skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What sector of the industry do you work in?

Here in NYC startup-land we have no trouble finding talent at "market" rates. Granted, market-rate for an engineer with even just a few years of experience and up-to-date tech skills is $150K-200K total comp.

I've noticed that the H-1B discussions tend to be extremely polarized, and it reflects the bimodal distribution of the tech industry. There's the highly-paid glam side (see: Google, Facebook, etc) where comp is high and you meet $200K H-1B engineers around every corner.

And then there's the bodyshop consultancy side of the industry, where cheap H-1Bs are brought in by the planeload and shopped out to clients at insane markups.

The bimodality of H-1Bs is important to remember. Personally, I have trouble meeting devs around here making less than, say, $120K, H-1B or otherwise.
No, it was caused almost entirely by fraud. If not for people within 'the banks' knowingly rating these mortgages as a ludicrously good buy, etc, there wouldn't be a banking crisis.

There are even further systematic abuses that should see thousands jailed, such as deceptive marketing and intentional misrepresentation of clients. None of this would have been self-sustaining without all the coverups.
I like this approach, although I don't have a router that I can flash with TomatoUSB. Instead I setup adsuck[1] which is a DNS blacklisting daemon. It can be setup on individual machines, or on the perimeter like in your case. I prefer the DNS approach as hosts files can grow to be quite lengthy (article proves it) and can in certain cases cause performance issues, as parsing several KBs of entries prior to sending a DNS request is noticeable.

[1] https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck
Looks like the line for Canada (where I'm from) - And most of the rest of the world, including russia - is currently about 6 years long...
Why not just delete the entries which block ads?
It's coming to Toronto http://www.beanfieldcondoconnect.com/index.html

It's more then an oligopoly, there's a government mandates to provide equal service to the north that also drives up prices.
Is an incoherent rant like this an uncharacteristic indulgence for a technopriest? Or are you just a fan of technopriests, not being one yourself?

Everyone in our increasingly automated gift economy lives in fear of being cut off from the support of the layers of technology they rely upon for all their needs, all the way up your vaunted Maslow hierarchy.

You shouldn't romanticize this state of affairs, and you should not crow about the special role of the priestly class. In my opinion you should think soberly between now and your 50th birthday about how you can contribute to a global society that is both more stable and more technologically advanced, and try to forget about the futurism that was peddled to you ( and all of us) by Wired magazine in 1994.
FatFractal Server Extensions lets you extend your API
In US English the example would be "two twenty-eight pm". This appears sane to me. The only complexity is for a single-digit minute, in which case you pronounce the 0 as "oh": "two oh-eight pm". I guess you have the exact hour, too: "2 o'clock".

Is there really a country that says "2 hours 28 minutes" for 2:28 pm? Omitting "pm" seems to leave it underspecified unless you have a locale that uses 24-hour time starting at noon.

If you want complex time rules, in colloquial Thai the day is broken up into roughly 6-hour periods, with a flexible additional split in afternoon/evening...
I concur. I live in Israel. From what I know of my friends who have moved to the Silicon Valley under H1B, they went to fill high-demand engineering positions with high compensation (definitely on par with their US-resident coworkers).
What is shocking is the fact that in companies where devs have no say in hiring, managers hire those people and then ignore the fact that they do nothing (or try to promote them out of development) to try and cover up their mistake. It is incredibly demoralizing working ten hour days trying to deliver working code while someone else is producing nothing, getting ahead, and going home at 4 pm. This shit is by far the single most enraging thing in all of software development. That's why I 'keep it real' in interviews.
You seem to be assuming zero capital costs for fusion plants and hydrocarbon synth capacity. Think about how cheap those would have to be in order to make oil burning economically unprofitable. And what about after oil price adjusts to decreased demand.

The vast majority of oil production is profitable at very low oil prices (it was still making oil sheiks filthy rich at < $20 a barrel). So you'd need to get something like $5/barrel synthetic oil to stop a free market system from pumping up and burning the fossilized oil.
While that may be true, but I can tell you from personal experience, that having to wait ~20 years to get a green card is not the most appealing choice either.
I would be fine with them getting green cards and letting them compete on the same terms as I do. I'm not fine competing with someone that gets deported if they get fired and don't find someone else to sponsor their visa. H-1Bs give employers too much power over the employees.
It's use msata interface. teardown picture :http://goo.gl/Gt2oN
Does anyone else see this as a Shock site gold mine?
I'd prefer using Disconnect and Adblock - I usually allow the ads on sites I read daily - at least they receive the impressions, even if I don't click on them.

Facebook and Twitter buttons on the other hand - sorry guys, you stay blocked.
> And that's why I don't think it will impact economic growth that much.

Economic growth is hugely tied to energy costs.
There may be some body shops with incompetent people, but I think there are plenty of competent H1-B holders.

The proper framing is that their visa can be held over their head to extract 14 hour days 6 or 7 days a week and other working conditions and salaries that Americans would not accept or be able to compete with (for good reason).
My all-time favorite interview was one when I was interviewing for an SDET intern position at Microsoft. That interview (one in a day of four interviews) featured a great progression: logic puzzle, code the fixed input solution, code the n input solution, test your solution.

The puzzle was (apologies to the interviewer, but it IS a common puzzle) the eight ball and balance problem, where one ball is heavier than the other seven and you need to use a balance scale to find the lightest of the balls in the minimum number of weighs. I'd heard of the puzzle but never worked it out. I initially jumped to the 3 weigh solution, but the interviewer challenged me to keep looking, so I kept thinking and I found the 2 weigh solution. He then asked me to write code that could solve the 8 ball problem. Pretty straightforward. Once I finished that, he had me adopt it to be able to handle [edit: any number of] balls. This tested my ability to abstract my code. Finally, he asked how I would go about testing the program and we talked through that.

I cannot wait to steal that progression when I end up doing technical interviews someday.
most people (even around here) are insecure about their programming skill,

This has a lot of truth.

I think also most people say "the best interview technique is the one I do best at."
I think this is basically true. But a point worth making is that a "puzzle" problem is a much heavier thing than lightweight tests like FizzBuzz. If you hand someone a puzzle you're pretty much guaranteed (absent the rare, truly gifted candidate) to watch them struggle at a whiteboard for half an hour. FizzBuzz (or "reverse words in a sentence", or whatever) will tell you the same thing in a minute or two.

Basically, the Venn diagram regions for "can code fluently" and "can solve puzzles" have a ton of overlap. So test the first one, not the second.
My impression is that they are no longer in vogue - for a few years when I was in college (2004-ish) they were all over the place. Our industry is extremely faddish, even when it comes to interviewing...

You can still see them in some places I believe. I've heard anecdotally that Microsoft is still a fan of them.
I doubt skin tone plays much of a role. Relative to other places around the world, Americans are rather colorblind.
I was invited to a company for a game development position. One part of the interview consisted of a fairly challenging mathematical/algorithmic problem. It wasn't impossible, but it's certainly not something I can do in ten minutes at a white board with some people taking notes about my every movement.

The other part was being shown intentionally messy and broken code. Not code that'd fail to compile (although it sure looked like it would), but something thrown together in a completely insane manner that I couldn't possibly make sense of in 15 minutes. Much of it boiled down to, "What would happen if you call this function and use this variable before you actually define them and then do x, y and z?", and the way this language did it was quite different from other languages. I mean, yes, I did learn a lot about the language from that interview, but I'd really hope that's not the kind of code they'd be throwing at me or expecting me to write at their company.
Have you read Neuromancer?

I'm not quite sure how what you mention is related to the use of the word cyberspace as Gibson used it.
I both agree and disagree. I'm on an H1B, and I am definitely paid market rate.

However, I have had the misfortune of interviewing a number of candidates coming from companies like those mentioned- they are indeed underpaid. However, they're also unemployable, because they are trained in highly specific areas. I interviewed more than one .NET candidate that did not know SQL, for example.

The sad reality is that they are underpaid because they are underqualified. In an ideal world no company would make do with that, but as these employers demonstrate, it's quite possible to get by stringing together a collection of underqualified employees and pay them less.
I may be in the minority, but I like that. If I really want to get to the vendor site I will type in the URL directly, this is generally safer than clicking links anyway.
You never know where a URL redirection service (e.g., bit.ly) is going to send you.
Pull request is in: https://github.com/ajacksified/song-of-github/pull/8
Compuware Talking To Buyout Firms, Looking For Better Offer
Please explain the anti-pattern you see and the pattern your prefer.
Oh, what you are complaining is the lack of PM.

I thought you was referring to crazy phrases (to me) of 3 hours and a quarter

Or half past 6 or something like that. (or 7 o clock)

There are no am/pm spoken because only US use am/pm format, in all other countries the default is 24-hour actually. So I think I missed that.

Maybe in the future I will implement am/pm spoken :)
Quick question: do you hire remotely? Obviously I am talking domestic-remote as opposed to Philippines-remote. If you restrict yourself to local, on-site hiring then yeah, there's a shortage. If you hire people working remotely from Iowa or Canada, then maybe less so.
Top 10 users of H-1B visas last year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys. Together these firms hired nearly half of all H-1B workers, and less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents.

I'm a little bit confused in here. Is it the same 65k visa cap for Europe and India? Does that mean that Tata and Infosys have taken half of it and people who they hired weren't even working in US?

I didn't squeeze into the last year's visa quota and decided to stay in UK (hearing - "if you reapply we might get a visa for you in a year" is not very encouraging). From what I heard, getting H1B is becoming quite of a race against time as the places are getting filled out quickly. I think I know why now.
Show HN: We created a tool for easy Facebook tab design
We're a team of four Swedes developing a facebook app called Decor Tab Creator. We launched the first beta version in april and we were selected for SeedCamp Paris (A startup competition) in November. We're currently working on a PRO version of the app, but for now it's still totally free and will be for our early adopters.

You can try the product out on http://www.decor-tab-creator.com/ which also features a short video demonstrating the product.

What do you guys think? We are trying to make this tool as easy as possible to use and feedback regarding the UX experience would be really beneficial!
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kami telah menyediakan customer service yang handal yang akan bergabung bersama agen tangkas galaxy88.com , kami akan selalu siap membantu dan melayani anda dengan baik.Untuk dapat mengikuti permainan tangkas , anda bisa mendaftarkan diri anda di agen tangkas galaxy88.com , kami akan selalu siap membantu dan melayani anda dengan baik. Segera daftarkan diri anda di agen tangkas galaxy88.com
The reality is that so few people will actually install a hosts file like this, that it's not going to make an appreciable difference in any statistics.
I had a similar experience, but from a slightly different perspective. I always found programming for the sake of programming to be sufficient motivation to spend time writing code. But when it comes to learning math, I have a really hard time caring about math in the abstract. Sitting me in a math class and having me memorize equations and formulas and operations, and solve a few word problems here and there (two boats leave point A, one going west, one going east, after one hour, blah, blah, blah) leaves me bored shitless for the most part. But if I have an application that matters to me, for the math I'm learning, I'm FAR more interested and willing to put in the time to learn the stuff.

Now that I'm trying to get deeper into Machine Learning stuff, I find myself motivated to go pick up books on Statistics and Linear Algebra and dig in, when I had very little interest in that stuff before.
The Burger King hack gets taken up a notch
After "what's the best new way I can find people who can write code fast and who will have a talent for finding security vulnerabilities", this is the issue that occupies all my cycles.

Like most firms working in security, our bread is buttered by large companies, who are bidding very high numbers for (in our case) appsec testing.

But by number, a conspicuously large fraction of our customers are mid-late stage startups, and taken as a whole, we talk to more startups than any other kind of business.

Startups are particularly exposed to the security market problem. They have very little infrastructure and they are spending most of their cycles just trying to stay in business and find traction. At the same time, they've managed to outsource all of the technical requirements of their businesses except the part which bears the highest security risk, which is their custom code.

What can we do about this? I talk to YC companies all the time, and it's frustrating. I am always good for a phone call and we'll even poke at startup apps pro-bono (we love working with startups) but that help has to get in line behind our paying clients, all of whom can be counted on to appear from behind a dark corner at any moment and swallow 2-3 weeks of our time whole.

I am seriously all ears for ideas on how security people like iSEC and Matasano can help early-stage startups without invoicing half+ of those startups last funding round.
Hah! Mix of domain and technical knowledge...
TotalSpaces: How Virtual Desktops on OS X Got Its Groove Back
It's going to lead to someone writing a MIDIBlock extension for Chrome, which I will happily install alongside FlashBlock and AdBlock.
That kind of computer will also make subtle and unpredictable mistakes.

Compared to a system which either gets it completely right or it doesn't.
No one can answer that question without knowing what "perfected" looks like. A Back to the Future-style Mr. Fusion, which can produce 1.21 GW in a volume the size of a household coffee grinder, is quite different than a large plant which produces the same.

The large power plants based on oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc. are thermal power stations. They use heat to convert liquid water into steam, which then drives steam turbines. These necessarily (by the laws of thermodynamics) produce a lot of waste heat. More than half of the energy used to heat the water is not turned into power at the end.

The waste heat is dumped in the large condensers of the cooling towers, which often have the characteristic hyperboloid shape because it's the most efficient form. This requires a lot of space.

So a commercial fusion system for large-scale use, if it can be built, would likely be little different than a nuclear power plant now, because it requires a big steam turbine at a large facility.

On a smaller scale, you might replace a large ship's diesel engines with electrically-driven fusion powered systems. This would reduce ship pollution and reduce the number of times it needs to refuel. (Assuming that a perfected system needs little maintenance otherwise.)

We don't think it's possible to get fusion power to an even smaller scale, other than people whose proposals and work are difficult to distinguish from a perpetual motion machine scams.

If we did have Mr. Fusion, then it would be a game changer. We would be able to have airplanes and helicopters driven by electric motors, powered by Mr. Fusion. You could probably think about the other things possible of power were essentially free. What about heaters under the sidewalks to melt the ice? I loved going to the outdoor heated pools in Iceland, heated by cheap geothermal. With free power, we would see more outdoor pools elsewhere. More people would have hothouses for growing flowers and plants in winter. Canada could become a major producer of orchids. People in Haiti wouldn't have to strip their country of trees in order to get power. And so on.

Mr. Fusion isn't going to happen, at least not soon. We'll still need transmission lines. This sets a lower limit on the cost of power. Life would be like in Iceland or the Pacific NW, where power is cheap enough that aluminum smelters relocated there for access to cheap power, or where data centers get located in the Dells for cheap power and cooling for data centers. (And where farmers use the cheap power for moving water around.)

In other words, not much different than it is now. Except with less dependency on petroleum sources and the global politics that that entails.
Link here http://www.decor-tab-creator.com/ :)
They knew it back then!
Companies have to offer their jobs to citizens first, before giving a visa to a foreign national.
The point of any question isn't whether they get it right or wrong. The point is how they work through it.

I've been perfectly happy with people who didn't get the "right" answer to some question.
You might be interested in pandoc: it allows you to write your documents in LaTeX or Markdown and then it can automatically convert it to docx, odt, html, LaTeX, Markdown, and more. For straigtforward[0] documents this works great.

[0] documents containing text, headings, notes, figures, tables, code listings, mathematics, hyperlinks, lists, references.
This is a cultural thing. In India, what is spoken around in family circles means a lot.
Indian here, and I have worked on a H1-B with one of the out-sourcers (Infosys/Wipro likes). I think the article has some truth and a lot of crud. It is important to understand the context first.

What you can say about technology right now in USA, there are two large disjoint islands. There is the silicon valley kinds of "cool"/startup technology and then there is run of the mill "IT" for Bank/Insurance/Big-Non-IT technology. Outsourcers go after the latter kind and in fact can only go after the latter kind. Their premise is to hire really below average "Engineers" in India, and expect them to just learn the tricks of the trade to replace/take over another run-of-the mill IT job.

The point is, if your day job is just about maintaining/coding something mind numbing, with no real value add or just being a cog in the wheel in some Big-Co that has nothing to do with technology, you can expect someone to do your job much cheaper. Probably the quality will dip, but then the Big-Co hardly cares about its software right?

Whereas, if you look at the stuff being done in the "valley like" companies, you won't find those outsourced developers. You will still find smart Indians on H1, but then the non-linearity of their talent is at play. Although, I have seen valley companies outsource their QA (manual testing).

I think it is important that one keeps working hard on moving from the second island to the first, no matter who it is (American or otherwise). There is nothing new about this... we have seen this happen to manufacturing. It has happened to web design - Go to elance and you will find at least 20:1 ratio of some Indian firm to US firm. All of them compete at the low-end of the scale.

It is very hard to secure a comfortable life in that lower-end of the technology pipeline living here in USA.
If a version of hexagonal targeted java then it would be "hexagonal.java". But .coffee and .js target the same "binary" so .js is the correct designation. It's about the runtime not the language.
Her husband is semiconductor engineer. I am sure he wouldn't code in modern web environments.

However, there is nothing wrong in the way Mr. Obama replied. Watch the video to get how article kind of distorts that fact.
I run BIND at home for my network and take advantage of that to do the following:
https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Easy+DNS+BIND+Sinkhole+Setup/7930

I also have a webserver that any black holed domain is sent to so that there is no waiting for a web request to time out. The first time I put it in place I didn't have the webserver so the performance when hitting one of these was horrible. I also use it for any ad server or analytic site I want to permanently block.

This way I don't have to distribute and update a hosts file to every machine in the house and I control where the offending sites redirect too.
How do you "keep it real" in interviews?

Concerning the viability of firing under-performing individuals, how likely is that? Are there any implications with indirect costs such as unemployment benefits? (I ask because I do not know - any insight on this would be greatly appreciated.)
XP must not of being storing them in a decent data structure. Geez. I wonder if this is the case for windows 7?
Apple Smart Watch Efforts Confirmed by US Patent
OpenShift Blog : Building Social IRC Bots with Node.js Part 2
There are frequent updates to this site, as new sites get added so often. In order to keep up with it, I wrote a lil script to download this and make it my host file, every so often (once a month in chron) saving the old one as a backup, of course. If I remember, I'll post it up on github this evening.

edit: I'll also add that this host file blocks adds on youtube, and pandora (and probably several others). I never wait for ads there anymore.
Yes, I was implicitly assuming the spouse was a citizen. Apologies for the confusion.

You have rarely seen this happen because it is illegal. It is also illegal to hire based on nationality, gender, race or any other identifying feature. You can't seriously claim that this doesn't happen in practice. While this may be cynical, I don't doubt this for a minute.
I'm not in IT nor am I a software engineer. That said I'm tech proficient and was an amateur coder in a past life. Security seems like it has a solid future. What's the best way to train for a career (change) in IT security?
Weekly Digest 2 - The most interesting links from .NET community