skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't take it as a dig at your dad, but shouldn't it be part of an administrator's fiduciary duty (at least at the top level) to ensure that people do get what they deserve? The longterm health of the institution surely depends on the quality and availability of the intellectual output as well as the balance sheet.
Your social network as currency
Resolvers still affected a week after the Craigslist DNS hijack
Url changed from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-12/02/stephen-hawki..., which points to this.
I got a H-1B visa. I was living in Ireland at the time. But, as it turned out, I never moved to the US.

It was for a compiler position at Borland. I ended up working remotely for the next 6 years or so, first for a year as a contractor at a 6 figure Euro rate, then later as a salaried employee after I moved to London. They flew me over two to four times a year to keep up to date with the team. I collectively lived over 6 months in Scotts Valley, albeit in hotels. All this wasn't cheap.

You're generalizing from a stereotype you've seen. But don't think it represents all situations. The mentality you've got is the same one at work with racism and sexism. It's reductive and will mislead you.

There's a certain amount of tech talent at any given technical ability level available worldwide, and only a fraction of it is in the US. The opportunities to leverage tech talent are, however, larger in northern CA than most other places. And some things can only be implemented by people with the right level of ability. When you artificially limit the supply of qualified labour, all you can do is shuffle your existing resources - paying more won't increase the supply quickly enough. Limiting supply of able labour will reduce the speed of innovation and economic growth - including for locals.

Maybe these "body shops" are a problem. I don't know for sure - I don't have enough information. The way they are talked about, it doesn't sound like the quality of people brought in is terribly high, so it seems to me you don't have much to worry about re competition, unless you're not very capable. On the other hand, it sounds like it could be upskilling India as these people get rotated out, which to my mind is a good thing - beggar-thy-neighbour policies don't pay off in the long run, and besides are morally questionable when the disparity in wealth is very large.
Cool algorithm! One problem is that its probability density calculation assumes a random ship placement. If the opponent were aware of how the algorithm works (let's say they deduced it from its behavior, which seems plausible) then they could devise a counter-strategy of placing ships on the squares which have the fewest other possible ship placements (e.g. in the beginning of the game, this is along the edges of the board).
"Simplifying". Now you have 3 ways to pay for the same thing, so now it is simple.

You have an extra ~3% discount for the all upfront method, comparing with the partial upfront. The financials here does not look good (for the user).
What exactly is the need to send humans to Mars? Why not robots? Is it worth risking a human's life for science, when a robot can do an equally good job?
We have to wait until the mid 2030s (20 years!) to put humans on Mars via the government's program?

I fear that this goal is not nearly ambitious enough. Set a deadline far away, and the time you "need" to spend preparing to meet that deadline will increase in order to fill the amount of time you have.
So uh, Mars is smaller than Earth now?
I know this is a little off topic, but did you really spent $160 a year to find strangers with whom you share lineage?

What was the draw?
I actually have two amazon accounts with the same email address (username), one has prime and the other one doesn't. Sometimes I type in the 'other' password and get the non-prime account and get confused.
I suspect that the majority of the cases where H-1B workers are paid less than the prevailing wages are at body shops like Wipro, TCS and yes, IBM. IMHO one potential fix for the situation could be to disallow (or at least make it sufficiently expensive) for a company to hire an H-1B worker for any third party work -- that is, if company A hires a worker, then the worker would have to work on company A's premises only and that any such work cannot be sold to third parties on a time and material basis. Yes, enforcement will be difficult and there will be clever ways of circumventing the regulations, but I honestly see no other solution except to cut out H-1B altogether. Which, IMHO would be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Having been in a position of trying to hire engineers in this market, the AeroFS experience is spot on.

And yes, we should completely get rid of L-1. I agree that it is one channel that is exploited by the body shops.
NASA does a lot of things, only some of which are related to any journey to Mars. Of course, they might suddenly drop everything and work towards sending humans.
I think you may be looking at one factor too exclusively - You're also comparing a rather homognious culture with the mixing pot of America.

While there's downsides as seen here ( where personal property is not held sacrosanct by all cultures ) there are upsides as well that may outweigh the costs. For example: Americans get exposed to many unique cultures in the course of their daily lives. One could argue that this is
beneficial.
But how you can be sure about that if WhatsApp code is not opensourced? Telegram has at least iOS and Android code opensourced.
Don't get me wrong, the terms of the H1B are pretty terrible but that should not detract from Yuri's point that quotas and other immigration restrictions have a serious impact on smaller companies' ability to hire the best employees.

Similarly a lot of people talking about salary are missing the point. Sure, there might be more candidates if the salary offered were higher but even if they had the right skills (and that's a big if) they might not be a good fit for the team.

I know mentioning "culture fit" may attract a lot of flak but consider this: if a candidate cares more about the salary than the product and the team then even if they're incredibly skilled they risk being detrimental to the company as a whole. I've seen what the world of finance looks like through some friends and it's not pretty.
what you say may be true for web-development but afaik there is not too much PhD requirements for web-dev work.

I'm in the computer vision and pattern recognition field and as you can guess from its popularity there's definitely a shortage - not just in the US but all over the world.

I'm in France and in my company we are trying aggressively to hire new people in the field but everybody good is already working somewhere or they're working on their own ideas. About 80% of our research/engineering team is from abroad: 2 Swiss, 2 Italian, 3 Turkish, 3 American, 1 Israeli, 2 Russian, 2 Canadian, 2 Spaniard, 1 Iranian - and only 5 French. finding talent in this day and age is a world-wide problem. there's not enough experienced people around for cutting edge companies and there's no way you can hire someone good in the field cheap local or away. that's a very absurd notion...

As I said, I'm currently not located in US and I'm not a US citizen. So, if I decide to work again there I'll need an H1B but as I'm already making quite well where I'm now, I wouldn't consider uprooting my life and returning back to US for no less than $200-250k. if this is considered cheap work, then so be it. exploiting imperialist bastards...
hi there, i'm having a hard time reproducing this - can you email me james @ tilt.com which version of chrome you're running?
Why do CEO jobs deserve protection and {...} do not?
Why do physician jobs deserve protection and {...} do not?

Either we make the US job market open for all types of jobs, or have the same rules applied to all professions. Right now, there are many jobs that are heavily protected (how many CEOs/Wall Street types are H1B?), while others are not.
Try immigrating to the EU as an American; not quite so easy there either. If you are a refugee from Africa you have an easier time getting permanent residence in France than a moderately skilled workers would. My Mexican (now American) wife went through the US immigration process (she had a green card already when I met her, so I didn't 'help') You CAN immigrate to the U.S., there is a process. Funny since we're talking about India a lot on this thread, have you ever been through their immigration process? For even tourists you can only visit the country once during a six month period. Mexico's immigration system is rather difficult as well. The U.S. isn't alone in the difficulty of their immigration process. Getting residency in China is very difficult. I don't see why America gets special status with the animosity people feel towards immigration. Places like Canada are exceptions -- immigration is generally a long bureaucrat process in any country.
This is really screwing with the independent publishing sector in the UK right now: go on twitter and look for #VATMOSS. The TL:DR version is that ebooks are VATable and if you sell direct to customers the VAT regs mean that just one ebook sale in one EU country puts you in a world of bookkeeping pain.

A lot of small publishers are basically getting ready to fold their UK-based ebook operations completely at the end of the month. When you sell 10-50 products a month for £2-5 a pop it just isn't worth the hassle. And these are people who refuse to go via Amazon because monopsony. It is to weep.
This is a great response. The economics of this aren't really that hard to puzzle out. Why did Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, and others collude to artificially lower worker wages?[1] The answer is simple, they were too damn high and they wanted to use cutting costs as a means to grow profits and deliver shareholder value. As a worker you simply have to realize this is DIRECTLY AGAINST your best interests, regardless of the rhetoric about some future where it's ultimately better for everyone. The H1B schemes debated here as well as the push to expand computer science education online and make it cheaper produce exist to produce a new pool of less skilled and therefore cheaper laborers as part of a pretty simple longterm economic strategy - programmers as the factory workers of the information economy. If you're a business owner this is good, if you're a high-paid software engineer this is bad.

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/03/30/apple-goo...
Allowing H1Bs to bounce around (unless each job they take can't be filled by the domestic workforce) would violate the intent of the law.

"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States."

http://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm
Call me cynical, but I feel like NASA won't end up shuttling humans to Mars. Instead, NASA will more likely be shuttling government money between various contractors before having the program cancelled in the far-future...

Politics + exploration for exploration's sake always seems at odds.
There's quite a few types of servers that have larger discounts (~10%), such as the 1 year terms for m3, c3, g2 (which is ~12%), etc.

Also, the previous model[1] had three different types of reserved instances-- light, medium, and heavy usage. These gave discounts based on the actual number of hours utilized, which is harder to keep track of than the new three choices.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...
As a CEO of a hospital that wants to make money I would hire the Swedish grad for less and give him a 4 month US legal medical mess class for a lot less in cost that wouldn't involve a doctor. Since I'm known as a hospital that accepts non-us residency people, I can save a lot of money until the market resolves this inefficiency.

Also there are the other 5 anglo countries, which will have no problems with english. Many of these UK, german, etc grads could also be people from the US originally, so there wont be english competency problems there. Many europeans also have excellent english on average, like germans and scandianvians. It would be miles ahead of the average non-west euro immigrant software engineer that is very common in the USA.

QC and skills wise, I don't have much worries from these top tier countries medical practices. Do you freak out if you have to go to a hospital in Sweden because the doctors may be bad!?
Isn't it prudent to spread out the $1 trillion cost over a couple decades? After all, we have to borrow every dime of that from future taxpayers. I'm including cost overruns.

Or are you willing to pay an extra $10K a year in taxes to get to Mars sooner?
> It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.

This may be unpopular, but so what if it hurts local labor? The global flow of goods is good, but the flow of labor is bad? Twenty years ago Pepsi and Coke entered the Indian market and destroyed/replaced the local beverage industry. Uber and Amazon have launched their own price wars more recently. A lot of people want Indian companies to win, but I don't see words like 'unfair' being used in regard to the American companies with deeper pockets that hurt local businesses. I get that immigration hurts American wages, but that's just kinda how the world works. What does it matter if your job is outsourced to India or if an Indian comes to America to take it? The latter is probably better for the US if anything.
> every H1 is a job a citizen isn't getting

That's assuming the job market is entirely inelastic, which seems unlikely.

By that same logic, every foreigner not allowed to start a company in the US is N jobs citizens aren't getting.
Companies can take advantage of situations for profit, and that's their right, but the argument needs to be qualified so that we aren't speaking past one another.

Are we talking about "should be able to" or "it's the right (for whatever definition of right) thing to do"? I'm going to go with the latter since I have little opinion on the law.

For example, a company has the right to ask its programmers to work 80 hours. It's their right to squeeze as much out of their employees as they can. Should they?

Should companies be taking advantage of low wages in other countries instead of paying market value? They certainly can chase the profit, but we're talking about people, not goods. At the end of the day, they're paying a person less simply because they know that they have little bargaining room.

Some consider it unethical, others do not.
Because we can. Climbing to the top of a mountain is also dangerous and usually of no practical value.
Any idea what they plan on using this money for? Having just raised $80M in January what could they need another $70M for?
> I don't think there's any other way of reading your comment other than "most Indians lie on resumes and in interviews."

That's not what I got out of reading that same snippet
This rings true with me. Some of my best work has been done laying on my bed (working from home) staring at the ceiling.

On one project, we initially gave ourselves a ridiculous deadline and subsequently made a lot of ad-hoc "fuck it" decisions without properly thinking out the consequences. The system is sufficiently complex that we ended up with something that _barely_ did what it said on the box (if it worked at all). I dreaded even adding the simplest of features, because I could just feel how fragile the whole thing was.

We ultimately made the decision to scrap the project (and piss off or outright lose some customers waiting to pay us money) and restart from scratch, and I spent a few months part-time just building up a mental model of the system and stress-testing it against all of the different requirements and scenarios we had to handle. I went through a couple of notebooks in that time, but I didn't write a single line of code.

For me, it was a lesson in the importance of deliberation and knowing what you should be building before building. As my uncle liked to say when we built houses together, "measure twice, cut once."
There was somebody complaining about a shortage of software workers on the Buffalo subreddit recently. When prodded he admitted he was offering $35K a year.
existence proof. a necessary step toward multiplanetary human civilization.
Github has gone through great lengths to begin supporting diffs on all sorts of files, 3d volumes, images, and all sorts of assets. I'd be willing to bet that some sort of bundled asset management is someone's dream project at Github.
Sure, I don't think I disagree with any of that. And don't misunderstand me, either - I think the power dynamic of the H1B can be damaging; I'm not opposed to immigration generally.
The article states:

"The company is still sitting on much of what it raised in January, but it wanted to "err on the side of being really well-capitalised" in case markets cool down, Mr Collison said."
If you're sending MIDI to a synthesizer that doesn't support choosing temperaments you can mostly fake it by sending pitch bend signals.
> What exactly is the need to send humans to Mars?

Lots of reasons, some below. Primarily, the reason to send humans is because we have to in order to ensure the continued survival of (known) life in the universe. Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization, which will reduce our dependency on a single-point-of-failure for all known life.

> Why not robots?

You ask as if we haven't been sending robots to Mars for the last 3-4 decades. (Edit: We should absolutely send robots. We should send way more robots than people. But we should still send people.)

> Is it worth risking a human's life for science, when a robot can do an equally good job?

Not sure if trolling. Humans have collectively agreed that it's worth 10,000+ annual deaths in the USA in exchange for the convenience of cars. So yes, 1-5 human lives on Mars is worth the science that they'd get done.

Also...there are no robot scientists yet. Maybe there will be in the future, but we can't bank on that and allocate budgets to imaginary robotic scientists that are better than humans.

I've been trolled haven't I?
Precisely this. The loss of productivity from disaffected employees is difficult to quantify, but at times substantial. And once a culture of disaffectation takes hold it's near impossible to get rid of it. Administration is well advised to be careful in this matter.
I don't find that allegation credible. Russ Tice became a whistleblower in 2005, but never mentioned the future president was specifically and illegally targeted until boasting about it on radio program in 2013?
The classic economics mistake of focusing on a single group to the detriment of the whole.

Yes, there is a group of local engineers that is hurt by companies importing cheaper, better labor from overseas. But everyone else benefits.
Shaming congress doesn't appear to be effective at the moment.

Bush Sr. talked about going to Mars with SEI. Bush Jr. talked about it after Columbia. Skylab (the space station in the 70s) was supposed to teach us about long duration spaceflight in order to go to Mars (and we've been parked in LEO ever since).

I want to believe... And I like Zubrin's plan to go to Mars. As it could work with an incrementalist approach, and thus is pragmatic (and sounds like what they are doing). But the problem is that there is a long time before the work on the incrementalist dream starts and landing on Mars. Who knows what will happen to funding in the mean time.
> fortunately he mainly did XML

Out of context, you sound insane.
s/boy or girl scouts/puppets raised in a bubble by sociopaths/

... with policies dictated by the folks whose sociopaths are best at hiding behind their puppets.

It's going to be very, very ugly.
It's pretty easy to predict what will happen. It will be a continuation of the current trend against diversity of views in US politics. The system will stagnate because security has been defined as the perpetuation of the system, not agility or adaptation. All nails sticking up will be pounded flat, using omniscient surveillance.
Relative sizes of planets and stars:

http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/gallery/star-sizes/
I'm doubtful that such a mission could be organized privately, just because there isn't any money in it. When humans eventually get to Mars, they might be riding a SpaceX rocket, but the mission will almost certainly be planned and funded by NASA or some other national space agency.
> There's a certain amount of tech talent at any given technical ability level available worldwide, and only a fraction of it is in the US.

And that is the "crux" of the problem. There will always be a shortage of great engineers/programmers/anything ... isn't that why we call them "great"?

I'm more concerned with pipeline. Companies continually push for these changes with reckless regard for grooming local talent. We're experiencing an artificial shortage because the global pool of "great talent" isn't getting bigger fast enough and it never will ... such a joke.
I don't think it would sound the same

01010100 01101000 01100001 01110100 01011100 00100110 00100011 00110000 00110011 00111001 00111011 01110011 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101101 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110011 01110100 01100101 01110000 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101110 00101100 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01100111 01101001 01100001 01101110 01110100 00100000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110000 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101110 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100100 00101110
Fight Against RSI – VoiceCode – Thoughts?
24/192 music downloads are silly
Ask HN: Best Programming Language for making an algorithm concurrent?
I am working on a new project that at its core is speeding up an algorithm that can do most of its processing in a concurrent way. Initially the system will just be a command line tool and if the speed is sufficient, become a web. What languages do people recommend and why? Erlang? F#? Etc?
I agree that HTML needn't be strictly semantic in the way that the OP suggests. But for the foreseeable future, it does need to encode basic structural data for CSS-less presentation. That includes links, headings, inter-page and intra-page navigation, and the like. Who needs that data? Screen readers, text-only browsers, and scrapers, to name a few.

Someday, it may be possible to do away with the concept of a web "page" or "document." Desktop and mobile apps aren't (generally) built in that paradigm. But if we move away from the document concept, we'll have a new set of problems. How do we represent things like blog posts, which really are more like documents than applications? How do we enable a variety of clients with varying capabilities to consume textual content? How do we maintain the useful concept of a URI, if at all? These may not be unsolvable problems, but they are challenging for sure.
OmniFocus with Airmail and Slack. True, everything Omni is expensive but the sheer impact is has on my life is priceless. I found every other GTD app too limited.
True, but if I want to take VAT numbers I have to be registered for VAT anyway and then do UK quarterly filings. I'd voluntarily lose the £81k exemption in this case regardless. A VAT MOSS filing on top of that would not be too much hassle.

Seeing as I'm not quite localised for Europe anyway, I don't think it's a huge deal blocking them at the moment. I'd much rather provide a good french service to France and a german service to Germany. But obviously I want to open that market up as soon as I possibly can, whether it's perfectly localised or not. This law just adds some delays.
The Rise of Travel Manager