Hacker News Reader

moistgorillaon More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

So the UK is basically subsidizing worthless degrees.

I've been living in Georgia for 5 years and I can count the amount of times I've seen or heard someone being blatantly racist on my hand.

moistgorillaon Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees

While somewhat unrelated considering that for new grads google forces them to submit a transcript. I woudln't be surprised if they cared about degrees over experience.

moistgorillaon NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

Except when you are using a library like boost or pandas you know the people behind it know what they are doing. When you are importing from a thousand different package authors any one of those people could be incompetent and/or malicious and screw up your entire code base.

moistgorillaon Chinese Buy One-Third of Vancouver Homes: National Bank Estimate

if the bubble pops it means people are selling.

moistgorillaon Legal marijuana sales forecast to hit $23B in 4 years

I don't know why you wouldn't think he was serious. I think you are ignoring that the vast majority of people that use pot smoke it. In that sense, it's probably worse because most people that smoke weed tend to hold the smoke in their lungs for protracted periods of time which increases the amount of tar that gets in their lungs.

moistgorillaon Hulk Hogan awarded payout over Gawker sex tapes

Thanks for the interesting discussion. Anyway after further thought I came to agree with you because the person in the second situation also had their privacy violated twice when they had the video/images stolen from their device and when it was spread without their consent.

But I think it's pretty self-evident that doing multiple wrong things to do one final wrong thing is worse than just doing the final wrong thing.

moistgorillaon Hulk Hogan awarded payout over Gawker sex tapes

>esp. in the anglo world

oh god, you think it's bad here in the anglo world? Don't look at Korea and Japan then.

moistgorillaon Hulk Hogan awarded payout over Gawker sex tapes

While both are horrendous, I think we can say that having intimate photos of you taken without your knowledge being spread is worth than having photos you took being spread. The reason being that in the first case your rights to privacy were actually violated twice.

moistgorillaon Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

You tell me the data is misrepresented, please tell me how? The data in the charts are accurate and this is from an esteemed economist.

Actually read the article I linked and he discusses how the standard economics literature has completely misrepresented the impact of immigration on native workers.

>Finally, Peri and Yasenov look at workers aged 16-61, and this is a particularly weird data manipulation. Among adult workers, a high school dropout is someone who lacks a high school diploma. But that definition, when applied to teenagers, means that 16, 17, and 18-year-olds who are sophomores, juniors, or seniors in high school are classified as high school dropouts because they do not yet have that diploma. Let me emphasize: All teenagers, whose earnings consist mainly of what they get in part-time and summer jobs, are part of the low-skill group. There are so many high school students who are being lumped with the real high school dropouts that they fatally contaminate the analysis.

Also when people talk about the wealth inequality in the US and how wages have been stagnant for 30 years

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

Look at the chart and notice how in the 1980s immigration begins to ramp up

http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Notice that in 1979 wealth inequality skyrockets, which is logically consistent with the idea that immigration is wealth redistribution from displaced workers to their employers.

edit: look at the graph and compare the gap in wealth inequality. In 1995 when immigration is slown down wealth inequality stays constant. When immigration is ramped up, inequality grows like crazy.

edit: for whatever it's worth I made the connection between wealth inequality and immigration. so try not to use that to say my source is bad

moistgorillaon Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

This is not true. Unchecked immigration is always a negative for native workers. It can be accurately described as wealth redistribution from workers to the companies that employee them.

They cause $515 billion in losses for native workers and $565 billion gains for native businesses. Look at the chart on page 9

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/03-16-16%20Bo...

moistgorillaon Heavy Recruitment of Chinese Students Sows Discord on U.S. Campuses

>My bias is my personal relationship with engineers abroad who are paid fractions of what we are. I am completely aware of my own bias and do not consider my position to be the "universally correct" position. I don't think such a thing exists.

My suggestion may go against your preference since it wont always help your engineer friends but I think dynamic targeted immigration at jobs that are suffering from worker shortage is the solution. What we have now is a disaster though, a long lasting law targeting fields that may not even need the increased supply in workers anymore.

I personally have nothing against immigrants, the people I have met are in general amazing. But I have my own interests to take care of before I can consider others.

Also H-1Bs target IT in general but is the sort of IT that disney laid off really facing a labor shortage?

>What I do find to be self-contradictory, is when many Bay Area tech workers support protectionism for their own interests (immigration) but oppose protectionism that oppose their own interests (housing development).

I'm not from the bay area so I don't know the fine details of the housing market but are you talking about engineers supporting building more apartments? Also if they are acting in a hypocritical way you would be right to call them out on it.

moistgorillaon Heavy Recruitment of Chinese Students Sows Discord on U.S. Campuses

So here is what I don't understand about the supply demand argument in the context of workers. When Disney hired their IT division it was clearly because their was a need and benefit from having them. If paying the wages of that division was prohibitively expensive wouldn't they have gone out of business before they had the opportunity to outsource? So clearly on that front I think we can assume that a company similar to disney would outsource simply for profit.

Now another argument in favor of immigration is that it brings down the costs of good for everybody. Chicken will be cheaper of course when you have people working for 5 dollars an hour to produce it. Well the reality is that only 5 to 6% of the cost of producing chicken comes from wages. I'm sure if we looked at the software industry we would have the same finding.

Now what is the cost of targeting a specific field for immigration? For native workers the loss in wages is half a trillion dollars. The immigrants create a 50 billion dollar surplus. Almost all of the increase in GDP from immigrants comes from their wages at 2,053.8 billion out of the 2,104.0 billion total increase in GDP from immigrants.

So American citizens see a 50 billion dollar net increase in GDP (that is relevant to them) from increased immigration. (page 9 in the link below)

So we are taking half a trillion dollars from targeted workers for a 50 billion dollar increase to the overall population.

The 50 billion dollar surplus seems like a lot thinking as a normal person but 50 billion is nothing when talking about GDP. So from what I see, the only purpose targeted immigration at a specific field serves is to divert money from workers to employers

In the same chart on page 9 it shows that the surplus is received by the native businesses that benefit from the cheaper workers.

also consider this, do we want to create an america where we have a clear divide between workers and owners because we constantly artificially inflate the supply of workers using immigration?

also I think it's a little hypocritical that we aren't bringing in other white collar workers, we should have A-1B for attorneys and B-1Bs for bankers, I'm sure people in other countries will clamor to learn american law and finance for a chance to come here

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/03-16-16%20Bo...

moistgorillaon Heavy Recruitment of Chinese Students Sows Discord on U.S. Campuses

>First, do not accuse HN commenters of shilling for their own economic agenda. There are 18 zillion different forms of message board incivility, and accusations of bad faith commenting are one of the minuscule few than the site bans overtly.

Did you read the parent comment? It generalized that every engineer that opposes immigration is doing it because they are selfish and are only interested in money.

Also you call it that I am claiming they are shilling when I was in reality pointing out that everyone has bias and you should understand your own before criticizing others.

>Second, if you oppose immigration on the grounds that it increases supply, lowers prices, and thus reduces wages for tech workers, do you oppose everything else that does that? Should we educate fewer tech workers? Should we do fewer things to spot underutilized tech talent? Should we have fewer remote-friendly offices, so that we can constrict the market down to only those people who are willing to live in tech hubs? Where do you draw the line?

The line will clearly be arbitrary. We as a country need to decide how much certain jobs are worth and design our immigration policy around it. Unchecked immigration of unskilled labor is killing the lower and middle class and driving wages into the ground. If Americans can't find jobs it's time to ease up on immigration. Likewise if companies like Disney are laying off entire divisions to hire cheaper foreign workers then maybe H-1B visas should be reduced.

I personally think the USG should always prioritize the welfare of Americans (including recent immigrants) over foreign workers.

moistgorillaon Heavy Recruitment of Chinese Students Sows Discord on U.S. Campuses

The only self-interest you seem to be pursuing is the self-interest of business owners. Targeted immigration at a specific field is wealth redistribution from people that compete with immigrants to people that do not (ie, the person that hires you).

So when you talk about that I should be selfless for the workers around the world that want my job, I pretty much know what side of the table you stand on. You are either A. A foreign worker B. an employer or C. have some broader social agenda

So stop criticizing workers for wanting to protect their self interest because everyone has their own agenda they want to forward

edit: changed it to be less rude

moistgorillaon Heavy Recruitment of Chinese Students Sows Discord on U.S. Campuses

>That's the problem, HackerNews comments aren't supposed to be humorous.

I don't know where you got this impression but it's not true

moistgorillaon NSA refused Clinton a secure BlackBerry like Obama, so she used her own

why would this in anyway end the scandal? so because the NSA didn't give in to your request you can go break security protocol and put people's lives at risk?

moistgorillaon George Borjas talks about the impact of high levels of Immigration on US Workers

http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/the-impact-of-high-...

Here is a link to his senate testimony. He begins speaking at ~43:00

One of the most interesting quotes from him is

"Immigration redistributes wealth from people that compete with immigrants to people that don't compete with immigrants"

moistgorillaon Venture Capital’s Answer to High-Priced Housing: Dorms for Grown Ups

I can't wait to live in a tenement with my coworkers and getting my daily rations of soylent and coffee from a dispenser in the wall.

moistgorillaon Lee Sedol Beats AlphaGo in Game 4

Wouldn't a million self play games exacerbate overfitting by learning it's own play style which it initially learned from amateur games? I

moistgorillaon Lee Sedol Beats AlphaGo in Game 4

Honestly, I think that is a meaningless distinction unless AlphaGo actually broke down in the middle of the match

moistgorillaon I stayed in a hotel with Android lightswitches and it was as bad as you'd think

I thought you were supposed to implement it in a basic way then have the investor money pay for other people to think through your project

moistgorillaon AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

Not to downplay how amazing Atlas is but I don't think that it reaches "about as well as a human" yet.

moistgorillaon AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

How about walking and image recognition.

moistgorillaon The connection between modern slavery and ecological disaster

No, we aren't all slaves despite how many edgy kids like to think. We can choose our job or not to work. We can decide not to pay our debts. I guarantee you if these people chose to run away or not pay they would be beaten.

moistgorillaon “I Helped 8 People Die”

When I was 20 I wanted to kill myself. Thank whomever that assisted suicide isn't a socially acceptable practice because I could have easily gone into some clinic and had someone kill me without my family knowing.

moistgorillaon Political Correctness Devours yet Another College, Fighting Over Mini-Sombreros

I read the article and I don't think I got anything wrong, also I think you meant to say "Why is it worse for a white man to play a black man for a light skinned woman to play a darker-skinned woman than?"

And it's worse because of the history of black face and why it was used

moistgorillaon Political Correctness Devours yet Another College, Fighting Over Mini-Sombreros

We've gotten to the point where your history and the oppression your people faced isn't important anymore. What matters is the color of your skin, if your skin tone is darker you receive more institutional oppression. Look at how the black community has turned on Zoe Saldana, who put on makeup and prosthetics to more accurately represent a black historical figure and was torn to shreds because she has internalized racism or some shit.

moistgorillaon Political Correctness Devours yet Another College, Fighting Over Mini-Sombreros

More like extremes ends of the political spectrum always tend to adopt authoritarianism because their demands on humans are too extreme to be enforced any other way.

moistgorillaon Political Correctness Devours yet Another College, Fighting Over Mini-Sombreros

When you live in a world where Donald Trump is "blatant" racism we've gone a little too far.

edit: To expand, there is nothing "blatant" about his racism and from what he says you can't even infer if he is racist or not. What he is clearly doing though is using dog whistle politics to bring in the racist vote and that in itself is a good reason not to vote for him.