skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For your first part, immigrants displacing jobs is a news story pretty much anytime it's not western European. These stories are common place with Hispanics, eastern Euros, Middle Easterners, Africans, etc. The difference here is the perverse corporate (read: institutionalized) incentives to benefit from displacing those jobs.

Your second parts about the reality of employment in the US is dead on. There are some companies (or at least some organizations) that benefit from grooming employees and keeping them engaged, but most pretenses of commitment are embarrassing lies. Reid Hoffman's spiel about "tours of duty" strikes me as the most suitable framework for the current corporate job market.
OK. Thanks. Aside, looked into the sirius video and I kept craving for a demo :)
US prison labor isn't usefully comparable to Soviet slave labor.

It was also not helpful of you to post a story from 2010 about a Georgia prison strike in response to this article (and I'm a little surprised it got upvoted so much before being flagged off the front page):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9653515
From where I'm sitting, having worked with someone here on an H1-B visa in 2001 at Lucent who was more qualified for the job than I who was paid $45K to my $80K, as someone who has acquaintances at e.g. HP who were laid off along with a bunch of other older employees, who then found HP advertising for an H1-B replacement for his job, I'd say it's very clear that this is exactly one of the things the mechanism is intended for, given the number of visas issued each year and the constant proposals to drastically increase them. It's telling that Ted Cruz, the best for reducing immigration Republican candidate for President in the 2016 election, wants to increase H1-Bs to 300K a year (everyone else in both parties wants to open the floodgates to all).
Not at all - go ask any devops/IT group running in small, medium and large businesses to replace their Microsoft tools with a competitor's (if you can find one) or FOSS tools and they'll laugh in your face because of how easy Microsoft makes things for them.

IT is a bit of an outlier. But I must admit, I've never encountered any self-described 'DevOps' who uses anything but Unix. Different spheres, perhaps.

Considering that Microsoft kicked off Web 2.0 with the invention of XMLHTTPRequest and the iframe, I'd have to disagree.

That's a bit shallow – every technology company has developed some tools and techniques that were ahead of the curve. It doesn't mean that their entire platform is.

Your whole argument is closed == bad and that's simply not true.

No, my argument is that closed has a very large downside, and that if you don't bear that in mind it's going to harm you later.
Am I the only one, who feels like there is something odd about this article?

250 Disney employees were told [...] that they would be laid off.

Is it really big news that 250 were laid off?

Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.

What does it mean to train your replacement for a software engineer? Did they teach them how to write code? 3 Month is not enough time for that. Did they explain how their existing code works? That would be quite a normal thing, but 3 month is really long for that.

"because of his superior skills and “outstanding” work, he had saved the company thousands of dollars"

The average software engineer should be able to save a company hundreds of thousands of dollars, not thousands, provided they are given the right resources. If he only saved the company thousands of dollars and did not generate new revenue, that explains why he was laid off.

His résumé lists a top-level skill certification and command of seven operating systems, 15 program languages [...] “I was forced into early retirement,”

If he was really so skilled, why did he not find another position at Disney or elsewhere?
You're better-informed that I am. I see from the NY Times:

> There is one exception to this wall of secrecy: a group of some 600 trade “advisers,” dominated by representatives of big businesses, who enjoy privileged access to draft texts and negotiators.

So yes, my arguments are completely wrong. I still believe that the core of any high stakes negotiation is secrecy while the actual horse-trading is taking place, but this is just stupid, and seems like bad politics too.
It is possibly to fork on Windows by using ZwCreateProcess directly, however the win32 subsystem and every single thirdparty library you are using does not expect this. If you are only using the NT native api then it should work just fine, but you are prevented from interacting with the win32 environment.
You will either love or hate http://skimfeed.com.

No ads, fast loading, and nothing to blacklist.
No, fork is only one path that can lead to overcommit. Allocation of new memory as COW references to a zero page, and COW writable MAP_PRIVATE mappings of files (such as the writable LOAD segments of any executable or library file) also lead to overcommit unless you do proper commit accounting. Any system that does not need to do detailed commit accounting to avoid overcommit is basically wasting the fact that it has virtual memory/MMU.
GitUp makes Git painless
Wow... how insulting.

This ought to be illegal, no?
If you've never worked for an appsec consulting firm, I would highly recommend doing that for a year before starting your own firm.
Unfortunately it seems the r/politics parroting of the "The TPP is secret so it must be bad" meme has also infected this site.

Here is a great summary of why treaties are negotiated the way they are: http://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/comments/35mers/...
Minorities and women are a protected class under US law- their lower wages are due to previous conditions in the US that the citizens of that country have decided to remedy.

Discrimination against skilled foreign workers is not illegal- in fact laws like H1-B require a certain amount of discrimination.

To compare the situation of H1-Bs to women or blacks or even illegal immigration is at best being willfully ignorant of US history and custom. Get back to me when H1-Bs are forced to pick cotton for a couple generations.
skills are not found in a vacuum but a market which has a price point. when someone says Americans lacking skills they usually mean at prevailing market prices. which always operate in the direction of reducing cost. so yes providing services at a certain price point is a skill. businesses do it by increasing efficiency, people do it by cutting discretionary income.
That doesn't seem very fair when industry B has 10 representatives involved in the negotiation, and industry A doesn't have any. Of course industry B is doing to argue that the tradeoff is worthwhile. And in reality, it's the big corps that have the reps involved in the negotiations right now, and the public interest group that do not.
A text editor written in ~40 lines of k+z code
The article fails to mention that for the H1-B application a Labor Condition Application(LCA) has to be filed, which explicitly states that the employer will

"Pay the nonimmigrant workers at least the local prevailing wage or the employer's actual wage, whichever is higher; pay for non-productive time in certain circumstances; and offer benefits on the same basis as for U.S. workers;"[1]

Full disclosure: I'm on a H1-B and paid way more than the local prevailing wage for my position.

[1] http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/h1b.htm
Are these across all LPR categories—i.e. employment based, family based, DV, asylum, etc.? The numbers make me inclined to think not, but I can't find any explanation on the website of what it covers.
Using the previous employer as reference when searching for future jobs could become difficult if you play asshole during the transitioning period.

Although in this case i think most future employers would be understanding of the situation. But even so, during an interview you only have that much time to show a good image of yourself, there's not always time to explain everything and any minor hickup, suspicion or oddity could cost you the job, you don't want to leave the interviewer only remembering lots of "but" and "except that time".
Fast tracked means it goes through an up-or-down vote instead of the appalling amendment process Congress usually prefers, which makes no sense in an international trade agreement.

They've made it available to members of congress without it being available to the public.

Yes. So they can do the jobs they were elected to do - represent your interest.

I'd have no issue if I thought it was going to take six months to pass, and members of the public could have a say, but fast tracking makes that highly unlikely.

Honestly, I don't think the public is really competent to form opinions on most of this. >>90% of the complaints I see about trade deals are uninformed, counterfactual, and ignorant. This doesn't mean I think all trade deals are necessarily perfect by any means, but the signal:noise ratio is appalling.
Search fields don't appear to work properly (Safari on OS X) - if you key in a full search (title, city, state) and hit 'refine' it puts the title in all three fields while showing you everything, not just search results. Interesting site though - I want to find me :)
I would love to see the illustrations broken up into PNGs and subtly transitioned when scrolled into view.
The MSc option sounds best to me, especially if it is a one-time chance to get such an opportunity. It will give you a better foundation in the fundamentals of computer science and software development.

Meanwhile, you can do side projects that apply what you are learning or that help you learn new technologies that your course work won't cover.
yes, and that's why I'd love to have another column to figure out if there are any countries that have statistically significant higher/lower Greencards per capita :)

It's probably not a super useful metric, but it would be interesting to see
Am I asking bad questions, or is someone/a bot just being contrary?
The past few times I've posted a question on Stack Overflow my question has been down-voted within minutes. Is there a down-vote bot? Or am I really asking bad questions?

My latest question[0] involves Racket and refactoring a function. How could I improve this question? (You'll see from the question that I know almost nothing about Racket)

[0]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30625909/how-would-i-make-this-racket-code-dryer
> That's assuming that things haven't become deeply coupled within the "call stack".

Yep; Monolith or SOA you still have to write SOLID code :)

> Separating things across a socket often forces a separation of concerns, which does tend to make refactoring easier.

It /should/, and if it does now your changing more than the one variable of "invoked across stacks -> invoked across socket", and are more likely to introduce a regression :)
Lots of 3D shapes can be squashed flat to a 2D grid. If you printed out a Doom level on a 3D printer and put it on your desk, you wouldn't claim it wasn't 3D just because you couldn't find any stacked rooms. The final product is 3D regardless of the constraints on which 3D geometries are possible.

You could argue there are no 3D graphics. Everything is transformed into a 2D screen representation.
> How long do you think it takes to write a rejection letter that provides useful, actionable data for the potential candidate?

I see nothing in the post nor this thread that indicates that's what people are looking for. An obvious form letter would be just fine. The point is that a candidate wants to know that the process is over, instead of being left hanging.
Those were the times of multi-frame abuse, webpage with sound and no control, site trying to be clever and disabling right-click. Pop-ups everywhere, site hijacking your browser window and resizing, moving it around. Stupid cursor that make your computer grind to a halt. Site designed for 640x480 and nothing else.

A lot of these still happen, except they are using different technologies and look slightly different. We have parallax scrolling, Bootstrap-like modal windows, unlinkable single-page apps, websites that screw up "back" button and above all we have pages that require you to download several megabytes of junk and execute tons of JavaScript just to read several kilobytes of text.
they do not provide their training set that they garnered from their ReCaptcha service.
Wouldn't hurt to just leave it as is, in maintenance mode. Especially since he built it for his sister.

Or implement a 'pay for features' model where its kind of like contracting work- anyone can request a feature and they are publicly displayed and sponsored, once the set value is reached then he implements it.
You're not wrong, but I wouldn't separate the two. The reason Google can have the #1 advertising platform is because it runs the #1 search engine. Search powers personalized advertisements, and is responsible for most of the money in Google's business.
Maybe I'm just bad at it.
> if the replacements were not Indian.

You hit the nail on the head. Would there be these many complaints if the replacements were Canadians? Nope. Would there be many complaints if the replacements were English? Nope. Would there be many complaints if the replacements were Aussies. Nope.

Would there be many complaints if the replacements were Mexicans? Yes.

What's common between Mexico and India? What ever could it be?
The article is interesting but does not mention a few facts:

- In several countries (including France where I live), there is a "tax break" in owning real estate since the virtual rent is not added to revenues (or: you cannot deduct your rent from your revenues). For instance, if you're renting a flat that you own but at the same time rent to someone the flat where you live, you'll be paying taxes on your rent income, but deduce nothing from the rent you pay.

- Rented flats tend to be in less optimal condition that flats that you own. Since the utility of a flat is to live (in the best conditions available), it's sometime a good idea to invest in renovation works, plan changes, etc. for which the owner of a rented flat will see little value.

And also it mentions but does not insist on one major thing. Taking a mortgage to acquire a property is a bet on future inflation. If inflation is/will be high is the next years, getting a fixed rate mortgage is a great opportunity (and there are little chances you will be able to get a significant mortgage for anything else than real estate). If inflation is low (or worse, we enter a period of deflation), renting is by far the best option. IMHO this criterion is by far the most important while deciding about rent vs. buy.
SQL and JSON for NoSQL? Couchbase Says So
Hello, a cofounder of Bitfusion here.

Thanks for your question, you can take a look at our TCD presentation for an overview: http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/05/bitfusion-helps-developers-...

Bitfusion is a software layer that discovers available hardware accelerators and then automatically applies accelerator libraries, smart load scheduling, and dozens of software optimization techniques to make acceleration “plug and play”.

Specifically, our software is built on top of OpenCL which allows our software to take advantage of any device that supports OCL. It’s a solid basis for hardware compatibility, and it allows us to take advantage of FPGAs that just recently started supporting OCL robustly. Second, we’ve build a bunch of functionality to make simultaneous use of multiple accelerators — even from different vendors and types. This is an important step because a fundamental problem for widespread adoption of heterogeneous hardware is being vendor and device neutral to keep software development sane and tractable. Thirdly, we’ve been developing, curating, and partnering to combine the most promising automatic software optimization tech to deliver to our customers to address app performance more generally.

Hardware acceleration to the masses is *primarily about friction: apis, code optimization, vendor-specific code. Bitfusion is all about bringing this friction down to zero. We love talking about this stuff all day, so send us a note if you'd like to talk more.

Mazhar
You should read the article. H1Bs are not immigrants but they are allowed to try to become immigrants while in the US. The process to get permanent residency is not any different between someone who has an H1B and someone who is oversea (ie finding someone to file a petition, either a spouse or a company). The only difference is that the H1B can live and work in the US during the process.
right, but it's still not the same as unlink it seems: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/06/07/15004...
I never meant to suggest that fork is the only path that leads to overcommitment, but that fork/exec generally insists on overcommitment for reasonable use.
Well, it's possible that "move fast and break things" is more than just hot air. :)
If he was really so skilled, why did he not find another position at Disney or elsewhere?

Agism is a real thing. Maybe he couldn't.
Sure, but to echo userbinator's comment above, compatibility layers are limited. Interix was architected to run directly on top of HAL.
Someone Managed to Sign Facebook's PGP Key with an ASCII Goatse
Yes, taking the financial advantage out of the equation would do much to discourage h1-b abuse.

Instead of trying to pin it to some standard of living metrics, I think its probably better to make it a multiple of the prevailing wage instead of the prevailing wage. If H1-B's are truly filling positions that companies cannot fill domestically then those workers should be worth far more than domestic counterparts. Companies should also be required to provide justification for rejection of each domestic worker that applied for the position.

These two things would probably fix the majority of the H1-B abuse, whether it results in more outsourcing is another question. But, large companies have data centers that need skilled labor to diagnose problems on site, be it SFP replacement or simply tracing cables. So i'm not sure how much of that kind of work can actually be outsourced.
It would be a cool story if it were true, but in fact AWS existed before Amazon was using it internally. They were selling their ability to run large datacenters, not their existing spare capacity.
My guess it that the word "slavery" usually implies chattel slavery, whereas these people were serving sentences of penal servitude.

Others have pointed this out, but penal servitude is alive and well in the US prison system as well [1] and it's not common to use the word slavery for that. Maybe they should, but it is arguably a different concept from chattel slavery.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_State...
That is wonderful, but regrettable it would never happen. There are too many employees living paycheck to paycheck.
When the warts of Russian history are being discussed, you'd be surprised what aspects of American culture (present or past) are suddenly considered comparable.
very related: http://yourdatafitsinram.com/
Get the education. I loved mine (the CS part at least). And then push yourself to complete side projects during free time- they'll boost your CV and allow you to practice what you learn in class.
This is a totally off-topic post, from 2010, submitted from an account with an ideological agenda (a comment history dominated for months with anti-capitalist comments) in response to a top-of-the-front-page story about Soviet slave labor on which they also added a derailing comment comparing Polish slave labor to modern US prisons.

Being anti-capitalist is of course totally fine and this person is a bona fide contributor in lots of other ways, but throwing off-topic ideological grenades onto the HN front page is not totally fine. Flagged.
JSON Support in PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and SQL Server
Why You Should Care About Flux
10% severance of annual pay seems to be very low for an employee of 10 years. Is this normal in America? In Europe, in my experience, your severance gets larger the longer you have worked there. So for 10 years, something like 5-6months+ of pay would be what I'd expect.

*Edit - According to the UK Government, the statutory redundancy (severance) pay in the UK for a worker of 10 years would be 15 weeks pay at a maximum of £464 which equates to about £7k $10k. Obviously this is only the statutory level.
Quit and find a higher paying job then? Why would the owner pay you more money if you will accept a zero or small raise and keep working for them?
My apologies: I just saw your request. You also don't have an email published so I'm not able to send it to you directly.

I would heartily recommend Liber Null and Psychonaut. You may choose to buy it via Amazon, but below is the ebook download (multiple formats).

https://archive.org/details/LiberNullAndThePsychonaut

Please know that most of your change will happen inwards at first. Your goal is to control yourself before anything else. From there, you will learn how to control your environment. And your ethics will be challenged. Many people go crazy with this power, in what we call magus-itis. Read more about it here:

http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usks&c=words&id=1083...

How is this useful: You will learn about yourself. You'll learn how to meditate, as well as how to use all 5 of your senses completely. If you wish to stop, stop. Nothing bad happens. Later on, when discussing things that aren't viewed, it does take some belief that they are happening. Things get weird when other people sense your 'hallucinations'. Do they, or do they not exist? I can't tell you. It's your path.

Historical: Many of the older spellcasting books since the 1700's used the name Liber [Something] as to denote it was a craft book. The 1700's through 1900 books were more of demonolatry and satanic worship. Think of them as mainly anti-Christian books of magic. There are other books outside this realm, but if you're interested, you'll find them soon enough.
While I don't work with outsourced employees, I do work in a completely remote team, and we use only email, IRC and video conferencing. In fact I had a meeting at 11pm just last night (not too bad for me, but for my colleagues in Israel and Australia who were also on the call it was some unearthly hour of the morning).

I think many of your points could be summarized as "we hired a bunch of idiots and they couldn't do their job very well". Timezones made some difference in that you weren't able to closely supervise them, but the fundamental problem was that your management shouldn't have outsourced the work to people not capable of doing the job.
You're correct. There was no battle. The ship had to be abandoned only because it ran aground in some shallows and then sank.
And if you're investing in 20 startups, why not take a few interesting gambles on the crazy outliers in hopes that they will be the the money-printing machine of a Gates / Jobs / Zuckerberg.

As long as the inventor seems smart and fanatical enough, and the idea is a good one that addresses or transforms an enormous market, it may be worth a few million bucks of portfolio money to see what he can do with it.
It seems unlikely. Where I live, web development isn't as diverse and -oh well- as profitable as it's in US. Low wages etc. And as far as I know, remote working isn't really that commonplace, especially for a junior developer.

I guess freelancing is always a possibility, as well as looking for a part-time development job once I settle into my studies abroad.