skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might be less likely to happen that way, though. Here are two possible reasons why.

First, there may be benefits to locating your workforce in the US. They may be closer to the location of core business activities, and the employer may enjoy some benefits of the US legal system and infrastructure. Opinions on this may differ, some people think location is unimportant, others think it is highly important. I'm just suggesting that it certainly may be a factor.

Second, a path to US citizenship or a green card remains very valuable. If an employer can sponsor a visa and green card application, they may get a higher caliber of applicant than they would overseas. There is also a lower possibility of turnover. While it is certainly possible to leave a job as an H1B holder for another, mobility does remain considerably more limited than it would be for a citizen who can freely participate in the labor market (including leaving the field entirely for better opportunities).

I don't really see this as a scare story, because it's pretty indisputable that these visas are sometimes abused. That doesn't mean they always are. How often and how much is another subject of considerable disagreement.

Overall, I will say one thing, they system is horrendously broken when a company that pays over 200k for H1B applicants is in the same lottery as outsourcing companies where people are training their replacements.
This is pretty much in line with my philosophy of functionality first then infrastructure. The problems that inevitably sprout while building the functionality will influence future infrastructure / plumbing decisions. Of course, some care has to be taken to not entangle everything, but this shouldn't be too hard if you take a simple services-oriented architecture or even forego services and just store all your functionality in model classes. Regardless of the approach, the first thing that should be written are the tests that validate the functionality. Getting those passing is the highest priority; how they pass comes after.
They weren't identified by name, and potential employers won't know their age until they're hired on and have to provide it for benefits.

Disney's legal department would probably prevent anyone from revealing names based on the information presented, to prevent expensive lawsuits (which, if they were to occur, might wipe out any savings they're realizing from their unethical behavior).

Stay classy Disney.
Why do you care whether the game uses more than one core. You'd need a truly ancient CPU for the game to demand more compute than a single core provides.
>> (Depending on area), current rents are in about the same ballpark as payments on a new mortgate,

> Not in Toronto, which is like the whole point

Then what is the rent/mortgage situation in Toronto? That was never discussed in the article. In my area rent is 2-3x higher than a mortgage, all I know about Toronto is that property values are high.
At least that is some form of response. My experience with big tech firms is either a request for a phone screen or tumbleweeds. I'd prefer the courtesy of a one line email rejection instead of the application disappearing into a black hole.
Thank you for your feedback! Poseidon is actually quite hard, true. I just promoted it to 'hard' :-).

I think I will first try to display the two R blocks on top of each other in the name of the functions. I will keep your suggestion in mind, though.
Need beta testers, it's the moment to promote your product for free
Yes, I read the article. My point is that cracking down on visas or immigration won't make any difference long term. The internet makes physical proximity not so important, and it will only get less and less important over time.
Twitter's got it right? Hiring a CFO as your CMO
Yeah, if you read the letter informing workers of the layoff, it's clear that their severance depends on continued good performance until a separation date. Good performance includes training the replacement.
As an Indian and an H1B myself who is compensated decently (1.8 times prevailing wage) -- I hate these companies since they lead to us being stigmatised as a group. I'm sure my coworkers are going to read this article today and point at me and say "Ugh, there's my H1B replacement.", even though I'm like one of two H1Bs at x00 employee company.

Ultimately, this leads back to the fact that the US has a large number of laws which are not enforced in reality. If these companies are breaking the law so badly (and they probably are, the top 7 or so companies using H1B are Infosys and other outsourcing firms) -- why don't employees go ahead and sue them? They are (presumably) incorporated in the US after all, it's not like they are untouchable.

This is also an excellent case for H1B reform. If a green card was a necessary condition of employing an H1B, these tech companies would have a much harder time retaining their lower paid employees, and the cost of "outsourcing in the US" as it were, would be prohibitive.
But that's different than having your replacement come here, to US soil, to sit in your exact chair as your replacement on an H1B. Whether you find this offensive or not, it's a clear violation of the intent of the H1B program as the sole purpose here is to drive down labor costs.
Google Now gets one and two and flunks the third. Interesting test.
This image from the article explains it.

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/06/01/us/visa-letter-alt...
the H1-B visa gives American businesses the best of both worlds, cheap labor and asses in the seats. You only get one of those with outsourcing.
Any specifics you can share about why the architecture was so obviously wrong? This is a really interesting topic for me!
Things I wish I had known before starting iOS development - Part 2
Actually this is one of the most appropriate stories to mention the US. US has the most prisoners in the world and the Russian prison slaves wished a world where there would be no slavery. That world is not here yet.
Bitcoin app busted
>(and not to be snarky at all but I find it fascinating that that was your take away after reading it)

It might be because I have a low tolerance for clickbait headlines and articles.
This makes me especially reticent to redeem the 'free upgrade' offer. I don't expect my machines to be bricked on update, but I'd rather play it safe until an acceptable level of stability is reached (per online response).
Ask HN: Career Worries
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this, but I think I need some advice/suggestions or even simple comments from people outside my own “echo chamber”... anything to help me approach this a bit more objectively to be honest.

A year or so ago, I started programming and immediately got hooked. I realized that it was something I saw myself doing as a career as well. So, I made some plans and took some steps to get my foot into the door. Surprisingly, it worked, perhaps a bit too well. And that’s where my problem lies.

I’m 30, living in a developing country, and I have a CV full of gaps.

I enrolled in a web development course (a joint venture kind of thing between the government and some private education company) and thanks to their connections I have a few interviews lined up. It’s too early to say anything of course, but I’m optimist about the outcome.

HOWEVER, I have been also accepted into a good CS/IT Masters program abroad, one with a really interesting curriculum... a mix of embedded programming, control theory and so on.

I’ve decided to go with the MSc option, but I feel like I’m being greedy... getting a job in programming has always been the plan after all. It seems like I’m jumping at the next best thing. But since I started studying, I’ve been wanting to learn more and more.

And I think the degree will lead to a lot more opportunities in the long run. (And give a way out when/if I want to move away from web development) To be honest, I’m afraid to pass such a opportunity. It feels like one of those crossroads moments.

But a part of me keeps nagging at me: This is what you’ve been planning. Get the job. Get the experience. Don’t postpone things for two more years... and so on.

In short, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what kind of replies I’m really looking for either. But I’m sure at least a few of you have gone through something similar, and hopefully could provide some insight.

Cheers.
I find mainstream hostility towards skilled workers really interesting because if you had replaced this group of people with any other group of people like women or other ethnic minorities, you can really start to see how outright hostile people are.

If you actually take the maxim of fairness and equality seriously, skilled foreign workers are by far the most unfairly discriminated group of people. Much more than blacks and women who are supposedly discriminated against in tech. Unlike women and blacks, skilled foreign workers actually have the government with arbitrary set of standards to determine who can work and who can't.

Another part of the immigration story that's fascinating is illegal immigrant stories are almost always come with some sob story to make readers feel empathic towards them. Such stories are almost never told with skilled immigrants.
I've been following this tech like sherlock on crack, it's just that exciting!

The idea of vibrating fibre is just so amazing that i really do think that they will pull this off, i'm just curious as to how large the controllbox will be and if they can manage to shrink it to glasses sizes.
I have a sequence of tweets here summarizing basic measurements I did on musl's posix_spawn versus fork+exec:

https://twitter.com/RichFelker/status/602313644026761216

There are still plenty of applications that use fork semantically, to keep the same process image in the child, which benefit somewhat from a fast fork. But most places where fork affects performance now are things that are already pessimized by using fork+exec instead of posix_spawn: the shell, make, cgi, etc. (GCC still uses vfork, but GNU make recently switched from vfork to fork because of vfork-related bugs.) Regardless of how fast or slow fork is on midipix (but I expect it to be fairly fast, much faster than cygwin), they would benefit a lot more from just switching to using posix_spawn.
This is part of the reason why I freelance. I get to say, "bite me, it's not in my contract."
Maybe it's different legally, but ethically it's the same thing.
Show HN: Protecting Your Software Assets Using OpenGL
> "In late November, this former employee received his annual performance review, which he provided to The New York Times. His supervisor, who was not aware the man was scheduled for layoff, wrote that because of his superior skills and “outstanding” work, he had saved the company thousands of dollars. The supervisor added that he was looking forward to another highly productive year of having the employee on the team. The employee got a raise. His severance pay had to be recalculated to include it."

That's absolutely horrible. Not only is it a case of left hand not talking to right hand, it almost seems cruel to review someone in the position of being laid off so highly that it warrants a raise. Nobody stopped to consider "maybe we should keep this employee around?" It's disheartening.
I think it's valid to take a discovery of human slavery in the past and compare it to slavery in the present. Be it mines using forced labor, sexual slavery, forced prison work, etc.

Hijacking? It's seems a natural on-topic comment to me.
I don't really think H1B workers can be considered at will workers. The company usually retains the right to fire the worker at will, but H1B workers have limited rights to remain in the US should they leave their jobs without a new sponsor lined up.

US citizens and permanent residents can change jobs freely, drop out of the work force, go back to school, transition to a new career, and so forth, all without jeopardizing their right to live and work in the US. While H1B workers do have some rights to change jobs, their mobility is considerably more limited.

You don't have to be especially cynical to believe that the very one-sided nature of the "at-will" relationship here, along with the high stakes for the employee (if you can't get a new job with a new sponsor, you will have to leave the country), is huge part of the appeal of these visas.
Tesla co-founder plans to electrify delivery and garbage trucks
But that's the myth. The delta between the total costs of renting and the total cost of ownership is wide enough that you can invest it in something that has much better returns than a condo. Even owning 50% of your mortgage payment gets thrown away at interest, plus your maintenance fees, taxes and the whole bit are also lost to the sands of time.
The point of the article isn't that someone else got their job, it's that someone else was imported to take their job under the guise of a program that is intended to fill labor shortages at the prevailing wage, not as a means of achieving a cheaper workforce.
Or they're paying a 10% bonus of yearly salary as payment if they're willing to train their replacement.

If someone offered me $10K extra on top of my salary to take the trash out and clean the company kitchen for 2 weeks, I would gladly do it without blinking, even if it's a little humbling. I don't know about you. Calling it extortion is a bit much.
I'm not sure, there are too many governments and agencies involved in the negotiations. It could even be a computer engineer that has nothing to do with the negotiations.
I think a lot of people tend to over-estimate how "scalable" they need their platform to be.
Or worse, they spend so much effort on what they think will be a bottleneck, only to find they spent optimizing something which could have run on a single core.

I tend to think monolith first makes sense, unless you thoroughly understand the problem-space.. even then, monolithic POC might be worth it just to confirm things.
#NOMORESAD is a free platform for interpersonal happiness exchange
Show HN: Mattermark API
> Sure it is.

I don't think you understand the term "search bubble". It's a bubble because you're cut off from the rest of the world, like the boy in the bubble.

The only way everyone getting the same results is a "bubble" is if you consider us living within the atmosphere of Earth as being in a "bubble".

> You get stuff that's a little more relevant to your usual interests

Did you even read the linked page?

Claiming that getting results that are in-line with your pre-disposed ideas (which are expressed through the profile Google/etc have of you) is like claiming that a board of directors full of yes-men is a great recipe for success.
It's been whispered on old blogs that i can no longer find that the founder started with AR software and then stumbled upon this new tech - so you might both be right.
A Smooth Transition to ECMAScript 6: New Features
Isn't this where people live up to the letter of the agreement but flagrantly ignore the spirit of it?
Interix is a lot different because it requires installing a system component, which requires administrator privileges. Midipix produces applications that (at least as I understand it) run on basically any NT-based Windows with no special privileges.
I think this would be less of a story if the replacements were not Indian.

Employees get fired all the time for being too senior, too wise to their rights and too expensive (even if that is not the stated reason), and in large companies entire divisions are often laid off and replaced by managed service providers and consultants that'll do the job for less.

This is just the horrible reality of employment in the US - the H-1B system has many faults, but that's not the cause here, the cause is the company itself.

You can see this in every field - employer loyalty is at a low, full time workers get hired on a part time basis, workers get rotated regularly, people get fired so they don't qualify for seniority, hours get shifted to comply with the bare minimum of labor law, etc.

Disclaimer: I'm on an H-1B.

-----

edit: Clarification: My first sentence should have been "if the replacements were American". Prevailing opinion seems to be that Americans losing jobs to foreigners is unfair, but no one bats an eyelid at Americans losing jobs to Americans - it's just capitalism.

I wasn't really going for the blatant racism angle, even though there is quite a bit of that too at the lower levels of the discourse pile.
However, access can be compared to areas that which do not have it.

For example, if I was in northern India and get injured, I do not have access to emergency room care. Nor do I have access to a hospital. I may have access to a local doctor, but (s)he may have very limited tools and even less amount of drugs to work with.

If I am injured in this country, I do have a reasonable access to emergent care. But the costs are exorbitant to the point that many people default on those bills.

And then I would also go to the argument that there is no informed consent on the bills for treatments. We, as a public, are supposed to go in for a problem and choose the appropriate solution with no regard for cost. Our solution is that we then get the "bill we deserve". There is no breakdown for "issue X is average cost Y".

In choosing what treatments can potentially cause harm, we have the idea of informed consent. We cannot make a choice, medically speaking, unless we know both the pros and cons of said argument. This somehow, does not transfer over to harms of money and reduction on standard of life.

That's criminal.

(And yes, I chose the Mayo clinic because they are a top of the line medical center. And they charge for it as well, when the client can bear it or has good insurance. I also know they do a great deal of charity work.)
I'd love for someone to explain how Kubernetes compares to Mesos. Every article I find on the subject says they are mutually beneficial, not competitors — that you would typically run Kubernetes as a Mesos framework — yet Kubernetes also seems like it duplicates much of Mesos' functionality on its own.
Great superhero/villian name!
Meta Man never solves the problem at hand. Instead he/she/it/they obliquely solve the generalized case. Meta Man Sees a mugger stealing cash from a victim, works on legislation to make BitCoin the default for all transactions.
@rand334 & @vdnkh: The original comment highlights the only two Senators who voted against the "Freedom" Act and supported net neutrality.
I was referring to the laid off employees, not the new ones.
Legal/compliance is a significant part of it. That rejection letter has zero upside to the employer and offers many opportunities to screw up.

If a company has: a mature HR process, people who know wtf they are doing, and give a crap, they'll do rejection letters. Most lack at least one of those things.

The guy at your SMB example is some jack of all trades, and dealing your resume is a priority-2 in a sea of P1's. He doesn't have a recruiting process. Google does, but even there it's still dependent on a human making a judgement call about what to write.
There isn't a (proven) financial incentive for Snowden, yet he's classified as a traitor anyway. Even here on Hacker News, a community of people with an intelligence over average, I've seen opinions that Snowden seeking asylum in Russia is fishy, in spite of the fact that he had no other option. Here we have Snowden living the life of a refugee and being hunted by the most competent intelligence agencies on earth, probably for the rest of his life and we are still discussing ulterior motives, even here on HN.

So what difference would a $100,000 incentive would make in the public opinion? Mostly none. But to the whistleblower, it doesn't make one rich, but it can be enough to escape a country and seek asylum somewhere.
I'm inclined to agree. I'm seeing fuzzy words like "several" and "many", but no actual numbers to quantify or estimate how many U.S. workers were replaced with immigrants. It also doesn't begin to discuss how many of the laid-off workers were immigrants, or how many new workers were citizens. This just sounds like a general off-loading of highly-salaried individuals, which I suspect would have been done independent of companies like Infosys.

Also, just a general off-topic thought. The article talks about how H1-B's tend to have lower salaries than U.S. tech workers. I'm under the impression that many of these H1-B candidates are individuals just finishing a degree and will later in their career move on to obtaining a green card after a few years. If this is the case, then of course their salaries are lower; they're earlier in their career. I'd love to see some data exploring this more.
Yes, I did understand that, but I think that if you're replacing "at will" employees with non at-will workers, in a very one-sided relationship, that is a relevant consideration in any use of the phrase "at will".
What's Your Algorithmic Citizenship?
Gayle Laakmann McDowell has a good Quora answer on the pros and cons of tech inteviews:

http://www.quora.com/Why-are-programmers-in-the-software-eng...

It's worth reading the whole thing, but here's a summary of why alternative interview techniques have their own problems:

* Testing for specific technology knowledge excludes good programmers who don’t happen to know that technology.

* Asking someone to explain their past projects is biased towards people who can explain effectively, not necessarily people who can do the work.

* Giving candidates a homework problem has several drawbacks: they may have someone else do the work for them; it is biased towards candidates with more free time; and because it requires negligible time for a company to send off a canned assignment, but potentially a lot of time for the candidate to complete it, it can be unfair to candidates.

* Having candidates work on a real project for one day makes it difficult to focus on characteristics that distinguish great programmers from good or mediocre ones, since real projects have a lot of simple tasks that almost any programmer can handle.

* Letting candidates use a computer during the interview can cause them to focus on syntax rather than problem-solving.

Basically, although many people hate the coding interview, there's no good alternative.
They weren't fired for failure to carry out their duties, they were fired because they were more expensive than their H1B replacements, which clearly violates the purpose of the H1B program.

So, was it legal for Disney to fire them? Probably. Was it legal for Disney (or rather, its contractor) to replace them with H1Bs? Probably not.
It really slowed down development because it made the feedback loops really long - you might have to start up five different JVMs, which would each take a while to register itself with Hazelcast before you could start the next that depended on it, before you could test your change. The service boundaries we had initially come up with weren't always correct (as you'd expect really), but it was a massive effort to refactor something across a service boundary, because each component was released and versioned separately.

Maybe there are ways to work in such an environment, but if so we didn't find them and no-one had the experience to know them.
I think the name Pat Baitman is a reference to Patrick Bateman http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Bateman
Guns made before the serial number requirement can still be sold through FFLs, I see no reason why this would be different as long as everything else is legally up-to-snuff.