tsycho

You are not wrong. It is dehumanizing (for Indians in particular), and downright dystopian for some.

However, people still go for it because they have significantly better career and financial prospects taking a tech job on a H1 in the US, in comparison to their home countries. It's a positive expected value bet, even if xx% of people end up with a negative outcome.

Further, many people aren't aware of the negative outcomes or come from rich families who can withstand it. While others hope that even if they don't get the H1, they can at least land a good job with a neutral outcome back in their home country or in Canada/UK.

How can we help?

I really really hope you are right.

Unpopular opinion (on HN at least): A Chromebook, under locked down mode to prevent installing any plugins, is best for non-tech savvy, casual internet users.

I know HN hates Facebook (I don't like them either), but isn't a simpler explanation that:

A lot of people are working from home, so there's less use of office facilities so there's less janitorial work needed, and whoever Facebook contracts this cleaning work to, decided to cut some staff.

I just don't see Facebook's savings as significant enough for Zuck to think about this.

Are you planning to provide native iOS/Android APIs? Any ETA if yes?

Underrated comment. Not sure if roschdal@ intended it this way, but I interpreted it in a dark way.

Old news, not sure why it's on HN now. That said, I remember being very surprised how little flak Microsoft got for such blatant cheating imo. Even this article is surprisingly being nice to Microsoft....I guess they wanted to retain their access to Bing execs, and didn't want to criticize them too harshly.

I want a two-person local network game to play with my son (let's say 6-10yr age range). The game play should explicitly have a parent-player and kid-player with different difficulty of controls and types of actions. I think collaborative games will likely work better, but competitive might be fine too if it allows for different skill adjustments.

Just make the game fun for both of us, I'll play almost any genre (except violence).

This one annoys me a lot, and I blame Amazon. They seem to think that my purchase data is a monopoly for them to sell me ads on. And to be anti competitive, they have completely screwed up the UX for customers.

"Hi, it's Amazon. We have shipped your order #udid. But you need to sign in to the app on your phone, and click through multiple screens, to figure out which item it is. Because you know, it's a $35 billion ad business for us."

What happened to Amazon always being consumer first?

Update: If Amazon offered a setting ("display item details in email?"), I would have no complaints. They can default to opt-out, and give it some self serving Apple-esque bullshit name like "Protect your data from third parties", I would be okay with all that.

First of all, I have been reading a lot of publications on Substack, thank you. I have been using your app for a few days, and have a few feature requests:

1. Can you please support signing in to multiple accounts? Ideally, you would merge the subscriptions together into one view, but even if not, easy account switching is good enough.

2. Can you gray out the read posts? The "inbox" doesn't distinguish between read and unread, archiving is the only option. But sometimes I might want to refer back, and don't want to archive it yet. (EDIT: I just found the orange dot, but it's not very visible)

3. When you know that I have read the post via email (from the tracking pixels), can you show them as read in the app?

Unfortunately, almost every company expect "total control" [1] over your life during work hours. FAANG companies just pay more.

Also, tech workers probably have way more autonomy on their schedule than most other industries.

Btw, I am just responding to your comment that "FAANG companies own you life"; not making an argument for remote vs in-person. I personally think that a hybrid model is great, and strongly agree with the currently-top comment by librish[2].

[1] significant control, if not total control

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30534539

Immigration?? It's been at record low levels since 2018, once Trump's policies came into full effect.

So is this iPhone to iPhone only, or can the customer use any NFC enabled credit card directly, or (shudder) their Android phone?

I am building a site to analyze my investment portfolio - run risk models, evaluate payoff scenarios, and even suggest options trades.

I have been doing a lot of options trading in the past few years, and needed better tools to analyze complicated options positions, so I started with payoff calculator for a set of options (both at expiry, as well as at intermediate times using Black-Scholes). Here's an example: https://tinyurl.com/pa-example

And now I am building other stuff to analyzing your whole portfolio, and to suggest options trades that will lead to a better payoff profile (as per your customizable utility function, eg: you might weigh losses exponentially and profits logarithmically beyond a threshold).

This is a side project; I have a day job and a family, so I get about 4-5 hours a week to work on this. I have been building this in Rails.

I have don't have any current plans of making this a real business. It's fun and useful to me, and I want to keep it that way, but I am open to launching it as a freemium/paid site in the future if others find it useful.

An ideal collaborator would be someone who is good at Javascript and web UI; but most importantly, our goals should match. If you are that person, email me at admin@portfolioanalytics.org (or reply to this comment with yours)

From their website (About/Disclaimer):

_The Unmask is not designed or intended to prevent, mitigate, treat, diagnose or cure any disease or health condition, including COVID-19/Coronavirus. Unmasks are intended for general public use only. They are non-sterile and are not intended for use in any clinical or surgical setting or where exposure to bodily or hazardous fluids may be expected, where the risk of exposure through inhalation is high, or near intense heat or flammable gas. Unmasks are not surgical masks, personal protective equipment, or filtering respirators (such as N95 masks)._

Basically, it seems like a soft, breathable mask.....but they make no claims that they will significantly reduce your chances of catching Covid from someone nearby. That said, if the only goal is to meet masking requirements in public places, then it "works".

Are you saying that Blackrock et al wouldn't buy homes if there weren't Zillow/OpenDoor/Offerpad? For Blackrock to rent these out, they clearly have to staff up a property management arm. Z/O/O might have made it easier for them to acquire some of these homes, but I don't see why they would not have bought a roughly equivalent amount even without them. As per the article:

> A representative for FirstKey Homes, a Cerberus portfolio company, said that it's purchased just 1% of its properties through iBuyers. Kathleen McCarthy, global co-head of Blackstone Real Estate, said that “not one of our portfolio companies have purchased a single off-market home from an iBuyer.”

I am absolutely agreeing that the steep rise in home/rent prices are a serious problem. But I am not convinced that iBuyers are moving the market that much, and the root of the problem in the most displaced markets remains NIMBYs that prevent new construction that prevent supply to rise up to meet increasing demand.

I also recommend these 2 articles by Philo which talk about the effectively-cartel like behavior that exists in the housing market:

https://philo.substack.com/p/housing-medallions

https://philo.substack.com/p/cartels (a shorter summary is here - https://ilearned.substack.com/p/13-on-competition-and-monopo...)

This is a non story, full of anecdotes without getting into the actual problem that home prices have been rising across the country faster than wages, making it harder for the lower income segments and young people to buy homes. That's it.

Look at this hypocritical anecdote from the article:

Back in 2001, Nicole Prince was able to buy a modest, three-bedroom home there while earning $12-an-hour. She lived in the house for a few years, moved to something bigger nearby and kept it as a rental. Last year, Prince, who’s Black, decided to sell and turned to the iBuyers. Offerpad agreed to pay $191,000 — far more than she thought she’d get: “I was like, ‘What?’ You couldn’t say no.”

The sale closed in mid-September. About three weeks later, the house was scooped up by Tricon Residential, a landlord that buys and manages single-family rental homes, for $5,000 more than what Offerpad paid, according to data from Attom. It still nags her that it didn’t go to a young person or family of color — somebody that was starting out like she was two decades ago.

So she got a far higher than expected price, but then has an opinion on who the new owner should sell to? If she actually cared, she could have chosen to sell at a lower price to her desired target audience herself.

A bunch of people use my email address for signing up to all sorts of websites (I have a common name, and my email is basically my name @ popular email provider). It is annoying to receive all this spam (usually I can unsubscribe), but the worst ones are people using my email for their bank accounts.

So now I get multiple password-protected monthly statements every month, and there is no way to unsubscribe since it's a bank statement. And the email subject doesn't have the full account number, and the email is from a no-reply address. Contacting the bank has been useless even when I found a way to do so. The most annoying one is from a bank where I have an account of my own (they used a capitalized version of my email address, which the bank thinks is a separate email), and so I can't block them all emails from this bank either.

The one fun time was when someone (in Asia) would frequently place food delivery orders using my email, and this service would send multiple emails for each order. Frustrated, I canceled their order once directly from the email, after which this particular problem stopped.

On the other side, unfettered population growth for the purposes of maintaining a sufficiently large proportion of young people (in a world where people are living longer as well) is basically a Ponzi scheme. We’ll have to eventually stabilize to a sustainable demographic distribution; the earlier the better.

This is a great law that I had never heard of. Given that NYT and others don't actually follow this though, how can California residents enforce this?

You can do all sorts of "monopolistic abuse" on your platform as long as it is small and inconsequential. No one cares, even if it was illegal, though it mostly is not.

But the rules and scrutiny changes once you become large enough to be "considered" a monopoly i.e. once your decisions and policies start affecting a significant portion of the market/ecosystem, then your policies are going to be subject to new regulation.

Google supporting side loading from the very beginning was a smart idea, even if its too complex and scary for the majority of Android users. They should have done the same for payments.

I don't think that follows, sadly.

The evolutionary history matters a lot in these things, since they set the culture and precedent on the platform.

Macs and desktops started (or at least, became popular) as an open environment where users obtained software directly from vendors. iOS and Android (with the caveat that it has always supported sideloading) started as closed systems, and the vast majority of customers are used to getting their software from the official app store.

UPDATE: Fixed a typo

Generally, using an internal IM client provides a stronger guarantee that all people in the group are employees. This reduces the risk of leaking out sensitive info, or the chances of a journalist/competitor snooping in, or phishing attacks etc.

As such, employers should strongly prefer that such communication happens via internal channels. It is the smart thing to do, unless you believe that employees would just stop discussing these things if you banned them from internal IM. But of course, this is Apple.

Yeah, it's a killer feature, but I really wish they had some sort of a documented "search API".

Instead of natural language search, where I have no idea whether it understood me, I wish I could do (modifying your example):

"North Carolina" "Maggie Thomson" "Tom Morgan" -beach 2018

for all photos in NC, with Maggie and Tom, not in a beach from 2018

and even better, if it could tell me the number of results that would show up if we removed each keyword above.

I guess it's a tough problem, even for Google :(

What a closed-minded article! The real hard part here was to solve self-driving, which is what Waymo focused on, and is at L4 already (or close enough to it).

The other points that the author raises are obvious things known for a decade, and Waymo doesn't even have to solve them, unless it really wants to.

- The cost of Lidar has fallen a lot already, and is likely to continue to do so.

- Waymo doesn't have to manufacture cars at scale. Carmakers would love to license FSD tech from Waymo and sell premium cars. I would happily buy such a car for $100k.

- Uber/Lyft will fight over themselves to license the FSD tech, Waymo has no need to build its own taxi services.

"This is water", by David Foster Wallace.

https://youtu.be/8CrOL-ydFMI

Fair point, but the other part of the game theory equation is deterrence - by paying the ransom, you might encourage others to copy the crime, even if many of them get eventually caught.

"Back office" (which includes most programmers, with the exception of algo traders) bonuses are much much lower than "front office" (traders, ibankers, sales) bonuses.

Google/FB devs total comp (including RSUs) will easily beat Goldman devs by 150-200%, depending upon your performance.

That's another broad generalization. I know many Bay Area Indians, and within my personal circles, a majority of them are anti-Modi and have been so pre-Covid too. That said, the amount of unquestionable Trump-like support for Modi is truly baffling.