skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not necessarily based on your title. When I went through the process, it boils down to:

- Do you have a degree, and experience? Great. Is someone willing to advertise the job to American citizens for a month or so, interview good potential candidates beforehand, and still want you? Even better. Now, just wait for next year's allocation of visa's and you might grab one on the day they're released. Then, wait between 1 and 8 years for your visa to be processed (while the job is still available) and you're allowed to work here.

- Are you an exceptional alien? Well, do you judge other's work, have papers written, have competed in a globally recognised event for your work, or some other proof of your excellence? Yes? Great, we can apply, but there's only a limited number of visas. Wait a year.

It's really, really tough. Not many of us make it. I had a few job offers moving over here but was only able to move here because my wife was American. And getting her back to the UK is also no easy feat.

Despite being globally connected the visa process still sucks.
And Skalzi we must presume is looking to his best interests which are apparently vested in the established system and may deteriorate if that system is disturbed.
When I go to that page I get a 503.
You replied to the wrong comment.

HN has a time delay for nested comments. That's why angersock's comment didn't have a reply link.
I want to add a clarification note that visa issues are harder to bring someone to US for the first time. Once someone is here, doing transfers from company to company is relatively easier. I say this because I know some companies that will outright stop talking to otherwise great candidates because someone told them dont get into visa stuff.
We use our fixed height standing desks with adjustable stools, so we get the best of both worlds while keeping the price down.
Do you have any evidence that they do in fact switch cameras every time something like that shows up? Because I seriously doubt that's true.

I downloaded the whole 2+ hours long HD video because I couldn't see the UFO you were talking about in the YouTube version. Well it turns out I could see it, I just thought you were talking about something more exciting than a round blob that rises slowly and predictably over the horizon, never moves, and has no distinguishing characteristics, but that's beside the point — the point is that in that 2+ hours video they change cameras or lose the signal several times, and at none of those other times was there any kind of "UFO" in the frame.

So, there's clear evidence that they frequently and routinely change cameras / lose the signal when there's nothing "suspicious" going on, and conversely there's no evidence (unless you have some to offer) that they purposely do it every time a UFO appears. It seems to me the more likely explanation is that out of thousands of instances of camera changes / lost signals, you've managed to find a few instances where there was coincidentally a blob of some kind in frame.

(If the intent was to cover up the existence of UFOs, why do they let the camera roll for more than a minute before changing. Perhaps the cover-up technician who's assigned to monitor the live feed was busy updating his Facebook or something.)
How complex does a system of algorithms have to be to "understand" something? Hard question.
Nice post. I especially like the advice to create something even when you have no more than 5 min to spare. From my experience when performed regularly these 5 min add up really fast.
Extreme power saver mode on the HTC One M8 does this essentially. You can only Call/Text/Email/Calendar/Calculator while in the mode and you get some crazy battery life as well.

Not my screenshot:
http://www.androidcentral.com/sites/androidcentral.com/files...
Leaked Docs Show Spyware Used to Snoop on U.S. Computers
Agree entirely. This is a perfect write up of the situation at hand.

> but one sector that isn't being targeted is the (disintegrating) middle class.

So, what (if anything) can we do to fix this?

Is there anything a regular person can do or work on to help the (disintegrating) middle class?
I've always wondered if leaving your WiFi open gives you plausible deniability WRT to torrenting copyrighted material (should anyone ever come knocking).
Um... it sounds like you're maybe not the target audience for the libertarian movement then
I've been looking for a task-based alarm app (i.e. solve math problems before you can disable it) that doesn't require any more access than knowing whether or not I am currently in a call (to reduce or mute the alarm). So far, all the apps I have found require some combination of the following priveleges:

- Identity
- Wi-fi
- Location
- Photos/Media/Files
- Camera/Microphone
- Device & app history
- In-app purchases
- Device ID & call info

Only the last is required (and only the "call info" part). I can't imagine anyone who would ever want an alarm app to track their location or have access to their identity information, but perhaps such people exist.

I'd prefer no ads, so I'm willing to pay for a no-ads version. But ONLY if the app is not a power grab by the developer so that any conceivable monetization strategy is available to them in the future. If I can't find such an app I'll just have to use the built in Android alarm (which isn't task-based, sadly).
Haa..you joke, but I bought a Nokia 521 running Windows 8.0 for $50, unlocked. It still does a ton more than a dumb-phone, though. Just enough internet to be useful, scan emails, check out twitter, but not as slick to make you want to waste a lot of time using it.
+1 Plaintext using Markdown syntax.
Escrow, reasonable terms once you're a member, they only take 5% (and only out of money you actually are paid), and they have assisted me in obtaining payment in the past from a deadbeat employer. There's also the general feeling that not everything is slanted toward the employer, which is not the case on some other networks.
Fortheon – A multi-language cloud application platform
As a Professor of entrepreneurship at NYU's engineering school (that VC Fred Wilson called a jewel -- http://avc.com/2014/03/the-value-of-an-engineering-degree), I can summarize the problem in one phrase many of my students said when describing their goals after graduation:

"... but I have to get a job at a big company to sponsor my visa."

They're brilliant, motivated, and capable, but almost none are citizens. To start new companies they have to leave the U.S. To stay they have to work for a big company even though more than half are continuing their entrepreneurial class projects after the course ended. There are options to jump through difficult hoops, but those options are much harder for most.

So we motivate potential entrepreneurs to start elsewhere or give up their plans. What if instead we motivated the world to start companies here instead of elsewhere?

(Incidentally, we're organizing an event in October for non-U.S.-citizens who found ways to start companies and stay here to help inspire others to find ways to do it. If you're interested, especially if you know non-citizens who found ways to stay and live near NYC, please contact me -- http://joshuaspodek.com/contactconnect.)
If we preserved everything, who'd have the time to experience it all?
Do you two work together or something? If so, must be a fun workplace!...
US planes start airstrike on iraq militants
> For what it's worth, one of the other four posts is a complaint about Ryan Block's customer service call with Comcast.

It's also a reasonable and well constructed (if unpopular) opinion. Thank you for highlighting it, though I suspect it didn't quite have the effect you were after.
The start up will need something if he actually says who it is, because they'd be hard press to hire anyone on here if this becomes public knowledge.
Looks nice, but the extra spacing means too much scrolling. Add a compact mode.
I remember a few months ago it was enabled briefly for the comment pages -- I was so happy. Then it was promptly reset. Looking forward to the re-addition!
If somebody for some reason managed to convince me to come onboard as an employee, and I was asked nicely to leave after two weeks, I would begin the conversation with "That is unfortunate and unexpected, as I was looking forward to working with you guys. We're all businessmen here, so we know that there are certain reasonable expectations which one has with regards to employment offers. I shouldn't be telling you anything you don't already know when I say that this is highly irregular. It would not be irregular if I were, say, a consultant. If you want to retroactively treat our arrangement as a consulting arrangement, I'm amenable to that reclassification, because I like you and wish you to succeed. I will send you a copy of my standard Master Services Agreement and a Statement of Work for two weeks work. You will sign them, as written. I will then invoice you for my standard consulting rate, which is $60,000 for two weeks. You will pay it and we will part ways as friends."

And then I'd see where it took me from there.
Argentina Sues U.S. In World Court To Stop Vulture Fund Billionaire
The car needs to be able to see well and detect pedestrians, they can already do that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXeUu_Y6WOw

Note that this was a few years ago, it's undoubtedly better.
Like I just said in another thread: most of America is in something resembling a depression.

To those who see no opportunity and no future, optimism is an insult. The Valley's optimistic self-helpy "follow your dreams" zeitgeist sounds like "and why do they not eat cake?"

Outside the alpha cities of the coasts, there is no future in America.
That WoW server blade
Contrast is a tricky thing. Some people really need lower contrast, while others can't stand anything less than black on white.
I want to see some demos using this!
For XPrivacy, it's a little scary to install. The warnings about making your phone unbootable, for example.

EDIT: I went ahead and installed it. No problems. I must say, though, I wouldn't call it easy to use. There are a lot of options.
Yup: it also shows the advantage of starting small. Think about how much easier it is to "wake up 5 minutes earlier" than "wake up 2 hours earlier"
Did you receive a copy of signed work contract? If not, you have no case.
Thank you for checking this.
Flappy Bird Returns To Life On Amazon's Android App Store
A better alternative would be to promote the use of Content-Security-Policy, perhaps by requiring it be used in order to load source material from an alternate domain.
While traveling through Africa I read A Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela. Reading about the history while being there makes it all very real. I also just read A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky, which has some of the wildest travel stories about Africa you could ever imagine. A must read if only to prepare you for what you are about to experience. Those two could keep you busy for a few weeks.
Bug number? Firefox memory usage beats all the other browsers by considerable margins in my usage and has for at least a couple of years now.
We use thrift for a lot of internal service calls - this seems like it would be a great little library to capture and debug production thrift calls.

Would I just need to implement my own PDU class that implements the protocol?

Thanks! This looks great!
You should actually ask this question before making decision.. and if your take it is that you would renegade on the decision, than you should delay making that decision.. and wait to find out if that dream job with higher pay actually came around.

Your current best offer will be willing to stretch out their offer for a week. And the other company will be willing to accelerate their decision process, so as to bridge this two weeks gap.

But once you made your decision, you should stick with your decision... at least for a year, all things other than this 'dream job' being equal. The dream company and the dream job-- if you got in today, you are likely going to get that again in a year.
> It has its upsides as well, you generally only need to target the latest stable version of Chrome.

That is an upside for developers; for users, there is an additional cost to using your website (i.e., updating Chrome, which they do seem to make as easy as possible).
The BobbyTables culture
Octopart Google Apps Add-On: An Open Source Project
100% agree. I was a consultant for 6 years. The contract, terms of engagement, and expectations are vastly different as a consultant and as an employee. The sum of all different parts of the 'opportunity cost' are much higher as an employee, than as a consultant.
Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
Even the tiny windows computers are RISC machines. Windows NT also dates back to somewhere around 92 and made hardware independence a big deal. Dave Cutler had to fight tooth and nail to keep it in while lots if people were telling him to just build it for Intel.
> I like the founders - they are good guys.

They are very professional.
Ask HN: Freelance or product dev to transition to indie work?
As I and several friends I know look forward over the next five years, many of us see ourselves transitioning away from corporate track careers into independent and self-driven paths. What would HNers recommend as a (financially) wise way to transition into such a track: freelancing in spare time or working on a product in spare time?

For example, I have successfully freelanced in the past and enjoyed it, but there is always the limiting combo of time and hourly or project charges. If marketing and developing a new product the upside is potentially higher, but the build-up is slower and it may be less sure. Eventually I would like to be in the product space so that I'm not restricted by simply the hours I can bill.

Thoughts? I realize much of it may come down to opinion, but there are always unique and insightful opinions shared in the comments.
A detailed review of Super Mario World
But this is entirely down to your interpretation of their word "Design"
Thanks, saved me a read.
See also, the famous "Acknowledgements" section in the scsh manual: http://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html (Also by Olin Shivers)
This happens a lot.

Mentor whiplash gets the founders all frothy that they need to do X, Y, and Z _immediately_ or their company will fall apart. Unfortunately, it changes to A, B, and C a week later after meetings with another 30 people. These founders aren't bad people. They just have no idea what they're doing. They got shoved into this crazy new accelerator experience, and they're being told by their heroes that they need to XYZ and ABC immediately, and they freak out and they make decisions too quickly.

Founders joining accelerators, do yourself a favor: the minute you think you NEED to hire one of those first employees, wait a week. Wait 2. Chat with some people informally. Don't setup a coffee meeting and ambush them with your whole team. Just breathe and take your time. Building your team is the most important thing you are ever going to do. This is not cliche. The process of building one, especially that initial core team, should be respected. Talk to some people. Do some contracts with them. Take it slow.

guybrushT, this sucks for you more than most given that you (and your wife!) were moving from another country. The founders should have been more careful. If you still wanna move to the states, I'd more than happy to introduce you to a bunch of startups in Boulder. We're always looking for developers here. Shoot me an email: ryan at ramen dot is.
I find it weird how different US is to EU sometimes. Guns have literally never came up in any of the conversations I had with friends, and the only "gun" I have ever held was an air rifle during my scouts training. Yet this article is fascinating and I would not have even though this would be such an important thing at US universities(or at least was - 27 years ago). Entirely different culture.
> Can you name any businesses where radical decentralization builds important revenue?

Well, contrary to popular belief, making large revenue isn't the only viable business model: The other viable model is to build something that greatly hurts your competition's revenue. Here, "viable" means "it survives", I don't think CARD is about making huge profits, it's about commoditizing scalable parts of a business, removing scalability as a revenue generating mechanism. (Airbnb and Uber are not CARD and I think will fail in the next 5-10 years.)

As for naming businesses: Only illegal business currently use this model, unfortunately (some parts of the online drug trade, and to some parts of the bittorrent scene.)
YCombinator people talk to one another.

They should talk to each other about why this was bad behavior. If the OP mentions the name, the company can respond with their reasons in an adult and professional manner, explain why they needed someone else, and how they are going to make this right. Then they look like smart, grounded pros willing to admit a mistake and will get some free marketing.
When I had an iPhone, I couldn't bring it to the library to do (school) work, because of the risk of bullshitting on the phone for who knows how long after receiving a text or something. So I would leave my phone at home every day and always miss everyone's calls. My family was not a fan of this, nor was my girlfriend.

I bought a used LG flip phone from around 2007.
This is assuming that everyone at Mozilla is capable of focusing on speed/memory. I'm betting there are several dedicated UI developers and designers who would not be able to meaningfully contribute to the core browser, and conceptualizing things like Lightspeed is their primary job role.
Right now this company has set a standard such that I will refuse to work for any YC-backed startup without serious contractual protection.
Much of what we are seeing is the effect of our insane visa and immigration policies.

The traditional entrepreneurial spirit of the United States was driven by the culture of immigrants. Over 40% of the companies on the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. These were once disruptive startups.

Now we make it very difficult for talented and intelligent people to become permanent residents. So instead they stay home, or maybe go to Canada or Australia.
Ignorance? Incompetence? Embarrassment?
What a bullshit article. They're essentially saying "I don't want HTTPS because it costs €25 a year and Google is a bad guy for penalizing me."

If sites were still accessed by IP address this guy would be mad at google for rewarding people for using DNS because he now has to buy a domain name, dismissing all of the advantages.

The "Google does this so more people will use Google services" argument is conspiracy-theory-level weak arguing.

edit: after reading the comments on the blog I was reminded of the free startssl certs, so it doesn't even cost money
I've been taken aback in the Bitcoin world just how many programmers do not understand double-entry accounting and don't implement anything near it in their systems when they do any transaction that is not recorded on the blockchain (exchanges in particular come to mind). When you're moving around other people's money this is quite important.
Lots of back and forth about appearing like a bridge burner.

In truth though, regardless of the appearance, bridge burning is never a good idea. NEVER.

I personally know a nursing home company that fired an employee in an unprofessional way. 20 years later she became the person in charge of nursing home licensing in that state. Guess whose licenses got revoked?! 20 years later, millions of dollars in losses.

That story may be an outlier, I don't know... but a simple evaluation of the risks and benefits of burning this bridge indicate very strongly that you should not burn it.

The argument people make about "having the right to know." to be able to avoid that company is really just self-serving curiosity. I am curious too. But...it's really only appropriate to share that info. to an individual, in private, if you feel they are truly at risk of the same unfair treatment.

Just my two cents.
What a beautiful cat
This is something you really have to test. You can ask, but people often think one thing but react differently.
Right. I have to imagine the visa was a VERY important factor. I am not a huge fan of this thread because it is a bunch of speculation with less than 1 side of a multi-faceted story. These guys are probably very early stage (hiring their first employee) and are figuring things out. The "just telecommute and we can sort out an international hiring visa" is pretty alarming. Maybe the company pivoted and his skill set wasn't a good fit for the new direction, buy they likely found someone local, or just got bound by an insane amount of red-tape. The ramifications for both parties lie in the initial agreement that we are not privvy to.
It's easily to be arbitrarily anonymous with something like bitcoin. The only way the government could maintain attributability for bitcoin accounts would be to put in place extremely aggressive enforcement policies that (hopefully) would not be viable.
Title should be updated to state that this was a Map car and not Chauffeur car as everybody expects.
How I Got from Idea to Product Hunt in 4 Hours
Who Should I Thank? (1994)
Typical car accident, only news because it was a google street map car.
An interesting piece by the YouTuber Tom Scott, based on the conceit that humans are unique in having evolved through competitive natural selection:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcPqk-O-fD4
That's almost happened to me by following google maps too closely. Always be aware.
It's almost unheard of for civilians to actually have automatic weapons, and it was in the 80's too. I think this is at least partially satire.
Google STREET VIEW car, not one of their self-driving cars...
> IIRC Firefox ESRs (extended support releases) do not update automatically. Or they update automatically but only to other infrequent ESRs.

I'm pretty sure you can disable automatic updates in any version of Firefox.

In the ESR editions, you certainly can disable them. It's an essential feature -- imagine being the manager of 20,000 desktops when they all auto-update at once, consuming all the bandwidth, simultaneously stopping the work of every employee in the enterprise, creating hundreds or more support calls, and breaking the corporate intranet.

And yes, ESR editions update only to other ESR editions.
Setting Up SSL on AWS CloudFront and S3
Title needs to be changed. No need to risk setting back a technology as important as autonomous vehicles just to get some more upvotes.

There are a huge number of these street view cars driving around constantly, them crashing is nothing out of the ordinary, should be about the same percentage as any other vehicle. I'm pretty sure I've heard of several others getting into accidents, you can even see street view images of them hitting a deer.
Lessons on Business Longevity from the Oldest Company in the World
OAuth is a mess [SLIDES]
You nailed it. I also add that the government (probably varies allot by state) makes it very difficult to hire employees. My wife and I hired a nanny a few years ago, doing everything by the book regarding taxes and insurance. Still got fined twice for some infantile amount owed on something, even after three calls to the state office resulted in three separate amounts of what we owed. I'll NEVER take on an employee again. The game is rigged to favor those who can afford the lawyers and accountants.
I've had the idea for a while to allow users to own a dumbphone and smartphone and be able to switch them back and forth easily to receive your main #. Smartphones are so expensive and I don't need the functionality over 50% of the time so it can cut down the risk of breakage by just bringing the flip phone instead.