skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Take the annual revenues of google and divide it by the number of their engineering employees, then come back to me.

May I ask how many years of real world experience running a business you have under your belt? Do you really believe that none of the non-engineering google employees contribute to the profit? Do you really believe all Google employees contribute equally? All the Google Plus employees create negative value; Paying them $200K guarantees someone gets LESS than they could have been paid -- and that assumes google actually gives in and pays everyone the maximum they can, which is unlikely cause they have cheaper talent pools to draw on. They pay less in London than they do in Mountain View.

> If you asked me in the early 2000s whether TV would be around in 10 years I would've said definitely.

It is 2015, and TV is still around and profiting nicely. Or, are you living in 2030?

> Which one sounds more unrealistic to you? Bringing down the entire television empire or forming one goddamn union for one company that fits my ideal?

Ah, but that one company will just shutter their R&D. It has happened before, and it will happen again.

> The power is with the 99%, and it's a thin line stopping us from acting on it.

Yes, but as a software engineer you are part of the 1%, not the 99% (literally - the "1%" Occupy talks about are actually the 0.01%). If the real 99% applied the same rule, you effectively get communism. 
And that worked very well as an incentive for talented people


> You from canada or something?

I left the US and I live in Israel these days. Where Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel and various other companies you have heard of have their largest most prolific campuses outside the US. They do this because the talent pool is large, and is cheaper than the US. The unions already exist; joining them is as simple as declaring "I want to join" and paying a small percentage of your salary (1%-2%, I think) as union fees; There are, in fact, multiple competing unions. And yet, over 90% of software engineers are not union members - and those that are make much lower salaries (correlation, not causation of course - but it definitely isn't random).
>Extortion: the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.

I guess I can see how threatening to not give them something is a threat, but if that is how expansive our definition is, how is regular employment not extortion?
I believe they have been given notices longer than a month.

Anyway, it's a financial transaction for knowledge and labor like any other, if you think you're getting a raw deal, you should not accept the deal.

Not sure how it is financial extortion though.
Exactly something so simple but so important!
> 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.

It's not just that, if the same practices were used in other industries that are traditionally protected (doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, accountants, etc) or unionized, all hell would break loose. But nobody seems too bothered that this happens to tech workers.
I don't think anyone is hostile towards the workers themselves. It seems more like they are hostile towards disney and the in-sourcing firm which pulled this off. The entire point of H-1B visas is to fill positions when Americans can't be found to do the work. How they can pull off laying off an entire department and replacing them with H-1Bs is very confusing to me. I'd love to hear an explanation for it. What loophole are they using?
The take away I got from the article is that these people are being replaced by workers here on H1-B visas. Which are suppose to be used only for positions that you can not find any American workers for.

So Disney instead hires a contractor service that employees H1-B people to replace the people being laid off at a lower rate.
>Investing/saving $5K a month for 15 years with an expected rate of return of 7% and an expected inflation rate of 3% will bring you to a place where you end up with a balance of ~$1.5MM (or $1MM after inflation) to your name. Would that make you wealthy in your books?

Definitely not. You get 'wealthy' when an event clears you a million. Anything other than that is just being 'well off'
Very easy to say from a distance. Imagine actually doing what they were coerced into doing.
RedHat was the worst when it came to this.

In 2007, I interviewed for a professional services position within RedHat. I had a phone screen and then three or four weeks would go by, and then the recruiter would ask me for another phone screen. It eventually ended up with a stay in Chicago for an in-person...series of phone calls and one face-to-face interview.

Another six months(!) went by before they called me to ask me if I would be interested in working with them and started the verbal negotiation process.

Suffice to say, I turned them down (my work situation had changed and I wasn't looking to leave), but, I always remember that process and the length of time that it took to get there when I hear friends talking about applying to RedHat.
I agree. I plan to increase the upgrade sizes or offer more variety.
Well it's more about preying on vulnerable people in general. Not playing along may make you lose your severance, and may also ruin your rep with that company for the purposes of re-hire.

Obviously you shouldn't work for the Disneys of the world if you can work somewhere else. If you're really confident that you can find good work wherever and whenever you want it then you can afford to tell a bad employer like Disney to fuck off. For various reasons, a lot of people can't do that.
AAA games are like F1 cars, they are the extreme that hopefully technology will trickle down from so that 'consumer' indie games can benefit from. Without the huge AAA games pushing the limits of tech we wouldn't have as many game engines for indies to use. I hope it continues because I love TIS-100 and The Witcher 3.
Judging by the responses in this thread, your comment was deemed off-topic. I think part of the reaction is that your tone sounded like you were pushing an agenda. Then when people said they thought it was off topic, you doubled down on the insist tone. Both of those things are a turn-off: people don't want to see reddit-like behavior (taking a topic about a historical discovery of slavery conditions in Russia and turning it into a US-centric political hot-button issue).

I thought your initial comment was a little off-topic, personally. But the defensive / insistent tone in this reply makes me think that you actually were pushing an agenda, and that the criticisms were valid. (Essentially, to me, you proved their point: you weren't interested in discussing the focus of the article, but wanted to hijack the thread to talk about an issue important to you.)
I frankly believe there are candidates applying for jobs based on the title and maybe skimming the ad, and then waiting for a response before considering if they actually want to work there.
The early-90s harbourfront towers by Bay and Queens Quay rent studios/1bds for $1500-1600 incl utilities or buy for $400-500k + maint fees $500-700/month + tax + util
FWIW, I have, in the past, applied for jobs at colleges and other research institutions which all have their own resume input system. All different from each other, of course, so it takes 30--45 minutes to completely fill one in. Yes, they have a semi-smart parser that will take a .DOC or a .PDF and pull out the relevant info, but they are more often wrong than right, so it's easier to just manually key in every field right off.

So, count me as a non-fan of these web-based systems.

With such a system, one may expect a quick response, but most of my applications went into a no-reply black hole, except for the submission confirmation provided by the form.

The most annoying one was a phone call from one institution, that I received the first day I started work at a different institution, 6 months after the application was submitted.

On the other side, most of the private sector jobs I have applied to have been very efficient at responding: either a quick rejection after a few days, or moving ahead in the process.
They would get the severance plus three months pay as opposed to nothing by quitting immediately. 4 months pay is presumably better than nothing.
Negotiate a higher salary then?
This debate goes back to the late 1990's.
> They used to allow smoking on board you know. What were non-smokers paying for?

A flight on a plane with smoke in the air.
NY Financial Regulator Lawsky Releases Final BitLicense Rules for Bitcoin Firms
I was once rejected by Spotify 6 months after i sent application in. No hard feelings, I just wonder who was that who waited that process out and got hired ;-)
> It's a bubble because you're cut off from the rest of the world, like the boy in the bubble.

Everyone getting the same narrow set of search results for a term based on global popularity means everyone's cut off from more diverse search results. We've seen research that indicates people click only the top couple results. IMO, that's a big bubble.

> 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.

And giving everyone the same results is like having a single board of directors for everyone.
Juju Support for Google Cloud Platform
If governments aren't doing anything wrong, why are they hiding the TPP?
The assumptions made by the author are ridiculous, namely:
- In the 10-year comparison, rents paid are not factored in at all.
- In the forward-looking comparison, condo prices are assumed to be flat, mortgage rates go up (why? can't they be locked in now?), while equity prices go up 6-8% per year
- Taxes are not factored in at all - capital gains on a primary residence are tax-free, while investment gains will be taxable (eventually, even if buy-and-hold)
- Mortgages allow an effective leveraged investment on home equity, so your gains (and losses!) on home values are magnified

It's a worthwhile debate, and there are merits on both sides, but such blatant bias has to be pointed out.

Also: in the US, unlike Canada, there are tax benefits for a mortgage...
You're being ridiculous. People are upset about the treatment of the existing workers, and angry at the management. Nobody's blaming the new incoming workers.

As far as comparing it to replacing people with women or other ethnic minorities; people did complain loudly about Mexicans "taking our jobs" but that has died down in recent years because people have realized how stupid it is to blame the workers.

Let's not muddy the issue with unwarranted claims of bigotry. The problem in this story is the management at Disney mistreating their existing (now former) employees.
I'm not sure that outsourcing is the appropriate term, at least not in the usual sense, when your replacement is brought in to sit in your exact chair.
You can, on your introduction message or on the thank you note you send after a first interview, state you understand the hiring manager is a busy person and you will get back in touch on a specific timeframe. And then you get in touch on that specific time.

If even this fails, you should fire the company - you really don't want to work there. As much as this is a fun read, unless you are applying for a job at The Onion, don't do it.
The dates in this dataset are "decision" date, not the application date.

In that year, there was a fast forward movement in backlog of India's GC application... Green cards have a per country cap-- at the end of fiscal year, USCIS can use the "unused" GC quota of other countries for the backlogged countries. This is why you see that "priority date" for India stays at a fixed place (e.g., 2005 for EB2 India) for most of the year, and then suddenly moves forward at the end of fiscal year.
Atlas for Android by Layer – Open Source Messaging UI Components
These guys:

https://www.manager-tools.com/all-podcasts?field_content_dom...

have excellent advice for situations like these.
maybe the astu command was a wrapper over docker? or something like it.
An Agnostic Dream of God
C++: What does it mean to be constexpr complete?
When they are brought on a visa, they cannot job hop like they can in India. They are usually stuck in their position for 5 years until they can get green cards.

I would be willing to bet if they gave these workers Green Cards instead of H1-B's, this practice wouldn't be as popular because the worker would be able to compete freely in the market.
This is why I say that the floor for H1-B should be 5X the minimum wage, or 10x the poverty level and a 20% employer tax on top of that. Then there would be a lot less abuse.

If you really cannot find someone domestically to fill a role, there's no reason you should be paying less for such rare skills.
> The problem is that 3D often doesn't tend to age well

We are well past the point where it explicitly ages badly though. HL2 still looks pretty good IMO and that is past a decade old. A few years ago you couldn't say that about many decade old games.

No 3D game released now that doesn't look terrible to start with is going to look hideous against what-ever is modern in a decade's time - it won't look as good of course, there will various bits of flair/realism/detail/what-ever missing somewhere, and the uncanny valley and such effects will be more noticeable, but it'll be perfectly playable and if the game is good the lesser graphics won't make it any less good.

Going back to HL2, if you compare it to Bioshock Infinite you can see the improvements in technology over the years, but it sill just looks less refined, not bad, and the differences don't affect immersion much (I would argue that BSI is more immersive, but that is mainly due to the design improvements (the whole but: art, music, story, ...) and not really due to the graphical improvements on their own).
It sounds terrible, but what's much, much worse is living in India. Sanitation is dreadful, salaries are low, and a corrupt bureaucracy ensures things stay that way.

So the NYT is opposing a practice which makes very poor people much better off, and makes much wealthier people a little worse off - unlike their Indian counterparts, they do not need to jump through hoops to get a visa and work at some other job - all on the basis of where those people were born. Classy.
Cheaper is not a skill.
I'm not sure I buy the argument that foreign tech workers are at any more of a disadvantage. Skilled foreign workers can eventually move back to India and stretch their dollar way further than it would go in the US. Does the average American tech worker have this option?
Excellent way of drawing attention to the subject! Kudos.

Might be interesting to explore the option of adding a beautiful data vis on the home page to capture the user's attention from the get-go. Looking at the sub pages you're obviously skilled enough at creating fascinating visualizations.
Ugh. I can't deny this may happen, and it shouldn't. But at this point, I think a lot of people are aware that there are alternate universes of the H1B system.

One side of it doesn't (deliberately) treat an H1B worker any differently than anyone else. In truth, even in top companies, the limited mobility of the worker may influence things in ways that aren't noticed - if it's harder to leave, it's harder to negotiate, even if you're a top dev at google. But ultimately, these companies more or less hire and treat H1B workers the same as their core workforce.

Then you have this completely alternate universe. A lot of people were pretty shocked (including people who strongly support skilled immigration) to discover that most of the largest users of this program are outsourcing companies. Part of the outrage even came from the pro H1B camp, since people who are offering very high salaries for top talent discover that visas are "all run out", because they have to apply for the same lottery as a company that is paying vastly less (and replacing a US citizen in the process).
Alternately: design your application as a bunch of Service objects with clear APIs that make (the moral equivalent of) RPC requests to one-another. Do this all in the same process. Whenever a Service turns out to need separate scaling, hoist the code for it out (no need to change it) and replace the "null modem" RPC layer between it and the rest of your code with a real socket-based gateway.

Hey! You've just invented Erlang!
Isn't this just straight-up illegal?

The H1B program disallows hiring foreign workers and paying them less than the equivalent rate for US workers. While there may be some debate about whether tech companies find ways to skirt the law, "we are laying off US workers to save money and replacing them with H1B workers" seems to flagrantly violate the law. No?
Swift, meet Objective-C
Thanks, I'm planning on adding few charts
You're going to pay the fees through your rent if you're a tenant, so they're not a differentiator anyway.
People I actually interview will be informed if they aren't hired, of course, but I don't generally email people I don't interview. I guess I could start adding all the email addresses of people I don't hire to a list and then sending them a generic message once a hire is made, but I'm not sure it's realistic to expect the hiring manager at a startup to respond to every single applicant. If you send me an email asking for an update or advice, I'll usually try to provide a useful answer.

That said, I feel bad. If anyone has recommendations for candidate tracking software/services that would make it easier for me to make this happen, I'd be interested.
Is it time to start publicly shaming their mirror partners?

I think it's pretty clear that DHI has no shame, but what about the mirrors?
Every resume just comes into Outlook as a single email and then sorted into a folder based on the subject (hence our need to follow directions). A bit old-school, but it works.

So we would need to reply individually to every single email (i.e. hit reply and cut-paste). 50 emails would probably be 15 minutes of work, but I would rather not waste that time.

The main point is that some of the resumes we get are completely off topic. I wish I could showcase some examples, but alas that would probably get us into trouble. Why should we waste the time in responding to auto posters, people who just attach a resume with no cover letter, or misspell subject lines?

I think our new system would solve all of this, just need time to code it this summer.
I agree that it's a publicity stunt. Most of the agreement will be totally boring to HN type folks--pages and pages of fine-grained calibration of relative tariffs on agricultural products, etc.

The most controversion provisions are probably already known (ISDS, which has been a standard part of trade deals for years), or leaked (the IP chapter).

That said, I'll be interested to see the language on cross-border data flows. One of the reported provisions is that signatories to the TPP will have to treat data from all signatories equally (i.e. no nation-based filtering). Another is that signatories will not be able to require tech companies to house their servers locally to provide services locally. Those both sound like they would be welcomed by tech companies.
I would love to know Paul Graham's reaction to this story. H1Bs are a f-ing scam. There is no shortage of tech talent, there is a shortage of companies willing to pay for said talent.

And stop talking about H1B holders as "immigrants". They are not. H1B is a non-immigrant visa.
I think so. The fact that skilled immigrants actually are skilled probably helps the notion that skilled immigrants don't need help and doesn't deserve any sympathy.

On the other hand, skilled immigrants often seem completely oblivious to the fact that they are completely being discriminated against. Just like blacks who thinks they are being mistreated simply because of their skin color at birth, and women to their gender at birth, skilled immigrants can perfectly adopt their narrative of mistreatment due to birth location. And yet, they don't. They simply take the world for what it is, and try to win it based on merits. Maybe it's because skilled workers go beyond race and gender, they themselves have a hard time identifying themselves with each others.
I think we would all rather see them get green cards instead of visas.

If they had green cards, than they would be free to find better paying jobs or switch jobs. Instead, the H1-B is essentially shackles that ensures an H1-B stays put while they apply for a Green Card. Otherwise they go back to India, that is a BIG disincentive to leave the employer voluntarily ESPECIALLY since they are here by exploiting a loophole as it is.
That "with clear APIs" is where you are going to fall on your face. Hard. And is the point. At the beginning, you often don't know where the actual useful boundaries will be. You probably know where you want them, but ultimately that is just an aspirational point.
The 13th amendment to the US Constitution, which generally abolished slavery, specifically allows for slavery or involuntary servitude in the case of conviction. It is very explicit in saying so.[0]

"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." [emphasis mine]

So yes, involuntary servitude in prison systems is specifically allowed under the US Constitution, and you could even refer to US prisoners as slaves, and that would still be allowed.

Please note this is not a judgement on whether it should be this way or not, just that the US constitution specifically allows this occur.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...
You should submit this to /r/GlobalOffensive as well, if you didn't already.
The entire fork/exec model is bonkers. The most egregious offsense is that it leads to things like Linux's OOM killer. If you ever find yourself writing something called an "OOM killer" you need to stop and seriously reconsider your choices up until that point. Even on the older Unix systems when the fork/exec model was first introduced, it was bloody stupid because there were much less sophisticated memory managers at the time and the performance cost of fork/exec was massive.
I know someone who has consulted for Disney IT a few years ago. Specifically in engineering management. They did not have a very high opinion of the culture and the overall productivity of the organization was abysmal; he considered it a "Dilbert-land" place to work. So in that vein they seem to be doing something completely predictable.

If someone comes to me to outsource me, I would totally help them do it because they will end up with exactly what they deserve. Outsourcing software engineering is the last refuge of incompetent management.
Happened to me. By the time company A managed to get me through the second interview, I was receiving a phone call from the CEO congratulating me for my excellent interview cycle with company B. And, while I'm sure company A would be interesting, I loved my time at company B.

And yes, they'll both remain anonymous.
There was a bit of hyperbole in the beginning of the article about H1B workers, but at the bottom the author adds this:

"But Disney directly employs fewer than 10 H-1B workers, executives said, and has not been prominent in visa lobbying."
What's the deal with the name "Kubernetes"? Does it mean anything, or have some tech significance, or is it really just because it basically means "ruler" in Greek?