New Evidence USCIS Policies Increased Denials Of H-1B Visas - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/25/new-evidence-uscis-policies-increased-denials-of-h-1b-visas/#29f948785a9f <comment><USER2> India has more applicants than all other countries combined times 2.5

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are fraud and legitimately rejected

[https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...](https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/Immigration%20Forms%20Data/BAHA/h-1b-2007-2017-trend- tables.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Having worked with H-1B "principal engineers" who can't write a bash script, I'm thinking yes, this is true.

<comment><USER4> People who work primarily on Windows have trouble writing bash scripts. That's not exactly surprising.

<comment><USER3> This was at a Linux shop.

<comment><USER4> That was meant as a joke.

While I agree that there are many incompetent people who have abused H1B and other such systems, I prefer to judge people on their individual merits and avoid stereotyping. I have worked with both the extremes.

See my longer response to the OP

<comment><USER3> I've never worked with a native employee with this particular defect for any appreciable length of time. They always get let go. The H-1Bs however, in my experience, don't. Why might that be?

<comment><USER4> > The H-1Bs however, in my experience, don't. Why might that be?

That is strange. In my experience, H1Bs are let go as quickly as natives if they are not competent. Of course, it could simply be a matter of the type of companies we have worked with. Again, see my (longer) response to the OP. I have mostly worked with Type 1 people I described there and have been fortunate enough to mostly avoid the Type 2. That said, I've worked with both extremes.

EDIT: When I say I've worked with both the extremes, I mean I have worked with both highly skilled and totally incompetent foreigners _as well as_ natives.

EDIT 2: I've also worked with a third category — highly intelligent people (PhD level) who are more interested in spreading their intelligence (i.e. showing off) than getting actual work done. Unfortunately, I haven't met the other extreme in this case. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know a lot of Americans think that most H-1B are cheap labor or incompetent engineers. There is some truth to it but hear the other side out.

The way H-1B is implemented, it does not distinguish a person with PhDin Computer Science from Stanford from someone who did bachelors in Computer Science from Univ of Timbuktoo. This is the only visa for a top student can get to continue to work in the United States.

Over many years, this caused a lot of grief with body shops abusing these visas. The new administration came in and appointed a bunch of racists to head USCIS, who started denying H-1B indiscriminately. Guess who are the guys getting kicked out now?

Yes, the same Stanford graduates (or other top university graduates) that America taught for many years.

The process also discounts non-linearity of life. A student produced by top American universities is likely a good engineer. If they've worked in top Silicon valley companies for many years, they've gained practical knowledge that many other countries would kill to have. These 28-45 year old people are typically startup founders, top engineers, execs and folks willing to take chances. The US unceremoniously chooses to kick them out brashly? Guess which jobs are going with them?

Also, the real mess of H-1B is the green card process of USA. There are so so so many people on periodic H-1B extensions for 10 years, 15 years etc. These guys have been in the US for the best periods of their lives and should be naturalized. But because of the patchwork laws of US immigration, don't have green cards. With the over zealous deportation machine (aka USCIS) in operation now, these folks are being kicked out with their spouses and kids.

The US under current administration has the world completely backward. If they ever genuinely had the intent to fix the immigration process (which I suspect they don't), they've chosen the worst possible way.

</comment><comment><USER6> Somehow, I don't see this article getting a lot of traction here on HN. I'm certain most of us have good friends and colleagues here in the US on an H1B Visa; I'm equally certain most of us have seen and experienced the abuse of the system.

H1B's stated purpose is "Specialty Occupation"s. A _lot_ of these Visas are being used to bring in workers for very generic IT helpdesk jobs. There's still many that are granted for exceptional talents in the field of Information Technology and Computer Science, but there's also a large number granted to companies that are primarily outsourcers, whose appeal is not specialization but simply being cheap.

It's been suggested many times on HN that the regulations on H1Bs be changed to make it a bidding process - Only bring over applicants who are being paid the most. I'm not sure I agree or disagree, but I absolutely think more careful scrutiny of what's considered a "Specialist Occupation" is a step that's reasonable within the current regulations. There's a lot of complaints of Fraud and Abuse related to the program that are also being addressed with more careful scrutiny.

<comment><USER7> _whose appeal is not specialization but simply being cheap_

If there was genuinely a shortage of tech workers there would be no ageism (or any other sort of -ism) nor would there be these elaborate multi-day hoop- jumping interviews.

<comment><USER8> Why? There is a legitimate reason for having a high hiring bar. Obviously this doesn't make ageism or discrimination acceptable of course.

<comment><USER7> _There is a legitimate reason for having a high hiring bar._

The "bar" is not representative at all of the nature of the work is why. It's artificially high in order to eliminate a glut of candidates early in the process.

I remember when there was a genuine shortage of tech workers - the dotcom boom. Hiring and compensation reflected that there was high demand and competition to hire. Outside of a very few niches now, the economics (law of supply and demand) simply don't show it.

<comment><USER8> >Outside of a very few niches now, the economics (law of supply and demand) simply don't show it.

Undergrads (not me though) can make $225k out of school now easily, is that not showing it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Broadly speaking, there are two types of H1B applicants[1]:

1\. Applicants being hired directly by US companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc. These applicants have either worked for a while at one of their offshore subsidiaries or were hired directly after a thorough interview process. They are typically paid on par with their US counterparts. These applicants are usually very good at what they do — regardless of their educational background — which is why they were hired in the first place.

2\. Applicants working for outsourcing companies who are being sent to work for their clients. Unfortunately, not all of them are good and are hired mostly to reduce costs.

Most of the stereotypical immigrant engineers fall in the second category. A lot of them moved to the US in late 1990s and throughout the 2000s. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple etc. don't typically hire incompetent people — barring a few exceptions which may have slipped through the cracks.

Unfortunately, the second category of applicants give all of them a bad name.

I don't know exactly how this can be solved completely. Perhaps H1Bs should be allowed to stay in the country after quitting their jobs for a certain period of time so they can look for another one — eliminating low employee mobility? Perhaps the minimum H1B wages should be increased — eliminating the low cost H1Bs? Perhaps there should be additional scrutiny for applicants going to work for a third party client? Perhaps there should be subcategories of H1B with different limits for the two types of applicants? Perhaps a combination?

In any case, treating the two categories as one is probably not a great idea.

[1] I know I am generalizing here and that the world is not black and white and that there are exceptions. But in my experience, these are the broad categories.

<comment><USER9> Both me and my wife fall in category 1, but were unceremoniously denied H1 visa extensions this year. Both of us have Master's degree in the US. As you would note from other comments in this thread, there is a lot of misunderstanding about H1B among Americans. For most people H1B = cheap, which is grossly incorrect

<comment><USER5> @dmode what did you and your spouse end up doing?

<comment><USER9> Thankfully my wife's second petition was approved. I am currently negotiating to work out of an international office. It is really complicated due to tax issues, transfer, wage leveling, timezones etc. Personally, it is tough for me as I have a toddler. The thought of a prolonged separation with her is stressing me out. We are also planning to move out of the US next year. Researching best destination currently

<comment><USER5> I hear you. Sorry about this! What other countries are you considering?

<comment><USER9> India, Singapore, Dublin, and Canada. Singapore is really easy work permit if you are already getting paid Bay Area salaries.

<comment><USER5> Do you need your company to sponsor you again? Or can you move there independent of a job offer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My understanding was that all (or most) applications are processed in 4th quarter of a fiscal year. That's because lottery is done in April (with results in May/June). So, comparing quarters of the same year make zero sense to me. Am I missing or misunderstanding something?

</comment><comment><USER11> From the article a)approximately 80% of full-time graduate students in computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are international students.

b)Economists Giovanni Peri, Kevin Shih and Chad Sparber notes "A 1 percentage point increase in the foreign STEM share of a city's total employment increased the wage growth of native college-educated labor by about 7–8 percentage points and the wage growth of non-college-educated natives by 3–4 percentage points."

<comment><USER12> > approximately 80% of full-time graduate students in computer science and > electrical engineering at U.S. universities are international students.

Just 80? LOL, that sounds low to me. I did an MSCS at a U.S. university in 2005, and I was one of two U.S. citizens in the entire _program_. I took multiple courses where I was the only U.S.-born person in the room, including the professor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Eric Weinstein has some thoughts on this: [https://mobile.twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/94208170561...](https://mobile.twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/942081705615155200)

Read the paper he links to there.

<comment><USER3> The decline in trust in "experts" isn't because people are stupid, it's because even uneducated Americans are actually pretty smart, more than smart enough to know when they're being lied to. This applies to people on both sides of the issues, it's just that the people who prefer the liars' side pretend not to notice the lying since they perceive it as beneficial to their interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm sure there is a good reason this idea wouldn't work, hoping someone can help poke holes in it:

Why not set a number of H1B visas (say keep the current of 85k), then rather than do a lottery or check qualifications, simply rank salaries offered to applicants (or total yearly compensation) and let the people with the highest offers get the visas.

This way wages won't be depressed, and companies with labor needs they are truly unable to fulfill with traditional methods will get all the people they need.

Viewing money as a crude measure of qualification it seems this would be the most fair method. Also would be the best for the American worker since it would prevent low cost H1B applicants from lowering local wages.

</comment><comment><USER15> More Indian H-1B applicants are rejected since [https://qz.com/889524/the-us- says-oracle-is-encouraging-indi...](https://qz.com/889524/the-us-says-oracle- is-encouraging-indians-to-hire-others-indians-and-its-killing-diversity/) and [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/world/asia/12iht- letter12....](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/world/asia/12iht- letter12.html)</comment>


The Diet Fix - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-diet-fix/ <comment><USER3> It's unfortunate that we have two definitions of diet:

1\. What we eat.

2\. A temporary change to what we eat that will produce correspondingly temporary results.

Another thing that trips people up is the paralysis rational human beings often experience at the start of a monumental task. Changing your diet to be healthier is, for many people, such a huge undertaking that they can't get started. Like so many other things in life, the trick is to start small. Try putting one less sugar in your coffee or, every time you open a Pringles can, throw the first ten chips in the trash. If you keep doing small things one day you will laugh at how little they really were while being awed by how far you've come.

</comment><comment><USER4> After reading some of sites' other posts I think it's just not a reliable source of information. The 'science' is hand picked to support the author's arguments. This is no different them the candida, sugar or vitamin proponents. They all have scientific explanations and plans of action.

<comment><USER5> His post about Taubes still being wrong does that [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/why-we-get- fat/](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/why-we-get-fat/)

I'd like Taubes to be wrong on some points, but the author would rather argue against his misunderstanding of Taubes, which doesn't help.

<comment><USER6> His argument in this post is "The laws of physics are unavoidable". That makes no sense at all! There is no logical reason to believe that calories (a thermodinamic unity) is transformed in fat in our body.

This is the same as saying that all fat should go to the feet because of Gravity and _the laws of physics are unavoidable_. It is pure non-sense.

Do you know how to measure calories on food? You burn it and measure the heat it generates. How this apply to our body function is a mistery to me. To anyone actually.

Taubes theory is based on hormones, which is what the medicine proved for the last century that is what regulates all kind of function in our bodies. Make much more sense, no??

Calories in - calories out muchbe relevant to a thermal plant, no to our body producing fat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great article. I'm always in favor of flexible and scientific approaches to dieting. Lyle McDonald wrote a great series of articles on why diets fail (hint: it's a hormone called leptin) [1]. Caloric deficits lead to decreasing leptin, which explains why you feel like crap when dieting because this leads to metabolic slowdown by downregulating things like your immune system (why you get sick more when you diet) and reproductive system (why you lose your sex drive). Leptin's effects on the hunger-controlling hypothalamus explain why you may obsess over calorie-dense junk foods when you diet. It's your body's protection against starvation, but it goes all haywire in our obesogenic (obesity-causing) environment.

So what's the best way to acutely raise leptin levels when they're depressed from caloric restriction? Flexible diet solutions like the ones talked about in the article. High-carb "refeeds" \- some people call them cheat days - <USER2> particularly helpful [2]. The trick is to binge on carbs (not fat!!!) while remaining at a caloric deficit, which is where a calorie journal definitely comes in handy. Things like sweet potatoes and pasta will fill you up and replete your leptin levels.

As an aside, while we're talking about leptin and flexible dieting, intermittent fasting is wonderful for flexible dieting. I'm working on a website right now that's based on the leangains method [3], which is great for folks in the moderately overweight category. For severely overweight or obese folks, Dr. Krista Varady (who I had the pleasure of speaking with on the phone recently), has published a ton of research on intermittent fasting over the past decade and just wrote a book called the Every Other Day Diet [4], which I _highly_ recommend for anyone trying to lose a lot of weight quickly and safely and keep it off.

[1] [http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-hormones-of- bo...](http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-hormones-of-bodyweight- regulation-leptin-part-the-last.html)

[2] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11126336](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11126336)

[3] [http://www.leangains.com/2010/03/intermittent-fasting-set- po...](http://www.leangains.com/2010/03/intermittent-fasting-set-point- and.html)

[4] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Every-Other-Day-Diet-That- Weight/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Every-Other-Day-Diet-That- Weight/dp/1401324932)

</comment><comment><USER8> Dieting does not fail, but dieting does not work how the author thinks.

For most, dieting is to maintain the status quo. Overweight or obese people drink and eat diet beverages/foods, or conform to some self-imposed diet, to maintain their current health. They know they can't give 100% into their desires, or they could have dire consequences (hospitalization, death), but they are not determined enough to take the actual steps to losing weight (significant diet change, routine exercise).

I see this everywhere. Family, friends, etc. They all say they're dieting, but year after year they are as out of shape as always. They are happy and content with themselves, because dieting to them does not mean "get fit like those gym guys on T.V."

</comment><comment><USER9> "Freedhoff opens the book describing "Dieting's Seven Deadly Sins", which are commonly held, but dangerous, beliefs about dieting. Hunger is the first myth to go. Freedhoff argues that any diet plan that leaves you hungry won't be sustainable. Sacrifice is next—perpetual sacrifice of anything you enjoy will make any diet fail. Willpower is important, but permanent resistance is almost certainly futile. Blind food restrictions are the next to go, and Freedhoff is adamant we need to manage, but not banish, certain food groups. Sweating is the next myth, with The Biggest Loser epitomizing the belief that exercise can contribute to significant weight loss. You can't outrun your fork—not in the long run. Anticipating perfection is also a myth, so real diets must be flexible enough to accommodate setbacks. Denial is the last myth. "The diet was great—I just couldn't stick with it" is a common refrain. As weight loss progresses, any suffering gets harder to sustain, and harder to deny."

Looks like a great beginning to a book.

One could write a great informational material only basing themselves on these myths.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is claim that exercise contributing to significant weight loss is a myth. I beg to disagree, while exercise itself might not be significant contributor to weight loss, no exercise means lower metabolism and overall health.

As always there is no silver bullet, you need to have a balanced lifestyle to be healthy.

<comment><USER11> Where does he claim that exercise doesn't matter?

"Exercise: You can't out-exercise a bad diet, but regular exercise helps keep weight off, and changes your attitude for the better. And exercise has enormous health benefits beyond any impact on weight. What exercise? Something. Anything. "Some is good, more is better, everything counts" Freedhoff suggests."

<comment><USER10> "Sweating is the next myth, with The Biggest Loser epitomizing the belief that exercise can contribute to significant weight loss."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" In this book we obey the laws of thermodynamics"_

Repeating a comment I made below, this makes no sense at all to me!!

His argument in his post saying Taubes is wrong is "The laws of physics are unavoidable". That makes no sense at all! There is no logical reason to believe that calories (a thermodinamic unity) is transformed in fat in our body - and no science to prove it either.

This is the same as saying that all fat should go to the feet because of Gravity and _the laws of physics are unavoidable_. It is pure non-sense.

Do you know how to measure calories on food? You burn it and measure the heat it generates. How this apply to our body function is a mistery to me. To anyone actually.

Taubes theory is based on hormones, which is what the medicine proved for the last century that is what regulates all kind of function in our bodies. Make much more sense to think how a diet affect hormones and how it affects are body producing fat, no??

Calories in - calories out must be relevant to a thermal plant, no to our body producing fat.

<comment><USER12> Come now. It's a matter of physics that you can't make stuff from nothing, and you can't do things without energy.

That's not to say that body fat is strictly dependent on caloric intake, but to certain extremes, there's no way around that fact.

<comment><USER6> Exactly!

What is calorie? Is is something? No! It is a unity of measuring heat. That's it! Doesn't matter at all.

Anything can become fat on your body, but what decides it is the hormones saying to your body _" this will become fat, this will become muscle or blood or etc, and this is pee or poo"_.

Counting calories is a proxy _at most_. But people started to treat the proxy as thing in itself, which it isn't.

<comment><USER13> What is a foot? is it something? No! It is a unit of measuring distance, That's it. Doesn't matter at all.

<comment><USER5> calories * X is proportional to weight loss, but X seems more important than calories in all but the most silly edge cases.

<comment><USER13> Nope. As far as having an effect on weight loss, net-energy balance (energy added - energy used) is several magnitudes more important than anything else, and the "energy added" side of this equation is entirely calories. Hormones are driven by your environment, and food is a huge environmental stimulus, especially when we're limiting our discussion to weight-loss. But don't conflate that with the idea that hormones are more important; they are subject to your environment (the food you eat), not the other way around.

Over 100 years of hospital-ward, double-blind, clinical trial weight-loss research have ALL shown the exact same thing; Nothing comes remotely close to the effect calorie intake has on weight. The macronutrient content of diet (ie. low-carb, mostly sugar, or high protein) and meal timing has NO significant effect and is completely drowned out by the influence of calorie intake.

But of course that's boring and difficult. What sells books and adverts on Dr. Oz is "calories don't matter".

<comment><USER5> _Except_ for silly edge cases?

Okay then eat your recommended calories worth of cocopuffs for breakfast, since it's all about energy. Calorie counting oversimplifies the problem. Sure it might describe what is going on, but it can be a poor guide for a dieter trying to decide what to eat next.

<comment><USER13> Edge cases are exactly that; not typical and therefore need special consideration. But these are rare in the general public.

I didn't say its ALL about energy, just that nothing comes close to the contribution of calories in weight-loss. The type of food you eat is completely drowned out by how much food you eat. So you CAN eat only cocopuffs and lose the exact same weight you'd lose eating a "balanced diet" consisting of the same # of calories (which means both diets contain the same amount of energy), although you risk becoming malnourished over time.

If a dieter's goal is to lose weight, the amount of food they eat (or more precisely the amount of food + amount of activity) is most important. This fundamental principle makes it easy to decide what to eat next. However if the goal is long term health, athletic performance, or growing muscle, then we need to modify how we choose. But it's really not that complicated for almost everyone; just eat _mostly_ whole foods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds promising. Calories in, calories out - the rest is just noise.

<comment><USER15> I dunno. I know people who've lost 100lbs and kept it off doing keto.

<comment><USER16> I lost 50 pounds eating ~500 calories more on keto than I did before.

Unfortunately I wasn't completely comfortable with the types of meals I ate with that lifestyle.

But it did make me feel as though the whole calories in - calories out was nonsense. Especially after trying (and failing) diets based around that (weight watchers) multiple times.

<comment><USER15> Have you tried slow carb? Avoids dairy and adds legumes. I've found it easier to do and it's (probably) healthier.

<comment><USER17> Slow carb worked great for me for 6 months, lost 25 lbs!

But alas I got so sick of chicken for dinner and eggs for breakfast, and I guess just got too bored with the meals. Gained it all back :-(

(I actually haven't eaten an egg since then. And I avoid chicken now. I'm wondering if some people develop an aversion to foods they eat too regularly?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The book sounds interesting, but unfortunately it won't be published and available for purchase until March 4th. I don't understand the point of reviews and marketing like this when you can't actually buy the book. I suppose 5 days isn't that much time, but after reading this article I am interested in the book right now. Are they really still changing parts of the book right now, this close to the publishing date? If not, why not just release it now? Perhaps it takes more time to get all the physical books ready at bookstore points of sale, but surely the e-book version is good to go.

I am also interested in how many people read the article, get interested in the book, find they cannot purchase it, and then never bother coming back to check it.</comment>


Towards Multiverse Databases [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://people.csail.mit.edu/malte/pub/papers/2019-hotos-multiversedb.pdf <comment><USER2> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200127) for a recent discussion

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand why this was marked dupe.

HN guidelines clearly say that the most original publication should be submitted.

In the comment below by _headalgorithm_ , I have been directed towards a review of the original paper, only because it has spawned a discussion thread.</comment>


Tesla's Future in Trump's World - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-11/tesla-s-future-in-trump-s-world <comment><USER2> This analysis doesn't mention lithium at all, which is odd considering Tesla's cars and solar panels both need batteries to be useful. Most of the world's lithium is currently coming out of Chile, Argentina, Australia; in the future it may be coming from Bolivia.

There are some domestic reserves; I'm speculating, but perhaps a less pro- trade, less environmentally-protecting, more pro-domestic-industry administration will try to de-emphasize international supply and favor domestic extraction?

</comment><comment><USER3> Market forces will continue to push out coal and natural gas in favor of rapidly cheapening renewable sources such as wind and solar. Even without subsidies, solar and wind are cheaper in some areas of the country than coal.

Interesting that a NAFTA repeal could help Tesla, although it would come at the expense of the rest of the American auto industry.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you want a free Mobile UI Designer? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I'm a young mobile/web designer who is looking for an interesting project or two to work on. What do I want in return? Feedback and recognition. That's it. If my work is shit, I'd expect you to tell me. I don't want to waste your time, don't waste mine by skirting around potential issues. Sound interesting? Read on.
What you get: Free as in beer work. No, I don't have a specific number of hours per week that I can dedicate to this, as I'm a student. Don't ask me for an estimate. I just won't answer.
What you have to do: Convince me why I should work with you instead of everyone else. Have something that is going to change the world? Tell me why.
Now, since you know nothing about me, here are some links you should check out if you're interested: Homepage - http://robs.im Dribbble - http://dribbble.com/RobSim Email - me (at) homepage <comment><USER2> Just sent you an email. I liked what I saw on Dribble and think if we worked together it could definitely be mutually beneficial.</comment>


Against a Tax Increase on Berkeley Students - <AUTHOR> https://lucatrevisan.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/against-a-61-tax-increase-on-berkeley-students/ <comment><USER2> The 2nd comment in the article reveals some interesting things.

Basically tuition is usually not charged for Phd students but is used for accounting purposes to get money from Federal agencies.

The "tax increase" would stop incentivizing universities to do these accounting tricks and declare tuiton as 0.

This is a good step in that tax code is simplified and accounting tricks / loopholes are closed for corporations and universities (and other public/private entities).

This is what I read, can anyone clarify this?

" But from an outside perspective, the current rules look like a money laundering scheme. Universities use an accounting gimmick of setting an arbitrary dollar amount for PhD student tuition, and then waive it. At least in STEM fields, essentially no PhD student actually pays tuition. Why not just set tuition to 0? The reason is because "tuition" can be charged to funding agencies, and so this accounting trick of setting and then waiving tuition allows universities to extract more overhead from the NSF, NIH, etc.

Of course, this accounting trick represents a non-trivial fraction of government support for academic research. It seems natural to simplify the tax code by disallowing this trick, but unless the goal is to de-fund academia (maybe it is), it should be countered with an increase in direct funding to universities from funding bodies. "

<comment><USER3> It seems like the Republicans are applying double standards here to universities vs regular businesses. Businesses can reimburse employee expenses, deduct those from taxable revenue as a business expense, and the employee doesn't have to pay tax on the reimbursement.

Grad students are essentially employees of the university, if they're being reimbursed tuition costs why should they have to pay taxes on a reimbursed expense when other employees don't?

<comment><USER4> We're not talking about expense reimbursements, though. They needed to be able to show that we have some number of certified AWS architects, so I paid $150 for an AWS certification test, and my employer is reimbursing me. They get the credentials they want, and I was made whole.

In this case, it's not that the grad student is getting to take classes (this is tuition we're talking about, remember) _for_ the university, nor is it that the school is benefiting from the student taking classes. That's something the school is providing to them as a service for a cost.

What the schools and grad students are trying to do is to barter their way around taxes: "you give me tuition, I give you some TA and research work", and no (or minimal) money changes hands. That the tax code allowed this was a loophole: in general, you're responsible for the value that was received, not just the dollars portion.

This is even part of ObamaCare: I have to pay tax on part of what my employer pays for my healthcare, even though it was never given to me in any monetary fashion. (the reason it's only "part of" is one of the great tax engineering f-ups, leading to the disaster that is our current system of health insurance)

Even campaign finance law recognizes in-kind services as being equivalent to the dollars they'd otherwise be worth. If your airline writes off the cost of the candidate's cross-country trips, for example, the value of those tickets would count as a campaign contribution.

<comment><USER3> > In this case, it's not that the grad student is getting to take classes > (this is tuition we're talking about, remember) for the university, nor is > it that the school is benefiting from the student taking classes.

Why not? The grad student's real job is research. The tuition is for classes to make them better researchers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its funny,

so many of the people I speak with who either go to or went to Berkeley support raising taxes.

They think if the government is better funded, it can provide more social good.

But now that it's actually happening to them, there's this massive pushback.

I don't know if this tax bill will be beneficial or not, I'm a coder, not an economist, but I do think there's just a bit of irony happening with this proposed tax increase.

<comment><USER6> I think the part you're missing is that they support raising taxes on the very wealthy, not on college students who are barely scraping by as it is...

<comment><USER7> oh those poor poor Berkeley college students

<comment><USER8> 53% of Berkeley students have under $30k a year of income and receive an average of $14000 in aid.

<comment><USER9> What are the 47% who make more than 30k a year doing, and going to school at the same time?

<comment><USER10> I worked in University IT and made over $30K working part time during the school year and full time in the summer, as did most of my coworkers. Also, we made slightly more than the normal person because Social Security tax is waived for working students, so that's like a 7% bonus.

When you're in the Bay Area and your students can choose to work for the University or go get a paid internship down the road, you have to compete on wages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If this change goes into effect, I'm not sure a real problem will occur. The reason is that many students will not be able to afford this change. Thus, universities will have to drop the tuition for such students altogether (instead of charging NSF or other funding agencies for it). Schools will then (eventually) respond by raising "overhead" on grants to make up for the shortfall. The net effect, thus, may be zero.

<comment><USER12> Finally someone is pointing at the elephant in the room. When I look at my student billing account, I see $60,000 waived under my grad "tuition waiver" every year. Should I feel thankful, or completely dumbfounded by the fact that they'd consider charging me that much to be a grad student in the first place?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I finished a chemistry Ph.D. at Berkeley in 2016 - the way that the university handled "tuition" for science graduate students always seemed like a scam to me during my time there.

In the early 2010s, we all made ~$28K/yr, while the university pocketed a comparable sum from the funding agencies as "tuition." I assume that they spent it like any other general tuition funds. For the vast majority of the time during a typical graduate career, everyone was working on individual research. I suppose the "tuition" could be interpreted as paying for the 1 hr a week of meeting with your advisor (when they weren't blowing you off for conference travel), but that seems like a stretch. That money should stay in the sciences, and ideally be used to pay grad students more.

So it would be good for universities to get rid of this money laundering scheme, but I worry very much for the folks that I know who are still in the system who may be hurt by this. I think this problem should be treated in some way less likely to hurt vulnerable people.

</comment><comment><USER14> The problem isn't that republicans want to tax graduate students (I think they should be taxed). The problem is that Universities classify their "employees" as students and then pay them very little. The underlying issue here is that graduate students are not paid well and are not really students

<comment><USER13> Exactly - appreciating this fact could help clear up other disputes in this thread. For STEM Ph.Ds you are really only a "student" for 1-2 years tops (when you actually take some classes) - after that, you are an entry-level employee. Your advisor is more of a boss than a teacher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There was a fairly large discussion on this topic yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15646571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15646571)

</comment><comment><USER16> Berkeley is crawling with people who are foam at the mouth liberals that love taxes. Why are they upset?

<comment><USER17> This generalization has zero value, and that's before we even get into the specifics of the argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's still income even though it never hits your bank account. Other students who pay their own tuition don't have this luxury. I'm surprised graduate level students at an Ivy league school can't figure this out, but then again, it's not in their interest.

<comment><USER19> Do you also believe that cancer survivors should be taxed $100k+ on their income from health insurance?

<comment><USER18> Well no, because you paid tax when you paid your insurance.

But some people would argue that health benefits should be taxed. We debated taxing employee benefits in Canada briefly. When an executive gets a $500k salary and $500k in benefits, should they be taxed as earning 1mil?

<comment><USER20> In the United States, even the most basic medical insurance is an "employee benefit", even if in Canada it would be covered by the provincial system out of taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Don't tax you!

Don't tax me!

Tax that person behind the tree!

</comment><comment><USER22> Everyone is for higher taxes until it affects them personally of course. Berkeley is essentially an ivy league school and a guaranteed ticket to a upper/middle class life. Asking their students to pay more and help the government stay funded is too much to ask though.

<comment><USER23> You are confusing college students and graduate students - their demographics are very different. This article is about graduate students for whom it is not uncommon to have done their college years in less expensive and less renowned universities. Grad students have fairly low salaries for their level of expertise (but there are other benefits to grad school).

Most liberals will be happy with a reasonable tax hike that is used to help the country. This one is used to cut taxes for the rich - this is why people are unhappy.</comment></comment>


Archaeologists Find Hidden Pattern at 'World's Oldest Temple' Göbekli Tepe - <AUTHOR> https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium-israeli-archaeologists-find-hidden-pattern-at-gobekli-tepe-1.8799837 <comment><USER2> Why are archaeologists so unwilling to consider that the people living in that time and place might not have been nomads or hunter-gatherers? What's the counter-evidence to the possibility of permanent (or perhaps even impermanent half-year) settlements that long ago?</comment>


Under a fermium sky - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/2017/06/under-a-fermium-sky.html <comment><USER2> If you enjoyed this article, the Restricted Data blog about nuclear secrets and allied issues is great: [http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/)

Also recommended:

The Nuclear Weapons FAQ by Carey Sublette (one of the foremost open source researchers about the actual workings of nuclear weapons -- much more on his site): [http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html](http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html)

And Gregory Walker's Trinity Atomic Web Site:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170606125046/http://www.abomb1...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170606125046/http://www.abomb1.org/)

(The last-updated version says "Trinity Atomic Web Site has moved to a new primary web server courtesy of the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech University." but apparently it's all just fallen offline since the last time I read it, sadly -- hence the archive.org link.)

</comment><comment> brian-armstrong It's a little weird to think that just 60 years ago you could be forbidden from publishing about findings related to rain. It falls in your own back yard, but you aren't allowed to study it or tell other people about it.

<comment><USER3> It would be interesting to look at a list what is forbidden from being publishing in the US today. Maybe it is forbidden to publish such a list.

<comment><USER4> Start taking pictures of policemen in your local area, especially near the station. I'm sure they will provide a guide to publishing...

Really, on a larger scale, is there much shock that reporting on top secret weapons research topics will get you in trouble?

[http://articles.latimes.com/1992-04-17/local/me-607_1_spy- pl...](http://articles.latimes.com/1992-04-17/local/me-607_1_spy-plane)

<comment><USER5> In the case of nuclear weapons specifically, it actually _was_ a shock when the US tried to enforce the "born secret" doctrine (which said that information about weapon design and mechanics -- even if figured out from nothing but public, non-classified sources -- would automatically become classified as of the moment the person figured it out).

See _US v. Progressive_ for the details:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Progressive,_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Progressive,_Inc).

Amusingly, the argument was made -- and made seriously -- that the mere fact that the government had pursued the case was a leak of "born secret" information, since the attempt to suppress the information was tacitly an acknowledgment that it was correct (since incorrect information would not be subject to "born secret").

<comment><USER4> Sonoluminescence research was made substantially more difficult, because most of the modeling codes for collapsing plasmas were considered innapropriate to civiliian research... or so I have heard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The good news is that given the geopolitical climate surrounding Korea, a new generation of atmospheric chemists will get to study radioactive fallout without censorship. Or wait, is that the bad news?

<comment><USER7> Kind of fucked up how you can joke about the murder of millions of people.

Replace Korea with Israel and now you got yourself a Holocaust joke.

<comment><USER8> Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or inflammatory comments to HN? You've done this repeatedly and we've warned you before, and eventually we ban accounts that post this way. We have to, in order to preserve the site for its intended use.

If you would read [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html) and use HN as intended going forward, we'd appreciate it.

<comment><USER7> >we've warned you before

What are you talking about? Are you serious? You must really enjoy living in a bubble. I'd be glad to take my sourced comments to a community that appreciates... sourced, verifiable comments. What's the point in discussion if it's not for finding the truth? Virtue signalling?

After the "Obama never did anything controversial" discussion (AND I VOTED FOR HIM), I can tell pretty clearly the mods here value cohesion over facts, logic, and reason.

So if I'm banned for that, I consider it a badge of honor to be on the right side of history in standing for liberal values. I really can't comprehend how you can value engineering and research and then shut your critical thinking brains off when you start communicating with other people.

The thing about bubbles is... they eventually pop. Enjoy yours while it lasts. It must be genuinely enjoyable to live in denial since so many people seem to be doing it these days. But I wasn't blessed with the ability to think I'm right all the time, even when someone posts a sourced rebuttal.

If this last election has proved anything, it's that people like you are furious that their bubble is starting to crack. You all thought you had the election "in the bag". Then the shock and tears came when reality seeped in to the bubble. So enjoy having a website, while the rational people will enjoy having the White House, cycle after cycle. Because as outraged as you get, the one thing your group statistically can't be bothered to do... is vote.

TL;DR I'm better than you. ;) :P</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Russians see when they watch the news on crimea - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/vladimir_putin_ukraine_and_state_tv_what_russians_see_when_they_tune_in.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds like the government propaganda that frequents most of the news channels worldwide

<comment><AUTHOR> true, but still outrageous</comment></comment>


Someone stole my identity on Upwork (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/someone-stole-my-identity-on-upwork-and-all-i-got-was-this-lousy-blog-post-d63aab2b4c90 <comment><USER2> The best part about Upwork is that they have invited me to be a premium freelancer and closed my account all in the same day. Hilariously I was told I'm not "good enough for the platform". I have had 5 positive job reviews, all pretty much 5 stars. That day I applied for 10-15 jobs as I wanted to bridge the downtime gap between two major gigs. I had 1500$ usd on that account, that I have not withdrawn yet. I was not working for peanut rate, but rather north of 50$/h.

Support was unhelpful and I couldn't get a chance to talk to human. Stole my money literally. They deactivated my account, and only after 10th email to their support have they've actually deleted the account.

Boycott Upwork.

<comment><USER3> For $1500, can you take them to small claims court?

<comment><USER2> I probably could have - but at the end of the day, it was money well invested.

I moved my business elsewhere (not toptal or any other platform, but a devshop) and told the same thing to 4-5 other devs that are my close friends who were charging about the same rate. At the end of the day, they might have gotten $1500, but they lost 5x that in matter of seconds.

I still feel a bit bitter about it though, but I need to let go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now that this is on the front page of HN, customer service is going to magically appear.

I don't understand why people even try to wrestle with customer service reps nowadays, when the only reliable method is getting visibility on HN/Digg/Slashdot/etc

<comment><USER5> You are unlikely to end up on the front page.

<comment><USER6> It's on the front page

<comment><USER7> In general though, there are probably hundreds (if not more) posts dealing with customer service that don't hit the front page.

<comment><USER6> Yeah misread original comment actually

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One day I found a fake profile that copied my description. Support said that they can't prove that he got it after me and they will not take any action.

I know two persons who were banned forever after applying to about 20-30 jobs and not getting them. Support said they are not qualified enough to be on Upwork, ever.

Sometimes they ban digital nomads for moving around the world too much. Sometimes they ban people because their clients got unsatisfied and clients are more important for Upwork than freelancers.

So the support is dysfunctional on many levels but Upwork is the only place where a non-US/EU freelancer without connections can find jobs relatively easy.

</comment><comment><USER9> Needs (2016) in the title.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've also previously raised the issue of freelancers selling their accounts:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309640)

</comment><comment><USER10> Hum, this is not a new history. The same history with exactly the same messages happened a few years ago to other (the same?) girl if i'm not wrong. I have seen before the word bombchelle somewhere.

There was also the anecdote of some people (mostly freelancers based in Africa or Asia) using stock photos of smiling blonde caucasian models to create a fake sense of trust (and the other freelancers disclosing it for fun again and again). I remember stock photos taken directly from the web of a dental clinic for example, or appearing in the first positions in google under the tag "entrepreneur" and so. It was an arms race, with upwork banning each time and the fake accounts reappearing and refining their methods each time

As general rule of thumb, If it looks handsome, young and dressed like a model in a studio of photography, is probably fake.

<comment><USER11> Probably because this blog post is from 2016.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That 20% at then end isn't quite right - its actually 23.75% - upwork charges the clients 3.75% above the contract amount, and they pay the freelancer 20% less than the amount (for the first $500, then the fees start to drop on the freelancer side).

So both sides are led to believe that the total fees upwork collects are lower than they actually are. Its more than a little shady.

Oh, and if freelances don't pay for membership, their accounts get automatically locked to private for "inactivity" if they go 30 days without receiving any payment. Regardless of actual activity level. So the freelancers who earn infrequently have effectively even higher fees. (Support can unlock it for free, but it can take a day or two.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Upwork recently increased fees massively and I left for good, both as a client and as a freelancer

<comment><USER14> Where did you go, if I may ask? I'm also interested in alternatives.

<comment><USER15> I'm a freelance web developer and I found that what has worked best for me when I'm in a dry spell is finding people who are actively looking for freelancers on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

No one is going to show up to your website or Google you. You have to actively look for people who need someone now. I noticed that the ones who post on social media want to avoid terrible work that is generally associated with UpWork so you can negotiate good prices.

Send them a quick message to get the conversation started and see where it goes. It is a numbers game.

<comment><USER16> Any particular part of twitter? or is this just your list of followers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anybody else annoyed by all the fixed HTML elements on that page? Here is all I can see on my 14" screen (maximized browser window): [https://i.imgur.com/u9L81nY.png](https://i.imgur.com/u9L81nY.png)

<comment><USER18> Create a browser bookmark with this:

        javascript:(function()%7B(function () %7Bvar i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3Bfor (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7Bif (getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed') %7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()

Has been pretty good at getting rid of "dick bars"[0].

[0]: [https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars](https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Upwork is an absolute piece of shit company and so obviously trying to protect their revenue in the race to the bottom of freelance work. We only used them as an agency (to hire freelancers) and they would randomly shut off ongoing contracts, stall refunds for paid but undelivered milestones after shutting down our contract, didn't pay back fees and have horrible customer support. The only thing they do is send a 10 paragraph email explaining that they're not responsible for the contractors on their platform and we should have read the TOS better. Stay away. Absolutely horrible.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's a bit disconcerting to find someone pretending to be you online. I've had my real name and moniker used multiple times. This has always been associated with a little information about me, namely they know a bit about me and will try to impersonate me based in that.

Usually, they get some details wrong - or make things up entirely. It's pretty well known that I live in Maine. It surprised me when I'd learned that I'd written about my home on coastal Maine. See, I don't live anywhere near the coast.

I've seemingly been an owner, or associated with, a few online businesses. I'm not, I really am not. In fact, I've never even considered doing MLM, sold stuff at eBay, or been a 'security researcher.'

If you discover someone impersonating you, my advice is to pretend to be one of their old friends. The more public you can make this, the better. The page(s) will get taken down, but it is fun while it lasts.

You can have a lot of fun with that. "Oh, man... I still think we did too much coke that weekend. I never thought I'd say too much coke was possible. Shame about that hooker, right?" Things like that will give you hours of enjoyment.

Sort of related, I kind of wish I had people calling me to help me fix my Windows computers. Alas, nobody seems to have put my number on the list. I have a mental script already prepared.

</comment><comment><USER21> Screw Upwork, i ditched them a long time ago

</comment><comment><USER22> It sounds like Upwork have a duty to verify their contractors are who they say they are.

<comment><USER23> They really don't, there is no such process built in. If it where as rigid as with bitcoin exchanges, this (and probably many similar) would not have happened.

<comment><USER24> I had to do a video chat before, kind of odd there was no one on the other end done through the UpWork site/scheduled.

edit: no one visually but vocally there was someone there

<comment><USER10> In my opinion; you do not own a total stranger your image just because they will promise you a few bucks. If they want their problem solved, just show that you can do the work. Unless for a very specific type of jobs, it is not their bussiness at all if you are bald, black or like to work in slippers.

Some people typically will want to grab as many of your personal information as they can, for undisclosed reasons. Just decline politely and walk away. Profiles and portfolios are designed for showing what you want to show. In the best cases those pressing to go further are other freelancers studying their competitors; in the worst, creepy people trying to impersonate you or selling your info to a third. Is a dog eats dog world and you do not own them anything.

<comment><USER25> > "in the best cases those pressing to go further are other freelancers > studying their competitors"

There are other valid reasons for requesting a video chat. One of those is to weed out agencies and impersonators of which Upwork and freelancing platforms are rife with.

It also builds better relationship to talk with someone face to face.

<comment><USER10> Of course and very reasonable, but if the people hiring hides their face wereas asking the freelancers to be videotaped, well... is a red flag. Specially if in the end, nobody is hired for this job.

Maybe is because they are shy, that is a perfect valid reason to me.

Another hypothetical explanation could be that in upwork some well stablished freelancers were targetting new fresh and disperate freelancers hiring then and paying in peanuts to do a job that they then would bill (for a higher amount) to the final client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I recently tried out their platform in hopes of procuring a few freelance gigs, hadn't had a whole lot of luck and after reading this I may just delete my account. Sorry this has happened to you, it truly sucks.</comment>


Debate: Why give away your work for free - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/medium-writing-prompts/why-give-away-your-work-for-free-5ed4513d5fa8

<comment><USER2> Giving away your work can be the prelude to finding paying customers</comment>


Sean Spicer Just Tweeted Something That Looks an Awful Lot Like a Password - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/sean-spicer-just-tweeted-something-that-looks-an-awful-1791649692 <comment><USER2> > A quick but important disclaimer: don't try to access Sean Spicer's Twitter. > For starters, his staff has almost certainly changed the password by now. > But more importantly, doing so is illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse > Act (CFAA.) There are much better opportunities to end up in jail—like > protesting, or covering protesters as a journalist.

Nice :D

</comment><comment><USER3> Is gizmodo nothing more than a gossip site now?</comment>


Uncovering the security issues of shared scooter services - <AUTHOR> https://www.imperva.com/blog/i-know-where-you-rode-last-summer-uncovering-the-security-issues-of-shared-scooter-services/ <comment><USER2> Besides security issues, scooter services have another big issue. They don't care about their customers.

I drove few times on a bird, and enjoyed the experience. Few months ago (right before the winter) they've changed the wheels to plastic wheels since many birds had a flat tire which cost the company a lot I believe.

The plastic wheel is likely to slide when you try to brake when the ground is wet.

Doing a move like this right before the winter starts showed me how money oriented bird is</comment>


Scientists Discover First 'Virological Penicillin' - <AUTHOR> http://www.sci-news.com/medicine/science-virological-penicillin-honeysuckle-02206.html <comment><USER2> The combinatorial space of organic molecules, nucleic acids, peptides, proteins, etc. is effectively infinite, and there are trillions of species on Earth making a vast array of such things. We haven't scratched the surface of what's possible either in natural compounds or synthetic ones.

</comment><comment><USER3> Biochemist here; not 100% certain how a micro-RNA survives the tea extraction process. If the claim is that honeysuckle tea has an antiviral activity, there are probably more active ingredients besides these.

<comment><USER4> I also found the survival in the tea surprising. But it is reported to be the case:

[http://www.nature.com/cr/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/cr201413...](http://www.nature.com/cr/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/cr2014130a.html)

"Here, we report that MIR2911, a honeysuckle (HS)-encoded atypical microRNA, directly targets IAVs with a broad spectrum. MIR2911 is highly stable in HS decoction, and continuous drinking or gavage feeding of HS decoction leads to a significant elevation of the MIR2911 level in mouse peripheral blood and lung."

The paper does compare honeysuckle tea and synthetic microRNA, and they seem to be of roughly equal potency. The authors also tried the tea with a specific inhibitor of the microRNA, and whilst that does look it has some effect against the virus, it's very small. Sadly, the data around the question of whether the microRNA is the only active ingredient in the tea is not as strong as the data establishing that either of them are active.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another sensational title. We have many "virological penicilins". We call them anti-retrovirals. We even got some for influenza(Oseltamivir ). The only difference is that this is "natural" ,which appears to matter to some people.

But it's a good discovery, another drug is always useful.

<comment><USER6> Sorry to nitpick, but just a minor correction - in general the class of drugs are antivirals, of which antiretrovirals are a subcategory for dealing with retroviruses, most notably HIV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Regarding the fight against Ebola this Liberian doctor is using antivirual medicine Lamivudine which is also used to treat hepatitis B and HIV, on Ebola patients. I hope we can fund some shipments of that if it works. For example Doctors without borders or crowdfunding via Dogecoin. "Of the 15 patients he treated with lamivudine, he says, 13 survived."

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/10/10/355164328/a...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/10/10/355164328/a-liberian- doctor-comes-up-with-his-own-ebola-regimen)

</comment><comment><USER8> One important difference is that penicillin is useful against a wide range of bacteria. I'm not sure, but the article says that this new drug is useful only against influenza.

There are many antiviral, but they are artificial and they are targeted against certain families of virus (for example, acyclovir is only useful against herpes and similar virus [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aciclovir](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aciclovir) ).

This is the first natural antiviral, but it's not a wide range antiviral.

</comment><comment><USER9> I guess I should stop ripping honeysuckle out of my garden then.

That stuff can kill an entire garden in one year though.</comment>


Ask HN: Which Y combinator startup you use on a daily basis? - <AUTHOR> I use Dropbox and ClearTax more often. Most of YC startups are not available globally but I really admire Airbnb, Wefunder, RazorPay. What are lesser known YC startups that you use on daily basis or of which you are a paid customer? <comment><USER2> Heroku ($), Docker, reddit, used Stripe ($) in the past, mixpanel ($), dropbox, segment ($), NewsBlur, MessageBird ($), Mailgun ($), CoreOS

($) := I pay for the service

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like you own a SAAS?

<comment><USER2> Yup, but I'm still in the process of building my product (I'm about 2 months before release).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Airbnb</comment>


Funding business plans from first time entrepreneurs won't happen anymore - <AUTHOR> http://the-accelerator.blogspot.com/2008/03/innovation-continues-apace.html

<comment><USER2> "Funding business plans from first time entrepreneurs just won't happen anymore!"

Until at some point a first-time-entrepreneur does something really cool, and gets funding, and becomes a success. Then this will be popular again, and the VCs will only fund "new entrepreneurs who aren't stuck in the old way of thinking!".

I give it 24 months, if it ever even becomes reality in the first place.

VCs will fund whatever makes money. If my dog could write a nice RoR app, suddenly the Humane Society would be filled with potential CEO's...</comment>


Ask HN: Heroku or Not? - <AUTHOR> Hi...My team does not have experience in setting up a server. I mean a production server. We are thinking about using heroku, because it removes the system admin. Heroku is costly compared to the setting up a server. So can you guys please give your opinion about using heroku or not? Thanks :) <comment><USER2> Wow, lots of heroku praise here. Let's put that a bit into perspective.

Heroku is indeed great for starting out when you can get away with the free plan or need only a small number of dynos and ideally none of their addons. Heroku can be a beautiful launchpad during the bootstrap phase.

Once your heroku bill approaches about ~$500/month you should start looking elsewhere, though. Their pricing for larger deployments becomes outright hilarious above roughly that threshold.

And with hilarious I mean _really_ hilarious, as in the $3500 price point for a 50G memcached instance. For that money you can also buy a physical server with 64G RAM every month, fresh from the factory...

<comment><USER3> Memory pricing for all shared/VPS hosting is simply bizarre. RAM is dirt cheap. I don't get it. It's almost like they all got together and decided to gouge on the one thing people need. It's this one factor alone that seems to make dedicated/colocation services a better option at about the point you mention.

<comment><USER2> _Memory pricing for all shared/VPS hosting is simply bizarre._

Not really. DIMM modules are fairly cheap but DIMM slots are not. Your average mid-range server can, in theory, be maxed out to 192G or even 256G RAM. But only if you use 8G or even 16G DIMMs - and those are still hideously expensive.

The most cost efficient configuration usually gravitates around 64G (16x 4G) nowadays, rarely higher.

So, when you factor in the cost overhead _per server_ (rackspace, power/cooling, network infrastructure, maintenance) then it's not hard to understand why RAM is the most expensive ressource in the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Trust me, Heroku is not costly compared to setting up a server:

$ git push master heroku

is a lot cheaper then:

Setup a machine. Then setup mysql, nginx, REE 1.8.6, or did you go with MRI 1.9.1? You're not gonna launch on Rails3 right? Because then you can't do 1.9.1, you have to go to 1.9.2. And you know how to setup nginx to pipe requests through to a Rails app. Are you going with Passenger or Unicorn? Oh make sure to bring up another machine to act as a MySQL slave. You know how to do that right? And you're dumping your DB to disk and backing up to S3 regularly right. Just write a simple script/cron job to handle that. And when you setup your machines you made sure to setup 2 so that if one goes down, the other will still be around, and you setup a load balancer that will realize when one of those machines goes down right?

etc.... :)

<comment><USER5> Setting up your own server gives you full flexibility as to your application architecture/tech stack. Want to go with Redis? Tokyo Cabinet? MogileFS? S3? A pile of files in a zillion small directories? something else? Your choice.

If your startup has any challenging technical elements, I think having 100% full control over your app architecture is quite important. You can live without it, but it's a potentially costly trade-off.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, judging by "My team does not have experience in setting up a server" I doubt OP is going to be playing with any of that stuff.

<comment><USER5> Granted, but if your team doesn't have experience setting up a server, I question whether they have the required skills to run a startup's technology. A startup CTO should be able to set up a server reasonably quickly, effectively, and securely...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am a Heroku fan. Some things for you to consider: 1) The real value of Heroku is time savings. Their deployment mechanism is near instant, so your savings come from the time you are spending doing more development, rather than managing servers. If you wanted to hire an ops person, that's a cost savings.

2) Scalability. As your system grows, Heroku manages architecture choices necessary for scaling all parts of your app. This is at the dyno web tier and database tier. But it also includes choices around architecting add-ons. For example, if you wanted to include their memcache add-on and you had multiple apps, should you create multiple memcache instances or one large grid? That sort of choice is handled behind the scenes.

3) Add-Ons. They handle configuration, billing, and setup of any add-ons you might need. Biggest savings is not having to research all of them to figure out which ones are stable, viable, functional.

4) Cheap to get started. You can deploy new apps for free, and migrate your code elsewhere if needed.

5) Their polyglot strategy is interesting, and they are pushing the envelope with beta implementations around nosql data stores. There is a nice polyglot post on their blog.

6) There is some performance advantages of using some of their add-ons. Because Heroku is deployed on EC2, and many of the add-ons are also on EC2, the integrated performance can be higher. EC2 ping rates are faster than gigabit ethernet in some cases.

7) Creating identical environments. If you manage your own servers and you need to create staging, QA, or development servers, you'd have to create those manually and they'd be close, but not identical because there is different hardware involved. In debugging scenarios, being able to clone a whole app environment has some advantages.

Good luck in your endeavor.

</comment><comment><USER7> BCC runs on a slice. A smaller client project runs on Heroku. I find Heroku requires less maintenance which is easy and more which is hard, like digging into Ruby gems to hack around why they are not working. By comparison, nginx configs and a thousand other things need to be done for VPSes, but the majority are straightforward or Googleable.

Strong recommendation for the DIyer: deprec will save you a week.

</comment><comment><USER8> Heroku is probably really great as long as you are small. Once you get serious you can host _much_ cheaper on your own machines, but there will be additional (hidden) costs to factor in because you'll be spending more time on doing all the stuff that Heroku does for you. That's their added value, super easy deployment and keeping your stuff up and running. Cost wise it is fine as long as you're small enough to not notice you bill as a 'significant expense'. When that happens you should look in to running your own server, maybe first a virtual one, then move on to a dedicated server. That should allow you to scale to quite impressive size without breaking the bank.

<comment><USER9> Once you get big enough you might be able to negotiate with Heroku for a better deal. They might not be willing to give you au better deal, but if you're already there you might as well try before going through the expense of moving somewhere else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's my take:

-> if time is more precious than money, go with Heroku.

-> if money is more precious than time, go with Linode/SliceHost etc.

You can change your mind later on (depending on scale increase cash etc), or even mix-and-match (eg: your workers on Linode, your front-ends on Heroku).

Last point: some software (eg: sphinx) are not available on Heroku, and some others (eg: websolr) are quite costly compared to a roll-your-own setup.

<comment><USER5> If money is more precious than time but you have a need for reasonably beefy servers, go with Hetzner:

[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver- pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver- produktmatrix/)

<comment><USER11> Maybe a dumb question, but my brief scan over there didn't see US Dollars or anything in American English. Do they have a US website, location or affiliate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Start with Heroku. It's actually quite cheap for low traffic.

At the same time, buy a $20/month Linode. Start playing around with it by setting up toy web sites and web apps. If you don't have experience setting up a server, then it's important to be experimenting with one for a long time because it takes a while to learn things. For example, you not only have to install and configure all of the necessary software, you have to think about security and resource utilization (memory, CPU, disk). You also are going to want to set up some server monitoring software such as serverdensity.com. And you're going to want to get used to managing web traffic (reading Apache logs, tuning Apache for performance, etc.). All of this takes time. But if you do this then if the time comes for you to switch away from Heroku, you will have experience setting up and managing your own web server.

</comment><comment><USER13> I recently launched a small project (<http://statusdashboard.com>) with the goal of learning RoR and was blown away by the community and infrastructure (particularly Heroku). 3 weeks from watching the first blog railscast to a fucntioning site (with SSL, recurring billing, monitoring, etc.). I've also setup a VPS and started learning how to host myself (I think it is always better to understand how the magic happens).

Heroku definitely hides the complexity of their "magic". It just seems to work so effortlessly.

However, my biggest question so far is this: what is the best practice for managing and maintaining the DB? I'm used to jumping into the db for routine tasks, ad-hoc reporting, and troubleshooting. Amazon RDS would make it easier, but a bit pricy for my needs right now. I also understand you can db pull, but I've heard a few examples of data loss when attempting a pull/push roundtrip with a local PostgreSQL instance. So, I find myself spending time in the Heroku console, manipulating the data in code, manually.

What do you do to manage/report on data in the DB? I'm preparing to launch a number of larger projects, but need to get a better system in place first.

<comment><USER14> Hi - as an aside - I think it would be worth adding some 'tour' pages to your status dashboard site. I like the design but I'm not sure how the site works etc.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the feedback. I'll be working on that this weekend. I'm thinking of including a short video as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've used both Engine Yard Cloud and Heroku. They're both great and have their pros and cons. Both are also powered by Amazon EC2.

The only major downside with Heroku is if there is any downtime within their infrastructure, your app will also go down. This has happened a couple of times in the last 3-4 months, and it took a lot of big sites down.

Engine Yard Cloud setups are self-contained and can be locked down to whatever setup, cloud version you're happy with. If they update their cloud setup, you don't have to update your instance anymore.

It also seems like you can get more "bang for your buck" with EY once you start needing more computing/db power

</comment><comment><USER16> I am totally in favor of Heroku. Like other folks have pointed out, it's far cheaper (at least at first) to scale up on Heroku than to hire an ops person. I think that outgrowing Heroku, or finding that your real costs would be lower by going elsewhere or buying hardware, is a good problem to have.

I would much rather spend my time building my product than dealing with all of the fiddly bits of managing web servers, databases, full text search setup, security, patching, etc.

If need arises, migrating off Heroku in the future shouldn't be too challenging.

Also, if you do choose to try out Heroku, pick up my iPhone/iPad app for managing your Heroku applications (<http://dopplerapp.com>). Good luck!

<comment><USER17> I love Doppler. Thanks for it! :)

<comment><USER16> Glad you like it! Hit me up at email@example.com if you have any feature requests or bugs to report. I have v1.1 in the pipeline right now, and would like to incorporate a couple more user-suggested changes before I submit to Apple if possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is no lock-in using Heroku. Start with it and if you later want to move, just get a VPS of the appropriate size, apt-get install PostgreSQL, install RVM, and then the Ruby you want and required gems. Once you do this a few times, it takes very little time. As another poster mentioned, make sure you setup cron backups to S3, etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> Heroku is a great way to get your app up and out there quickly. Get in front of users and then iterate on your product. The perceived cost of Heroku won't turn out to be an issue until you've scaled out to many dynos.

Don't fret optimizing your hosting bill until it gets large enough to be an issue!

</comment><comment><USER20> I like Heroku, but if you want your own server (so you don't have to pay for outgoing email or cron jobs or DelayedJob), you can set up an Ubuntu 8.10 server super easily with Moonshine. I gave a talk about it at SD Ruby a while back.

[http://jarinheit.posterous.com/a-talk-i-gave-at-sd-ruby- depl...](http://jarinheit.posterous.com/a-talk-i-gave-at-sd-ruby-deploying- rails-apps)

</comment><comment> joe-mccann Heroku is awesome for ruby development. If you're attempting node.js development, they do have a private beta (which I've tested), but is somewhat limited as I believe it uses an NGINX proxy so doing something like websockets with node.js (currently on Heroku) is not possible.

git push master heroku

is reason enough to give it a shot.

Joyent may be another option...

<comment><USER21> joyent is nice and their support is tops

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Use Heroku. The cost of acquiring or hiring the sysadmin knowledge is going to far exceed just using Heroku. This includes Heroku's main competitor, Engineyard.

EY has its upsides (and downsides), but definitely requires more sysadmin experience.

</comment><comment><USER23> We did all manually before. Now we use heroku. For a small/medium sized project it is just perfect. We replaced about 1 to 2 days of works by 10 minutes with heroku. I cannot recommend it enough.

It took only 3 hours to adapt our projects to heroku. Compared to many days working on hosting ourselves our projects. Because the longer is not to set up the environment but to choose what will be the best. I believe the heroku team made the best choice for me.

</comment><comment><USER24> Heroku's definitely easier to setup and use - it's usually the right choice when you're first starting out and/or you don't have any advanced needs.

I don't use it much anymore - I stick to Moonshine and the Rackspace Cloud. The setup and management of a private slice is super easy and, IMHO, it's worth the small amount of extra work to setup.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the most important thing is getting something up and running quickly because you don't know where the design of the system will lead and you don't need the distraction of setting up a server. Don't waste more than a week fretting over this issue. Even a week is too much! During development you can still consider this issue so it's not an either-or thing. You're still developing in rails and can easily move your system to a standalone server. You're just delaying the cost of hiring a system admin or training one while you spend your valuable time in creating a working system which is very valuable in terms of figuring out the design of it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Heroku is great for site that might work out and might not. The initial cost is zero, but you can scale out as needed. Hopefully youve structured your business properly so that herokus cost is a small percentage of revenue.

</comment><comment><USER27> Heroku is awesome. Not only does it work well, it also encourages best practices.

</comment><comment><USER28> Although I love Heroku, and it really is a great platform, I find that, for my startup and personal projects, the costs hold me back from doing some things.

Say I need to run a simple background job, that would be $36/month - almost 2 linodes. And with the excellent articles on <http://articles.slicehost.com>, I find that setting up a vps takes no more than a few hours. Plus, it's a lot of fun and a good learning experience!

I don't see how Heroku could do it much cheaper though, when you look at the pricing of Amazon EC2 instances which their platform runs on.

</comment><comment><USER29> Heroku is great. But, if you use something a bit outside ruby/add-ons (which is a lot, including NoSql databases, Apigee, and lots of other great services), you will need to move.

<comment><USER30> Actually, Heroku supports all the popular NoSQL databases out of the box via their addon system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> definitely use heroku if you are using a ruby framework. we've had a much better experience than with managing our own EC2 server or using RightScale

</comment><comment><USER32> Im a sys admin and have to administrate dedicated servers at work but choose to use heroku for personal projects just for ease of deployment.

</comment><comment><USER33> I recommend heroku for starting out and and getting your apps some traction or whatever, then if/when you make more money hire a sys admin and migrate to something else if you want.

I really love heroku though, especially after setting up my own servers on media temple for rails apps (which sucks using passenger).

</comment><comment><USER34> Use Heroku is the simple answer. Unless you have specific needs for background processing or do some stuff that is not in Ruby, use Heroku. This is especially true if you have not set up a production system before.

</comment><comment><USER35> Definitely go with Heroku for two reasons: time savings (no sysadmin is huge!) and flexibility (you can always migrate later, which is easy since almost all of their stack is open-source).

</comment><comment><USER36> Question about heroku: I know that they have delayed_job support, but I need something that will kick off a DJ call every 5 minutes or so. The hourly cron add-on just won't cut it.

<comment><USER7> Really easy with DJ, but hackie: jobs create jobs, set run_at to five minutes in future. Optionally, similarly created batch of twelve with hourly cron.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Come ask James at Startup Bootcamp :-)

<http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu/#speakers>

</comment><comment><USER38> If you don't have experience in setting up a server, wtf not? Learn it. It's kinda useful.</comment>


I Just Logged In As You: How It Happened - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001263.html <comment><USER2> In other words, the attack was nothing new or special: if you use the same password in many places, they're all in the same "pool". If one is compromised, they're all compromised. It's ironic (and stupid) that Jeff Attwood's OpenID — which is supposed to obsolete passwords — was compromised like this.

The lesson's simple: before you re-use a password think about what's in it's pool, and for fuck's sake use a unique password for OpenID and your password manager.

<comment><USER3> Or better yet, don't use a password at all: Use a client-side SSL certificate.

Set your password to something random, and use a client-side SSL certificate to authenticate yourself to your OpenID provider. You can use the password reset feature if you lose your SSL certificate.

I've got instructions on how to do this on my website here: [http://joel.franusic.com/How-to-set-up-a-client-side-SSL- cer...](http://joel.franusic.com/How-to-set-up-a-client-side-SSL-certificate- on-myopenid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading Jeff's blog is like watching a big budget Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer production of... an old guy playing solitaire. Huge wind up and little payoff.

<comment><USER5> But, but, but... he just put a three on a four, after building suspense for the _whole_ week! How can you be so flippant?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> About 12 years ago or something, I used to chat on a 'talker'. Telnet talker.thevillage.something:8833 or similar. You had a login etc, and it was good fun.

So, I started learning about network programming etc, and built my own talker. Registration etc etc. I got quite a few people to register on it, and was surprised when I realized they were just using the same login details as they used on the 'main' talker we talked on.

So I logged in as one of them on the main talker and impersonated him... got banned for a bit. It really is surprising how easily this is done. (I was young, and foolish).

"Hey can you just try out this webapp for me? register here." <\-- Always use a 'throwaway' login.

<comment><USER7> I just had a brilliant idea (or, at least, I'd call it brilliant if it were foisted upon me): a demonstration of the true possibilities of phishing, in real-time AJAX in front of users' eyes. Have a one-page lure for an attractive webapp, with registration right there on the front page ("all you need is a username and password!")

When you put in your details, however, instead of doing any "registration", it works for a few seconds in the background, and then pops up a box listing all the sites it just logged into successfully using that username/password combination. As long as it's done by someone reputable enough that users won't think they actually got their password recorded by the server (Microsoft? Bruce Schneier?) it could be a very successful educational technique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Corrections to post:

1) Palin's password was not compromised directly. Instead, the backup "private security questions" had answers which were in the public domain -- such as "name of your high school" -- to a sufficiently dedicated adversary. (There are four in Wasilla. Sort of narrows the search space a bit versus trying to brute force a password, right?)

2) This doesn't prove OpenID is a good idea, at all. Let's review facts: the site which was compromised _uses OpenID_ and presumably an OpenID provider which has bulletproof security. The problem with this is that, for most users, the vulnerability is not the strongest provider but the weakest one, since they share credentials everywhere. Equivalently, you could say that the weakest link is the user. (Even on an Internet where EVERY site used OpenID, most users would fall for a compromise-anywhere-compromise-everywhere phishing attack.)

<comment><USER9> According to the article, the site which was compromised does _not_ use OpenID.

<comment><USER10> There were two sites that were compromised. The first did not use OpenID; it stored an unsalted hash, which lead to the compromised password. The second compromised site -- StackOverflow -- uses OpenID. It was compromised because Jeff used the same password on both sites.

Patio11's point is that this is common user behavior, so OpenID doesn't offer any better security than its weakest point, which becomes sites _not_ using OpenID but storing the same password as OpenID. I have to disagree, though: The alternative to OpenID is many more login/password pairs, which has exactly the same problem to a worse degree: too many passwords to remember, so the users reuse them.

<comment><USER9> StackOverflow wasn't compromised, Atwood's password was. The actual site that password is entered into is irrelevant. If this is a compromise of SO, then banks are compromised every time somebody steals a credit card.

<comment><USER11> If that credit card had access to all of the funds in the banks, then you would be right. Atwood has an administrator's account on StackOverflow, and presumably administrator powers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      Oh, and for those who claim my password was a dictionary
      word, and thus this is a de-facto dictionary attack. Well,
      I just went to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/
      .. and entered my old password there:

      "The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Click
      on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the
      search bar above."

      Like I said, it *ain't a dictionary word!* It might be in
      cracking tables somewhere, but it isn't a dictionary word,
      at least not of the type you can use in Scrabble without
      getting challenged..

Uh, Jeff? If you password isn't long, it's going to be in the rainbow table, no matter how complex. Nobody uses their machine to hash the lines from /usr/share/dict/words anymore! They just download a highly-compressed rainbow table, which will have every non-dork password in it.

</comment><comment><USER13> So the summary is that he got hacked because he reused an insecure password for his administrator account on SO. The guy who logged into his account seems to have broken ethical and legal obligations to the original website that he got the password from.

<comment><USER14> Hmm..not so black and white I think. He helped out Jeff and there was nothing malicious done. If I was in Jeff's position I would be thankful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand how the attacker got his hands on the MD5'd password? Does Open ID expose that data to anyone?

<comment><USER16> He didn't. The attacker helped out with a site that didn't use OpenID and doesn't salt their passwords.

And Jeff used an insecure password on both the "evil site" and his Open ID provider.

The attacker only had access to Jeff's hash because he had access to a site that Jeff used.

<comment><USER17> To be explicit: the attacker was given trusted access to the password database on another site and violated that trust. The fact that the site used poor security and that Jeff was stupid enough to use the same password in two places doesn't mitigate it.

I was expecting the answer to be that Jeff somehow revealed his real password publicly somewhere, not that this idiot stole it from a database that he had trusted access to.

This would be grounds for instant dismissal or even legal action in my book.

<comment><USER18> But that's irrelevant once your identity is stolen.

<comment><USER17> It might be irrelevant to Jeff, but it wouldn't be irrelevant to me if I was the one employing this person to work on my web site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This sound about right?

Add a column named 'salt' to USER, then the PASS column=PASSWORD(salt+'text');

<comment><USER20> PASS column = MD5(MD5(plaintext_pass) + salt)

SALT column = salt

Is the way used in most distributable web applications.

<comment><USER3> I think what you actually want is:

PASS column = HMAC(plaintext_pass, salt)

I might be wrong? As I understand it there are issues with MD5(MD5(password) + salt) that HMAC avoids. I'm still not 100% sure I understand the difference, but I think that is what the wikipedia article on HMAC is saying: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC#Design_principles>

<comment><USER21> HMAC is mostly useful when you want to verify that some text hasn't been altered. The client sends message + HMAC(message, secret) and then the server (which also knows the secret) can verify that no-one has changed the message.

Dunno if it helps anything when it comes to salting. Anyone else who knows?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GHC 7.4.1 is out. Now with kind polymorphism. Here's the release notes - <AUTHOR> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.4.1/html/users_guide/release-7-4-1.html

<comment><AUTHOR> My favorites:

* support for registerised compilation on the ARM platform, using LLVM.

First class REPL!

* It is now possible to give any top-level declaration at the GHCi prompt

* Safe Haskell

<comment><USER2> Constraint synonyms are a welcome addition as well. Will really help clean up some messy signatures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some of the cool new features include a relatively lightweight compiler plugin facility and the abilIty to now write down types that are parametrized over typeclass constraints. Also some of the on going work on data parallel Haskell has been integrated into this release.

</comment><comment><USER4> Anybody knows if Yesod compiles on it now?

<comment><USER3> the github repos says yes <https://github.com/yesodweb/yesod>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is probably a good place to ask:

Does anyone have any tips for web scraping with Haskell? I've used tagsoup but the memory usage is really bad (or maybe I'm using the wrong string type?) and the interface is really clunky compared to something like pyquery or hpricot.

<comment><USER6> Here are a couple of suggestions:

* Use tagsoup only for small projects or sites that are so broken that other packages fail to parse/load DOM properly.

* Shpider[1] package on Hackage (which I maintain these days) makes it somewhat easier to do the crawling bit. It has an intiutive API and we are always open to suggestions/new functionality there.

* Instead of tagsoup, learn hxt (and arrows along the way). It is really, really hard to get used to, but just _amazing_ in extracting information using combinators from DOM once you're there. Perhaps you could do it as a back-burner learning project. Make sure to look into the arrow proc/do notation as that's pretty much key for scraping.

* Alternatively, you can use one of the xml parsing libraries and their combinators. Some that come to mind are: haxml, hexpat, xml, xml-basic, xml-conduit. I'm sure these would be great too, although I haven't used one in any great capacity.

[1] <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/shpider-0.2.1.1>

<comment><USER5> Thanks! I've heard of Shpider, haven't had a need for it as of yet because I haven't needed programmatic web browsing (just downloading the page and extracting info).

I'll see if I can clean up the markup enough to get it to parse with hxt, otherwise Shpider provides a good reference on how to correctly use Tagsoup. And also the Shpider codebase is really clean and well documented.</comment></comment></comment>


China's 500-meter FAST radio telescope is now operational - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-01-china-meter-fast-radio-telescope.html <comment><AUTHOR> FAST stands for Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope</comment>


Instantly create your own virtual and physical cards - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/issuing <comment><USER2> Can I sign up for this service and use it instead of privacy.com?</comment>


Mailappapp - <AUTHOR> http://visualidiot.com/articles/mailappapp

<comment><USER2> Pretty funny, but ... there's only been one new iOS mail app in the past year, right? I understood when people skewered to-do and weather apps, but I don't really see a glut of mail apps.

<comment><USER3> <http://dribbble.com/search?q=ios+mail+app>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >"Typography is a lot easier when you just use Proxima Nova. So we're just using Proxima Nova."

Glad I'm not the only one that feels Proxima Nova is overused.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's pretty funny.

</comment><comment><USER6> i love the design style toggle</comment>


Show HN: Hooked.io – Instant Stripe Notifications - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
We're two young guys in Scotland who made this over the summer. In brief, you connect your Stripe account and get notifications via email (push, sms, Hipchat, Slack and others coming soon) of important events that occur.
We'd really appreciate any feedback or opinions on it: https://hooked.io
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Posts without urls are penalized. You'd be better off reposting this using the url, then adding your text as a comment in the thread. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh hey, thanks for the advice :)</comment></comment>


Bitcoin's blockchain tainted with links to child abuse imagery - <AUTHOR> https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/03/21/bitcoins-blockchain-tainted-with-links-to-child-abuse-imagery/ <comment><USER2> Based on my own analyses, I can't see how Bitcoin will survive. Other "bitcoins" (cryptocurrencies) will surely arise to fill the gap.

Time to call it for me: The fundamental value of Bitcoin is naught point nothing. USD 0.00 EUR 0.00 etc.

Tax evasion pressures, money laundering pressures, commercial pressures, exchanges "losing" bitcoins all the time - and now child pornography hidden within the blockchain itself?

Whatever the current status of the open source project(s) and whether they can play nice - can anyone explain how this can turn out well for Bitcoin?</comment>


Swiss town of Zug first to accept Bitcoin for government services - <AUTHOR> http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/crypto-valley_zug-first-to-accept-bitcoin-for-government-services/42143908 <comment><USER2> Being the first government to accept Bitcoin and creating the first trusted and government backed BTC bank and clearing house could both give real legitimacy to bitcoin, while continuing the swiss legacy of "your money is anonymously safe with us" and continuing their financial dominance for offshore accounts, trust funds, and other financial services for the foreseeable future.

I know it's a pipe dream, but it would be great.

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent.

... on a trial basis until the end of 2016

Oh. Well, then good luck!

<comment><USER4> it is going to leave a sore taste in their mouthes and they'll never consider it when it actually is useful

<comment><USER3> Yup, it's not going to blow their minds in 12 months. It might not even break even, depending on how they use it. Hopefully they're not taking a hit on converting it to their currency.</comment></comment></comment>