skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is untrue. If you actually look at the data, you'll find that the companies who hire the majority of H-1Bs are actually not the silicon valley usual suspects. Some of them you haven't even heard of.

If you're not in the consulting world or are not a foreign worker in the US, you probably don't know much about Infosys, Wipro, Tata consulting services, Satyam computer services, Larsen & Toubro, HCL. Yet these companies comprise the vast majority of all H-1B petitions, with average salaries ranging from 50k to the 75k, well under market for tech.

Some silicon valley firms are there, yes. IBM averages 82k, not bad for a company which capitalizes on commoditizing engineering. Then there is Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Google, Amazon, Intel, which form a minority of petitions, and have /average/ salaries of over $100k. How is that not a competitive salary? 6 digits is not wage slavery, and these people were not compelled to settle for that, for christ's sake.

The companies have to pay 5 to 7k in legal costs and fees to get the H-1B, and even more for larger companies. And they have to wait for months for a chance to get it approved. For the former group, given how low the wages are, this is cost effective. For the latter group, it really isn't better.

Facebook, which doesn't even make the top 50 list, has been campaigning for immigration reform and has repeatedly been the target of "taking our jerbs" rhetoric, when their average foreign worker salary is around 120k.

So yes, some companies win, but not the ones you expect. Blame the right companies, and don't throw everyone under the bus.

----

Data: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2013-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx (yes, yes, not all LCA's files actually turn into visas, etc, but they are representative of wages companies intend to pay.)

Disclaimer: I'm on an H-1B, and I'm getting a bit sick and tired of clearing up misconceptions that keep coming up on this subject on HN. An old post on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5515519

----

edit: To clarify, yes, I think the legal immigration process, especially the H-1B is messed up. I think it needs to be fixed and modernized. I think it needs to be untied from company sponsorship, and the workers need to not be tied down to companies, and subject to market forces. I think there needs to be more transparency too in terms of the data. I've even proposed a policy limiting the number of H-1B workers larger companies can have, which addresses the H-1B sweatshop issue somewhat, while not damaging foreign workers. But yeah, I get mad when people talk about a subject so important to me without having any clue about the data, and reach their conclusions through political rhetoric they heard elsewhere.
> Hiring the cheapest programmers available generally doesn't work out well, especially if they are cheap and experienced.

It works out just fine on quarterly earnings reports so it works out just fine.
If a one-time $100K credit is the difference between success or failure in your business model, you have a pretty weak business model.
That's exactly how it is set up. Just install a couple deb files or set up the repo and DKMS does the rest on every distro I've tried it on.
> Browsers are de facto operating systems (though typically running on another OS, not on bare metal)

What does this mean? Are you defining "operating system" loosely enough that you could also count the JVM, for example?
I think if you look at an ecosystem as a whole the. It has happened. Google is a good example. The actual enterprise has thousands of jobs but has created over a million. You have upstream hardware manufacturers and downstream developers. There is SEO, advertising, X-Prize, managed services, etc. If someone deleted google today the net loss to jobs would probably be well over 1m jobs.
I have to disagree, although I'll admit that what's "trivial" is subjective. Sure, a container means you don't have to run another kernel. If the container is single-purpose like docker encourages, you skip running some other software like ssh and syslog as well. That software doesn't use much CPU or memory though. I just booted Ubuntu 12.04 and it's using 53MB of memory. Multiplied across 6 VMs that's 318MB, not quite 4% of the 8GB my laptop has. I'd call that trivial.

On the last project where I had to regularly run many VMs on my laptop, the software being tested used more than 1GB. Calling it 1GB total per VM and sticking with the 53MB overhead, switching to containers would have reduced memory usage by 5%. Again, to my mind that's trivial.
Funnily, modern file systems (extfs3/4, NFTS, HPFS+?) all support extended attributes in some form or another. However, they are currently only rarely used: Mostly for the "this file was downloaded from the internet, do you really want to open it" flag.

For anyone interested in these, they're called Alternate Data Streams in Windows. When you download a file from the Internet, an ADS is created, called "Zone:Identifier", which contains a ZoneID indicating where it came from.

I believe Windows 2000's Explorer allowed the user to add arbitrary tags to any file, and that those were stored in an ADS. For some reason, that was removed in, I think, Windows Vista.

At least one virus stored itself using Alternate Data Streams, which I imagine is related to why they've been more or less downplayed.
Your proposal doesn't really sound like it deprecates files, but rather that it enhances them with attributes. Most operating systems other than Unix have already expanded on the file as a bag of bytes to one that supports features such as extended attributes and forks. Even most contemporary Unix file systems have xattrs (most notably XFS), but overall they seem to have had limited impact, and in the case of NTFS-style alternate data streams, even introduced some nasty security risks.

Really, what you seem to want is a file system with built-in version control and network sharing? Git and Mercurial are already virtual file systems of sorts, I guess.
H1B visas clearly lead to lower wages, longer hours of work and fierce competition. At times it feels like a modern form of slavery. Interestingly enough, the software industry is one of the few truly innovative industries in the US. Makes you wonder what would happen to healthcare/nuclear/manufacturing if it was as easy to hire foreign skilled workers and even more so if you'd allow them to create their own companies. The H1B system makes it extremely hard for even accomplished developers to stay and get a greencard eventually, start their own business - only the best and (legally) most enduring will prevail. A simple point system for visas a la Canada with a clear path to citizenship and cap on welfare support would attract a lot of creative individuals, methinks...
Since you already now this person for more than a year, why keep using Homejoy? You could make a deal with her that benefits both parties (she'd get 100% of the profits and you'd pay less since Homejoy is not in the middle)
- just curious how Homejoy manage to keep clients coming back to them.
Love that the onion uses humor to recruit. Too bad it's not something that's actually useful somehow as well!
Water will be a serious problem, if I remember correctly Jordan has to import potable water. I'm sure they would be interested in any ycombinator ideas, and the government of California.

Where I live there is an abundance of crystal clear drinking water being wasted by fracking to sell LNG at bargain basement prices.
was Einstein a patent clerk ,when he modeled theory of relativity?Does it mean , they have more time to be creative or does it mean something else?
I think it is true. Ending software patents is great for startups, but it's good for Google, Apple, and Microsoft, too.

The big companies aren't getting much value for what they spend on the patent system and their valuations depend on growth of the software ecosystem that requires startups.

The ones that will lose out when software patents aren't lucrative are the entrepreneurial lawyers who found a loophole in the system and mercilessly exploited it. Several of the "inventors" in the patents in op were patent attorneys with no experience in computer networks and software. They saw a chance to cheat and they took it; no technology was required.

Well, Intellectual Ventures will lose out, too. They're large in the sense that they're winning more than the tens of millions that small time trolls do, but not compared to IBM or Amazon.
We have self-cleaning public toilets, and automated car washes. I can certainly see an down-market option where the cars are cleaned automatically.
What I'm buoding is most definitely not a "filesystem". Those use filenames and folders and crap like that. My system does away with that.

What you said about a glorified metadata search is right on.

Some people share devices, but most people we share with use other devices.

I'm glad you think its silly because all great things have haters (bitcoin, justin bieber, etc.)
I think E2 is regarded as entrepreneur visa. It requires investment coming into the US though...
Maybe the networks now are quite weak.

But in a future where a large percent of rides are shared by 3 passengers on average, or maybe even more via SUV(for cost savings of course), being the dominant provider is tied directly achieving optimal routes and average share ratios.

In such a future , the network effects over riders is much stronger , and it's probably a "winner takes most" market.
I built and ran a broadcast monitoring business for 5 years from 2003 to 2007, competing with services such as TVEyes and Critical Mention. It was called RooseveltMedia.com. At peak, it recorded and catalogued about 400+ shows per day in 15 media markets and had about 75 customers.

As we grew, I knew we needed to expand nationwide (which would require raising VC). My saying was "We need Johnson and Johnson, not Congressman Johnson's office." but this question of legality loomed very large. Legal or illegal? If illegal, no investor in his right mind would give us money. Unfortunately, the evidence I had at the time pointed towards "illegal" rather than "legal":

1. There were lots of lawsuits. This Fox vs. TVEyes is not the first. We definitely tiptoed around TV groups so as not to draw attention.

2. The International Association of Broadcast Monitors (IABM, a group of regional services and some single-market self-employed folks) spent several hundred thousand dollars to try to get the law rewritten so that royalties would be set in stone, much like jukeboxes. Why would they do this if they didn't all also believe it was illegal? In any case, the effort failed.

With this evidence in hand, I tried to grow the company organically, but it became untenable. We weren't getting enough money from the single-market (or few-market) customers to fund the expansion. By contrast, Critical Mention was self-funded by a dot-commer, and completely ate our lunch. Even if we'd attempted to raise money, the fundraising sidetrack would have set us back by a few more miles and I had zero additional bandwidth. There really wasn't a good answer to the question.

Ultimately, despite finding product-market fit almost immediately with this freshman business effort, I decided to pivot into a more "legitimate" business. I altered the tech to provide archiving systems for TV stations... and it went over like a lead balloon, cratering the businesses and leaving me with a pile of personal debt which took a couple of years of "real world" work to pay off.

Since then I've tried to start 2 more companies (huzon.tv and words4chrome.com) and while my execution and engineering skills have become vastly better, neither found product-market fit like the first. Beginner's luck, I guess.
Have you ever been threatened with being fired?

Try this, ask for a pen and a piece of paper, write your resignation letter, sign it, hand it back to them, and walk out the door.

9 times out of 10 you won't get to the door, half the time you'll have a pay raise by the time you get back to the office.

You're a huge valuable asset that the company has invested lots of money in that knows how things work. They want to shave pennies not lose investments. Act accordingly.
Fair enough. If the quotas are not adequate for determining the standard of work, then they made a mistake in implementing this work-from-home program.

But that's not at all what the focus of the whistleblowers are. They're all upset because they don't know exactly when they're employees are working. To be honest, I only read the first two, but they both mentioned almost nothing about inadequate evaluation methods and focused exclusively on the fact that they didn't know when their employees were working.

Well, that's not how work-from-home works for most organizations (and that's never how I've seen it work with successful organizations, having been working from home for over a decade now).
jhancock was referring to cooperation between telecoms, not cooperation between telecoms and the government.
Cryogenic on-chip quantum electron cooling leads to 10x less power consumption
The gov't builds cases using the testimony of criminal conspirators against their accomplices all of the time. Are all of those cases are a sham? If no, then all of your noise about Nacchio's stock sales is irrelevant to the matter of whether the government's prosecution was in retaliation against him.
So, for research farther back, LexisNexis will be needed to find transcripts only.
I still have my Palm V - it's still charged, and I use it occasionally.
At the very least, he's my favorite. Discovered him when I was about 16 and immediately decided to read everything he ever wrote. Truly an imaginative and amazing man.

Also his poetry is really incredible and offers an interesting look into Argentinian culture, both Gaucho and upper class.
Why does the "fix" have to be the cdn versus China itself? Why is that being ignored as the real issue?
Obviously the cloud is just a pile of SD cards connected together.
Harder than in China for sure. But I'm not really complaining since I'm a mix. I'm sure full asian have it harder.
> I presume it would be easier for him to decline the job than if he were an employee of a service with contracts and reputations.

Do you have any reason to believe that outside of a need to avoid cognitive dissonance? I ask because it is well-known that for some services (e.g. Uber) refusing open contracts will result in penalties or termination of the agreement with the service.
There's a long history of mocking and decrying the file as a user-level concept, and many applications hide the concept from the user, even though they store user data in the filesystem. Music players (such as iTunes) are an example: there are songs, albums, and artists, but files do not show up in the UI in any way. This is standard practice at the application layer. However, implementing something at the OS layer with the expectation of exposing it directly to the user goes against the current thinking that it's the application layer's job to provide user-friendly concepts, and that the job of the OS is merely to support the application layer in doing that.

If providing support for application-level user-friendly abstractions is what you want to do, then I would suggest studying applications with UI abstractions that you admire and judging your OS storage layer by how well it supports application development.
Right off the bat, I spent 5 seconds looking at the plugin page and wasn't immediately sure what the plugin does. There's a list of features starting with "Playback Controls" and "Now playing information"... I assume it's a music player maybe? I'd suggest working up a short, succinct sentence that explains in very simple terms what the plugin does and make sure it's the thing I first see!
I'm not optimistic about municipalities running anything efficiently. However, this would provide great opportunities to get rid of public transit as we know it. Private sector rides could simply be subsidized for low income users. How much more convenient would this be vs taking the bus?
you could use Homejoy to find a good cleaner and then talk to them directly, they are a contractor and are free to make a contract with anyone they wish.
It's friday, just one last push to add comcastifyjs.fixMyImagesLoadingSoFast() to the build process before the weekend...
Yeah if developers could keep their protests within US - that would be great.
Companies like Uber and Lyft operating without as stringent regulation as regular taxi companies is their main competitive advantage (AirBnB is in the same group).

Taxi drivers have lobbied for years to build up the kind of economic protections they have from disappearing margins in a competitive marketplace, and consequently being a taxi driver meant you could make a middle class living without tortuous hours.

Uber comes along and operates without the limitations of those protections and drivers earn less. Ultimately without intervention it puts a whole industry of people on a trajectory towards poverty, and this is before we even get to self driving cars.

What are we going to do with everyone who gets forced out of their middle class jobs?
It needs a whitelist of giant corporations like Netflix that acquiesce to Comcast's fees. Images should only load slowly on poor websites.
I know the permissions are overbearing. The reason it requests permissions for all sites instead of just the supported players is because of the way Chrome updates extensions. If I were to go that route and at some point add another player (which happens often), Chrome would disable the extension for everyone until they re-approve the changed permissions.

I believe there is a way to do it dynamically and allow the user to choose which players they want to allow access to, and then accept the changed permissions. However a majority of my user base will not care, and would actually prefer the one click install ease of use. At least that's my reasoning.

For those of you really concerned, you can download the source and modify manifest.json to change where the contentscript is injected for peace of mind. https://github.com/kkamperschroer/Musicality
The billing makes sense but, can you provide any detail about why scheduling is important to you? Is this really an ad-hoc service for you?

In my experience with HomeJoy and Exec (now HandyBook), they understand the value of recurring revenue and are actively pushing for customers to have regular service. For this kind of service, I would think that would be very normal.
Have you looked at camlistore? It sounds familiar to your idea.
> educating everyone to above the current median skill level

I see improving education as the best solution here. There is plenty of room for innovation and improvement.
Good question; I don't have single definition for "operating system".

The Wikipedia page for Operating Systems says "An operating system (OS) is software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs", and by that definition, the JVM would count as one.

Though most users also expect some GUI/Desktop from an OS, and that's what browsers offer, but not the JVM. (The JVM allows programs to have a GUI, but it doesn't have a GUI itself, for example for launching other programs).
The most frequent obstacle to telework I've seen in Government is basically "If I can't work from home, you can't either!" from managers.

I can't help but think that this case is more of the same.

If the work isn't getting done or it is of poor quality - make that the point.

Unfortunately, enforcing accountability for that sort of failure is non-existent in Government whether the workers are in their cubicles or in their pajamas.

If the only verification of work you're doing is something that could handled with grep, you don't really get to complain.
It's unbelievable that the US government is focusing on providing a legal path to citzenship to ILLEGAL immigrants, while legal immigrants who are highly educated (sometimes at Ivy Leage institutions) have to wait for years to get a greencard, depending on their country of citizenship. What's unbelievable is that they can't easily change employers during the green card application process. There is nothing more absurd than American top universities educating thousands of highly qualified international students, only to make their lives miserable with respect to immigration after they graduate and doing everything in their power to encourage them to take their brains to another country instead.
How MHacks reignited my optimism about hackathons
I disagree. Account creation is very important to building a client book of business. There should be two options: 1) Sign up with Facebook/Google+ or 2) Enter only first name and email address. Other information can be gathered at a later date.
That's awesome I cancelled my account last month due to the issue of "we are lowering prices for summer" me thinking naively that this meant eventually prices would go up after a month or two. However after receiving not only notification that the prices would not go up further (Houston drivers at a minimum) but also I would now be required to pay 10 dollars a week to maintain service. Prior to Uber I was thinking the sharing ecnonomy was an embodiment of a change in corporate attitudes. F me right?
Thank you... Glad you liked it...

Yes this one sprint per month good be great :)
But are they really sufficient or is it lack of imagination? I mean, why wasn't the XT sufficient? Or the 386? Is it a universal constant that a single, ~3GHz stream of x86 instructions (forget about ILP and friends for the moment) is sufficient for human needs (but, say, 1GHz isn't)?
You could actually make a far better case for Emacs being an operating system rather than a browser, what with the former not having as many security and sandboxing restrictions.

That and you can actually boot from Emacs: http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux....

Really, by your definition, any piece of software with a plugin-based architecture is an operating system. There's certainly a trend we're witnessing where, for the end user, the browser is displacing the underlying operating system, and turning the latter into an environment for hosting the former. But to call the browser an OS is a huge stretch.
Great point. That was one of my concerns. I was hoping the screenshots were self explanatory, but that's probably a bad assumption.

I'll work on refining the title and description. It's really a quick-and-easy controller for online music players.

Thanks. :)
I sort of agree with you - "concern troll" applies more to OP than this post, upon reflection - but let me explain my reasoning.

Lots of people have explained elsewhere in the thread why this is a completely trivial issue. I don't think it's a reasonable position to hold that a kilobyte of static data in the runtime is an actual problem that needs solving - if it were, we would see pull requests like any other bug, not a pearl-clutching HN thread.

Concern trolls attempt to weaken or fragment a community by pointing out "problems" that aren't actually big enough to actually warrant attention or energy, then accusing the community of weakness/malfeasance/hypocrisy for failing to act. This primarily serves to divide idealists (who want to solve every problem, no matter how small) from pragmatists (who want the community to focus its energy on things that matter).

Amplifying a small matter like this into a "deadly" one and claiming that it "reeks of immaturity" is such grandiose posturing that I personally cannot imagine it's in earnest. It seems more likely to me to be someone heavily invested in another toolchain who wants Rust to not be taken seriously, wants contributors to Rust to fret over every commit, and wants people considering Rust to worry about the consequences should they adopt it. That's all I intended to convey.
Size is certainly an important factor in embedded systems, one of the areas there is a lot of interest in Rust.
It could be useful for people campaigning for net neutrality if they want a "This is what downloads may become like:" with an image on their site.