skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's about availability, not price.

The best employees are very hard to find because they're always employed (for themselves or others) and when they do go looking for work, they rarely look through regular recruiting ads (since good workers know: these are a waste of your time). You either need to poach them, target them, acqui-hire them or encourage them to seek you out.

One of the easiest ways for the latter to occur is if they simply want a working holiday (very common for employees aged 25-35). Many people will try to get a job at large companies in an area they'd like to visit. But they'll expect you to help with their working visa.

Even if you're poaching, targeting or acqui-hiring, you need to be able to bring the employees to your place of business. If they can't get a visa, you've wasted your time and money.
Good thing North Korea is keeping workers out, that's why North Korea is so rich and has such high wages.

Where did you study Econ 101?
Well my 2 cents to the discussion.

We really tried to make Mongo work over the last 1.5 years. We decided to go for mongo mostly because of JSON and geospatial indexing.

We became to realize that for our business case it is not the right tool. That said, and I work with databases now for 20+ years, I don't see what problem Mongo solves.
Pictures of Town Recently Dry After 25 Years Under Water
Is it possible to write a C++ template to check for a function's existence?
Because 35 USC 101 reads as follows: "Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title."

Business methods are surely processes, and this simple and general language does not admit a lot of ad-hoc, judicially created exceptions like ("but no software patents.")
I'm speculating here, but I think you're wrong and that this is exactly playing both sides. To me it looks like a quid pro quo arrangement where FWD.us helps a conservative cause (the pipeline) in exchange for cooperation for a immigration reform. Keep an eye on it. I'd expect to see some political grease applied to a liberal cause in the near future too. I think their game plan is to basically buy favors with senators until they've got enough votes to pass a law they actually care about.
I think he means, "new money."
Hmm. Looking at the cyclist, his legs aren't fully extended on each down-stroke (akin to having the seat too low on your bicycle). They could get a lot more power out of each stroke if the cyclist could extend her or his legs fully.
I don't know what your agenda is, but you're assuming an awful lot about me and the other guy. You're reading things we never wrote, and it's quite irritating. Because I use the term "profit mongering" means I demonize wealth? I don't think so, and I'd appreciate you not to insult me like that. I think it's pretty easy to understand what we're saying. You seem to be being intentionally dense, or intentionally argumentative. I'm not sure which.

Society adopting laws and regulations depends on there being a respectable society to being with. Laws will only get you as far as their enforcement. It's incredibly easy to take advantage of a poorer person than yourself just because you have the upper hand. I'm not talking the difference between bee farms and soft drinks, I'm talking the difference between helping farmers set up these fences themselves and forcing farmers to set these up while demanding half their profits forever in return. But you completely understand that, don't you?

The phrase "because it makes" shows that you are going to stop being pointless unless you have a valid argument to bring to the table. To quote The Big Lebowski: You're not wrong, you're just an asshole.
SpaceEngine: Explore a large portion of the universe in 3D
Reddit GoneWild: 'girls next door' pose nude in exchange for Bitcoins
I don't know what kind of person would downvote this comment.
The gym is an interesting special case because there really is value in the commitment device of "I paid for this gym membership so it will feel really wasteful if I don't go all month". Our second biggest competitor -- http://gympact.com -- turns that aspect of gym pricing up to eleven, charging you more for not showing up (and giving you a kickback if you do).

As far as auto-canceling subscriptions, the gym could also make an argument that they have to provision a lot of physical space and equipment based on how many people have paid to use the space. They don't recover that cost when you don't happen to show up.

None of this applies to most SaaS companies though!
#OpPetrol Will hit Hard
Windows NT Kernel Contributor Explains Why Performance is Behind Other OS
While you are correct that H-1B visa's benefit employers of tech workers, and harm American tech workers, you are wrong to claim that this means it is a matter of billionaires vs "workers".

Most of these companies are public, and therefore pay money to shareholders, and also pay taxes. The distribution of wealth is a separate issue, that could be dealt with by changes to the tax system.

Both sides on the H-1B debate come up with bad arguments for their cause, but the economics is very simple: labor is like any other commodity, and free trade is optimal, ignoring externalities. In this case the main externality is having a bunch of foreigners living in the US, and possibly staying: it's up to Americans how costly (or beneficial) they think this is.
It’s a distributed near–real‐time querying system for data at rest that supports subset of SQL.

Google has scalable SQL database called Spanner[1]. They also have a proper NoSQL database called internally Megastore[2] that provides distributed transactions based on entity‐groups on top of BigTable. Also known as High Replication Datastore and available via AppEngine[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_%28database%29

[2] https://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2011/Papers/CIDR11_Paper32.pdf‎

[3] And hopefully via Google Compute pending announcement in few days at I/O. That is if Google actually wants their Cloud to succeed.
Only on the west coast would Bill Gates count as "old money" :)
No one has yet..
Be cautious about using Chartio (or at least, don’t follow their directions)
This is not odd at all in work places. Salary has a huge correlation with the demand when you joined and how hard you negotiate. There's a reason employers try their best to keep salaries a secret.
I'm not sure this has ever been tested in court. But yes, as far as I can tell, that is what they are trying to claim.

It's interesting, because to stream H.264 video, you don't even need to necessarily have encode it. You could get video encoded by a third party (perhaps you got it that way, or perhaps you sent it to a third party to re-encode), serve it to your users, and they could play it with licensed H.264 player. The MPEG-LA seems to think that for doing that, you should have to pay them a license, despite the fact that you have never touched an H.264 encoder or decoder.

I would find it hard to believe that they could sue you for this and actually succeed, though they could probably bleed smaller players dry in the process of defending themselves.

It would be interesting to set up a video service that did this; used H.264 without ever using an encoder. You could make your users upload it encoded appropriately, or use Zencoder or AWS Encoding to transcode it for you.
The devil is in the details. What constitutes a "skilled" worker? The selling point of the H-1B program was that there really were high-paying jobs available that absolutely nobody state side was stepping up to the plate for, so they needed to bring in skilled immigrants who had the chops to take on these high-paying jobs. The imagery was that America's Best Companies were stalling because they couldn't find the "best and brightest."

Evidence suggests otherwise (http://www.epi.org/publication/bp356-foreign-students-best-b...). Now, I'm not saying you can't find H-1Bs with high salaries or genius intellects. The study linked simply says it's not a majority of the people coming in. Most of them are decidedly not "best and brightest" and certainly aren't pulling six figures annually. That is, the program isn't being used for its stated purpose. Rather, it certainly seems that the goal is _not_ to find local talent, even if it's there (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU), because one wants to manipulate the meaning of "prevailing wage" and "qualified worker" to suit a lower labour cost margin.

As well, there are other economic indicators to consider. If there really is a widespread tech shortage you'd expect wages to rise. And you can see various market niches' wages spike at certain localized times of labor shortage. But you don't find high and increasing wages across the board, sustained for years at a time. That is, one of the key indicators of a crippling shortage, simply isn't there. The low unemployment rate in tech hubs like Silicon Valley is further perplexing in the face of a claim that the talent can't be found. When companies like Facebook whinge about having a hard time finding top talent, I get the feeling they're really just making an observation that finding people at the extreme of a bell curve is hard. Increasing the sample population doesn't make that search appreciably easier.

Mixed in with all of these observations, you'll typically find smaller details that make sense, even if they are latched onto bigger ideas that don't. A common objection is that of sending newly graduated foreigners back to their countries of origin rather than letting them stay here. I'd say it's a no-brainer they should be permitted to stay indefinitely. But that doesn't mean it's a no-brainer that we should rubber-stamp every single person with a tech background into an H-1B slot.
Generally, productivity is a better match to a country's wealth than natural resources. Certainly, at some ultimate level, things depend on the latter, but what you make with what you've got seems to matter far more in practice. That's one of the reasons a country like the Netherlands is rich despite not having a great deal in the way of natural resources.
What a prude.
From your link: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=41884...

Level 1 Wage:$34.11 hour - $70,949 year

Level 2 Wage:$40.52 hour - $84,282 year

Level 3 Wage:$46.94 hour - $97,635 year

Level 4 Wage:$53.35 hour - $110,968 year

From http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000

National:

15-1131	Computer Programmers	detail	316,790	1.2%	2.431	$35.71	$37.63	$78,260	0.6%

SF:

15-1131	Computer Programmers	detail	9,080	11.1%	4.603	1.89	$47.49	$47.71	$99,240	1.6%

So if you factor in stuff like the costs of filing H1-B and such, it's similar. I'm not sure if the statistics are comparable though.
great thoughts.

loved this part:

But if you’re trying to do something worthwhile and creative, then shutting down your brain is entirely the wrong way to go. The real secret to productivity is the reverse: to listen to your body. To eat when you’re hungry, to sleep when you’re tired, to take a break when you’re bored, to work on projects that seem fun and interesting.
If you want to look at an interesting functional language that has some very solid real world uses, have a look at Erlang, and its own "Learn you ..." here:

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

Which is a fantastic book, clearly written as a labor of love.

Erlang doesn't have Haskell's type system and doesn't seem to be of much interest for CS research types, but it's awesome for developing certain kinds of system.

I am curious about Haskell myself, and don't tend to need a lot of excuses to learn a language, but I don't perceive a "sweet spot" for it just yet, as in "I could go build X, and Haskell would be a great fit for it". Given how many smart people use it, I'm sure there are a lot of applications for it, but I also get a feeling that there's not one thing that really stands out.
I started the transfer process for a .im to Gandi last night. I just wish Namecheap handled that TLD so I could manage everything in one place.
I'd definitely do plumbing for anything more than $100 an hour. Plumbing is kind of awesome.
I keep trying to deny this, but I keep seeing it before my own eyes.

It's hard to take people seriously when they tell me about how hard up they are financially, when I know they have iPads and iPhones, and so on and so forth.

Anecdotes are not data, of course, but I am gradually becoming more and more convinced.
How well do those projects go? I've had bids rejected for being too high, even when other developers failed to deliver due to underbidding. Some people never learn.
Google Earth GIFs of Earth over time
An Interactive Map of Racist, Homophobic and Ableist Tweets in America
Antarctica would work well for physically isolating the installation from those without some baseline technology, but I imagine it would be harder to build a long-lasting facility there. Less radiation and meteors, but a great deal more moisture, wind, etc. There are some other places on earth that are more "stable", but I don't think most of those places would do a good job of keeping looters and vandals from getting at it.

Machine readable yet long lasting is indeed a big problem.
I mostly a lurker of hacker news, do the see the scores as you gain more profile karama?
This is a perfect example of missing the point though.

Patents aren't the goal, they're a tool congress can use. The goal is to promote the invention of useful things.

Patents are probably the worst way you could come up with to do this in terms of collateral damage to society, and benefit to inventors.

Academics would try to square the circle forever if funded and as you point out judges are funded. They don't have a stake in solving the problem, just looking clever.

Not knowing when to quit and endlessly looking for any way around a perceived kludge is usually the source of more kludges...
Once you git it you got it, get it?
It has a downside too. When your tank is full of gasoline, due to gasoline's tendency to absorb water, the walls of the tank are not exposed to air or water. This helps prevent rust. When your tank is empty, the walls are exposed to water vapor and air, and can rust.
Song from the album: http://youtu.be/feOLbipVGEU

If you find a copy of his explanation in Japanese I'll try to see if he's referring to a literal animation or not. I couldn't find one and he doesn't really refer to anything beyond the theme/concept and the girl's theta-like eyes.

Edit: Something else I found (https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/essfr/6/3/6_160/_pdf).
If NoSql's speed and flex gets you to MVP, and MVP gets you traction, then all the hell you may go through to rearchitect for SQL is probably worth it.

Premature scalability is as dumb as premature optimization and premature generality.
Not to speak on behalf of GP, but I think the issue is not you as a successful permanent immigrant, but the way the system holds other potential immigrants out and permits some only on short-term visas who then get dumped back to their places of origin.
That deleted post from the MSFTer is pretty damning, but is the difference one that really matters?

Take a look at these benchmarks that were posted here recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5644880

There isn't a single comment in that whole thread about how outrageously bad EC2 performance is. Meanwhile I'd bet that most HN startups run on EC2, heroku or other virtualized cloud platforms. And how many are using dog slow interpreted languages like python or ruby? It looks to me like people around here are quite willing to take very large performance hits for the sake of convenience.

I find Windows to be a small performance hit for the sake of convenience.
iPads aren't that ubiquitous.
Can you please elaborate on this inherent design flaw? My understanding of NTOS DPCs is that they are quite similar to Linux tasklets/bottom-half interrupt handlers.
It's called vesting
It's interesting to me that EPI is doing research/PR against expanding skilled visas. They're more or less a think tank/advocacy group for organized labor (check out their board of directors). Would they have a different agenda if the tech industry were more unionized?

Anyway, who cares if there's a "shortage" or not? If you're going to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDP, come on in! We'll find something for you to do!
Do you consider xnu to be general purpose? OS X/iOS have been tickless for a long, long time.
scrypt is designed to be difficult on hardware. Both bcrypt and scrypt are currently difficult on GPU hardware, but it's unlikely to remain that way. Both are better than PBKDF2. scrypt is likely to be better longer. But really: throw a dart at any of the three of them.
Ask HN: What substantive good can you do with $10k and 3hr/wk?
Substantive good is good enough. Extra points for significant quantities of substantive good.
If you find an awesome person, who you know will be great for your company, why should one have to beg the government to let them come? Finding another such person might take months, and might actually be impossible.
Do salary deltas of even 100k make a substantial difference to the bottom line for large tech companies like FB and GOOG? Of course the difference is greater than zero but as a percentage of operating cost I imagine it's relatively small.

My guess is large tech companies are eager to import foreign talent primarily because of cultural and socioeconomic differences. Who would you rather hire to maintain your legacy code bases? A skilled immigrant that's thankful for the six figure salary and will obediently complete their tasks without much fuss? Or the native-English-speaking citizen who can find a six figure salary at any of his friends' companies and will walk as soon as the legacy codebase's tech stack starts to reveal itself as less-than-inspiring?
All you can tell by someone owning a consumer device is that ''at some point'', they had the money to pay for it.

They may not have the money anymore, and it may not make sense to sell all of their high-depreciation items at large losses when they can have the satisfaction of continuing to use the device.
> xmonad, one of the best tiling window managers for Linux

...and BSD
"His post has been deleted! Why the censorship?"

We didn't delete it. It was deleted by whoever posted it.
Of course giving out access is probably a bad idea -- so what would be a good alternative for them to do instead?
Help me find the topic for the 50th blog post
I like to write and try to write as much as my entrepreneurial life allows me to. I write at my blog at http://akhil.me and usually write about entrepreneurship, marketing and experiences. I have posted 49 posts and for the 50th i want to do something special. Please check out the blog and see how/what i usually write and help me find the topic for the 50th post.
> where western people write very comprehensive documents with too much information, that Japanese counterpart often won't bother reading.

Yeah, I've run into that problem in the past. I have to make a conscious effort to simplify anything I write (or say) in English in order to ensure that Japanese people understand it. They usually won't tell me if they don't understand something, whereas I'm the opposite when it comes to Japanese, so that I can optimize my language learning.
Just get a backup MX. http://dyn.com/email/dyn-email-backup-mx/
Adobe: Eliminate the mandatory "creative cloud" subscription model
The third section though, as you suggest, is hideously depressing. Certainly a book worth (re)reading in any case.
35 USC 101 read that way long before State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group in 1998 got business process patents going. And we have over a century of jurisprudence prior to that on the proper meaning of the word "process" which did not point towards business methods being patentable processes.

Furthermore my understanding is that the Supreme Court has punted on this issue. But since the ruling precedent is from United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the window is open for the Supreme Court at some point to disagree with business method patents. (Though Bilski showed no evidence that they are eager to tackle that issue.)
Thanks. I added the explanation.
1) > romanticism of depression

Saying shit like this makes me think you don't get it. You know what's even stupider than self pity? Being alive.

2) Why ride them out when you can end them right now?

3) When you're depressed, you don't 'enjoy' anything.

4) > there's just nothing.

Perfect. Where do I sign up?

Not trying to downplay your experience or anything, but your assessment of what depression is sounds an awful lot like what people who aren't depressed think depression is.
These types of services just can't be SaaS. Ideally they would provide a prebuilt VM to drop in your environment (like GitHub Enterprise does). I had been struggling with the same quandry with regards to a code review system and a monitoring system I have been working on.
Share My Dabba
No delete button on the internet v125786123. Sidebar: do deleted comments appear with showdead on, or just ones that are deleted on HN side.
The Evolution of the  tag
> Patents aren't the goal, they're a tool congress can use. The goal is to promote the invention of useful things.

So you have to understand where patents fit into the big picture. For the last half century or so, legal theory has been heavily influenced by economics. Patents are a classic case of addressing an economic problem (the free rider problem), with a legal solution (property rights).

So it's not just that patents are a tool. Patents are property, and property is the tool.

> Academics would try to square the circle forever if funded and as you point out judges are funded. They don't have a stake in solving the problem, just looking clever.

Judges have no stake in looking clever either--unlike academics there is no publish or perish. They do care intensely about fashioning good law, however.

> Not knowing when to quit and endlessly looking for any way around a perceived kludge is usually the source of more kludges...

I don't really see how you get from point A to point B here. You avoid implementing the kludge so you don't have to live with the ramifications until the heat death of the universe (which is the average lifespan of kludges).
>We fill headcount with nine-to-five-with-kids types,

then

>We occasionally get good people anyway

Uh... nine-to-five-with-kids type here. Thanks for the stereotyping... from your safe corporate nest.

Otherwise an insightful post.
The actual answer is much less colorful than the other answers in this thread. Increasing the number of visas for skilled workers is not that controversial. The problem is that it's part of a more general immigration bill, which is controversial.
> 35 USC 101 read that way long before State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group in 1998 got business process patents going

35 USC 101 was always read very broadly--it's just been relatively recently (for obvious reasons), that business method patents have become relevant.
Duplicates existing functionality (2010)
Good book. Previous discussion on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=535675

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=336085