skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
despite being a lifelong avid computer user, i was about a year late getting to the internet. all i heard about it was hype, hyped to the high heavens. i figured anything being sold to me like that couldn't possibly be any good.
+1 to the comment about good lawyers making or breaking; my wife went with Paul Parsons located in Austin, TX - http://www.immigrate-usa.com/ - paid less than $10k (though it was not an EC1/2 case), and got a green card in less than 2 years time, despite moving to another state during this process and having to transfer the case. We consider ourselves lucky to have worked with him and his team.
I came over from UK on a L1-B, with a big oil company.

About 98 or so, the process was started and I got my GC in June 2001. The lawyers were Amdur and Amdur in Houston who were great to work with. I have no idea of the cost though I imagine it probably ran to 10 or 20 k.

I was lucky, as many companies shut down the process in the recession that started around then.

I also have a masters from University of Aberdeen, which was accredited as equivalent to a US masters degree. I'm sure that helped.
One company's unofficial policy was that they would let foreigners located in the US 'volunteer' at their job with no pay and decide to support their visa after three months of 'volunteering'. Not sure about the legality on that one...
of course i know what site you're talking about, since you've been around here for awhile, and so have i.

another thing pg says about startups is that they're very risky. while you might not be getting the respect you deserve in your first startup, perhaps you'll do better in your second, or third.
I guess I'm not understanding the problem then, because I thought we were not supposed to expand into a do, since the problem states:

"Define ntimes (page 167) to expand into a (local) recursive function instead of a do."

Isn't the problem asking you to write this without expanding into a do, or am I missing something here? What would be a correct solution to the problem?
Expressing one's opinion is, to a degree, a narcissistic act. IMO it's more ironic when critics cannot be critical of themselves (not saying it is the case here).
I have to apologize for spelling mistakes, but do not expect that all YC readers are native English speakers.
Firefox 3 Ready for Prime-time
How much clearer? Well, you could have started by not comparing employees to caged lions.
How to turn $100,000 into $6 Billion+ on inspectd.com
A Mathematician's Apology is a beautiful read, by definitions both plain and, to some degree, those elaborated in the essay itself.

One interesting thing about the relevancy of the essay is the potential change in the aesthetics of mathematics in wake of the proof of the Four Color Theorem. Personally, I have to believe that some day someone will find a proof that has all the elegance mathematicians are looking for.

"We do not want many ‘variations’ in the proof of a
mathematical theorem: ‘enumeration of cases’, indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument. A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way."

If you consider his constant foil in Chess, it's fun to think that perhaps he'd see some degree of beauty in computer algorithms that solve the many enumerations of chess in far more "general" and "surprising" ways.
1927-1933 Chart of Pompous Prognosticators
10 Commandments of Negotiations
The 10 commandments of negotiations here apply to every negotiator, deal maker, mediator, lawyer or simply anyone who’s trying to negotiate something. To be real successful in negotiations, you need to invest and reinvest time to prepare ahead and adopt skills to help you improvise on the spot.
Yeah, and the worst affected people in software are people who have their own determination and drive, but have it subjugated to 'playing by the rules', 'not running too far ahead of the weakest member of the team' etc etc. I'm lucky enough to have a design role in my current position, and have always worked fairly independently, in software deployments and the like.

I think that being an engineer in a large company does get a lot better once you become a manager, in that you gain a bit more control, but obviously it can still suck depending on the overall goals, how smart your superiors are, and how capable your team is.

Obviously, there are people who are very happy to have most responsibility taken from them, and who in return for a regular paycheck, just have to come and sit in a fabric box for 9 hours a day.

Sadly, the box warmers are not something you can put up with if you want to move quickly, and it seems like growth from a few 10's of employees to a few 100's seems to add disproportionately to the wrong category, unless you are very disciplined in hiring.
i don't agree with the coding horror writer, but i think a lot of people would agree that pg's essays tend to be polarizing.

paul's essays sometimes follow a formula. explain three or four alternatives, present arguments for why all but one of them suck. assume the reader will go with the one remaining option. from there, you've got another choice to make. paul presents another three or four options, and explains why all but one of them suck. and so on.

a lot of times, while reading, i think: hey, he's just eliminated the option i would have taken for reasons that don't apply to me so much.

now, that doesn't mean paul is wrong. but from over here, it seems like he IS somewhat adamant about choosing the One True Way through the sea of the problem he's talking about. whereas other writers might emphasize things like "you could go this way if you want this type of result," or "you could go that way if you've got this type of constraint," etc etc. paul does that sometimes, but his consideration of those constraints almost always leads to dead ends. for example: so you've got a wife and kids to support, therefore you need a steady income. okay then, startups are probably not for you, and you fall off the edge of paul's decision tree. that's got to be maddening for people who buy into paul's philosophy about 80 or 90 percent, except for a few details here and there.

it seems to me like a mistake many readers tend to make. paul's not wrong, he's just describing a path that does not fit their situation exactly.
The irony is that if he had been right, there would not be a bunch of people reading that article right now.
My Lisp-fu is lower than the expected for this exercice. But it seems that you have to create a recursive function not a recursive macro, which is what you are doing.

Maybe the macro has to define a new recursive function that recurses until need, and then call it?
So, I'm guessing Billy Bragg is not ignorant of the economics of radio. Maybe you could refine your argument so that it becomes, you know, credible.
My implication, and I think you got it, was that you should have definitely gotten more than "some equity". I speak from no experience (still a student), but I don't think I'd care who is paraded in front of the media as "the founders" - whatever makes the company more likely to succeed is best. If the other guys are more media-friendly than I am, all the better!

What would really matter for my ego is what piece of the pie I get in the end, although, in your position, it sounds like that's a hard area to negotiate, too, since said "semi-famous person" is adding all the value in the very beginning (before any code is written). This is probably faulty logic to base your equity on, since your piece should be proportional to the value you add at acquisition.
We should talk.

$USERNAME @ brevity dot org.
Ask: OK, I've got my Web 2.0 website.  How do I promote it?
OK, I've got my Web 2.0 website. How do I promote it?

This is really two questions. The first is: How does one promote a website in general? The second is: How do I promote this particular website? The first question is interesting to a broader audience than just me, but if anyone has any suggestions for the second, I'd certainly be appreciative.

The website is called Golimojo (http://www.golimojo.com) and the service it provides is Wikipedia "autolinking". Basically you can take a webpage and have Golimojo examine it for noun phrases that can be linked to Wikipedia articles whose titles match those phrases. Golimojo is smart enough (I'm using "smart" loosely) to autolink nouns like say "Iraq" or "Iran" but not common words like "page" or "men". It works better on some pages than others. I did most of my testing on political blogs (lots of name dropping) and the online versions of newspaper and print magazine articles (poorly linked even today, fifteen years after the World Wide Web was invented).

Now out of the billion-odd Internet users out there, probably only a tiny fraction of them would find Wikipedia autolinking really useful. Still that could be thousands or even tens of thousands of users. The question for me, is how do I find them? In particular, how do I find them without putting a lot of effort and money into the process?

One obvious target market is Wikipedia editors who might like a tool to help them identify missing links in Wikipedia articles. But there seem to be dozens of Wikipedia mailing lists, and I'm not sure how a service that looks like it might be commercial would be received (I have no commercial expectations at this point).

Any ideas?
Yahoo Research: Microsearch (*Not the recently announced Searchmonkey platform*)
More propaganda about the great depression.
[here](http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traffic_Jams/great_depression...) is a lengthy podcast about the great depression and its causes.
The article is from 2000.
The thing is there's a difference between the equity of management founders, and "non-management founders" which is basically just that the former get a seat at the table at any negotiations, and the latter doesn't. I actually didn't know there were non-management founders till I got to California (you hear occasionally about them - linkedin has one). And the thing I also learned is that liquidity of equity is more important than the percentage.

And I don't think that Kevin added all the value in the beginning. He was significantly less famous at that point, and in fact was about to become unemployed. Many of his coworkers tried to launch sites around the same time, with nearly as much fame, and they all failed.

There was a lot of luck.
D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths

Star Trek, the original series

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. The first science fiction story I read, which lead to all the others.

The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll and Martin Gardner. That's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll, with wonderful annotations by Martin Gardner.
That is the hope. I pretty well knew what was going to happen the day I met our new CEO. I was not prepared for the extent of the bullshit.
My comment wasn't intended to be mean-spirited. I just couldn't resist the 'gay' and 'planing' bait, that's all ;-)

I certainly don't expect all YC readers to be native English speakers. I did try to be helpful (AMQP/RabbitMQ suggestion), but without knowing more details about your idea it is difficult to help. My company does quite a bit of work in the financial messaging area (as a user, not as a SaaS provider), so I'd like to hear more about your ideas.
curtis9

I want to shake your hand. This is probably the best example of utilizing Web 2.0 that isn't ambiguously superficial, no obscenely huge banners, flashing colors of "beta" texts. You're attacking the technology at the core. I congratulate you heartily, sir.

I would promote this service personally by NOT making it social (yet), for one thing. There are lots of possibilities in socializing this type of software, which is truly unique and very helpful for research endeavors; all of them good. This may kill some of the buzz you might get from TechCrunch or Mashable on the blogosphere, as it is a great app but I wouldn't rush to make it social just yet. Find the user incentive to socialize it, understand the needs and demands, then bring in the sheep.

Great job by developing a bookmarklet: you see many blogs out there with autolinking, those double underlined links that popup little hover boxes and kill usability by displaying a screenshot of what they're going to see. Maybe even develop your bookmarklet so that it will bring up a smaller, unobtrusive hoverbox with the page title of where you're going (eg. Wikipedia: Tibet) for the end user.

You are correct in estimating that not very many people would find this useful. You may target it at education based blogs, or even yes, wikipedia editors. I know one guy who was just elected to an editor position and I'll be more than willing to ask him if he'd find any use in it.

Finally, commercialization really should be your last thought. 37Signals put it best, solve your problems first and the rest will fall into place. Build to solve problems, not create new ones with financing.

Just my two cents. Awesome application overall, I'm very impressed overall, most notably at your method of attack; sticking with the core technologies and solving a problem from a different angle. Color me surprised if your work goes unnoticed by the big wigs out there.
If you're really going to build it, then keep it. If it's something you want to exist, and you aren't really going to build it, then post it.
first congratulations for ur effort - u shud start using blog as one of the tool, visit the site below and see whether that can help to spread the word .

http://innovation.freedomblogging.com/2008/03/19/top-13-ways...
I just did some quick research into this and all I have to say is WTF?? Why'd they do you like that? Please tell me you've got enough equity to put you in the briar patch if and when the company exits.
I didn't mean to inject my bitch-fest into this thread, my point is that the idea that being a founder is going to lead to a job where you have control and independence, can run into a big road block as soon as you take VC money. It's important to get stuff clear with your co-founders before you sign anything.
Small BIz Survival Checklist
Here's one clue. I was 44 when we started. I think that explains some of what happened and also why I put up with for as long as I did (as someone said above, letting the media-attractive people parade before the cameras was good for the company). And yes, I'm waiting (sometime impatiently) for the exit, and if I get what I'm supposed to get, I'll be back here apologizing for every bitchy comment.
Yes, it is about AMPQ. Just a hypothesis, that implementing it in Haskell instead of Erlang is a great idea :) (e.g. provability of correctness of implementation etc.)
Ask YC:  What is your company's datacenter footprint?
I admit to being very curious about how much datacenter space startups and others are using (either renting of individual machines or of racks).

Right now all of my space comes to about 2 racks' worth, including stuff I run on behalf of my customers.

We all know about e.g. Second Life and their 2000 (equivalent to about 50 racks or more, depending on density and how much other stuff is in the rack) servers.

Are you running on one or two servers to start?

Or are you using 5 racks each in 2 different DCs to be redundant and ready for insane levels of traffic?

Do you have a growth strategy, or are Amazon's services what you intend to use when you get bigger?
I would say that open-source is a "long road" for financial institutions, in general, even if it is not for rational reasons. They are concerned about crooks finding vulnerabilities they can exploit in open codebases, for example, and they are concerned about always having a 'throat to choke' in the form of a very solid support services provider. Only when an open-source project is huge and very well-supported by several large systems companies do most institutions start to come around. Linux, for example, has been hugely embraced by financial institutions...but most of that acceptance took place only after Red Hat, IBM (etc. etc.) were around for services/support contracts. Financial institutions do NOT like risk. They absolutely HATE risk. A guy in a garage is a huge risk for them, even if you do develop a killer product/service.

As a 'guy in a garage,' I'm not sure a financial messaging product would be my choice to focus on, open-source or not. It is a rather difficult market even for well-financed companies with teams of programmers and salespeople. Isn't there another market where your skills might be better leveraged?
"Q. What would make you bearish and negate your mega-bull market scenario?
A. The primary consideration would have to be another serious war."
make it into a facebook app and see if that increases usage.
I actually liked "Silicon Snake Oil." I think he believed that what I call the techno-optimists oversold things, and he probably was too extreme in opposition (because that's how debate works).

But his original point is probably just as true today - the pollyanna-ish "technology will cure everything" side is still dominant,and there is no question that negative things about the internet get glossed over. The reality is in the middle somewhere.
I've always wanted to start a taxi service. Nothing really special about that, except I'd let the people drive to their destinations (provided they had a license).

ALL kinds of risks there with insurance and what not, but it's mostly just a crazy out of the box, but a bit too optimistic fantasy.
Hey thanks!

I'm not even sure how to make it social, so that's certainly not high on my list of things that need to be done. A lot of the design is such as it is because I was scratching my own itch, and I have no love of in-your-face UIs (I didn't fully succeed here, but I can't justify a lot more work unless I get some actual traffic.)
Amazingly, I would have thought that datacenter space would peak at some point as more virtualization, and more CPU power in the same space (4-core and dual-CPUs = 8 cores in 1U) takes hold, but it seems that more and more DCs are being constructed due to strong demand.

There is a publicly traded company called Digital Realty Trust (NYSE: DLR) that focuses on buying and building colocation facilities etc.

They are being upgraded, even though this is a "down" market and we can expect corporate spending to be throttled somewhat.
r u looking for hacker co-founder?
OK, I agree with 70% of pg's essay, but here is something that worried me. Most YC start-ups want to sell to large companies (they pay better!). Is pg saying that they go from being free men/women to caged animals? Or is he telling them "take your money and run?" If so, wouldn't a large company knowing pg's advice assume that people will leave quickly, so put a lesser valuation on a deal? After all, companies like Google acquire companies like Zenter for the talent as much as for the product. If the attitude is "take your money and run", wouldn't that necessarily lower the value of every YC company in the eyes of the large acquirer?

To an extent, there was always an element of start-up founders taking the money and walking, but by making things so explicit ahead of time, isn't pg unwittingly devaluing the very companies he has nurtured?

Second, what should an employee number 18 in a Loopt or a Scribd think? Should they start thinking "I am not a founder, so I am missing something". Apply this recursively ... is pg in effecting talking away the very talent that his companies need to grow?
My congrats. Case transfer between states often leads to unexpected delays. Actually, it's one of the most popular reasons to get your case delayed for years - it's being simply lost.
I'm not sure Wikipedia autolinking would be popular or useful on Facebook, although some other form of autolinking might. I have a coworker who's put a lot of work into a Facebook app, I'll mention it to him and see what he thinks. (My personal position towards Facebook is that it seems like a great idea in principle, but I've never found it all that interesting in actual practice)
Hm, "appeal to nature" does seem to fit the bill better, as "naturalistic fallacy" means something slightly different:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

It seems funny that I trust wikipedia+random guy on the internet over my economics professors.
I think the problems with both readers is a symptom of the respective companies loosing focus on their target markets. These specific products are trying to satisfy too many industries at once. Instead of trying to address publishers, distribution, and customers all at once; these companies should have focused on doing one thing and doing it well.

A simple book reader that just handled pdf files and was priced competitively to books (less than $100), would stand on it's own. However, being priced at >$400 means that these products have to solve many problems at once (availability, distribution, and hardware), and if they don't do all three well, then they will fail.
I assume you're not talking about the whole EBGC process. I don't believe it's possible to file a case and pass through all steps in just four months. And actually I never heard it can happen in less then 10 months.
Furniture manufacturing in East Africa! http://mibaofurniture.com
YouTube Investor Comes From Racist Family?
What you call a "bitch-fest" I call incredibly valuable data rarely seen here. Since most HN readers will never become part of YN, your experience is extremely apropos.

You should seriously consider writing a "Don't Let This Happen to You" piece (a la Philip Greenspun) and posting it here to save others from the same fate. Change the names (including your own) if you like. A post like that could be the single most important thing some hackers ever take away from here.
One of my friends always follows his GPS navigation system, even if he knows it's wrong.

In particular, there's this one point on a freeway where the freeway signs clearly indicate the correct route, but his GPS always tells him something else. Without fail, he follows the GPS directions, which tell him to exit the freeway and almost immediately get back on the freeway.

It drives me nuts.
hey congrats man, it works quite well. I like the concept. You should see if you could get this incorporated into opensource forum software and the like. Most of these pieces of software have user preferences, one of which could be to have your hotlinking turned on by default. I think forums are a good place to start since it is a basically large amounts of text, almost none of which would be linked properly, lending itself well to your tool