skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is patently wrong advice. Do not do this, as it will invalidate all visa-waiver travel for EVER.

You should only apply for a visa when you are reasonably sure you will get it (i.e. have an offer of employment, funds or family to sponsor you).
Phase 1: Collect Underpants

Phase 2: Instead of complaining create a "service bundle" of services you would use together that add up to $150, contact the service owners and ask them to get into a bundle agreement for $50 bucks total, you take $5 on each sale.

Phase 3: Profit
You could easily pay 2$ per transaction + % of the revenue to credit card processor. So, 2$ price tag = 0$ profit, or even loss.

Also it's probably about 8 times simpler to get one $15/month subscriber than eight $2/month subscribers.

It's the market. If it was feasible to sell those services for $2/month - there would be competitors taking advantage of that fact. Since there's (I assume) none - that means it's not economically reasonable to sell something at that price.
Court allows agents to secretly put GPS trackers on cars
You could use Conkeror. It's a keyboard-oriented browser based on Mozilla inspired by Emacs and vi:
http://conkeror.org/FrontPage

The extension 'Vimium' for Chrome offers similar functionality:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgn...
Ask HN: What does Opscode do (http://www.opscode.com/)?
I hear that http://www.opscode.com/ is a successful startup.
I know that Engine Yard used their chef software to build their cloud platform.

But I can't understand from their site what services/products they provide ? Why do people pay them? Can someone explain it to me like I'm a 10 years old?
Anything new compared to what? There was plenty of background information in the article, and definitely more info than in the OP's "is this site down?" link to the site that is down. Or was this an "Ask HN"?
Is there any useful information to extract from the oBservations that China and India have a significant amount of powerful leaders as former engineers?

Keep engineers out of government unless you want your country to be like India or China?
> Let's not forget the story is told from Andy's point of view.

That's very true, and from the other side it might come out very different.
Except that you then don't have a search box. That's the magic of Chrome, is that the address bar IS ALSO the search box.
I've recently jumped into Erlang, and have come to some of the same conclusions. I read Armstrong's Erlang book, and thought 'that seems cool' and didn't at all grok what was going on beyond the superficial. Then a few months later, just sat down and started solving Project Euler problems. At first it was strange and foreign and I was mad variables were immutable. A day later and it just clicked, I'd never had that much fun writing code.

The FP paradigm is (to me, even after 15 years of imperative programming) so much more natural for development, since you're able to sanely start attacking the problem directly -- instead of architecting a big-picture solution up front that's probably wrong anyway because you've ignored some detail you haven't yet discovered.

Building things with actions instead of objects just makes much more sense. Reuse comes much more naturally, and doesn't seem as contrived as a lot of OOP reuse seems. I've noticed that working my FP muscles out has made me a much better imperative programmer -- I write a lot more clever and effective code (not clever like 'tee-hee-no-one-will-ever-figure-this-out'!).
John Cleese on creativity, getting in the zone, and interruptions
Avoiding the Uncanny Valley of Interface Design
All taxes have dead weight costs. Thus, suggesting something which is objectionable on efficiency grounds is ok on efficiency grounds is wrong.

More directly to the point, saying X does not cause an objection means little. Perpetual motion machines don't break the laws of gravity that does not mean you can build one.

And even more directly, saying X is independent of Y so we should do X because of Y is irrational.

PS: I have 4k karma to burn, if you want to down mod me on ideological grounds feel free. However, if you really believe I am wrong please try and create a rational argument as to why.
$15 is ridiculously cheap. Don't even get me started for businesses: $15 pays for a third of the cab fare for your consultant to get from the airport to your office. For a revenue generating app it is a no brainer.

$150 is not much for a person to be spending on ten identifiable line items, either. Maybe if you only know poor college studentsr that sounds like a lot of money. For a middle class family, that sounds like a cable bill. If your service is in the top five most important things for mom in her life, price in two digits is irrelevant. She spends more on shampoo, hair care, feminine hygiene, paper, magazines, romance novels, etc, etc.
The list is at the same time too little and too much. Too little, because it misses on fundamental subjects like computer architecture and algorithms (modern algorithms, which are heavily graph-based). Too much because those books contain lots of in-depth information that is not required, unless you're really, really passionate about the field. And some parts are simply not very relevant - e.g., Knuth tells you at length how to implement (in assembly!) algorithms that are very specialized and you normally draw from a library (plus the fundamentals of assembly are not exactly the same on today's multi-core, speculative execution machines).
For me one of the real eye openers was that I'd gotten to the end of a fairly long book on FP without seeing a single assignment of a value to a variable.
Let them know that you are working long and hard. -- Dishonest and Disrespectful.

Seek their opinions, even when you don't really need them, especially on topics that aren't within the reach of their roles.-- Dishonest, Manipulating and Contemptuous

Good luck to you sir.
What else would you expect when 4 out of 5 media outlets say the economy is bad?
Thank you--this is a good explanation of why the parentheses don't work on anonymous functions: Ruby's immediate calling essentially forces you to choose between "objects that you can call like methods" and "objects that you can easily pass around." This hearkens back to carbon8's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141245); viewing Ruby's handling of first-class functions as "inconsistent" definitely betrays a Python-centric view of things.

In that sense, I see why it's not so bad; the difference between methods and anonymous functions is very explicit, and when you want to pass things around, it's likely that you will have target code which expects a Proc object and source code that generates it. Perhaps it's not so bad because there are few legitimate use cases, if any, for transporting a method when an arbitrary block is expected.
» Tips for Auto Financing Loans
I haven't seen anyone mention Optimal Layout yet in the thread, so I will:

http://most-advantageous.com/optimal-layout/

It lets you move, resize, and tile windows easily with just the keyboard, and you get a better Cmd-Tab that switches by window (though unfortunately it binds to Alt-Tab by default, and I haven't figured out how to override that).

I think it's better than both Divvy and SizeUp.

Also, +1 for vimperator and Quicksilver.
The lesson would be not to sign exclusitivity agreements with a potential acquirer.

Or, alternatively, you make the price of exclusivity, independent of successful deal completion, high enough to make it worthwhile.
Only Burning Man Stands Between Diaspora and Its Public Launch
I'm not sure if trackpads have the same ergonomic properties as a trackball. It's possible but I might wait and see if any research or anecdotal evidence emerges
Thanks, but yeah, in my case, it doesn't work since my MacBook is too old to support it. But I tried it and it seemed very useful indeed.
What else would you expect when it is bad?
>When the hacker's system crashes in Windows, as with all typical Windows crashes, Heckman said the user would be prompted to send the error details — including the malicious code — to Microsoft. The funny thing is that many say yes, according to Heckman.

That's funny. I distinctly remember noticing how those error details frequently "complete" instantly, so I've performed an experiment a number of times:

1) Get the report-crash window to pop up. 2) yank your Ethernet cord / power off your wireless. 3) submit report. 4) "success!"

The only times it's ever sent anything has been when some Microsoft core-product crashed on me, and then you get a progress bar and nearly always a link to info on a (likely) related error. And it catches less than 1/2 of the ones I've generated.
Archived under "Defense Against the Dark Arts".
Procs (lambdas, procs and Proc-wrapped blocks) and Methods are callable and all respond to #call.

As wycats pointed out in a post earlier this year (http://yehudakatz.com/2010/02/21/ruby-is-not-a-callable-orie...), the reason you don't need to explicitly call #call on methods is that Ruby is designed for the common case of calling methods. In addition, it's uncommon to even explicitly use #call or #[] on Procs since calling them is built into the language via yield.
Source is the lawyer handling my paperwork. http://www.trackitt.com/ also has info by nationality.
It hasn't stopped working, it just behaves differently. It stopped working on shadow blur amount of 0, but it works at 1px or more.
Now hold on just a minute. I didn't say anything about it working well, or destroying Facebook or anything remotely like that.

I said they may have it working since they last talked about it. That's all.
I have just finished the first iteration of a web app written in clojure and in the several hundred lines of code, I have a single variable which changes state.
Actually, they just wanted Theora (now WebM) blessed as the one codec you knew would always be available. They were quite happy for "better" codecs to be provided in specific circumstances as long there was a baseline that would be guaranteed to be supported everywhere. It was Apple & Nokia that pushed for only one codec (namely H.264, which coincidentally couldn't be mandated as part of the standard and implemented everywhere because of patents).
YouTube open free movies
I'm wondering why the roads are still so full of cars, even late into the night.
The kind of teacher/pupil coach/athlete relationship you are talking about is expressly not what Universities have historically aimed to provide. A University gives a student access to resources (including mentors), and time to study, it _does not_ provide someone to continuously watch over you in the way you describe.

In fact, you are only really tested to see if you have improved once in an entire bachelor degree -- at the end of it.
It's not a problem in Ruby because you don't pass around method instances, you pass around Procs (wrapped blocks, lambdas and procs), so if you are passing a callable around, you know it's a Proc. If you are passing around a method instance, you should almost certainly be using a block, lambda or proc.

Also, see wycats post: http://yehudakatz.com/2010/02/21/ruby-is-not-a-callable-orie...
The economy's great or bad depending on what you look at.

Large businesses are doing fine--they get a lot of money from investing in diverse markets that are less affected by a single country's political and social situation.

Small businesses and most people in the US are still in a rough spot though.
It seems like the exclusivity agreement is the main issue here. Imagine if 3PAR had an exclusivity agreement with either HP or Dell, they would not be in such a good negotiating position that they can add hundreds of millions onto the price.
I almost never hit yes for those popups. Much of the information I touch should never leave the company. It's probably safe to send the crash dump but it's safer still to not.
People with second and third jobs, people taking night shifts to stay employed, people working late to stay employed.

That and stuff like it, mostly.
How RabbitMQ 2.0 stores messages on disk
"Product/market fit is not an exit" - Izhar Armony on the limits of lean
The slab you see to the right of the address/search combo bar is a tab.
It's an extension of the critique leveled at dynamically typed languages by Java/C/C++ devs. How can you possibly work in a world where function foo can return/expect any type?

The more dynamic (powerful?) the language the more leverage good, experienced developers have. They can achieve results in 10 lines of code that are hard/impossible in more static languages (closures, meta-classes etc.). The other edge of the sword is that one dud developer can bring your whole stack down by being too smart for their own good. The more dynamic the system the greater the risk. In Ruby as is pointed out you can have a developer on the other side of your code base royally screw you because he wants feature X of sequences to act differently.

As with all things it's a balancing act, how smart are your devs, how much time can you spend testing and how strict are your coding standards.
Bathroom Monologue: In Sheep's Clothing
On a completely different note, I'm disappointed to hear that they've been courting an acquisition. I really don't understand this -- you have a great product, happy customers, lots of growth, a solid business model, and tons of continued growth potential; why would you want to get out of that?

I've been promoting their service and gradually signing up my clients (even though, last I checked, their reseller program still wasn't active). I was hesitant at first because I wanted to be sure that my clients were getting a service which would be around for the long term. Bummer.
Keep the Fire Burning
Not to pile on, but It's "Mac", short for Macintosh. MAC is, as far as I can think, only for Media Access Control (as in MAC address).

That said, my first thought for the low barrier to no-mouse would be Linux as well, but as others have said there is more to OSX than just a pretty face.
Ask HN: How do you find careful programmers vs. clever programmers?
It seems like there are at least two kinds of software people: the clever and the careful. I'm oversimplifying of course but it seems that some people really enjoy making things in new, clever ways. They like new programming languages, they like doing stuff in far fewer lines of code than it would normally take, they love clever techniques, new algorithms and so on. In contrast, the careful people just really want to make sure it works and don't really care as much about using some neat trick.

I think all good programmers have aspects of both. I think I tend to skew more toward the clever side but I think I have a healthy dose of careful. Another programmer I know is super paranoid about bugs and is much more focused on being careful. Perhaps that is because she spent a lot more time in a real software company which ships code to big customers where as I spend a lot more time on research style projects.

So I think I have a relatively good sense of how to find the clever programmers. But my company is currently searching for someone more on the careful end. How does one find the careful programmers? How does one find the kind of person how says "My system never goes down. It's tested 10-ways from Sunday and is bulletproof"?
A more humorous take on it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zADyh0JQh8
I call this the textmate syndrom. It is too easy to have text programs today give you a standard start to your webpages with just a few hotkeys.

Why would you go back and delete the js libraries if you want to just write one line of text? It becomes slower to...
What about the dev v. project manager?

Bah! Devs vs. DB admins, that's where the blood stains the rivers red, the crows feast like kings, and legends are born!
I couldn't live without Visor, I have it set to ctrl-~ and a full screen terminal. It's lovely, I spend most of my time there with vim and screen.
I've always wondered about tab usage among the typical IE user. Do you have any hard numbers or studies that corroborate your statement? I ask not to put you on the spot, but figure it's possible you have this information or may even work in a usability lab that has actually studied this (this is Hacker News after all).
I think you have to talk about the pros and cons overall not just the amount.

Pros:

+ Can boost developers' morale. Feeling of contribution of their work to society is a plus for many people. If developers are shameful of their work or do not want it publicized, however, it could decrease morale.

+ Possible increase in amount of eyes on code and users of product, which may increase the need for code changes that could increase the quality of the product. The predicted quality increase is still often overestimated.

Cons:

- Most projects with any respectable amount of use in-the-wild (many are not used, and it is not a problem) require a level of support which might not have been necessary had they not been open-sourced. And the amount of time required for support and related added functionality is often underestimated.

- Despite best efforts, projects will inadvertently leak private company data. Usually the risk associated with data going public is small, but web searches can often find passwords, etc. Many things can mitigate this risk (thoughtful design and practices, a more secure network, etc.), but it is a risk.

Tips:

* The more time spent on fewer projects, the more successful they will be, and the more this will reflect positively on the company.

* You need a good balance where there are enough leads on the project to sustain some leaving, but too much complexity will kill a project.

* Company and organizational/cultural politics can severely weaken a project. This is probably just as valid of a reason that many large academic projects stink as the reason that they are not money-driven or having to deal with competition.

* Lawyers and legal/licensing concerns can kill or severely stagnate an OSS project.

Despite all that, I still think companies should do as much OSS work as possible, even if it isn't always good for business.
I think I might like this actually. Chrome was a good start to reducing the wasted vertical space in the browser compared to earlier versions of firefox. Combining the address bar and tabs into one line is the next logical option, it might work, it might not. Tough to know unless you've tried it for a while.
The problem with this article implies a bureaucratic division of labor when developers are often the sysadmins. Any upcoming startup can't afford to be resistant to change--and things will break, but nobody will know more about the software than the developer. This kind of thinking reminds me of the way the enterprise software world is run, and they're not exactly renowned for quality, either.

I've found that great scaling is the result of sending sysadmins to work along side developers, and having developers work with production/testing to learn about each's side struggle. It's not R&D vs Operations, they're on the same team! If you're building a house, you might have architects and builders, and while the architect draws the blueprints, the actual construction people are just as important since they have an equally good understanding of the other side, such as applying the materials in good form.
talk to a different lawyer. Try these dudes:

Leon Hazany
310-500-5052
leon@hazanylaw.com

Robert Goodman
914-935-0015
rig@rigoodmanlaw.com
http://www.rigoodmanlaw.com/

Leon is based in LA and was very helpful when i spoke w him about my co-founder. Robert is based in NYC and was particularly knowledgeable about tech and immigration.

also, fyi, ALWAYS TALK TO MULTIPLE LAWYERS, especially when one does not give you a satisfactory response. Immigration is complex and many are bleeding heart save-the-poor types who do not understand the biz/startup side of the equation at all.

Every lawyer will give you 30-60min of their time on the phone for free. Multiply that by the number of lawyers in the world and you can get A LOT of legal advice for free.

Good luck!
I have been on 6 different visas, over 15 years, I have quite a bit of experience in the matter.

1. 90% of the answers in this thread are bad advice. Some of it really bad. A lot of it just misleading, bogus or exaggerated (on HN, it's bad form to criticize others, but when it comes to life-altering advice such as here, I can't let it stand).

2. It's too complicated to explain in a paragraph. It depends on too many factors.

3. The best lawyer site I have ever seen is http://usvisanews.com. Read this weekly for 6 months, then you'll start having an idea of how it works

A few facts:

a. anybody can incorporate a US corporation. You don't even have to set foot in the US, by the way, to do so.

b. the main issue is living in the US while having some kind of activity for a company. It's usually defined as work, and that's when you must be very careful and have the right status.
I don't just read that it is bad, I see the effects in my environment. It's happening everywhere I look around locally, businesses that have been around for years closing, no raises, no spending and everything that I hear about things going well at the top end just don't seem to be reflected at the bottom.
Chrome is my primary browser, but every now and then what I really miss about the two separate bars in Firefox is this use-case:

1) Select and right-click word/phrase on page

2) Select a search engine from search bar list

3) Look it up instantly on whichever search engine has focus in the search bar.

In Chrome this wouldn't be possible without a form of overhead somewhere (add-on, user script, using keyboard, etc.)

Just to clarify, I'm not against using the keyboard shortcuts - just that when I'm reading a page with a hand on the mouse/trackpad, it annoys me a just a little bit to switch to the keyboard and back to the mouse again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_triangle
You might have to mess around with the default behaviour but you can use the Firefox address bar as a search box. You can set it up so that typing 'g foo' searches for foo on Google, 'w bar' searches for bar on Wikipedia etc. It's actually more useful than the search box (in my opinion) as you can set up shortcuts so 'gm' will open google mail, 'lol' will open up the lolcats website. So there's really no need for a bookmarks bar either (as long as you can remember your shortcuts!).
I've also talked to some immigration lawyers, and that seems to be the only route that can get you 6 years in the u.s. The other route maybe graduate from a u.s university and use your 29-month opt period (you do have to extended it) to work for you own u.s registered company. Since opt authorization is done by the school you graduate from, it should be much easier to do than issuing an h1b for yourself.

Just my 2 cents,
Implementing OpenID on Your Site
And here I thought it was sysadmin v DB Admin.

I guess no one likes the poor DBA...
Welcome to 1996...
Whistling past the graveyard when it comes to the greater VC industry including most especially the unfounded hope that the IPO market will return in the foreseeable future. As I've commented before, the modern VC era was the product of government laws and regulations, from the beginning when the Small Business Investment Act of 1958 put it "over the top" to the final nail in the coffin in 2002 with SarBox.

YC and AVC type companies are great, but I continue to ask, where will the next radically new hardware thing like FPGAs come from (in terms of impact, they had plenty of antecedents)? Heck, the entire post-Fairchild history of Silicon Valley, the silicon part of it, was in this period....
How to Screw Up an On-Site Interview