As someone who got "rejected" in the H1B random lottery - yes, the system needs an overhaul. Perhaps an auction system would be appropriate, where companies bid on visas, then top N bidders get visas from the pool, paying the lowest winning price. This would also work well with the idea that companies should first seek talent within the United States. The auction final quote would be a clear, publicly available portion of the costs of getting employees abroad. The only caveat I see is potential employment contract clauses forcing employees to stay in the company for a certain number of years. Currently there are no restrictions for switching jobs on an H1B.

Where N becomes a political football that us raised and lowered at the whim of lobbyists ultimately allowing wages to fall below market rates.

There is no labor shortage in a nation of 300 million with the best university system in the history of humanity.

If we need any sort of system, the appropriate one would be to reward companies that train citizens in skills the employer needs in order to fill any sort of skills gap.

While in principle I agree with you, in practice N was most of the time equal to 65k, with the exception of the dot-com bubble (years 1999-2003, so 80% of the time; program was added in 1990). And there probably should be something like H1B in any immigration system. Anyhow, the current political climate in the US does not give many hopes for an upgrade. In the meantime, I've discovered Switzerland, and quite honestly - I'm not looking back.

"Best university system in the history of humanity", which nation are you talking about? What is the metric for "best system"?

>with the best university system in the history of humanity.

While I don't disagree, you can only hire so many HYPSM grads - and many of these H1B's are getting hired from our universities.

I'd rather just eliminate the H-1B (and some other classes of visa) entirely, and just add a new blanket supernumerary visa that works like this:

(1) There's a fixed initial fee and an annual renewal fee for it,

(2) Anyone who doesn't have any of the features which exclude you from immigration regardless of qualification in other categories can apply,

(3) The visa category is issued without numerical limit to qualified applicants,

(4) The visa is a dual-intent non-immigrant visa (that is, you are not prohibited from applying for an immigrant visa, if you are otherwise qualified for one, while present on it),

(5) The visa does permit you to work without restriction while present on it.

I think it's not unreasonable to have an auction system in place. You don't want your labor market to be suddenly flooded by foreign workers - this isn't to say that they're bad, but when it's a singular large number in proportion to the existing workforce, it can be very disruptive short-term.

This doesn't necessarily have to come with a hard cap - you can just increase the bar slightly for every new application that is filed, and let the market figure out where the profitability bar is.

eh the VISA BS from Washington keeps our tech salaries high

look at what engineers in Europe - especially Berlin and London - earn solely because of free trade, I wouldn't be in this field if I was over there

I had a friend who got rejected twice, had to leave the country. He's a good software engineer for one of the big companies.

Fortunately they kept him on and I guess they will try to get him an L1 once he meets the requirements.

I think the complexity of the problem actually speaks in favour of Varnish. The Unix philosophy of writing software is based on the principle of doing one, possibly small thing very well. And that's exactly what Varnish does: it is a reverse-proxy cache that can optionally do a bit of preprocessing on the incoming HTTP requests.

Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.

> Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.

Certainly true.

I guess that for me "beautiful code" invents some abstractions that transform a problem that initially seems dauntingly difficult into something that is easy to reason about. A proxy cache does not, for me, satisfy the first part of this premise, although I can imagine that the details of such a project take a lot of effort (hence "not trivial", but in a different way).

>I guess that for me "beautiful code" invents some abstractions that transform a problem that initially seems dauntingly difficult into something that is easy to reason about.

Well then, look no further than any RDBMS.

Seriously, for as much as people sometimes rag on the relation model, it is amazing for its power and relative simplicity.

Welcome to a new era, one where negative interest rates have no lower bound.

In the step 2. you write that you "Ask everyone to accept proposal i", but to satisfy the safety property of Paxos you can only accept proposals from round "i" if you were a participant of the round "i" in the step 1.

Ah true, I should have probably written "all round 1 participants". It can be enforced by the receiver as well. There are some other implied receiver-side steps that I did not write down, such as rejecting all proposals with a sequence number <i.

The original IP address can also speed up the prosecution process, at least in Europe, where many privacy violations are a criminal offense.

I do not think spam accounts are ever deleted, just flagged. Maybe those created in some absurd numbers. After all they make a valuable training data for spam detection algorithms.

My thoughts exactly: which one is true? A) Amazon is a kind of narcissistic codependency/Stockholm syndrome environment; B) the "horror" stories are exaggerated; C) the job is so cool that people are willing to take some abuse; D) there is other reason as to why Amazon succeeds.

Honest question: do you think that only Amazon has interesting problems to solve? I do not know much about the company internally, but there exist other companies that compensate and treat employees better, such as Google or Facebook.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. Maybe I didn't phrase my thoughts well. Amazon's problem is providing "interesting" problems. Interesting problems also are usually very niche. The problems that Google and Facebook are trying to solve don't necessarily overlap with those being solved by Amazon. My comment was more aimed at the viability of Amazon finding the most capable people it could. It seems to have removed "culture" as a positive and the only thing that it has going for it is "interesting" problems. Without them Amazon will rot. So far they continue to allow people to work on cool things.

German EUR bonds have the second lowest yields globally, with Switzerland being the leader. Also their ratings are higher than f. eg. the US bonds. So the German government does not really have to worry about borrowing money.

Japan's are lower than Germany's.

For now. Things change.

Nitpick: you need a potentially unbounded number of alternations between existential and universal quantifiers to get PSPACE. Otherwise it is just somewhere in the polynomial hierarchy.

Otherwise you are right, "outsmarting" the rest of the world is probably in PSPACE.