skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone know whether the Startup Visa will allow dual intent - i.e. if you pass the "remain in the country" criteria can you apply for a green card?
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Why is it sad? Your tone makes it sound as though most people should care about such things.

The strange thing I notice about this submission is that it's not actually a software product. It's not even a prototype "weekend project, try it out" thing. It's just a announcement that somebody intends to build some software.

I'm surprised to find it at the top of HN.
i don't see why founders of such business wouldn't be a welcomed addition to the US population?
Not really. Except for the first category, it's 100K in financing. Not penny change, but not a big amount either. Of course, you can also generate 100K in revenue (two years is plenty enough time to get there) and then financing isn't a requirement.
So, you can use vertical-align:middle? that seems pretty good. Looks definitely worth a try.
I have never heard of it by that name, and yes I'm familiar with the standard five relations. Are you calling it "Bachmann-Landau" for a reason?
Your comment made me look up Plan 9 on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs). I like very much the philosophy of Plan 9 and the evolution from the Unix base and it is really a pitty that Plan9 did not have much success. I hope that some of it designs will find its way to Unix though.

I discovered that at least one Plan 9 invention had success and is found today everywhere: UTF 8 encoding.
I've always used http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php on windows.
No they don't, noise drowns out signal, see Google's problem with spam and splogs.
A non-snarky answer: because even the names of files can be be sensitive.

For example, learning that your boss is working on a file named "Employees to Layoff This Month" reveals information you were not aware of earlier.
Never heard of "Bachmann-Landau". Big-o is of course familiar.
Uh,

How is a debate a flame war in circumstances where name-call is not happening? What we have here is a heated debate. I might accept that Shuttleworth is totally wrong for the sake of argument. Even, I can't see ad hominem attacks, innuendo, comparisons to Hitler or any of what I'd see as the characteristics of the flame wars I know about.

The idea that the app Launcher doesn't matter seems implausible to me - first impressions are very important for example. But maybe you're right and it doesn't matter. We still have to argue what is or isn't important. I don't see anything embarrassing about that.
Ask HN: Questions about search for local services space 
What sites do you use if you want to hire someone to do a local service, like moving or plumbing? Do you use craigslist, google place, angies list, thumbtack, etc.? Do you get referrals from friends? on facebook?

I’m interested to hear what people think about the space and the market? Are there other interesting startups?
By that metric, spam is signal because some people (spammers) want it.
It doesn't say you can't mention YC. It seems like this post only goes so far as to say "I applied but was rejected."
1. don't spend money on things you don't need, otherwise you won't have it for things you do need (food, shelter, fuel, healthcare, tools, retirement, training and "down time", etc.)

2. avoid ever having to be in a queue (of people, cars, callers, etc.) -- well, a blocking one, if it's asynch/callback, so you can do something else in the meantime, that's not so bad

3. avoid paying for things that are free (drinking water, the ability to exercise (I think gym memberships and "exercise machines" are pretty close to throwing money away))

4. don't commit to any deadline or scheduled time/places for things unless there's a strong personal benefit for you

5. take a nap/veg/slackoff whenever your body/brain seems to need it (you'll be healthy, happier and more productive) -- coupled with, whenever you do have the desire and energy to work, work, don't slack off -- this takes judgement but both types of things are needed to achieve balance, but your ups will be higher and your downs won't be as down -- this lifestyle is almost impossible to live if you have your own family and/or a salaried 9-to-6-cubicle-corporate-commute job, but much easier to do as indie contractor/consultant or entrepreneur
Here's my problem with not encrypting metadata:

Suppose we have a determined attacker who is looking to target DropBox accounts. They can attempt to crack username/password pairs, or maybe intercept an entire SSL session and do a brute-force attack on it later. (If there are virgin credit card records in that session stream it may be worth doing this even if the cost is CPU-years.)

Letting this attacker see the names of files in a session gives them a clue as to what's stored in the DropBox account in question, and therefore lets them choose their targets -- if a user is uploading nothing but files with names like Hot-Fuzz-Directors-Cut.h264, they probably don't want to bother: but if the user is updating files like customer-accounts-backup.sql or passwords.txt, there may be money to be made. If the metadata is encrypted it forces attackers to tackle accounts at random in hope of finding something worth money. Which is much less attractive because the attacker has to do a lot more work in order to be assured of a pay-off.

At the very least, it would be best if the decision of whether or not to encrypt metadata was in the customer's hands. (Then maybe I wouldn't need to keep my business-critical files on DropBox inside an encrypted filesystem image, which almost certainly causes a much worse performance hit than an extra SSL roundtrip.)
While not technically required, it's pretty convenient to treat radians as their own "angle" dimension. This lets you distinguish an angular velocity from a simple periodic repetition. The latter happen to rarely (never?) occur naturally, but I run into artificial ones often enough.
> But would you consider someone who can only do that a fantastic developer?

In some circumstances yes, in others, no.

We don't expect medical doctors to be good at everything, we don't expect jet engine mechanics to understand diesels, and so on, so why would we judge software folk based on some universal standard?

Let's look at it from the other side. If someone isn't very good at plumbing (or floating point, or crypto, etc), does mean that said someone is not a fantastic developer?
Microserfs seems relevant... I know this is what the OP asked, but remember there is more to life than work work work (not to mention, to someone else's business)

http://www.amazon.com/Microserfs-Novel-P-S-Douglas-Coupland/...
My favorite is:
system("/usr/bin/seq 1000");

Only thing is, the interviewer would ask, "How would this work in Windows?"
Facebook to Offer Groupon-Inspired Discount-Deal Service
Voted.

This is a completely separate issue from discussions about illegal immigration or border security.

Hopefully our elected officials are able to look past the "immigration" stigma and vote based on the bill's contents.

And hopefully nobody gets up there and starts shouting "They took our jobs!!" </south_park_redneck>
Here's the wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation#Family_of_Bachma...
Better Husband App
This is really important. Wish I'd known just how astronomical before I came out here (fortunately only for a limited time at first, but still).
Does anyone know how long will it take to find out if the bill passes or not?
Hot trend in world
I really fail to understand this line of thinking.

>Is there a shortage of startups in the USA?

What harm will an additional 1000 startups do, even if they fail? Fill the Whitepages and Yellowpages and make it heavy when you have to carry it inside your home? Look at the upside. Even a few successful ones(esp. big ones) can more than make up for the failures.

>Can startups (that in reality have an online-only product) not occur outside the USA?

Things are more conducive in the USA. So the same people may not be able to start and succeed elsewhere.

Online only etc. doesn't matter. There will be too many obstacles like tax laws, payment methods and what not.
If anyone needs advice on getting a long-term US visa without getting funding, feel free to email me (it's in my profile). It's currently an incredibly difficult process, but do-able.
Ask HN: Is Canada a good place to move to?
Is Canada a good country to move to and raise a family? How vibrant is the startup scene? What are some of the good cities to consider in terms of friendly people, prospects, weather, lifestyle, and startup culture? From what I have gathered, the startup scene is flourishing in Canada, but I would like some detailed analysis from fellow HNers.
Beyond open source:  real-time code fragment sharing and dev among flash mobs.
You can watch as people make copies of your code while you are typing it in real-time. And you can even see what modifications they make, what happens when they run it, etc.

And you can of course copy back anything you like from their code as they are typing it in real-time, and so on.

Such a system might encourage programmers to make at least small fragments of their code available in real-time because it would encourage collaborative development and debugging via flash mobs.
I don't know how bad it is at the state level, but according to the US Code, at the federal level it shouldn't take years; there's a rigid statutory timeline on hearings, measured in increments of 30 days.
A couple of stories have covered this, their wave estimation was low. That being said, its clear they can improve and had the imported generators been able to connect to the plant's cooling power plugs this would have been moot.

My guess is that positioning backup generators are safe from tsunamis and that can be moved into position quickly, and are pre-tested to be compatible with the backup infrastructure will get added to the licensing regulations.
You can be a regular company and still do good things. You should be very, very sure that being a 501(c)3 is ESSENTIAL to what you want to do, otherwise it'll be a LOT of unnecessary work.
Report Shows Radiation Levels On TSA Scanners 10 Times Higher Than Promised
I think this is more a matter of tact than anything. People with good social skills know that constructive feedback demonstrates authority and skill better than condescending feedback. Those who are prone to condescending feedback especially know this, but lack the grace and tact to act on it. That makes them more anxious and more insecure, which in turn increases the lashing-out behaviour.

I think the sad fact of the matter is that many geeks just have poor social skills. While some are content to just be quiet, others feel the need to overcompensate. Luckily, I haven't met too many of the latter in real life, but you see it everywhere on the Internet. The dehumanizing nature of interacting with a computer screen seems to absolve people of their need to act socially, so they act like fuckwits. On 4chan it takes the form of blatant aggression, although anyone familiar with the place knows it's all part of the joke. On reddit people make snarky replies that make up for their lack of content with the sharpness of their barbs. Here on HN it's more muted. While no one is a blatant asshole, there's a lot more "downvote and ignore" that goes on. This contributes hugely to the hivemind effect, because there aren't arguments given as to why someone is wrong, you just have comments that don't jive with the rest of the community getting hidden. This, in turn, causes people to self-moderate, so that they only post opinions they think the rest of the community will agree with. Obviously these are oversimplifications, and the issues I mention aren't particularly common, they're just how the same issue manifests itself in the different communities.
Amazing that nowhere in all those responses is the simple answer:

Pay them for their time.

Want me to sit in your cube for 12 hours on a Saturday? No problem. That'll be $(hourly_rate * 12). Need 70 hours of my time this week because we've all got to dig in for this one last big push? I'm there, so long as you're prepared to pay me $(hourly_rate * 70).

Granted, if you want my best productivity, you'll purchase 30 hours of my time over the course of 4 days each week. But hey, it's your choice.
"Tim realized that software was becoming a commodity. He saw the same thing play out earlier with hardware in the IBM era. When something is commoditized, an adjacent thing becomes valuable. In the IBM era when hardware was commoditized, software became very valuable (and Microsoft won)."

I believe that now that software is being commoditized, as is cloud hardware, that a lot of data is now easily captured. So analytics has become valuable. Analytics has not been commoditized yet, and good analytics are still prettify rarified.
Yea there are some geeks out there doing this now it is called ESPN. lol
Introducing "Anthill", the First VP8 Hardware Encoder IP Release
haskell's niche: PL theory research. as a professor of mine said, "it's an incubator for PL theory". that said, are there merits to non-PL researchers learning it? i think so. for one, the functional paradigm is increasingly being integrated into the mainstream languages and the "genpop" is starting to use FP concepts to solve problems. haskell is supposedly "the purest" functional language. therefore, if you like FP, studying haskell is like tapping into "the source".

while i find functional constructs aesthetically more pleasing than imperative ones, a reason i often hear given in support of using functional languages is the promise they offer w.r.t concurrency/parallelism. in the words of the same professor i quoted earlier, "concurrency/parallelism is currently broken in most other languages. it's like building skyscrapers atop matchsticks". i believe this now. i also believe haskell's approach to be quite a big step in the right direction (STM and atomically). an outstanding paper on the topic exists here http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

regarding haskell's type system...in my opinion, hands down the best currently in existence. yes, it's hard to work with at times. i strongly disliked it at first. yes, the type errors can be a bit cryptic at times, at least until one gets used to them. the upside? there be real magics there. and i'm not talking about devices that begin with the letter i. the majority of the time, if i can get code to type check it works flawlessly.

working with it over the last 6 months has really changed my thinking about programming languages and has actually swayed me to go further in that direction in my studies.

don't mean to sound like a fool in love, but ...
I need to watch the video, but the title has got me thinking, "What is/will be the new valuable thing if ebooks really do push down the price of books to the end consumer to near zero"?

Yes my mind is stuck on that side of things, but then I've been doing less free time coding and more plotting writing projects of late ;)
Yes, it's pretty dumb, but is this really the most shame-worthy thing?
Does feeding your staff actually make them work longer, or just spend more hours at the office eating? If you stay at the office longer because you're eating there, how many extra hours per day would you say you're at work because of that?

How about people with spouses or kids - don't they just want to eat their meals with their families? What about people who just prefer their own cooking? I can see this strategy backfiring for some, who might think "enough already, I don't want your food, I just want to go home."
You say you want to see Portland's scene improve, but I might suggest what you are really asking for is Portland's scene to change. I am a web developer here in Portland (been here for 10 years, love it). I do freelancing and don't run a startup, so obviously we're in different situations, but in my opinion what makes Portland Portland is its ease of living -- cheap rent, good cheap food, low traffic, mild climate, and most importantly: an utter lack of ambition. I grew up in the NYC area, and the difference is striking (it's subtle, but very pervasive) -- people just don't really care that much about achieving extraordinary things. And I don't mean this in a bad way at all -- I don't think there's anything intrinsically good or bad about being super ambitious, it's just a choice that we all make for our own goals and personalities. So it makes a lot of sense to me that Portland doesn't have a startup culture anything like S.V. -- and I feel that if it did, it would cease to be Portland.

BTW, this is coming from a place of respectful discussion and sharing of opinions -- I work downtown, if you ever want to meet up for coffee and discuss more, that would be fun (contact info in my profile).
I never said details. I just expect a firm grasp of the fundamentals. If I say "This algorithm is linear," or "This algorithm is quadratic," or even, "This algorithm is linear in the worst case, but constant in the average case," I expect them to know what I mean. Anyone who pulls a B average in an undergrad CS program should be able to do that.

I find your example with civil engineering and QCD disingenuous, because one doesn't need quantum theory when building buildings, bridges and roads. My point in mentioning Newtonian mechanics is that it is the foundation of mechanical engineering. I never said "it's all just physics," so I don't know why you did.
This whole thing is ridiculous because it ruins the whole justification for baking pies on 3/14.

Those of you that want to study the Dao De Jing on 6/28 are free to do so but please leave those of use that eat pies on 3/14 alone.
Am I the only one still trying to figure out (and still failing to understand) what facebook did SO right to become what it is today?
I've seen a lot of people latch on to this writeup as authoritative, and I'm not sure why. Oehmen may indeed be a "research scientist" at MIT but his specialty is supply-chain risk management, not reactor design (http://web.mit.edu/oehmen/www/). Is there any reason to believe that he's anything more than an interested amateur on this topic?
No place for the past tense :-)

The OS is under development, and as more people jump in [1], the pace increases. A lot of software has been ported natively or to APE; you can get a pretty decent UNIX workstation with P9 alone those days.

On the other hand, if you want to try it the easy way, consider http://swtch.com/plan9port/ Runs on virtually any POSIX environment, but it's just a teaser of Plan 9. I'm using the Acme editor from it daily.

Linux adapted quite a bit, the clone() syscall, the --bind option for mount (only partly implemented, thou), the pervasive namespacing, the XRender API (modeled after BitBlt) and some more.

In a way Git's storage resembles Venti [2] but probably is just convergent evolution.

--

[1] http://9fans.net/archive/ search powered by grep :D

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti

EDIT
Re: UTF-8

It's a funny story; Linux only imported half of the Unicode support from Plan 9. In P9, UTF-8 is used on-the-wire and on-the-storage. However, in case a process wants to deal with sizeable amount of text (say, a text editor, a grep etc.), it converts the UTF-8 into `Runes' -- strings of 32bit integers (till recently 16bit) directly denoting Unicode characters, for fast access by offset. And back to send over wire or write to storage.

Another nice story, you get a network connection with just one libcall: dial().

For example,
int fd = dial("tcp!news.ycombinator.com!http", 0, 0, 0);

and that's it :D
It is not easily possible. Just drag them off the dock after they're installed.
I don't understand why having your template be valid HTML is even a little bit good (I'm not saying it's bad — I just don't see why it's better than anything else). I don't think sending unprocessed templates as pages is a common use case, so there is zero benefit in having them be in a language that a browser can render unmodified.
Isn't Inferno just the continuation/successor of Plan9? That's what I always thought anyway...
MUCH better results, thanks!
Agreed. Plus it's better to have some sort of public "surface area", presence, reputation, whatever, thats out there, and let people come to you. I'm very close to living a 0% resume life right now (not perfect, got a recruiter demanding one last week but they get off to a bad start with me when that happens, and I have lots of non-resume-needing opportunities on my plate to pick from). I think resumes are:

(1) retarded

(2) archaic relic of past age (like a horse & buggy in a world of interstate highways & helicopters)

(3) distorting

(4) low fidelity

(5) too confining

(6) too static/dead (not interactive, searchable and multimedia, like a web page)

(7) surpassed by the ability to have online presences and profiles

and (8) far far inferior to just showing your past work directly and relying on word-of-mouth recommendations and Internet findability, plus, having a personal conversation and telling someone what you can do for them, and doing it.

I once got a paying gig because when the client typed in a certain combination of keywords in Google, I came up as the #1 result, 1st page (!). You can't beat that. And that sort of recruiting/hiring/sales channel was just not possible even 20 years ago. Let's take advantage of it. Death to the past. Long live the present-becoming-the-future. :)
The 24 Hour "GET RID OF PANIC" Method
I'm sure people CAN handle it, but if everyone wasn't flipping out about Japan (for good reason) there would probably be a lot more emphasis on the BofA stuff.

Ex: Go to CNN.com. What's splashed all over the front page right now? Can you find even one link to an article about the BofA leak?
Some are too Rich to afford their Ideal Lifestyle
SGI's IRIX is also a nice one; check out the gallery on Nekochan http://www.nekochan.net/gallery2/main.php
Don't know how active the start-up community is here, but Toronto and Vancouver would be your best bets. As for a country, Canada is the best.

Toronto is cold during the winter, people are friendly, pretty laid back culture, which can be a bad thing when people don't get angry about the BS that goes on here sometimes. Taxes are high, but its probably worth it in the long run.

Canada is the best.
Why? Because the definition of state-of-the-art OS is one with a useless Aero/Compiz/whatever 3d graphics Hollywood feel?

IMO, the most exciting OS stuff is far from visible in the UI, let alone screenshots...
100K in financing that must come from a US-based VC/angel, no friends-and-family fundraising or personal savings allowed.

That 100K is going to be rather more costly to acquire than you think.
Stunningly brilliant. Develop a widget that other companies can put on their sites, and charge for it.