skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know literally dozens of foreign residents, working at tech companies,
who would love to create a startup here in the SF Bay ...
but cannot legally do so because of visa restrictions.

Next you meet them, ask why they are under "visa restrictions". It's highly likely it's because of the current broken immigration system. It takes 6-10 years to get a green card (with practically no job mobility during that time).

Which is precisely what the comprehensive immigration reform that the parent called for will fix.

Second, the startup visa is still a visa. They will still have "visa restrictions". It's highly likely to have restrictions against bailing from the startup you were "authorized" to start and joining another startup or becoming an employee at a company.
This is dumb. You're going to end up with students who are great at farmville and terrible at anything remotely difficult.

In other words, he is rewarding task completion and ignoring self-motivation, discipline, creativity, etc.

I've seen this same theme repeated many times. "Foods engineered to be addictively tasty" or "Reality TV engineered to hook viewers", etc. You are manipulating people to obtain a specific result (sell more food cheaply, get more viewers, get higher grades), but not necessarily the one that would be most beneficial to the individual (healthy food, rewarding storytelling, mature adults capable of tackling complex problems).
I agree. See relevant blog entry - http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/02/part-time-entrepreneur.htm...
That's pretty funny

... but basically useless
Chinese Academics’ Paper on Cyberwar Sets Off Alarms in U.S.
Science is edging ever closer to stating the basic truth: The perfect food is pork rinds. Nothing but fat and salt.
I don't think this is an assumption: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_fr... http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directsh...

I always thought it was a mistake that <img> wasn't extensible (e.g. Mozilla would display PNG with <img> but for IE you'd need <embed> or <object>) and I think that mistake is being perpetuated with <video>.
Revenge of the Fat Guy
I am developer (about 12 years of commercial experience, more than 20 years of total experience). I was tech-lead of admin team on last big project for about 3 years.

I can administrate servers (about 9 years of commercial experience, about 20 years of total experience with UNIX administration, starting from school), but I hate that. My choice is to create copy of the server, then make changes and write them down, then test them on the copy, then apply verified solution to production server (see http://vlisivka.pp.ua/en/modern_administration , sorry for my English).

I even implemented my own run-book automation tool, which reads documentation and then executes steps in automatic or semi-automatic mode (I prefer Documentative Programming style).

I often prefer to develop script or RPM package to make change to the system instead of making changes by hands.
You can't have it both ways. In one breath you want to welcome highly-qualified people to start companies. In the next, you dismiss the concerns of such people about having to leave in two weeks if the business fails after two years without being given an opportunity to reboot with a glib comparison to getting hit by a bus.

Hint: chance of business failing is (thankfully) much higher than getting hit by a bus.
Oof, my bad. It was New York 7, no insertion of digits, same as SF.
Chargify is led by EngineYard founder Lance Walley, and came out of Grasshopper's (http://grasshopper.com) inhouse incubator. I would not hesitate to go with them.
Great article comparing the assorted vendors you can use (with pros and cons):
http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/accepting-payments-on...
Read the article even if 'salt' doesn't seem exciting. One can see why this article won the 1999 award from the National Association of Science Writers. It does a tremendous job of explaining a complex controversy.

For me, the parallel with global warming is uncanny: locked in camps looking at the same data, coming to opposite conclusions, and accusing the other of being blinded by bias.

Searching now for other things Gary Taubes has written...
Really now? I've always found negotiation works better, as long as you're willing to take some time to do it right.

As an example, AWS's one simple price structure for bandwidth is way above what you'll get from most other providers given some negotiation. Of course, your negotiations with other providers will start higher, but you can get em down substantially.
The problem with summer vacation is that it's between 8 and 10 weeks in most places. During that time the kids lose some of what they learned the previous year and then more time is wasted at the beginning of the next school year on review. Certainly there are other things that are beneficial in other ways and for other reasons that are available in the summer. Let's be honest though, how many kids are actually doing those things compared to the number of kids sitting around watching tv, playing video games etc.

Most year round schools in the US simply shift the 8-10 weeks of break into three smaller breaks. This gives the kids and families time to take their vacations, go to camps etc. This is better for the children in many cases as they have less time away from the school in witch to lose those new concepts that they have learned. Additionally many school districts have managed to use year round schedules and track systems to service more children from fewer schools.

Finally, if you look at other industrialized nations that are offering significantly better educations and having better results with their education systems you'll find that they don't have these long summer breaks. We are no longer a farming nation as a whole, and the summer vacation being necessary for everyone to work in the fields is an outdated concept for the vast majority of our citizens. I'm not suggesting a reduction in the total time away from school, though there's an argument for that, simply removing the single large block during the summer.
Yes, but he's already written large parts of the book on his blog. He could outsource an editor or even ghost/cowriter to assemble it. Could be a possible project for after he quits the day job, but there are probably others that would pay better.
I re-read part of it before I recognized it as the shitty article it was. It was fluff in 2005, it's fluff in 2010.
getting the merchant account is the hard part

Swombat wrote great article on this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530055
i'm not sure what to make of the response ratio. i definitely find life difficult. for the "no" responses, i wish i could ask a follow up to distinguish those who are being stoic vs those who actually have it easy.

your attitude of "An easy life would be dull" is very productive and has probably been strongly selected for. at the same time, i'd like to point out that evolution does not select for happiness. i wonder how much you really appreciate those difficulties while you're dealing with them, vs. reflecting on them. i think we should be weary of struggling for the sake of surviving.
I'd guess that tipping is mostly a socio-cultural thing -- it is expected; it would be considered rude not to. In addition, peer pressure is a factor -- unfortunately, I doubt that I would tip as high as I do or as often as I do if I didn't have other guests at my table.

Online, you just don't feel bad if you don't tip -- there is no peer pressure and no expectation. So, of course it doesn't work out.
If you use this, then you will be in trouble. It has been all over the news that apple is removing these type of apps from the app store.
Using Slashdot terminology - Interesting, but not Insightful.

Patrick is trying to derive generic advice by formalizing his personal experiences. While it is useful to know what worked in his case, it is still just one project, an isolated experience.

I've been in a similar situation myself. I have sold a startup that settled me and my family for life, and things unfolded pretty much as I expected them to from the start to the acquisition. But the more I think about the whole experience now the more I am becoming convinced that there was a great deal of chance involved. And over the years I started describing my startup less in terms of how things should be done and more how they worked for me.

In other words, once you are lucky, twice - you are good. Once you are "twice", then it will be Insightful. Until then it's just Interesting. Feel free to disagree ;)
Yeah but I have the bad feeling that these glorious times are over - to me this is universal short sightedness. If the US want to stay #1 they need radical change especially in that regard. It might be hard to digest when you see the illusions fade and that party time is over but then again cutting back on a lot might lead to a much sturdier leadership.
"LFM Sheldon final PST with GPA, transcript checks at library PST"
Agreed, I thought it would be interesting to mention the tipping strategy that the for-profit entity Causes uses at the same time they are helping out nonprofits.
I mostly agree with that. Probably because I consider myself a good programmer and am perfectly fine to delegate all sysadmin stuff.

I think the point is they are distinctly different skillsets. Programming is very different from setting up and maintaining systems. There's a tiny bit of crossover, but not all that much.

Sysadmins do need a basic sense for coding, however they tend use different technologies than the one people generally use to write web applications (though maybe they'll release Bash on Rails sometime soon)
"Now I have another very important point to make. Errors in base pairing, also known as mutations- are usually very very good. Why? Because 1/3 of errors are bad, 1/3 do absolutely nothing, and 1/3 are good and provide benefits. That means 2/3 of the time- mutations do nothing or help the organism."

This is the same sort of reasoning as "either I win the lottery or I don't, so there's a 50% chance". More mutations are neutral, than harmful, than beneficial.
I didn't say that I thought that this mathematician was intelligent because he was incredible with math. I just stated that he was he was more intelligent than me (which I base on all experiences I shared with him, same as with my "chess-master" friend). Then I just gave some additional trivia about him to show what things he was capable of.

My personal feeling is that having high IQ can help you raise your skill in something up to a certain point fast. After that if you are not genuinely obsessive about this subject you flatten out. People who are more interested than you (but are less intelligent) can catch up and surpass your skill. IQ doesn't determine how good you can be but only how fast can you reach your max.
Those who just use computers as they come out of box. These users will have Windows 7/Windows Vista

Most netbooks sold in the last few years have run Windows XP Home, and some continue to ship with it. Granted, many of the buyers probably fall under your type 2, but not all of them.
Interesting. I think this is totally the wrong medium for tech companies, but what about for a struggling band attempting to stand out from the crowd?

Showing 1.3 million people 30 seconds of your band's music is bound to build at least a little awareness.
Strong typing and dynamic typing aren't mutually exclusive. Most dynamically typed languages are strongly typed, and C, a statically typed language, is weakly typed.

But good suggestion. :)
TV advertising is a completely different animal than the advertising Google is used to selling.

Ad "frequency" - eg how many times users see a given ad - is the most important metric for TV.

Without a large budget commitment it's extremely difficult to gauge the success or failure of a given campaign – even if you get a handful of visitors. That’s why you see brand advertisers continue to fill up the majority of TV spots.

Nearly everybody in this space has had a lot of trouble getting traction, internet advertisers don’t have the headspace for TV, and TV isn’t suited to small budget / small frequency campaigns.
Chrome is also intel-only, so even if you were running 10.5 on your iBook, still tough luck with ppc.
This is no different than how many (most?) courses are structured. Many teachers assign points to various projects, homeworks, test and quizzes. The overall grade in the course then depends on total points accumulation (in relation to other students if there is a curve).
I think the tendency to "underspecialize" is universal and not limited to the extremely intelligent. Most people, left to their own devices, would prefer to be a dabbler for a while, until choosing later on an area in which to specialize. (Then, the question is: in that field, will they specialize? There are general mathematicians who tend not to publish cutting-edge results but know the field very well, and then there are those who identify solely as algebraic topologists.)

However, my suspicion is that people who hyperspecialize are (and always were) most successful in their time, while the more general-minded will be the ones who are remembered in 100 years. Eratosthenes had the derisive nickname "beta" because he was second-best in a lot of fields, but he's the first (as far as we know) to have proved the round earth.
desktop?

You know... You could hook up VGA and a couple USB ports to a microcontroller, run Linux and call it a desktop computer, but you would be lying.
It all depends on how it is implemented. After all, you could take regular grades and assign points to each grade -- and the two systems would be equivalent.

The big question for me though is exactly as you point out. Engineering projects, for example, are really only valuable if they work. And it's hard to measure the progress in-between non-working and working if you don't observe the team carefully, except of course by "time spent."

No matter which system is used for grading, it won't be perfect -- it will cater toward some students and not toward others. Since most students are only exposed to one dominant way, I am all for experiments such as this.
What is Experimental Mathematics?
The education you receive at school has little to do with the curriculum in the classroom.

You learn socialization skills, learning skills and interaction with the opposite sex etc. etc. This has been discussed many times on HN.

Education inflation is pointless. These kids are not going to perform better in the workplace or get better grades at college.
www.amember.com - Its a script you install to your server and gives you the ability to accept over 50+ gateways. Very nice and only a one time fee.
Undoubtedly this is a network-by-network thing. Cable vs. over-the-air and time of day matters a lot too.
It looks like the Borg got to it first...
Looks like the wearables.stanford.edu stack from a few years back.
Take him to court before he can take you. This will give you the better position and he will probably get scared and settle.
Off topic, but I can't find a way to send you a message on HN. What ever happened with izillow.com? I see it's owned by the man now. Post a followup story?
Algorithm for nice graph labels
"I know that a CC is superior to a debit card in every way."

Then why do they still exist? Yes - this is a snarky question, but a valid one, IMO. If they are so obviously bad and horrible, why do they even still exist? Why is there even a debate?
> During that time the kids lose some of what they learned the previous year

Shouldn't we train teachers and devise lessons that actually give lasting knowledge? To me anything less seems like a waste of everyone's time. Shorter breaks only delay the problem, because eventually the kids are going to graduate, which is the longest break of all.
Nice. That's definitely an attractive option.
Self-control is a limited resource, use it sparingly.
I had to actually check wikipedia to see what a "charge card" was because I've always always heard it used synonymously with "credit card." In fact, I always assumed it was just an old name for "credit card." It would appear that is not the case. Perhaps that speaks to the power of credit card marketing in the US - or maybe I'm just ignorant. :)
It's up to web developers to take the plunge and decide to stop supporting IE6.

Stop complaining about having to support IE6/IEx, bite the bullet and just direct people to download a competent browser.
Desktop distributions do have single video codec API (gstreamer).

But browsers are unlikely to use OS-provided libraries for anything downloaded over net, if they can avoid it. If there is a exploit found in third-party code, the browsers cannot work around it and they get the blame (remember the Firefox-on-Windows shell exploit?).
Candidly I think you have mis-assessed.

o Code is 10% of the business
o Wall Clock Time vs. Calendar Time
o Avoid Events, Plan for Processes

all seem broadly applicable and non-obvious
Irrelevant background images?

Non-stroked or unshadowed white text on busy photographic backgrounds isn't good for readability.

All I see is consistency in this UI style.

It's consistently sloppy, but I don't think that's what you meant.. :-) Perhaps pointing out the inconsistency was a bad choice of term. Really, it's just "bad." I'll use http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9F4QJK1wFs as a reference walkthrough of the interface for some examples.

On "still" screens (that is, not in the middle of scrolling or similar) you end up with the giant typography getting chopped up: http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46wk/w1 .. "pictur"? Or http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46w6/w3 "game"?

When displays like "pictur" and "game" are scrolled horizontally to show further content, the distance travelled doesn't match the position of the header at all. See here how the headline has moved slightly (now obscuring the "g" of "games") yet an entirely new style of view has appeared (with overly light text, no less): http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ib/w4 - Everything seems to move at a different speed in relation to everything else on the Windows Phone. This is inconsistent and "feels" wrong.

Front page elements are varying sizes: http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ws/w2 - some items even embed other items inside. And white on turquoise == poor readability.

If you watch the video above around the 11:00-11:30 mark (the "People" screen) you'll see contact boxes randomly changing, pictures popping up inside, etc. There's no indication that this should be occurring.

Another problem is that there's also no solid indication that there's anything to scroll to on the right, yet when the guy does so, there's a bunch of stuff over there. Using the truncated title text as a sort of "this page is wider than you think" indicator is a really crappy UI hack.

I haven't got time to go through everything that feels wrong about the Windows Phone UI, but I'll leave with the Tufte-derived view that the information density is also poor. In the demo of the photo section, the number of photos shown on screen at once is very low. On a touch device you can't go too nuts with filling the screen up, but Apple has struck a smart balance between too little and too much - Microsoft leans way too far towards whitespace and endless scrolling.
> It all depends on how it is implemented. After all, you could take regular grades and assign points to each grade -- and the two systems would be equivalent.

This is absolutely true. That is why people always claim you only get out what you put into schooling. You have to do more than just make the grade. This article makes it sound like he really wants to ramp things up, though. And I believe he's approaching it the wrong way.
I should say no it is not slow..3/5ths speed of current j2me. Android 2.2 has a JIT and will be on most devices except maybe old G1s
yeah, i understand. i just imagined him reading and felt bad :o)
It Japan, as far as I know, it's not "periodic bouts of crunch time" that brings salarymen to small hotels instead of home, but "nightly bouts of alcohol".
The elephant in the room with all of those systems (we use Chargify) is that you still have to sort out getting a merchant account on your own, which depending on how well set up your company is, may be non-trivial.

If, as it would seem from your profile, you are in Iceland this will be especially hard since you'll probably need an American entity with a bank account to be able to use many of those systems.
Well, considering this is a game design class, it's actually quite clever.

Also, details do matter: instead of Farmville it could be more like Dungeons & Dragons where professor is your dungeon master.
I saw this subject mentioned in Dan Ariely's Ted Talks. Here's his specific blog post about the subject. It would clearly work.

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=235
As someone with C, C++, and Java experience, but no Objective C, I started reading this article with interest. But it lost a lot of credibility with me when he started complaining about Java strings not being null-terminated. Also it sounded like he had coded his app specifically for iPhone hardware capabilities and not tried much more than a naive port.

It would have helped if he had broken his rant out into "things that I wasn't used to" and "things which are broken". As it stands it seems he just wants his Nexus One to be an iPhone. When he already has an iPhone.
It would be interesting to have it based on awards/achievements, rather than experience points as experience points are just a renaming of the grade number that maps to a letter.

At the beginning of the class, there is a huge number of projects or tasks, and they are combined in different ways to "unlock" achievements. Actual grades could be based on how many of different difficulties you have at the end of the class. You can't unlock more difficult achievements without unlocking other ones first (or in tandem). Students get to choose exactly which path they want to take through the assignments to get the right kind/enough achievements to pass. Consider a compiler design class, where the tasks are things like "implement a RPN calculator", "write an LALR parser", "parser that acknowledges operator precedence", "code generator for a CISC machine", "code generator for a RISC machine", "implement space-saving optimizations", "implement time-saving optimizations", "execute code by walking the AST", "generate intermediate bytecode", "parser generator using Yacc/Bison", "parser generator using lemon". These are kind of high level, they'd need to be somewhat more discrete in the ramp-up phase at the start of the class.
A computational perspective on set theory
We tend to have quite a problem with survivorship bias[1] on HN. We like to look at the cases where things went well and we assume that is because they did something right that the others did not, and since the founder believe this, he will list the things he intentionally did that he thinks helped. In reality, it may have been something he was taking for granted, or it may have been that he happened to miss some common pitfalls. From one data point it is impossible to know if those are the factors that pushed him over the edge or not.

Of course, one data point like this is useful if we look at all the other stories we get here on a daily basis.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
NYSE and Bloomberg go open source
I'm deeply saddend that he will be leaving Apple in the near future, according to rumors, but if it's to pursue greater causes such as this, then I'm excited to see what he'll do next.
Apple's been removing apps that use private API's. Or apps that they deem "inappropriate". So, unless you make an app with the feed of $somePornSiteYouLike, I don't see either of those issues popping up from this.

Although, if all your app does is follow an RSS feed, I don't see many people buying it. Might get some downloads if it's submitted as a free app though.