skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very obvious if you're as familiar with Hebrew scriptures as Jesus seems to be.

The claim in Matthew 7 is much more explicit to modern readers -- Jesus is discussing how people will get into heaven or not based on his say-so.
Yes. Over 100,000 H1-B's are coming over every year. This keeps discussing exceptional programmers. You mean we need more than 100,000 exceptional programmers coming over every year? The reality is that the idea that even 10,000 of these people are exceptional programmers is a laugh.

Every year 100,000 H1-Bs can come in. To believe this article, we'd have to pretend that we have a big wall up preventing these dozens or hundreds of exceptional programmers from immigrating to the US, and completely ignore the existence of the H1-B visa and the hundreds of thousands pouring in every year.
The phrase “social proof” seems to have originated online in 2007
Doctors Revive and Transplant Hearts That Have Already Stopped Beating
Music to Code By, 2014
Is that more or less effort?
They are WMDs by certain standards of international law on the technicality of belonging to a certain class of chemical munitions. The shells they were packaged in were not designed for mass dispersal, however the classification is on the stuff inside the shells.
SHA512crypt versus Bcrypt
That is actually a good point.
To be honest, this is something I would say to my boss when he brought up that he was going to use a system like this for standups. "Hey, why spend 14 bucks a month when I could build this in a few hours? We'll just write a cron job then cc everyone in the team.."

First off, there is probably a lot more to a system like this then you think. What happens when you need to add people to the team on the fly, or change the format of the email? Do you want to be the person who has to maintain this system for the foreseeable future? Is this what you really want to be working on?

It's a cheap bet that could shave off a few hours a week of work. Our standups can take up to 30 min each morning for our team if there are a lot issues from the pervious day. I rather have a 15 min standup and have time to prepare my questions the night before, or on the way to work.

It's hard to justify new systems like these when as engineers, we are conditioned to build our own tools when we see repetitive tasks that need to be streamlined. Personally I would love a system like this. It would save a lot of time for me each morning. On the other hand, I could see this going to the company graveyard of dead tools after someone finds a new system they read about on HN.

Agile practices can sometimes turn into Show & Tell time when people don't succinctly sum up there issues. Making people think about what they are going to say before they bring up blocks and issues they are having can definitely save time each day.
The Guardian like to run these stories about how terrible competition is without acknowledging that no other system in reality actually fixes the problem, no-one is actually ruled by philosopher kings. IT security is notoriously bad in many governmental areas, non-profits, universities etc as Manning showed us. The Soviet Union after all gave us the Stakhanovite movement.

The difference is that in a competitive environment you get creative destruction, where things that go wrong benefit competitors who then learn from the problem. Yes there are all sorts of problems when banks become too big to fail, it's far worse when there is only one bank.

Competition is an amazing thing - this salesman who moaned who the Guardian has an opportunity to start selling better encryption software, disaster planning and testing consultancy services, virtualisation software or toolkits that stop random people messing with production server they don't understand.
But you understand the world isn't that simple right?

Imagine you lived on a land with 100 square feet. You wanted to open a store, but the big supermarket (because they started early) already has 60 square feet and the price of the other 40 square feet is astronomical. So you can only rent out 5 square feet. Well, you can't do much with 5 square feet, and that big market is making lots of money with theirs. So they keep buying more square footage and driving up the prices until there's literally no way any other business can continue to exist.

See, by artificially limiting things you can create a situation where only people that are already in an advantageous position will strengthen that position. Now, if you want only big tech companies to exist and not see the innovation brought forth by small companies then sure continue supporting and advocating for restrictive policies. If you actually care about the long term future of what the human race is capable of then you'd want to remove all artificial restrictions and let the more natural "survival of the fittest" of the market iterate towards new innovations and technology.
Why would higher level necessarily imply garbage collection?
Sure, that's true. But the purpose of asking for the code is because if the program works there is guaranteed to be enough information to reverse-engineer the corresponding model if necessary. With just a specification of a model there may be built-in assumptions involved which only become apparent in the implementation. Standard language and protocols are one way to avoid this problem, but these are usually not as exacting as a compiler.

I'd definitely prefer to have both a model and an implementation available, but if I had to pick just one it would be the code.
Posted this out of curiosity -- does anyone know what "patient zero" is for this meme?

It's a meme that I find possibly harmful, since it amounts to the idea that herd effects and other forms of social confirmation bias are a good thing and that these biases should be intentionally built into the decision making process. It also carries some other questionable baggage / corollaries:

- Secrets do not exist, hence trade secrets and contrarian business models or scientific ideas are rare or nonexistent.

- Markets are almost perfectly efficient -- including the marketplace of ideas.

- Conceptual thought and first-principles reasoning are very unreliable.

- In addition to intellectual biases toward cargo cultism and herd effects, it also introduces a powerful bias toward cronyism and "old boy networks."

I'm also curious if the original idea was possibly more nuanced than that. It's very common for a nuanced idea (e.g. disruption) to get very dumbed down by the game of telephone.

Related: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-conventional-wisdom-...

Social proof would seem to be an intrinsically bad thing in investing -- so why is this concept so popular among investors?
What about the 95% of great companies overseas?
Why don't SV companies hire programmers abroad by opening tech centers abroad? That's what other tech companies do, either directly or via outsourcing companies like SII or EPAM. Quality control is mostly a matter of pay - if it is good enough, you will get the same quality of work as in US.
I suspect it's meant to be negative (mass squared) rather than (negative mass) squared.
I see PG's resume, but I seriously wonder how many programmers he's interviewed, hired, managed, and fired in the last 5 years. How often has he thought about what to pay his engineers in relation to their output and others in the group. How much experience does he personally have with offshoring?
I bet not that much actually.
Its called Brain Drain and its a real issue.
This is recognized as a problem, and is an issue that immigration reforms attempt to address.

Every company ends up competing on "H1B lottery" with large body shops. So a startup with 1-2 application has very little chance of making it through compared to others with lot more lottery tickets.

I will also point out a closely related issue. The craziness that full 100% quota of the H1B visas for the year gets disbursed on one day in the year (practically speaking, on April 1. Though full approval process takes a few months). This makes it hard for a startup that wants to hire someone in December, but has to wait 4 months to apply (April 1), and 8 months for the new hire to actually start working (Oct 1).

And therefore, there is a need for a reform here of the current regulations.
While I do agree in the general sense with what is being said, I very much dislike it when numbers are abused to strengthen a subjective argument. It feels like you're abusing facts and lying.

>"Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed"

This is a pretty big assumption, there are huge cultural differences between, for example, India and the US. Who says that these differences could not enormously sway the distribution of great talent?

The next argument made is that since the US only has about 5% of the worlds population it also follows that only 5% of the worlds great programmers are naturally available there. However, apart from the question of potential, there's also the question of opportunity. I'd wager that the standard of living in the US is substantially higher than in most other parts of the world. Which leads me to suspect, but not to prove, that that 5% of 'all great programmers available' is actually quite a bit higher.

It's obvious that no matter how good you _could_ be with a computer, you won't be able to sharpen your skills if you don't have the means and those means are more readily available in the US than in China.
I had those, I could imagine the commercial jingle but I couldn't remember what they were like. thanks so much for the nostalgia link. awesome.
> Footnote [2]: it is dishonest of the anti-immigration people to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the same motives

Profit? Who is being dishonest here?

How is being against an H1-B indentured servant coolie visa being one of the "anti-immigrant" people?

I guess the women's groups who protest that Russian, Mexican and Brazilian strippers are being imported into Tenderloin clubs are anti-immigrant as well.
Since you're asking a math question the answer is "yes of course." However having owned an Elise and driven a Tesla Roadster I will confirm that strapping the equivalent in weight of an entire F1 car in batteries to the bottom of one removes aerodynamic handling from the bigger equation at play.

They're fun as hell and also uncomfortable as fuck. 400 miles is more of an endurance test for the driver than the power supply. (Also, loved every second inside both of them!)
Not yet, so far they are theoretical, but this is what the paper is about.
About wheelbarrows: the Western wheelbarrow isn't unoptimized, it's just optimized for a different purpose: loading instead of moving. Having the wheel at the front allows for a deep body with low sides, which makes it easier to fill (and empty) the wheelbarrow with a shovel.
Not to mention, there's nothing preventing companies from hiring this mythical 95% and allowing them to work remotely.
Much less fun.
On the plus side, it is nice to see that HN is not a rah-rah PG echo chamber.
Yes and no. I think Stallman is right in that it's important to realise the relationships between components are often a bigger and more pernicious source of bugs than the components themselves. It's not a problem when you can pretend the components are actually one single component, which is obviously not possible with service architectures or proprietary code.

I'd expand that to say there's a kind of CAP theorem analogue for code, where if you want it to be sufficiently modular (partition-tolerant) you'll need to either sacrifice availability (before you know if it works you have to check its interaction with every other module) or consistency (you write code assuming the other modules work the way you expect and maybe they don't)

Unfortunately, beyond that core idea this article is just sort of befuddled. It is possible to understand the behaviour of a component without seeing its code (contracts, APIs, specs and tests are all examples of doing this). Further, it's a problem not at all specific to proprietary software. Even if you have access to every line of code ever written you're still not going to be able to understand the million interactions that could exist between all the things currently running on your computer in their various languages, frameworks, architectures and programming styles. And, to the extent that you can, it's probably not a very good use of your time compared with just emailing whoever wrote it and saying "hey, your software's not doing what I think it should do".
The possibility for misunderstanding is much greater too. You and your colleague might speak perfect English, but you may still have trouble conveying to them exactly what the problem is with the vibrating mirror assembly is that's causing it to wobble without just showing them. That's difficult to do over email, and a conversation of that nature can take weeks, while if you're in the same office it might take hours.
I am from EU and moving to US would not bring me much improvements. Especially with a family it is very expensive there.

Perhaps US could first tap resources within its borders. There are 50 million people in 'fly-over' states which are sort of ignored.

And 1% of all men are in prison, perhaps allow them to learn (and graduate) while in prison. Right now they are not even allowed tv, not mentioning internet.
Yann Arthus Bertrand – From Above
Everything is Awesome
I still don't know what differentiates an exception programmer from a good programmer from a competent programmer from a terrible programmer. Combine that with the fact that this definition has probably changed in the past 10-15 years anyway, so what are the odds that we have the same definition in the future that we do now?
How many fxOS users are there, approximately? Does anyone have this data?
It's ease of use. Elm first and foremost teaches programming. That happens to be in an exclusively FRP style, yet it ignores the usual evangelism. It is a practical language with automatic type inference and a simplified syntax.

But elm is a step on the road to a future where I believe that, when the dust settles, it will acknowledge that iteration, map, filter and reduce are as elementary as if-then-else.

So these operations (and if-then-else) will gain an iconic representation in the syntax, like punctuation. There is no need for words to be reminded of their function, the mere appearance of the program should suggest the flow and transformations they implement instead.

In other words, current languages are not FRP languages yet, but elm comes closest.
Good points.

The distinguishing difference between the crowds seems to stem from the differing skillsets. WaFo has more non-programmers than HN, and consequently differs in market dynamics from HN.

"Gurus" on HN, considered in a context parallel to that of WaFo, enjoy the privilege of writing actionable content because most readers can program, and therefore can take a different route to profit from non-programmers. Thus books from HN authors can simultaneously promote profit and add value, unlike those from WaFo authors, which create a bullshit-cycle by selling things to each other. Then again, maybe that's just good business...
> something as inconsequential as a shopping website, or Yet Another Chat App

Alright so first off, 150k will give you a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle in SF/SV (assuming you have no dependents, in which case it's just middle class). It's really not the astronomical salary that you seem to be imagining.

Secondly, it is completely impractical to pay people based on the "difficulty" of their work. Difficulty, even if we can agree on a definition, does not correlate with revenue. Revenue is traditionally where salaries come from.

Intuitively, if person X in a team of n people writes an app that produces profit Z, then it would make sense for person X to get something on the order of Z/n -- not 100k because it's just a chat app. This is not actually how it works because of some artificial constraints. I believe the calculation in most cases looks more like pay = 120k + 20k if in expensive city + MIN(.01 * profit, 150k).
Just worthy of note here, we can do comparisons in linear time with respect to the number of bits, however OP's algorithm is exponential in the number of bits.
Do you understand that the world is not that simple? The only artificial shortage in play, is created by those self same companies - or unemployment in the US particularly among 40+ programmers would be 0%.

If you care about the long term future of the human race you would be fighting both ageism and indentured servitude.
A big problem with the current H1B system is that companies like Infosys are supposed to pay what they claim is market rate, but have every incentive to lie about the true market rate. The problem that Paul would like fixed is that there are a lot of really good programmers who startups would rightly like to hire but can't.

Paul would like to eliminate the cap. But this makes the first problem worse. If you solve the first, then removing the cap makes perfect sense.

So how do we solve the first? My proposal is that any company wanting import an employee can, but has to post a significant bond for the cost of deporting the employee if there are problems. That immigrant is free to transfer employment. At the end of a year, if that immigrant left to go to another company, the original employer loses the bond and owes the difference between the immigrant's current income and the original one.

Under this proposal there is a disincentive to bring in an immigrant unless said immigrant really is paid above market rate for their skills. Locals may not like the competition, but people will be hiring immigrants because they think they are better, and not because they are cheaper than the market.
That exceptional labor either moves to other businesses locally (good for the local economy) or it goes back home and you're back to where you were. Not sure what the downside is here?

Educated, hardworking people are always a fantastic asset to any country. They're not the ones you need to be worried about no matter what the economic condition. This isn't about bringing in a lot of migrant farmers for permanent citizenship.

My suggestion:
New VISA. Similar requirements and restrictions as an H1-B (educated, employment based, dual intent so can be switched to a green card with enough time). Only companies (no subsidiaries) with more than 3 employees or 500K in the bank and less than 500 employees can apply. Don't have the same timing as an H1-B, make it like the O1 where visas can be processed and granted year round.
MIT Unifies Web Development in Single, Speedy New Language
When this is combined with widespread sensors and surveillance, not even your emotions will be private.

That assumes the technology works. If it doesn't, then it could be worse: False emotions will be attributed to you.
This paper is claiming that they have.

If neutrinos move faster than light, then by definition they are tachyons. Nobody has come out and said "we have verified the existence of tachyons, and neutrinos might be some of them". Rather, the claim that neutrinos move faster than light is the claim of verifying tachyons.

Incidentally, in this case the claim seems a bit more roundabout: that neutrinos may have imaginary mass, a different but equally-well-defining feature of tachyons, and thus they can move faster than light.
Could it be that they do some sort of pre-auth when you try to make a trade? If so, those take a couple days or so to get credited back to your account.
Related work: http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/videodigests/
Most tech startups don't have full-time lawyers, but they have full-time programmers.
I use text editors for editing, but I still use the workflow of "Markdown with embedded latex --> pandoc". That way, you can write readable plain text when possible, and restrict the coding to formulas where latex layouts shine.
There are two different classes of H1B sponsors : Cognizant, Tata, Wipro and gang; and Google, Facebook, Amazon and gang. AFAIK, the latter pay competitive salaries. The former, not so much. Conflating the two is not constructive.
It is of course important that some efforts be made to verify the correctness of the assertions that are made about a routine. There are essentially two types of method available, the theoretical and the experimental. In the extreme form of the theoretical method a watertight mathematical proof is provided for the assertion. In the extreme form of the experimental method the routine is tried out on the machine with a variety of initial conditions and is pronounced fit if the assertions hold in each case. Both methods have their weaknesses.

We're still sorting out the weaknesses in both methods.
I highly doubt HN is the right venue for this. Maybe you should contact the local equivalent of the SEC?

Are you taking into account that markets are closed right now?
Yeah, I concur. Basically the gradient in the price of labour between countries is driven up to a point by immigration policies. In the general sense increasing the pool of candidates will lower wages.

I suppose what PG is after is creating a policy of allowing 'black swan standard' programmers of outstanding skill more in to the US using a different mechanism than the current H1B?
If true, this would explain the Fermi Paradox. If there is a faster-than-light particle in this universe, then that is what intelligent life would use to communicate. We can assume that aliens that are smart enough to reach the level that they figure out what a neutrino is, would also, eventually, figure out a way to use it to communicate.

Edit: in case my point wasn't clear, I mean that no intelligent life form will communicate with the standard parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which at best travels at the speed of light, if there is a faster alternative. IF there is a particle that travels faster than light, then it seems likely intelligent life will find a way to send that particle in bursts, allowing at least as much communication as is allowed by Morse Code. The point is, the universe is very big, and the speed of light is very slow if you are trying to converse with someone on the other side of your galaxy, or in another galaxy. So if there is a particle that does move faster than the speed of light, it is likely that intelligent life would attempt to use it for communication. This would explain why the SETI project has not picked up anything yet -- they are listening for the wrong thing.
Wasn't there some issue with Pascal type system being too restricting sometimes (the unfortunate lack of cast) ?
Woah awesome. -- I remember using this at an after-school class when I was young. I'd forgotten the exact name and could never find it after.

I remember making a conveyor to sort blocks using a color? sensor. The older kids got to make and use the turtle, which just ran logo commands.
It could be a thing where they choose a tire that maintains sufficient performance at a lower rolling resistance.