skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly, this is a philosophical question that I can't offer an answer to without the potential contamination of lots of personal bias, but I'll tell you how I think about it.

A lot of countries have a lot of rich people at the helm and aren't really, what I would call, benefiting from that. It could even be argued that a lot of the problems in countries are caused by the rich.

I think about it kind of like this: We all want to keep getting richer. I just take that as the rule from which I derive a couple more points on this topic.

First, to be a noticeable increase in wealth, that increase must be appreciable. It must be felt by the wealthy person. I think to appreciate it, it must be a certain percentage change. We probably wouldn't notice a 0.05% increase in our wealth, but we would notice a 50% increase.

Second, assume rich people and poor people desire an equivalent feeling of wealth growth. If I make $10k a year, $1,000 more next year will feel great. I'll have almost $100 more to spend a month. Someone making $100k desires an increase in wealth of $10,000 a year.

Now, if we spread that $10,000 worth of wealth created to make the rich person feel better to the poor people who only needed $1,000 additional a year to feel better, we could have made 10 people happier, instead of just one person happier when that money went to the rich person. $20,000 worth of wealth could make 20 people happier, instead of 1 rich person and 10 poor people = 11 people.

If you believe in Greatest Good for the Greatest Number anyway, but not all subscribe to that philosophy. I do I think. If one person experienced elation at the expense of the whole world, would that be good? Not to suggest that I would offer to harm a minority to bring joy to the world. But I do wonder if growth is beneficial. I think it may not be. It could be bad.

So, I am not sure how to answer your question. I do not know for a fact if it is in a country's self interest to encourage the growth of the investor class with at least $10M in the bank. It may take a lot of stagnation or depression among the working class or creative class to create additional wealth for an already rich minority.

Further from that, if you raise the foundation, quantified as the poverty line perhaps, then it increases the quality of everyone's lives, even the rich. There's less crime, less blight, and people are simply much more pleasant to be around than when there are huge disparities between the rich and the poor.
Oh, of course. I errantly assumed they didn't have root at the same time as you still had access.
You can find sweet chili sauce at most Asian grocers in the states.
(note: in #1 above, i have no opinion on whether people are "buying" visas... that's a subjective interpretation. what i meant to say is that the new legislation is specifically for people who DO NOT own the capital directly, but who raise it from other investors)
Hasn't stopped American Apparel. Not to mention actual high fashion brands who arguably have more to worry about with seasonal differences in fashion. Then again, I'm no expert.
This is a classic dilema: what you love doesn't pay well.

The solution is to try to AUTOMATE your income so you can spend time doing what you love, whether it pays or not.

You can automate it by putting in the grunt work up front to build something passive or save enough money to live off your net worth (rental properties, investment income, etc).

I've explored this topic in depth on my blog, http://www.StartBreakingFree.com if you're interested. Sounds like you're off to a great start though, you're not alone!
I'm sure Yelp has rules about saying the wrong thing, but "promising what you can't deliver" is almost the definition of sales pitch, and you weren't there long enough to break into the inner circle. All the successful salesmen know a few rainmaker phrases that are very effective at closing the deal.
That's fantastic. I'm still trying to get my books sent over after two years . . .
can just setup a few lists: companies / founders / current batch companies / current batch founders
Only supported if the server you're requesting to sets an "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" HTTP header specifying that the referer is allowed. You cannot change the referer via JS. If that header is not set, the browser denies the request. It's very well thought out I think.

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control
I don't get why you are downvoted. I too remember seeing that site.
Ask PG: Question about the position of the questions in YCS10-app
Hi,
I took a look at the application form for YC, and while filling it, I noticed that the position of the project/business details (What's new about what you're doing, What do you understand about your business, Who are your competitors), are after some informal insight about the people applying (achieved projects, successful hack, etc).

If I remember correctly the form is the same as Winter 2009 one. Is this position intentional, in the sense of creating more confidence in the applicant? (Maybe a lower application rate if the questions were all at the beginning, perhaps I replied myself)
Google Buzz Boosts Sharing On Google Reader By 35 Percent
This is a good summary; I could have done with it back in 2006 when I needed to use R for something.

As an aside; while R is a neat tool and pretty powerful in many ways, there's a phrase in the documentation which makes it really clear that it wasn't written by computer scientists: the authors claim that R is 'the same language' as S because it has the same syntax, but it has 'a different engine', by which they mean that it has different semantics...
@philwelch: I quoted you here http://syskall.com/why-we-should-eradicate-agnosticism-from-..., hope you don't mind. I tried contacting you by e-mail but it didn't work.
Addresses are mainly important for store checkout. A good way to grab the zip code first is to ask when calculating tax and shipping in the cart. When they check out, just default to the zip and state, then ask them to verify on the last step.

A good way for the server to detect user error would be to use IP2location. Unless they're using a proxy or VPN, you could add something that would ask the user to double check if their IP location was more than 100 miles from their zip code. But the user could always override that warning.
Everyone saw straight through the farce that is Cost Co in Melbourne's Docklands area. We're simply not that type of "bigger is better" community. It's refreshing to head down to the Queen Vic Markets on a Saturday and still barely be able to move.
Ah, Dreamhost. Where I got this support answer gem for a load average of 15+ on my shared server:

After looking at the ping and traceroutes, this is not an issue of server slowness, but of the connection slowness from DE to the United States, and as such there is nothing I can do to assist you in this matter.
The tone is rude, yes. It's OK to say that point X was hard to follow for reason Y, but calling the article incomprehensible thrash brings little to the discussion.
"[..] and Cassandra being more suitable for real time transaction processing and the serving of interactive data."

Does Cassandra actually support transactions?

"For example, adding a new node to the system becomes as simple as bootstrapping its Cassandra process and pointing it at a seed node (an existing node within your cluster)."

You could easily have this in a distributed system that has a single master (implemented as a distributed state machine), without all the disadvantages of a gossip-protocol.

"Secondly I have come to the conclusion that Cassandra’s P2P architecture provides it with performance and availability advantages. Load can be very evenly balanced across system nodes thus maximizing the potential for parallelism, the ability to continue seamlessly in the face of network partitions or node failures is greatly increased, and the symmetry between nodes prevents the temporary instabilities in performance that have been reported with HBase when nodes are added and removed"

None of these features require a P2P system. Actually, a P2P system will in most cases be slower than a hierarchical one.
We ask about the people first because we care more about the people. The earlier you invest, the more you're investing in the people rather than the idea.
'Alas, this may take some time—as Mr Gates pointed out at the TED conference, new reactor designs like TerraPower’s can take 20 years to invent and another 20 to deploy. So Mr Myhrvold may find that the suspicions against him of patent-trollery have a long half-life.'

nyuk nyuk nyuk...
This I don't get. The branching/merging thing seems to be overblown to me.

The reason I'm switching is because I like the tools better, and you can be up and running with a repo in about 5 seconds. I think that's argument enough. There's less pain.

But what is so different about merging in hg/git that merging a complex change from a branch is somehow made magically trivial? I mean, the tools for handling changes might be better because they are more modern, but the whole "changeset" thing seems to be hyperbole -- all (well, any good one) VCS's track changesets, that's what those revision numbers (or collectison of rev numbers) mean. :-)
Nice FUD, Git has been running just fine on windows for years.
Drastically relaxing green card restrictions.
Dave,

I think the big issue most people on here are having, is the fact that if you fail to either create 5 jobs or revenue of $1MM or a larger VC round, you get kicked back to your own country despite having invested 2 years and all the effort that comes with planting your roots in a completely new country.

It is hard to understand this if you've (and I'm not calling you out) never switched countries but the older you get the harder it becomes to simply pick up and move and since you are at the mercy of either the VCs in raising a new round or the market in creating a sustainable entity it becomes less attractive as an immigration option. What if you do create 5 jobs and then tank in a year? Even if you have a million users?

An easier solution would be to give everyone with a successful track record of being an upstanding citizen (paid taxes, earned > $xxx amount, has a professional qualification) immediate permanent residency exactly like the UK and Canada and not tie it to metrics that are hard to measure and achieve in a short amount of time.
It's a business decision. It's much cheaper to lobby the government than to innovate. It would be irrational for them to do otherwise, at least in the short term.
Wouldn't it have been more prudent to have linked to the actual article instead of a summary on someone elses domain?

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/retail/20100216-us-companies....

Significantly more information contained within.
You should add geolocation down to city level. Nice idea.
Yes, and Jason Calcanis is just an entrepreneur who sees huge potential in a "whatever the hell he's calling Mahalo lately."

Seeing an opportunity and exploiting it makes you money, but it doesn't always make it right or good for the world.

And I don't think the comparison to Wal-Mart is valid. Wal-Mart succeeded because they have the best logistics in the world. They may have some aggressive business tactics in deploying stores, but selling cheap goods to people who need them is nothing even remotely like patent-trolling (or Mahaloing).

Wal-Mart has been shown to have very positive effects on communities, such as making prescription drugs and doctor visits affordable to poor people.
ETA: A simple script to predict endtimes.
OK, I wonder if I can rank higher by tomorrow?
"The current line is 7-9 years long."

Only if you are on a low-priority employment-based visa and are Indian or Chinese born (i.e. waiting for priority date to become current). The process is still much too long though, even in other cases.

Not that I want to defend the US immigration and employment visa processes. Far from it. The system as it stands is completely and utterly broken. It turns away many of the very people the nation needs to keep its competitive edge in the world.

Realistically though, it will be quite some time before any politician will be willing - or even able - to show the kind of leadership that is necessary to tackle immigration issues, regardless of the merits of doing so.
Awesome web developer needed for building social commerce applications
If they don't record sales calls, hard sells are predictable - so if they don't record sales calls, they might want it to happen and want plausible deniability.

It would be very easy to avoid these types of accusations if they just recorded the sales calls, or even recorded just one side of the sales calls (to avoid recording the other person - Skype extensions can do this easily enough).
Me: "That's amazing..that's where his office was."

Colleague: "What's amazing is that you're looking at it like that."
On a slightly related note, the @newsycombinator bot hit 10,000 followers yesterday: http://twitter.com/newsycombinator
Ask HN: Do you have a good source code to HTML solution?
A while back one of HN's members posted about a great online tool that he had created for converting code snippets of just about any language into colorized HTML. Despite my best searching I can not find it again, and searches of the internet in general all return source code colorizers that have some form of drawback to them.

What do you use to turn source code into HTML?
They claim that it's twice as efficient as grid. But this might take into account losses during energy transfer from power plant to receiver.
We consider them children, but I got two 15-year-olds in a row, one male and one female. In modern America, you're still a child, but as far as Judaism and Christianity are concerned, you're already a few years into being an adult at that point.
I'll preface my comments by saying that, as a libertarian, I'm a fan of pretty much anything that opens the US up to greater immigration. That being said, this reads to me more like a publicity stunt than an actual gateway to bringing successful entrepreneurs to the US. The effort required to hunt down qualifying talent overseas and to hook them up with VCs willing to make a (sizable) investment seems like it would make it significantly less attractive than finding a domestic startup in need of funds.

If they want a way to really bring skilled people into the US, they could start by heavily revising or completely doing away with the execrable immigration quota system: http://www.immigralaw.com/english/immigrationquotas.html
How accurate is this?

http://www.geoiptool.com/
FreeBSD is dead
Isn't that exactly what a fuel cell is about?
Share HN: When I first talked with PG
October .... 1996. I was working as tech correspondent at The Economist and had managed to push the story of ecommerce being exciting not because of Amazon but because these guys at Viaweb were helping you set up stores yourself.
So I am on the phone to PG going over this and that late one night--because of timezones. And I'm asking all these questions, trying to figure out how to get it across in five hundred words in The Economist.
Really excited about revealing this cool company in The Economist. Next day, I am writing up the story and my assistant flags me down, interrupts again, and again 'It's urgent'. Turns out my dad is really ill (he's been fine ever since). Leave the story half written on my Atex terminal, off to the hospital, with a promise I'll call in to finish it, don't get back to my desk for a month and story never runs.
ViaWeb and PG a success nonetheless :)
The Not So Wild, Wild West
Thanks for the reply, understood. I can think of this method as the most successful through people that are not recognized in this space (eg. first times appliers like me).
The only difference is my EC2 site has been running continuously without supervision for months, and my AppEngine site often has glitches.

Nothing is perfect, but some things are better.
While msysgit runs okay on Windows as of fairly recently, for a very long time, Git had very bad performance on Windows, and required Cygwin. Saying that it ran fine for years is pretty bad hyperbole--especially since both Git and Mercurial are only about two years old at this point.
obviously the issue of how fast the INS is able to process legitimate green card applications is an issue, however i don't feel that it's a legitimate reason to exclude this new proposed legislation.

we can attack the problem by focusing on improving INS processing times, rather than excluding other valid applicants (of any type). we are certainly not suggesting StartupVisa green card applicants "move to the front of the line" ahead of anyone else, simply that their application be considered fairly & reasonably along with others.
I'm usually okay with these comparisons as long as the author lists his intentions out, as well as his environment/hardware and how he runs each test.

I agree that the past two blog posts have been kind of pointless, but fun anyways :)
If patents worked the way they were supposed to, this would be fine. People who had an interest in building or using a technology would weight the difference between licensing a patent, or buying it outright and the market would thrive.

Instead, we have a cabal of robber barons forming with no intention or building anything whose sole purpose is to rent-seek (or outright extort) those who are actually making progress in any given field.

Perhaps as a society, we need Nathan Myhrvold. We're civilized enough to know that we can't have warlords driving rusty toyotas around terrorizing villagers with ak47's but not quite civilized enough to purge ourselves of the type of men who desire such lives. So we give them paper weapons and tolerate their antisocial behavior. At least no one dies while we collectively wait to grow up.
Yeah, except that Git is 5 years old and that the Cygwin requirement was just a dll that came _with_ the installer and was _automatically_ installed with Git. Nobody would notice except people that had an agenda against git (hg supporters, svn etc).

Edit: about performance, while Git was slower on windows than on linux, it was still faster than both SVN and Mercurial.
entrepreneurs are no stranger to risk. yes, there is a risk they do not meet the basic qualification to remain in the country. however, they are fairly basic: can you create a minimum of 5 jobs in the US within 2 years? (or reach break-even on $1M in revenue, or raise subsequent financing of $1M or more).

entrepreneurs who fail to meet the bar are not being unfairly punished by investors, rich or otherwise.

these rqmts are simply the proposed bar for qualification. meet them, and you can stay. nothing more, nothing less.

this is a considerably better situation than what we have currently.
Yes, the DMCA does suck quite a huge amount. But is the DMCA the main thing stopping you from disassembling and reassembling gas pumps before you use them? I'm guessing probably not.
Declassified Documents Relating to the NSA/Central Security Service (1931–1985)
Bruce Schneir adds "Formerly 'Top Secret UMBRA.' From my quick scan, there are minimal redactions." FWIW: TS/Umbra is the highest classification known within the agency!
There's hardly a regulation that's been passed in the past century that hasn't opened up opportunities for abuse. If the potential for abuse is enough to make a law a bad idea, then there would be precious few laws ever passed.

Which, I must confess, appeals to me personally, but if we concede that we need the ability to legislate, then the simple potential for abuse can't be showstopper for any individual piece of legislation.

Rates and/or severity of abuse maybe, but not the simple possibility of it.
DPCI Accepted as Microsoft Gold Partner for 5th Year in a Row
this is a reasonable suggestion, and it is currently being addressed by other proposed immigration legislation.

however, our proposed legislation simply focuses on making visas available to people who can help 1) create jobs, 2) create innovation, and 3) create economic output.

the two are not mutually exclusive, and are likely even complementary. however, this does not mean they have to be merged, and they can be worked on indepedently.

(that said, it is likely all such legislation will be considered in a comprehensive immigration bill supported by the left & the right sometime this year... we hope :)
Customer Development Hacked: How to interview 10,000 customers in one day
It's actually more like 70% of clicks go to the top one link these days, I've been told.
Maybe I can rank higher for juan corbett's name? http://alicious.com/2010/juan-corbett-name/
What a bizarre statement.

I really don't see the correlation between a memorable (and thus brandable) business name and business performance.

Some of the web's biggest and most respected properties have almost whimsical names, but that doesn't reduce their "street cred" so to speak.
I think his main point was that producing a product that people want as opposed to a non-scaling service is the way to go for financial security.

I think he might have just gone with subscriptions in his examples because it's the best understood way to make money online since it's obvious who is getting paid and when. This is in contrast to ad-based, virtual-goods, or skimming off transactions.

The article as a whole was a bit short, generalized and simplistic for my liking.
multitouch@reddit posted this link: http://file.wikileaks.org/files/microsoft-spy.pdf
I've decided this script is too useful not to make available, so I've spent ten minutes knocking up a description and putting it on a web site. If you find it useful, let me know. Maybe I'll put it on github or something if people think it's worth it.

Of course, it'll probably sink without trace ... glub, glub, glub ...

ADDED IN EDIT: I've just realised that that's a seriously ugly page. However, since it's for the people here who can discern quality without having to be patronised by useful but pretty shiny things, I'm not going to change it now. Besides, Hypnos and Morpheus beckon ...
10 points for brushing your teeth
Points For Toothbrushing: The Gaming Speech Everyone Is Talking About

People keep Tweeting and e-mailing... did you see this speech? Yes, I saw it. This is today's must-watch about the future of gaming — and the future of life.

Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of entertainment and technology, Jesse Schell, tore down the house at the DICE Summit last week in a half-hour presentation about where games are heading, beyond consoles and beyond even the current gaming phenomenon, Facebook's FarmVille.

The hook behind FarmVille and so many other popular games these days is authenticity and reality, Schell argued. He said the leading trend is games "busting through reality," denying the old notion that gaming's best attraction is fantasy.

The idea of games being part of the real world is what's taking hold: games that have you jumping around in the real world, games that have you connecting with people in the real world. Facebook gaming, in particular, is a key attraction for this kind of play that more and more people are discovering that they want. Playing a game in which you're outscoring your friends — not people you meet on Xbox Live, but your old college roommate you've friended on Facebook — is the undeniable lure. Mix that in with Achievements for ... everything. (Memories of the so-called World of Chorecraft.)

So where does that take gaming? And life? If you're short on time, go to the 20-minute mark.
It doesn't matter. It's already been proven that code is speech, and unless there is an amendment to the Constitution, speech cannot be restricted.

If it becomes illegal for me to give away my work for free, I will just sell unlimited rights to my code for one cent. Proceeds will be donated to the EFF.
That's the thing. As a public school, at least in our area, you're allowed to be on the grounds when the school isn't open. You just can't go inside.

I once was ticketed for being at a park after sunset in our town. The cop explained to my friends and I that if we had just been across the street at the elementary school then it wouldn't have been a problem.