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Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

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Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#611

Post by dang »

solarkraft wrote: post #609
dang wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was probably downvoted because it was a reflexive flamewar style comment rather than a thoughtful, substantive one. " Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There's something to that, it's admittedly not hugely insightful. Is it "reflexive", "flamewar style"? I wouldn't classify it as such, since the option presented is an in my opinion a real possibility. It may be a bit harsh and inciting for a rational discussion however, so maybe vsareto's subtlety is more appropriate here. Generally I'm happy this place is moderated strictly to keep the discussion civil. That there…

Racism in America and related offshoots of the George Floyd story (for example protests, police brutality) have surely been the most-discussed topics on HN in the last month. You're probably running into the paradox that every story, even the most well-represented, feels underrepresented on HN.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#612

Post by dvtrn »

dang wrote: post #607
dvtrn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this being greyed down because folks just don’t want to consider the possibility that straight up racism might be just as much a part of this or did it touch a nerve for some parties who saw themselves getting called out?

It was probably downvoted because it was a reflexive flamewar style comment rather than a thoughtful, substantive one. " Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Brevity does not need be dismissed as an immediate association or prelude to flame wars, nor does it reflect unsubstantive thinking. While I understand your desire to vanguard the guidelines, and aversion to the messy-nature of the ‘race debate’, dang, I disagree with your conclusion as applied in this case.

Assuming positive intent and being vulnerable enough to ask questions usually will do a lot more to mete out such flame wars than latching on to the first emotional misconstructions of the drafting of ideas.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#613

Post by hintymad »

somurzakov wrote: post #610
hintymad wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this will probably be flagged or voted down, but at least please understand that I truly want to see people in the US get better and more equal. Here it goes: if the US wants to invest in local talent, the US had better invest heavily in education. And I'm not talking about an-iPad-per-kid kind of investment, but investment to hire great teachers, lots of them, to public schools to the point that tutoring scho…

problem is not in teachers. Problem is parents. Yeah parents. Good parents with good parenting skills raise good kids. Bad parents/single parents - it is much harder to raise kids and give them good education. if you want reforms - you need to adopt Scandinavian policies in America (high taxes, universal healthcare, universal childare, universal K-12, universal college system) - that way it will be easier to raise we…

Unfortunately parents don't know how to teach STEM topics, not in the US, especially given years of cultural slash on hard science and engineering. I don't have hard numbers, but I'll venture to guess that very few parents can explain how to use recursion to find the closed formula of a sequence, or the intuition behind vector space, or why 0.9999... is actually 1, or even as simple as modeling a problem as a linear equation system. And all these are really high school basics. I'm using math as an example, but the same idea applies to other subjects too, like not every parent knows how to write, let alone providing precise and accurate feedback to the writing of their kids.

And from a parent point of view, why would I want my kids to waste his or her time in school learning very little, and then to spend my own time tutoring them? All I want is my teachers to do their job, and do it decently.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#614

Post by hintymad »

scarface74 wrote: post #604
hintymad wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in California. The State is responsible for allocating education fund, with a few exception.

33% of education funding comes from the local government. https://lao.ca.gov/Education/EdBudget/Details/281 https://ed100.org/uploads/images/shares/CA-19-20-budget.png

But the California State government allocates the fund, right? If the state government decides where the fund goes, then can we still conclude that "the richer gets richer and the poor gets poorer" from the fact that local tax funds education?

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#615

Post by hintymad »

xellisx wrote: post #575
dfischer wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to spend a lot of money, it's hard to execute and get results. Despite the USA spending a ton of money, it doesn't curate quality education. The entire system needs to be reworked.

The whole teaching towards the test, and prepping kids for college (which I've heard we even do a bad job at), is just awful. We don't typically educate to teach people in a way that can make a connection that to what can be used in the real world, nor do teach real world things, such as basic money handling matters. I was able to take a Math of Money class in high school, but that was my senior year and your had to…

This is the same argument that progressive educators have been arguing for decades, and I respectfully disagree. Schools teach students fundamentals. Simplified, but fundamentals nevertheless. You think learning Newton's laws does not teach student how to "make a connection to what to be used in the real world"? You think that years of training in maths didn't prepare the students for the real world? You think it's fruitless to study rigorously and hard on "spherical chicken in vacuum"? You think that all the algorithms, mathematical stats, or data structures have little to do with real-world engineering? Unfortunately, here is the shocker: they are very relevant, and they are the secret of a nation can educate millions of qualified engineers, scientists, and business people who can reason with data and numerical sense.

The only reason that students have to study highly simplified models is that the real-world is too complex. Without years of study of "simplistic physics" in high school, there is just no way that one can learn rigid-body mechanics. Without years of practice on algebra 1/2 in high school, an ordinary kid will have no hope of understanding calculus, and without understanding calculus, the kid loses hope of understanding stats, and without understanding stats, the kid loses hope of understanding machine learning, and without understanding machine learning, the kid won't be able to jump on the gravy train of being a machine learning researcher. And now should the kid cry wolf the world is not fair and the system is rigged? Of course, this is an extreme example and there are thousands of other professions. All I'm saying is that sometimes a subject looks hard and mundane and pointless, but it is actually useful in the long run.

And as specific as Math on Money? It's nice to have, but it's not necessary. I have no problem studying on my own the theory of options and quantitive finance even though I had no idea how money worked. But I have strong background in math, in stats, and in computer science, and some background in economics. And really, such fundamentals carries me a long way.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#616

Post by scarface74 »

hintymad wrote: post #614
scarface74 wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

33% of education funding comes from the local government. https://lao.ca.gov/Education/EdBudget/Details/281 https://ed100.org/uploads/images/shares/CA-19-20-budget.png

But the California State government allocates the fund, right? If the state government decides where the fund goes, then can we still conclude that "the richer gets richer and the poor gets poorer" from the fact that local tax funds education?

I am assuming the state sends each school district the same amount of money per student and the local government makes up the difference. So yes it is the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I know in my Metro area the more affluent parts of the city, love breaking off into their own city to keep their money even more localized.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#617

Post by dang »

dvtrn wrote: post #612
dang wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was probably downvoted because it was a reflexive flamewar style comment rather than a thoughtful, substantive one. " Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Brevity does not need be dismissed as an immediate association or prelude to flame wars, nor does it reflect unsubstantive thinking. While I understand your desire to vanguard the guidelines, and aversion to the messy-nature of the ‘race debate’, dang, I disagree with your conclusion as applied in this case. Assuming positive intent and being vulnerable enough to ask questions usually will do a lot more to mete out s…

I don't disagree that much with either you or solarkraft. Moderation is guesswork and not all of these guesses hit the target. FWIW, here is some explanation of the general approach we take.

Brevity is fine. The issue is the expected value of future subthreads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

We have to go by effects, not intent: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

When the topic is flamebait to begin with, the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#618

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

fredfoobar wrote: post #593
SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it have to do with individualism or collectivism? Why are you bringing an opinion of Sapolsky as if he was an important person? What I am telling that the current H1B system in US does not benefit anyone exception for the employer and probably enslaved employee. The original motivation behind the program is decent - let the really outstanding specialists to develop more (as US provides more opportunities fo…

> What does it have to do with individualism or collectivism? Why are you bringing an opinion of Sapolsky as if he was an important person? This proves my point, you think like a collectivist, the individual doesn't matter much to you. Besides, the reason I posted that article is because I wanted to give you some reference to understand the construct I'm talking about (a bit of "meta" so to speak), so that you can or…

I do not need any scolding from a random internet person. My grammar cannot be "Asian" because I am native speaker of an Eastern European language. You do not even know me, and yet are trying to psychoanalyze me remotely. I am neither "individualist" nor "collectivist", I am just a pragmatic - whatever creates more stable world, without concentration of power in one country or group of people (which is exactly what goes against individualism) rubs me wrong way. I, in my turn, would advice to grow beyond Ayn Rand books, and understand that neither "individualism" nor "collectivism" can be ultimate goals, they are just instruments for particular societal issue at hand. Attempt to coerce people to buy into libertarian ideology is very "collectivist" by the way, it is forcing people to be like you, to make you feel that everyone else are like you.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#619

Post by masonic »

jusonchan81 wrote: post #137
dx87 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If H-1B visas were being used how they were intended, they would be a good thing, but we often see them used as a way to get cheap labor, or even directly replace American workers. The company I work at has H-1B junior web developers, hardly "very niche, hard to fill" positions that they can't find any qualified Americans to do.

I guess this is indeed an issue. I’m a manager and I am trying to hire. 100% I’d rather find a person who can start in a couple of weeks than several months for a candidate who needs immigration. But there are rarely any local applicants and even when there are they don’t make in the interview. We pay in excess of 300k for all roles so it’s not like we are trying to find cheap talent.

I find it odd that you don't put any contact info in your profile, then. It's totally free advertising.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#620

Post by tekknik »

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #577
tekknik wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re just repeating sound bites. Why? explain in detail how this helps humans (especially since it goes against darwinism) and doesn’t hurt them.

If you are a social darwinist, I am not here to convert you.

This seems like a bow out and still I have no answer, just an assumption. So once again, what benefit does humanity have for decreasing poverty instead of the country decreasing it themselves?
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