breadwinner

It will be too much if the worker leaves after a month, or gets hit by a truck.

No, Chinese will stay home instead of immigrating to the US.

China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. If people stop immigrating to the US, then we will surely fall behind technologically, economically and militarily, and soon we will be making t-shirts for Chinese for $5 an hour.

Why would locals not want high paying jobs? The question is whether qualified people can be found locally or not.

This is good news for China: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3318178/tale...

$25K annual fee per H1B worker as opposed to $100K one-time would have made more sense. It would have made even more sense to have employers compete (within their own sector, such as tech, aerospace, etc.) such that whoever offers the highest salary will get the H1B worker.

> nationalist xenophobia the true most important priority for this administration

It is a little more complicated than that. It is what around 40% of American population want. (Then another 9.5% or so voted for Trump based on the price of eggs, the fact that the other candidate was a woman, and so on).

For those who are reluctant to install a Google product on your computer (who knows what it will hoover up and associate with your Google identity), you can use Lucene to index your files: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka

With anything Google you have to worry about privacy. Where is the privacy policy? Does it associate information it finds on your PC to your Google identity?

How about ranking on salary but by profession, so there should be a separate rank for software engineers vs. biomedical researchers.

Not if they file dozens of lawsuits challenging the election results and loses all of them.

Denying election results, for example.

Violence should not be how we settle our disagreements. But if someone is genuinely a threat to democracy we should be able to express that opinion. Fear that someone may act violently should not cause us to suppress our genuine fears about the future of our democracy.

Right, thinness doesn't help with anything. I want smaller width and height (i.e., a iPhone 17 mini) so that the phone will fit better in my jeans pocket.

OK, I meant at least have a roundabout, and I meant in England not in London.

As an American tourist in London I found the roundabouts very interesting. In big cities and small, all intersections have a roundabout. Compare that to the US. You have Stop signs which are easy to miss. Sometimes the Stop signs are ignored by people in a hurry. Sometimes people steal the Stop signs to use as decoration in dorms.

Do not confuse strong language with strong argument. Yours is the former not the latter.

If it is publicly available information it is legal to scrape it, regardless of what robots.txt says.

See: https://www.webspidermount.com/is-web-scraping-legal-yes/

If you look at the source code of a program, learn how it works, and then you make your own program with the same functionality, is your program "based on" the original, or is it independent work?

Back in those days, software was just an accessory to hardware, not something that was valuable and could be sold by itself. So they would not have thought to secure their dumpsters.

Bill Gates played a significant role in jumpstarting the commercial software industry, especially with his "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" in 1976, which urged people to pay for software.

I don't see any credit being given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) upon whose work this is based [1] [2] [3].

The quotes below only talk about OS source code, but they found language interpreter source code as well, see register story.

> "So, for a few years that is where I spent my time. I'd skip out on athletics and go down to this computer center. We were moving ahead very rapidly: BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong." [4]

> "While his parents were concerned with his slipping grades, there was no slowing him down. He and Bill would go “dumpster diving” in C-Cubed’s garbage to find discarded printouts with source code for the machine’s operating system"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC-PLUS#Comparison_to_MS_BA...

[2] https://everybasic.info/doku.php/basics/decbasic#influence_f...

[4] https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/

[5] https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx

The tariffs are being used by Trump to control other nations. India didn't nominate Trump for Nobel Prize, so 50% tariff for them. Brazil is prosecuting Bolsonaro who aligns with Trump, so 50% tariff for Brazil. Trump is even using the threat of tariffs to strong arm other nations to retreat on their climate commitments [1]. How can all this be legal?

Meanwhile a court has found that Trump's deploying of national guards to Los Angeles (presumably other cities as well), as a national police force headed by Trump is illegal [2]. Trump says a lot of Americans want a dictator [3], and a national police force would certainly help accomplish that goal.

[1] https://archive.today/o0LHW

[2] https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2025/0902/trump-nation...

[3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-sa...

Exactly. Satya was in charge of Azure just before he became CEO and it was his decision to open things up in Azure.

Managers and above know this. In order for execs to get their bonus they have to meet diversity goals. So execs have promoted women to positions they would not ordinarily be promoted, in order to get their bonuses. This started many years ago, and continue to this day.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/18/13681738/microsoft-diver...

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-microsoft-execs-earn-the...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft...

Nonsense. None of the top companies are H1B abusers. Meta, Google, Microsoft are all using H1Bs for the intended purpose. The abusers are companies not in tech industry like Disney etc. who bring in H1Bs to decrease their payroll expense. Top tech companies don't do that.

So you're saying average people are fine for a big company? I would agree, if all you want to do is maintain existing products.

Look at AI. Microsoft was an early leader in AI but that was only because of their investment in OpenAI. What has Microsoft done in AI since then? Is anyone excited about Copilot? Look at what Google has done since then. Lots of interesting stuff. Only recently has Microsoft released something interesting: Mustafa Suleyman released the company’s first model trained internally from start to finish [1].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/microsoft-tests-mai-1-previe...

Ballmer's chief mistake was sticking to what worked in the past. He was not willing to let go of the Windows monopoly, and Azure in its early days was based on Windows servers. Then Satya came in and said, no it is OK to support Linux, and in fact it is OK to run Microsoft's own services on Linux. It is OK to support Open Source, and in fact we'll open source some of our stuff. That put Microsoft back on track. For now.

Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years.

Another of Satya's mistakes is his faux pas related to women employees. He was accused -- unfairly in my opinion -- of saying women employees should not ask for a raise. He did no such thing. He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time. But since he said that at a women's conference the accusation stood that he meant women employees specifically. Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees. Executive compensation at all levels at Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute.

Microsoft today is the second most valuable company behind Nvidia. But you wouldn't know that looking at their products. They don't have any interesting new products. To some extend they are coasting. Will their success continue into the next decade? It's going to be interesting to watch.

Originality and creativity in problem-solving were set out as goals back then. Today's AI does not meet that criterion.

> Clearly, the company with fewer lines of code is better off.

Fewer lines of code are better if functionality is constant. But that doesn’t make code debt. By that logic, factories, employees, equipment, processes, and policies would also be debt — since fewer of them would likewise be better if revenue stayed constant.

Code is fundamentally an asset: it generates revenue, scales with near-zero marginal cost, and embodies intellectual property. Like any asset, it carries liabilities. Well-designed and reliable code behaves like a productive factory; buggy or hard-to-maintain code behaves like debt, draining resources instead of producing returns.

Ans tariffs in response to India not nominating Trump for Nobel peace prize!

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/us/politics/trump-modi-in...