How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/silicon-valley-h1b-visas-hurt-tech-workers <comment><USER2> Friends, I'll approach this from a different perspective, if you'll please take a moment to lend me your ears, and hear my plight.

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> But in reality, most of today's H-1B workers don't stick around to become > the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin

I recently wrote a letter to a Congressperson about this, regarding the recent House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Immigration Reform. The same point was brought up there too. Do these people think it's _easy_ to start a company on an H-1B? It's near impossible. I'd know, because I've looked into it with a brilliant lawyer. Let's take a look at the factors.

* H-1B costs around 4-5k, and the result of the application is uncertain. Would you want an uncertain cofounder? Would investors?

* H-1B workers must be paid prevailing wage. For a programmer in Cambridge, MA, the cheapest level-1 codemonkey _must_ be paid around $55k/yr. How many of us started out paying ourselves that much money? Or any money for that matter?

* A document called the Neufeld Memo from 2008 states that the H-1B sponsor and worker need an employer-employee relationship. This means that the company, that you helped start, must have the ability to fire you whenever it wants. You must relinquish your rights to control your employment in that regard. How would you feel about this?

* For similar reasons, owning majority stake in your company is nearly impossible, and owning any stake is generally frowned upon and investigated further by authorities.

* Work visas are per-company and per-job. You want to do some consulting on the side to keep the purse full? Tough luck, unless you also are able to get an H-1B from there. (hint: it's tough.)

If you had all these limitations, how likely is it that you'd be the next Sergey Brin? Is it any wonder that H-1Bs are not creating jobs for Americans? The reason for all this is that the H-1B was created for BigCo.

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> ComputerWorld revealed last week that the top 10 users of H-1B visas last > year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys. Together > these firms hired nearly half of all H-1B workers, and less than 3 percent > of them applied to become permanent residents.

Again, the H-1B system surely favors BigCO. The reason for this is because it was created for BigCO, and it was advanced by constant lobbying by BigCO. There is no equivalently large lobby, however, for the bright immigrant entrepreneurs that America wants. Brin himself is probably lobbying for the H-1B, as Google is in the top 10 H-1B employers.

"Less than 3% of them applied to become permanent residents". Honestly! This makes me angry. Do people think they didn't _want_ to become permanent residents? Are we this out of touch? This is because they can't decide to apply to become permanent residents themselves! They need sponsorship for PERM (green card) applications too! But the companies don't want to take this costly and time consuming (6+ years for Indians) route often, when they can just replace them.

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There are more glaring things in the article, but I want to keep my point clear. Do I think H-1Bs are great? NO! God no. But calls to ban it are a bit overzealous. Please, have some compassion.

People seem to forget that H-1Bs are the only way to legal immigration for people who don't have ties to the US, or people like me whose American parents haven't lived in the US for a long time. Ban it, and the likes of me are screwed.

I hope that there comes a better alternative that doesn't serve corporate interests as much, that supports foreign founders who create jobs for Americans. Something that raises the bar for potential applicants and lowers the bar for consultancy-farms. I'm hopeful about the STEM visa. I like the startup visa. I think there are tons of flaws to be fixed in the system.

Please, consider what will happen to us, just as you consider what will happen to you. I understand that America must think of its own first. But consider how immigrants created entire industries, ___when they were allowed to do so_ __. Heck, most Americans are descendants of immigrants. If you call for the ban of the H-1B, please also call, twice as vigorously, for the creation of something better.

<comment><USER3> >> But calls to ban it are a bit overzealous.

No one has said anything about banning H1B in this thread. You're misdirecting us from the real issue which is that H1B program is about to be EXPANDED. This will accelerate the damage to the job market in places like NY/NJ/CA/TX where most H1Bs are placed. The amount of H1Bs that were previously admitted in a decade will now be admitted in slightly more than 2 years. What do you think that will do to salaries (yours included)?

>> But consider how immigrants created entire industries, when they were allowed to do so. Heck, most Americans are descendants of immigrants.

You are once again misdirecting. If you consider the statistics, a 3% citizenship rate is indicative that the H1B program is not really a immigration program at all -- it is actually a guest worker program.

What's wrong with that? Guest workers who have limited freedoms, are tied to their jobs for legal status, and can be sent back to India on their employer's whim are not really free market participants or citizens -- they are indentured servants or modern day slaves to the corporations that hold their visas. It's then unsurprising that this special class of workers lowers market salaries, or that expanding the number of people in this special class will lower salaries.

>> Do I think H-1Bs are great? NO! God no.

You admit that H1B is a awful visa, but you don't want to rock the boat and do anything about it. You are not actively campaigning to improve conditions, instead you are here misdirecting and essentially supporting the expansion of the H1B program in its current form. I'm sorry, but that's a mistaken attitude and I can't get behind that.

<comment><USER2> I think you read me wrong. I agree with everything you said, but you need to take your thought process one step further.

You are indeed right about the banning - in this thread. This issue, however, has been coming up recently (3-4 major articles in the last 45 days or so) and there is a growing "let's get rid of it" sentiment, but without proposals for an alternative. If you take a peek at my conclusion again, you'll see that this is what I'm asking for. An alternative.

>If you consider the statistics, a 3% citizenship rate is indicative that the H1B program is not really a immigration program at all -- it is actually a guest worker program.

Read again please, I agree with this exact point in the second section of my comment. I made the point that it's not the worker's choice, it's BigCo's choice. The system is set up to serve temp-workers to BigCo. I've supported this exact idea in the 5 bullet points I've made above that. What I disagree with was the implication in the original article that guest workers didn't _want_ to naturalize. "less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents" makes it sound that way. They can't apply themselves!

I don't need lecturing about how guest workers have limited freedoms. I know firsthand! I'm not too keen on servitude myself! It's not that I don't think rocking the boat is a good idea, but I'm wary and scared. Do you know how many alternative visa program / immigration reform bills have been proposed so far? And how many have been passed? And how many of those have been bills that support the current long-term temporary worker style?

As my wise lawyer says, "I'll believe it when I see it".

I'm afraid that we're going to kick this system over, in favor of _no_ system. And then no alternative is going to be agreed upon (in the Senate and House), or the alternative is going to be heavily lobbied yet again, to create a similar system, entrenching it even more.

Is this fear not justified?

<comment><USER3> Once again you are mixing in logical arguments with emotional ones, and using emotion to override logical arguments and ultimately support an unjust status quo.

You agree that changes need to happen. So why not lobby for the changes that you want to see? Why lobby for the status quo or the expansion of the current broken program?

From your comment, why not lobby for these:

1\. Employers should NOT have the right to send people back within 30 days if they eliminate a position. Instead, the person should have the right to look for another job as long as the visa period has not expired.

2\. Employers should not be involved in the green card application process -- people should apply for a green car on their own, after X years of stay.

Why not have a real change agenda instead of sniping at non-existing arguments (they'll ban H1B!) or adding support to the idea that being exploited by BigCos is the only way things can be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Being in IT since 1997 I definitely agree with this. I have seen way to many job postings for positions that want a great deal of experience and well below market pay. Eventually these get filled by H1-B visa holders.

Overall I see H1-B visas as a means of companies to suppress wages of domestic IT workers. I know entirely way too many good software engineers and developers looking for jobs for there to be a "shortage".

That being said I am very aware that my comment like the rest of the comments is anecdotal. I am hopeful more objective numbers can be found that will allow us to have a more informed conversation on this.

<comment><USER5> I have way too much trouble finding good developers to hire for there not to be a shortage. I wonder whose anecdotes are correct.

<comment><USER4> At what price point? If you are looking for good developers at or near the "market" you will probably not find them. Anyone who has been in the industry for awhile and is very competent will know they are generally worth more.

<comment><USER6> Under that definition there is no such thing as a shortage.

<comment><USER4> That is the point I was trying to make. I don't believe their is a true shortage of talented workers, but I do believe large companies state that there is as a means to drive down wages. H1-B Visa just happen to be the handy hammer they use to do it with.

<comment><USER6> "Shortage" in an economy is expressed as higher prices. In almost any cases you will be able to find more workers if you are willing to pay an unlimited amount. There is no way of determining the "correct" price. The reverse is also true. More potential employees in the marketplace lowers salaries.

If you take "you could find employees at a higher salary" as a proof that the shortage doesn't exist you'll virtually always have that proof. Under that definition shortages don't exist which feels like some sort of semantic trickery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am an Indian here. I have heard horror tales from TCS employees on how they are given "on-site" experience. Mostly it is a portrayed as a favor done by the management to the employee. You have to earn the on-site opportunity which involves a great deal of kissing people's rears. It is mostly not about the talent you have. One of the guys who had gone on-site on one such occasion had told me how the organization billed him as an Expert Oracle consultant while he was told to study oracle while he was boarding the flight. It is true that they get paid a pittance when compared to US nationals. A developer with 5 years of experience makes about $2.5k a month. They usually subsist on Taco Bells, McD burgers and so on. On the other hand many indians prefer this, as it still works out better than if they had stuck to the indian job. In fact, in many family circles you are not considered a human if you are working in IT and do not have any "on-site experience". Most these folks are completely dependent on the organization that they work for and are willing to fight for it tooth and nail to defend it even if the organization is holding them under a sort of an indentured servitude. There are a few genuinely smart hackers but those are far and few in between. Most of these organizations are as dysfunctional as the companies that they consult for.

<comment><USER8> _In fact, in many family circles you are not considered a human if you are working in IT and do not have any "on-site experience"_

I'm probably too independently minded, but I'm not sure I could be bothered to give a rat's ass about what my family thought of me with respect to my job or how I live my life. If I'm working, keeping a roof over my family's head, enjoying what I do and getting better in my profession... tough cheese if someone in my family doesn't 'consider me human' - that says far more about them than me.

<comment><USER9> This is a cultural thing. In India, what is spoken around in family circles means a lot.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps aspects of any culture which focus on shaming people and making them feel like less than human should be de-emphasized or ignored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another piece of recycled fear-mongering garbage.

From all the people I know around here who're on an H1B, the salaries are quite on par with US nationals. I do admit that I don't know anyone working for the companies named in the article (TCS, Infosys).

The issue that needs more discussion is why not let US-educated non-immigrants have an easier path to Permanent Residency vs. letting them leave the country to start companies back in their homeland.

<comment><USER11> The salaries people receive with H1-B on those companies are $60k to $70k/Year. And they are billed at $100k/year to the client.

I would say the pay is same as Americans working along with them.

The reason many companies are off-shoring to India is that there are more people with mix of domain and technical knowledge in India.

<comment><USER12> _Top 10 users of H-1B visas last year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys. Together these firms hired nearly half of all H-1B workers, and less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents._

I'm a little bit confused in here. Is it the same 65k visa cap for Europe and India? Does that mean that Tata and Infosys have taken half of it and people who they hired weren't even working in US?

I didn't squeeze into the last year's visa quota and decided to stay in UK (hearing - "if you reapply we might get a visa for you in a year" is not very encouraging). From what I heard, getting H1B is becoming quite of a race against time as the places are getting filled out quickly. I think I know why now.

<comment><USER11> It is a per year limit. Most H1-Bs return back to India within a year and a new person will be sent to fill in the same position next year.

That's why most people never get PR. The main reason is not to short charge the client, but to give chance to other workers in India, cause most companies pay them only $5k to $14k/per year back in India(That's the market rate in India). There is a rat race where people have to fight to fly to US or other western countries so that they can earn 10X more.

<comment><USER13> > Most H1-Bs return back to India within a year and a new person will be sent > to fill in the same position next year.

That sounds wrong. The period of the H1-B visa stay is three years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Yet if tech workers are in such short supply, why are so many of them unemployed or underpaid? According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), tech employment rates still haven't rebounded to pre-recession levels. And from 2001 to 2011, the mean hourly wage for computer programmers didn't even increase enough to beat inflation._

I think anyone who is actually any good at programming could disagree with that statement.

There are 2 problems with H-1Bs:

1) Body shops in northern NJ bringing mediocre talent here, lying on their resumes to get them placed, and then paying them 1/10 of what they're billed as indentured servants.

2) Not enough visas for qualified people, partially because of 1.

<comment><USER15> What's ironic is that these body shops are mostly non-American companies (usually Indian ones that hire Indians).

<comment><USER14> Yeah. I work with several very talented indians, and hear on a regular basis about their visa woes. People who've paid taxes in this country for 10 years, raising kids here, the only reason they're not citizens is because the process takes too damn long. They're on H-1Bs and deserve to be citizens, so it touches a nerve when I hear H-1B described as some 'dey tuk ur jawbs' system.

If you're being outcompeted by the incompetent body shop employees, you need to step up your game rather than try to restrict the labor market.

<comment><USER16> There may be some body shops with incompetent people, but I think there are plenty of competent H1-B holders.

The proper framing is that their visa can be held over their head to extract 14 hour days 6 or 7 days a week and other working conditions and salaries that Americans would not accept or be able to compete with (for good reason).

<comment><USER15> The US government actually sets generous price floors on what H1-B's can be paid to prevent this sort of thing (for better or for worse). An H1-B application specifying a salary that is lower than said floor would be rejected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I register today just to say this TL;DR: it sucks being here on visa. Even if I want to be a US-citizen and I contribute like a US-citizen, they still make sure I'm just a second-class in here.

I am a F-1 Visa Vietnamese student that recently got a pretty good offer in a big corp. I am really tired of being treated like half-resident person. While I do all of my duty (paying taxes), I never receive the benefits of being an resident. First there was a out-of-state tuition for every public university in the US. For over 5 years in school, I've seen many of my friends run out of money because of this "premium" price we pay.

Now, some of us try to work to support our premium tuition, but we are not permitted to work outside of school. As a result, most of us would have to work illegally in some Asian restaurant, usually with under-minimal wage and no tips. I understand they stop us from getting a job to protect American. However, from what I observe, those minimal-wage jobs which could not be taken by international students will be taken by illegal immigrant anyway. So it puts the US government in a lose-lose situation: those jobs won't return to American citizen, and they lose some of the taxes. Maybe they should look at others country, such as UK (allowed to work up to 20h), or Australia(allowed to work in controlled manner)... and rethink.

The only way you can work, is to get a job in your college with minimal wage or to get an OPT. I've had a job on campus in which I design a website for dorm using bottle.py and backbone.js for... $9.5/hour. Before tax. An OPT is a program where you can work outside of your college for one year, but the job has to fit your major. I got my internship with EMC by OPT.

Now, although we do not have the benefits of being residents, we still have to do our duty while we are in here. I have to pay taxes like everyone else. I just finish doing my tax for last year. With one internship and an on-campus job, I fall in the second braket of tax, although I did pay a lot more for my education. We also do not have credit cards as no-one trusts us. I just got my frist creditcard after 6 years being here :).

Now, after 6 years of suffering, it finally pays off for me to have a offer for a big corp and be an h1-b visa. I can asure you that they pay me very competitively. However, it is still pretty damn hard to become a US-citizen from here. The process is lengthy, and sometime depends on luck. Not to mention if I want to bring my wife to the US, my wife will not be able to work at any form, not even on college campus.

<comment><USER18> Be grateful many people don't have these opportunities. We all pay the same for tuition if weren't not from that state. I've suffered working in a restaurant for the past 6 years and low rate college pay jobs. At least we can still afford tuition when a lot of people can't or don't even have the option to go to school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Indian here, and I have worked on a H1-B with one of the out-sourcers (Infosys/Wipro likes). I think the article has some truth and a lot of crud. It is important to understand the context first.

What you can say about technology right now in USA, there are two large disjoint islands. There is the silicon valley kinds of "cool"/startup technology and then there is run of the mill "IT" for Bank/Insurance/Big-Non- IT technology. Outsourcers go after the latter kind and in fact can only go after the latter kind. Their premise is to hire really below average "Engineers" in India, and expect them to just learn the tricks of the trade to replace/take over another run-of-the mill IT job.

The point is, if your day job is just about maintaining/coding something mind numbing, with no real value add or just being a cog in the wheel in some Big- Co that has nothing to do with technology, you can expect someone to do your job much cheaper. Probably the quality will dip, but then the Big-Co hardly cares about its software right?

Whereas, if you look at the stuff being done in the "valley like" companies, you won't find those outsourced developers. You will still find smart Indians on H1, but then the non-linearity of their talent is at play. Although, I have seen valley companies outsource their QA (manual testing).

I think it is important that one keeps working hard on moving from the second island to the first, no matter who it is (American or otherwise). There is nothing new about this... we have seen this happen to manufacturing. It has happened to web design - Go to elance and you will find at least 20:1 ratio of some Indian firm to US firm. All of them compete at the low-end of the scale.

It is very hard to secure a comfortable life in that lower-end of the technology pipeline living here in USA.

<comment><USER20> I'm a journalist doing a story about H1B visas for public radio. I think you have a very interesting perspective and would like to speak with you about your experience. You can reach me at email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just an interesting note to point out that the man who's wife spoke with Obama did get a lot of calls / interest from companies across the country, but because of a custody agreement needs to stay in North Texas, which I'd be willing to bet contributes much more to his difficulties finding a job than H-1B visas.

<comment><USER22> > because of a custody agreement needs to stay in North Texas

Wow, pretty bad case to blame immigrants.

As a father I can sympathize with the guy, it should be hard having to choose between a decent job offer and the ability to see your children every day. But mobility is one important factor in the job market, you don't always get to choose where to live while advancing your career (unless maybe if you're a rock star and telecommuting is viable), especially in STEM areas that have most jobs in large metros or startup/high-tech hubs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We're a startup and have hired 2 (and soon to be 3) folks on H1B visas. These were folks who got their Masters degrees here, who are brilliant and who'd have otherwise left.

While I don't dispute that there are holes in the program and abuse that happens, it has enabled us to find some folks for our team who have put us as a company on a different trajectory.

Disclaimer: data point of one.

<comment><USER24> Thank you, by the way. (Sincerely.) The more great people from around the world stay here, the better we all will be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "My husband has an engineering degree with over ten years of experience," the Fort Worth resident told the president during a web chat hosted by the social network Google+. "Why does the government continue to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?"

There's engineers and then there's engineers. If he could code (or was interested in coding) fluently in modern web environments, I suspect he'd have no problem finding a job at all...

<comment><USER26> Her husband is semiconductor engineer. I am sure he wouldn't code in modern web environments.

However, there is nothing wrong in the way Mr. Obama replied. Watch the video to get how article kind of distorts that fact.

<comment><USER25> One should learn and adpt to the world's conditions. I'm an ex-semiconductor engineer who took up the web myself. Far easier to start a business with little capital.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the way H1-B visa holders are basically beholden chattel to a specific enterprise is especially repugnant.

Anyone who reads through job listings for engineers (all types, as in real engineers) and programmers will also conclude that many job descriptions and salaries are designed so that a) there are practically zero people who will match the 'minimum' requirements, despite the fact that most of the deficiencies candidates are likely to have can be solved by 3 months or less of training, and b) if there were any Americans with the actual qualifications expressed, they would never work for the listed salary.

It's also worth noting, the hidden secret to getting cheap developers in the US is to be based somewhere that doesn't have a huge tech hub.

If you base yourself in moderate size cities you'll find a hidden field of competent applicants who will take salaries close to $50k a year just because there are few jobs in mainstream America that aren't Java or .Net unless they move to a tech hub (people often do not want to live in NYC or SF, at any cost). And 50k in a region they like with a tech they don't hate is better than moving. On average.

I should know. I'm a competent (but not end of the world amazing jock rock star hipster) developer getting paid 50k a year somewhere in America that is distinctly not New York or California. And my company pretty much has me locked in because there are pretty much no other businesses or shops in town that use Javascript or Python or other similar common open source languages instead of .Net or Java (or PHP). (Obviously not an issue of technical ability, but language taste.)

<comment><USER27> _I think the way H1-B visa holders are basically beholden chattel to a specific enterprise is especially repugnant._

As an H1B holder on his third job in the US, I can tell you that we aren't actually beholden to any employer.

<comment><USER16> Probably you paid off a good agency in India to fix you up with jobs, then.

You're right that it's a little more complicated. A family friend is here from India on some kind of visa where she is able to switch employers, but she has to leave if a new one won't sponsor her or something. But she pays (or paid) thousands of dollars to some agency in India to fix her up with a job/jobs.

What really gets me in her case is that she has a child who has lived here for over a decade and can't get in-state tuition without special treatment despite being legal.

<comment><USER27> Well, I'm not from India, so no, I didn't. I changed jobs by going out, looking for a job, applying for it, and interviewing.

The principle is absolutely simple- an H1B visa is freely transferrable to a new employer. There is absolutely nothing (legal) that your old employer can do in retribution once the transfer is complete, and it is possible to go through the transfer process without notifying your current employer.

<comment><USER28> The problem is almost always for people from China, India, Mexico and Philippines. The Green Card process takes less than a year for all other countries except these. The Green Card paperwork takes a lot of time and effort for people from these countries. While doing the paperwork, there are extended periods where it does not make sense to look for new jobs. That pushes the expected date further in the future. For example, as of today, people who applied for the GC in 2004 and have a MS or 5 years of experience, are just eligible for it now: <http://www.travel.state.gov/visa/bulletin/bulletin_5885.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What does it say about programmers that HN is half swamped with complaints about recruiters and half with complaints about putative oversupply of labor?

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm right now under an H-1B visa...

I know it is not fair for americans to be unemployed because we foreigns are taking your positions; but you guys don't know what it feels to live in a third world country.

You can read all you want about poverty and violence, you can get shocked by the news and movies that touches that kind of topics. But you will hardly ever experience what it feels to live in real poverty. You don't know how it feels when your brothers or children are dying of starvation.

So I kept studying for years, stuck in a country were you can get killed anytime... became a freelance and later I was brought to the US under a H-1B visa. And guess what... it saved my life and my family's.

I've realized America is the kind of country that loves to exploit and get as much as possible from other countries (third world ones generally), and when it comes to give back some of that... well, you find this kind of reactions.

</comment><comment><USER31> My team has 4 job openings. The only two candidates who could pass our phone screen are not U.S. citizens. One is from Russia, who didn't get the visa for on-site interview.

America seems to be very harsh to legal immigrants, but pretty nice to illegal immigrants.

I think it's good for a country to import some competition. After all, h1b has a 60000 cap each year, that's not too many people.

<comment><USER32> Agreed. In the process of sponsoring green cards for prospective candidates, we go through the process of trying to find US citizens that could fill the role. This is a requirement of the labor certification process. We rarely, if ever, find _any_ US citizen that applies for these positions. Most applicants are immigrants, which makes us reject them (since the exercise is to really see if we can find citizens). These are not low-paying grunt jobs. These are highly-specialized, very well paid positions.

<comment><USER16> Maybe you should focus on finding smart people (if you actually pay decently and are located somewhere somebody in their right mind would want to live) and then consider training them in your 'high-specialized' whatever you need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Oh boy, here we go...

Norm Matloff's H1B web page should be required reading for anyone who wants to discuss this: <http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html>

He definitely falls on one side of the issue, but he's the leading academic researcher on the subject.

</comment><comment><USER34> If the people who run unions were smart, they would have gotten rid of H-1B a long time ago. The tech industry is the only part of the USA economy that even has a potential for the sort of labor shortage required for healthy private- sector unions.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is as true today as it has been for the past 10-15 years. "highly specialized knowledge" == "cheap talent". And as has always been true, you get what you pay for.

</comment><comment><USER36> As for why many of them don't become permanent residents: it is quite hard to jump from H1B to permanent residency. I'm facing this problem myself at the moment and there's no easy solution. Living in such uncertainty about your future is hard and many people are just like 'screw this' and leave after some period of time. It's not like they want to leave and take their work with them.

<comment><USER36> The point is that laws are such that they encourage you to leave the country after you've been educated and gotten good work experience. Which is crazy. You'd imagine there should be an easier way to become a permanent resident after you worked in a country for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am journalist for public radio and I'm doing a story on H1Bs. I am interested in getting the perspective of employees working on H1B visas. Anyone who is interested in sharing their experiences can reach me at firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER37> Be competitive, rather than eliminate competition. If an H1B can do the same job for a cheaper price, he should be hired. What's so wrong about it?

</comment><comment><USER38> My $0.02: there are a lot of reasons to want to move to the US that are completely unrelated to job opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if H-1Bs were attracting more Europeans than Indians, would Americans hate it the same way?

<comment><USER40> I doubt skin tone plays much of a role. Relative to other places around the world, Americans are rather colorblind.</comment></comment>


Im Not a Programmer - <AUTHOR> https://heatherbooker.github.io/blog/2019/12/24/im-not-a-programmer.html <comment><USER2> I'm not quite sure how I'm meant to feel about this. Some of the things on this list are truly trivial: I don't care if you use a mouse. _I_ don't like to use one, but it's not because I'm a programmer.

Other things on the list are kind of unfortunate. "I don't know how to use awk". I mean, that's totally fine. Lots of people don't. I kind of feel like this is a celebration of ignorance. You don't _have_ to know awk to be a programmer, but awk is useful (even if you aren't a programmer)!

I'm not sure if the author is working through their own imposter syndrome and trying to feel better about themself, or if they are admonishing others who value things that they don't value. I mean it's both OK that you don't know CSS as a front end developer and OK if you think that CSS is important to know as a front end developer (it really is, by the way ;-) ). You don't go from knowing nothing to knowing everything in a day. Where you are is where you are and there is nothing to apologise for. However it's important not to plant yourself there and say "I'm alright Jack. I don't have to go any further. All this other stuff is not important", because some of it is (or can be, if you want it to be).

Edit: grammar and clarity

<comment><USER3> I couldn't have summarized it better... On one hand, don't feel imposter syndrome. You're paid, you can produce output, good!

We definitely shouldn't be ashamed of ignorance, but celebrating it is not gonna get us anywhere either. Analyze knowledge gaps, study, apply knowledge... Rinse and repeat.

I'm also kind of ambivalent about the post. Wish the author all the best though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, the negativity in the comments so far has me flummoxed. What I see is a person, in a development role, posting about how they have been made to feel inadequate or unsuitable for their role, because they don't know things that aren't necessary for said role.

If someone is succeeding, who cares whether they know Awk? If someone is doing the job and getting paid, who is anyone to make them feel inadequate, call them whiny, etc. What do we gain, both as people and as a community, for snubbing people who post things like this?

Note that I didn't mention whether those things would make them better at their role. They probably would, but it matters less than the bulk of the comments seem to think.

<comment><USER3> > If someone is succeeding, who cares whether they know Awk?

I'd 100% agree with this (and the following) statements. I think what rubs commenters the wrong way is that the article seems to be almost celebrating the ignorance.

It is of course a pure conjecture on the readers' side, but I think that's mostly what people object to. Not knowing things is OK. Being proud that you get paid despite not knowing things is not accepted in a subculture that prides itself on self-improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't understand why this upsets me.. I mean, this is obviously a person not interested in computers, and, that's really okay. But somehow, I'm left upset, maybe by the choice of ignorance? Maybe I feel offended by this person not caring how to learn the basics..

And, that's entirely my problem.. If they're fine with it, then that's all that should matter.

Damn, I was 13 years old when I ran my first webserver, I started by installing the OS and configuring Apache (got a lot of help on IRC) and I remember having to find a place, physically, to put it.. I was eventually allowed to place it in a room in the school, they arranged a static IP, and the trade was that they could also use it for hosting some image files.. I got my first domain back then, had to fax forms, on paper, with signatures, in ink, to hostmaster :D

Anyway, I guess, I'm offended because the things this person does not find interesting enough to learn, is the stuff that got me hooked.. Even in recent times, when, a few years ago, I discovered the awesomeness that is JQ.. And this person, they've not bothered to learn it, even though it's so damn good and can do so much for them... Maybe I'm annoyed on their behalf.. But I've no right.

If they're happy, that's all that matters, and all I can do is rant, and wish the world was more like I wanted it. ;-)

Maybe I'm upset because this person tells me that they don't care enough to learn all the things I think are cool and that people should learn, because I like them.. My problem, entirely.

<comment><USER6> They have programming as a career first while you have it as a hobby first. I wouldn't consider them wrong for doing this, but your annoyance at someone using your passion as a tool for their ends also is not unfounded.

<comment><USER5> That's actually a good point, I didn't think about that, for me, it is my hobby, my passion and my career, and it does just rub me, when people are doing it without the passion part. Again, I can't defend that emotion, it just does. It's like seeing this thing you care about, not receiving the care you feel it deserve I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is a ... bad take? Ambiguous and confusing(ed)? I mean - I guess there are people who believe in some stereotype of "real programmers", but this post kind of buys into this stereotype by arguing with it, and then does it in a way to comes of as ... lazy and envious? In this post - some points are straw-man/stereotype and some seem ... to deny worthiness of in-depth expertise, skill and experience.

I'd compare with ...

I like playing soccer, but I'm nowhere near skills of even minor-minor-league or even a skilled amateur, and there might be people that would totally make fun of me if I tried to describe myself as "a soccer player", but it doesn't make me bitter, or discouraged. I just do what I can, it works for me and I feel OK about it. I can still appreciate skills of people better than me and don't deny that they are useful and great to have, and in a way I wish I could have them, but I know it's just will not happen, not because I'm somehow worse human being, but because I have invested my time into different things and my priorities/predispositions are different.

It's unfortunate that I've found it on HN - because it will get a lot of negative publicity, and it seems the author might need actually some positive encouragement?

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe this is just one of the majority of journal entries in the world that aren't particularly interesting. The author was feeling insecure about some things and decided to write them down. It just so happens her journal is public. There wasn't a lot of thought or research put into this, it's just a feelings dump that reflects her mood at the time. Maybe she's a capable developer that just feels disconnected from the rest of the huge world of software and is hard on herself sometimes. Maybe she does like learning new things and getting better at her job. Maybe she has other interests outside of development, and that's fine too. Her company pays her to stick around and do work, and it's been working out for them. Overall, I think some of the comments are overly harsh and judgmental -- not that they're not welcome, but let's be thoughtful.

</comment><comment><USER9> _Define_ 'Real programmers™'. I couldn't care less of what 'Real programmers™' use. Use what ever you want to get the work done quicker, to generate more cash that pays everyone's bills on time. So to me, whatever these Real programmers™ use is irrelevant unless it makes the most cash.

But if __your __choice of experimental tools on your workstation are affecting the quality of the work negatively or if you 're too busy for weeks configuring your dotfiles to work with that shiny editor, then I would just give you a MacBook Pro or just get rid of you.

Nobody got fired for buying Apple computers.

</comment><comment><USER10> In fairness, we are all just learning. I've been at this a long time and a lot of this comes down to personal choices and using the right tools to be productive in your environment.

Mouse or no mouse? your call. RTFM? your call. Plan or no plan, your call (although if someone else is paying the bills then this may not be your choice).

There is no right or wrong way, its whatever helps you be productive. If we all followed everyone else we would still be flicking switches on an Altair. So if everyone around you wants to wear a hat while they code, that's cool but it does not mean you need to. Fashion is for fools.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this is exactly the difference between a programmer and a software engineer. A (successful) software engineer _should_ understand how memory works, what a server is, how to plan a project and predict the obstacles, and a lot of other stuff said in the article.

But if you don't wanna bother with that, and just want to make some cool websites, that's totally fine. You are still definitely a programmer, just not a software engineer.

Ohh and in most cases, don't expect to be paid like a software engineer.

<comment><USER12> There is no hard definition of a server. I think OP finds the fact that people use the word all the time when it doesn't mean anything confusing - they feel there is a load of secret knowledge that other people have that they don't. But a lot of the time people just use terms without worrying about whether they actually know what these words mean or not.

Any network enabled machine responds to network packets with other network packets. Is that a server? Does it have to encapsulate a 'service' in some way? What is a service? Is this a higher level concept than tcp? Maybe it has to be something useful to someone, whatever that means. So OK my client machine starts running iis, is it a server now? I just use iis to test my Web page as I develop it, no one else connects to it, well apart from Steve who helps me with testing, he connects to my machine and it serves up the pages. We could go on.

When someone says they don't understand something, make sure you do before telling them they should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If anyone took a second to read any of this lady's other content, she seems like quite the special flower. Not saying that I disagree with her that you don't need to know everything to be a programmer but she also blatantly lies in the article.

I poked through her github and she definitely knows how to write css. Articles like this make people feel alright with complacency, it's fine to be an okay or new programmer but you should always be trying to improve what you are doing.

</comment><comment><USER14> She lists CSS on the first line of her CV. I imagine her whiney, troll of a post will really help in her next job search.

</comment><comment><USER15> The definitive last word on what real programmers do: [https://xkcd.com/378/](https://xkcd.com/378/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, you're not a very experienced programmer I'll give you that. This list is trivial for the most part. Please, learn to set up a server.

</comment><comment><USER17> Another kid got PC for Christmas wow.

(The article started fairly reasonable laughing off some cliches about mac and mouse and whatnot, but when I got to the part of "I don't like planning" or "What is server" or lots of other _super_basic_ stuff it became clear that it is just a celebration of ignorance: she doesn't know some stuff and she is proud of it. "I don't like reading" \- after these words I decided that either she is a murky troll or just sadly proud-to-be-dumb person.)

</comment><comment><USER18> List as a whole is already summarized in other comments, but one item attracted my attention because it is commonly held attitude: many programmers express scorn for shell scripting and bash in particular (probably the only shell they heard about).

As a result we have a vicious cycle: programmers refuse to learn shell scripting. When they have to write a shell script they produce a crappy one. Problems caused by badly written shell scripts only confirm their belief, that the shell scripting should not exists.

</comment><comment><USER19> This whiny blog post is obviously in reference to criticisms or comments received during her career by gatekeeping nerds.

Get over it--every field has gatekeepers. Have you ever, as a casual football fan, tried to get a word in edgewise with armchair NFL coaches?

Point being: they exist, and you don't need to write a self-flagellating blog post because you're tired of the musings of aspie "tech bros."

<comment><USER4> An argument that gatekeepers exist is no evidence that gatekeepers should exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for the honesty. I find people who understand their own failings interesting.

</comment><comment><USER20> >I'm just a web developer.

I am very sorry; that is not forgivable :-)</comment>


Hard Lessons from Our First 6 Months Bootstrapping in SaaS - <AUTHOR> http://blog.profitwell.com/hard-lessons-from-bootstrapping-in-saas/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting, Ryan. Patrick Campbell here, CEO of Price Intelligently - the makers of ProfitWell. Happy to any additional questions around our journey. I hope you find it helpful, and ultimately timely in your journey.</comment>


Aaron Wall: Scraping & Incentivized Mechanical Turk Driven 'Content' - <AUTHOR> http://www.seobook.com/information-age <comment><USER2> so where the hell was there any mention of turk, or scraping in the link/post...

is this what's meant by troll??</comment>


America doesn't have enough truckers, and it's starting to cause prices to rise - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/america-doesnt-have-enough-truckers-and-its-starting-to-cause-prices-to-rise/ar-AAxAyYC?ocid=se <comment><AUTHOR> "it now costs more than $1.85 a mile to ship a "dry good" that doesn't require refrigeration or special accommodation, a nearly 40 percent increase from the price a year ago"</comment>


Goldman Sacks owned Circle pay acquires cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/26/circle-acquires-cryptocurrency-exchange-poloniex/ <comment><USER2> Dupe, on the fp now. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16466064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16466064)</comment>


TLD only website HTTP://AI/ - kalium-xyz the domain http://ai/ is top level only yet has a website hosted under it, sadly the url parser of hackernews incorrectly thinks its invalid. <comment><AUTHOR> This might make an interesting blog post, or if you discover something that can be played with, a Show HN: if it meets the guidelines.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Good luck</comment>


Ask HN: How to write techincal documentation for complex systems? - <AUTHOR> I'm a junior dev in a large company and after a few small projects I got an assignment to write a technical document for the system my team develops and supports. The document will then be used internally between developers, especially newcomers.
The system is made of out of the box enterprise solutions, custom software, a bunch of APIs, numerous SQL and server instances, legacy business code, web apps etc. There are bits and pieces of documentation for some of the parts but there is no complete document where all of the ins and outs of the system are explained in a readable and understandable way.
I'll have help from senior devs and architects but this is mainly my task. Are there any articles, tutorials, books to read and can you give me advice how to start, what to look for and what to avoid before I jump into this rabbit hole? <comment><USER2> I write a lot of documentation. I do it not because others ask, but because I genuinely believe it is going to be helpful to someone at some point, and anticipate this need. So when Bobby from marketing asks about a feature, or Kate the junior dev can't wrap her head about some algorithm, hey, I got them covered!

So I think this mindset is the first thing you need in order to get going. It will inspire you to write more and better.

Secondly, my practical advice is the following: divide your doc in sections. Plan them out beforehand by writing just titles and subtitles. See how they fit together, if their sequence makes sense. Rearrange them until they convey a clear story. Usually you might want to have three macro-sections: 1. Introduction - what is the document about, who is it indended for, and why it was developed. This helps set expectations right off the bat. You can also describe the big-picture goals of the system/feature. What is it used for. What are the main use cases. 2\. System/Feature Overview: here you can describe the big-boxes architecture, the main components (apps, servers, middleware, db, whatever), what they do, and how they work together. Describe communication protocols and standards followed. Describe functionalities the system provides. You can follow up on the use cases you mentioned in part 1 and show how the system delivers them. 3\. Technical Details/Implementation Choices: depending on the audience of your doc, you might want to document non-obvious design choices. This is also where might want to describe expected inputs and outputs. If it's an API, describe the routes, accepted methods, paylods. Provide actual examples, as many as you can. Describe the data model.

Then as you follow this trace, you might find out you wrote a lot about a certain topic. Depending on the level of detail you want to achieve, break it down in smaller sub-sections, or move parts over to section 3.

As for the writing style, you might want a prose with short sentences and easy language. Make sure to explain stuff thoroughly and not take anything for granted. Everything that looks damn obvious today, won't be 6 months from now.

Sorry if this looks like a stream-of-consciousness. It sort of is. I hope you can find some of it useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a rather structured stream-of-consciousness, thanks. I'm mainly afraid that because I really don't know what are the parts of our system and what they actually do that I'll screw this up. But I really trust my support system of senior devs and PMs and with my beginner mind this could be a great learning experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> These two old threads from Ask Metafilter might be pertinent:

[https://ask.metafilter.com/98291/How-does-IT-documenation- wo...](https://ask.metafilter.com/98291/How-does-IT-documenation-work) (2008)

[https://ask.metafilter.com/111250/Document](https://ask.metafilter.com/111250/Document) (2009)

</comment><comment><USER4> Did you try LaTeX?</comment>


Char2Wav: End-To-End Speech Synthesis - <AUTHOR> https://mila.umontreal.ca/en/publication/char2wav-end-to-end-speech-synthesis/ <comment><USER2> I am getting tired of people implementing "deep learning to convert foo into bar" and staking a claim on the name "foo2bar".

It leads to "AI hallucination", where even if "foo2bar" doesn't work, people assume that it's the one right AI for turning foo into bar. When someone gets better at turning foo into bar, the typical response will be "is that just foo2bar?"

This happened absurdly backwards with doc2vec, which after word2vec everyone talked about as if it were a real thing, until Radim Řehůřek finally made a reasonable implementation of it under that name.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure people will interpret it that way. For example, seq2seq is really just a generic term for an entire class of networks that map sequences to other sequences.

<comment><USER2> If someone else made a speech synthesizer named "Char2wav", wouldn't the author of this project feel like their branding was being stolen from them?

<comment><USER3> "branding" a project that way might make the authors unhappy, but i can totally imagine someone saying in a couple of months "I built a char2wav net with GRUs and deconvolution" or something like that, ie using the word as a generic term...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/files/wav/blizzard...](http://www.josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/files/wav/blizzard/best_bidirectional_encoder_9.wav)

I have not laughed this hard in a long time.

<comment><USER5> You might also enjoy [http://badsamples.tumblr.com/](http://badsamples.tumblr.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> the demo page isn't clearly presented.

for example, on this page, only spanish has the char2wav label.

[http://www.josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/](http://www.josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/)

It's unclear which results are the output of the model.

<comment><USER7> I love how the "Reader over characters with vocoder output." samples sound sometimes like they're giving up or falling asleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many of the synth voices sound to my ear very similar to people who are either drunk or have a brain injury. I'm not complaining, it's an interesting parallel.

</comment><comment><USER9> So how does this work? It's not very clear from the article.

<comment><USER10> Hi, I'm one of the authors. In broad lines, we pretrained one model (the "Reader") to learn to read text and output vocoder variables, and another model (SampleRNN) to go from these vocoder variables to an audio waveform. Then, we finetuned both models together to be able to go from text to speech, end-to-end. The "end product" is a text-to-speech system, but without the need of having to extract tons of hand-engineered features from the text to be able to generate speech. We also expect that with more training this will be able to overcome the usual vocoder speech "unnaturalness" issues.

<comment><USER4> Can you comment on what's happening in this sample (result???) clip? [http://www.josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/files/wav/blizzard...](http://www.josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/files/wav/blizzard/best_bidirectional_encoder_9.wav)

Also, I notice that many of the result clips trail off in volume. Is that a processing error or intentional in how the clips are edited?

<comment><USER10> I think the model just got tired of reading text and decided to mock us :) Just kidding. The attention mechanism got stuck somehow for this sample. This does not happen very often, though. It's important to note the samples we posted were not cherry-picked: they are just the first 10 sentences from our test set.

Regarding the truncation at the end, that was a bug in our sampling code that we just fixed. We will update the samples soon!

<comment><USER11> Is there any way to artificially induce that failure? I'm an artist and I've been trying to get a handle on ML stuff, and being able to feed speech through this to give it the flat affect of the phoneme-mode samples, or insert attention failures at specific points, would be extremely useful for a number of projects I have in mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Proceeding to feed this Paul Bettany's "Jarvis" from some movies...

<comment><USER5> This is no joke something I have considered - do you have a source on a pairing of "read speech" and "transcript" for this? I could process the movies myself but that seems... tedious...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to feed _The Chaos_ to it and see how it fares.</comment>


CS 179: GPU Programming - <AUTHOR> http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs179/ <comment><USER2> I'm taking a free course in CUDA programming on Udacity at the moment that's co-taught by a guy from NVIDIA Research and a professor from UC Davis. If you're looking for something that starts from the basics and is really easy to follow, I highly recommend it.

[https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-parallel- programming...](https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-parallel-programming-- cs344)

<comment><USER3> I'm working on a Ph.D. working in GPU architecture, and this course is the real deal. It goes beyond how to run things on a GPU to analyzing the runtime and work efficiency of algorithms suited to the GPU.

Wen-mei Hwu's lectures on "Advanced Algorithmic Techiques for GPUs" (first lecture slides: [http://iccs.lbl.gov/assets/docs/2011-01-24/lecture1_computat...](http://iccs.lbl.gov/assets/docs/2011-01-24/lecture1_computational_thinking_Berkeley_2011.pdf)) are a gold mine of GPU programming techniques. I believe he has published several books on the topic too, and released a benchmark suite (Parboil [http://impact.crhc.illinois.edu/parboil/parboil.aspx](http://impact.crhc.illinois.edu/parboil/parboil.aspx)) optimized with these techinques.

<comment><USER4> He runs a Coursera MOOC too, how useful is that? I gave up early on because the homework was very simple.

<comment><USER5> The university course is also a joke, except for the project, which is "what you make of it".

<comment><USER6> I took the course at UIUC (ECE 408) 2 years ago. While the assignments weren't too challenging, I thought they were thorough in covering the material from class, and the material from class came straight from Professor Hwu's book.

Plus, the final exam was extremely harsh so I wouldn't have called it a joke.

<comment><USER5> Compared to the physics classes or that algorithm class, I put my brain on auto-pilot. Sure, the final was hard but mostly because I didn't have time to write code in a word document, and people who went to the official exam area actually got significantly more time (I took it a few years before you).

Many things were missing from that class, including how to improve performance by ensuring that warp receives the optimal data size, for example by using float4.

I could have learned the same stuff by looking at his MOOC - which is what OP got bored of doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is very cool to see that the class is being taught by a group of juniors/seniors (checked the top two, first one was a senior and second one was a junior), and an appointed faculty is listed only as a supervisor ....

I am really interested in the class outcome, and would love to hear what the students in class feel about this arrangement ....

I can see the good things about this. It gives the instructor/TA students an opportunity to grow while giving the peer-learning atmosphere to students in class. Plus, the students in class will learn from their peers who has the latest working knowledge of CUDA fresh in their heads, and this arrangement also frees up a faculty (or two) from having to prepare the course so that they can do their faculty/research work (prepping and teaching a class, especially an interesting and engaging one, is a really draining experience on the part of the faculty as well.)

Only downside I can see could be managing the class well enough so that class time is efficiently utilized. But I believe this should be covered by the faculty who is in supervisor position ....

<comment><USER8> I took this class as a junior and then later co-taught this class as a senior undergrad in 2015.

The motivation behind the student taught class is that it allows for more classes to be taught than could happen otherwise.

As a student: Like any other class, the quality greatly depends on the work put in by the instructors. I think a student instructor is more likely to care about the quality of teaching, but also more likely to be overworked and not have enough time to dedicate to the course. I didn't think the course was particularly good when I took it due to lack of time from the instructors, but I'm glad the course was offered and that I took it as it got my feet wet with GPU programming.

After taking the course, I did an internship doing GPU programming. Doing this internship, I learned a ton and had a lot of ideas about how to improve the course. This put the idea of teaching the course in my head.

As an instructor: Myself and one other student designed the curriculum, gave the lectures, made the problem sets, did everything. We had a 3rd student who helped with grading. Teaching the course was hugely valuable to me, and also a ton of work. The course was hugely valuable because I learned a ton about GPU programming by teaching it and answering questions. As part of my motivation for teaching was to make the course more how I thought it should be, I didn't reuse many materials from the year before and spent many hours making lecture slides and problem sets. Towards the end of the course, I fell short on time and the lectures and problem sets weren't as good as they could have been. We made the class have a large final project of the student's choosing, and a few awesome things were made. Overall, I'm glad I taught the class, and I think I mostly accomplished what I wanted with improving the learning outcome for students.

<comment><USER9> Do you have the course content uploaded somewhere? If not, do you mind uploading it and sharing the link here?

<comment><USER8> The lecture slides from 2016 are on the course website (which this HN post links to).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For someone that knows a thing about CUDA and parallel programming already, the best reference is Paulius Micikevicius' presentations. If the words in it mean something to you, these 100+ slides explain more about the hardware and programming model than any other documentation you'll find elsewhere.

[http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2013/presentations/S346...](http://on- demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2013/presentations/S3466-Programming-Guidelines- GPU-Architecture.pdf)

If you want to really master CUDA, Nvidia GPUs and the various programming model tradeoffs, the best thing is to write a GEMM kernel and a sort kernel from scratch. To take it even further, write two of each: one that optimizes large GEMMs/sorts, and one that optimizes for batches of small GEMMs (or large GEMMs with tiny (<16 or <32) `k` or another dim) / batches of small sorts. Specialization for different problem configurations is often the name of the game.

For GEMM, you can work through the simple GEMM example in the CUDA documentation, then take a look at the Volkov GEMM from 2008, then the MAGMA GEMM, then the Junjie Lai / INRIA GEMM, then eventually the Scott Gray / Nervana SASS implementation, in increasing order of complexity and state-of- the-art-ness.

</comment><comment><USER11> I took this class last year. Although it was nice to see undergraduates instructing the class, the lack of teaching experience really showed: the students were pretty rough around the edges in terms of their examples and explanations. About 2/3rds of classes ended early (at least this is better than heavily wasted time). This somewhat fits in with the unofficial caltech policy of "figuring out the finer details on your own".

That said, I thought the practical nature of the class was a refreshing switch from the heavily theoretical foundation of my other CS coursework experiences.

</comment><comment><USER12> The lecture slides are very good.

For anybody following along, there's 2 other books, Wrox Professional Cuda programming, and Cuda for Engineers, which would ease entry for those who aren't versed in HPC (PDE solvers, BLAS/LAPACK, Fourier transforms etc). The Storti/Yurtoglu book is the best intro i've seen to the topic, the Wrox book covers a lot of the material in Wilt's Handbook, not as exhaustively, but more up to date (Kepler vs Fermi).

________________________

There's other course material online, UIUC, oxford (especially good, IMO)

[http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/gilesm/cuda/](http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/gilesm/cuda/)

[http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/fa15/cse260-a/lectures.html](http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/fa15/cse260-a/lectures.html)

[https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero](https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero)

</comment><comment><USER13> Are there any course videos available anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER14> Anyone know how this compares to the course(s) NVIDIA offers on Udacity?

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there any resource as good, that targets a recent version of OpenCL?

</comment><comment><USER16> Wish there were videos available for the same course ! Can someone suggest a good lecture series with videos, other than udacity.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why CUDA not OpenCL I wonder?

<comment><USER18> NVIDIA does a great job at dragging their heels on OCL support and a heavy marketing push on CUDA. IMO they produce a much higher-quality product than AMD.

If I were NVIDIA I'd probably donate scores of servers+GPUs to schools like Caltech in order to inspire curriculum just like this.

<comment><USER19> In fact, that's what NVIDIA did at my alma mater, Grinnell College. I believe the intent was for courses like the OS course to be taught using CUDA (at least to some degree). I don't think that has panned out, but now a tiny liberal arts college has a ton of GPUs to use.</comment></comment></comment>


Comparing note taking interfaces show a striking difference - <AUTHOR> https://s3.amazonaws.com/storage.memrey.com/videos/comparison_notepads.mp4 <comment><AUTHOR> The app on the left is Evernote and on the right is Memrey. Evernote sports the most traditional notebook type UI with a column of notes and an area to show the notes. Apple notes, simple note, and many others have this same design.

Memrey has the same infinite scroll list allowing you to select a note, but the interface loads 4 notes at a time on each page. So you see your note in full, and the surrounding context of notes. This makes it much easier to browse and understand your notepad. It is the type of thing that once you use this new UI, you will never want to go back to the traditional UI again.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> to checkout memrey and access a demo account to play around with the interface yourself visit [https://www.memrey.com](https://www.memrey.com)

On the homepage is a button to log you into a demo account with no need to signup before trying! Feel free to play around with the app! There is so much magic under the hood, as you use Memrey you will discover advanced powers!</comment>


How to Program an NES game in C - <AUTHOR> https://nesdoug.wordpress.com/ <comment><USER2> If you're interested in programming Gameboy Advance games:

While in college, one intro course on lower-level computer programming had a few projects for programming for a Gameboy Advance emulator. This site was heavily used for reference and guidance: [http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm](http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm)

Also, here are some materials (from the course) and even examples of created projects:

_

 _Related Course Materials_

1\. Main Reference: [http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm](http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm)

2\. GBA Installation: [https://github.com/nuppan/Georgia- Tech/tree/master/2nd%20Yea...](https://github.com/nuppan/Georgia- Tech/tree/master/2nd%20Year/CS%202110/Linux%20Assignments/CS2110/GBA%20Installation)

2\. Another site: [http://www.loirak.com/gameboy/gbatutor.php](http://www.loirak.com/gameboy/gbatutor.php)

_

 _Projects_

1\. "Duckhunt" \- [https://github.com/jabelman/duck_hunt- gba](https://github.com/jabelman/duck_hunt-gba)

2\. "Pacman" \- [https://github.com/zjhzyyk/gba- pacman](https://github.com/zjhzyyk/gba-pacman)

3\. Video of "The Snuggler" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxnEY3RRPp4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxnEY3RRPp4)

4\. Video of "Samurai Jack" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgIeKCxAfSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgIeKCxAfSk)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it possible to somehow "copy" an NES game that you've compiled onto a real NES cartridge so that it can be played on a real NES? That could make this an incredibly fun hobby. Especially as a parent of kids who actually enjoy NES and SNES games.

<comment><USER4> The simplest way to deploy your homebrew ROMs to a real NES is to use something called a "flash cartridge"[1]. This is equivalent to a real NES cartridge except it is backed by rewritable flash memory instead of a permanent ROM. It contains all of the necessary glue logic[2] so the console can't tell the difference. You can rewrite the flash if you connect the cart to your computer via USB.

The magical thing to google if you want to do your own research is "NES flash cart".

The "EverDrive" that aji suggests is, indeed, an example of a flash cart. It may or may not be the best one for the NES - I honestly don't know, all of my experience is with the GameBoy.

dpflan's approach of erasing and reprogramming a REAL NES cart is also possible, if you enjoy pain and suffering in the name of being lavishly historically accurate. (I know I do sometimes.)

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_cartridge
      [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_controller</comment></comment>


Duck Duck Go Passed 1mm Searches Per Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/02/duck-duck-go-passed-1mm-searches-per-day.html <comment><USER2> I wonder how many include the google !bang to go direct to google. I love DDG, and have it as the default search on all my devices and browsers, but more than 50% of the time I go directly to google with !g in the search, and another 20% i guess i start at DDG but then add in !g when i find the results inferior.

For many searches, google's results I find are better - a common issue I've found it DDG's results are just too general for quite specific searches - .e.g the top result is teh homepage of a brand when I search for something more specific like "brand something something" (sorry i can't come up with a great example right now).

I still use DDG as I can use the rest of the bang syntax to get to wikipedia et al, and for certain things the results (e.g. code/technical) are clearly superior to googles.

I hope DDG logs all the times I go to DDG, then add in !g, to get some great analytics on when I found the search results lacking!

<comment><USER3> Dittos.

For many years I pretty much laughed at Google-search wannabes. Now I really want there to be a credible alternative.

I've set DDG as my preferred search. But I'm still !banging to Google at least half the time.

Can haz moar betters releventz plz!

<comment><USER4> We would appreciate any specific examples at <https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html> \-- it's a great way to improve!

But higher level, !g roughly accounted for 1% of queries yesterday, which also includes all the cases where we ran out of results and people clicked on our Try google link.

<comment><USER2> Here's a real example that just occurred. A Search for "jquery select visited anchor" on DDG returns the jquery selectors docs first (okay match) and jquery.com match second (useless). A search on google.com, the first 2 results are SO answers that answer exactly my question.

My point isn't specifically you rank SO lower than it should imo (although i do think this is the case) - its in general, for me, you return roots of homepages or brands at hte top when the query is clearly looking for something very specific.

<comment><USER4> I'm not seeing that result set at all. Do you have a region set? I'd appreciate emailing me a screen shot if you don't mind at email@example.com

Btw, we index SO ourselves, e.g. <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nginx+apache>

We just have a high bar to show it, but are working on that piece so it comes up more. It's also full punctuation.

<comment><USER2> Email sent, but for other readers' reference, shots taken in anon chrome:

ddg: <http://i.minus.com/iKakLPppwCv14.jpg>

google: <http://i.minus.com/iZvY24AxfnHRR.jpg>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Totally off-topic, but why do some people write 'mm' when they mean (I presume) million? From the subject line I initially thought Duck Duck Go had passed 1 millimetre of searches per day.

<comment><USER6> M is the roman numeral for 1,000. So MM is meant as 1,000 x 1,000, which equals 1,000,000 (one million). OP should have used capital letters, as mm does indeed denote millimeters. Better yet, just use the more common M symbol to mean "million."

<comment><USER7> Pedantic: MM means 2 tousand if we are really to stick to roman numerals.

<comment><USER8> Another pedantic remark is that people use $1K instead of $1M to mean $1000.

I think it's fine to use whatever it takes to get the message across.

<comment><USER9> Which stands for kilo and is correct.

<comment><USER10> Lowercase k stands for kilo; K stands for Kelvin (as long as we're being pedantic).

<comment><USER11> It is uppercase in the comment above.

And a letter can stand for multiple things, from temperatures to chemical elements to whatever.

As long as we're being pedantic, that is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome. Resist the temptation to create DuckDuckMail, DuckDuckPlus, DuckDuckMaps. Stick to what makes DDG great; a simple, private, universal search engine.

<comment><USER13> While I agree that DDG should keep it simple, two of the three Google examples you've given -- Gmail and Maps -- are products I rely heavily on, and am glad Google decided to branch out for those two products alone.

I would have listed other, more toxic and/or embarrassingly unsuccessful examples, like:

\- Privacy practices \- Adsense/Adwords \- Search personalization "features" \- Docs \- Buzz \- Jaiku \- Wave \- etc...

<comment><USER14> Adsense? Are you serious? Google isn't a search engine. It's an ads engine.

Without Adsense, there is no Google. Everything else is just a platform for it.

<comment><USER13> Not sure what you're arguing. I was using Adsense as an example of a toxic product from Google.

<comment><USER15> Perhaps toxic, but Adsense/Adwords are what make Google possible. Without revenue there's no Google.

<comment><USER16> The dis-proportionality of contextual pay per click revenue has financed Google's excursions in to all of these other areas.

One has to wonder if Google had just stuck with search, the search product would be significantly better than it is today. Instead we've got Google trying to be everything to everyone, at the cost of the integrity of those search results.

<comment> the-cakeboss Have the search results degraded that much in your opinion? I still find their results the most useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well done to Gabriel. I love the clean design and customisability of DDG and the privacy policy. However I wonder if he's figured out a way to monetise it without sacrificing user experience [1] to keep it viable into the future.

[1] <https://duck.co/topic/financing-model>

<comment><USER18> They have had sponsored links for quite some time now, but I wonder how that pairs up with BOSS API not being free anymore.

<comment><USER19> BOSS queries are $0.80 per thousand queries, so $0.0008 per search. A web search site that uses a premium sponsored link feed should be able to generate about $0.04 per query (50% share of the $0.09 per query that Google makes). Thus the revenue generated could be about 50 times the cost of the raw materials (the BOSS search results). BOSS is cheap in that regard. If you extrapolate to an entire year, DDG could be making about $15 million per year in revenue if they chose to show ads aggressively.

<comment><USER20> Pardon my ignorance on the matter of ad revenue, but $0.04 per each search query? That sounds very high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm rooting for Blekko and DDG and pretty much anything that will uproot or disturb Google's stronghold.

For one, I miss the days when Google search felt fresh, magical, and honest. Search Plus Your World just irks me, because, as many have pointed out, it isn't providing relevant results and its shoving G+ down my throat.

As an aside, I'm interested to see which major search engine will partner with Tumblr. I'm not smart enough to figure out the details of the relationship, but I think have access to their stream of data could be pretty cool.

<comment><USER22> When you eliminate the reblogged duplicate content, that stream would just be a trickle. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> 1 millimetre? Who measures Searches Per Day in millimetres?

<comment><USER24> I read it the same.

M = 1'000 in Roman. So MM is a million.

<comment><USER25> MM is a million. mm is a millimetre.

<comment><USER26> In the metric system,

1 mm = 0.001 m = 0.001 metres

but

1 MM = 1000000 M = 1000000 ?????

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> DDG and even Bing/Yahoo both need to index much more of the web if they want to be competitive. You just can't beat anyone in quality when you have fewer results to work with - it's just simple math. I hope DDG uses some of its investment money on solving this problem (as well as speed, but speed is secondary). The bang codes, privacy, etc are all great.

<comment><USER28> isn't ddg a meta search engine (if I remember correctly they scraped google and used yahoo search api)? Or has this changed?

<comment><USER29> It uses Yahoo, Bing, and a number of other sources (but not google). See [http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources) :)

<comment><USER27> Then they are limited to what's in Bing's/Yahoo's index, and their index is vastly inferior to Google's... it's not even close. This is partially why Google has better results - they simply crawl more of the web (plus their algorithm too, of course).

Why can't DDG just cut their losses and invest in building their own index? It's much more worth it in the long run. All DDG is doing is adding cool, nice to have UI features on top of Bing/Yahoo, but what about the core?

<comment><USER28> I'm quite sure they used to use google in the past

> Why can't DDG just cut their losses and invest in building their own index?

That's far from trivial task.. Scraping and using other peoples results is easy, building and scaling a huge database like search index is one of the hardest problems you can find.

<comment><USER27> Ok that's fair. But in that case, I don't understand what compelling way DDG is differentiating themselves from other search engines besides a few cool, nice, thin value features.

<comment><USER28> .. that's almost exactly what I'm thinking too ..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I always liked the site but to be honest after using it as my default search engine briefly in chromium, i found it didn't quite compare to google in terms of:

1\. Performance. There's a small but significant gap between the two services in terms of the speed in which they serve redirects and search results.

2\. Features. Although a lack of features like mail, maps etc. is, I suppose, part of ddg's philosophy, I feel like it's merely inconvenient compared to google where all it's services are immediately available with a click. Also, ddg doesn't save any web history which can actually be very useful for people using more than one computer.

It's not that I dislike ddg and what it does. It fills a nice gap in the market and I like it's principles of privacy. But for now, performance trumps freedom I guess :p

<comment><USER30> in hindsight this comment seems a little harsh. It's not fair at all to compare the two in terms of performance when google is a huge multinational with servers all over the world and ddg only has a few (I imagine)

<comment><USER4> We are working on this issue -- where are you located?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is great news. I remember a previous post where the HN community suggested minor improvements on the placement of sponsored links, and DDG was quick to suggest a fix was in the works. The partnership done with Linux Mint means that they have been my default search engine ( + thousands of others) for about 3 months now. There isn't a feeling of loss felt by using their service, except on a few, rare occasions.

... I just hope they stay true to their goals _it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience._ [http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources)

</comment><comment><USER32> Congratulations to DDG Team, I switch to DDG around a month back and have loved it ever since. !yt, !so..<http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html> are really good when you want the search to get out of the way.

Amazing job!

</comment><comment><USER26> My favourite part about using DDG is the !bang operators. Now I can search Wikipedia, Amazon, Google, etc. from the same "command line" (i.e. my Firefox search box). Awesome.

<https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder how much of those come from mint installs, anyone have this information?

<comment><USER34> I think Opera has DDG as default search engine too

<comment><USER35> <http://screencast.com/t/yZIkmNkMV8wp> ^ Fresh Opera install. Opera ships with DDG but _not_ as the default. Frankly I would guess that the impact this has is insignificant: Opera has a small user base in the first place, and ddg is just one of several options in a list. How many people will, without prompting, explore what this new search is in their Opera, and understand the benefit of using it? At first blush (without knowledge of the privacy protections, bang syntax etc.) DDG is just a cleaner, slower, unfamiliar google with worse results. (I say this as someone with DDG as his default on all browsers.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Guess my use of it is in the stat. :) I'm using may be 50% DDG and 50% Google. Still training my muscle memory on the hot key.

DDG's privacy policy is superb. Its search result is pretty good with non of the bloats. I still remember how Google Preview was infuriatingly distracting that I had to install add-on to get rid of it completely.

</comment><comment><USER37> And that where i switched from Google to DDG yesterday, great :)

</comment><comment><USER38> I like navigating the search results on DDG....Good service..

</comment><comment><USER39> 1mm?</comment>


Why do people hate their jobs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/04/why-do-people-hate-their-jobs/

<comment><USER2> It pays to have experience with hostile work environments where harassment and threats is an issue before you start work. If you get stuck in one of these, try to learn from it and make the best of it. Had lots of friends who accepted a job where they were thrust immediately into the "hot seat". It's an aspect of a job that they don't really teach in school.</comment>


Priceline – the $60bn travel titan you may never have heard of - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/03/priceline-online-travel-agent-booking-com-opentable?CMP=twt_gu

<comment><USER2> I've followed their business for a few years and the rate of growth has been incredible.

I think a big part of it is down to the quality of their products. Booking.com is fantastic to use, I book every hotel trip through their site and the experience keeps improving. Their SEO & PPC approach works well, they seem to rank #1 for every destination. Their conversion process from landing on site through to booking is great.

Would love to know more about them, wish they published details on their approach, growth engines, engineering etc.</comment>


Show HN: Guesto – Self check-in and name badge printing app for events - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/guestoapp/introducing-guesto-for-ipad-8cbbf7b4688e#.honngnd8m <comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback or questions welcome.</comment>


Airbnb : 10 Million Nights Booked, 200K Active Properties - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/19/airbnb-10-million-bookings-global/ <comment><USER2> Not gonna lie, saw title and thought vanity metric lol</comment>


Ask HN: favicon o.O - <AUTHOR>

Did anyone else notice at (http://news.ycombinator.com/news) that HN's favicon was temporarily reddit's favicon around 7:30am PST? Maybe I need to get some sleep. <comment><USER2> Firefox? Most likely a browser bug, I've had sites show favicons of other sites I've recently visited before (not for a while, though)

<comment><AUTHOR> Safari. You're probably right--fun while it lasted though.</comment></comment>


The U.S. Congress Has Started to Revive Gun Violence Research - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-s-congress-has-started-to-revive-gun-violence-research-mdash-and-must-follow-through/ <comment><USER2> Why does everyone dismiss the first one? Why do we need a new bill and millions more spent for what we already know? Is it because it does not align with the anti-gun agenda?

Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence [https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3#15](https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3#15)

[https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/cdc-gun- violen...](https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/cdc-gun-violence- study-goes-against-media-narrative/)

[https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15941-cdc-s...](https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15941-cdc- study-ordered-by-obama-contradicts-white-house-anti-gun-narrative)</comment>


Where are all the Steam machines? - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/where-are-all-the-steam-machines-1679148236

<comment><USER2> Even if we had Steam Machines the video game makers are not cooperating with Valve to port their games to Linux. Your SteamOS based Steam Machine would have to connect to your Windows PC and play games over the Cloud in order to have games to play.

The Steam controller, they went too fancy with it. Didn't design it very well and made it very expensive to make. The Xbox One controller is much better and you can get a Windows driver for it and make a Steam Machine with Windows 8.1 on it to play Windows games with Steam.

Valve didn't keep up a good communication with the PC makers in making Steam machines, so they delayed or made Windows boxes instead.

At one time Microsoft wanted to make a new standard called ACE Advanced Computing Environment with Microsoft OS/2 and MIPS CPUs with a dozen PC makers. They too had communication issues and Microsoft OS/2 got turned into Windows NT and the MIPS version of NT was used on those machines instead. As of Windows NT 4.0 MIPS was no longer supported. But the MIPS NT 4.0 machines could run 286 DOS programs for some reason. Yet who wanted a MIPS based NT system when an Intel X86 NT system was cheaper and ran more software titles?</comment>


Social-first: The new way to live - <AUTHOR> http://jackealtman.com/socialfirst-the-new-way-to-live

<comment><USER2> good thought, definitely true, reminds of this [http://www.switched.com/2010/12/27/navy-pilots-flew- helicopt...](http://www.switched.com/2010/12/27/navy-pilots-flew-helicopters- into-lake-tahoe-for-facebook-pictur/)</comment>


The Privacy Battle to Save Google from Itself - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/google-privacy-data/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wish that Wired would cover my essay. It is my attempt at a history related to this stuff.</comment>


Sam Altman of Y Combinator paying $10K to be killed and brain preserved forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5503045/Tech-billionaire-pays-10K-die-brain-uploaded-online.html <comment><USER2> The waiting list on this, is it a relatively quick thing, or is it moreout reserving a spot at some undecided time in the future? It'd be a shame to lose out on such a brilliant mind so early.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Silicon Valley Billionaire"

Sam hit the three comma club?

<comment><USER4> Worse than that: in UK parlance, isn't "billion" what Americans call _" trillion"_? (What Americans call "billion" is referred to as "thousand million" in the UK).</comment></comment>


The only thing that is going to help you dunk, is to dunk - <AUTHOR> http://rene.bz/the-only-thing-that-is-going-to-help-you-dunk-is-to-dunk

<comment><USER2> A lot is attributed to his training regime and his will power. But I think a small dash of jumping genetics are needed to!</comment>


Things that aren't progress - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronkharris.com/things-that-arent-progress <comment><USER2> Said another way: anything that flatters the ego feels like progress to the ego-driven. Real progress starts with quietening the ego.

<comment><USER3> That's a great way to think about it. Guess I could just call this "vanity metrics."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's amazingly difficult to find the right metric when you are still at the MVP level.

However, once the system has proven itself, it's only a matter of optimization.

I think it's one (amongst many) reason why so many startups fail at the MVP stage. Looking for metrics at that stage is just speculation; optimizing for them is a complete waste of time. The focus of the MVP is to build a proven system without getting lost (minimal waste of time/effort/resources).

<comment><USER3> You're right that optimizing for metrics too early is a mistake. I do think, though, that there are good metrics to focus on at the MVP stage. Talking to users is generally a pretty good one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Fundraising is just a tool to accomplish your real goals, not a goal in and of itself.

I don't disagree with that point, but it's weird to say that obtaining a tool to further your goals is "not progress".

<comment><USER6> Kind of reminds me of visiting photo gear forums. People get into crazy discussions about megapixels, resolution, dynamic range, shot noise, and everything but actually taking pictures. "Pixel peeping" is a far cry from using the gear for its intended purpose.

Fundraising is like a camera, it's a tool, a means to accomplish something. A great photographer can do amazing things with a cheap camera. Achievement is measured only by the images produced, not the gear used in making them.

Analogously "progress" is measured by what an enterprise produces, not how much money was raised. In short, having tools is not the same as using them, especially using them well.

IOW having tools is a necessary, but not sufficient condition of making progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really love these, I spend some of my time trying to help groups come out of my alma mater with working startups and it's frustrating how hard it is to get these points across to virtually all new founders, we've all been there and know what it's like chasing the shiny object.

I understand what you are saying on the last point, there's no silver bullet and you better come in ready to really work, but it has to constitute progress when you get in YC. Anything that you do to improve your expected value by a multiple is progress, this includes getting into YC (specifically), recruiting a stellar co-founder or landing the perfect investment partner.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a good list.

Press/Retweets in and of themselves aren't progress but they can be a good indicator of it (and also a poor indicator). I've had many conversations which have turned into sales that included that person talking about how they've been seeing my site everywhere these days.

Eyeballs/Uniques are precisely why the advertising I sell is done on a monthly basis. Either the advertiser will like the results of the campaign by tracking the activity on their site, or they won't.

</comment><comment><USER9> Honestly who considers these their primary goals? Every company I've interviewed / interacted with has focus on real numbers or a sense of why something ties to underlying strategy. Most likely I'm suffering from selection bias, but honestly curious what companies run like this.

This must be directed at first time, earliest stage founders.

<comment><USER2> Probably usually novice founders who think they too can pull off the _launch - > go viral -> fundraise -> scale -> monetise/exit trick_ that rarely works but has worked for some of the biggest successes (eg YouTube).

I fell for it.

These days, most of the companies doing well enough to offer you a job are too smart for that.

But I still hear of "well credentialed" founders who succeeded that way in the 90s or 2000s, trying to do it again and failing miserably - burning 8-figure sums of money in the process because to VC's they're "proven" \- eg Color.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Upvotes on HN.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe progress is anything that increases your revenue.

<comment><USER12> I'd take it a step further: Progress is any work that is enterprise value accretive. Prioritized to the degree to which it is.

<comment><USER13> That's a good way of putting it, I think. Revenue is obviously very important, but there are other values that an enterprise may be concerned with as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Are we naturally lazy? - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/are-we-naturally-lazy/

<comment><USER2> this is stupid. if the 'we' refers to humanity in general, of course we are. it's called the path of least resistance, and it's easy to find throughout nature.</comment>


TIL: The original Shockley lab is right here in Los Altos - <AUTHOR> http://anuragpandit.com/post/65091211119/change-at-the-heart-of-the-valley

<comment><USER2> ... so why was the picture taken in Mountain View?

<comment><USER3> Because the author could care less about fact checking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honest mistake, I always assumed that area was Los Altos. Three cities intersect somewhere around there. However, the point wasn't about the city, but rather the state of the building and how it's changed.</comment></comment></comment>


Continuous Cross-Architecture Integration with Gitlab - <AUTHOR> https://community.arm.com/developer/research/b/articles/posts/continuous-cross-architecture-integration-with-gitlab <comment><AUTHOR> My blog post on using docker-in-docker combined with qemu-user-static and Docker BuildX to enable you to build multiple-architecture (arm, arm64, power, etc.) images using GitLab's own x86 CI cluster.</comment>