially in math and science. However, keep in mind that the RAND institute conducted a large study and concluded that Americans are avoiding graduate degrees in STEM fields largely because these fields have fallen badly behind the pay and stability of other careers - in short, the "shortage" is a very rational response to market conditions.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html

This is why I'm favor of general skilled immigration programs, but I'm very skeptical of public policy based on an assumed shortage of STEM workers. Overall, I don't think the evidence supports the claims of a shortage.
> How about the despecialized edition?

I'm a fan and an active user at originaltrilogy.com :-)
I love my Microsoft keyboard, I use it with my MacBook Pro all day long at work (I do NOT like the standalone Apple keyboards). If they came out with a keyboard cover for the iPad I'd buy one, and I'm willing to bet it would be a huge seller. As for the Surface tablet itself, I'll be blown away if it ever makes it as high as the #2 tablet. Only their usual pigheadedness will keep them from actually succeeding in "reinventing the tablet" by releasing one.
> Are you sure that's what he's saying? Is he suggested all patents are impediments?

I'm not sure. It seems to be what he's saying from the letter to the editor, but I don't know if he's said so publicly elsewhere except about software patents.
Agreed. A growing number of games are requiring a persistent online connection for DRM verification.

I miss that feeling of being able to completely disconnect from the Internet and just enjoy gaming on my local machine.
Why say "Toddler" ? Could be any child.
I found this article incredibly interesting, because I've only worked on low-traffic Rails apps so far. I've always wanted to learn about sharding, but haven't needed to, and didn't know where to start.

Now I'm inspired to start up a few VMs and have a play with the gems they mentioned, and try to get replication and failover happening.
Japan's Reaction to Haruki Murakami Not Winning the Nobel Prize
One very nice side-effect of hosting on GitHub is that it integrates very nicely with your repository GitHub pages. URLs for your repos are simply http://domain/reponame. For example (apologies for the self-promotion):

* my website, hosted on GitHub: http://crystae.net/

* toy cellular automata project, hosted on GitHub: http://crystae.net/automatra

Author's argument about Github Pages not allowing custom Jekyll plugins is true, but you can always build the site locally with whatever plugins you like and deploy the built copy (see Octopress[1] for a popular example of this).

1: http://octopress.org/
> 3. You are willing to suffer.

> 8. You fall asleep exhausted, fulfilled, and ready for tomorrow.

Most articles like this are trying to convince me I should be excited to work 12+ hours in a day. I like my offline time. I like seeing my family and the world. I don't need to work 60 hours in a week to be a great developer.
Crashlytics Labs announces the release of Backbone.StateManager
I think there are some big problems with this latest round of "TaskRabbit for X", aggregated labor services (Cherry, GetMaid, and others). In the case of Pathjoy, the differentiation they are trying to sell is price. The technology is nothing special unless your idea of finding a house cleaner is Craig's List. Yet, is price the problem to be solved with these services? Is pushing down the price on a service like this beneficial to anyone except the aggregator?

For some TaskRabbit type tasks, especially the last minute or one-off tasks, it make a lot of sense because the transaction may not have happened otherwise. However, for these kinds of
specialized labor type tasks, isn’t there some harm done to the service market through lower wages for the cleaner and inconsistent service for the customer?

Also, how does Pathjoy maintain customer loyalty? If service is a kind of “on-demand” how can you maintain consistent work for the cleaner? What is to stop the cleaner or customer from doing an “under the table deal”?

I think there could be an opportunity to “Disrupt” these older services but I’m sure lowering the price is NOT the way to a sustained business, even at scale.
Show HN: Best time to meet
Since no-one else has replied, I'll give it a shot...

I think there's a general impression in the UK -- no doubt fueled by US TV shows -- that the American prison system is utterly barbaric and you might as well extradite someone to North Korea as the USA. It could well be a misapprehension, but I've not seen any American claim differently, so... what do you think?

Also, there was a feeling that there would be pressure brought to bear on the court by the US military, to find him guilty and impose a harsh sentence, in order to distract attention from their incompetence in securing their systems.
The effect is the same (it's composition vs inheritance) but the SASS CSS is going to be more space efficient. The way I think about it is that @extend copies the selector while mixins copy their contents.
I find this interesting because as a former artist, the reason I love programming is that it scratches the same creative itch.

I'm not sure if I fit in the 'Creative Coders' category, since though I was an aspiring artist prior to getting into development, I was never commercially successful at it, and I'm really not a good designer since I find commercial art pretty tedious.

Programming, however, is another thing altogether; within about a year of beginning from scratch, I got a job at one of the companies in this list (Mirada) leading development on an interactive storytelling app. One thing that I think gave me a good edge was some development experience in the entertainment realm -- I had made an iPhone app to help screenwriters organize their thoughts, and got a chance to make an app for a comic book trying to get off the ground.

I also know that we're currently looking for more iOS developers (especially with OpenGL experience) so the development side is only growing.
My old eyes cannot handle very very long lines of very small type, and after several tries I was not able to guess the URL for the story in human friendly form.

Please submit links for humans, not machines. Add the machine link in a comment if you wish.

PS: I'm aware of Readability and the ability to increase font sizes. There are other problems in general with print links that those do not address:

• Print links generally do not include extras like comments. This particular story had a large number of comments at the original site.

• Although not applicable in this particular case, stories often include sidebar links to related stories, and these are often omitted from print links.

• The non-print link usually includes a very easy way to get to the print version. Typically, you just click a print icon and you are there. The print link, on the other hand, usually does not include any link or other mechanism to get to the non-print version (other than the "back" button if you happened to have come from the non-print version).

Taking this all into account, particularly the last part about it being very easy to get to the print link from the non-print link, and not easy to go the other way, in almost all cases the link submitted should be the non-print link.

PPS: there are some sites that offer an "all on one page" link, which is distinct from the print link. The former simply does away with splitting the article into pages, keeping the comments and sidebar links and human-friendly formatting. Submitting "all on one page" links is great.
This is mod_status, one of the modules Apache ships with. Why is this worrying?

Here's the same thing for apache.og: http://www.apache.org/server-status
They also seem to be hostile towards modding, which is a shame, since extensive modding has kept SimCity 4 alive to this day, close to 10 years after its release. A cold gesture towards their fan community, as well.
The problem here is that H1b people are being preferred over others because its is assumed that they are being paid less. There are laws to not let this happen.

The lowball offer if it is not prevailing wage is illegal. They are not allowed to work for less (there is a specific clause just for this) , just like other employees.
And if the lowball offer is not less it aint no lowball offer.

../i am the queen of everything.
How to use a Landing Page to validate your Startup idea
Traduzindo A Interface Do Joomla
I grew up around a situation similar to this. Thankfully, it hasn't turned out that badly. People with that kind and depth of mental illness have to have someone watching out for them. One little slip, one missed pill has the potential to send them down a road that they will not be able to recover from on their own. It can get bad fast and take a long time to bring back under control.
While doing research I came across Zuora [...]

What other solutions did you evaluate? Which of your requirements did the other solutions not meet?

After I research solutions to a problem, I end up with a list of requirements and a list of solutions with notes regarding each solution (e.g., pros and cons). If you were to post a complete list of your requirements and notes regarding each solution you evaluated, it would be easier to provide relevant feedback.

(If you didn't take any notes, you might want to consider the benefits of note taking in the context of a personal or company wiki.)
better is rarely enough. the biggest killer of "great" products? ones that are "good enough".
Ask HN:  What do you use for persistent chat?
We are trying to improve intergroup communication at my job. One of the ideas we have come up with is to create a persistant chat room (or channel) for the groups to chat on. Then when an issue comes up the groups all have a history of the conversation. Currently we use GTalk for chat and most of us use Adium for a chat client. The only requirement is that the chat room log has to be visible to all parties with at least 48 hours of history.

So the question is, what do you guys use for persistent chatrooms?
Norm Matloff discusses the issues on H-1B
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

___

Bottom Line: there is no labor shortage and there's no need for special targeting of technology jobs.
Terrible analogy - there's a proven market for cars.

At this point, it's pretty hard to prove there is a market for non-iPad tablets that aren't e-readers...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/my-son...
I'd propose another feature: you can upload a picture of your stolen bike (make one now!) and crowd-source finding a match. Like others have said here: even if one person finds their bike on this service it's worth it. I've had bikes and bike parts stolen all over the world and I won't buy another one as I can't keep it indoors where I live at the moment. This service won't make me change my mind to buy another one but I might spend a few minutes a week comparing bike pictures as a good samaritan.
IMHO, "your life's work," is the work you do... while you're alive. Sometimes you are miserable. There's a group therapy session we all go to... it's the bar. Get used to it.
Virtually none of that is in fact unique to MATLAB or even a strength in the first place.

> Matlab is awesome above all else because the design is
> coherent. Both the syntax and the standard libraries.

It certainly is coherent, and also consistent, but only in the weakest and least interesting sense. Namely, everything's about equally messy. Namespaces are non-existent in the standard library and clumsily realised otherwise. OOP remains rudimentary and feels as tacked-on as it happens to be. The one-function-per-file system ruins everyone's day. No standard arguments (and checking nargin loses its appeal rather fast), and shitty inlined pseudo-lambdas.

> It is extremely quick to whip up anything and then turn
> that into a script and then into a software with
> functions

No different from R or Python, and most of the time a genuine weakness; it's a key reason for scientific/engineering code being as ad hoc and convoluted as it is.

> If you as a newbie create a custom function for a
> scalar, there's good chance it will work for vectors or
> n-matrices automatically.

Vectorising functions in Python (that is, NumPy) is about as straightforward.

> It's also much much faster than some looping in another
> scripting language.

Nah, MATLAB is now fairly good at unrolling and optimising such loops. Don't worry too much about vectorising every single bit of your algorithm.

> There's help which actually returns something sensible
> when you type help

That's also true in the cases of both Python and R. Long story short: Most of your perceived advantages aren't unique, and that comes on top of MATLAB's exorbitant pricing schemes and extremely dubious language design. Trust me, if you think MATLAB's a particularly well-designed language for anything other than linear algebra, you owe it to yourself to check out alternatives and other languages.
Searching the title on Google gives this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/my-son...
Press CTRL+PLUS a couple of times to increase the font size. CTRL-ZERO to go back to 1:1.
Which is the better start up hub: Berlin or London?
"Video Connection: The Basics"--display what's on your mobile on a big screen
Talked to them a few years ago. At that time there were hefty setup fees and $XXXX/Month
No I did not.

H1B transfers require the new employer to go through a significant amount of paperwork, and have all of the usual lags that anything to do with the government does. As a result the requirement to deal with this is a significant impediment for changing jobs. Particularly for very small employers that may not have people dedicated for this kind of paperwork.

What I'm describing is, "Oh, you're in the country on a valid visa? Come work for us tomorrow, at the same rate under the same rules that a US citizen faces!"
No, SASS had @mixins and @extend. And now it has @extend with %placeholders, which is the least bloaty solution of them all. Lots of the use cases mixins are touted as solving are actually much better solved by @extend'ing %placeholders.
Doesn't this suggest that way back when Informatics/IT was boring and unattractive to the great majority but a few 'engineering types' that people set up in advance a system that would filter out undesirables?
I think that's giving these theoretical gatekeepers more credit than they deserve. People don't typically plan that far in advance for a day when their profession might be 'displaced by the other'. (for example Y2K)

I think it's more of a case of engineers filtering out using the tools which have worked in the past and perhaps not revising them, if they need revising, but not from some kind of nefarious conspiracy.
I disagree, quite frankly I don't care for your explanation even if you were to offer it.
Ctrl-+ (control-plus) on a PC or Cmd-+ on a Mac will increase the size of the type quite nicely. Ctrl-- (control-minus) will decrease the size, and Ctrl-0 (control-zero) will set it back to its original. This doesn't work well on every website, but works fairly well here.
A Picasso and a Gauguin Are Among 7 Works Stolen From a Dutch Museum
BodyForm response - social media done right
It's quite easy to create duplicate styles in the output with mixins - the compiler isn't that smart yet, do placeholders avoid all of that? I haven't seen a lot of comparisons or examples that really drive it home so far.

I'm actually working on a css post-processor script that optimizes css output. Grouping styles in the most efficient way possible is quite tricky.
This is pretty cool I'd like to see more useful filters when searching for candidates. If you just search python it shows both learners and experts. Also no salary filter and other stuff it seems like.
CUDA 5 is now production ready
By "legislate away," did debacle mean completely eliminating file sharing? I presumed he just meant to firmly establish law and legal precedent that prohibits IP infringement.
Our award winning task mgnt app is free today. Ranked higher than Facebook,Gmail
Once I signed up for PowToon the pricing for our plan was $57 a month... which gives you 20 video exports.

I thought about music... but after an hour trying to find a good match I gave up and figured I could add music later.
Mind Management (Not Time Management)
Check out Readability.
will it even be possible to DRM 3D objects? How are you going to do that? Can you put machine-readable watermarks onto physical surfaces that aren't trivially circumvented?
You can blame the schools for misdiagnosing ADHD, and you can blame them for a poor IEP, but you can't blame them for a child not having a normal life due to one of the most tragic diseases known to man.

Schizophrenia is not the kind of disease you can treat with an IEP, and it sounds like the author's son fell out of the system from a very young age. Trying to blame anything but genetics and development for his son's state is disingenuous - treating schizophrenia is a complicated, involved, and ultimately very stressful process for everyone involved, and in the end it can only bring someone on the brink of homelessness or self-harm into a situation where they can be stable most of the time, but never all of the time, or even almost always.

> The word “disability,” for instance, should have covered Tim and children like him.

ADHD or blindness are not even in the same room a schizophrenia. It's like comparing having six toes on your left foot to being comatose.

> If I were a legislator today, I’d mandate — and provide funding to ensure — that every teacher receive training in recognizing symptoms of mental illnesses.

Teachers have enough on their plate, and more importantly, that's not what teachers are for. It sounds like the author took his son to plenty of mental health professionals, and he still wasn't properly diagnosed until he was nearly an adult.

> I’d see that pediatricians are trained to make screening for mental health concerns a regular part of well-child exams.

Many mental health diseases don't manifest to the levels for proper diagnosis until adulthood, and even then the process of diagnosis is not scientific.

> I’d put much more money into community mental health services...

All of that sounds great, but mental health services are one of the first things cut into in a down economy.

> Tim is where he is today because of a host of public policy decisions we’ve made in this country.

No, he isn't. The author is wrong, and I'm sorry for that, but it's very unlikely that his son would have ever been a contributing member of society. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disease that cannot be treated like a 'special need.'
Thanks, that's all I wanted to know. Seems you are better off making something custom.

Note: I have no issues with Zuroa. Never heard of them and have no experiences with their products. I was just curious about what the OP meant by expensive.
The only thing keeping me on Windows is the games. If Steam was on Linux with a strong library to back it up, I'd switch right now.
That sounds like an excellent use case for IRC.
I'm excited to see this. People in the SEO industry have clamored for this for a long time, but it wasn't really necessary until negative SEO has became more prevalent and effective the last few months. Traditionally, a link to your site could never really 'hurt' your domain. That has changed as Google has rolled out Penguin though and there are plenty of horror stories of people building 1000s of spammy links to a 3rd party sites and harming their rankings[1]. It wasn't fair to allow website owners to have their domains penalized for something that they have no control over...you can't prevent people from building malicious links to your site.

Also worth noting that Bing rolled this same feature out in June of this year[2].

[1]http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-...
[2]http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive...
From what I see, Go is not really meant for web development. I think Google's real bet on web and general app development will be Dart, as Go looks more like a C++ replacement. Also from the project page, I see like 80 people are committing to Dart so that sounds pretty promising ( https://code.google.com/p/dart/people/list ).
When you consider that (probably) most of the people who exhibit serious substance abuse problems are self-medicating, the numbers aren't difficult to digest. (I say this not as somebody with studies in hand, but as a person who's been clean and sober for more than a quarter-century, and who has significant experience dealing with other addicts and alcoholics. One can make pretty reliable predictions about underlying issues based entirely on the addict's "drug of choice".)
"It duplicates all the styles, instead of grouping common selectors into one style definition like @extend does."

This didn't come through entirely until I read the comment. I think an example of what mixins would produce would be helpful.

At the end of the day we have two goals: 1) keeping things easy to develop and 2) keeping the CSS filesize as small as possible.

Mixins accomplished 1 but not 2.

One potentially relevant example is bootstrap's core "btn" class, which has over 50 lines:
https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/less/button...

When you want a button in HTML you have to add the btn class, as well as an additional class for that button's styling. IE: btn-large, btn-primary, btn-info

Bootstrap could have made this happen with just one class by implementing mixins, but that would result in each btn-primary, btn-info, etc repeating those 50 lines from the btn class.

If Bootstrap used @extend instead, that large btn class could be replaced with a multiple selector, IE: .btn-large, .btn-small, .btn-primary, etc. Then the independent styles could be defined below, as they already are, and we would just need one class to add the appropriate button style.

I guess they could do that today by just using the long selector instead of .btn, but that makes the file harder to maintain.

Let me know if I'm thinking about this wrong.