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"All You Americans Are Fired"

The H-2 guest worker program, which brought in 150,000 legal foreign workers last year, isn't supposed to deprive any American of a job. But many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to deny jobs...

Click to view the original at buzzfeed.com

Hasnain says:

A really well researched piece of investigative journalism, from ... Buzzfeed.

"For years, Linda White ran a business in Livingston, Louisiana, securing H-2 visas for hundreds of employers. Late last month, she was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for creating phony receipts in an attempt to convince regulators she had placed newspaper ads for dozens of clients, when in fact she had not. During a three-year period reviewed by the Labor Department, her clients were approved for more than 8,000 visas, federal data shows.

In an interview, White called the matter “a mistake,” adding that “nobody was going to call for these jobs over dumb newspaper ads anyhow. When clients come to me, what they want is their Mexicans.”"

Posted on 2015-12-31T08:21:02+0000

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The "chad bug". The Hangouts Dialer on Android absolutely REFUSES to find 2 of…

The "chad bug". The Hangouts Dialer on Android absolutely REFUSES to find 2 of my contacts. I have 132 of them in the group "My Contacts" and all of them… - Marc Bevand - Google+

Click to view the original at plus.google.com

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How people come to believe that completely messed up practices are normal

Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time, when I describe …

Click to view the original at danluu.com

Hasnain says:

This is one of the best things I've read in a long time, hands down. Everyone should read it.

"The data are clear that humans are really bad at taking the time to do things that are well understood to incontrovertibly reduce the risk of rare but catastrophic events. We will rationalize that taking shortcuts is the right, reasonable thing to do. There’s a term for this: the normalization of deviance. It’s well studied in a number of other contexts including healthcare, aviation, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and civil engineering, but we rarely see it discussed in the context of software."

Posted on 2015-12-31T07:44:29+0000

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For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions

The very richest are able to quietly shape tax policy that will allow them to shield billions in income.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

"For the ultra-wealthy, “our tax code is like a leaky barrel,” said J. Todd Metcalf, the Democrats’ chief tax counsel on the Senate Finance Committee. ”Unless you plug every hole or get a new barrel, it’s going to leak out.”"

Posted on 2015-12-31T04:33:50+0000

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When coding style survives compilation: De-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries

In a recent paper, we showed that coding style is present in source code and can be used to de-anonymize programmers. But what if only compiled binaries are available, rather than source code? Today we are releasing a new paper showing that coding style can survive compilation. Consequently, we can…

Click to view the original at freedom-to-tinker.com

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No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded) » No Brainer.

It is alive but empty, with a cavernous fluid-filled space where the brain should be. A thin layer of brain tissue lines that cavity like an amniotic sac. The image hails from a 1980 review article in Science: Roger Lewin, the author, reports that the patient in question had “virtually no brain”. Bu…

Click to view the original at rifters.com

Hasnain says:

"What scared me was the fact that this virtually brain-free patient had an IQ of 126."

This is an extremely interesting article. It seems most of the brain might be redundant, and simplifying it still keeps the IQ around.

Posted on 2015-12-30T06:54:56+0000

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How I Created A $350 Million Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software

I’ve always wanted to make a lot of money, have people pay a lot of attention to me and do a lot of exciting things. I just never knew how. Many of my..

Click to view the original at social.techcrunch.com

Hasnain says:

"We got substantial VC funding from great firms who believed in us and, finally, a great office space that impressed everyone except my father — who kept asking me why I wasn’t a doctor yet."

Posted on 2015-12-30T06:45:18+0000

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