skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If SpaceX's approach shows promise I'd expect NASA's program to evolve to integrate it somewhat. SpaceX might become the launch vehicle for the unmanned portions, for example.
off topic: if the hacker news community is NOT familiar with farnam street and the person who writes the book reviews, shane parrish, you are in for a real treat. be prepared to linger. it is one of my favorite go-to sites for insight and inspiration. shane will introduce you to non-mainstream books that are mind altering.

the other day i noticed that he is accepting donations to buy books for kids to give out at christmas time. if are looking to give a gift that keeps on giving, i would suggest checking him out. i think there are some projects going on here in the usa, btw, if memory servers me correctly, shane is located in ottawa, ontario canada.

disclaimer: i have no connection to shane or his site. i am just a loyal lurker who reads and bookmarks his blog postings on a regular basis.
It's up on YouTube now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBoj-1m-qLU
Though the point is somewhat moot because US government spends more per capita on public healthcare than the British government does, bizarrely. So while it's not "free" in the UK, Americans get charged twice via taxes and insurance.
Found it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBoj-1m-qLU
You linked to an article that references a study. Care to share the original data?

The Department of Labor has wage floors for H1-Bs (prevailing wage). Company's can't legally pay below that.
Personally, I never had a problem with my salary because I am good at what I do and I project my skills honestly. Salary negotiations involve negotiation skills that a lot of fellow immigrants don't have or don't care about. But when I see their work outperform local workers who are paid more but actually complain a lot about salary, I really get pissed. I have worked with really smart local workers who have all told me they don't feel threatened by immigrant workers. Likewise, I never have felt that someone can exploit me because I am on H1B. But honestly I have far less flexibility in moving jobs which unfortunately seems the only way to get more money in America. So long term I lose. Unlike you, I do think there is a thing called over paid. It is when your value/dollar ratio is exorbitantly high.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/01/nasa-orion-sp...

It seems they're just hyping this Thursday's mission.

That said, I don't know anybody could withstand a one year trip in a capsule the size of Orion...
For you, yes. I work in an organisation with over 100000 non savvy users and I've not seen a single person that has successfully switched default search engine from Bing to Google in IE. They just complain about search "being bad".
Yes, and any exploit is much more likely to be through a vulnerability in the PHP application you are running on the site. That is my experience as a former system administrator at a webhost.
Summary: Amazon just announced a new pricing model for reserved instances. At a quick glance, it appears to be better in some scenarios, worse in others. For instance, the "No Upfront" option gives a 30% to 50% discount from on demand pricing, with no upfront payment -- though you have to commit to using the instance for a full year. On the other hand, a 3-year Light Utilization reservation used to be a great way to get a substantial discount without much upfront obligation, and that doesn't seem to be possible any more. (Though you can still buy Light and Medium Utilization reservations until Feb. 2.)
San Francisco | KeepSafe http://www.getkeepsafe.com/ | Mobile Engineer

KeepSafe is seeking engineers who will integrate and shape existing privacy and security technologies to fit in the hands of our users. You'll develop new ways to manage privacy that every day users didn't know they needed or wanted, and define the new direction of existing privacy, security and cryptography technology.

We're also sick of reading resumes. They suck. We'd rather read about your work and your passion than what technologies you've worked with.

Stuff we do:

https://github.com/KeepSafe

http://keepsafe-engineering.tumblr.com/

Where to apply:

http://www.getkeepsafe.com/noresume.html
Tiny Mini-PC Boasts Quad-core Cortex-A15 SoC
Words don't need to be said; words don't have needs. People sometimes could benefit from hearing words. But if you're going to be a jerk about it, then people generally aren't going to listen. Ergo, no benefit.

In this case, though, I don't think stating the obvious was anything that the original poster needed to hear. You were responding to something where he already said that he was "a dummy" and will do it differently next time.

And I think your accusation of laziness is... unevidenced. He's a college sophomore at a selective school, he's studying half-way around the world from home, he has a number of neat projects on his blog, and decided to make a cross-country trip over Thanksgiving break. And in a follow-up to a theft, he took the time to post something to help other US visitors avoid thefts in the future. That doesn't look lazy to me.
#2 is out of their control. I'd speculate that at least part of the purpose of this announcement is to shame Congress into ensuring sufficient funding.
To support his claim here's a video of a law firm advising companies on exactly how to craft employment ads to hire only foreign workers and not hire Americans even if they are qualified. In fact he even says it explicitly, the goal is to not hire a domestic worker, and getting a suitably experienced domestic worker applying for the job is considered a failure state of the process.

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

It tells you where to place your ads so that they are "publicly visible" but nobody sees them, and how to craft them to the exact skillset of the foreign worker you're already going to hire.

They say that they are complying with the letter of the law, but they are not because the law requires you to make a good faith effort to hire domestically and they are telling you how to reject those candidates even if they apply.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=TC...

"our goal is clearly to not to find a qualified and interested US worker."

I understand the skepticism on HN because many people are working in places where real high-end work is being done. But I worked in the Midwest for over eight years and we had guys brought in to do Apache Struts work, and half the time I had to teach them how to do it. Maybe part of the reason some of you guys who really need qualified foreign workers are getting squeezed is because other companies are screwing you by fraudulently hiring. Why weren't the people in that video above ever prosecuted? They're on video admitting to crimes.
The underlying assumption of this entire post is that "economic, innovation and productivity performance" is the most important thing in the world. Yet this "belief" in itself is nothing but a product of the culture the author lives in. There is nothing universal about it, nor is there any real reason to agree with it. Personally I couldn't care less about "efficiency" if it means things that I consider beautiful - such as the diversity in the world - has to go away.
I'm pretty sure that you and JC actually agree completely. You are just going into more detail about my vague apple tree analogy than I did.
Introducing the beta for Steam Broadcasting
The author of the article areas with you! He says that hiring an H1-B is MORE expensive -- not only do you have to pay what the DOJ considers the prevailing wage for the area and the job but you have to pay legal bills, relocation, interview costs, a lot of personnel time plus you have to wait frigging forever to be able to finally employ the person.

His experience is exactly my experience too: I have hired a lot of H1-Bs (perhaps 5-10% of all the hires I've done over the years) and they were always a last resort because at the end of the day they cost so damned much.

I don't see anything wrong with this. Hire a local if you can, just like shopping locally if you can.

(I suppose if you're a commodity contractor shop hiring people to write Java code as the front end of a billing system, the situation might be different -- that's the programming equivalent of hiring a gardener and I assume in most cases skills aren't considered that important).
Bill by the day, or by project.
That's why H1B's should have a significant minimum requirement for the salary (depending on place).

They do already. It's called the prevailing wage and it's based on what is currently being paid for those positions.
I think the 4p has a Western Digital 1773 controller. I don't know if it is much better beyond supporting double density. My code does wait on status checks after writing commands. Maybe that's not necessary, but I haven't done floppy drive programming before this so I followed the example code closely.

Doing some speech recording back in the day -- heady stuff! I've always wondered how Big Five (and other) TRS-80 games managed to get reasonable voice output considering they are 1 bit/sample at 5 KHz.

Takes me back, remembering how proud we were that our "baby" computers could speak. And now? Well, let's just say that I wish the "tab is producing audio" icon on Chrome tabs functioned as a mute button.
Are you deliberately missing the point? The ecological impacts of sustaining human settlements go far beyond housing sites. The American west is overstretched for water. Much of the land west of the Mississippi is effectively already overpopulated.

Beyond ecological concerns, you can't add people without compromising the lifestyle of people already here. Go ahead and ask people in most cities if they want their town to be a lot more like Los Angeles. The answer 90% of the time will be No. But that's what's happening anyway.

This idea that there is a ton of land for new urbanization is obviously wrong. The good land is all in use. What's left is semi-arid, flood plain, or unsuitable in other ways. You can't just stick people out in a prairie or desert or on an Appalachian hill top. You have to ship in food and pipe out the sewage. That's not economically viable most places.

The one area of the country that could actually support a higher population density is the great lakes region, but it's in fact slowly depopulating at the moment. Immigrants are not moving to Erie, PA. They are moving to places like NYC and cities in California. So this point that there is available land is a pointless academic discussion unless you want to impose soviet style internal passports.
Mail to employees [An attempt to motivate them]
[ If you are atheist please be little forgiving as I believe in GOD ]

Hi

for some reason I want to tell you things to do if suddenly I disappeared
- You are a creation of GOD, you are the most amazing creature GOD made, so act like one.
- Raise your head as high as possible and see what GOD made for your.
- You are not what community want, you are what you are, you shape the world with kindness and love, don’t make a problem be always the solution.
- If someone said something you don’t like wait and it will fall if it is not right.
- Don’t talk a lot arguing the obvious or discussing assumption (IT IS WASTE OF TIME)
- We have very limited time in this world, make use of it.
- Have fun when you can.
- Don’t ever let your head be empty.
- When you are going to get married look for someone who respect you and value you, love is crap it always end up with very bad situation.
- If you want expect respect, give respect.
- Life is a race and everyone is moving on, if you want to be remarkable be remarkable of what you do NOT what you can “fake”
- Don’t be afraid to standup and say “I don’t like that”, it is you and you should be always proud of your self
- Each and everyone of you is a leader, leader of hope, push people forward, don’t give up, it takes time, be nice with people.
- When you talk to someone look in the eye, you don’t have something to hide or something scares you.
- “Speaking loud doesn’t make you right”
- Don’t argue, only people was enough time and power do and you don’t have time for this.
- We are in this world to make it better by our action.
- Listen to people because “They say their words and you hear your words”
there is a lot I want to say but this what I can recall
Things for F16Apps
- Make it great place
- It is source of hope, may be not for you but for others.
- We “Egypt” have young graduate with very...
Original post https://medium.com/@neo_4583/f16apps-archives-mail-to-employees-a4598e0b5cf8
Don't really see any grounds for comparison...anyway, corporate raids and coups are, unfortunately, quite common in Russia: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/magnitsky-verd...
Well here is the link to my paper in Nature
http://rdcu.be/bKB9
The NSA had a file/active series of wiretaps on Obama from at least 2004 onward.[0]

We live in interesting times.

[0]:http://www.businessinsider.com/the-nsa-spied-on-barack-obama...
Ask HN: Whole class 'C' is on a “SpamRats” list – how to solve?
This is a Linode server. To quote: "Usually this means the whole range has the same issue of naming conventions or no reverse DNS AND that many IP's from this Class C have been used in Spam Attacks, Dictionary attacks or other forms of attacks, as detected by Mail Servers in the Data Collection Grid. You will NOT be able to use the removal form to remove your IP Addresses."

What should I do? the messages ou server sends are very simple, and not rated as spam by Google or SpamAssassin at my other hosting provider, but I suspect many of the messages are being bounced or dropped somewhere, because only about half of our recipients ever respond -- the sample includes personal friends only.
NASA's annual revenue is 73% SpaceX's market cap.

But lets pretend that doesn't matter. Musk makes a solid ~1.1 billion a year off of various investments, and has ~11.7 billion in assets. Even if he dumped all that in SpaceX, you'd sill be ~6billion short of NASA's budget. Implying those assests could be quickly liquidated.

Even if we assume SpaceX has more/better talent then NASA. Your still working with at least an order of magnitude lower budget. Which is massive, especially when we are talking about the difference between $1bil/yr and $10 billion/yr
It's not like the UK, Canada or Australia which have point-based immigration systems. The US has very few ways for a competent, educated immigrant to enter the country.

The US and Canada both have immigration caps for different resident visas. And they are very similar between the two countries.

A more appropriate way to describe the current situation is that demand for entry into the US is far below available supply.
Sometime in the past fifty years NASA became paralyzed not by budget cuts, but by political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape. And then there is all that pork that goes around with the entrenched contractors. The tale of the last Mars program that NASA put together is a great example of this. They got handed a technically sound plan to get there in reasonable time with reasonable resources. Then every org-unit in NASA wanted to add their own part to stay relevant and it got so bloated both technically and financially that it had to be put to rest.

So unless they convince me that they managed to get their internal structural problems under control, I don't think they get anytime to Mars within this century. And certainly not before the private sector does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program

p.s.: There is a free movie on YouTube telling the tale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTZvNLL0-w
The Tower at PNC Plaza, a 32-floor building under construction in downtown Pittsburgh, uses a solar chimney and other passive air handling methods to significantly reduce energy consumption:

http://www.paladinoandco.com/case-studies/tower-at-pnc-plaza...
Cute Christmas Photo Shoot Idea
I don't see him making any reference to non-NASA entities at all. All he said is that a trip to Mars made by somebody, anybody, might happen someday, but the odds of sufficient financial support for this attempt are poor.
> That said, I don't know anybody could withstand a one year trip in a capsule the size of Orion...

It's possible that they'd use something like Bigelow's inflatable module for extra living space during the trip. A year in Orion without additional space and with two roommates sounds like Hell.
Agreed. If you keep writing posts like this, as a VC, you risk losing one of the most important differentiating points you have - your credibility and trust. People need to respect you as a thought leader, and not worry about reading blog posts with a "remove bias / advertising" filter in their heads.
We had a developer named Jason, fortunately he mainly did XML.
AFL isn’t a source-level fuzzer. It interposes between the compiler and the assembler to add instrumentation to assembly code emitted by the compiler. Shouldn’t it be possible to do the same thing via binary rewriting or emulation in cases where source access isn’t possible? The first one would be hard and the second one would be slow, but I don’t think there’s anything about AFL’s approach that would stop this from working.
Can someone please suggest a more accurate title?
>Yuri is wrong. h1b is absolutely about costs -- unless they claim (a somewhat fantastical claim) there is nobody in the US at all who could fit their needs. A claim which is trivially untrue. Those people exist and could be hired. Why isn't Yuri hiring them? Because of the price they demand.

Excuse me, he is just a guy with a company, not some demi-God who has access to a list of all qualified people out there.

When people say: "Hey, there's talent in the US! Look hard and you will find it!", you are kinda missing the circumstances under which he is operating.

First, the cost. Are you suggesting he offer $1 million for a job that used to go for $200,000 just because he can't find anyone? That is flawed economics and a blind faith in the market. The market is not perfectly elastic. We're talking about people, and not mass-produced goods or primary, replaceable material (Iron, Coal etc.). He probably can't operate profitably at those prices.

Second, people are super diverse, and from personal experience, its very very hard to find the right kind of people for any job. If he's found someone who works well for the company, he's very lucky and realizes that. All he wants to do is to bring him to his main office so that he can possibly be more efficient and productive, and the current US labor laws are not letting him do so.

>In fact, the way you can tell this is bs and it is entirely about price is AeroFS opened a canadian subsidiary! I wonder how much that cost. At a guess, $30k? So apparently $30k is less than the premium required to pry engineers out of dropbox or box.

What if engineers working at dropbox are perfectly happy where they are? How do you know that he hasn't tried that? Does he even have time to court all the employees of dropbox; he probably has much better things to do with his time.

>Or god forbid, train someone.

Anecdotally, this is false. I admit I've worked only for 2 American companies so far, but both of them have been incredibly involved with the local community; hiring many entry-level engineers, giving internships to students from community colleges and organizing learn-to-code events on premises.
PostgreSQL’s New LATERAL Join Type
Typically this is because they are able to make decent generalisations about the total risk pool they are insuring.

Offering 100 policies at £100 makes sense if you can make a decent estimate of the average annual payout being £90. The fact that one guy walks in to the policy knowing he'll cost £500 doesn't concern you.

Offering 1 policy at £100 without any exclusions means that you get adverse selection - a unusually high proportion of your clients would walk in knowing that they'll cost the £500.

In many countries where health insurance is obligatory, regulators have risk pooling between insurers to help negate selection effects (I think this was included in ObamaCare provision but not sure)
Do you realize who you're replying to?
I read some of the background material about Orion. The transfer mission will include much larger structures for crew habitation. Orion is there as the return-to-Earth vehicle which also provides something they call 'abort anywhere' - the ability to pull the plug on the entire mission at any point during the flight to Mars.
> The only way it could not be true if there is actually no one in the local labor market who can do the job, and that's a very difficult argument to make. Outside of that, every H1 is a job a citizen isn't getting.

Does that mean being a citizen entitles one to a job regardless of qualification? Also, does that mean 100% of the US should be employed before bringing in foreign workers? I think such generalizations are far fetched. The conspiracy theory that claims that H1s are all low paid workers falls flat when examined closely.
> But the reality is that we need a deep bench of competent developers willing to work for substantially less than $100k a year.

And there we have it. You want developers to continue to be happy with less than $100K salaries while the costs of local housing skyrockets by 20% year over year.

Clearly that won't work for developers hitting their 30s and wanting to start a family or those with families already.

So you're left with hiring the young, highly educated, and unattached. Hence the move to hire H1Bs from overseas.
Location: Victoria BC (Canada), repatriating to USA soon

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: JavaScript (jQuery, Node, Angular, learning React); PostgreSQL; MongoDB; Java; PHP; plus experimentation or quick hacks in many others

Résumé: http://cyranix.github.io

Email: andrew.m.harrison+hn@gmail.com

I am most interested in organizations with opportunities in a social-good space such as education, health, the environment, or justice.
I was informed that my opinion was incorrect and confusingly out of touch with reality.

Little did they know that what really turns some of those young women on are not so much guys with muscles and tans, as... guys who are into planetariums, the Hubble sequence, tinkering with Maxwell's equations and such; and able to explain it all, while camping in the desert on a moonless night.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
I've been on an H1B visa before. This has been my experience.
You forgot to mention it's a tether to keep talent in a given company also.
You are also very limited in the kind of jobs you can take. I think that part of the appeal of the H1B is that it creates a pool of programmers who are only allowed to be programmers. Keep in mind, the biggest competition for programmers may come from outside the field. In my opinion, being a programmer is actually very difficult. Even the much derided "crud" apps require a substantial amount of reading of dense material, tremendous persistence in the face of strange and obscure bugs and errors, the ability to communicate with (and negotiate with) non-technical stakeholders under deadline pressure… really, people who can do this are able to take jobs that often pay better with more stability in other fields, provided that they are free to do so.

For instance, registered nurses and dental hygienists in the bay area earn a bit more and a bit less than application developers, respectively. Under the H1B terms, it would be difficult for a programmer to become a physician, lawyer, nurse, dental hygienist, mortgage broker, or many other jobs. As a result a salary and prospects gap can emerge between programming and these fields - increasing the probability that those people with freedom and choice will avoid programming (and ensuring that the "shortage" continues decade after decade).

Truth is, visa programs that are designed to target specific jobs or industries by allowing workers only to work for a specific employer or in a specific field are likely to end up badly distorting labor markets.