skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
... but "we" haven't given government the power to micromanage every aspect of our lives.
Always follow the money.
Just want to share my perspective as an Indian who was in US for 6 years until I came back to India a couple of months back. I am not sure why you think companies can bring folks from other countries (India in your example) at a meagre salary of $25K per year and that too in a managerial capacity. You are directly questioning the work that folks at USCIS do. I was in US on L1B initially, which is different from L1A that you are referring to, and then converted to H1B and I believe I was paid a fair market wage all along. I know there could be exceptions but don't think this can happen at a scale at which you are projecting. Also, I agree that the definition of management can be stretched but don't think the wage parity can escape the authorities.
Unfortunately, this isn't true. In many non-privileged areas you may have supermarkets like c-town, associated, fine-fare, or other non-boutique supermarkets that mostly stock mainstream products from mainstream food producers, as such they usually have very limited selections of organic and non-GMO foods, if any. So unless rules like these are passed, those groups are reliant on companies changing their behaviors based on market trends (such as rice krispy treats removing high fructose corn syrup from their boxed product). Worse, even in those cases most large food producers tend to roll out the "healthier" products specifically to the privileged areas, leaving the non-privileged with "worse" product.
Yet also coming to JS, see https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2015/02/26/the-path-to-p.... Not a reason per-se to do wasm, at least in short term. Longer term, great to do full pthread things in wasm and not pollute JS.
I wonder about allowing drivers to bid on taking customers/routes?
Tough. Many people were idiots when they were younger, and have found themselves saddled with criminal records. Most of these people are not the same person they were when they committed the crime. Yet they still find themselves paying for it. I fail to see why a company should have it any different.
I switched my default search to DDG and haven't thought twice about it.

I have—it's about 80 – 90% accurate for me, which is pretty good but not always perfect. The search-within-site feature (i.e. "search string site:jakeseliger.com" is definitely not as good as Google, though I'm not sure why. Searching within Reddit or HN, for example, is not nearly as good.

That being said the !g button is great: if DDG doesn't work, the move to Google is fast and painless. I've definitely evangelized DDG some to friends.
Well, unless you produce HTML dynamically Googlbot supporting JavaScript doesn't really matter.
Huh? Who signs their checks?
What would happen to you or I if we lied to a federal agent?
Yes, geography is the most racist of the social studies.
There's a dual-screen e-ink phone, http://www.engadget.com/products/yota/yotaphone/2/
Sure, but I'm not sure what conclusion that helps us draw in regards to a contractor/employee distinction.

The former is saying a business cannot exist without employees performing critical functions (I'm not saying that this is de facto truth, but just phrasing the argument).

The latter is saying that without a business, you don't have employees/contractors, which makes sense, but seems obvious and inconsequential.
I read that as meaning all of the Dynamics products - AX, NAV, GP etc. - not just CRM.

Not sure the comparison with Box is that appropriate - Box is more comparable to SharePoint, which is a huge product (on-premise and as part of Office 365).
Holy shit. Greenland is so tiny compared to basically everything else.
And after reading your post, words "trolling" and "easily offended for no reason" come to mind. H1-B visa clearly stipulates that no American workers can be displaced in order to hire H1-B workers. That's the law. If a company breaks the law, an appropriate punishment would be to bar that company from hiring H1-B visa workers again, at least temporarily - just like you take away the driver licence of someone who is caught driving while drunk.
The Profiles You'll Never Read in a Magazine Are Happening on Instagram
But the schedule is forced by their employer. They don't start and stop working whenever they feel like it.
This study didn't show that. They showed that toxins that are injected into the brain clear faster during sleep, but not that the brain is actually clearing anything endogenous. Sounds like a technicality but the claims were overblown based on their data.
We have one as well. However, we also don't have any kind of maximum work week, so many of these people who come over for companies like Tata find themselves working insane amounts of hours, and have no chance at raises, bonuses, or promotions. So they'll be working for 5 years at the same rate.
Not sure that it helps, but the one local to me is Massachusetts, USA, and they describe it as "Suffolk (Boston)," where Suffolk is the county name. No one would use that in day-to-day talk… maybe they have some more or semi-official name of a "region" in your area?
We teach Hacking Access Denied is for being hackers. For those who are new to it
Why? User data is only one way to measure traffic. There are others.
List of Citizen Science Projects
This is Disney/ABC which is canceling the tech worker layoffs, which impacted 35 workers. Looks like the Disney World story which resulted in over 250 layoffs to bring in H1-B workers hasn't changed.
Taxi company scale versus the scale Uber is attempting are completely different situations.
Project Thor Will Deliver First True Hybrid IronWorker Solution
> Would you mind sharing how you go about making these?

Spend a month or two reading the appropriate books about cartography, complex analysis, and approximation theory, and then write some Matlab code. :-)
EU Web Host Ruled Liable for Users' Comments–Even Though It Didn't Read Them
Later in the article:

"And eventually, Philae will hopefully get sufficient power in its battery to drill into the comet and analyse its make-up."

Although claiming it was never a failure is pretty laughable.
Slowly, gradually, they will start doing that. The trade off for them is too much. Previously they claimed they don't read your personal emails like Google does. They soon realized they were losing big customer base because of people preferring Google Now over the pretty useless Siri. Now they have announced Siri Proactive, but for offering those features it has to read your personal emails. Now they claim they do read emails, but everything will stay on their phone. On the whole, users want intelligent features, and if Apple doesn't give it to them, they're going to go away.
Perhaps that particular machine did (I suspect you're mistaken though), but that is not the norm. Mutilating coins is not illegal in the United States.
Oh I agree, completely -- silent failures can confuse even experienced programmers. But it's very hard to get to the higher-level reasoning, i.e. does this code actually work...if you are continually tripping up on syntax. Moreover, a failure to understand the implications of the syntax can limit your ability to code.

For example, for beginners, it is not immediately evident that the two following code snippets are equivalent:

a = "Hello world"
b = a.lower()
print(b)

and:

print("Hello world".lower())

This isn't just a problem of recognizing the simple logic...but that when you're new to code, it takes more mental energy -- at first -- to pick apart the symbols and process them efficiently. And that mental energy is largely from the same reservoir that is used to process the higher-level concepts.
I didn't sling an accusation, I said "I suspect there could be some small amount of bias". If I were accusing, I would have said "this person is biased.". Despite what you say, I still think the suspicion is valid.
The only way out of this is for everyone to stand up and say they won't train their replacements, even if it means losing their severance. That's the only way. Sounds like....unions?
What's wasm's optimization story? Is there an optimizing JIT running on wasm code, or is the code supposed to already be optimized by the AOT compiler (in which case, wasm is less appropriate as a target for languages with very dynamic dispatch, which should still compile to JavaScript)?

EDIT:

I see an optimizing JIT is planned for future versions: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FutureFeat... while the MVP is primarily meant to serve as a target for C/C++.
That may be, but that doesn't mean it was useless to halt that abuse of the process.
Pepper was floated on plugin-futures@mozilla.org a long time ago, roc replied advocating not reinventing web APIs:

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-futures/2010-April...

The collaborative aspect is important, but one side of a coin whose other side is polyfillability. Nick Bray of the PNaCl team stubbed out Pepper.js more recently, and JS finally got some SIMD and threads love. It's all converging, finally. Yay!
JavaScript the Good Parts shouldn't be the recommended book anymore (and I think even Crockford himself said something along that line in one of his newer videos, couldn't find it though... it's been a while)
7. If you get into an accident, you're screwing your passenger(s).

Yes, the valuable you're transporting is another person's life, and you're doing it in such a way that circumvent all regulatory safeguards to protect that.

Don't make Uber out to be selfish and greedy when you're doing the same.
A Python Lib for Consuming RouteSMS' API
https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com
I fail to see how this screws them. The only people it screws are companies like Tata, who's entire business model relies on importing cheap labor, and squeezing as much as possible out of them before discarding their withered husks back to India.

Cut those people out, and let companies that will actually treat them as human beings employ them.
Currently, it seems only the first three plus phishing/malware protection are enabled by default. The phishing/malware protection is also used by Firefox's "Safe Browsing" feature: Firefox uses a local blocklist to check for potentially malicious sites, so you only connect to Google to update the blocklist and double-check when you actually run into a site on the blocklist; Chrome does the same.

See: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...

Prefetch makes local predictions and connects to any site, not Google in particular AFAIK.

The omnibar prediction service uses your default search engine, so Google is only involved if you've left it as such.

So if you take the obvious steps of changing your search engine and signing out of Google, that leaves only the navigation error service. As with safe browsing, this appears to send URLs to Google only if certain local conditions are met.
For people interested in the difference between taking an architectural license vs. using standard, off-the-shelf IP, have a look at this article too: http://www.alexvoica.com/when-soc-met-ip/
>They also carry salary parity requirements

This is easily gamed by creating "new" positions with trivially different responsibilities than the old positions you want to get rid of. Now you don't have an established salary history to work with. That's on top of having H1B's by the shorthairs because its so difficult for them to switch jobs, thus the 60+ workweek the domestic workers rightfully balked at is achievable by cost-cutting managers.

That's on top of what Disney did, which was just outsource an entire department to a provider, which side-steps all the paltry protections in the H1B program.

>The majority of H1-B recipients these days are foreign nationals who attended American universities, often with masters degrees. Those are the kinds of foreign nationals we want participating in the US economy.

Frankly, in IT/CS a lot of higher degrees are little more than adult daycare. If you can't figure out how to code via a 4 year degree then another 2 ain't helping you. Even if Disney got MS holders because their workforce needed MS's for some weird reason, which sounds highly questionable to me, some nerds straight out of school aren't going to do a good job running operations with zero professional experience and 10 hours of training from the previous guy. Its clear they did this not for better outcomes but for cost savings.

Its likely an H1B has an undergrad degree for a foreign university that's little more than a diploma mill anyway.

Its hilarious that we bemoan the lack of people, especially women, in STEM, when many STEM jobs can be eliminated with the blessing of the federal government via whats essentially bought and paid-for legislation by large companies looking to cut IT costs. No wonder law school enrollments and finance higher ed degrees have been so high. The smart guys, and women in general apparently, know tech is a ripoff precisely because of shit like H1B's stealing their jobs. Lets stop excusing the H1B program. Its designed to take American jobs from Americans and everyone knows it.
You can have APIs without a runtime. For instance, the WebAssembly implementation should have a function to spawn a new thread given a function pointer. That should result in a real OS thread running in the same address space. Any further semantics beyond that would be up to the software targeting WebAssembly.
Thousands of premade !bangs that I would have to memorize, rather than create myself (which makes memorization much easier)

Although pointless, it's fun to use my keyword "ddg" to use their bang syntax to search another site. Even if I already have that site as its own keyword.

ie:

There is no difference between me searching "y this searches youtube" and "ddg !y this also searches youtube" or having to actually visit ddg to search Youtube. There's no reason for me to not just use a feature already built into my browser.
Uber drivers to be considered employees and not contractors
I've got a version 1 Kindle Paperwhite, and you can tap the screen to turn a page. That's what I do.

Random ramble time... (because this aspect of the Kindle Paperwhite annoys me every time I think about it)

The tapping bit is fine, so reading books is no problem, but to be honest, in general, the touch UI is no more than resoundingly adequate. The tapping is fine, and the swiping works, but it doesn't feel as nice as it does on iOS. For me, swiping works best when the UI updates pretty much instantly as your finger moves (e.g., iOS, Android). The Kindle, on the other hand, doesn't do anything until your swipe is finished and the action has been registered. Feels like somebody who's never used an iPad read was given a one-sentence summary of what swiping was, and then wrote some code to do what they imagined. (Maybe they were worried about the screen going all blurry? Well, that's fair enough. But technical reasons won't make the touch UI suddenly brilliant.)

This makes the experimental web browser rather hard to use - a shame, as this could have been such a great feature! - and the book list a bit annoying.

But, still, compared to the non-Paperwhite equivalent, it has a backlight, and it's a bit smaller. And there's never anything wrong with a few more pixels. So overall, I don't mind, and the Kindle Paperwhite gets a thumbs up. It would still have been improved by some more UX work and/or a couple of physical inputs. I think this is what annoys me about it so much - the device is good, but it could have been better, and it's really obvious.

Ramble over. Phew! Sorry about that.
Yes; in a way it's laundering by placing a 3rd party in between to achieve the outcome, but the contracting shop could not complete or offer such savings without leveraging the H1-B system. Remember you can't replace employees with contractors, and outsourcing is suppose to be taking your service and transitioning it to specialized experts, so leveraging outsourcing to do layoffs, to cheap staff new to the field and training them is walking a line. Also instead of repositioning your staff into the new 70+ positions, forcing them to leave then re-submit is poor leadership, and it forced them to renegotiate new lower salaries.
Fortunately, I wasn't desperate, so I had the advantage of being able to walk away. And I agree with you - I think that ultimately I dodged a bullet.

It's a shame, though - I think I would have had a lot of fun working there and believe I would have made good contributions to the team. I'm disappointed, but I consider it their loss. Oh well.
There is already an mruby port to the web using emscripten. When emscripten targets wasm, that port will get that for free.
How about we simply outlaw any conditions on severance?
> What happens when increasing automation leads us to permanent structural unemployment?

A social safety net funded by a tax on automation.

> I think arguing about the minimum wage is ''fighting the last war'' and not facing the real problems in the future that will force societies to evolve to survive.

We agree here. The real problem is, how will we equitably distribute productivity as automation continues to work itself up the stack? Allow the owners of automation and software to soak up the majority of income? Probably not. It'll either be basic income or guillotines.
Researchers at Audi are making synthetic diesel fuel using only water and air. Miracle? No. Science.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/28/technology/audi-diesel-air-w...
As a Windows Media Center user, I beg to differ.
It means they want a paycheck, and Uber will give them one. People driving for Uber are generally not particularly well off (they are not in poverty either, but they are not in a position to debate with employers). That means Uber is taking advantage of them, in precisely the same dynamic as factory workers and business magnates around the turn of the 20th century. What you're advocating is to REVERSE a full 100 years of progress in the field of labor rights. Why exactly is this good? So that startups can keep 'disrupting'?
If anything, this is an argument to stop giving people life sentences, not for giving companies "permanent" punishments. Basf, Siemens, Bayer - all used to work for the Nazis and used labor from concentration camps. Yet you can't possibly say that these companies are the same as they were 70 years ago.
That is actually much closer than I expected it to be.

> Prices Including Rent in Shenzhen are 36.96% lower than in Los Angeles.

To compare,

> Prices Including Rent in Los Angeles, CA are 36.34% lower than in Zurich.
Nokia lost 17 million euros a day it's market value while Elop was CEO of Nokia. I guess he is going down in the history as one of the worst CEO's. Though, some say he wasn't a mole but was hired to sinking ship but somehow it is hard for me to believe from his actions.
Google Maps data is better right now, no question, but I've been using Apple Maps in iOS recently because of performance. I've found that the Google Maps app is frequently unresponsive and often takes significantly longer to load data, which is particularly noticeable when I have a less reliable cellular data connection.

Has anyone else noticed this difference between the two apps?
Why is tipping the baseline expectation? I personally use Uber explicitly to avoid tipping.
> A backlight without blue light, for reading at night without screwing up sleep cycles

This is much needed.

The Marvin e-reading app on iOS can change the screen color temperature to adjust the blue level, which helps with bedtime reading.
This sometimes works, but I've found quite a lot of cases where it doesn't. The two most frequent culprits for me:

1) Smaller index. Some stuff just seems not to be in DDG at all. Even after finding a page I'm looking for via !g, I'll go back and try to see whether I could've gotten DDG to return it with some more specific search term (even verbatim phrases from the page) with no luck.

2) Languages other than English. The Google/DDG search quality gap is much, much larger in Greek than in English, for example.
Even better, just npm install -g babel once on any machine you use. Then it's ready for any and every .js file.
Nice, but I'm still waiting for 64-bit integer arithmetic!

For our use case, what I like about this is that we can continue to use emscripten and the technology will come to us, rather than requiring app developers to invest in yet another technology (our switchover from NaCl to emscripten was very time consuming!)
I agree. I don't use Uber for the price, as much as the convenience.
Love that book.

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;

Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'

Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;

Man got to tell himself he understand.”
djb's software is pretty low-quality for very many metrics of "quality". Lots of it is not elegantly interoperable with existing UNIX systems, because he has his own idea of how UNIX systems should work. There's the entire qmail backscatter thing. There are pieces of crypto code written in a custom assembler. Curve25519 has its own reimplementation from Chrome's Adam Langley, and all of NaCl its own repackaging in the form of the libsodium project, because the official distributions are difficult to use. NaCl has been promising certain features in the "next release" for years (notably Ed25519 signatures), but no release has been seen. All the downloads are over plaintext HTTP with no cryptographic signatures: I've always interpreted this as implying that if you're not qualified to audit the entire tarball you downloaded, the software isn't for you.

None of this is to claim that he's a bad cryptographer, or even a bad software engineer. But pure code output is far from the only important metric for software. GitHub makes it easy to do release engineering well, or to let other people help you with that if it's not your forte. (libsodium, for instance, is on GitHub.)
Thoughts Google I/O's diversity, most promising ideas and disappointments
But with Uber/Lyft, there's a lot more ingenuity involved in deciding when, where and how to work. It's not just a simple question of working longer hours.
He will always be vilified, but the truth is that Nokia was on the way out anyway, no matter who was in charge.
Thank you arca_vorago!

First - I am saddened that a line of questioning could be deemed dangerous. So much for our 'progress'.

> The main mistake though is to think they are all in on it or even understand it.

I hope I have not misunderstood but what you've said really confirms to me that what we see is roughly emergent from individual actors (consider a group an actor as well) seeking out their own interests. Of course it makes obvious sense that people of like status/wealth know closely other people of similar status/wealth. This can only lead to collusion the same way my close friends and I could be seen to collude in relation to our, admittedly, far smaller sphere of influence.

In general I agree with what you've said about Hanlon's razor but I also feel it is a useful approach simply as an exercise. Brute force remains a useful way to find the truth.

Thanks again for your response! I truly appreciate being able to discuss a topic like this without it devolving ala. most reddit boards etc.
They will do tips.
They will do a time sensitive auction.
They will set a minimum bid (by the customer).
Building with Node.js at Netflix
Machine Learning Open House (NYC)
The next frontier of civic tech
Here you go. Clinical study performed at the University of Minnesota on the effects of reduced calorie intake. At least those men did lose weight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experimen...

>> None of the claims you just made are correct.

Must be fun to be able to ignore everything everyone says unless they did a Phd on the subject, while never actually presenting any arguments yourself.
At some point, Uber promised to pay a minimal hourly wage so if there were no passengers requesting rides, drivers would still make (a bit of) money. The resulting scam was to sign in as a driver, then just sit on your couch, skipping fares while still making a non-zero amount of money.

When Uber caught on, they added the penalty.