skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
USCIS's main problem is that they are stretched too thin given the current resources. Adding a subjective approval process to their roster of duties without giving them more resources is only likely to lengthen the time it takes to get any kind of permit. Adding new resources at the scale required to fix it is impossible given the current budget crunch.

By adding the investor clause, the government is essentially 'outsourcing' the subjective qualification process to 'qualified investors'. I don't think it is a perfect solution but it seems like a practical approach given the constraints.
A Different Model for Building Software
If you don't need the memory savings, you probably want to start migrating to ruby 1.9 for the speed improvements. JRuby is also a good alternative. (faster than 1.8, OS-level threads)

So no reason to not use REE, but there are other alternatives that have their own strengths.
All-American Streetcar Boom Fuels Urban Future
Your mention of Wikipedia is a red herring since the idea there is the content is user generated and donated by the creator with a CC license. Things that are found to have been copy-pasted are removed.

JSTOR sells content so that's also a red herring.

Google Books is relevant. Their business model is based on not only stealing, but selling without permission content they don't own. This is criminal and unethical.

edit: downvoters please state your case. Is it that you agree that corporations should be able to steal content from those of us who actually create things, as Google is doing with Google Books?
This is my take on a certain tech business alliance announced Feb 11...
Bingo. Cory Doctorow's take on it is informative, even if you don't agree with his conclusions, as he covers a lot of this; it heavily features our old friends, the music publishers (who became a viable business themselves, back in the day, only by taking the music that already existed and selling it on without permission).

Well worth reading, and comes under a creative commons licence.

http://craphound.com/content/download/
Congratz, you posted a wikipedia article, care to explain why?
http://www.fabricegrinda.com/entrepreneurship/9-business-sel...
Easily manage Git hooks (per user, project, or globally)
I made a project that did news recommendations a few years ago. One major problem I came across while developing it is that there's a trade-off between accuracy and bias. The more accurate recommended articles are to a user's taste, the more they reinforce biases that he or she has. Republicans like right-leaning articles, Democrats like left-leaning articles, etc.
If true, I think the market will make some obvious adjustments. In-app content will be vastly (%30?) more expensive than "out-of-app" purchases. Apple will counter with more reasonable rates. The end result will mean nothing has been lost and that app content will be more accessible. As with similar Apple initiatives (music, apps, etc.), users may find themselves more eager to pay for content at the end of the day.

Apple are canny about their relationships with content owners - I'm hesitant to believe that they'd attempt a flagrant "Apple tax". Many of their most important products - the iPhone comes to mind - have a relatively small slice of their market. In this atmosphere, it would be untenable to risk losing important content sources with exorbitant fees.
This may be a bit more than you're looking for, but Van Lindberg's book, Intellectual Property and Open Source, is pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Pro...
is it me or is 30 a robbery? I feel like Im watching goodfellas and any italian mafia movie where the mob asks for unfair piece of the business so they can protect you from unwanted guests...
Free Online Kurdistan Newspapers
FYI, I am using Firefox 3.6.13 on a Mac. I do not see any tags. I do see tags in the first photo when using Chrome or Safari.
Manage a web site with Git and Gitosis
The business horse answers your business questions
Initially I thought this, but Amazon has to pass on 70% of the sale to the publisher, and with Apple taking 30%, regardless of how much the ebook was sold for, Amazon is left with nothing.
Although it would complicate matters, I'd prefer the license to be by song or by band or similar. Otherwise they'd either need to track your listening/downloading habits to make payments to artists fair, or else just make the payments on their own metrics (which are always tilted toward the artists most controlled by the labels)
America: The Grim Truth [2010]
Sort of. It allows lawyers to make hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawsuits if/when it happens. In general though, it's the nature of software to make it hard for someone to steal whole-products worth of code and repurpose it for their own similar-but-different product.

The problem is that current laws now allow someone else to force me to stop using my own code. Which is really a more dangerous threat as far as I'm concerned.
I assume you are referring to the way the government is constraining who they qualify as an 'investor' (someone who has made an investments of at least $50,000 every year for the past 3 years)? It does make sense to have some clause like that to avoid the loophole you mentioned.

It is still orthogonal to what I am saying though, which is that once an entrepreneur has raised the money from a qualified investor for a legitimate startup, they should essentially get a permanent residency permit.
If that was the case, they could require Amazon to use their inapp purchasing platform without taking a 30% cut.

It seems pretty clear to me that 30% of all Amazon's iOS business would be a nice addition to anyone's bottom line, and Apple feel like they're in a position to take it.
"A ‘Top of All Stories’ story on Digg would have previously brought in 80-100k uniques whereas of late we’re seeing between 5-10k on average."

Ouch.
Regarding ajax heavy applications, I have been faced with that particular problem. A few of my sites are javascript heavy apps, with long flows between page reloads. If I ever change my server API in a way that would break the javascript, I need to signal to the client that it needs to refresh. (I keep track of version numbers for the server code, and whenever that is bumped, it means the client is out of sync)

This can be kinda.. awkward. What I've opted either a lightbox or some kind of message saying we need to refresh the page. But that is not ideal.

Has anyone dealt with this issue before? With javascript heavy apps, the development is more like a traditional desktop app, or a mobile app that has to deal with the client/server model interface in a non-trivial manner.
The post doesn't mention it, but the best source for learning awk is _The Awk Programming Language_ (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/) by Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan. It's short and to the point, has a good tutorial and reference, and it's even co-written by Brian Kernighan. It's that good. There's also a collection at resources at http://awk.info/ .

Awk's pattern-structured rules are very powerful, and learning to use them well (rather than writing if statements, etc.) is a big part of using awk idiomatically.

Also, note which awk you're using - awk may actually be nawk ("new awk", the awk that book covers) or GNU awk, which, in typical FSF fashion, has grafted on a whole bunch of extra functionality. (Although the networking stuff is cool.) Things will probably make more sense if you start with nawk, and then explore the sprawling extensions of gawk.
So facebook spent a mathematically undefined amount on hosting? Sounds like something a BigCo would do to get out of paying their hosting bill.
I'm interested by the nosedive in attention to netbooks.

Obviously the media has gotten bored and moved onto tablets, but have consumers really moved past netbooks? I thought they filled a real niche and would be significant for a lot longer
I'm not sure why you think they didn't before... The term is in their glossary [1]. A cursory search found the term has been in use by BBC News for at least a decade.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5400052.stm#whitehat
I am the author. You are right. I've updated the page.
" I'm sorry but the majority of what's called web development is writing WordPress themes or Drupal modules, and most of this work is leveraging some API in tedious and uninteresting ways. Create this content type, do this when you save it, make this form, validate it like that, blah blah. "

You're correct that lots of web development is simple. However, a very large assemblage of simple components is not simple, and lots of web apps are very large. For example: one of the first web projects I worked on was a game written in PHP and MySQL. At first, it went much faster than expected, as writing a basic CRUD app in PHP is very simple. However, as it grew, it turned into an unmaintainable mess, and I got my first lesson in some basic coding standards.

My friend had a good distinction - there's "difficult" projects and "complicated" projects. Something that is difficult might require some clever algorithms and maybe more time spent with a pen and paper than at the keyboard/ Something that is complicated requires a lot of coding, and thus a lot of effort spent in organising that code.
Walking Creates A Thirst For Knowledge
A study that backs up what a lot of smart people (including PG) have been circling around lately.

http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2010/12/15/walking-creates-a-thirst-for-dry-knowledge/
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
Is height entirely inherited? No, diet makes extraordinary differences. Is physical strength entirely inherited? No, exercise builds muscle.

There are of course factors on both sides, but for mental / physical strength I'll happily argue for landing waaaay towards the what-you-do-with-it, not-what-you-have side.
I don't "get" them either... I have a smartphone and a netbook, and I don't see what a tablet would bring to the table. Apparently my netbook "isn't better at anything", I must have missed the release of Eclipse for iPad /s
They should make great viewers for non-reflowable nonfiction PDFs where you want to jump around the document a lot. Laptops don't fare so well with documents that want to be in full-screen portrait orientation, and e-ink devices have a large display latency.
I think you're mistaken, Paul.

Most incubators including YCombinator softly exclude single-founder businesses and yet these probably constitute at least 50% of the pool of start-ups. Add to them all businesses which get profitable enough to avoid taking outside investment and those which never get funding at all and I'd be surprised if 2/10 startup founders raise outside money, even in California.

Just assuming people who aren't getting funded aren't pursuing scalable business models is myopic.
Learn Strategies for Tapping into Foreign Markets
Well the system doesn't work at all for the little guy. I was talking patent/copyright in general. As far as software patents, my own opinion is software is obviously copyrightable but not patentable. However, that is not the current viewpoint legally, and this serves the interests of big entities not small ones.

I support IP rights. But the current system is seriously broken. Let's say I invent something totally new and innovative (which I have done many times). And I choose not to patent it. So my competitor reverse engineers my product and then patents it and sues me. What now? I can tell you because this is exact thing has happened to me. I get sued and the court case will take 5 years and require calling costly expert witnesses and the jury won't understand a word of the testimony and will flip a coin in the end. Regardless of what their decision is, I am bankrupt and the big company only spent 0.01% of revenue, and in return they got to buy what IP assets I had in bankruptcy court. Wow, that is messed up.

So let's rewind. Not getting a patent was a big mistake clearly. So let's say I got a patent. Or not just say, since I have done this one too. Now the next company says "we want to license it". I agree to this and they then hire me to create an implementation of the licensed patent which will work with their product. Then, after this is done and working and they have sold it to clients at a huge profit, they fire me and tell me I have to transfer ownership of the patent to them if I want my job back. When I refuse they start creating legal problems for me that costs tens of thousands of dollars to deal with and take me out of the employment pool for a year, and after all that their company goes bankrupt, their IP is sold to a bigger company in bankruptcy court, and then THAT company (Fortune 100) re-patents the things I have already patented and serves me with a cease and desist.

So if I get a patent or don't get a patent, me, the guy inventing awesome new things that benefit humanity, is damned either way because of corporate abuse of the system.

The only answer is to stop innovating or to become a corporate parasite that steals things.

The problem in all this is not with the concept of patents or copyright but that the way it works in practice is to enable the powerful to squash small innovators who are actually doing useful stuff.
The problem is that it isn't a craze. Very few PEOPLE are clamoring for them. Unless by people you mean a handful of city and state officials who think it's an awesome way to spend millions of dollars of money they don't really have on smiley vanity projects.
Does not still prevent anyone from selling books.
I don't think any Social App will be able to replace email unless it is just as distributed and private as email is. Maybe if the Social App ran entirely on the users machine or they could run their own servers then it would have a chance to overtake email. Maybe something like Diaspora? The fact is, people send IMPORTANT emails. People who send these emails aren't going to have their correspondence in the cloud being raked through to squeeze advertising money out.
interesting. i have had difficulty with outside-US investments. i will probably not be doing them in the future.
You are one of the youngest entrepreneur in Italy and your slides are concise, clear and well focused.
I think we will have news from you soon!
I can't even access half the published papers I want to read, so I suspect the scientific community will need to solve that problem (ie how to throttle the publishers) before any thought of allowing versioning and revisions to papers.

As well, how would references work? Citations would have to reference a specific version of every paper, which could potentially create a huge mess.

But I totally agree that change needs to come to the way scientific papers are published and accessed, and this is one of the better ideas I've seen out there.
"Your mention of Wikipedia is a red herring since the idea there is the content is user generated and donated by the creator with a CC license."

That's simply false. There is tons of public domain content in Wikipedia, for example the entire 13th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was used as the starting point for many of the original articles. And the only reason why there isn't more public domain content like this incorporated is because there isn't any more public domain content; everything after 1926 is under copyright.
I know of one existing journal that is pretty close to this, the insight journal: http://www.insight-journal.org/
To avoid the burnout which seems to follow only working on other peoples' stuff for money.
seconds late to the patent office

More often than not, the other independent inventors didn't feel the idea was worth patenting, didn't have the money to spend building a meaningful patent portfolio, or didn't want to feel like human scum.
"Police rape claim woman in court", anyone?

The correct parsing would be "Lessons learnt from the launch of Badgeville, winners of TechCrunch Disrupt's audience choice award". I think.
IMO your offline presence is more important than your online presence, but maybe I'm just old fashioned :)
Music isn't different, but it's treated that way presently. For instance, if I build a website using Windows, .Net, and SQL Server, I don't have to give Microsoft 50% of my revenue. Same with shareware. I don't have to rely on other big companies to negotiate deals with the shareware authors. I just buy the software directly from them.
> I'm of the opinion that if I was going to carry around something too big to fit in a pocket, I might as well just make that thing a laptop.

If I want to go out to a coffee shop and do some writing I have a netbook bag that I throw my iPad, a set of earbuds and an apple wireless keyboard into. It's great because it's a lot easier to focus on writing than it is with my laptop. I use Elements which syncs to dropbox. I also use that bag if I want to just hang out, sip coffee, and read the latest book I downloaded.

I love my iPad. It makes so many small tasks so much easier. Right now it's streaming a SomaFM station. I can look through and pick stations on the SomaFM app faster than I can dig through their website. It also makes a wonderful remote for my Apple TV.

Edit: I haven't had much exposure to smart phones aside from a blackberry that I didn't care for. I have owned an IBM ThinkPad 750 which is basically ye olde netbook. (Yay 14.4 modems)
I'm really hoping that we'll see some REE love for 1.9, but right now they're focused on other things (rightly so). Forking unicorn workers is so expensive without a COW-friendly GC that I've reverted back to thin.

Very happy to see development continuing, and I'll be upgrading all my 1.8.7 apps to run on this later today.

So, thanks phusion team!
'gorilla value" ??

This is a value scale I'm unfamiliar with - although I will certainly be using it in the future. I fear though that you have confused gorillas with some other species of mammal - a month free is meerkat value at best.
Standalone sandboxed IE6, IE7, IE8 executables (Recovered after a takedown)
I'd bet it's semantics.

Rolling back the code-base would mean everyone else would need to roll back theirs, and you'd lose history. It's easier across the board to simply re-write what it was - a "roll forward", if you will.
So true. "We're 90% done, with 90% to go." :)
It's reasonable for us. Most people (who are not into programming) would find it ridiculous and pointless.
I see a lot more real people using netbooks as opposed to tablets. Tablets still seem like a toy for older rich folks while netbooks are a viable cheap computing option for a lot of people who don't need a machine that does any heavy lifting.
@joshu Do you have specific selection criteria for non-US businesses? And when you do them is there usually a business model from the get go?
There's a difference between making money and highway robbery. And note that we aren't talking about content producers making money. We're talking about middlemen who serve very little purpose anymore making far more money than they deserve.
The problem is that current laws now allow someone else to force me to stop using my own code.

Well, no, not exactly. Your reply is talking about patents, which I've agreed need reform. However, you're perfectly free to use and sell your own code, as long as it doesn't duplicate some function which enjoys patent protection. (the problem here is over broad or obvious patents, like Amazon's 1-click checkout) But even then you simply have to do away with the infringing portion. For example, there was a recent post on how storenvy.com just raised funding. Well, they might have had 1-click checkout as a web store function. In the worst case they would have to eliminate that and/or find an even more innovative way for ecommerce customers to check out, but it would not likely mean the end of their business.
That is the problem here. The Kindle is not a device specific thing, it is hardware and mostly the software that is available on all devices. I do not own a Kindle, I own many Kindle books.

So if I buy one on my PC a while back, then go to my Kindle app on the iOS device and then Amazon has to hide it because it wasn't bought there?

This is actually Apple, which I own many products, being anti-competitive on allowing other bookstores at all besides iBooks.

This will force possibly the market to go more PDF and away from DRM, maybe a good direction in the end. Amazon should switch to PDFs. Then you can load those up in iBooks.
You are right there is public domain content. This is public domain and is not even a point of contention.

The only possible issue here is the non-public domain content, so that is what I mentioned. That is contributed under a CC license and that which is not is removed. So it is a red herring. There isn't a problem with Wikipedia.

If you believe the public domain content represents some IP controversy, it is up to you to establish that. I have never seen that argument presented so it's up to you to establish what it is.
couldn't agree more about persistence. Keeping an even keel during the ups and downs is very important as well.
Ask PG/Admins: I'm dead. Can I get a do-over?
I let my emotions get the best of me on a political thread and now I'm dead: you have to turn on show-dead to see me. Am I stuck dead, or can I redeem myself?
It seems like there needs to be a real break between the collectors of data and the analyzers. At the moment heaps of data is collected by the same teams that analyze it, but just as an API opens up a codebase to new ideas, so would a standard practice of placing the data into a library before starting analysis.

Fortunately there's already a growing number of places (typically government in my experience) making an effort just to keep data libraries up and open to further research.
"Vivek does have a point as well though. Currently, employers who sponsor "green cards" have the power to get the sponsored employees and their families kicked out of the country simply by firing them."

This is exactly right. While the PG does have a point, this is the most grave issue with the act. You will see the ugly when the bill passes and as more data gathers in subsequent years about how investors abuse it. Or you can just look at similar situations right now - how employees who are sponsored for green card are exploited by unscrupulous employers.
I'm building a web app because it doesn't exist yet and I want it to exist.
Sadly, I didn't have the time to go to the congress, but I've seen their club in Munich.
Their spare-time projects impressed me quite a bit: the members unlock the door with a digital key sent to the lock via wlan; they built that 3D-printer that can print it's own components, they have a self-written mandelbrot-based music visualizer, a soda machine where you can pay with a specially prepared USB-stick (anonymously, of course), computer-controlled lights in the whole flat, and lots of other cool stuff.
The members were very nice people, too.
$1.5M Robbery of Bellagio Casino Foiled Thanks to RFID Chips
For fun and profit, to disrupt the industry I am in, and to improve my skills. So pretty much all the reasons in your poll.
Actually, all three authors of that book (not just BWK) are the original authors of awk(1).
"Stay away from .co at all cost. We tried registered irealty.co when it came out since .com and many others TLDs didn't have irealty, and we really wanted that name. We've put the .co in the logo to emphasize that it's not .com, but people kept telling us that our logo has a typo - it's missing the m the at the end. We ended up ditching irealty all together after that." -- taa

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2174690