hildaman
From what I could tell, there is a whole system of unwritten rules about how different political factions could collect their "percentage", how these factions compete with each other and eliminate each other and so on.
In a way, it is efficient because everyone who matters (i.e. princelings who control the CCP) has an incentive to "play the game". It is efficient because there are no nasty courts to slow you down, you don't have to deal with the lowest bidder nonsense - it all comes down to connections. The party credibility and the need hold power serves as a very powerful check on the system to prevent the system from becoming too blatantly corrupt and keeps the system going.
But if you aren't someone who matters - i.e. a princeling, you will be forever on the outside looking in.
Postgress makes a copy of _every_ row and you need 100GB of extra space on the hard-drive until you commit the transaction. Now extrapolate to a 1TB table that needs updating.
Oracle has a way of doing this w/o copying the entire row.
I use DuckDuckGo for search & Twitter for social media. I find discovering new things/People on Twitter more interesting than the sclerotic family/friends stuff on Facebook.
I have started to trust Apple maps - not as good as Google though.
Hope this gets commodotized though.
YouTube and Gmail substitutes and then I am Google free.
This is what I bought:
-> $4.22 Q-tips Cotton Swabs 500 ct -> $16.32 iPhone 5/5s, iPhone SE, iPod Touch 5th/6th Gen Adidas Nylon Armband Case - Sports armband for adidas miCoach training system -> $6.95 iBungee Stretch Laces (26-Inch, Black Laces with Black Race Lock) -> $4.79 4 Philips AA Zinc Chloride Double A Batteries R6 1.5V Super Heavy Duty Battery -> $8.10 Monoprice Apple MFi Certified Lightning to USB Charge & Sync Cable, 3ft White -> $89.96 ASICS Men's GEL-Kayano 23 Running Shoes T646N
The order for the phone arm-band was cancelled and everything else shipped _separately_ - I Literally got 5 different packages in the mail - over a week with different items.
Had I gone with Amazon, I would have received - one, maybe two packages with everything. Infact, Jet probably lost money on most of the items they shipped to me.
Us techies sometimes tend to forget the real world (in this case customer experience) while playing with cool technology.
To me, an old fashioned optimizer running on a 15 year old AMD Opteron that delivers the appropriate real-world result is worth more than that F# and CUDA thing that seems to have over-optimized the problem to create a bad customer experience (getting 5 packages in a haphazard way).
Employer to (theoretically) underpaid/under-represented minority: I offer you x.
Underpaid minority: accepted.
Employer to market-rate perspective employee: I offer you x.
market-rate perspective employee: nope.
Employer to market-rate perspective employee: how about X+25K?
market-rate perspective employee: sounds good.
This bill tries to fix a symptom of the problem - but the underlying dynamics causing the pay disparity will remain.
Once you get out of toy frameworks that won't scale, refactor or "age well" - you end up with a JEE style framework.
It's like that famous cliche about unix - "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
You are right about older versions of JEE being a pain in the ass to use - but that critique hasn't been valid since 2004 when EJB 3.0 was released - 13 years ago. JSF is really slick for front end development.
But even prior to the release of EJB 3, can you name any EJB equivalent (from the pain in the ass xml era) that is still used, supported and actively developed?
We literally still have 15 year old EJB's - that "just work". People just inject them into the new EJB's they write and they work!
You might think rewriting services to keep up with the latest and greatest fad is a productive use of your developers time - but I prefer to have my developers focus on solving new - revenue generating problems, with building blocks that have already been written instead of constantly reinventing the wheel.
We have a mix of American developers (junior, mid-level and senior), offshore developers in 6 countries, and H1-B developers - all of whom are paid at or above market rate for their work (150K+ for the State side workers). I don't think any one of them considers themselves "disadvantaged" in any way because of the technology stack.
They understand that they have problems to solve and JEE are a tool to solve their problems and I am sure they grateful we aren't making them re-write 15 year old code to keep up with the latest fad.
To me the beauty of JEE on the backend is: 1. Scalability - the application server creates as many instances as needed - until it hits either the JVM limit or the machine limit. 2. Declarative transaction management so I can write reusable code that interacts with the database without having to worry about transaction boundaries. 3. Excellent and portable Object Relationship Mapping (Java Persistence Architecture).
On the front end, with JSF webpages can be developed very quickly.
There are a lot of other things you get with JEE like Asynchronous Messaging (JMS) - built in.
There is a reason mature organizations worth billions of dollars and with highly skilled architecture teams have settled on JEE as the defacto standard for their information systems.
There is definitely a learning curve with JEE, and someone fresh out of school will need a year or two to really understand how it fits together - but when you write something in this framework, it is easy to read, maintain and rarely needs to be re-written.
Most importantly, the framework will continue to be developed for the foreseeable future - I mean multiple decades.
On the other hand, some of the newer javascript stuff - is horrible broken spaghetti code that is glued together by spit and prayer. 99% of these frameworks will fall out of fashion with the associated problems that come with falling out of fashion - the canonical example being Ruby On Rails.
This is whole article is actually designed to get attention at a time when the CJS (Commerce Justice and Sciences) appropriations bill is being marked up[1]. The CJS subcommittee (of the House and Senate Appropriations committee) decided how NASA money is spent.
It is no surprise that articles like this are popping up - at literally the same time as CJS Appropriations bill is being marked up.
The way things work, is at times like this, even if NASA had the money to go to Mars, they would never admit to it - because appropriators might start cutting (do more with less... yada yada yada...)
I say this as a big fan of science and space exploration, but thought that fellow HN'ers might appreciate a look behind the curtain to better understand what is really going on here.
[1] https://appropriations.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?E...
> You could even, if you wanted to, make an argument that this has some things in common with what was historically called indentured labor. But to use a charged phrase as a rhetorical weapon in an ideological battle, which you clearly are doing, is the wrong kind of comment for HN.
You are right, I could have absolutely talked about the history of indentured labor in America - but I don't think that was germane to the implications of the Regulation or the implications for the current (sorry) state of Guest Labor in America which what this discussion was about.
Regarding: > The bigger problem is the one you didn't respond to. You're showing up in an HN thread with a single-purpose account armed with seasoned ideological talking points. That's very much not what this site is for, regardless of which battle it is and which side you're on.
I am a geek, who has frequented HN for a long time, and before that digg and before that slashdot (I still go there BTW).
I usually don't post very much.
And "seasoned talking points" - cmon. Doing my research before shooting my mouth off - is a GOOD THING and I would like to think that I am elevating the level of discourse.
Infact everyone else (except projectramo - who I did mishandle and doesn't disagree with my characterization of H-1B/L-1 workers) who has weighed in seems to think my comments are very apropos:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14746165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14746303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14746400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14746592
Infact, in my view - you are the one who is flaming me and disrupting the discourse here.
Regarding "indentured servant" - that is the factually correct term to describe the situation. Even H-1B visa holders themselves use this term.
Here is a video of an H-1B visa holder using the exact term "indentured servant" with Congressman Darrell Issa at some policy event about the H-1B visa in Washington DC: https://youtu.be/2Tgc9m1IwNc?t=35m47s
The term "indentured servant" is exactly the right term to describe the employer-employee relationship between Guest Worker visa holders and their employer's. As demonstrated in the video, even the H-1B workers themselves are saying that they feel like indentured servants.
I personally feel that politically correctness is somehow having the effect of normalizing this very abnormal employee-employer relationship (at-least here in America).
As the guest worker in the video says, if he loses his job - he has to take his kids out of school, sell his car, sell his house and leave. This is not in any way a normal employee-employer relationship.
I would like to think the points I am raising are thoughtful. well researched and articulate. Apart the "swipes" - which I will tone down on - I don't think I am guilty of any other transgressions.
VC: Hey DHS, Entrepreneur lied about something 2 years ago just before/after he came here.
Entrepreneur: That was not a lie - that was marketing. Every business does it.
DHS: "Get out"
> For a VC and an entrepreneur, the VC has shares in a company that is run by the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur ALSO has shares in the company and always will even if they leave the country.
This is nice in theory, but in practice (especially in knowledge economy companies), the employees are the company - everything else is furniture, coffee machines, ping pong tables...
The VC can just start a new company with ideas stolen from the person they just kicked out. They can offer the (now unemployed) employees of the previous company slightly more equity and money then they would have received at the previous company.
I don't understand why you are defending a system like this.
Is "bonded labor" better?
When the "entrepreneurs" very status in the US is dependent on being in the good-graces of anyone else - especially vultures like VC firms - these "entrepreneurs" are no better than indentured servants.
Think of it this way - any dispute with the "sponsoring" VC firm could snowball into a complaint to DHS which could result in the "entrepreneur" having to leave the country (and leave behind the carcass of a company the VC's will then proceed to digest).
Entrepreneurs might not understand or appreciate this yet, but they are better off going to Canada or somewhere else as landed immigrants with rights - instead of living in the US as indentured servants of some entity.
The junking of this rule has potentially saved so many startups from being absorbed by entrenched players (Hello Google Ventures). The resultant dispersion of wealth/ideas and the increase in competition will benefit all of us.
L-1 visa holders _cannot_ change jobs. H-1B visa holders have to go through an expensive and cumbersome process to change jobs which effectively restricts their job mobility.
Obviously, outside super-hot job markets like silicon valley, US workers have a hard time competing with indentured labor.
This visa would have created brand new class of "entrepreneur" indentured to deep-pocketed VC firms. They would actually be worse off than H-1B and L-1 workers because - not only would they be beholden to the VC firms for funding (thereby their jobs) in the United States - but they would have to part with their ideas.
No nativist here - just saying how things are working on the ground once you shave off the corporate propaganda.