skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to job hunt in SV on a tourist visa?
Using a throwaway for anonymity.

I'll be in the Bay Area in a few weeks on the ESTA tourist visa. The amount of time I can stay there is flexible.

While there I'd like to investigate job opportunities. I'm most interested in working at a startup or a company on the smaller end of mid-size, 150 people maximum say. I'm a full stack guy, mainly Java and JS (both Node and frontend, proficient with React).

If I was hired, I would need to apply for a working visa, so I'd be limited to companies willing to go through this process. From job listings it's often not stated if they are, and so direct applications might be fairly fruitless if a high percentage of companies won't. I suspect the majority of startups won't, for example.

What are some effective ways for setting up interviews for somebody in my situation? For example are there recruiters anyone can recommend who specialise or are particularly good for foreign candidates who don't yet have a working visa?

By the way, I have checked and am almost certain that applying for jobs, and attending interviews, is legal on an ESTA visa, so long as no actual work is done. If you then get a job, you must leave the US before applying for a working visa to re-enter and start the job.
Except a physical meeting involves getting up from your desk, going somewhere, waiting around for everybody else to get there, having whatever meeting you're supposed to be having, hopefully without anyone taking it off the rails into some unrelated tangent, winding down the meeting, then going back to your desk. There's a lot of wasted time there, and I get very irritated by other people wasting my time.

Then there's the fact that nobody ever records the audio of in-person meetings, and almost never actually takes minutes or notes of what was decided, so the only record of it is the progressively hazy memories of the participants. So then you have another meeting next week to rehash the shit you just went over.
This is an amazing idea. My parents watch Korean (or Asian in general) drama shows all the time, that shit isn't available in Sweden or Netflix.

Nothing that says they won't enjoy content from Africa!
I hope you add subtitle support for multiple languages, and make it community driven.
yeah but I don't have business connections looking me up on facebook. People have very different usage of Facebok.

They look me up on Linkedin and I can see who they are and what they have done and who they know and search for relevant stuff.

I meet a lot of investors and in general people from all over the world and have been very happy with LinkedIn personally. It's the least intrusive social network I know off.
Not much additionally to add from the previous comment except that I thought a lot of the recruitment stuff I got from LinkedIn was fake until a friend got a pretty amazing job through a LinkedIn found recruiter.

I have replied to a few recruiters and while I haven't changed companies, it is the equivelent of head hunters for our generation and some of them have been very, very tempting offers.
Getting a blank page.
Electrolaser
Thats actually a very good idea. Here in Germany credit-reporting is done from one central institution called the Schufa and their methods of scoring as well as their practices are completely intransparent and can sometimes have quite a big impact on peoples lives (about even the most basic things like being able to have a cell phone contract or renting a flat) without any alternative for both creditors and debitors. This area could really benefit from some innovation.
The ESA's New Head Just Dropped a Proposal to Build a Village on the Moon
We always delve into ridiculous analogies on this site for some reason when it comes to this case, trying to somehow justify that someone, knowingly, was accessing a system they, again knowingly, knew they should not have been accessing.

Status codes, locks, no locks, these silly analogies aren't really useful. Proving intent is.
It's pretty useful for individuals so long as you make adjustments for people who exercise every day (ie, very few people) or people over about 6'5" (again, not many people) and very obese people (where it tends to under-estimate obesity).
I know someone with multiple endorsements for "General Awesomeness". To be fair, he actually deserves those. But yes, not exactly a "skill".
Nowhere will you find me arguing that. In fact, this case was already captured in my comment. What you won't find is a single core desktop CPU that has the ability to run several threads concurrently well. The performance will necessarily decrease drastically as you add more concurrent threads.

There is a reason dual core has been standard for awhile. The performance of a single core on a multi-tasking machine is deplorable compared to a machine with additional cores.
Basically it is how all modern languages would be if Lisp Machines haven't died.

Seeing anyone using Mathematica looks quite similar back in the day to the way Lisp Machines, Interlisp-D and also Smalltalk were being used, by those lucky enough to have access to such systems.

So in experience, it is quite close to Lisp, even if it uses another syntax.
> The law does not have to abide by the law, only has to appear to do so.

Given that weev's conviction was overturned for the prosecution not abiding by the law, while that may be true in some abstract sense, it doesn't seem particularly relevant to weev's case.
Eh, as long as it's on the other side of a hardware based IO-MMU, I'm not super concerned.
Hack day report: Using Amazon Machine Learning to predict trolling
I really like these diagrams, as an answer to your question: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

You can't predict breakthroughs. A scientist might spend their entire career following their research to a dead end. That's not a failure, in my opinion. It just shows how much we already know, and I think we should honour those scientists just as much as the lucky ones.
So, there are certainly valid questions about whether one can build a "Netflix-of-$NICHE", but I want to point to a lovely little example named Crunchyroll.

You can definitely succeed in a niche, provided you have some factors in your favor:

1. An audience that is dedicated to the content you serve

2. The ability to focus on the niche provides you a greater library than broader competitors have

3. The ability to market yourself in such a way that you build reputation with the core audience

The end result is you can create a product that other people will pass up competing offerings for that might have broader appeal - or will simply subscribe to both.

Netflix used to be the go-to for Anime for a long period of time. However, Crunchyroll was able to provide a much more massive library of anime on-demand and catered to the dedicated fanbase.
Why I won't be going to OSCON this year
Awesome and Marvelous AMAs
Sure, hitting someone stopped is almost always the legal fault of the person rear-ending.

But that doesn't mean that Google is somehow off the hook. Google could invent a car that never causes crashes, but yet is still more dangerous than a human driver based on the inability to avoid crashes that humans easily avoid.

And, really it isn't hard to envision such a car being built. If it randomly hits the breaks to avoid phantom sensor readings, then the cars might be stopping in unexpected places an order of magnitude worse than a normal driver.

I'm sure driverless cars will eventually be safer than human, but I'm not convinced they will be.
+1 for DataTau, I didn't know about that.

http://www.datatau.com/

Check out this too: http://www.pyquantnews.com/
Telecom-- a government granted tri-opoly. The FCC limits the number of organizations who can license spectrum in a given metro area.

Airlines-- government regulated, airports are local government monopolies and they limit competition.

Microsoft- Not a monopoly in any line of business

I have been waiting for a long time for someone to come up with an example of an actual natural monopoly that exercises monopoly pricing power. In every case so far, either they had competition, or government is the one that was limiting competition in the first place, usually by regulation.
If you can't see value in LinkedIn you're either not looking or not in business. A global database of resumes/CVs is obviously extremely valuable.
And also on - http://hackr.io
Ops, flipped it. If the price moves up you sell, if the price moves down you buy.

The reason this is not 'optimal' is if the price moves up to far you have sold every stock and run out, also you need a reserve to handle the price moving close to zero and if the stock goes bust you now own a lot of worthless stock.

PS: So, you will make money on a bounded random walk, but potentially far less money than holding the stock. In the end all this does is trade unbound potential gains for a finite income stream. Which is what all algo provide there effectively choosing which game to play in Vegas or shifting risk around etc.
Blocking subreddits from /r/all is basically essential for a decent reddit experience and is only available with RES or reddit gold.
The PowerVR guys appear to be running a full RTOS w/ memory protection on their GPU FWIW.
News for the anti-sitting gurus: standing up all day is not good for you either
Octopodes, not Octopi. Octopuses if you must.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Etymology_and_pluraliz...
Why not split the difference, go for a mid to late stage startup? If you don’t really know the founding team of an early stage startup and don’t have experience, it’s tough to assess the risk regarding the team, the product, and the market. If they’re hiring you out of college, they may be looking for cheap labor. A mid to late stage startup likely has product and market solved, and is focused on growth. You will still have an impact, likely learn from top notch people, and see what success looks like. Then you can move smaller or bigger as you choose depending upon what you want.
FWIW, I think JS swallows all async errors regardless of whether you use .catch(). If the error is thrown async, you can't catch it. Right?
Yes, satellites are a problem. However they transmit in narrow frequency windows so you deal with this by simply notching out those frequency channels. You do need to make sure that there isn't so much power in the intereference that it does nasty things like send amplifiers into compression.

(source: I am a radio astronomer)
How can philosophy make itself more relevant?
Where is this setting located? I'm looking for it to see if I've done that and can't seem to find anything about access to Gmail contacts.
Data Elixir #44: Linear Algebra with Python. Easy Neural Net. Sports with R. Pluto
Menstrual Man shares story
The Google self driving car already relies on being fed a detailed map of everywhere it's going to drive. Adding things like fire lanes and parking restrictions to that should be relatively easy.
That depends, how do you quantify progress or rate of progress in physics? To compare directly to technology, Moore's law seems to indicate a accelerating pace of technology. On the other hand looking back to the 90ies progress in computer games, where you could expect a never seen before breakthrough each year, it seems that computers have hit a point of diminishing returns and probably the important metric is something like the log of computing power or something similar. So quantifying rate of progress is not well defined and it seems that it is possible to argue that the rate of progress has slowed down, even for computing power. The counter example would be digital video, where there was very little progress, for the average user, until divX and since the early two thousands, we went from cut scenes at 320x240, to Youtube and 4K video.

Putting the measurement problems aside, progress in physics seems to be a lot less smooth and the big jump occurred in the first three decades of the last century with the discovery of special relativity and quantum mechanics plus the ongoing project of formalizing physics. That one was a complete paradigm shift towards mathematical models and towards an entirely different picture of reality. Since then the development of quantum field theories is basically just using the same trick as for quantum mechanics. ( Not trying to belittle the development of QFT, that is one of the monumental achievements of the human mind, it just pales in comparison to the development of QM. ) So, in this view the next big jump may be just around the corner or not possible for a human brain, but we will only know the answer after progress happened. ( I should cite one of the famous philosophers of science here, unfortunately I forgot which one.)

As an example, string theory is currently not even wrong, because we can not build the known experiments that would enable us to test string theory. However a lot of brain power and ink was expended on its development over the last thirty years, and we simply do not have a good idea if it was worthwhile. If someone suggests a experiment that can distinguish between string theory and other models of quantum gravity, and if a string theory passes this test, then it was probably worthwhile to spend all that effort.

In conclusion, I would argue that the question is ill defined and runs furthermore in epistemological problems, that is even if we would find a good definition we can not really know the answer. However, I am actually quite optimistic that a breakthrough is just around the corner. For example, I think that the connection of information theory and physics is not really understood, but concepts like entropy and information seem to crop up everywhere one looks.
Ripping music and films illegal again in UK after High Court overturns new law
This series of blog posts from Mike Farnsworth (a rendering fanatic and blender contributer) goes over how to create a "modern" ray tracer from scratch. Highly reccomended:

http://renderspud.blogspot.com/2012/04/basic-ray-tracer-stag...
Completely subjective opinion from being avid HN user it would be Functional Programming, React Flavours, JS Frameworks with a sprinkle of ML.
I have to say however, that apart from the ongoing dilution of the JS ecosystem it would feel like a very good development to leaner, less entangled, data-driven architectures with respect to new mongo-core era.
Done, and gets things smart – 2008
Also when you need change, all of a sudden they have $0 on them.
Fluentd v0.12.14 has been released
Startup for a few reasons, with an assumption you aren't married with kids.

1. You will never have the freedom you have when you are young. Once you are more established with family, kids etc it is harder to take risks, not impossible just harder.

2. You will learn more good and bad in a year at a startup then 3-4 years at an Enterprise. You will be forced to grow and do things you didn't know you could do, but you can.

3. Even with the cons, startups are one hell of a fun ride. Yes, at times it will suck, but better to have some excitement then be bored after your first 6 months at an enterprise job.

Now, the other side of that is. Enterprises can still teach you a lot and let you grow some while giving you greater stability, it just takes longer. You will also get to see how screwy corporate cultures can be and some good parts too. There are just things about working in and around Enterprises that you can really only learn well by being inside and seeing the beast.

If you want an easy life, and to retire fairly young in a more "guaranteed" way, you will be better off taking an Enterprise job, working 20-25 years and saving well. You'll be well compensated, can save and invest well to retire quite comfortably. Not to mention you will rarely be working crazy hours and can take your vacation regularly etc. Yes it will involve stress, but IMO 75% of the stress is the bureaucracy you have to learn to navigate.

In the end no one can tell you the best choice. My brother and I both came from the same entrepreneurial family and I went on my own after some experience in Enterprise businesses and he stayed in the Enterprise space.
Since both this and my parent post on JavaScript being compiled were downvoted without comment I can only make the assumption this is because someone came along who believes this is not the case.

So first I will link out to this StackExchange doc that does a pretty good job of describing this.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/138521/is-jav...

The JavaScript specification says nothing about the language being interpreted or compiled. Today; most current versions of major browsers use a just in time compiler to handle JavaScript. V8 (Chrome & Nodejs), SpiderMonkey (Firefox), Chakra (InternetExplorer), Carakan (Opera), JavaScriptCore(Webkit/Safari)

For more information take a look at the Wiki entry for EcmaScript engines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ECMAScript_engines
Full-on, spot-on, and a huge "hell-Yeah."
I've said it before and I'll say it again, we need to build a really big damn space ship.
(buildtheenterprise.org)
I definitely see the benefit, because I can ignore all other posts. But when the topic or thread gets big, it just gets overwhelming for me. But I guess that can be the case either way.
This is why I mentioned Occupy, they had the people in place to make a meaningful impact. They were able to come out in force so quickly because of the free flow of ideas and information. It may have been that quickness that kept them from forming a cohesive strategy for achieving their ends, but that could be a whole 'nother article in itself.
“an analytics company masquerading as a games company.”

I'm wondering if that was responsible for it's downfall? I get that gaming is somewhat of a hit-driven business but not nearly like, say, movies. Incumbents have humongous distribution advantages. I'm amazed that Zynga relinquished its commanding position so thoroughly and so rapidly.
That's the total opposite of what the car should do if it knows it's going to be rear ended. It should lock the brakes and tension the seat belts.
The important question is what you're trying to define. Are you trying to define existing system or some your ideal?

If you're trying to define existing system, I would disagree that exchange is voluntary here, unless you play with words and say people are free to die of hunger. (Also it's not clear what "private ownership of labor" means.)

If you're as capitalism designating some other ideal system (based on your values), for example anarchocapitalism, you should be aware that these always failed too, sometimes even more horribly than attempts for communism. But then anyway, why would you attempt to call this ideal "capitalism"?

This is actually the basic contradiction in your thinking. You say "the system we have is not really a capitalism", so the problems (that many people see) are not problems of capitalism. But then why do you want to call it capitalism, if not as the reference to what we have today?
One of my good friends is a veteran of the USMC, who served two tours in Afghanistan. While deployed, he sustained injuries to his hip and brain. As a result, his mobility is impaired, and he has lost half of his field of vision.

Until his town succumbed to the taxi lobby and banned ridesharing, he was able to run errands, get groceries, and take care of himself. Now, he is counting down the days in captivity, waiting until he can once again be self-sufficient thanks to autonomous vehicles. Keep up the great work, Google et al, and let's hope that day comes soon :)
Since Siri is now incorporating Shazam it might be possible. Otherwise the iOS watchdog would kill the listening App the sooner the later so it would not be possible without use of private API/Support from Apple. Also keep in mind that when recording apps in iOS get the red indicator bar on top of the app. Much more likely that you have been ML'd
Since most of the comments are critical, I'll say: thank you for the awesome writeup! I agree this is more complex than HA PG setups I've done in the past, but I'm thrilled to have another perspective. Also doing a thorough writeup like this takes time, and a lot of people would rather jump back into building the next thing. It's a great contribution!

I agree with pilif that you almost always want to failover the db manually.

I agree with teraflop that just because etcd gives strong guarantees, that doesn't mean your application logic built on top of etcd primitives shares them. So you have to be careful about your reasoning there.

I'm curious if you're doing anything to mitigate haproxy being a single point of failure?

One thing I've had to fix in other people's HA PG setups is ease of getting back to HA after a failover. You lose the master and promote the slave, and now you've just got a master. Ideally it should be easy to just launch another db instance and everyone keeps going. I think this setup achieves that, and that's great!
> I don't get how Netflix-of-$NICHE can be a long term business. It seems that once $NICHE-stream demonstrates sufficient demand, Netflix can simply license the same content and provide customers with a superset of the content that $NICHE-stream provides.

The marginal value of content with a strong, dedicated, but niche following to Netflix -- whose branding is mainstream and not targeted to that niche -- may be less than it is to a provider specialized in targeting that niche, which means that the licensing fee Netflix could afford to pay is less.

Further, your argument presupposes that all streaming licenses are non-exclusive. That is, rather decidedly, not the case. If someone else secures an exclusive license, Netflix cannot license the same content and provide customers with a superset of what the niche provider offers.

> It's also unclear to me that Netflix is even lacking in this specific niche.

It probably isn't compared to any major provider that a consumer is going to find today. OTOH, it could be in the future, especially if a more targeted competitor exists that starts outbidding Netflix for exclusive licenses for content in that niche.
Compared to the logic involved in actually driving down the road safely these are all easy problems to solve.

But realistically they are problems that won't be had, because in the near future (and probably in the far future as well) most people aren't going to buy their own personal self driving car because not only are they expensive, but it is pointless to have a personal car when it is way more convenient to offload responsibility for the car ownership to someone else.

Instead they will use an app to summon an automated taxi car owned by a corporate entity (Google, Uber, etc), and when they are at their destination that car isn't going to park, it is going to be off to pick up another passenger.

The car owner will have designated secure parking lots for overflow cars that aren't needed out on the roads during non peak hours. The cars would return to that designated lot when not needed.
Implementing the THX Deep Note Sound with AudioKit [video]
You can always transfer money from point A to point B, the only difference is how costly and transparent that transaction is is. Banning private contributions increases the cost but decreases the transparency.
But then they should have been allowed the benefits of that classification, which they were explicitly denied.
There's no contradiction between saying "Consider other people's advice carefully before acting upon it" and "That said...here's my advice."

"Think" is probably a pretty good way of summing it up.
This is a substantive post, but the title is too baity for HN, so we've changed it to something neutral. Happy to change it again if anyone suggests a better one.
Oh, yes, that's fine. Although by that point you've kind of already spent the time, so it's not going to gain you much by throwing it out.
And just a few hours after I posted this I got into a car accident and hit my head. FML