skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Guys, consider the source, really... it's one of those rightwing 'newspeak' organizations
http://americasvoiceonline.org/research/background_briefing_...

Secondly, though L1 visas do not have a prevailing wage, they DO look at the wage and if it's much lower the L1 visa is NOT granted. Also note that L1 visas are ONLY granted to people who have already worked with the company for several years and need to have been in a managerial capacity for at least 1 year out of the preceding 3 years.

As @rada indicated, the cost savings aspect alluded to are more often than not the result of lower age ranges and NOT just from wage discrimination.

Also note that if salaries are lower than what one would expect, it's because the prevailing wage number is lower than one might expect, simply because is is defined as the median wage for that position across the STATE, which would explain why prevailing wages are often much lower that what's "prevailing" in metro areas like NYC. (disclosure: IANAL, and I'm not 100% sure this is still the case, but I think it is)

One more thing to realize is that H1B workers and L1 workers PAY TAXES in the USA, BUT have NO rights to unemployment if they lose their job, nor to retirement benefits later in life etc. UNLESS they make it to the 40 points limit. At 3-4 points a year, this will typically take 10+ years and thus makes it near impossible with max. duration of visas, even if you 'stack' L1 and H1B (years on L1 add towards 6 year maximum of H1B). In short: the H1B workers fill the coffers of all non-visa workers without the option to withdraw their contribution in the future, unless they become citizens or marry a US spouse. Note that even if they do 8naturalize or marry, they'll need to get to this 40 point level to obtain retirement benefits. Can't find a link, but have the notifications from the social security administration in my files somewhere.

I'll be honest: I would not wish an H1B job on my worst enemy. I consider it modern-day slavery because you are beholden to your employer. These days it's not as bad as in the early 2000's, where you were forced to leave within 10 days of losing your job, but it's still not an easy or secure life.

Finally, a nice little overview comparing H1B and L1:
http://www.immihelp.com/l1-visa/l1-visa-h1b-visa-comparison....
I think the article tagline would be better "Domain Specific Languages for data analysis". Fortunately, the article does mention Python which is critical because new people might not recognize just how prevalent Python is for solving data analysis problems after reading this. The great work of the SciPy community has enabled Python to be used for all of the things that Matlab, R, and Julia can do. In addition, Python can integrate easily with these languages, so if you are a data analyst you need to learn Python.
For developers who want a simple blogging engine. Try http://substancehq.com . All your blog's content will be served via varnishd which is an awesome cache.
Stata is close to your ideal - it is popular with business and economists. However, no one can ever resist Turing completeness - that would require shelling out to another language for that one small thing every project needs (a different thing for every project)
That depends on how high the walls are, and the argument could be made they're not very high at all. A minor entry fee, hardware (don't count this highly, someone wanting to develop for platform x likely already has platform x), and an approvals process that blocks mostly porn and malware (plus a few more edge cases).
The lines look like those on an inverted plane: http://xahlee.info/SpecialPlaneCurves_dir/Inversion_dir/inve...
OTP Technical Board - Decisions affecting Erlang R16
Check out Amazon's pricing pages ([1] and [2]) for details.

As for resources spent, my own blog has had just over 10k pageviews since Saturday when I launched on S3/CF and for that I'm paying $0.07 (S3) + $0.12 (CF) = a whooping $0.19! Including a lot of writing files back and forth to get everything up and running.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
[2] http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
Vimeo clearly states: Vimeo Plus users may not upload videos that are commercial in nature, or that are intended to sell or promote a product or service.

So how can Vimeo be an alternative to YouTube?

Am I missing something here?
I think you are going in the wrong direction. It's too easy to paint yourself in a corner that way.

> It would be awesome to let people express their ideas in terms of the domain and not worry about low-level details like loops.

Yes! I think you want to build this functionality on top of a powerful language to easily handle the dirty ETL work too. This is the reason lots of financial companies use python with scipy, numpy, pandas, etc, on top of it.
I'm happy to see this thread on front page. Some of those projects seem to be very challenging and interesting. I would be careful however with the creative coder concept. Most of the work done in interactive installations is highly unusual and takes from graphics programming, computer vision, physics programming and sometimes integration with social media. Solid programming background is a must - I don't really see how knowing processing or three.js suddenly makes you a creative coder. I would rather define it as a all-round developer with loads of ideas on how to make unconventional combinations of technology work together.
My anecdotal experience working in that kind of "big enterprise environment" as an occasional COTR agrees with this 100%.
It used to take me around 10 seconds to get from opening a new tab, to specific files in Google Drive. Now it takes about 2 seconds. This is a huge improvement. But I hope they integrate it to the chrome omnibox to take it under 1 second.
That may be true but I find the term denigrating towards programmers. This isn't the advertising industry and their nomenclature isn't appropriate here. It implies a "non-creative" type of programmer. It also implies most programmers are of a "non-creative" type. Furthermore, the implication is those programmers, since they are by definition non-creative, don't do their own thinking.

The term may not technically mean the above however the implication is there.
Python acquired that capability with Pandas in the last two years. Same nomenclature, tens of times faster.
Hey, I'm an avid MBP, iPad, iPhone user and I love them, but I think this is really going to be big for Microsoft. There are many, many people who are completely immersed in a Microsoft world. These people use iOS and Android devices because they are the only viable options. I foresee this being a huge blow to Apple, which will (hopefully) wake them up a bit and focus back on innovating a bit more again.
Cardboard bicycle 'close to mass production': tough, green and just $20
And what if you have your email open? Someone could see the senders and subject lines if they can see your screen! Oh noes! The same way anyone can see anything you're doing if they can see your screen!

This isn't even FUD, this is just plain bullshit.
I don't really like this dark header in contrast with the body.
Also the dropdown menu dark border looks horrible IMHO.

The rest is quite ok! :-)
Glad you like it! Definitely nice when you get to take the time with these kind of projects.
I'm glad you resubmitted it. It was interesting.
Last I heard any manufacturer of an ARM device capable of running Windows RT would be required to prevent the loading any other OSes via secure boot, or the disabling of secure boot.
BingAds.com: I have to install silverlight and opt-in to sign up? Microsoft #WTF
I mentioned the 18+ games part to highlight the hyperbolic nature of the article. It assumed, based on current guidelines , that Skyrim et al. would not be allowed by MS. But that situation is quite absurd because it assumes the guidelines will never change and that MS is willing to lose money on the biggest gaming franchises.

Using extremes like this doesn't support an argument. There is no actual evidence (i.e. non-hypothetical) in the article that MS plans on losing the hardcore gamer demographic on the PC. I don't see any restrictions on developers that haven't existed before. Developers can still program desktop games and avoid the store, just like they've been doing all these years.

I feel there's this illusion where it's either the old, "open", Microsoft business model or the closed down Apple model. There can be a middle area where certain form factors, such as tablets, can benefit profit-wise from a closed down system (iPad, WinRT) and other form factors, like the desktop, can benefit from a dual system (ie consumers can opt for the store, or just download like normal). This notion that MS has and will fully lock down all their platforms seems unlikely to me personally.
Comic-Con 2012 Gallery: New York Edition
Growth Hacking decision/testing idea can come from anywhere in the startup.
Consider GitHub. They decided on giving free account for Open Source projects and paid ones for private projects. This decision was the main cause of their viral growth according to the CEO Tom Preston-Werner. This decision can't be made by a developer or a marketer, unless you are a very small team.
Boxee to offer cloud DVR service, over-the-air channels next month
Varnish would have been fun to play with for a static blog. For one thing you then could use ESI to not have to invalidate the cache as often.

But I disagree with one thing — the "git push → deploy dance" is a pro for Jekyll! ;)
You can search Google Drive directly from the omnibox by creating a custom search engine in Chrome. Then you only have to type a couple letters, tab, and the search query.
Microsoft buys online storage service StorSimple
My brother in law, who is a foreman for a crew of painters on Disney property, has been waiting for this, specifically for office. I've often suggested that he could just collaborate on documents (and they do this often) through google docs ... but office/windows is entrenched, and he'd love it if he had access to office on a tablet.
> Thusfar, they've been unsuccessful at legislating away people's ability to copy data

Tell that to the thousands of people who got sued several years ago, or the Pirate Bay guys who are either in prison or facing prison sentences.
> The great work of the SciPy community has enabled Python to be used for all of the things that Matlab, R, and Julia can do.

As much as I hate R and love Python, this is not entirely true (unless you count rpy2 as part of "Python"). R has many more statistical models and better plotting capability compared with Python. It also has a lot of domain-specific packages (for example, Bioconductor) that are not available in Python.
Even clicking through to the link, it loaded faster than I could Alt-Tab to the next window.
Noble Matching Algorithms
You wouldn't steal a shape.
I called this out before... Vimeo could be considered optional. Youtube can be configured as well for hosting the video. Or you could self host. The post was more about the production.
Isn't labeling a marketer as "growth hacker - someone focused on creating scalable growth by manipulating and measuring each aspect of the customer funnel" is same as labeling a programmer as "bug squasher - someone focused on establishing a project with consistently very low open bugs reports by manipulating and measuring each aspect of software quality control" ?
Building a database-backed Clojurescript app
>It implies a "non-creative" type of programmer. It also implies most programmers are of a "non-creative" type.

i don't think that's an unfair implication. There is plenty of programming that has no creative aspect, and i'd say the majority of programmers are not creatives. It's a term with a well-accepted industry definition, and if you start defining it as broadly as you want to you could probably apply it to just about any job, anywhere in the world. The guy wiring up power poles outside my office does his own thinking, does that make his job creative?
What considerations did you have for the type of voice used?
That's neat.

> This trial is only accessible on https://www.google.com in English and for @gmail.com addresses (not available on Google Apps accounts).

Oh.
If you haven't tried it, the data.table package is great. Mostly like a data.frame (in fact a subclass), but fast.
> You mean like extracting billions of barrels of oil a day and burning them?

The actual figure is about 85 million barrels per day [1].

[1] http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx
This is actually very cool. I've never heard of Promises/A before, but after toying with Node.JS a bit (and being turned off after having many nested callbacks in my code), I am definitely a fan of the flat code structure this library allows.

Although it's obviously not built in favor of any particular JS framework or environment, it may entice me to give Node.JS another shot in the future with implementing RSVP.
> "(plus a few more edge cases)"

That's my argument - "a few" edge cases aren't actually that few, and these are edge cases with the potential to grow into hugely productive industries.

Under the current scheme, DOOM would never have been released, and the multi-billion dollar action/shooter games industry would be dead on arrival.

Applying the same standards to textual content, sites like Reddit and Digg would never have been approved (in fact Reddit apps on the App Store are rated 18+, a rating strictly disallowed in MS's scheme), and we would never have seen the explosion of link aggregation.

These few edge cases aren't that few, and they aren't that edge casey.
[Minority Report Technology] Playing Tom Cruise with Oblong Technologies
WWWizer is pretty cool, but I'd rather roll my own on Heroku. I have a Heroku "app" that Heroku thinks is PHP, but it just contains a .htaccess file with some RewriteRule directives to 301 http://example.com to http://www.example.com. I then do the real hosting elsewhere. :)
Autobahn for Hacker News has always allowed you to disable or enable any feature separately, including the User Profile overlay, as the launch video, official page, and this screen shot shows since July 4th.

http://vlad.github.com/autobahn/img/autobahn-options-google-...

Autobahn also has hundreds of daily unique users and launched on July 4th with the headline "Save Time on Hacker News." If you want to ban stories and see full subdomain names, get it today! http://vlad.github.com/autobahn/
I am very confused. My source is a Dice salaries survey, and to refute said source, you link to a website trashing some guy named Mark Krikorian? Did you reply to my comment by mistake?

(1) Your link is to America's Voice, a Washington DC-based pro-immigration lobby organization, hardly an objective source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas_Voice_(lobby)
The idea that immigration status is in any way linked to a company over the long term is clearly broken.
I was in the US working on a TN for 1.5 years. At that time, TN's were not tied to the employer. I'm not sure if this is still the case. You just had to have a job in the field that you came in on. That said, you couldn't apply for a greencard while on a TN. For that you needed to get an H1B.

For our company I was paid the market rate, no different than a local hire.
All programers are concerned with design, if nothing else the design of the implementation! All good coders realize that there will really be two groups of users, the consumers and those who wish to extend or maintain the application. A piece of code with a good UX (maybe DX instead?) makes my life so much easier and can save my company quite a bit of money if my salary is high.

For small groups, having developers who can make good end user interfaces is pretty much a requirement, but this is noting special. If you were developing oilfield software, you would need to know about drilling. If you are developing software whose purpose is to augment some already-existing element of humanity (like communication), then it is not a surprise that you would want developers that know about how humans like to do things.

As members of a community focused almost entirely on a specific subset of everything there is to know about in the world, we must not forget that while a furniture maker should know woodworking well, he should also know about how people sit.
Green energy just isn't there, yet. Instead of infusing it with lobs of public cash, we need to let it simmer for a bit and become efficient. Private investment will increase as they learn to run lean and solve problems better, which means stunts like giving them 1/2 billion dollars are only holding up real progress.
Where can we see the results?
True, but it is also true that nerds HATE with a passion to be referred as the de-facto helpdesk for those they will give any recommendation.
I would never EVER, recommend any Linux distribution at the time being to any of my non-nerds contact, in favor of a product that is simple to use (even at the cost of some freedom) and very hard to break.
SpaceX promises new engine and rocket larger than Falcon 9.
But that's not messing up the PC ecosystem. PCs running Windows will be just like PCs running Windows always have been. Tablets and other ARM devices will be just like tablets and other ARM devices traditionally have been; the OS that comes preinstalled is the OS you have. You've really never been able to install, for example, Linux overtop of Windows on an ARM device before. The status quo isn't changing.

The only exception to the ARM rule in recent years has been Android, in a niche market, and only on some devices. That's not changing either.
I have found it to be fun the first few times, but as your blog grows I've found it to be a pain to deploy every time I make a small correction. Also, with markdown there are always corrections to be made for formatting purposes.
Quite sure that news posted by YC companies is weighted higher than others (namely to promote job postings, product launches, and so forth).
Why is hacker better than other social media platforms?
Please save us from JavaScript, google.
That might be on purpose -- releasing the RT model first just to force the rest of the manufacturers to also release something on Win8's debut, without releasing a Pro model to directly compete with the initial sales. As much a reference design as part of the marketing campaign -- ensuring Win8's launch looks concerted.
Mystery chip in Apple Lightning connector exposed
How I can acquire a small/medium sized Tesla Coil?
You'll probably want to see Dart's Web Components[1] work. I suggest you direct any questions over to the mailing list[2].

[1] https://github.com/dart-lang/dart-web-components

[2] https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!forum/misc
In case there is any confusion, Autobahn for Hacker News launched on July 4th with hundreds of unique daily users using the slogan "Save Time on Hacker News", so I ask this author to come up with another tagline to avoid confusion.

With Autobahn, you truly save time: you can ban stories by domain name, see full story domain names, and view user profiles in an overlay with a twitter button and picture, so you don't have to click the back button; also, profile links and e-mails are clickable as well, so you don't have to copy-paste!

If you only want some of these features, simply uncheck the ones you need using the options panel: http://vlad.github.com/autobahn/img/autobahn-options-google-...

Official site: http://wwww.autobahnapp.com

Original Hacker News discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4197062
Show HN: Uptilt - multiplayer card game we built during Rails Rumble 2012
Excession by Ian M Banks - sentient AIs managing an advanced civilisation run into something they don't understand (an unusual occurrence which piques their interest). Funny, subtle, and provocative by turns, it is one of his better sci-fi novels, and far above much of the genre in plot and character.
Sure, but registries don't have to just be focused on "find once stolen". Who wants to fill that in?

Velospace is a great example of a registry based on people loving their bike and wanting to share it. People use it even without the trace functionality. It didn't need to overcome any network effects, people love posting pictures of their bike online and talking about it only second to posting pictures of cats.

What I'm saying is:

Build something that has such a great utility without your bike being stolen, such that if that unfortunate event occurs you already have a record of the provenance constructed.

If someone builds that, then I will email my 22,000 London cycling contacts and tell them to put their details in. And then I will post on my forum, and then I will email other forum admins (and I know a fair few personally) and say... this is awesome, tell your users too.

And people will do it, because they love posting readers wives pictures of their bikes online and would love to do so yet again and talk about it.

And with all of the avid cyclists reached pretty quickly, the utility cyclists would follow naturally as more blogs, forums and magazines say, "use this awesome registry to keep your bike safe".

Seriously, I'd champion it. I might even build it... #4 on my list of startups to make if Microcosm fails.
Quick and Dirty Lifecycle Emails
Re point #1) this is definitely new. This was NOT the case during the first bubble in 2000/2001, when H1B holders were forbidden to solicit new employment. Slavery was alive and well then.

Also, contrary to popular belief, there is NO grace period after losing ones job. If you are on an H1B, you have to find another H1B job and file for a change or extension while 'IN STATUS', or at least have the new employer apply for a temporary I-129 work permit().

Note: Some say the explosion of outsourcing to India after the first bubble was actually a result of hordes of South Asians, familiar with the US business climate, who were fired and sent back to India, resulting in a humongous braindrain.

() http://www.murthy.com/2012/09/18/h1b-layoff-strategy-when-ch...
> Big-O is an upper bound on the growth of a function. The function being bounded can (per his item #3) represent anything of interest.

> In practice it is common for the function to be the average running time of an algorithm.

In other words, Big-O is the worst-case of the input. You do the complexity analysis and then assign it to a Big-O class, the Big-O class represents the worst-case for that given analysis. If you analyze the average, its Big-O class will be the worst-case/upper-bound of the average and you obviously can't expect it to say anything about the actual full algorithm's worst case scenario because, well, you didn't analyze the algorithm's worst-case scenario.

Big-O is worst-case, you just have to know what it's the worst case of. If the input is just "here is the quicksort algorithm", then Big-O would be the upper-bound for the algorithm itself, aka the worst case for the algorithm, namely O(n²).

This seems to be just an issue of convention, does "Big-O" refer to the upper bound on the algorithm or on the average algorithm performance? That's been discussed elsewhere, but it seems like programmers imply the average while the strict definition does not. So my point was that the original article should have just said to be careful about vocabulary, not asserted that Big-O isn't about worst case, since it is.
My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
GetMaid charges 45US$/hour, Pathjoy only 21US$/hour.
Its not scaling if its not chock full of numbers (and maybe even graphs). There's not one mention of requests per second or latency in this. Users/capacity per shard, bottlenecks run into, etc.
Show HN: Learn Origami - Garage Campus
This Island Earth - an early example of the use of a puzzle (meritocratic choice)to determine an intelligent protagonist as well as a defense against being mathematically expendable. Though the movie bombed, the book and its themes still resonate.