skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we can extrapolate from the numbers at [1] (not sure how representative it is) then about 29% of the 233,000 total petitions would be filed under the Master's cap. That'd be around 67,337 Master's cap petitions.

[1] http://redbus2us.com/trackers/h1b-visa-tracker/
Yeah, but the linked blog post is from 6 years ago. So like 3 years before you joined.
Hey that's cool. I completely forgot about that feature of bitly.
I disagree. Bytes from a source who is demonstrated to be willing to lie to you for ratings isn't information, it's just noise, which is not useful. I can't objectively say it's not interesting, but I can say is that I'm not interested.
Not skilled at office politics at all. Just hate to see douchebag taking credit for work of others.
Almost 50% of all L1 petitions get RFE (Request for evidence). It's becoming harder to use this visa to bring people to the US these days, too. It's especially difficult for big outsourcing companies (proving and supplying enough evidence for the "specialized knowledge" (L1B) category is really non trivial for the companies and often not clearly understood by the USCIS officers, hence the RFE).

However, USCIS has recently released a new L1B adjudications policy for public feedback (http://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-posts-updated-l-1b-adjudicat...) where they clearly define the "specialized knowledge" category. Maybe this will help companies to properly understand what's needed to demonstrate the specialized knowledge in the future, but I really doubt it.
They explicitly want people to try again, some of their biggest successes were accepted "eventually".

Many of our successful founders applied multiple times
before we funded them (including Drew Houston of Dropbox).

http://blog.samaltman.com/applying-to-yc

I think they would be very hesitant to call any ideas terrible - recently they instigated changes here in comments outlawing "gratuitous negativity" and one of the stated reasons was they don't want to risk people abandoning ideas because of criticism -

New work and new ideas are fragile. Too much gratuitous
negativity might be the difference between someone giving
up on a crazy idea and building the next Airbnb.

http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline

Rejections won't always be actionable reasons or even you/your idea/your team, you're also being measured against everyone else's applications and YC's collective experience and knowledge of ~700 other startups.
Sensu Enterprise
Is approval notice the same as getting picked up in lottery?
I think you can get picked up in a lottery but approval is not guaranteed.
Thank you for the link. It was a simple and yet detailed. Wish more companies took time to explain parts of their privacy policy.

However my concern is more to do with thinking as an outsider. I have toyed with idea of a company that requires establishment of trust among users. Although it may seem as simple as do no evil on the surface, it is an extremely hard undertaking. The thing with Cloudflare is that its niche is its own problem, "Man in the Middle", even if I were to place trust in the privacy policy, there are other things I need to be worried about. What if there is a break in and a hacker places a sniffer to sniff the communication between Cloudflare and the client sites? Sure the client followed the best practices such as, one way hash, strong crypto (eg bcrypt), 1000+ iterations, database encryption, https communication, etc but all of it is pointless or redundant now because the browser ends up sending the password in plaintext. Now imagine if instead of an hacker its a govt agency and that too with a gag order. See my concern?
Probabilistic Programming Simplifies Coding
Ask HN: Do you use 'open source' or 'open-source'?
It seems to be split 50/50 across the board. What do you use? Open source or open-source?
If the carriers are calling this scheme 'Internet' or using that word (or concept) to market this, then it is fraud. If they are instead calling it 'Airtel Zero' access, then they are fundamentally offering access to a different thing from the Internet, and thus it would not be a 'net' neutrality issue. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, its a duck- if not, then it shouldn't be advertised as such :)
They could listen to the DOMSubtreeModified event in the 10s div.
From the way I understand it cases with premium processing should here back until May 11. From what I've heard, others "before October" (one company doing consulting for H-1Bs expects these until August 15).
I totally agree! I can't wait for Martin Kleppmann's "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" to be complete. I've read the chapters available through the early release and highly recommend the book based on what I've seen so far!

http://dataintensive.net/
How to Make Your Wordpress Site More Secure
> I'd love for technical books to start rendering PDFs for multiple common ereader screen sizes.

Google Play Books supports having both EPUB and PDF for the same document, and, I believe, chooses between them based on screen size or other platform features. I don't think it supports having prerendered pages for different layouts yet, but certainly the "buy a title, which might have multiple formats for different devices" thing is already established there, so its not a big jump to see it being done with more specificity.
Modern C++ as a Better Compiler
Why I Stopped Using Instacart
This sounds like a great opening for another startup to steal their customers! Starting it today!
The recently announced acq. of Lynda seems to indicate LinkedIn trying to penetrate other markets. If the revenue source from the main product is waning, they could diversify revenue streams or purchase a value-add company making their overall offering more competitive.

Maybe they are trying to reposition as a credentialing institution, where people can network, build skills, and manage their professional calendars.

I am not sure if this is the case here, but numerous acquisitions outside of core competencies could point to a strategic shift in positioning, possibly in an effort to shore up declining revenue and relevancy in the core business.
Did you anticipate the kickstarter campaign would be so successful?
The trust-on-first-use model makes it hard or impossible to regenerate certificates. If you don't have that problem with SSH it is because you connect to your own servers only.

There have been several attempts for a distributing certificate checks on the wider Internet, but they all come with their own set of problems.
IMHO, fix this by replacing the 'random' with 'highest salary' (or total comp). Just go down from the top.

- It would alleviate (though probably not solve) the downward pressure on salaries.

- It would ensure that companies are well motivated to find domestic workers since they would, theoretically, be cheaper.

- It would ensure that H-1B's go to the people who would add the most value to the economy (or else the company would be less competitive due to overpaying).

- It would favor the most talented foreigners rather than putting them in a random lottery with new grads.

- It would allocate the H-1B's to the companies that need them most (since they're offering the most money)

- It would maximize the future tax take of the US government (maximum income => maximum taxes paid)

Ironically, this might have prevented me from getting my own H-1B as I got it fairly early in my career.
Custora (YC W11) is hiring engineers to shape the future of marketing
Didn't mean to really fault you. Just sucks that some douchebag caused you harm and ultimate NASA too.

Many many years ago I worked at a badly run startup. One dude was made a manager over us and started trying to shake things up. One thing he wanted was documentation (although mostly it was to prepare let go some people). So I wrote up one page document, really simple stuff (no formatting at all) and put up on fileserver.

Few days later I happened to see a printout of a documentation lying around. It had been printed to show higher up that IT was improving process. Content was what I had written. Word by word. It was in better formatting, with tables to separate creator, date etc. For the creator, the manager had put in his own name. There's no mention of my name AT ALL.

World is full of such douchebags.
The wiggle word here is "right", I suppose. It's easy to ascribe meanings to that word which are very difficult to use---my limited understanding of Philosophy makes me think that this is the realm of ideas like "qualia" and the like.

For a long time statisticians wrangled over this word in a reduced context. The "art" of statistics is to build a model of the world which is sufficiently detailed to capture interesting data but not so detailed to make it difficult to interpret as a human decision-maker. Statisticians usually solve this problem by building a lot of models, getting lucky, presenting things to people and seeing what sticks.

For a long time this lack of a notion of "rightness" was so powerful that it precluded advancement of the field in certain ways.

With the advent of computers we discovered a new, even more precise form of "right" however and this formed the bedrock of Machine Learning. The "right" ML is concerned with is predictive power. A model is "right" when it leads to a training and prediction algorithm which is "probably, approximately correct", e.g. you can feed real data in and end up with something useful (with a high degree of probability).

So with respect to computer vision we know that it is very difficult to build "efficient" algorithms, ones which work well while using a reasonable amount of training data. CV moved forward when it realized that there were representations of the visual field which led to better predictive power---these were originally generated by studying the visual center of human and animal brains, but more recently have been generated "naively" by computers.

So, there's a reasonably well-defined way that we can find the "right" representation of visual scenes: if we find one which ultimately is best-in-class of all representations for any choice of ML task then it's "right".
Its generally not worth it to give smart answers to dumb questions. I guess its a pet peeve of the author though.
Notes on transitioning from Angular to React: the good parts and the bad parts
Seldon Microservices API for External Predictive Algorithms
> 1 second launch window

Why is it so precise?
This sounds like a great argument for AGPL.
What is "solving skill"? Where can I get some of that? Why do the people who have it look at the people who don't with amusement, are they jerks? Should those of us without "solving skill" rise up against them? This changes EVERYTHING people!
Can Amazon Make Machine Learning More Accessible?
No, I just think rounded rectangles are ugly.
I suppose it depends on the application. Mine is in a compiled language. Hard to reverse engineer. If yours is in an interpreted language like Python, there might be a source code obfuscator that you can apply.

Do not underestimate the value of your expertise. Even if they had the source code, the chances of a paying customer becoming a competitor is low. Again, I suppose it depends on the application.
Owner's Manual for Localized Social Media Automation
I use Open Source and Free Software (capitalized) as well as free as in beer (lowercase).

No one else seems to be picking up on my typographical hacktivism though.
Show HN: ReadThisThing – one great piece of journalism in your inbox every day
In the good old days, it wasn't so easy to hire a foreigner that studied computer science in an American university: They'd get an automatic 1 year practical training visa, and if after a few months you saw that they were a good hire, you'd sponsor them for an H1-B, and eventually a green card. That's how many senior people that were born overseas got to their spots.

Now, thanks to low quotas, and some rather unsavory consultancy companies, the H1-B program has now become useless for this purpose, as you have less than a 50/50 chance of getting an H1-B approved, just due to quotas. So while an honest company that wants to hire a good developer will not be OK with the delays and the low percentages of hiring someone in those conditions, a mill that interviews thousands of people and will place them in third party customers as consultants will gladly just keep flooding the market with applicants that probably will not get anywhere.

TL;DR The H1-B program used to be defensible, and maybe useful. The way it works now, it only works for companies who abuse it.
Maybe I really am too old to write code anymore. :-/
High performance, easy to use, multithreaded commandline image scraper
Great write-up.

If you're interested in this and you live in (or would like to live in) London, we're hiring. Email's in my profile.
Terrestrial Sonar
Normally I'm agnostic on the issue of type safety, but the best game scripting language I used was a proprietary one that was strongly typed with no implicit casting (it also had no GC).

In my experience, a game script most often uses handles to certain types of game engine objects (cameras, vehicles, characters, the player...) and although it's often necessary to define your own types/classes/objects they're rarely complex. Usually you're just iterating over collections of stuff, exploring trees, querying the current state of the game engine or dealing with some kind of internal state.

Because of this, explicit type safety isn't really the burden it can be in other use cases, even for prototyping. Because you generally want hot reloads and for a game script to fail gracefully without stopping the engine, you probably want to add as much sanity checking as possible before it gets to that point.
What can you say other than... cool.
Every 'girl' you've offered a large diamond ring has declined the offer? Perhaps the problem is not the size of the ring but with you
No, never heard of it. What's this 'malware'?

Also, you use the squire on your own volition.
A self-signed cert says "I claim to be example.com", while a signed cert says "I claim to be example.com and I previously convinced someone else that I was example.com, too."

It's certainly not perfect, but it is a much bigger hurdle for a mitm attacker to get past.
Net neutrality rules published, lawsuit to overturn them immediately filed
It's somehow quite reassuring that you can just type complete gibberish in JavaScript and it usually does something; for example:

!~!~1234.5678["constructor"]["constructor"](console.log("foo"))

Of course that logs "foo" - why wouldn't it?!
Is there any way to use drag to decay the orbit? We don't have to reach the sun quickly.

The solar wind is blowing past, is it possible to "sail" against that at an angle and - over time - dump orbital velocity and so end up in the sun?
Facebook moving from esprima-fb to babel
C++ devs are a curious bunch :-)

Fixing a build can be pretty torturous though. My main thought when I'm looking at using a library in C++ is "oh god I hope this isn't a pain to build"
I don't know where. Where do you get some of foreign language knowledge? I don't have such place ready for you, yet here I am writing to you in a language that is foreign to me.

"Why do the people who have it look at the people who don't with amusement?"

Because people who don't have it consistently praise the wrong thing.
does anyone have it and can give a short review?
Deny! That's exactly what I'm getting at. With a good thorough always-on collaboration tool, you can actually share better and easier than crowded around a table trying to share a document, or fool with a projector, or waiting for somebody to arrive, or a hundred other time-wasting things that happen in physical conference rooms.
The crux of the problem with Mars is that its magnetic field is smaller than its atmosphere. All water gets blown away by the solar wind. Venus has a similar situation, and it's reacting somewhat similarly, having lightweight particles blown away by solar wind.
Indeed, the Earth is the only one of the 3 with a larger magnetic field than its atmosphere. We look like a small gas giant by comparison - our magnetic field reaches far out into space, more than half as big as Neptune or Uranis' magnetic fields. This protects our water and other environmental factors.

Sadly, this means that seeding the planet with water, perhaps by towing an ice-asteroid into orbit and knocking it to the planet, would be a temporary fix at best. Eventually all of that water would just evaporate away and join the Heliopause.
I listened to On Writing as an audiobook narrated by Stephen King himself and I recommend it even to people that are not interested in writing.
Or even better, if you`re in a recent version of Firefox you can click on the little "open book" icon in the address bar and enter the reader mode which looks pretty nice as can be seen in http://i.imgur.com/oiZGekO.png
What are the "actual solving skills" that allow you to generally solve problems that you have never seen a prototype of before? Pretty much all learning is recognizing what types of patterns there are and how to apply them. People who are good at solving logic puzzles like this tend to have seen a lot of them before. In the real world "applying the method used to solve a similar problem" is a solving skill used to solve actual problems. If there are generalizable skills, why aren't we teaching them? And how would we teach them if not by showing examples of problems where they are applied?
The article's thought experiment is useless, it's not even internally consistent. He imagines a world where we could be able to collect old solar panels, but all knowledge is lost. Now what on earth is going to destroy every library in every town all over the earth, but leave solar panels on the rooftops intact? A single small-town library would contain huge amounts of useful knowledge. If we include the knowledge contained in the heads of the survivors, the only realistic way of losing all (or even most) useful knowledge is killing everyone.
Student Loan Hero - https://studentloanhero.com/ - New York, NY - Part-Time - Remote

Student Loan Hero (SLH) is looking to add to its team of writers for the SLH blog. We’re looking for writers who can offer a fresh and original take with writing that interests and excites our growing audience of student loan borrowers.

https://studentloanhero.com/freelance-blog-post-writer-remot...
open source is a compound noun. open-source is a compound adjective.
So you're saying it's just here as an announcement, not for anyone to discuss? That generally seems to be a privilege limited to YC companies (or YC itself). Everything else gets discussed, for all the reasons that discussion is considered beneficial. It's what the platform was written to facilitate. But hey, if it's just an announcement then we're done. I hope it reaches its intended audience, and congratulate you on that shiny armor.
Sorry, but I'd get fired if I started leaking any information about future plans. If I even knew. Which I can't say if I do. ;)
I use "open source" personally, but it depends if there is ambiguity.

"Open-source" is a compound modifier which are used to avoid ambiguity.

Example:
"Man-eating shark" could be read "man eating shark" without the hyphen, which can change the meaning to a man eating a shark instead of a shark eating a man.

Wikipedia switches constantly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

"open-source" occurs 138 times
"open source" occurs 119 times

I can't think of a scenario where "open source" leads to ambiguity. I would argue "open-source" removes any chance of ambiguity and is the better choice, but for aesthetic purposes I prefer "open source".
preassurenet is cool!

It always reminds me about this interchange:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8292091

Probably easier to google up someone on the launch team and ask them.
Sounds simple, you should do it!

:)
I am sorry that you think it is ridiculous. However, it is the only reasonable way to think about bonds. They are not safer than a risk of default, and the spread between bonds expresses exactly this (relatively). If bankers buy at a high price (low spread) when clearly they should not have bought at that price they are simply poor investors. No one forced them to buy - they could, and should, have bought something else.

I don't see we disagree about the numbers? Of the 200 Billion, only about half of the losses were realized. The rest was pushed onto public books (as new bonds or as bailout-loans).
You get foreign language learning by looking at examples of the patterns used in a language and learning how to apply them. By your logic there should be a general "language skill" that anyone could use to immediately apprehend any language. No such thing exists.
That's not true - if your goal is to change minds or address a standpoint, treating the position fairly and giving a smart, reasoned, and respectful response to a charitable interpretation of your opposition's standpoint is the BEST way to proceed forward.
Opera's site specific patching
This is why you'd use gravity braking to do the work for you...

You just have to change direction, not slow yourself down, as long as your path intersects the sun you're done... we have sent spacecraft to the sun... it's not beyond our technical capabilities.

Basically, it's like flying into a banked curve... as long as you're pointed at the Sun when you exit the curve you're going to hit the sun with out needing to bleed 30km/s.

The fundamental reason why it doesn't work is because it's really expensive get stuff into space...

If it was difficult to hit things with large gravitational forces we wouldn't see very many comets in the night sky...
I can't. I don't have the discipline to finish anything.
Don't use drag use gravity...

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

Basically you loop in front of a planet, and then it slingshots you back to the Sun.

Voila... done.
My understanding is that "temporary" in this case means, like, "one million years or more."

While I appreciate that that's a very short span of time by both geological and evolutionary standards, I don't think it's meaningfully "temporary" by human standards.
I love the new shorter domain and name.
Nice! There are probably clocks all over the place when you start looking around :)
I'm originally from France, came to the U.S. for undergraduate studies in 2010. My first year here, I fell in love and started dating an American student, and have been dating her ever since. Similarly, I fell in love with the United States, and wish to spend my life here. Currently, I am currently on OPT, applied for the H1-B process this year with my great SF company, and now am waiting to hear back about my 28% chance of getting a visa...

I'm not trying to scam the U.S., or cheat Americans out of a job, and my company is paying me the same amount as the americans who started at the same time as me. Instead, I want to be an American, and be a part of this country. Despite this, I am now at risk of being deported if I don't get the visa, and having to leave behind my whole life here, and my girlfriend here who I intend to spend the rest of my life with.

The worst part about this is that I am completely powerless, and at the whim of chance.
If you're in a position to MITM a TLS connection, you can most likely also alter those signatures for your target.

You would need to use something like DNSSEC as well, relying on a government-controlled PKI [1], which isn't really any better than the current situation.

[1]: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/
Agree with all the responses to my top level comment, in that management is ultimately responsible for setting and maintaining the engineering culture. It can be tough, however, to balance competing (tensioned) requirements - if you have to choose between engineers that follow best practices (user stories, standups, TDD, pairing, etc) and no engineers at all (let's face it, they are scarce today) - what do you do? Wait to hire engineers and let the product deadline slip even further? It's a tough balancing act.