> If I ran the H1B program it would be an unrestricted work permit with an automatic pathway to a GC after 5 years. Don’t get convicted of a felony and here you go.
H1Bs create new companies here, we continue to attract the smartest people here.
However each company would have to weigh the risks of bringing someone to the US and they then walking away.
We could even change it so instead of a 100k fee, you have to invest 200k in US bonds which only mature after 5 years. Of course even if it doesn’t work out you still get your money back.
1) It benefits an extremely tiny slice of American entrepreneurs by allowing them to operate directly against the best interests of the broader American labor force?
2) This posits that there must be a large pool of highly trained and specialized Staff Eng sitting idly in other countries just waiting to be poached. What are those countries doing which is generating a huge untapped pool of labor? If that _is_ the case, then why aren't entrepreneurs in those countries capitalizing on the idle labor?
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Maybe I'm entirely too cynical - but I simply don't believe that #2 is true. There isn't a huge Indian talent pipeline just pumping out hoards of incredible world-class engineers worthy of poaching, yet America is entirely incapable of producing the same tier of engineer. I think it's purely a function of depressing labor costs at the lower end of the labor ladder and over the last ten years has actually just been an immigration pipeline with pay-to-play schemes on both ends.
Of course not, but you seem to miss the point: no company is going to pay $500,000/year for a part-time office assistant, $200,000/year for a bus boy, $2 million/year for a construction worker, $100,000/year for a farm laborer.
There is no developed country on earth where labor shortages are addressed by "just increase the salary until you find a native-born person to take the job."
This is a misnomer is _my_ point. A labor shortage has a trivial solution, "pay more". It's intentionally framed as "labor shortage" by capital who would prefer the labor pool be near-infinite so they can pick the best for the cheapest. No, no company is going to like it. And that's okay, immigration, and government policies more broadly, should not be about "what would maximize private capital profits?" They should serve the broader American public.
If companies can't find a farm laborer at 100k/yr then that sounds like it's an *incredible* situation for the average worker.
> A labor shortage has a trivial solution, "pay more".
Whenever you think a solution to a problem that plagues an entire nation (especially one the size of the US) is "trivial", you should ask the question: if it's so trivial, why hasn't it been fixed after so many years? And if your answer depends on some sort of conspiracy, you know you're wrong.
There are so many problems with "pay more". Let's start with a simple one: it's based on the assumption that the employer's only alternative to paying more is going without the output. In a lot of labor markets, this just isn't the case.
Jobs get mechanized/automated. They get outsourced to a different country. The employer reduces output (reduces staff) and in many cases at the same time increases prices. Sometimes, as has been seen with restaurants and retail, hours get cut or they go out of business.
Another problem with your "solution" is that in many markets, especially those related to healthcare, it's not just pay that limits hiring. It's things like caps on residency slots due to Medicare funding, a lack of clinical placements, a lack of faculty, etc. You can't pay more to hire workers that don't exist because the market structure doesn't allow for those workers to exist in the needed numbers.
> If companies can't find a farm laborer at 100k/yr then that sounds like it's an incredible situation for the average worker.
Except this experiment has been tried. Look up the Bracero program, which was terminated in the 1960s to increase wages for domestic farmworkers. I'll give you a hint: a study comparing states heavily exposed to bracero labor against states that used little found basically no wage or employment gain for domestic farmworkers.
The farm doesn't survive with a bunch of recent university grads who studied CompSci picking fruit at $100,000/year. The farm mechanizes, where possible, and switches to crops that require less labor. And the market fills the demand for the crops that were switched out with imports.
And let's also be honest: the average 20-something native-born American doesn't want to pick fruit in 100+ degree heat in dusty small farming towns where there's nothing to do, the male-to-female ratios are out of whack, etc. This too has been tried: UFW ran a "Take Our Jobs" campaign about a decade ago and...wait for it...literally nobody wanted to.
> Frankly I don't care if I'm fairly displaced. That's meritocracy at work.
Right, The concept of a "meritocracy" only works if everyone is agreeing to the core tenets. If any group starts expressing in-group bias, then that group exponentially grows and will end up displacing all other, more meritocratic, groups.
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H1Bs visas allow for corporations to sidestep meritocracy because they can leverage the foreigner into 70 hour work weeks.
F1 visas allow for corporations to sidestep meritocracy because they get a five year exemption on some taxes for that employee.
Nearly every TOS I've ever read has a "We can ban you for any reason, or no reason, are under no obligation to disclose any reason." line somewhere in it.
HN's for example
> We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change or modify portions of these Terms of Use at any time.
> You acknowledge that Y Combinator may establish general practices and limits concerning use of the Site,
> You further acknowledge that Y Combinator reserves the right to change these general practices and limits at any time, in its sole discretion, with or without notice.
> Y Combinator reserves the right to investigate and take appropriate legal action against anyone who, in Y Combinator’s sole discretion, violates this provision, including without limitation, removing the offending content from the Site, suspending or terminating the account of such violators and reporting you to the law enforcement authorities.
Not even close. Even OpenAI and Anthropic aren't bad enough that they claim literal ownership of your inputs and outputs.
> HN's for example
You're not paying to use HN. Getting banned here has essentially zero consequences.
If Z.ai uses its absolute powers to ban you because you wrote a review about them or something, then you lose actual money. This is especially relevant if you're looking to take advantage of their discounted yearly payment option.
Consider the reputation implications of them banning someone who can get their complaint about it to the front page of HN and into the YouTube drama loop. They’d get swarmed with activist cancellations.
At most I suspect the A.I. providers will just come up with yellow banners like Anthropic did where naughty smut writers get put in the time out corner.
The post I was replying to wasn't talking about that, but sure, let's consider it.
Everything I post here is public, and it's just relatively low value commentary anyway. It doesn't matter if Y Combinator has rights to it. Arguably they actually need to assert some rights, otherwise they wouldn't be able to transfer copies of copyrighted comments to other visitors of the site. HN's terms are probably too broad for their purposes but it doesn't really matter much because this is just a forum.
AI on the other hand is for actual work, both public and private. There are actual economic implications here, so the stakes are much higher. I absolutely want to own the inputs and the outputs I paid money for.
That's a TOS thing though. I don't think that works just as trivially in e.g. the EU, you can't just single-handedly stop a service someone is paying for.
> Even OpenAI and Anthropic aren't bad enough that they claim literal ownership of your inputs and outputs.
In this case you are placing your trust in OpenAI and Anthropic. I'm not sure about Anthropic but OpenAI has changed their mission corpus quite a lot from its humble beginnings that it results hard to trust them when they say they don't use your stuff to further train their models. If I'm a Big Corp with enough lawyers to putnup a fight, I would then feel ok with such clause, but being a small guy, who is going to defend me when the truth comes out that they have been training their models with my data? Similar fiasco as with Facebook, who had claimed they didn't sell your data, even though they were.
That's where I'm coming from with all this "trust us, we don't train our models with your data". At least this Chinese company is being upfront about it.
None of the major LLM chat providers (ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and I just confirmed this) claim rights over your input.
They also don't claim rights over your output, but because of how copyright law might apply, they explicitly assign all the rights to the generated output.
Not just that but, even if they wanted to claim ownership of the output, courts in the US have deemed that copyright cannot be assigned to machine-generated output.
So yeah, happy to take a look at a counter-example if you have one (aside from GLM 5.3, obv.).
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However, if we check the market share of generative AI providers, ChatGPT+Claude+Gemini make up around 88%; while Grok is 2-4% depending on who you ask.
the government can ask .... who? If the claimed text is genuine, then the government is responsible for submitting the text to ...? all frontier labs? surely not every model within a lab is going to watermark in the same fashion?
I'm so very confused on this implementation and would want to see an expected use case.
> "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask.
Surely you don't think that he literally meant to use those seven words as a bullet proof prompt, right?
I will never understand this way of responding literally and pedantically to verbal psudocode. He's leaving it as an exercise to the reader to specify "check that the software works as intended" because he could never possibly properly articulate a perfectly comprehensive QA and validation flow for every piece of software that would satisfy every individual's need.
It's still the same problem. Now instead of checking if the code is correct, you have to check every day if your prompt is still validating the correct features that you expect to work.
And my point is, no matter how advanced you are going to make that prompt, AI will find a way to mess it up. If you say, "A, B and C must be true", then eventually an agent will find property D which you did not thing about, making the program unusable.
Again, this is normal if you are interactively working on software and can fix any problems you see. It is only problematic if you do what OP says, and make it on cron, daily and unattended.
