skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being committed for 1 year is very different from being committed for 4 to 10 years(as another commenter below pointed out).

The "significant resources" amount to around $4000 for an H1B if the company files the expedited visa and $2500 (IIRC) for the default route. This is significantly less than the monthly salary of a programmer in most places.

For a green card, the expenses are roughly double but often shared by the company and the employee.

So the scale here is very different. What's more, your sister is not going to be thrown out of the country if she leaves Crossfit before the year ends. I think it makes sense to have a pay-back agreement for legal expenses in the case of an H1B but not to have legal immigration status dependent on that specific job.

Skilled employment based immigration should be based on the immigrant's level of skills, not tied to a specific job.
This system has come up before a few times (the one with the most discussion I see in a quick search is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877535).

The problem with this system is that it seems to require 10 usable fingers, which excludes a non-trivial number of people. Or, as my best friend (who only has the equivalent of two fingers - but less flexible - and who has to mouse using his feet) puts it, "The future of interfaces seems designed to screw me over."
ShowHN: Lenny.in - another gmail sms alert app over twitter
Title is uninformative: suggest change to the title text of the page, "FBI Tracks Suspects' Cell Phones Without a Warrant".
We've been happily using the free Google Ad Manager on Kongregate for 18 months or so. We're way higher than the 90M monthly impression level so it looks like we'll have to start paying. I don't mind that if the terms are reasonable and they keep improving it...
David Chang, famous chef and restauranteur, is a progression of accidents
there was one that did this on HN a couple of weeks ago.
see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143489
> The claims that we are "scraping" are absurd... we're using google, bing, twitter, etc. apis to do a comprehensive search page.

Some people would consider that scraping. How do you define "scraping" and how does this practice not fall under the definition?
"All that being said, I don't think being an entrepreneur actually has anything to do with being an expert. It's much more luck and hard work."

Isn't that kind of the unifying theme between the 10k hour domain expert and the innovative entrepreneur? That both require the ability to work and persevere through setbacks beyond what most people care to do in order to be successful?
If you don't hire the negotiator when you get an offer, when exactly would you do it? It would be pointless to do so after accepting the offer.

Don't ever hire a large large law firm (50+ lawyers). Unless you have tens of millions at stake, to them you'll be nothing but a small fry that they use for associate training. And for that dubious privilege, you'll pay through the nose.

Go with a boutique firm if possible. Those firms are usually smaller, charge less, and have fewer clients so they can do better work for their clients. They're also better capable of addressing the non-legal issues (i.e., quality of life) related to accepting/rejecting the offer.

And don't hire an investment banker. They'll charge you a large percentage to offer you meaningless advice that you're usually better off rejecting.
Well, I'm still missing a real-time ad serving api for adsense. The last week happend riotwise-api is just much more innovating than this.
Based on the same yarchive link I cited, the risk seems to be twofold - acute damage to liver or kidneys by recreational users who takes too many pills at once (and don't know enough to separate out the acetaminophen with cold water), as well as chronic kidney damage in people who are legitimately taking the drug for prolonged periods of time.

I should stress that there aren't any additional 'poisons' added to opiate drugs. Rather, it's the toxic effects of acetaminophen at high doses that are being exploited in a misguided attempt to deter abuse.
Five Best Linux Video Players
Net neutrality and preserving the dinosaurs
How is this any different than a member posting their startup (that charges money)?

He created something of interest to the community and charges for it. I love free content but I still think it's great that he created something of value and is asking for money. What's wrong with that?

The only thing better would be if he followed up with a post about how it went and what he learned.
Garbage Collection and the Ruby Heap
Right, you'd be guilty of murder. It wouldn't matter if anyone caught you, or whether you targeted specific individuals or random ones. For example, I'm old enough to remember the Tylenol murders of 1982:

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

In that case, the murderer was never positively identified.
For large installations (e.g. the NT4, Win95. office codebase) they did not use VSS. But that was way before Mercurial's time.
I make the sun raise every morning.

No, seriously. Every morning, I wake up and the sun has risen. Clearly I made it happen. It happens while I'm asleep so it can't have been the placebo effect.
There is an obvious question here: why would someone learn B?

The entire reason for C being conceived was the lack of creating abstractions in B. No project should be carried out using B, so I suppose its published for sheer historical reasons..?
A couple clarifications if you don't mind then ;)

- If you don't want those pages indexed in Google then why are you submitting them in an XML sitemap?

- I have already shown examples of the 0 original content pages ranking, so how can you claim that they do not rank?

- You are not scraping directly, you are pulling from 3rd party sites and using it as content on your own site. Which is worse, because there is no way to opt out of it.

- My problem is not just with what you call stub pages, but with most of your pages. When you give people embed code to embed your content in their site you give them an iframe AND a direct link back to you. If you want me to stop highlighting the absurdity of it then perhaps you should hold yourself to the same standards as what you offer others. But you do just the opposite when you embed 3rd party content in your site. You slap a nofollow on the links and embed the content directly into the page (rather than in an iframe).

- Worth noting that every time I mention the above point you end up talking about stub pages or experiments or some other strategy to try to redirect attention. But in reality, what I am talking about is what you do on almost every page of your website.
Google employee praises new Google product. Film at 11.

Jeff LaMarche, a prominent iPhone developer and author of a couple iPhone programming books, wrote about this from the opposite side: switching from an iPhone to the Nexus One. I think his take is far more interesting: http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2010/02/nexus-one-from...
I don't buy it. Data collection is much easier today than even 10 years ago, and I don't see any evidence that "more people will live a reflective life and make better choices."
Possible seems the wrong word to use here. Either every sequence appears, or some don't, and though the former seems likely, as far as I know it hasn't been proven yet.
I recently went to Wal-Mart for the first time in Bloomington, IN, where I go to school. It's a bit of a drive but we decided to make the trip to save some money on household items. It was one of the bigger Wal-Marts I've seen and it looked fairly new. As we were leaving we decided to check out the supermarket section. Boy were we surprised.

The selection of fresh produce was about twice the size of what you could find at the local Kroger and even better than our local organic grocery store that gets its food from local farmers. They had a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and they were presented very nicely. We found pre-packaged chicken breasts with no additives, no antibiotics or hormones, and that were fed a purely vegetarian diet; they were quite tasty and pretty cheap. The store was very clean and bright and it was a fairly pleasant experience to shop there. I like to eat things that are good for me and I usually don't mind spending more for them, but after my experience in the store and now after knowing that some of that produce has come from local farms, I think I will be doing a lot more of my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart.
> We are the process of NOINDEXING the pages that are below 300 words just to make Aaron happy... we actually had these noindexed before our last version and that got lost in the shuffle of the new launch (really, it did... when you do new code you might leave something out of the old code).

It's been a few weeks: have we seen any evidence of this happening?
I took it as "hopeless romantic" where the romance is found in the ideal of a successful start up.
The concept is important, but the personal attacks (link bait) is what I'm referring to, and is unnecessary.
That's the most interesting piece to me, they slipped in that basically everyone who was using Ad Manager for 90M+ now has to pay.

As someone who is working on a for-pay ad server this is good news.
1. everything in site is in the sitemap... it's not selective. it will be shortly.

2. they don't get traffic is my point... we look at any page that gets over 100 page views in a month and we build those pages out. so, even if you find a page that ranks it will not have traffic. if it has traffic it gets built out.

3. we are not scraping, we are using search APIs

4. i dont understand this issue of our widgets (which don't get used to be honest.. it's a failed program)

5. this is simply false... our traffic comes from how to articles, walkthroughs and Q&A. if you want to know what the top 10 pages are they are things like how to play guitar and call of duty walkthrough pages. those things are 3-5k words!

just lay off dude... go troll someone else.
These slides are _ILL_ bro.
I wonder whether anyone has devised a similar set of metrics for scientific research. That would be a very interesting discipline to follow.
why do they still think people care about serving ads. serving is a given, selling is what really matters.
> Does this news signal the beginning of a new East v. West cold war?

Cool! Moon rockets, faster computers, government funding for weird projects... Fun toys come out of cold wars ;-)
According to google:

on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.ht...
You know, I've been playing the game he's describing since I was born. Is called REAL LIFE and its point system uses money. Spend on upgrades (education) get new powers and eventually earn more. Spend in shops, get new toys. Etc.

This is not the future, it is the present.
I always learn so much from you and Damato.
But they do prevent me from installing iBoobies (or whatever they just removed from the store) by other means right? Unless I jailbreak the phone (the bottle), which I assume they don't encourage, they're controlling not just the restaurant, but also how i consume the alcohol...
Sounds like a pretty dark future to me.
I like this little esmerel.com site ... it's quaint and interesting. Thanks.
Under Accenture there is an employee title "Consulting Consultant". What does that even mean?
What fraction of your traffic comes from those 3-5K-word articles? And what's your return on investment from those compared to, e.g., one of the pages that Aaron linked?

I'm curious! I'm in the content-creation business, and if what you're doing works, I'll either need to radically change what I do or to start copying you.
- 1. everything in site is in the sitemap... it's not selective. it will be shortly.

Ah, so now you admit it was intentional. But good on you for (eventually? hopefully?) fixing it.

- 2. they don't get traffic is my point... we look at any page that gets over 100 page views in a month and we build those pages out. so, even if you find a page that ranks it will not have traffic. if it has traffic it gets built out.

If a person has a quarter million pages that are getting 5 visits each that is still a lot of traffic. Especially when the page has 0 editorial costs.

- 3. we are not scraping, we are using search APIs

The end result is what people would typically call a "scrapper site". It is irrelevant how it is created (if you scrape directly or syndicate from somewhere else that is scraping). The issue is a lack of editorial control (see your page about 13 year old rape) and a lack of citing sources with links.

- 4. i dont understand this issue of our widgets (which don't get used to be honest.. it's a failed program)

Search engines have duplicate content filters. If the content is within the page as HTML (as you do on Mahalo) then you can often outrank the original source for their own content. You bypass this issue and me mentioning it if you only use an iframe to embed the content in your pages. But if you embed it directly into the HTML (as you are doing right now) then of course it is bogus.

- 5. this is simply false... our traffic comes from how to articles, walkthroughs and Q&A. if you want to know what the top 10 pages are they are things like how to play guitar and call of duty walkthrough pages. those things are 3-5k words!

I am not talking about your top 10 pages. I am talking about the bottom 300,000 pages, which in aggregate get far more traffic than the top 10 pages do. :D

- just lay off dude... go troll someone else.

Not trolling at all. Just trying to give you valuable feedback, as you have claimed it to be publicly multiple times (unless you were lying when you stated that) :D
These are the pages that get traffic at Mahalo:

1. Breaking news:
http://www.mahalo.com/nhra-fan-killed
http://www.mahalo.com/andrew-koenig
http://www.mahalo.com/bloom-box

2. How To articles
http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-speak-french
http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-play-guitar-for-newbies

3. Walkthrough articles with our videos!
dozens of them here: http://www.mahalo.com/walkthrough
http://www.mahalo.com/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2-walkthro...

is there something wrong with this pages?
Intangible Assets and Sunk Cost Fallacy
Seriously excellent slides.

Any chance of a video of this talk being released? I'd love some commentary from you guys.
Really interesting article, and kinda scary. Part of me wonders if we'll start to see small local farms having to ramp up productivity to sell to Wal-Mart and how that will affect the farms. It could end up going the way that "industrial organic" has, like Michael Pollan describes in Omnivore's Dilemma.

I do think, though, that there is some point where you have to weigh business practices against each other. Wal-Mart may be doing good by supporting local farms and bringing fresh produce to underprivileged areas, but they also decimate town economies by opening up stores and destroying the competition - not to mention how horribly they treat their workers. I've never been in a Wal-Mart (there are none around here anyway) and the local farmers market is excellent so it's not a concern for me, but other people might want to weigh their options before deciding where to shop.
It means you have to make 0 real decisions, just recommend a lot of stuff, haha
glad you liked the slides.
They already do this... everything is run through a proxy and cached for a few minutes (regardless of etag or anything else).
yup, it was recorded. not sure when the video will be out, but i'll tweet it or something as soon as i hear.
Pretty much like a Nokia employee raving about the N900. Can you say biased?
Men Who Stare At Computers?
Yes, and so has Google. This isn't a completely new product, it looks like it's the next generation of DART for Publishers and Google Ad Manager, united under a single brand.

I'll be curious to see what they do with it. Ad server usability is almost universally horrid.
I think a lot of these comments are missing the point. There is a huge difference between a mouse and a finger and you cannot just abstract this difference away by pretending that hover is only used for tooltips. Flash programmers from the very beginning embraced the platform because it allowed dynamic and flowing interaction with the movement of the mouse pointer. I can think of dozens of very common Flash techniques that will never work with a finger without being re-writen.

* Combo boxes that only expose the drop handle of hover.
* Controls (video) that only appear when you move the pointer
* Camera controls where the mouse motion is used to anchor view.
* Animated buttons, flyouts etc.

As an example I did a google search for "flash examples" which led me to http://ziggystudio.com/v1/main.html

This app has an "AUDIO" link in the upper right that scrolls out on mouse over to expose the actual controls. This app simply will not work in a finger environment and would have to be re-written. I would argue virtually 100% of the flash applications written will have broken functionality in a click+drag only environment.

Most of these apps will "work" but in a massively degraded state. Many of them will simply be incapable of being used.

You cannot gracefully degrade to a click/drag system from a hover/click/drag system. They are too different. Flash was developed to maximize the mouse paradigm. It will never work well with a finger interface.
New Approach to Generating Truly Random Numbers May Improve Internet Security
...has already been discussed by Thomas Malthus back in the 70's and dismissed.

Not sure which Malthus you mean. In 1770, he was only 4 years old, and by 1870, he was dead...
Can anyone point to why flash is so processor-intensive?

Is it a necessary property of doing what flash does, or is flash implemented inefficiently?
We (Google) will be publishing a paper with the results of our investigations, which includes the suggestion from the article of varying the initcwnd and measuring loss. Hopefully it will come out this side of the next IETF meeting in March.
> I actually proposed that the "king" be democratically elected, so instead of hundreds of bickering congressmen, he would have largely unfettered power to then make decisions as he saw fit. The one thing he could not influence, at all, would be the process by which the cycle continued fairly after four years.

Do you really think that once someone is in power that they couldn't just ignore that limitation?

> I don't see how that's all that different than today in terms of risk of executive takeover. I mean in theory the president could stage a military coup and declare himself dictator for life tomorrow. And the legislative branch could vote in measures by which it could be exceedingly difficult to remove the currently sitting members.

The reason that the president can't stage a military coup is because there is more to the government than just the executive branch. If the 'president' by and large is the government, then the military just does whatever he says. Sure the president is currently the command-in-chief of the armed forces, but do you really think that they would obey an order to take over Congress? But you are proposing that there is no Congress. It's much easier to obey an order to suppress the population (i.e. 'keep them at bay') in order to keep the 'president' in power than it is to obey an order to completely restructure the government (i.e. remove power from Congress by force). Even military coups in banana republics are pretty 'small' when compared to taking power from every Senator and Congressperson (i.e. you only have to take out the current 'leader' and some of his associates).

> It was just a thought experiment, vary at your pleasure. How about dramatically reducing the number of legislators to, say, 12? Would that really be much worse? It's still democracy, just a different spin on it.

I was under the impression that we have such a system of Congress so as to make sure that everyone gets a fair hearing. The real issue isn't that Congress no longer listens to the people, it's that the people feel helpless to do anything about Congress. Most people don't deal with political matters anymore, they just ignore them. Maybe it's just a sign of our country/population being too large to be governed by a single body. Maybe we should take the more Libertarian route and give power back to the state governments with a severely neutered federal government.

And your example of a 'democracy' isn't really a democracy, it's a republic (which is what the US really is).
I couldn't agree more. To add slightly, I think the intensity and novelty of what you are doing are probably the biggest factors in how you spend your 10000 hours.

I know I learn more from spending 1 hour trying to solve a new problem I have never tackled before than spending 10 writing yet another CRUD procedure or yeat another GUI for the database. Similarly, I improved my running faster (back when I was still running regularly) with runs that challenged me and on varied terrain more than I did from yet another tread mill run at a regular pace.
What it reminded me of is when, after waiting on hold forever, the CSR says something like: "Thanks for calling ABC Company. What's your account number?" or "What is your phone number?" Having the first "words" a customer utters be numbers is probably not the best idea. I wonder how many hours of waiting on hold could be eliminated if more companies understood this phenomena.

I also wonder if the full word "hello," would be necessary, since the word "hi," makes the similar cavity-sound as the spoken number "five"?
In early stages, aspiring programmers need mentors. It would be interesting to know how many people who consider themselves good programmers, spend a reasonable amount of time mentoring other jr. programmers. Looking back in 7 years, there were only two good programmers I learnt a lot from. I took every chance to read their code and ask them to review my code and pair program with me once a while.

I became convinced recently with a new approach to this problem. If you want an artist, pick someone with decent interest to learn art and put a brush in his hand and he becomes a painter. It takes time but this is overall good for the programing community.
Edison is notably overrated. While he does deserve some credit, his approach to R&D was infamously brute-force. Tesla noted, “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” He also infamously took credit for the inventions of his employees--the long and impressive list of things Edison invented is really a long and impressive list of things invented at Edison's lab.

While it's hard to argue with success, not every successful man should be a figure of unquestioned admiration. Edison was famous in his day, and remains famous today, because he had the best PR and marketing in the business.
YC is now on twitter, will be updating with YC news and events
We have been using Xero (www.xero.com) and absolutely loving it for several years. They are web based and have an API.

They're getting pretty popular in New Zealand (we're they and we are based) but also gaining traction in Australia and the UK. They have a US version available as well but marketing seems to have been focused outside the US so far.

They're a listed company here in New Zealand so I expect they'll be here for quite some time.
or in a positive sense:

"leave a task opened"
On Incorporation - Hold Off Until You Have The Cash To Spare
All of google reader is blocked by their robots.txt, exactly like the article is saying mahalo needs to do for their scraped content
http://www.google.com/robots.txt
If the title of an article is a question, the answer is no.