skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you read the H1-B requirements, it's supposedly about bringing in talent that's unavailable at any price. Not just seat-warmers who can be billed out with a hefty margin by a "body shop."

People with advanced degrees and unique skills should by all means be welcomed. Sending people back to India after they get degrees at MIT or Stanford is idiotic. But the stated intent of H1-Bs and cheap body shops are not compatible at all.

This article is all about morale-sucking, wage-depressing, quality-destroying indentured servitude that actually takes away the ability of R&D-oriented firms from obtaining H1-Bs for vastly more deserving people.
I like my panels vertical, and looks like [1] MATE has inherited this bug from Gnome 2, that window buttons go crazy if the panel is vertical, and there are more than 8 windows open. Gnome 2 never fixed this bug, and apparently is still exists in MATE, too.

Anyway, I think Xfce is better.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1351825
Transducers are coming (2014)
The Wellness Warrior, Jess Ainscough, Has Passed Away
Early atoms where unquestionable intentionally crippled. During the netbook era, by leaving out stuff like out of order execution, SSE functionality, no x86_64 bit extensions and forcing vendors to bundle crappy intel GPUs and limiting systems to 2 gigs of ram and XP only. I'm shocked there was never a lawsuit over this.

Its hard to say how much that continues today, but one gets the distinct impression that atom is still held back much like the other low end intel processors (pentium, celeron) with stuff like AES-NI and AVX disabled.

Seems to be part of a ploy to preserve high end margins and fend off ARM on the lowend with "just barely good enough" chips.
PsySH has a tendency to crash on fatal errors. If Boris figured out how to recover gracefully that would be a huge point in its favor.
> For developers and freelancers, it would be nice if we
> can work with a business vocabulary. I think any
> freelancer can whip up a page like nngroup.com and
> present themselves as a consultant, or is there more
> to it than just the surface?

> So essentially it's a sales technique.

I've worked as a freelancer and with consultants and I think your problem is that you're focusing on the website. These businesses receive Zero (0) inbounds from their websites. The reason why they even have a website is because, well, it's 2015. It might be a window into how the business works but changing your freelance website to look like a consultancy would make no difference whatsoever.

What divides the two is their professional networks: where they find business, who they're working for, and why. Freelancers try to drum up business by going to meetups, following up on weak leads ("I hear Jim needs a new website") subcontracting through agencies. Their value proposition is that they do an hour's work for an hours pay and they're in business for themselves most likely cause they're just trying to escape the cube farm.

A consultant got into her business because she's realized that she's reached the peak of what she can make as an "individual contributor". She has a big book of business before she even hangs out her shingle and perhaps decided to start consulting because she had too many people wanting to give her money and didn't want to commit to one. Her client list grows organically through referrals being made through her huge professional network. When she enters into sales negotiations the impetus is on the client to sale the gig to her rather than the other way around.

I would like to work for myself again but not as a freelancer. That's a dead-end world. My goal now is to either develop my career to the point where I can be a proper consultant or (even better) develop a SaaS product.
So I tried a couple of countries and noticed an error at least for Austria: you display the number as +43 0676...

It won't work, it should be without the leading 0 : +43 676 and so on
> Create a zip of your Go source code and send the zip file to gochallenge [at] joshsoftware.com by the 15th of the month (midnight IST, 11:30 AM PDT). No new solutions will be accepted after that.

Presumably, March 15?
That's just how it auto-formats / displays. The numbers are from Twilio and I've got some customers using Austrian numbers. Sorry for the confusion.
Good point, will fix this up!
Yesterday or not, Backbone works. Loads fast. And is dead simple to use.
I think that may backfire as I can see more c# people moving to swift for ios projects.
There's even a French Patisserie in Silicon Valley with entirely French-trained Japanese culinary staff with all ingredients shipped in from France.

Go figure. :P

(despite the high prices, their products are quite good)
I would suggest that if you are loading up large storyboards in XCode, then you could be putting yourself in a bad position for a couple of reasons in iOS, let alone trying to make it all come back together using Xamarin.

Storyboards are a decent solutions for certain problems, but if your app ends up as one monolithic or a group of large storyboards, you are going to be structuring and defining things in ways that will have friction with some of your better practices in your C# code.

That's not to say Xamarin "should be a cakewalk, you're doing it wrong." I found pain with dealing with the same area you describe -that back and forth with designs built heavily in storyboard. Not to mention, so many helpful posts on dealing with UI features and quirks seem handled or better handled in plain old NIBs + custom code, etc. Drag and drop layouts with D+D segues are nice, but when the client wants things "just so" I'd end up having to tear things out of the storyboard/designer to get all the things moving and performing well.

The storyboard failed me with AND without Xamarin.
Organizer here. We definitely do require community help to build a submission mechanism. Anyone?
There's an even larger issue driving this problem:

As Table 1 shows, Infosys and Tata pay very low wages to their H-1B workers. The average wage for an H-1B employee at Infosys in FY13 was $70,882 and for Tata it was $65,565. Compare this to the average wage of a Computer Systems Analyst in Rosemead, CA (where SCE is located), which is $91,990 (according to the U.S. Department of Labor). That means Infosys and Tata save well over $20,000 per worker per year, by hiring an H-1B instead of a local U.S. worker earning the average wage. But at SCE specifically, the wage savings are much greater.

When the H-1B worker isn't employed directly by the company seeking the "savings" (for example, Infosys or Tata), and instead is employed by a middleman outsourcing company, the worker is essentially a victim of double exploitation. In these situations, wages for the h1B workers become even more dismal. The outsourcing company takes a huge cut of the workers' earnings (which are usually hourly and without benefits) and then uses threatening tactics to essentially "scare" these workers into outputting more in less time, without overtime, etc.

See also: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134...
>But the author here claims that "H-1B is not about skills or skills gap" and cites as evidence the fact that the vast majority of the approved applicants have only a Bachelor's degree. Perhaps he's not familiar with the current state of the software engineering market, where an advanced degree is in no way a prerequisite to become a top-rated engineer?

Sure, you can be a great developer with just a Bachelor degree or even no degree.

But between "they found all this top-rated engineers with mere Bachelors" and "they got some cheaper developers for their gruntwork by shopping abroad" my bet is very much on the second case.

It's what business owners do at every level, including manual labor where "top talent" doesn't matter much if at all...

BESIDES, and this makes your point moot, they pay them less. If they considered them "top talent" they'd pay them as they do American developers, regardless of if they have a degree or not.
"2. Use plain linear models for non-linear interaction"
It should be noted that Linear models are only linear in the model parameters, while the features can be transformed using non-linear functions. This trick makes linear models very powerful. Also if you have big data (in millions/billions) then you are better off with linear models, as SVM is very difficult to
scale.

In my experience (all in big data), I rarely seen people use SVM, usual choices are logistic regressions and tree based models. In some finance and insurance industries you are restricted to use only interpretable models, which linear models are.
I use this. It's great. Much leaner than others, without being spartan.
Are you running Windows? If not, you've found a bug and should report it. If you are, you've discovered the reason Boris doesn't run at all on Windows :)

Seriously, though, if you're running on Windows you should report fatal errors that make PsySH crash as well. It works around a lot of them, but there will always be more, so let us know.
TL/DR: Simulating a low noise environment is lot easier than finding one in the real world. And that's not news.

Researchers simulated a 1Tb/s transfer rate within a 100Mhz channel. Shannon's limit[1] explains how: set the noise term arbitrarily small, and your transfer rate can be arbitrarily large.

Bandwidth is popularly misunderstood to be some fixed range of spectrum, as if signals outside the range are attenuated to zero. But you can't attenuate a signal to zero. "Bandwidth" is measured[2] as the range over which attenuation is less than (say) 3db.

If not for noise, you could utilize a limited-bandwidth channel as if it had infinite bandwidth merely by amplifying frequencies outside the range in the exact proportion they are attenuated.

But every real system has noise. Overcoming this noise is the challenge of high speed transfers. There's no indication these "researchers" have accomplished anything whatsoever.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy-channel_coding_theorem

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutoff_frequency
Work Advice: More questions about whether employers’ demands are legal
Yeah, sorry that wasn't clearer. It's just ~15 countries that you can buy a number for, but you receive the SMS anywhere in the world by email / etc.
You might want to change your profile picture. That negative black & white photo looks unprofessional.
I don't understand why they would compare the average wage of all H1B workers spread throughout the US against that of a particular job title (Computer Systems Analyst) in Los Angeles CA. Wages obviously vary by job title and location. No surprises that wages in CA are higher.

I searched to see what Infosys (1) and TCS (2) actually pay a "Computer Systems Analyst" and found:

- For Infosys, there's only one result for Houston where the salary came out to be ~105K.

- For TCS, it's around 85K-87K for San Franscisco area. Didn't find anything for Los Angeles.

I can't vouch for the correctness of data but the site says they get it from the Department of Labor. Infosys and TCS would probably be using different job titles on their H1B petitions to try and get a lower wage determination.

(1) http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=INFOSYS+LIMITED&job=COMPUTE...

(2) http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=TATA+CONSULTANCY+SERVICES+L...
That was the interesting thing for me when I found it on google. Internal? Pdf title in metadata "SCPoster_RobinReview_v2_print"
Tinder Plus will launch on Monday
I've heard that but just US people for a US number. Anyway, the issue was that I (Australian) couldn't get an Australian number :) Thanks for checking it out!
I think there are many cool features of English. My favourite is how you can change any noun into a verb.

A stone, to stone someone.

If the reader/listener has never encountered a novel transformation she will tend to not accept it, but it is within the bounds of the language to do it with any noun.
Ways to think about market size
I'll make that clearer - thanks!
That’s the cable industry, which invested to create the nation’s high-speed broadband platform and now is being punished for it." Oh, puh-leeze. The FCC has always generously subsidized phone company expansions, one way (tax breaks) or another (increased tariffs, a.k.a. bigger phone bills). It's easy to google up examples of this from the recent past:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2147360/fcc-adds-9-billion-to... http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Takes-100-Million-in-... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/the-book-of-bro...

This is one of the rare times the FCC hasn't decided in favor of monopolies or duopolies, and the really big propaganda guns are coming out. This article includes the word "pusillanimous" - I think the cable industry is really stung that one of their own (FCC Chair Tom Wheeler is an ex-cable-lobbyis) actually did something for non-corporate people.
Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions
Swift may become the new Javascript if Apple plays their cards right.
Ever since late Ds9, vulcans have become more and more angry and racist. ST:Enterprise was full of angry vulcans.
Appserver Is Pushing PHP Into A New Era – Powerful Open Source Infrastructure
Not sure what you refer to here. All pg_dump formats should work for restoring a database. The only flaw in pg_dump that I know of is the mess if you want to dump an entire cluster of databases but still have one file per database.
They want people to develop their apps using C#/Xamarin, because that greatly reduces the friction in developing Windows Apps.
I tried pressing CMD+B and CTRL+B and it didn't work on Chrome for Mac OS X.
There's a visual tour here of the new version here:

http://xfce.org/about/tour
FLSA is an interestingly-outdated animal. Basically anyone in a white-collar job gets an "executive" exemption. See: anyone working in financial services.

Meanwhile, in areas like retail, workers' lives are notoriously made difficult by unpredictable and arbitrary scheduling. So you're a part-time salesperson at Best Buy? Here's the 21 total hours you'll be working next week, spread out over 7 days because we need to cover little gaps here and there.

For better or worse, worker protection in the US is an illusion.
Microsoft is really stepping it up. They've finally learned how to make a honeypot ;)
วิธีเช็ดตัวให้ลูกเมื่อลูกตัวร้อนจัดมีไข้ให้ลดลงอย่างรวดเร็ว
Nice to hear that it works so well already. It is a very new feature which was sponsored by the company I work for only a couple of months ago. We are not even done migrating our database yet (we have to convert stored procedures and the queries in the application too).
Mongo dump Stream
This looks pretty nice. I've been using Recent Bookmarks (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/apps?hl=en), but it's not exactly helping the bookmark proliferation problem.
More like supporting your neighbors, people who speak your language, people who share your values, people whose kids your kids might grow up to marry.
Google Gets Sassy with Time Warner Cable
That's exactly what I am talking about. Your anti-example is a case of library-level abstraction. Now, if you are saying that JavaScript doesn't lend itself to writing extensible machine learning routines whereas Lua does, it's a different story.
in other news water is still wet
Couldn't a central bank just reimplement its monoply on money creation as a monoploy on mining, then sell those mined BTC below market value to banks to give out as loans? Adjusting the discount given based on the amount they want to increase inflation as they already do, essentially replacing the mint with miners. If the price of miners + electricity ever becomes < the price of printing paper currency + losses due to forgery this might be a good idea.

After mining stops spitting out coins they would just charge transaction fees (sales tax) instead of mining like the btc network already assumes will happen.
The submission instructions mention including your full name, country of residence, and twitter handle. I don't have a twitter handle, will my submission still count? Do you accept anonymous submissions?
I completely agree with you, but sadly, this kind of thing will never happen until there is a strong incentive for those companies to hire dedicated security people. Right now it's standard for companies to apologize and give people a year of credit monitoring.

It's become such a common issue there is no incentive to invest in security and that's a bad thing.
That wouldn't surprise me, and I do frequently add vinegar to my almond milk when baking to make it more like a buttermilk, even if the recipe doesn't call for it. The additional acidity when adding vinegar to a recipe that uses baking soda or baking powder can replace some of the effect of using sour cream (a very common "secret ingredient" in non-vegan chocolate cakes), which provides more leavening. It probably also alters the flavor in some way, though there are so many other competing and strong flavors, and the vinegar is such a small amount, that it probably doesn't do too much.

I don't think I've used vinegar in my chocolate cake attempts, however, so it's probably something I'll try next time.
Yes. It's 15th of March. Shall update the same. Thanks.
Just wait till the armed drones fly over.
i'm a user... aware of irccloud since the extended beta, but recently a user due to various nesc. evils of corporate networking. except honestly the ui sucks for history and non existent search sucks compared to botbot.me ie. https://botbot.me/freenode/google-containers/

erlang vs python .. connected clients vs historical search.. apples and oranges i guess...
"Find me any company that doesn't have a difficult time sourcing well-qualified Rails developers, or experienced JavaScript experts. There is huge demand, not enough supply, and very little correlation with the candidate's formal education. There aren't any Master's of AngularJS degree programs."

Any company offering remote work and a good salary.
No issue. You can include your full name and country of residence. We are accepting anonymous submissions but then these participants are not eligible for the prizes.
How do you take that argument when huge corporations like Target have been compromised too?
Seems kind of pointless if it is ignoring up-votes.
How do you generate the initialization vector? CBC mode requires an unpredictable IV, which usually equals cryptographic random number.

> var hash = crc.Crypto.Hash.SHA256.hash(password.value),

> crypter = new Crypt.Mode.Licobo(new Crypt.Rijndael256(hash)),

From the code I cannot see any generation of IV, so I can only assume that the same IV is used every time. A predictable IV leads to many kinds of attacks. In particular, since the key is generated without salting, this means that a combination of the same key and IV will be used for multiple files, completely defeats the confidentiality.

And no integrity protection whatsoever? So vulnerable to bit flipping attacks?
Or on Bare-metal. It works just the same on Xen but slower because of the VM overhead.

Containers are really only part of the solution, there's a lot of other things you have to think about if you want to build a better mousetrap in the virtualization world (like networking and storage).
I use Linux Mint on my main computer, but have used Xubuntu with good results. It's particularly good for older hardware.

You might want to use Kubuntu if you're a KDE fan.
Operation: Brilliant Movie Review
It's strange how action which has apparently helped to lift tens of thousands of poor Indian workers out of poverty is portrayed as a "scandal". There's clearly a big labor pool willing to work for lower pay than Americans. Give them a chance at a better life! If Californians dislike foreign workers so much, why are they still allowing people from the midwest to work there? Shouldn't they be throttled too to keep wages high in silicon valley?
Agree with Mint. Its Cinnamon experience is excellent and, if it turns out you're not a fan, it's just Ubuntu: you can switch to any of the other desktops without reinstalling.
I built my SaaS app backend on sails. There are quite some gotchas left but overall I'm pretty happy with it.

Deep relational fetches would be very very helpfull though, now you basically have to cobble up seperate async fetches to do more complex joins.
> I also must say that modern Xfce is better at the Gnome 2 thing, than Gnome 2.

Gnome 2 is wonderful when configured, but yes, some interactions (like moving toolbar elements around) are pretty awkward by 2015 standards.

That being said, RHEL 6 with Gnome 2 is a great choice for older, less performant systems that you configure once and don't touch frequently. Or for replacing XP on Grandpa's old ThinkPad...
I'm less impressed by Mr. Nimoy here, considering that his colleagues would perform the first interracial kiss on-screen later that year, and more bothered that substituting "1968" with "today" in your question doesn't make the answer obvious either.
The wording is inaccurate in that instead of /all/ users it should say the /majority/ of users must accept changes proposed to bitcoin. Regardless, you honestly don't see how that gives the decision-making power to the people? Why do you think that?
> in the 20th century a flaw was found in a 2500 year old definition of "truth".

What are you referring to?
There isn't enough research being done on that frontier yet. We know the 300-3khz has a "higher sampling rate" than 44.1khz, but we don't know how high.

However, I'm actually happy with properly mastered 16/44.1 on a proper DAC that has THD and noise levels below what is required for 16 bit (which I can get for $100 in an external DAC, for $150 with multiple inputs, from Schiit).

The big issue is, they don't properly master them, and releasing the HD versions seems to lessen the impact of an improper master (such as we can hear finer steps in volume than 16 bit can do when all the samples have a smaller dynamic range, but we can't if they had mastered everything with 12+ bits of dynamic range like the creators of CDs had intended).

Honestly, if CDs had chosen 20/48 instead of 16/44.1, most of this bullshit would have never happened.

tl;dr I'm a bigger proponent of increased bitdepth over sampling rate, but I'm happy if I get both to get just one.
The story in this challenge reminds me of one I heard from Peter Samson, one of the original MIT hackers who worked on their PDP-1, at the Computer History Museum. Back in the early 1960s Peter, a classical music buff and musician in his own right, wrote a four voice music synthesizer program [1] - one of the first ever written, I have to think - for the PDP-1 and arranged several classical and baroque pieces for it.

Sometime in the 2000s, I think, when the Computer History Museum was restoring its PDP-1, they stumbled on some tapes or something that held inputs - entire classical works like Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - for Peter's synthesizer. Unfortunately they couldn't locate a copy of the synthesizer program itself but, being one of the OG hackers, Peter was able to examine the data on the tapes, reverse-engineer the data format he'd invented decades prior, and write a brand new synthesizer for the PDP-1 that was compatible with the original tapes. All of those adages about data structures being more important than code suddenly rang true in a very real way :-)

He told the story over a live demonstration of the PDP-1 playing music with his program - it's a wonderful experience and if you have the chance to see it, you shouldn't pass it up [2]. If you have a chance to see him at the Computer History Museum, don't pass it up! Steve Russell joins him with a Spacewar! demonstration (you get to play it!) and they're happy to answer questions and recount stories about their old days in the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club :-)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony_Compiler

[2]: They have the PDP-1 demo on two days of every month, twice a day. http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/