The Decline and Fall of the American Empire - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-30/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-american-empire <comment><USER2> The most important factor in this analysis doesn't get called out by name: healthcare costs. When Cowen mentions entitlement growth forcing spending reduction and tax increases, healthcare is both the most certain and the biggest culprit by a wide margin.

If you were going to do one thing to extend American prosperity, it would be disruptive structural improvements to our healthcare system. That's structural reform, not new biotech (except as allows you to disintermediate care). The fact that our total expenditure is so high relative to other countries with similar quality of care is evidence that the economic models, not the technology available, are to blame.

<comment><USER3> Attack exorbitant salaries of physicians, and watch them suddenly forget how to treat your medical problems. And probably refuse to treat your family too, just to teach you a lesson.

How long are you willing to go without medical care just to make a political change? Not sure that geriatric politicians will be skipping their monthly appointments.

<comment><USER4> This entire line of argument distracts from the real issues and makes progress harder to achieve. Physician salaries are one of the worst possible places to start addressing this issue.

US doctors apparently earn about 2x the average for other comparable nations. That's not a small number, but doctor's salaries _in toto_ are only about 8% of US healthcare spending. A 50% reduction would bring our salary spending in line with everyone else, but only save $100 billion out of a $3,300 billion cost.

Meanwhile, outright waste in medical supply spending costs $765 billion per year. That's drugs discarded at expiration dates which are known to be too restrictive, spending on combination drugs which are identical to the sum of cheaper components, and supplies thrown away by hospitals for non-sanitary reasons (e.g. vendor change, or drugs allotted for a patient but never issued or opened). Changing some parts of this would involve challenging the profits of drug companies, but in many cases not even that would be required. A handful of regulatory changes could save enough to offset the entire cost of paying doctors.

The situation with unnecessary or ineffective medical treatments is comparable. Some of the most common surgeries performed are known not to work, suspected not to work, or known to be more risky than inaction for standard patients, but they're still carried out at enormous expense. Adjustments to medical publication standards, physician statistical training, and and malpractice risk profiles could massively reduce the number of unnecessary and even net-harmful surgical procedures performed every year, cutting costs while directly _improving_ care.

Framing medical expenses as a conflict between consumer expenses and doctor's salaries is false and harmful. It literally can't solve the problem, but it's excellent at derailing the work that could.

[https://www.propublica.org/article/the-myth-of-drug- expirati...](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-myth-of-drug-expiration- dates)

[https://www.propublica.org/article/what-hospitals- waste](https://www.propublica.org/article/what-hospitals-waste)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/when- evid...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/when-evidence- says-no-but-doctors-say-yes/517368/)

<comment><USER3> I know this is an unpopular view, but who are you to decide what level of risk should a patient accept? Literally every step, including inaction has risks. Can patients decide independently what should be done with their own body, or are they presumed to be too dumb and must obey your decisions?

Should patients be consigned to disability immediately without even attempting some procedure, simply because the chance of success is too small in your arbitrary definition?

You have never been seriously sick.

<comment><USER4> > _You have never been seriously sick._

For a comment arguing that I'm being dismissive of sick people, this is a genuinely insulting and exceedingly false assumption to make. Yes I have, yes I _am_ , and those experiences absolutely support my point.

> _Who are you to decide what level of risk should a patient accept?_ ... _Are > they presumed to be too dumb and must obey your decisions?_ ... _Should > patients be consigned to disability immediately without even attempting some > procedure, simply because the chance of success is too small in your > arbitrary definition?_

I did not say any of this at any point. I did not say anything remotely resembling "people should be consigned to disability because some procedures rarely work". None of what I am proposing is about denying patients treatments they make informed requests for.

Please actually read that Atlantic article. It is not _in any way_ about denying medical care to a sick patient who wants it because "doctors know best". It is exactly the opposite - a patient was being railroaded into major heart surgery that made sense as a malpractice precaution but not as patient care. He did his own research, obtained multiple opinions, and independently decided to what should be done with his body.

That is what I want more of. In a discussion of cost-cutting I focused on the straightforward case of expensive treatments being pushed on patients without giving them full information, but over-treatment and under-treatment both happen. If it would make you happier, I can list some of the ways I think we can get better care at lower costs by providing _more_ treatments and emphasizing patient wishes over current medical consensus.

I'm painfully aware that the 'patients are clueless' attitude you're attacking exists. I mean that literally, as a result of that attitude I'm in pain right now. But you read an entire worldview into one sentence, in the face of examples that specifically disagree with it. The thing you're objecting to is terrible and deserves opposition, but you're picking a fight with someone who already agrees about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The very worst fears about climate change won't come true. But a nagging > succession of storms, plus required adjustments along the coasts to > accommodate a rise in sea level, will eat up about 0.5 percent worth of > economic growth.

For a 'clean tale of hypothetical decline' this really seems to undersell the climate problem. As of the weekend along the Norther American West coast there was almost continuous forest fire smoke from southern BC to near the middle of the Central Valley. It's not implausible we will see a sizable percentage of the Western US forests destroyed by fire in the next couple of decades. For anyone who has observed the ecosystems over the past few decades the changes are starting to become quite alarming.

So the climate problem is pretty big. At least at the national level the US is basically ceding responsibility for developing technologies to address it to other nations. This looks like a big future opportunity loss in addition to the actual costs imposed by climate changes.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the author, and his out there style has produced some gems. This article though, it feels like he started, but didn't really get anywhere.

What is (for the purpose of this article) "American Empire" anyway?

If it's relative economic & military power, than the writing is on the wall. China is matching and surpassing the US now.

Is it "Empire of the Mind" where the US leads the world in terms of political ideas, holds the torch of civilization and such? That's a whole different discussion.

Is this an article about upcoming disasters of a political-economic kind?

<comment><USER7> The authors viewpoint would be that the "American Empire" is the large amount of political, military, and economic influence that America wields internationally. You can infer from the article that he believes this empire is what keeps regional powers in check. This is a good thing because a lot of those nations (China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia just from the article) are much more autocratic and illiberal compared to the USA. Additionally, even if you believe that's not true of these societies, growing regional ambitions in the absence of the "American Empire" leads to destabilization and more conflict.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Each fall of civilization is a tale of N cities... there's rarely "the one magic" factor.

US has:

\- situations leadership cannot (ie no immediate benefit for them) or will not (ie blind tradition) correct the rules of the current system in a way founders, whom understood human-nature, could adjust to make it work better.. instead the ship is falling apart:

\- essentially unlimited private campaign financing.. resulting in corruption metastasizing into all three branches, from POTUS down to sheriff and district attorneys, which leads elected officials to dismiss the public good to mostly consider the rich'es and their good.

\- disengagement through manufactured consent, learned helplessness, divide- we-fell polarized animosity and non-participation.. yes, and celebrity chefs.

\- mass-media oligopoly.

\- insane student debt bubble, just the latest bubble.

\- largely morally- and ethically-unmoored, unregulated market chicanery leveraging complexity, obscurity and trade volume speculating to alter the worth of real capital.

\- large, diffuse official workforce participating in inverted totalitarian wage-slavery and living in their vehicles. more co-ops employee ownership, shorter work weeks, higher pay relativr to the cost of living and workers on boards-of-directors are needed.

\- "excess" labor due to automation and outsourcing. those "better jobs elsewhere" rarely materialized, hence opioid crisis.

\- opiod crisis.

\- undocumented workforce which subsidizes costs of many essential goods for the lower-income classes with their cheap labor.

\- complex geopolitical situation in an ever-flattening, connected and population-stabilizing work (sans Africa).

Maybe in a million years Bezos will be the first quintillionaire Morlock and feast on the marrow of the Eloi while paying for everyone's UBI since there's no jobs left except Scruffy, the Janitor.

</comment><comment><USER9> The article sounded like the silly Stratfor ramblings by Friedman, but in a kind of reversed way, where USA ends up suffering. In the Stratfor fiction, USA grows and flourishes, while varyingly imaginative scenarios emerge all over the globe, harming others. This article was kind of the opposite.

Certainly the pax americana is at the end of its road, because of e.g. the costs of upkeeping the military, but will USA somehow implode and shrink to irrelevance and vanish completely? No, I don't think so.

China is emerging as the next big power. However, I am not so sure it will stay as a cohesive whole during this development as it reaches its peak. I believe technological advancements and ever-increasing interaction with other, continuously developing and changing cultures are incompatible with an increasingly tighter grip of the population (via e.g. the social credit system). Free flow of ideas & communication and an ever tighter "police state" in the physical world do not mix and will eventually collide, destructively. From extreme to extreme, then balance.

Long story short, I think in the future the world will be a multipolar one and this will be the "low energy state" of the global system. All of the current top players will eventually take a hit of some kind, and become different from what they are today, but not disappear nor sink into a Mad Max style world full of oblivion and despair.

</comment><comment><USER10> What seems least plausible about this to me is that a long period of decline like that (basically what happened to France and the UK) wouldn't result in something like a civil war or other split in the US.

<comment><USER11> Based on observed uprising or civil wars [1], to have one of those you need (1) stark mass poverty that borders on famine, i.e. people _really_ scrapping by, and (2) Youth! It's much much easier for a younger population to revolt.

And, no offense, but relative to the rest of the world Americans are kind of old and kind of fat.

So: probably not.

[1] Sources:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybowyer/2013/07/18/youth- in...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybowyer/2013/07/18/youth-in-revolt- the-demographics-behind-middle-eastern-uprisings/amp/)

[https://www.fragilestates.org/2012/11/25/causes-of- revolutio...](https://www.fragilestates.org/2012/11/25/causes-of-revolution- the-role-of-youth-and-other-social-factors/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it adapting rapidly enough to changes in technical/human/natural environment or not?

Just ask this question of any society, past or present, and tell reliably whether it's in rapid decline or not: democracy, empire or otherwise.

Accumulating enemies, losing friends, having trouble with rainfall amounts, not adjusting to internal human needs and wishes, insisting on obsolete techniques? Then you have a problem whether Mayan, Roman, Soviet or other.

</comment><comment><USER13> For the sake of humanity I really wish it would be true, but somehow I doubt it. Not for another 50 years or so.

<comment><USER14> "Do you think you'll like the next empire better?", dmm asked with a small nod west over the pacific.

<comment><USER13> I don't know but at least there's hope that it will be different or perhaps, get ready this is a bit radical, there won't be any empire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems that American journalists and coastal elites do nothing more lately than (ironically) talk about how much they hate their country. What happened to patriotism? Why is it so 'cool' nowadays to hate the USA?

<comment><USER11> Can you tell us where in the linked article the author shows "how much they hate their country"?

Please provide actual examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is purely speculation with no sources.

These articles are a dime a dozen in the age of Trump and most of them are shortsighted and factless.

</comment><comment><USER17> [deleted]

<comment><USER18> Unprecedented? It isn't unprecedented at all. It is entirely pedestrian. Add that it was substantially caused by a) a massive burst of government spending, b) foreign buyers front-loading delivery to beat out pending trade wars. It is going to get ugly from here.

The American economy is pretty much at 100% right now, as any chart could tell you has been the result of almost 10 years of growth since the financial crisis. Which is why it is shocking and startling that it is coupled with extraordinary deficits approaching a trillion dollars. This is the time when the government is supposed to be eliminating deficits, not blowing them up.

The US debt is simply grotesquely unsustainable, and when even the anti- deficit right has ceded the fight...bad times are ahead.

So yes, the US economy is a "terror" movie of sorts. It is so profoundly irrational that it has some serious jump scares coming up.

As an aside - Trump is boasting about a steel maker making record profits. Ignore that it cost $12B in taxpayer money to farmers in a single year, and will cost billions more, and that it dramatically increased the prices for US consumers and threatened a wide swath of manufacturers...at least US Steel is making money, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can we stop calling the world's largest democracy an empire? Belligerent nation sure but it's so click baity and inaccurate

<comment><USER20> USA is not the world's largest democracy. That title goes to India.

<comment><USER19> By economy, not headcount

<comment><USER20> Then it should say "world's largest economy", not "world's largest democracy".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Stupid click bait. Expected to read about the fall of civilization in America, kinda like a fusion of Mad Max + Walking Dead. Instead read about high taxes and elderly people causing congestion on the roads.

That's what happens when economists write, they make the coolest topic boring af.

<comment><USER22> The reality of decline is going to be quite boring.

Boring,and a world worse than today in many ways, if we don't get out ahead of the failure modes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you ask me, the fall of America from the lone 'superpower' to a 'great power' is all but assured as long as the structural racial inequality in this county persists.

Let's take a look at education for an example: USA ranks pretty low on global education rankings despite the fact that we have some of the best schools in the world across all levels, its hard to think why that may be the case but when you consider the inequality in school systems due to property tax law and de facto segregation it makes a lot more sense.

Look at the criminal justice system: we have over 1 million prime aged men who are basically frozen out of achieving economic prosperity and contributing to this countries success because of bad policing and disproportionate enforcement of law.

Look at healthcare, there is a huge gap (although closing) of life expectancy between races.

India and China are not utopias by any means, but they have 1B+ people: these countries are growing larger and larger in influence and will create a middle class that contains hundreds of millions of people. The US is getting more and more in-equal and at a certain point we will reach an inflection point where we are too damn lopsided for our own good. People want to talk about lower productivity and lower wages, when you have 1.5 missing men from the workforce what do you expect?[0]

0: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missin...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing- black-men.html)

<comment><USER24> Can you name a time in America's history when there wasn't segregation and inequality?

<comment><USER23> There has never been a time where America wasn't segregated or in equal. I think throughout America's history we've had a long runway: the fact that the continent was open to use w/o a well organized Mexican or Indian state to stop expansion, the isolation from WW1 & WW2, the fast amount of land in this country and natural resources, the decline of Europe and relative weakness of China, etc. We've been able to take advantage of these conditions for 200+ years. The rest of the world is catching up though, we will need to really unlock the potential of people who in the past have been marginalized to continue our run as a superpower.</comment></comment></comment>


New Search Engine: Wolfram Alpha shows data in a way Google can't - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10233763-2.html

<comment><USER2> i bet its not that Google can't...its just that Google doesn't want to do it. I'll be surprised if Wolfram Alpha's niche is more than 1/10 of a percent of Search users

<comment><USER3> This is hand-curated data. It goes against Google's core philosophy of improving the algorithm instead of just the data.</comment></comment>


ASUS to build iMac-like PCs, rumored to be at $500 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.laptopmag.com/add-another-to-the-eee-family-eee-monitor-revealed

<comment><USER2> Misleading headline... these PCs aren't Mac clones, even though they use the fully-integrated-in-the-monitor approach. Apple isn't the only one to do that though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't like the other headlines either, saying it's iMac's rival. You are right though.

And true that this is not unique even in the PC world. What's exciting about this story is the prospective price and the fact that there's at least one decent, innovative PC manufacturer not under Microsoft's control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Right, because we all know how well iMac lookalikes sell.

<comment><USER4> I think that one of the major factors in the iMac selling well is that there is no cheaper box-only OS X offering* to canabalise it's sales.

*Excluding the mini, which is too far below to really be a direct iMac competitor.</comment></comment>


Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem <comment><USER2> "I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much better spent helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. Of course this brings us to the more fundamental question - are schools more for learning or daycare?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24257872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24257872)

<comment><USER3> This. Teachers speaking in front of the blackboard is overrated, anyone can do that.

In fact it is precesily this part that a student can go and find on the internet explained in 30 different ways if he still doesn't get it.

<comment><USER4> I beg to differ. One of my most vivid educational experiences is of my teacher calculating approximate square root on the side of the blackboard when he needed it for something completely unrelated. To me it felt like he was riding a unicycle or swallowing a sword.

Seeing that the audience was perplexed, he reluctantly took a five minute detour and explained Newton-Raphson algorithm, at which point the unbelievable circus trick suddenly became trivial.

<comment><USER5> But you can also go down related rabbit holes on Khan Academy if you find an interesting tangent...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In high school I would get to school early and practice my instrument or hang out. My band friend was in remedial algebra and failing and got up enough courage to ask for help with his homework. On the second problem I noticed that he couldn't read his own handwriting and asked him to write cleaner. He started getting the highest grades in the class and saying it was easy.

When I started Algebra, I was trying to save paper by writing everything on one line ``A = B = C = D = answer`` which makes it hard to do things to "both sides" of the equation. I could mostly do the problems in my head but showing my work was impossible and it's easy to make trivial mistakes at any step that give you the wrong answer. My friend was using a whole sheet of paper per problem and showed me how to do it and then it got easy.

My point is that if five minutes with a peer can fix trivial, fundamental issues with a student's approach, imagine what a trained teacher or professor could do on a short one-on-one session with each student?

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's a fantastically detailed 2019 review of replications of Bloom's work:

[https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/](https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/)

As is oft the case, the conclusion is 'it's complicated'.

</comment><comment><USER8> I loved learning about this phenomenon from Patrick Collision's blog.

Anecdotally, this makes sense to me. Up until the 3rd grade my mother would work with me every single day on my homework. I was consistently number 1 or number 2 in my class.

This changed when my mother began spending more time with my siblings my homework than with mine. I personally believe simply having someone with you to walk you through problems makes all the differences in the world.

<comment><USER4> I have opposite experience. My parents did not help me with homework beyond first or second grade. After that it was my responsibility, like cleaning my room. I was near the top of my class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> With mastery learning, it's the feedback loop that's making the difference. In some domains where the subject matter itself can be computationally modeled (such as math), it seems plausible that the feedback loop as well can be emulated by software. There have been many attempts and many failures to do so, but I'm optimistic and believe it's a matter of further investment and research.

</comment><comment><USER10> It doesn't say whther the intervention was assigned randomly (and those assigned all stuck with it). Home environment and parental support has a huge influence and also those who get tuition (or stick with assignment to the tuition group) probably have strong parental support.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've never learned anything in a classroom. I've always learned by doing or from a tutor.

Standardized education is a joke.

As others have said, it's more about daycare than education.</comment>


What It's Like to Work Inside Apple's 'Black Site' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-11/apple-black-site-gives-contractors-few-perks-little-security <comment><USER4> This story is about the non-Apple employees that work at the subcontractor Apex.

To generalize, the title can be _" What It's Like to Work Inside Company X's subcontractor."_

Similar stories about subcontractors with less benefits & perks were written for Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Subcontractors are always going to be "2nd class citizens" compared to real employees of the client company. The phenomenon is not specific to the tech industry. Even a workers cooperative like Mondgragon outsources work to subcontractors and those non-employees complain about not being able to participate in Mondragon's benefits.

The "subcontractors" that have the same level (or higher level) of prestige and respect as the client company would be consulting companies like McKinsey or Bain.

<comment><USER5> Does the big tech company bear no responsibility for shifting as much work as it can out to subcontractors in order to cut costs? It seems to me that they're knowingly using the subcontracting mechanism in order to get away with offering Apex's 24 hours of paid leave per year, insufficient bathrooms, and other appalling conditions without tarnishing their sterling reputation. It says right in the article that Apple reviewed the Apex site and thought it was fine.

If big tech companies want to own up to being heartless mercenary capitalists who will wring every drop of sweat out of workers and spit them out as burned- out husks with no savings at the age of 35, hey, that's the system we live in. But something seems off when they want to have their cake and eat it too– that is, they want to seem like inspiring, human-friendly forces for good, but quietly use the glow from that reputation to get away with subcontracting away a huge amount of their labor to people working in miserable conditions. There's a reason that some labels moved away from sweatshop labor: it's bad press. If Apple is going to effectively use sweatshop labor (through a contractor, whatever) they should have to eat the bad press. Don't defend it as just the contractor's fault. It's literally the exact same situation as a clothing sweatshop.

<comment><USER6> You know, unless you're VERY careful about your shopping, you're also using sweatshop labor (to manufacture your clothes, electronics etc.).

Also, I don't think that Apple is especially covert about them being a (heartless) business like everybody else. Steve Jobs even said, in response to a question about bringing manufacturing back to USA: "We're in the business of making phones, not in the business of employing people". It was clear that people were mainly just means to an end for him.

<comment><USER7> I think it's better to advocate for improvement without practicing it than it is to not practice it and not advocate.

Better to do one thing right if that's the best you can pull off!

<comment><USER6> > I think it's better to advocate for improvement without practicing it than > it is to not practice it and not advocate.

Isn't that the definition of hypocrisy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was a weirdly meandering, clickbaity article, because the only piece of news is that they found this building and talked to a few people inside of it. What is the article advocating for? Is it for Apple to pay $100/hr for data tagging or move those jobs abroad and pay $5/hr? I'm not sure.

7 million people live in SF Bay Area, and of those only about 800,000 work in technology [1]. An article like "hey, look, someone sorta-kinda works for Apple, but doesn't make $300,000/yr" is incredibly ignorant for the reality of the majority of Bay Area residents. If you take a teacher's lifetime financial growth path, it'll look bleak, compared to a recent grad at a FAANG. However, that won't generate as many clicks.

[1] [https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/10/tech-job-growth- slows...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/10/tech-job-growth-slows-in-bay- area/)

<comment><USER9> >This was a weirdly meandering, clickbaity article, because the only piece of news is that they found this building and talked to a few people inside of it.

The article very explicitly uses terminology to imply that the report is about an intelligence community black site. The article says this explicitly:

> Workers say managers instructed them to walk several blocks away before > calling for a ride home. Several people who worked here say it's widely > referred to within Apple as a "black site," as in _a covert ops facility._

It says it is widely referred to within Apple as a covert ops facility. (It doesn't say jokingly referred to that way.) In addition it uses the word back door in the second paragraph, which is really evocative. It says:

>From the outside, there appears to be a reception area, but it's unstaffed, which makes sense given that people working in this satellite office—mostly employees of Apple contractors working on Apple Maps—use the back door.

An editor who didn't want to evoke this would change it to secondary entrance, or simply, "don't use the main entrance". They wouldn't use the term back door. Bloomberg isn't some tabloid.

For better or for worse, people are missing that the article calls this a "covert ops facility" (using those exact 3 words) similar to room "Room 641A" \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A)

Finally, the suggestion to walk several blocks before hailing a ride doesn't make sense in any normal employee context. The article is calling this an intelligence community site, says so very explicitly, and puts that term in the title.

Reference: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site)

\--

NOTE: I got mod approval to post this response, since I am doing so from a throwaway, but not to break the site guidelines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While the conditions weren't nearly as bad as those in this article, I experienced some of this as a contractor for Walmart at their Sunnyvale office.

On Thanksgiving, they had a special lunch prepared for everyone that had to come into the office (mostly just to monitor and be ready if anything went down). There were emails and signs, everyone was excited about it. When I went down with my team, they stopped me and a couple of other contractors at the door and said we couldn't go in unless we were full-time employees. There was no mention of that anywhere. We had to go get lunch somewhere else.

A couple of times a year they would buy movie tickets for everyone at a nearby theater. At lunch, the full-time staff would leave to go watch a movie for a few hours while the contractors stayed in the office.

Both of these weren't really a big deal, but they definitely made you feel like you were a second class employee.

<comment><USER11> As unfortunate and depressing as it is, a lot of that is required or strongly encouraged by the IRS. Otherwise, it starts treating the contractors as actual employees: [https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs- contr...](https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contractor- designation)

Sadly, the entire point is that they are not employees, let alone second class ones. In the end, it boils down to the perennial question of how much of your work is done by employees and how much by vendors. And it always leads to awkward situations. (Quite a few of those when I was an employee at Google and something I don't see as much anymore, luckily.)

<comment><USER12> This is almost definitely not about the IRS--or at least it is only to the extent that Walmart might use that as an excuse. It's very likely that Walmart is already treating them as de facto employees with scheduling and management practices. Letting them eat at Thanksgiving isn't likely going to be to be the straw that tips the scales to employee.

IRS: here's a list of things that can be evidence you are using contractors as employees.

Walmart: OK we'll ignore every single one of them except that we won't provide them with health insurance, we won't withhold tax, and we won't let them eat Thanksgiving dinner or go to the movies.

There is a massive problem with employers skirting the law with respect to this, but companies don't care because enforcement isn't consequential enough to make them care.

<comment><USER13> I thought the whole reason companies care this much is because it enforced. The go to example of what happens when you treat contractors like employees is what happened to Microsoft where they got sued for breaking this line.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us- findlaw-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-dont- treat-c/dont-treat-contractors-like-employees-idUSTRE53063S20090401)

<comment><USER12> That happened in 1989/1990\. The regulatory landscape has changed a lot in 30 years.

Also I'm not saying it's never enforced, I'm saying the enforcement isn't consequential or consistent enough to convince companies to stop treating contractors like employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have worked as a contractor for Apple. I have to say that my personal experiences have been generally positive. Although I am only working with them at certain periods so it's not like I'm a "full-time" contractor so I can understand the frustration of being in that kind of position.

Overall, I found them to be very accommodating and concerned with our needs. They treated us well. There has never been any expectation on my part that I would be receiving any regular employee benefits. I felt like Apple treated us better than our actual employer/sub-contractor and if there was anything good coming to us it was from Apple and not our sub contractor.

The only thing I can relate to is the toilet situation. For some reason Apple has offices that can accommodate 100s of staff with literally 3 toilet cubicles to go around. The toilet door is like a conveyor belt and I often have to go several times until I can find an empty cubicle. Whoever designed these offices severely underestimated the allocation of toilets.

<comment><USER15> Never heard a toilet stall referred to as a 'cubicle' before. A cubicle is where my desk is located, and that is not in the bathroom :)

<comment><USER16> Might be British English as it sounds normal to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _Workers say managers instructed them to walk several blocks away before > calling for a ride home._

Huh? Why? Zero context and zero explanation given.

This article seems pretty sensationalist... when it's just describing the entirely normal practice of contracted employees.

I mean, seriously... complaints about lines for the men's room after lunch? Spoiler alert: (non-contract) employees of big tech companies encounter those too. All the time, from personal experience. Or that the color of one's badge is a "sad grey"? Give me a break.

Yes there are some arguably valid arguments to be made against the prevalence of contract workers in modern America... but this article ain't it.

<comment><USER18> >complaints about lines for the men's room after lunch? Spoiler alert: (non- contract) employees of big tech companies encounter those too.

Interestingly enough, that's one of my biggest complaint working @ Bloomberg.

<comment><USER11> At Google, things got so bad in some Mountain View buildings, where few were contractors anyway, that they started adding fancy bathroom campers in the parking lots.

I always wanted to find out if there was any relationship to the signs that warned people not to urinate in the showers...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've worked at a number of famous tech giants and none of them have enough men's bathrooms. I'm not sure that lines for the bathrooms are the strongest point of this article.

<comment><USER20> _screams into a pillow_

My least favorite job was at an investment bank where men outnumbered women 100:1. Urinals were always clogged with garbage, toilets were left unflushed, and sinks regularly filled up with human waste.

<comment><USER21> Sinks? What sort of waste???

<comment><USER22> Do you really want to know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So their complaints are that they have to work in a bland looking office with an under stocked vending machine and there are lines for the bathroom. You are all so out of touch with regular people it's ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER16> Comparing lack of access to a gym to a being in a 'black site' (location where lack of oversight of security services has been allegedly used to facilitate torturing people) is truly stupid.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm really curious about something. Most contractor jobs seem to be meaningfully distinct from the work that direct employees are performing, whether it's stuff like security and cafeteria, or stuff that is too specialized, like short-term needs (this is the Bain thing).

But how does it come about that companies have both direct employees and contractors carrying out identical tasks in their core business? In the valley, this question amounts to: how does it come about that companies have both direct employed and contractor devs? What is it about the developers that causes them to land on one track rather than another; what is it about the products that companies are building that causes them to decide to staff one with direct employees and another with contractors?

Does anyone have some insight into this? This is the part of the contractors in the valley story that strikes me as really weird---the market rate for a package of skills in a firm ought to be more consistent than it it seems to be given the contractor/direct thing.

<comment><USER25> It's hard to find good people.

It's not uncommon to have more work in a given area than you have employees to do that work. So, you hire contractors to fill in.

But are contractors allowed to do all the things that employees can do? If not, then you've just created a whole new series of problems for yourself.

Been there, done that. On both sides of the fence, multiple times.

<comment><USER26> Why hire a contractor with the same skill set over an employee with the same skill set?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems like the answer to the question in the title is: Not that bad.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is nothing new and hardly unique to the tech industry. Back in the 90s I worked summers at a factory that made door latches for Honda, Chrysler, and Nummi. About 1/3 were "temporary employees" employees of Manpower even though some people were there for over a year. Same job lower pay and no benefits.

</comment><comment><USER29> I worked for Ericsson for three years as a contractor (two tours), I looked at it as a leg up - but eventually you either fail out, or you build up enough confidence in yourself, that you know even if this job goes away - you'll find another, and if you don't, you don't.

This sounds like poor oversight (and policy) on the apple side however - <USER3> apple should be making sure that all employees are treated well - <USER3> contractors are employees, just indirect ones.

</comment><comment><USER30> I honestly stopped reading at this:

> The restrictions were just one of many reminders of the contractors' > inferior status, right down to the apple design on their ID badges. For > direct employees, the apples were multi-colored; contractors got what one > described as "sad grey."

Really? Really? Even Bloomberg knows how much of BS this is:

> It's common for companies to distribute different badges to contractors

<comment><USER25> The badging at Apple and what you're allowed to do on the basis of your badge color, is the second-worst that I've ever personally experienced.

The worst was when I was a government civilian, working in the Pentagon, and I had a security clearance. The badges made it very clear who had what level of security clearance, and that governed where they could go and what they could do.

But at least the US Government had a pretty good reason for the way they treated people in that way.

<comment><USER29> Can you give me an example of how apple was so bad?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Vending machines to be understocked, and to have to wait in line to use the > men's bathrooms.

Oh the horror! Somebody alert OSHA. Come on Bloomberg, I know outrage stories generate the most clicks and profit for you, but this is getting absurd.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's map editing. Big deal. Why is this a big secret? And why is it even in Silicon Valley? It should be someplace with a labor and housing surplus but a job shortage.

</comment><comment><USER33> the seedy underbelly of being a "tech employee"?

</comment><comment><USER34> >"It was made pretty plain to us that we were at-will employees and they would fire us at any time,"

most employees across the country are at-will, do people not know this?

</comment><comment><USER35> I was hoping it would look cool and was disappointed to see it was the same glass and trash metal building we see in strip malls.</comment>


MySpace may have lost more than a decade's worth of user music - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/18/myspace-may-have-lost-more-than-a-decades-worth-of-user-music/ <comment><USER2> This is why the Archive Team projects should be promoted... And yes, backups are important</comment>


Ask HN: Speech recognition/synthesis witho Google? - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone!
I am interested in creating a digital assistant and would like to start with voice commands. However, it seems like every JS library I find is a wrapper of some sort for Google Chrome. I'd prefer not to rely on them for my project.
Is there such a library or project that exists? <comment><USER2> If you want to stay in JS, check out Pocketsphinx ([http://syl22-00.github.io/pocketsphinx.js/](http://syl22-00.github.io/pocketsphinx.js/)). If you can get outside JS, look at Sphinx or Kaldi. As an alternative, if you're on mobile, both Android and iOS have local recognizers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info!</comment></comment>


Michael Bloomberg considers an independent presidential run - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michael-bloomberg-considers-a-presidential-run/2016/01/23/1a0f4176-c1ee-11e5-bcda-62a36b394160_story.html <comment><USER2> Bloomberg $36.5b [1]

Trump $4.5b [2]

Clinton (household) $111m [3]

Bush $21m [4]

Context: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Presiden...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Presidents_by_net_worth)

Sources:

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/profile/michael- bloomberg](http://www.forbes.com/profile/michael-bloomberg)

[2] [http://www.forbes.com/profile/donald- trump](http://www.forbes.com/profile/donald-trump)

[3] [http://moneynation.com/hillary-clinton-net- worth](http://moneynation.com/hillary-clinton-net-worth)

[4] [http://moneynation.com/jeb-bushs-net-worth](http://moneynation.com/jeb- bushs-net-worth)

<comment><USER3> Bernie $528,014

Source: [http://moneynation.com/bernie-sanders-net- worth/](http://moneynation.com/bernie-sanders-net-worth/)

<comment><USER4> What did he do with all his income? Senators make $174,000 per annum...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What he did with the NYPD scares me a bit but I think overall he was truly responsible for cleaning up that city (physically). He also implemented the first "Data science" team for a city, which was used to prevent building fires and sewage pipe bursts, among other things [1].

[1]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/nyregion/mayor- bloombergs-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/nyregion/mayor-bloombergs- geek-squad.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

<comment><USER6> [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003NX7OA0/ref=dp-kindle- re...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003NX7OA0/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm torn on this.

\- I would LOVE to see a significant voice in politics outside of the two parties.

\- He would only be capable of mounting a campaign outside the two-party system due to his billions of dollars, which is exactly the problem.

<comment><USER8> When Trump started gaining momentum I realized how poetic his success was. Democrats couldn't say he was in it for the money and Republicans who thought it was ok to have unlimited campaign spending couldn't complain either.

Plutocrat candidacies are the legacy of Citizens United.

<comment><USER9> > Plutocrat candidacies are the legacy of Citizens United.

Wouldn't he be able to self-fund his campaign even without Citizen United?

<comment><USER8> Yes but I think we'll see more plutocrats running now. There's no possible limit on them using their own money.

<comment><USER10> This doesn't make any sense. Citizebs United had nothing to do with self- funding a campaign. If anything a reversal on Citizens United would incentivize more self-funded campaigns, as political speech by third parties is what would be limited.

The concern with big money in politics isn't about the spending of the money itself anyway, it's the alleged connontation of what that money is buying for the other party. A self-funded candidate would be more insulated from such influence, as such a candidate cannot exactly buy their own influence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd love to see how well Trump, Sanders, and now Bloomberg, could do as independents against the official candidates of the two parties in a 5-way race.

</comment><comment><USER12> @chamath called it? [https://www.quora.com/What-should-we-do-about-Trump-How- bad-...](https://www.quora.com/What-should-we-do-about-Trump-How-bad-would-it- be-if-he-became-president/answer/Chamath-Palihapitiya)

</comment><comment><USER13> It seems like there are way more interesting candidates this election than in the last few.

I wouldn't mind if either Trump, Rand Paul, or Bernie Sanders win. A glance at his stance on the issues shows I probably wouldn't mind Bloomberg winning, either.

</comment><comment><USER14> Regardless of how it splits the vote, I have a hard time arguing against anyone who pins their flag to the !Trump platform.

</comment><comment><USER15> If he does, he's just handing the election to Trump.

<comment><USER9> Why? Isn't he a republican? So, if he ran, he would be stealing primarily the votes that would go to the Republican candidate.

<comment><USER16> Bloomberg's views on guns are such that many Republican voters would refuse to vote for him.

<comment><AUTHOR> But many Democrats would and many Republicans appreciate his pro-NSA stance, his calling for the prosecution of Edward Snowden, and finally his pro Israel government stance. Ultimately he is pretty right wing and his anti-guns thing is consistent with all of the above.

<comment><USER17> Is pro-NSA a Republican stance?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I do think so: When Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Arguably Ted Cruz endorse NSA meta data collection, yeah, it's a safe bet that it is a Republican position.

[http://mashable.com/2015/05/20/nsa-2016-candidates/#5BXfYekf...](http://mashable.com/2015/05/20/nsa-2016-candidates/#5BXfYekfzgqX)

Donald Trump Stance here: [http://truthinmedia.com/trump-supports- reauthorizing-patriot...](http://truthinmedia.com/trump-supports- reauthorizing-patriot-act-nsa-metadata-collection/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introduction to Gate - <AUTHOR> https://savo.la/introduction-to-gate.html <comment><USER2> Program/process migration was a thing in the 1980s but was largely abandoned and ultimately replaced in the 2000s by VM migration, which solved the problem of migrating OS and network state by migrating the entire OS and network stack (though there is still some complexity regarding IP forwarding when a VM moves to a new physical network, as well as the annoying problem of data access potentially becoming non-local and therefore much slower.) But VM migration always struck me like hiring a truck to haul your entire house to the grocery store.

Now that containers are supplanting VMs, we've largely abandoned that migration capability. Instead the approach seems to be to make containers disposable, spinning up a new container and shutting down the old one. Migrating minimal, per-application VMs is still possible but not very popular.

Gate reduces OS state and cleverly moves across CPU architectures by leveraging webasm, but IP address forwarding is still a pain across networks.

It always occurred to me that something like this would be doable (even with older webasm-like systems like NaCl), but the network/IP forwarding bit and non-local storage problem still seemed like it might make it more trouble than it was worth.

Nonetheless, I would like to revive the approach of a distributed OS on a cluster of machines where you wouldn't really care which machine your code was actually running on, and could easily add more compute/memory/storage/interconnect in a modular manner. Live hardware and kernel upgrades seems like a nice feature as well.

<comment><USER3> We separate and migrate state all the time. The database is a persistent heap for many shortlived execution contexts. HPC relies heavily on check point and restart. Many on-prem and off-prem cloud environments rely heavily on migration.

The mechanics required to implement migration unlock many other architectural wins. I don't think process migration has been abandoned at all. I think for too long it was controlled by the OS, these new VM environments liberate migration by being able to run it from userland.

All of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIX) was predicated on globally addressable resources within a cluster. In an SDN environment, connections don't even need to be _forwarded_ because they are already an abstraction for user code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone rediscovered Jini.

<comment><USER5> Yep I was thinking the same :)</comment></comment>


The Shapes of CSS - <AUTHOR> http://coderwall.com/p/xrxaxa

<comment><USER2> This is blatantly stolen from <http://css-tricks.com/examples/ShapesOfCSS/#> or is it just me?

<comment><USER3> So glad Coderwall implemented comments for this very reason. There was a _lot_ of stolen content on there.</comment></comment>


uTest: Get Paid to Find Bugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/10/utest-now-open-for-business-get-paid-to-find-software-bugs/

<comment><USER2> Get paid to find bugs: Get a job in QA or test engineering.

Seriously, pay is better, as are job security and success rate. I got my start in industry as the testing guy for a fairly small contract software house. I started following the instructions on someone else's testing plan, then eventually graduated to doing my own testing plans, from design to execution. For someone in his last year of undergrad/right out of school, it afforded decent pay, good job security, and great industry experience.

Furthermore, it made me a far better coder, because it gave me a crash course in how to try to break things. It gave me a better sense of where and when software tends to break. As a result, the software I write is much more reliable than it would otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to sign up for a pre-paid master card in order to get paid? I gave up after that.

<comment><USER4> Hmmm, well I have done some freelance programming through another similar website and yeah, I had to sign up and get a debit card(from master card) through them to get paid, so what? Of course, there was other payment options but I used the card option so that I could use that later for online purchasing, etc. I don't think that should convince you to not sign up IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> beware, it's not ready yet, sign up is a waste of time

</comment><comment><USER6> I can see this being useful, but what incentives would I, as a developer have, of paying people to find bugs? Especially when they pay me and find the bugs and usually report them anyways?

<comment><USER7> Bugs found by your paying customers have a cost even if they appear to you to be free. They increase the total cost of using your software, and in a perfectly fungible world ruled by rationality that's extra money you could be charging them for bug free software.

It also helps with massively distributed software where invidiuals are less likely to report bugs (without some kind of automated bug sendoff tool). Netscape had their $50 bug scheme, for instance.

<comment><USER6> Good points. I never really thought about the increase in cost of using the software.

<comment><USER8> you can alway beta test your software before adding the cost of bug to your customers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had this idea just yesterday... earn 10 cents to be the first to submit a bug.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, the Amazon Mechanical Turk beat you to that one.

<comment><USER9> I love Amazon Turk. I wish people used it more. People-powered processes with contributor cuts is not a new idea at all. I certainly never come up with new ideas :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of topcoder, but for testing

<comment><USER12> Reminds me more of Amazon Mechanical Turk, which I was thinking of using as a generalized QA mechanism for computer software just the other day--the HIT would be "Report a new, unique, significant bug on the bug tracker of a piece of software you use."</comment></comment>


This.cm is shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/07/the-share-one-link-per-day-platform-this-is-shutting-down/ <comment><USER2> I never looked deeper into it (because I still fail to see the benefit over a blog), but to me it looked quite like something a single developer can create and maintain.

What did I miss?

(Queue the 'of course you can write a twitter clone in a weekend, but scaling, etc.pp' \- but I didn't see This.cm taking off really.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Such a bummer. I always liked the daily email. Niche media biz is hard

</comment><comment><USER4> The daily email digest was really good. Gave me links to interesting stories that I would have never seen in my information circle which strongly skews tech-y.

</comment><comment><USER5> This. was a public service. Sad to see it go.</comment>


Cryptocurrency startup Ripple funds all teacher requests on DonorsChoose.org - <AUTHOR> https://www.donorschoose.org/ <comment><USER2> This is huge... They funded every single project on DonorsChoose.

My mom is a kindergarten teacher who got several tech projects in her classroom, like iPads for the kids, funded via this.

Ripple gave these teachers far more funding for their classroom than they get through their school district per year. Just something to think about...</comment>


Moving to GitLab: GitHub Censors Daplie's LetsEncrypt Module - <AUTHOR> https://daplie.com/articles/why-github-took-down-daplie/ <comment><USER2> Why does this sort of stuff happen automatically when companies become big? Seriously github why don't your employee quote exact violation of Section XXX?

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5l731y/moving_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5l731y/moving_to_gitlab_github_censors_daplies/)</comment>


Show HN: Completely native bug tracker - <AUTHOR> http://www.asitrack.com

<comment><USER2> _Every professional team uses version control. And nothing works better than Subversion for complex commercial projects. So asitrack provides built-in Subversion integration with your repositories and checkouts._

I disagree with this statement. I have found DVCS like Mercurial to be far superior than Subversion for managing complexity in commercial and non- commercial projects. I have increased confidence in branching as branching is a first-class concept (see [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2471606/how- and-or-why-is...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2471606/how-and-or-why- is-merging-in-git-better-than-in-svn) for a good discussion on why DVCS is better than SVN at branching/merging). I also find being able to locally track changes without sharing them to be a huge benefit.

What are your thoughts on this?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's only a temporary targeting strategy. We found that people tend to be dismissive when their favorite features are not supported, even though the product is young. So we tailored our texts and descriptions based on the features we currently have.

We do know that different people like different things. And that each version control software has its advantages and disadvantages. This is why asitrack will support both Mercurial and Git in the near future.

But we had to start somewhere and we chose Subversion. And for now nothing works better because it's the only one we support. :)</comment></comment>


Accepted to a well-known accelerator in Fall, but B1 visa to the US denied - <AUTHOR> I will be attending a well-known (obviously not YC) accelerator in US in the fall. But my B1 visa was just denied under section 214b, for apparently "not having convincing reason to returning". What are my options here? Would appreciate help from any immigrant entrepreneurs out there. <comment><USER2> Unfortunately after a denial it is much harder to apply again as they'll check your previous application and look for alterations (i.e. lies or additions).

A business accelerator doesn't really fall into any one visa category well. Is it a 2-3 month "business meeting" (i.e. B-1), is it educational (i.e. F-1), or even a "short course" eligible under a travel visa (B-2)? All of the above?

The reason you got denied is as it says, and while you can re-apply providing more evidence it will be an uphill battle. You just have to show WHY you'll be returning home (e.g. family, a job, other obligations)? By any chance did you list yourself as self-employed, rather than an employee of your own company? They hate self-employed people and often treat them as "unemployed."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. The USCIS website actually now says that being in an accelerator is fine with a B1, and in fact if the accelerator has fixed start and end date that can act as a proof that I will return home after the accelerator ends. Look at [http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/b-1-business- visitor/und...](http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/b-1-business- visitor/understanding-b-1-requirements) under "How do I show that I intend to remain for a limited time?", it's the 3rd point.

Silly me, I didn't see that before the interview. Anyways, my interviewer was new and had no idea what an accelerator was.

What I am doing now is interviewing in another city, with the same application, albeit with added true information that would support why I want to come back, which I honestly do in the short term as my parents are unwell. The city I interviewed in first has almost no startups, so they have never encountered a situation like this before. This time I am interviewing in a city that has a history of sending startups to US accelerators including YC and Techstars.

Let's see, I am interviewing this week. Taking all documents including my parents medical documents and a printout of the page above. Fingers crossed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> They want to see ties to your current country, i.e., reasons why you NEED to leave the US to return after your accelerator program is complete. Do you have a lease? Are you a current student? Do you have family remaining in your home country? Do you have other non-negotiable responsibilities in your home country?

B1 is a non-immigrant visa; you need to convince them that you are not going to attempt to immigrate.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. So if you decide to immigrate with B1, you have to do so illegally, right? And in this case your only option is blue collar jobs. But someone with enough knowledge and skills who is able to get into some accelerator program obviously won't go for these kind of jobs...

But in case if it is possible to legally immigrate with B1, then what's the problem?

<comment><USER3> If you decide to immigrate with a B1, you generally have to return home first and apply for an immigrant visa, unless you fall into a category whereby you can immediately file for an Adjustment of Status (which is almost certain to cause red flags to go up at USCIS).

There are certain visa classes that are considered "dual-intent"[1], meaning that you can have the intent to immigrate while obtaining a formally non- immigrant visa. One such visa is the K-1 fiance(e) visa, which allows one to enter the United States for the purpose of marrying one's US Citizen fiance(e) within 90 days and subsequently applying for an Adjustment of Status (i.e. green card). The B class is not one of these, so you need to overcome the immigration / CBP officer's presumption that you intent to immigrate[2].

OP: Note that you are free to reapply for the visa; make sure you read the instructions on the form and fulfill the evidence requirements as much as possible.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent)

2\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_visa#Requirement_to_overcome_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_visa#Requirement_to_overcome_presumption_of_intending_immigrant)

<comment><USER4> I was asking about the concern of immigration officer - why should they have this presumption if you're, say, an experienced software engineer or similarly high skilled educated professional. Nobody with these skillset are going to stay somewhere illegally and work [without permit] in "dirty"/heavy job space.

<comment><USER2> A software engineer could trivially illegally migrate to the US and then make money via their trade (e.g. freelance development work, app sales, pretty much anything online, telecommuting abroad).

You're right in the sense that it would be hard to get a normal 9-5 job without a visa/SSN but you're dismissing a huge number of alternative routes to income which wouldn't even depend on the person's physically being in the US (e.g. open a Google Developer account as if you were still in your home country, pay taxes there, but do it all from the US).

Plus your assumption that developers are "above" working in blue collar jobs is flawed. There are tons of fully certified Indian doctors working blue collar jobs abroad right now, developers are no better.

<comment><USER4> OK, refusing a visa because of your last sentences makes sense - i.e. to prevent you from "stealing" blue collar jobs from US citizens.

But in your first sentences, you describe quite self-sufficient/sustained person - who "steals" nothing from US people. He/she even contributes to US economy by living there - paying rent, eating food, etc... plus not using US social system. So why such person is not welcome then?

<comment><USER2> I wasn't responding in order to clarify "why" the visa system is the way it is. I was simply pointing out that your assumption that "no developer would ever illegally migrate because they couldn't get a job once in the destination country" argument is flawed.

The way the current US visa system is structured self-sustainability isn't really their primary motivator, the primary motivator seems closer to "just keep everyone out UNLESS they provide enough value to US society as a whole" (e.g. people with high sought after skills or qualifications).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Attending an accelerator on B1 visa is always a dicey proposition. On B1, you are not allowed to gainfully employed, i.e. you cannot run a company but you can conduct activities like,

a) attending meetings, b) Solicit sales or investment c) Make investments or purchases d) Interview or hire staff, etc etc.

As you can see the line is very thin between whats allowed and whats not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, but it's getting better now even if informally. See this link [http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/b-1-business- visitor/und...](http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/b-1-business- visitor/understanding-b-1-requirements) under "How do I show that I intend to remain for a limited time?" It explicitly mentions accelerators. As long as you are not "employed" by the company, or more specifically the US incorporated entity, it's okay.

The problem is that there's no "directive" as such, so a lot depends on the interviewer one has, because it's so subjective. Mine was new and had never heard of what an accelerator was. He thought it was an MBA!

But there's no scope for an appeal, one has to reapply and pay the hefty application fee again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry to hear that. You are better off talking to the accelerator and see if they could move you to another batch. B1 visa is a tricky visa. You need to have clear reasons for returning back to your country. You can show them any liquid and non-liquid asset that you own, maybe an inc. company,etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I am going to give it another try. My first thought was to register the company here, but it takes 2 months to do so! But worse comes to worst, I will have to do that and ask the accelerator to move be to a different batch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where are you from? Why did you apply for a B visa instead of taking a tourist visa (or visa waiver)?

<comment><USER3> B is the tourist / work visa class, and not every country is on the visa waiver program.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, my country isn't on the visa waiver program. So B1(/B2) is my only option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gotta love our Visa system.

Oh, you play videogames professionally? Have a Visa!

Oh, you are starting a business? Our economy's bad, but we like it that way. Starting a business might change that. Why don't you learn to play League of Legends or become a fashion model and then try again?

</comment><comment><USER9> What country are you from? Is the visa waiver program available to you?

<comment><USER10> Even if your country is a participant in the VWP program, once you got denied a visa you're no longer eligible for entry under the VWP

<comment><USER9> This is not true.

<comment><USER10> Please don't provide advice on things you're not sure of such as the VWP. [http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/visit/visa- wai...](http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/visit/visa-waiver- program.html) look under "Previous Compliance and No Prior Visa Ineligibilities"

<comment><USER9> Please don't assume I'm unsure of it, I am speaking from my own experience as a foreign founder who travelled to the U.S last year, including 3 separate entries at 3 different airports under the Visa waiver program after a B1/B2 refusal.

I also helped bring in the rest of my team under B1 and E3 visas, including one team member who was at one point flagged by CBP and had to re-enter under the B1 rather than the VWP.

<comment><USER11> How did you bring in team members to work in the country on a B1 visa? That is expressly forbidden.

<comment><USER9> To be clear, these were co-founders and our company was also incorporated outside the U.S, which allowed for more room for manoeuvre.

Many things that are 'forbidden' on paper turn out to not be so when it comes to the visa process. Many other things that aren't mentioned at all become crucial factors. The U.S visa process is incredibly onerous, and giving facts only as necessary was what worked for us.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blink - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E

<comment><USER2> I just had to try marquee :D

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cmarquee%3E&safe=off](https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cmarquee%3E&safe=off)

<comment><USER3> [https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E#q=facebook](https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E#q=facebook)

You can make it work with any keyword ;)

<comment><USER4> And you can combine different easter eggs: [https://www.google.nl/search?q=%3Cblink%3E#q=tilt](https://www.google.nl/search?q=%3Cblink%3E#q=tilt)

<comment><USER5> Now all webpages appear tilted to me. I'm disoriented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.google.com/search?q=ling+rush](https://www.google.com/search?q=ling+rush)

<comment><USER7> Can I fight back?

<comment><USER8> Yes, if you click them it keeps track of your kills and actions-per-minute (APM) :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%3Cblink%3E](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%3Cblink%3E)

I wasn't really expecting an easter egg, but was surprised to not find a single result about html. Does it strip any non alphabetic character?

<comment> nevi-me I did a \<blink\> trying to see what DDG would do, and it keeps sending me to some blinkfitness.com website. Anyone know what action backslashes add?

<comment><USER10> Backlash as the first character means "Go to first result" :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if searching for "onScroll" in 10 years will trigger a similar easter egg.

<comment><USER5> People will probably still be using mice for input. It won't be all swiping by 2014. The nice thing about a mouse is that it requires very little effort. It takes a lot more muscle movement to perform a swipe.

<comment><USER12> I think he means that lot of the new website designs change the scroll behavior because they think it's cool (just like <blink> was), but they make the user experience worse in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This comes up occasionally, but the history of the blink tag and how it was created from a joke is actually pretty cool.

[http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag](http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag)

</comment><comment><USER14> But is it milspec (3 units on, 1 unit off timing)?

I can't tell from the pixels and the CSS. Required reading: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213625](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213625)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not just blink keywrod. Happening for anything: [https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E#q=%3CGOOGLE%3E](https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E#q=%3CGOOGLE%3E)

<comment><USER16> Incorrect. You're only getting the blinking because <blink> is still in the URL.

compare your link to mine: [https://www.google.com/search?q=%3CGOOGLE%3E&safe=off](https://www.google.com/search?q=%3CGOOGLE%3E&safe=off)

This is probably a bug.

Same applies for the [tilt] query, eg: [https://www.google.com/search?q=tilt&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=goo...](https://www.google.com/search?q=tilt&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=google)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny. But my favorite is still "do a barrel roll": [https://google.com/search?q=do+a+barrel+roll](https://google.com/search?q=do+a+barrel+roll)

<comment><USER18> Might as well remind everyone of this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_hoaxes_and_easte...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_hoaxes_and_easter_eggs#Search_Engine)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This query shouldn't work in Firefox 23+, no? [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/bl...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/blink)

<comment><USER19> It's not actually a blink tag but CSS:

        em {
        animation: 1s steps(1, end) 0s normal none infinite blink;
        }

<comment><USER20> Marquee likewise is not implemented using the <marquee> tag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Blinks this too [https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E#q=%3CMarquee%3E](https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E#q=%3CMarquee%3E)

</comment><comment><USER22> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948930)

Unfortunate side effect of their incremental search system :P

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://www.google.com/search?q=recursion](https://www.google.com/search?q=recursion)

</comment><comment><USER24> A dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7280783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7280783).

</comment><comment><USER25> Try this <marquee>

[https://www.google.com/#q=<marquee>](https://www.google.com/#q=<marquee>)

</comment><comment><USER26> Am I the only one not getting this? Is it supposed to make me want to blink along with it? What's the point?

<comment><USER27> You are either too young or not a web developer :D

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/bl...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/blink)

<comment><USER28> I'm guessing, "too young".

"Eeh...back in my day, it were blink and marquee tags as far as the eye could see. We were doing web development for below minimum wage back then you see, and every hour, our cruel overlords would drag us out of the basements in which we worked and beat us. CSS?! HTML Tables it was in MY day lad!! Didn't 'ave none of this fancy _styling_ business. We were at the HTML coal face then, yer see! Don't know yer born you young 'uns...."

etc.etc.

<comment><USER29> I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Marquee tags on fire off the shoulder of Geocities. I watched blink tags glitter in the dark near Tannhäuser.com. All those websites will be lost in time, like tears in rain...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Someone should make a list of all the little tricks you can use on Google, or any other site for that matter.

</comment><comment> vladimir-vg Also "tilt" query

</comment><comment><USER31> Makes you wonder how much energy is used, and how much carbon is produced, by every frontend server for Google Web Search in every Google datacenter needing to (at the very least) do an extra string comparison for every search done.

<comment><USER32> Compared to the power used by the client computers dealing with Google's increasingly heavy search pages? Pretty much nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> <Flash> does the same.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E#q=%3Cflash%3E](https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E#q=%3Cflash%3E)

<comment><USER34> No it doesn't. It is only returning that because you have the q=%3Cblink%3C in your url followed by #q=%3Cflash%3C. ( so basically it is loading the blink page and querying for the flash keyword).

Try this url [https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cflash%3E](https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cflash%3E)

Something more Interesting [https://www.google.com/search?q=tilt#q=HackerNews](https://www.google.com/search?q=tilt#q=HackerNews)

<comment><USER35> Oh man... [https://www.google.com/search?q=tilt#q=ling+rush&safe=off](https://www.google.com/search?q=tilt#q=ling+rush&safe=off)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> half expected this to be announcing google's competitor to slingshot/snapchat. left relieved.

<comment><USER37> 'Blink' is the name of Chromium's web renderer. [http://www.chromium.org/blink](http://www.chromium.org/blink)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Sorry for being critical here, but are we all so easy to please that any random easter egg from google becomes top story on HN?

<comment><USER22> Well, yes. [http://xkcd.com/1386/](http://xkcd.com/1386/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> That page is a perfect example of Domestic Terrorism.

<comment><USER40> What?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> #old

</comment><comment><USER42> So, that's what all that brainpower is doing at Google (that and build military robots to kill people).

<comment><USER43> That escalated quickly..

<comment><USER37> Explanation: A protestor at yesterday's Google I/O keynote shouted "you're all working for a totalitarian company that builds robots that kill people."</comment></comment></comment>


Web Monetization - <AUTHOR> https://webmonetization.org/ <comment><USER2> As usual there seem to be fragmented efforts going on. Does anybody here know what's the difference between these two?

* [https://webmonetization.org/specification.html](https://webmonetization.org/specification.html)

"Web Monetization is an API that allows websites to request small payments from users facilitated by the browser and the user's Web Monetization provider."

* [https://www.w3.org/TR/webpayments-overview/](https://www.w3.org/TR/webpayments-overview/)

" ? "

<comment><USER3> Those two efforts address different use cases.

Web Monetization is an API for websites that wish to accept a stream of small micropayments as long as the user is on the site. This suits pay-as-you-use content and service models and is a good substitute for advertising revenue as it's passive (no user interaction required).

Web Payments (there are two APIs: [https://www.w3.org/TR/payment- request/](https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/) and [https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-handler/](https://www.w3.org/TR/payment- handler/)) are discreet payments requested by the website and explicitly authorised by the user. These are best suited to use cases like ecommerce, donations etc.

<comment><USER2> nice! I think these paragraphs should be added to the top of both sites :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anyone involved with this stops by, could you clarify how Interledger, Coil, and Ripple are related, if at all? It seems like this (Web Monetization) is an attempt to make a w3c standard around browsers initiating transactions out of fintech accounts that support Interledger (a protocol developed by Ripple for moving currency from one ledger to another using escrow) developed by Coil (a micropayments platform), but I might be missing something...

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that Interledger is the backend which Coil uses to send payments. Interledger is able to use multiple currencies, ranging from crypto to fiat. Ripple is mostly just building the infrastructure for it, enabling growth in the crypto ecosystem.

I think, for them, the payoff would be that using XRP is be the cheapest solution in the end, which would make it interesting. Also quite important, they also directly benefit from there being more entries in all orderbooks, since their software will be more efficient (ODL, on-demand liquidity). They have a benefit for the entire (all cryptos) ecosystem to thrive.

<comment><USER3> This is a pretty good summary.

Interledger (interledger.org) is a protocol stack and a network. The network consists of a number of companies that have setup arrangements to settle payments between them via different payment rails and implemented the Interledger protocol to make those payments.

The Interledger network is used to send payments between these companies consisting of millions of tiny packets (each worth nano-cents) allowing for very small amounts to be sent at close to zero cost.

Coil is one of the companies using the Interledger network as it is perfect for our use case of Web Monetization (which is only viable on a payment network that allows very small payments without a fixed fee).

We originally developed the Interledger protocol at Ripple and there are still folks at Ripple that participate in the community. I think Ripple's incentive for seeing Interledger succeed are well described above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am rooting for this, but I have a hard time understanding how it can gain mass acceptance.

Coil [0] is also an interesting app built on top of the Web Monetization API.

[0] [https://coil.com/](https://coil.com/)

<comment><USER7> Chris_f I would love someone on our team to talk to you. We are attempting to solve those pain points by working with partners like you. Email me matt at coil domain

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm wondering where telcos and ISPs stand in this context. I mean, given almost everybody owns a mobile, and telcos already have your details and payment data anyway, it's surprising that no telco-backed payment solution has emerged (except for maybe mpesa in Africa), when telcos are already part of a highly regulated market (in EU at least) and could be further regulated to provide payments in a non-discriminatory way to the benefit of both the telco and the user. In the 1990s, downloadable ringtones with anonymous payments via special phone numbers were widely used, making use of MMS which has an option to request paid content where the UI asks you if you want to accept the paid content. What's the reason for this not taking off? Is it that previous efforts were failures, or that Telcos were too greedy or what? Or was it ruined by Google and Apple who'd rather want you to consume their ads or paid media offerings?

<comment><USER9> Since the early 90's I've argued that banks should join forces and make a phone or at least a chip for a phone. I talk with a few banking people not to low on their food chain but they didn't understand it at all:

Phone companies are doing transactions per second which requires them to replicate a bank. It might be that you can only buy one thing today (calls) prepaid phones are ordinary bank accounts and phone contracts are credit cards. Where do you, as a banker, think this is going to go eventually? To add to this insanity [I added], you have a 0.50 cent per minute help line. You are already using their bank to sell support to your customers. Hundreds of guilders are transferred per person from your accounts to your competitor every month! Compare the service level: If I don't use the phone often enough they steal my money and close my account!

Over the many years that followed I got properly robbed by phone companies multiple times and hear at least 30 crazy stories from people I know. Schemes not even the greediest banker could dream up. They would go to prison fast.

<comment><USER10> This is effectively M-PESA.

As usual, the incumbents don't care and have ossified structures and a poor understanding of technology. Banks, in particular, care least about the bank accounts - they're almost a loss leader to get people in for the real business, which is loans, especially mortgages.

<comment><USER9> Right, but we take a mortgage with them because we already use their other services. 10 cent funeral insurance is a gold mine. I suppose they will stay ignorant until some random tech giant lets you buy the house from the street and unlock the door while drones fly in your belongings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone explain how this might me made resistant to payment blockades erected by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and the like?

<comment><USER12> > Can someone explain how this might me made resistant to payment blockades > erected by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and the like?

I'm kind of surprised nobody has automated using cryptocurrency for this.

It's possible to buy e.g. Bitcoin with a credit card from a hundred places (right?), so somebody creates a website that takes the user's credit card info, passes it through to any Bitcoin seller and then receives the Bitcoin and transfers the value to the target. From the user's perspective they just paid the target with a credit card.

The party actually charging the credit card is the Bitcoin seller, who isn't affiliated with the proxy transaction at all and could be transparently swapped out for anyone who sells cryptocurrency and accepts credit cards without the seller even being aware of the indirection.

You could presumably do the same thing with any asset whatsoever. The user gets a charge on their card for gold bullion or baseball cards, which get shipped to the payment exchange and then liquidated again with the proceeds going to the target. But that's probably just unnecessary overhead compared to using cryptocurrency.

If there are laws against this in some countries, the site itself would only be glue code running on a webserver, so couldn't it just be located in any place where doing this is legal?

<comment><USER10> > somebody creates a website that takes the user's credit card info, passes it > through to any Bitcoin seller and then receives the Bitcoin and transfers > the value to the target

Two things go wrong:

\- credit transactions are reversible and bitcoin isn't, so the middle party gets stiffed by fraud

\- you have to have a merchant account to take credit payments, and the networks will blacklist you if you do things like this

<comment><USER12> > credit transactions are reversible and bitcoin isn't, so the middle party > gets stiffed by fraud

So they hold the Bitcoin in escrow until the reversibility period has expired. Also, this is presumably what the independent Bitcoin seller has to do anyway, because it's their problem rather than the middle man's.

> you have to have a merchant account to take credit payments, and the > networks will blacklist you if you do things like this

But the middle party isn't taking credit card payments -- that's the point. They're just forwarding the user's credit card info to any unaffiliated third party who sells Bitcoin and accepts credit cards, and then giving the Bitcoin to the target. They're not really a payment processor at all, they're just a process automation website for doing a multi-step transaction in one step to reduce friction. (Though they are in a perfect position to take a small cut to cover their costs.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain how with web monetization we won't have microtransactions on the Internet as we do with games? i.e. I don't want to pay per article read, as that would take away from the unlimited nature of the internet, where for a flat fee to my ISP, I can read/watch/listen to whatever I want.

<comment><USER7> That is a great question and partly why there is valuing in having a Web Monetization Provider such as Coil. The job of the provider is to optimize and distribute the spend in a way that gives you the best experience. There is still much to be explored here but the basic premise is that the Provider basically makes micro-decisions for you so you don't have to.

<comment><USER13> So now I pay the ISP as well as a third party? Seems excessive, it's like streaming services all over again. Some content will be gated behind one provider, and others behind another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Without a concise and fact-based description of what constitutes "corrupt business models", I think they ought to avoid mentioning "corruption" entirely; it does not really serve a useful purpose.

<comment><USER7> That is fair feedback, thanks. Will raise an issue in the repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is relative easy to ask developers to implement ways to charge users; how accessible is it to the end users?

</comment><comment><USER16> The only icon I recognized was Angular on the page.

I feel though a standard of sending money is a little too similar for paying a vendor. I'd personally prefer companies to handle this than a recommendation, because who is to say my payment details are saved and then a malicious script sends the bad actor my money?

</comment><comment><USER17> No thanks

</comment><comment><USER18> Does Brave implement this? LOL

<comment><USER3> No. Although it would be great if they did.</comment></comment>


Apple is officially discontinuing its AirPort routers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/26/17287434/apple-airport-time-capsule-routers-discontinued <comment><USER2> So I immediately jumped on store.apple.com thinking it would be good to own a backup for the 3TB Time Capsule that has been serving my 4 macs (2 laptops, 2 desktops) faithfully for five years or more....

...and read the reviews. Oh dear. The current generation of TCs seems to be plagued with connection and overheating issues.

OK then -- what is a non-Apple substitute for seamless in-home backup and routing?

<comment><USER2> The magic phrase for searching Amazon is "personal cloud" which turns up lots of 2TB-8TB NAS devices. The problem then is to suss out whether they support Time Machine.</comment></comment>