Hacker News Reader

falsestpropheton From Freelancer to Founder

That really only suits funny people

falsestpropheton In the Works – AWS Region in Canada

That's not how exchange rates work.

falsestpropheton Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

It's sad that it won't be easy to find news in the United States that represents the view of the Emir of Qatar.

falsestpropheton Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine

It doesn't follow that because many European physicians come from India that few European physicians would choose to work in the United States.

falsestpropheton New finding: 600M years ago, a single mutation changed everything

Where is this 600M years taken from?

I didn't read the paper, but probably this technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock

falsestpropheton Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine

People are accustomed to having foreign physicians, other-than-white physicians and certainly other-than-Anglo-Saxon physicians.

Nearly 30% of US primary care physicians trained abroad.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/health/12chen.html

Only 8.7% of the US are descended from the English (Anglo-Saxons)

Source: http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/c2kbr-35.pdf

That said, the US could easily recruit physicians from Europe including the UK so you may very well get more Anglo-Saxon physicians!

falsestpropheton FOIA'd Email Shows French Motives for Overthrowing Libya [pdf]

"The Americans largely do the same (see how quickly the leader of an oil producing country is deposed is he declares to ditch the dollar). The Brits gave their empire to the Americans to piggy back off this."

This petrodollar conspiracy is baffling.

Countries don't hold dollars primarily to buy oil.

The oil and gas industry is only about 4.6% to 6.5% of the global economy.

Countries hold reserve currencies to manage the exchange rate of their currency. Petrodollar conspiracists would be well served by learning about foreign exchange reserves.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves

And in any case, only 65% of foreign currency reserves are in the USD.

Furthermore, research shows that being the world's primary reserve currency affords the United States negligible advantage: 0.3 to 0.5 percent of US GDP in a normal year.

See: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/an_exorbit...

Compare that to the costs of "deposing the leader of an oil producing country": $6 trillion for the Iraq war or about 36% of GDP

See: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSB...

falsestpropheton Waiting for an Employment-Based Green Card

As far as I can tell permanent residency in India is only available to persons of Indian origin or former citizens of India.

falsestpropheton Waiting for an Employment-Based Green Card

For context, India requires 12 years of lawful residence before naturalization.

Is it an injustice that I have to wait so long to be a citizen of India?

falsestpropheton Congress has added CISA to the federal budget bill

Companies like Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro who provide our country with tens of thousands of the world's greatest minds to maintain enterprise applications for about $70,000 a year.

falsestpropheton The Importance of Reading as a Software Engineer

Clearly OP needs to read more books.

falsestpropheton Elon Musk: Only a Carbon Tax Will Accelerate the World's Exit from Fossil Fuels

A Falcon 9 rocket launch costs $61,200,000. Propellant costs $200,000.

falsestpropheton Sitting on an Ocean of Talent

Obviously, the prevailing view is that it is not a right for anyone to move or work anywhere.

falsestpropheton Sitting on an Ocean of Talent

They're all European countries, which is not exactly a random selection of countries.

edit:

European union countries share similar populations both culturally and biologically.

If you moved the populations of Catalan, Cameroon, Kuwait, Cambodia, Korea and Kiribati to the same geographic area, that would be a different experiment.

falsestpropheton Sitting on an Ocean of Talent

European Union citizens who are habitually resident in another EU country are entitled to receive welfare benefits. (The current UK government wants to renegotiate this arrangement.)

falsestpropheton Sitting on an Ocean of Talent

A more cautious approach would be to open boarders selectively to people who have demonstrated whatever "talent" is deemed to be economically useful.

Of course, many wealthy countries do this already (including the United States).

falsestpropheton Turkey Shoots Down Russian Warplane Near Syrian Border

Turkish airplanes breach the Greek airspace over the Aegean sea multiple times every day

The Russian bomber was on a combat mission near the Turkish border. Turkey has a legitimate interest in preventing combat aircraft from deliberately or accidentally bombing Turkish territory and Turkish people.

Turkey stated it would respond disproportionately to any incursions into its airspace and has shot down Syrian aircraft for similar incursions.

falsestpropheton [dead]

It can be hard to get work visa to very prosperous countries without a university degree. Here is an alternative option:

Argentina is a nice place to live, if you work remotely for North American companies. The local economy is a mess at the moment, you probably don't want to bother with that.

Turkish citizens can enter Argentina without a visa and anyone without a criminal record can be naturalized as a citizen after two years of legal or irregular (undocumented/illegal) residence. (The naturalization law dates to 1869.)

Do talk to a local attorney that specializes in naturalization for irregular migrants, do buy a round trip ticket, do have a hotel/hostel/Airbnb booked for the duration of your imaginary stay and don't show up at border control with anything a tourist wouldn't carry. If that doesn't work, I understand a lot of Chinese and Koreans just walk over from Paraguay.

It will be difficult to bring dollars into the country if you can't leave for two years and physically carry them, but the president-elect will likely remove currency controls soon. If not, you can use Bitcoin.

Though, if you want to start a company there are less painful places to do it than Argentina...

Full disclosure: I'm not Argentine or an illegal immigrant to Argentina, so do check with people who know more

falsestpropheton Genetically Engineered Salmon Approved for Consumption

My concern, oddly enough, would be copyright.

You mean patent infringement.

falsestpropheton Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It

>And when the oil runs out, just another ISIS.

Or when the demand for oil diminishes (holding supply constant) as battery-electric transport becomes widespread.

Not only are batteries becoming less expensive every year, but the deployment of autonomous vehicle networks (self driving Ubers) will make battery-electric transport more cost competitive by distributing the high fixed cost of the battery between many users.

falsestpropheton Is Wall Street Beneath Business Students' Standards?

How does one distinguish between being ethical and highly ethical?

falsestpropheton Ask HN: Who hires Infosys and Cognizant?

You can public companies file annual reports that explain the basic operation of their business.

Infosys reports they focus on the following industries [1]:

  Financial services
  Manufacturing
  Retail, consumer packaged goods, logistics
  Energy, Utilities, Communications 
  Life Sciences, Healthcare & Insurance

I wouldn't hire them, but I'm not Proctor and Gamble so they'll probably survive my disinterest.

[1] http://www.infosys.com/investors/reports-filings/annual-repo...

falsestpropheton Senate Passes Bill to Boost Competitiveness of U.S. Space Industry

The same is true of our nuclear weapons industry. My father moved to the US from Iran and many of our family are interested in nuclear weapons engineering, but CANNOT come to the US to work to follow their passion because of these laws.

Why is it that only Americans have a right to participate in nuclear weapons engineering just because they happened to have been born in the "right" place?

falsestpropheton Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program

"Just establishing a cap on the number of visas per company as a percentage of the workforce"

This can be gamed too. Large employers could start operating bodyshops.

Say the H1B limit was only 5% of a company's workforce. Then Walmart could sponsor 110,000 workers. Yum!Brands could sponsor 22,000 workers.

This probably wouldn't even put Infosys or Tata out of business in the US they would provide the same recruitment and management services they do now, but other companies (in this example Walmart and Yum) would be the sponsors of record.

falsestpropheton Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

Google has studied this.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman...

falsestpropheton Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

And Waterloo. This guy is really not paying attention.

falsestpropheton Ask HN: Worth pursing web development if you have a criminal history?

For context, the US Army wouldn't hire you.

falsestpropheton Let Twitter Be Twitter

Yeah it doesn't really mean anything. Being a benefit corporation doesn't obligate the company to do materially reduce profits and in any case the company can choose to stop being a benefit corporation at any time.

falsestpropheton Theranos, Facing Criticism, Says It Has Changed Board Structure

There is no evidence that the tests Theranos offered are inaccurate. The company has voluntarily discontinued them to allow the FDA to review them [1].

The controversy is principally about Theranos claims about technology it has yet to deploy and the company's high valuation [2].

[1] http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona/investigations/2...

[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-bloo...

falsestpropheton Theranos, Facing Criticism, Says It Has Changed Board Structure

A lot of people here and in the media seem very troubled by Theranos and say it is a sham or a fraud. But a fraud upon whom?

Theranos is a private company with a small number of sophisticated institutional investors: ATA Ventures, Continential Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Tako Ventures, and Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle) [1].

These sophisticated investors presumably performed due diligence before parting with $400 million.

But then again, maybe journalists and internet commenters know more about this company than Draper Fisher Jurvetson and should all set off on lucrative careers as biotech venture capitalists.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/theranos/investors