skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As entrepreneurs in the US are trying to create jobs and companies we pay 30%+, just not fair.
Imagine if they had included Click-to-Flash by default instead.
Ask HN: Startup jobs for International students
I am an international student (Computer Science and Math major) studying at a liberal arts school (yeah, I know) in the US, currently a senior looking for jobs. Without giving away too much, I want to say that I'm fairly qualified in programming and I have a decent GPA. I have a lot of research under my belt and interesting projects. I think working for startups is amazing experience but from what I've seen they are reluctant to hire international because of whole H1-B situation. How much of it is true? Is there a resource for finding out if a startup will take foreigners?
Unfortunately these people have been playing with pads since they were kids, this isn't a change that could be introduced easily. I do think it is more or less the way things need to go though, but I don't actually see it happening.
Well, it's up to England's citizens to change the efficiency of England's government. Google is doing great things. By but dodging its taxes, it is forcing ordinary citizens to pay more. Or make do with less.

It doesn't matter whether it would do better with the money. I think I could do better with my tax money than the US government. But then, that's not my choice to make. My job is to work to make sure that the US government does better with my tax money. Not to deny the government the money. If I don't pay, someone else will have to. And that's not okay.

It's like saying I need your sandwich more than you do. I'm hungrier, I could make better use of it, therefor I should get your sandwich. Even if I could legally take your sandwich. It's still not okay. It's your sandwich! If I take it, you go hungry.
Wrong link, here's the Monkey Peeler:

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=ycyRAAAAEBAJ

How can you patent something likes this? Isn't it just a regular peeler?
I look up odd 'words' all the time. However the vast majority are not verbs, adjectives, or simple nouns, but proper nouns, and in effect 'proper verbs' (scientific/technical, actual code). How are you going to beat selecting in Chrome, and right-click google?
Netbook generally isn't about form factor, it's about use factor. A netbook is made for lightweight browsing, emailing, IM'ing, etc. You know, stuff on the 'net.

The new MBA falls into the class of devices known as ultraportables. It's a full powered machine in a very small form factor/weight factor.
They follow the letter of the law. If the law is bad, change the law, don't bash Google for managing it's tax liability cost effectively and accuse them of being evil.
FWIW, opposing "Platonists" doesnt mean opposing Greeks. Aristotlean and Socratic were two different ways of thought but both greek.
You're not nuts. I'm doing it and I'm over 40, I spent a decade or two in civil engineering as a land surveyor and then as a cartographer. That whole industry collapsed, and since I had learned BASIC and C in high school and did some sysadmin UNIX stuff decades ago, I'm getting back up to speed thanks to Python.

My advice would be to get a related job in a shop that uses a similar set of technologies and has programmers on staff. Keep working on your skill set, and get some mentoring from an experienced programmer.

Another avenue I would recommend is to work on a high-quality open source project to get some experience under your belt.
Yahoo used to be a BSD shop, then moved to linux.

Yahoo still uses BSD. They're not completely BSD, of course; but they're not completely linux either.
Ethics aside, Google shouldn't seek to deprive nations of tax revenue because they benefit in no small part from that money. They hire employees educated with government money, buy research projects funded with government money, build data centers that depend upon public infrastructure, etc.
Frankly, without government money, Google would not exist.

By gaming the tax systems, they're not only flipping the bird to the ladder they stood upon to create Google, but they're strangling the future pipeline for the very government products they depend upon.

And people only call Google out for crap like this because they insist on running around claiming they "Do No Evil". They set the bar higher for themselves. If they didn't want it there, they should shut up about it already.
Flash had never come in-the-box for Windows, even long before Microsoft had Silverlight.
I think the last paragraph really sums up why this drastic of a change is not going to happen:

"Without the helmet, they wouldn't hit their head in stupid plays," says P. David Halstead, technical director for the Nocsae, the group that sets helmet-safety standards. But without helmets, the game "wouldn't be football," he says.

There may be a sport similar to American football without helmets right now that becomes very popular in coming years. However I don't see such a drastic change ever being applied to American football directly.
I'm going through a very similar situation, though I never finished my degree the first time around. I dropped out, and spent most of my 20's working in various dead end tech support jobs. Then 3 years ago I went back and finished my degree. I graduated in June of 2009. I took a job I now hate because I was trying to get in to get experience and to be able to pay off my student loans. I'm going through the motions in this job, but trying to work my way into the field I want to be in, web development. Bottom line for me is, if you don't enjoy what you do for a living, you don't find it engaging, then you shouldn't be in that job. Find the job you want to work in. I realize it's more difficult as a person who is looking and not currently employed full time, but keep at it. Just keep racking up experience where you can, and eventually you'll get the job you want to be in. Trust me, I've wasted a year in this job, and if I could go back a year, I wouldn't have taken this position.
Your Employees Are Voyeurs
The camera is now called a "FaceTime camera" unlike all the other Apple laptops which have "iSight camera." I wonder if there is a significance to the name change.
Sure, but just because he hasn't designed an interface doesn't invalidate his opinion. His opinions are mostly from the perspective of his field, which in some ways influence user interface design.

Many user interfaces use elements (he did invent sparklines) and principles he has talked about in his books.

I mean seriously, if Joe User criticizes a user interface is he wrong because he hasn't designed an interface before?
Has Google stuck to its philosophy?
Yeah, I'm not familiar enough with tax law to know the details of tax laws. I'm sure they're terribly written. Especially in the United States. We need desperate tax reform. Really it ought to be the first place we look for solving the deficit: closing loop holes and raising taxes. But if those two words are put in the same paragraph as each other -- "raise" and "taxes" -- there's mass panic.
Check out these 2 posts

http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/

http://cdixon.org/2010/10/16/the-ladies-night-strategy/
Yes, if the price is right, and the specification interface is easy.

The interface needs to be significantly less effort than writing/modifying a Stackscript (http://blog.linode.com/2010/02/09/introducing-stackscripts/)
ritard, in this case.
> By but dodging its taxes, it is forcing ordinary citizens to pay more. Or make do with less.

See, I'd disagree with you and say the opposite. I think England taking money from Google would mean less infrastructure and research out there in the world, meaning common citizens would be forced to pay more for services instead of Google's free services, or make do with less.

> I think I could do better with my tax money than the US government. But then, that's not my choice to make.

I believe it should be. Really, I mean that, I think taxes on productive labor are evil. Really, actually, unmitigated evil. I'm not against taxes, I'd actually be in favor for high property taxes divided split between federal, state, and local, which would encourage economy of space, reduce waste, and discourage real estate speculation while encouraging development. High taxes are okay. But taxing earned income, no way. Demanding a percent of honest labor to me seems no different than claiming ownership over a percent of a man. I think it's tyranny, and that in the future people will look horrified at income taxes the way we look at feudalism, serfdom, slavery, and other forced claims over a man's labor. But I understand I'm currently in the minority on that point of view.
In practical terms, modern mathematical finance's modeling of market with the Gaussian distribution has the implication that it is possible to add together a number of risky items to get a product which is less risky.

Nonsense. Any Finance 101 textbook will tell you this is only true if the securities are uncorrelated. It will also tell you that assuming the EMH holds, people will buy into the lower risk index until returns are reduced to 1%.

As for LTCM, the thing that killed them is that they didn't have an unlimited supply of credit and they got hit by margin calls.

The entire stable of CDO etc product sold on the same basis, the basis of providing risks no greater than the highest rated corporate bond but with significantly higher return.

No, the entire stable of mortgage-backed products was backed by the assumption that housing won't go down crash, a factor exogenous to Black Scholes. Also, you seem to not understand how CDOs are priced - the Black Scholes style models are used for interest rates, which have not exhibited infinite variance. Default rates, which are included separately, also have not exhibited infinite variance (in fact, since they are bounded between 0 and 1 they cannot exhibit infinite variance).

No model works if you plug in the wrong parameters. To quote Babbage: ...I have been asked, – "...if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
I've got an obligation to maximize profits too: an obligation to support my family. But I don't have the resources Google does to set up complex income shifting tax avoidance schemes, and for that I'm heavily penalized by paying a much larger share of my income in taxes than a company like Google does.

If these big companies want to have the rights and privileges that citizens do (treated as legal entities, freedom of speech through political contributions, etc) then they should have to play by the same rules and with the same encumbrances.
The reason I dislike Microsoft and actively avoid their platforms is largely because despite their vast resources and obvious talent, their management rarely compete head to head with technology and would rather resort to other practises that, as a tech person make me sad.

There are plenty of examples of this. See what they did to companies that wanted to ship dual-boot BeOS systems. See the approach they took to OOXML. See the approach they're currently taking to suing OEMs shipping Android handsets that refuse to pay their license fees. See the copius amounts of misinformation they put out about Linux.

A company with Microsoft's resources, I want to see competing for my business with the tech they're obviously capable of producing.
We can argue what is legal or illegal, and whether something that is legal should be illegal etc for ages.

The fact is that they pay 2% tax while most US based persons pay at least 10x that rate.
Trademarks & patents for startups
Trademarks for start-ups promotion started on October 12, 2010:

http://www.pinskylaw.ca/News/news.htm

Patents for start-ups promotion will start on October 25, 2010:

http://www.pinskylaw.ca/News/patents_for_startups.htm
Unless you made a shitload of money I highly doubt your effective rate was 40%. The rate on the last x% of your money might have been taxed at 40% but most places have a progressive tax structure. Deductions should lower the effective rate further.

I'm speaking for the US, by the way.
Does arc have full tail call optimisation?

Yes. Arc's reference implementation inherits TCO from Racket.
Startup idea: Company that cheaply sets up individuals/small companies to evade taxes in the same way big corporations do. You pay a subscription fee or something and they fill out the returns and set up a PO Box in Bermuda or whatever.
Nice gesture, but (unless I'm mistaken) the 24+ hours of being dead means that its upvotes/time ratio won't see it back on most people's screens
I hope you guys can find other means/ways to create jobs. I live in Vancouver where hi-tech companies receive generous amount of SR&ED (Science Research and Education) grant. Let's just say that it was a good thing for short-term but not-so for long-term.
Precisely why I want to see someone successfully supplant it. We're so wired into thinking we need a keyboard, that it's nigh-ideal, that I really want to see something better because I can't think of what it could possibly be.
Somehow I don't think so. Oracle is a pure B2B play. Apple computers are still a rarity in the enterprise, and in those companies that do have Apple computers are most likely not Oracle's target market.

Oracle might try to remedy this situation eventually, but my bet is that it will be too little, too late.
So in effect, this is hiring a Linux sysadmin consultant for a short/fixed term contract (?)

That's cool. A lot of devs is not very good at sys admin stuff. I've actually had my puppet config and other sysadmin set up by a contractor.
When is this ?

Maybe add a link to the website ?

How many people do you think will attend ?
Is there any point where you would want to pass a pointer but NOT because you want mutable state, simply because it's more efficient or something?
i agree with everything, but i especially agree with this:

> Make stuff you can show off.

if you have a good portfolio and can convince someone to look at it, they will care much less about your experience, grades, etc..
To be fair, its been tried a couple of times to build really customizable machines. It is just more expensive from a manufacturing point of view and the market is never really there. The Treo lost its slot and I seem to remember an attempt by some of the Amiga team to build a PC in a modular way (ended up in a museum somewhere).

The problem has really been the cellphone focus which means "open" = "what carriers want". The lack of a true iPod touch equivalent has hurt the potential of Android.

I really think if you were trying to build and open, customizable, modular platform, it would be competitive with Apple, Microsoft, and RIM. Android really doesn't have a love for an ecosystem of gadgets around it. It is a lone wolf and needs to really have a high speed connector where people could really build cool add-ons that it can plug into. Make it the "I can carry my world" device that can be plugged into other things to get more power / capability.

The funny thing is that the inside of the Mac Pro has so many niceties from a hardware expansion point of view that never really appear on PCs.
Yeah, 64bit and the graphics card will probably become more important. I was wondering why they went with the Nvidia card (which probably precluded using a Core i-series processor instead of the Core 2 Duo), but given the OpenCL emphasis, it makes sense. Hopefully Apple will allow some performance optimizations, like how they disabled the water-ripple effect of Dashboard on non-OpenGL video card computers when that came out.
Ask HN: Design work for bootstrapped side project?
I have a side project I'm working to launch in the next month or so. I'm a developer, code is my thing. And if you ask my daughter she will tell you, I can't even draw a stick figure... So my question is, what is the best solution to the lack of design skill and getting a nice yet cheap design for a side project?
Sorry but... this opinion is about three years old.
I intend to get Hackety Hack 1.0 in there, for sure.
Indeed, they were somewhat forced to maintain their own port of Sun's JDK because Sun was in a position of power and Apple was perpetually "beleaguered" back then. In contrast, Sun had no choice but to put resources into maintaining the Windows version of the JDK. Perhaps Apple has grown to the point where they can expect Oracle to deliver the JDK on Mac if they want to have a presence there.

If not Oracle, then the OpenJDK community. Either way, if it's wanted badly enough, it will happen.

The long-shot bet would be an LLVM/VMKit implementation that is clean of Sun code.
Why it's so hard to digest this? GS is so successful and so hated for certain reasons, and that's one of them.
Maybe they will, maybe not. But for the moment Apple is effectively dropping Java support, and that's not a minor thing.

I'm writing this on an MBP and might well post from a Macbook Air someday but I think Hacker News is giving Apple a very non-Hackerlike treatment. They're clearly moving their computers to a much more controlled iPhone/iPad model.
You could try asking them? Is there a company or a small niche you're really interested in? Might as well pitch yourself directly to them.
I still need to figure out how to deliver the custom machine image after building it on racksapcecloud/slicehost.

"Pick this option in your slicehost setup. SCP this file into your home directory. sudo go-get-a-coffee.sh and come back in twenty minutes."

Alternatively, the same thing delivered as a Chef script or what have you. Capistrano and Deprec used to be a fairly good option for getting a generic Rails stack ready on Ubuntu, for example.

As to whether I would pay for this: heck yes, but there is a fairly narrow window for it. When I'm doing green field development, like where I am for a very small window now for Appointment Reminder, I can make extensive changes to my infrastructure without paying ginormous switching costs. After that site goes live for the first time, though, I can't use your service until the next time I launch a product, because I can't trust that you understand my needs intimately enough to handle a migration.

Why would I pay for this? Fairly straightforward: I am not a professional sysadmin -- I am a developer who knows a few things about a few things because he has to. I know I'm going to burn two or three days tweaking my configuration prior to launching AR, even with productivity enhancers like Deprec to use. I will probably make at least a few consequential errors which will lurk until they bring the site down some weeks later, and create technical debt against later upgrades. I do not enjoy configuring servers. Blocking off three days to tweak an Ubuntu install prevents me from writing a two line email to a satisfied client and booking a consulting engagement worth several thousand dollars.

Incidentally: you're going to hear a lot of feedback from developers about how you're gouging them if you charge reasonable prices for this. They are not your customers.
Try to leverage your previous experiences. Five years of work experience and your development skills make you the uniqe person.

Add what Patrick wrote above and try to review your situation in this ligth.
It is: http://startupbootcamp.dk/ :)
Welcome to the world of tax arbitrage. More information:

http://www.freshfields.com/publications/pdfs/2007/boyle.pdf

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/austan.goolsbee/research/mun...

http://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/pubeco/v93y2009i1-2p142-159.htm...
How did you end up spending 5 years in tech support after gaining an electrical engineering degree? Shouldn't you have been working as an electrical engineer?

The question may seem unhelpful, but I suspect that in the answer may lie a problem that is going to persist throughout any type of career change that you attempt.
Generally I think programmers hate Microsoft because programmers hate Microsoft. It's a self-perpetuating meme, and let's be honest, if your goal is to hate Microsoft (or any extremely large corporation) it's pretty easy to come up with reasons. Especially IE6, which is the Exxon Valdez of the programming world.
It's Tuesday Nov. 9th, 09:00-13:00

www.startupbootcamp.dk

90 signed up so far ;) a portion of which are investors, expect north of 150.

This is the culmination of 3 months of 24x7 work for our ten teams(1) and they're dying to show off their stuff!

(1) Our entrepreneurs are from Denmark, Romania, UK, Lithuania, Nigeria, Germany, Latvia, Argentina, Portugal, Iceland, and Russia!
What if my income is $250 million? It still evil for the government to claim a percentage of that to provide services?
I get the following error:

Unknown or expired link.

Does this mean the site is down?
I will be there!
Yes. The fact that anyone can get a concussion in 2010 with a modern helmet on is crazy.

Fix the helmet or get rid of it.
Debate: Computing was the Most Significant Tech Advance of 20th Century?
Actually, there is a body of research attesting to your logic:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2006/11/peltzman_on_reg.htm...
There are 2 things involved in this. 1. Setting up the initial server involves quite a bit of labor. 2. It involves skill. If your customer is trying to avoid the labor but has enough skill to maintain it later then this makes sense. If he doesn't have enough skill to maintain the server after the initial setup then this is useless. He can let you manage the server as well.
Physics is extremely useful in terms of making models of reality. It requires somewhat different ways of thinking in comparison to math, but is no less useful to a programmer. Of course, if you are building things that interact with the real world, it's invaluable.
It's worth mentioning that AIR apps do not use native UI widgets. (and in my opinion: the Flex widgets kind of suck)
Sounds really interesting. Where is it taking place?
They're not "skimping on paying taxes", IMO. They're arranging their affairs in such a [legal] way as to maximize the return to their shareholders, which is the fiduciary duty of a public company.

The global competition in taxation is a good thing, IMO.

Am I exploiting a loop hole by deducting my mortgage interest? Am I exploiting a loop hole by deciding to hold an investment an extra day so as to get long-term capital gains treatment? Am I exploiting a loop hole by buying a computer or washing machine on "state sales tax holiday weekend"?

Maybe you'd argue that I am, but I believe that I'm just reacting rationally to the incentives offered. (There might be a valid government reason to encourage home ownership, long-term investing, or to spur local purchases in the economy. Must I ignore the incentives to act in a way that governments have decided to encourage? If not, why is it different for GOOG?)

"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands." Judge Learned Hand, 1935
How far are you getting, are you not getting interviews or are you getting stuck at the interview stage ?
I think this is true but I think a lot of us on HN are either too far gone or started too early to realize.
Windows and Linux drivers are maintained by the manufacturers.
Why would you have nil in a list of integers? In cases where you encounter nil instead of some type you look for you can add behavior to nil without doing if nil? in the function all the time.

I would agree that not having nil is better if you have these big typesystems but for a dynamic languge its hard to avoid.

Question: Don't these static langauge use "unit" to signal what nil would do in clojure (in some casses)?
Thanks for all the responses so far! Any recommendations about CSS? And recommendations for good books apart from "Javascript the good parts" mentioned so far?