skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a lawyer, but I am an H-1B holder, so filter my interpretation accordingly.

Mostly this document is a declaration of intent. It says "if you are a legitimate entrepreneur, we are on your side". It doesn't actually change any laws or regulations.

Instead it clarifies the circumstances under which you can apply for existing types of visas. Since applying for a visa is expensive and lengthy, people tend to avoid applying for them if their qualifications are ambiguous, so saying "yes, you will definitely qualify" is a valuable thing.

In particular, they are saying they are making it easier to get an EB2 visa, which is a very nice one that lets you stay permanently and apply for a green card. The official requirements for an EB2 are quite strict:

http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b...

Specifically it requires documentation of 10+ years of experience and you have to be a "professional" (e.g. doctor, laywer). However, these requirements can be waived under an existing exception for "national interest", and this document is basically saying that entrepreneurship can be considered as being in the national interest. That's a huge step!

In addition, H1B visas are usually oversubscribed, so they become a lottery. But there have historically been lots of EB2 visas left over every year. So not only does it make an EB2 easier to get, but if significant numbers of H1Bs applicants decide to apply for an EB2 instead, it will increase the total number of visas issued every year (anti-immigration campaigners should note that the numbers we're talking about are still laughably small: there are only ~13,000 EB2 visas available every year, and ~65,000 H1Bs).

In answer to your specific question: if you can prove to the USCIS that you are really an entrepreneur and are trying to start a business, you may be able to get an EB visa under the waiver. However, it remains much easier to join an existing business an American has started and then apply for an EB2 or H1B to the existing business.

In short: America still doesn't seem to like it when foreigners come over and try to create jobs, but they have agreed to make it slightly less difficult if you do.
Zero-day flaw in WordPress image utility
There's a conflict between the age of criminal culpability and the age of consent. Why aren't these the same ages?
Really, really bad news travels oh so fast.
DEC also used periods to separate filename from extension.

People forget that CPM's conventions (which were copied by CPM/86 and PC-DOS) were copied from DEC conventions. DEC operating systems were very, very popular at the time.
> please describe the three most recent things you have invented

The "most recent" qualifier makes this a short answer, which would be:

Of the last three of my inventions, two are trade secrets and the third has not completed the patent application process. I am not able to discuss any of these. Would you rather discuss some of the patents I hold that are public instead? While you are considering I would like to know what your company's exact policy is regarding the projects and things I will be inventing outside work hours using my own equipment. Obviously the policy will have a major impact on whether I decide to consider accepting an offer to work here.
Ok but I don't understand what's not working on your side? Everytime I click the button I go back one day, so first sunday, then saturday, then friday.
The reddit thread http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/j6sr1/a_simple_and_e... has a bunch of good comments that outline why Notch isn't really in a position to post stuff like this.
Spot on. I don't get the whole "we dumped the body in the sea" crap. That's not proof. My children tell better lies.
Background: Trunk.ly is a social bookmarking service that is highly automated and powered by full-text search. For example, you connect it to Twitter, Trunk.ly automatically extracts the links you share and crawls them building a search index for you.

We decided to release a connector to Hacker News for Trunk.ly and scratch our own itch.

The Hacker News connector scrapes anything appearing under "saved stories" and adds the source link into Trunk.ly, indexing it so you can always easily find the link again.

A couple of quick notes - we know that this is NOT the most secure solution in the world. To do this, we have to scrape the site on a regular interval as you. So we have to store your username and password. We encrypt this and take other general precautions, but I highly recommend that you use a different password for HN from other sites as an additional precaution.

It would be great if there was some nice "third party" way of accessing that useful content, either via OAuth or even just using some API key or something.

There are some limitations:
* we don't back crawl every story you've ever saved as this could be a large number of pages and we don't want to harm the server. We limit it to the last 200 stories total.
* we only support the default HN username and password (no clickpass). We can do click pass if enough people want it.
* there is no submission date I could see to scrape, so stories will be stored in Trunk.ly as at todays date.

Let us know what you think.

Credit: Partially based on the work of https://github.com/edparcell/HNScraper
That runs in ~0.4s on my system (Xeon E5520, 2.27GHz), but replacing the 'digits' lookup table with simple arithmetic on the ASCII values ('0' + j%10) speeds it up to ~0.23s. Yes, L1 caches are pretty fast, but ALUs are still faster (for integer addition anyway).

Edit: This was with GCC 4.1.2, newer versions probably optimize differently, so who knows.
...and believe it or not out of 100 Million Android users 1 Million will do exactly that.
I'm sure everyone will convert to middle Endian eventually. :P
Not only that, but it makes requests for non-blocked pages on the target server look like they're coming from a small group of proxies (I guess just one in practice). This plays havoc with other assumptions around load balancing and anti-abuse that don't assume entire countries are funneled through single proxies.
Xkcd's Randall Munroe talk at Google (w/ Norvig intro, Knuth Q&A) (2007)
Interesting (for U.S. residents), considering SCOTUS' 2002 opinion in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, which upheld depictions in cases where actual children were not involved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coaliti...
C's biggest mistake: http://drdobbs.com/blogs/cpp/228701625
I don't care whether you are happy with it or not. It is a poorly written product with many problems. There is a zero-day exploit in SMP allowing people to take over servers that they haven't bothered fixing in the months they've known about it, for example. So what if they are paying lip service to Minecraft development?
In that case, wouldn't it be more fair to compare it to a C++ re-implementation of sprintf using the new `constexpr` keyword?
Minecraft doesn't need money to be finished, it needs time. Hiring completely different developers to work on a different game will not affect the development time of Minecraft so I don't see how that is unethical.

The security holes is definitely an issue but that doesn't make Notch's criticism any less valid.
Doubleclick was a New York startup. In reference to point #1..
https://market.android.com/details?id=image.viewer
A Closer Look at Crankshaft, V8's Optimizing Compiler
Please Give Me Some Feedbacks on My Project Fasho.me
hi guys,

here is a project that I am currently working on (www.fasho.me)

it's just something i've put together hoping to create something new for self expression & file sharing. The splash page is still under making, but once you login, the interface is much better.

I hope yall can give some feedbacks on potential themes , as well as design. Any feedback in general would be greatly appreciated!

thank you
Yeah, but it does make you appear cool on Slashdot.
Business Model Analysis: Platforms and Network Effects
voxel animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl6PE_n6zTk
Hat tip: http://pgraycode.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/solving-xkcds-nerd...
Interesting.. I guess I should have mentioned gcc 4.5.2 on a Xeon X5670, 2.93GHz, which is 12M cache. Changing it to ('0' + j % 10) has no change in overall speed for me.
Sorry for the delay, just noticed these replies. I built it using Ruby and a framework called Ramaze. I built it 100% from scratch, for better or for worse...
I'll try my best to remember!
Ah, down to 14s for 100 tests. I had originally avoided spork because it looked rspec only, but I guess there's spork-testunit as well.

Thanks!
My biggest challenge in NYC has been the availability of dependable salaries for coders and designers from non-startups, especially from banking and finance. Start-up equity isn't as valuable here to people who can get great pay from a bank or hedge fund.

I see saying NYC needs some extremely successful startups, more engineers, or more product designers as well intentioned, but it's like saying mice need more bells on cats. Everybody agrees, but no one knows how to make it happen.

Also, Parsons has a design and technology program like NYU's ITP. I've taught at both and they're both excellent. There may be other programs. I've worked with two Cooper Union alumni (one artist-turned-graphic-designer and one engineer) and both were among the best people I've worked with.
The diminutive "little pet" prefix at one point applied to: linux kernel, kde, gnome, jquery, prototype.js, node.js, ruby, &etc. Your dismissal of small, young projects is akin to saying "Don't start a startup, just join a big business!"

You're calling out to people in the Bazaar and asking them to join your Cathedral. Good luck!
If I send you money to work on project A, and you invest that money on into some other project B while paying lip service to project A then yes, I would say you have a bit of an ethical problem.

Notch's criticism is hypocritical, and invalid on the grounds that he doesn't have enough information to say that the project is a "scam".
Indeed. If i cannot understand a system (in my field) in a couple of days (depending on the size), and have been asked to work on it, chance is i'll ask for a rewrite, with documentation and readable code.

If your system is not readable and undocumented, don't blame the guy who will come and decide to rewrite it.
Ah, these are great suggestions - Thanks RobIsIT!

1. Good point. I will start lookign for one.
2. The generated content is really just whiskies and tastings. I don't really want people to contribute videos since I think that'll just add a lot of social-network style cruft.
3. The browse button automatically sorts by rating. I have toyed with the idea of adding a 'leaderboard', but never got around to it since the browse button is the same thing. Perhaps once there are more tasting it'll be more useful.
5. Don't I have to get more tastings first?
6. Yes. This is a great idea that I've seen other sites in the genre do.
Can your face, the cloud & social networking reveal your social security number?
Building an Engineering Team from the Bottom Up
I do too, but it wouldn't matter if we had good men as lawmakers. That's the problem, we are led by fools.
I wonder if there's not some sort of content-estuary (for lack of a better term) effect that Twitter causes?

Twitter is a massive content stream with all sorts of sources of content flowing through it, and when you're using Twitter, you can curate the sources of the content using lists and who you follow so that you get more of the content you want.

Over time, however, I have found myself interested in only a few content providers - to the point that I frequent their websites directly rather than Twitter itself. So I have paddled my boat off of the Mississippi that is Twitter and found a more comfortable, manageable home in a few smaller, content streams.
Good point; I guess I was thinking of the simplified textbook case of computations with no external interaction. I wonder if this MIT system is able to exclude the most likely false positives, like polling for input? On the other hand, maybe polling too long for input counts as an infinite---or at least, too long---loop for their use-case of interrupting user programs that seem to be hanging, so that the user can save.
Startup Quote: Jason Fried, Founder, 37signals
5 Big Usability Mistakes Designers Make on Carousels
Sloppy Work at Oracle: Java 7 Compiler released with known defects
Replace 'NYC' with 'LA' and it's equally true.
Great example of people that know how and when to appropriately use node.js.
It’s simple until you make it complicated.

- Jason Fried (@jasonfried)

http://startupquote.com/post/8399036416
Which NYC startups are looking for product designers?
But that's not the issue being debated. The issue is tracking the communications of people we disagree with. Let's be crystal clear about that. They're trying to bury the intent in another issue to confuse people and get what they want. The bill will help no child.
I once read the following story about a famous hacker. If I remember right it was about Woz, and recounted in the book Founders At Work.

At some point Apple was taken over by beancounters who wanted reports from programmers saying how many lines of code they'd written. Woz spent a day or two refactoring something, removed 5000 lines of code, and thoughtfully submitted a form with LOC marked "-5000".

They exempted him from having to submit any more forms.
Why can't it?
That's kind of what I mean. The fact that null-terminated strings can get arbitrarily long doesn't seem like a big advantage. I mean, if you're working with really long strings, you probably want to use something more sophisticated than a character array anyway.
I think Chris is confused about the magnitude of $100M to bring a top university. $100 million in infrastructure upgrades to under-used land to attract a university is a bargin. The income and sales taxes would earn back the $100M in no time. It is pretty hard to find $100M investment, that will bring $1B+ follow on investment, and a few thousand people on a payroll who use very few government services.
If I was paying a subscription fee to play, I would agree with you. But I spent $15 a year and a half ago for the product /as it was/ and it was absolutely worth it. You are not entitled to updates, they're just nice to have.

And I'm not paying for server support or anything, so I don't necessarily expect rapid bug/exploit fixes.
The choice of a null terminator vs len+adr is distinct from the issue of buffer overflows. A string implementation could use storage buffers sized with len+adr (with len as capacity) and range check them at runtime, but still use null terminators for the actual string length. This wouldn't necessarily be redundant; null termination has desirable semantics for algorithms that process text as a stream (e.g. scanners, regex) and saves having to keep track of distance to string end in a separate counter.

The deeper problem is lack of memory safety. The state of the art in static checks wasn't as advanced back then though (Pascal, in its original form, was not well received at the systems level), and dynamic checks would be considered too costly.
It may very well be - I haven't looked at AWS pricing since their Win2k8 plans came online. ORCS has some high-profile supporters (Hanselman comes to mind), but I had a lot of downtime in the six months I used them.
You're framing the relationship between customer and game developer differently than I've ever seen it. When I give a developer money for a game, I'm not "sending him money to work on project A". I'm paying him for the game.

In bold print right on the Minecraft purchase page:

"Please note that when you buy the game, you're paying for the game as it is right now!"

Anyone who buys Minecraft under the delusion that they're contracting Notch to build them a game is, well, delusional.

There are only two contexts -- that I can think of off hand -- in which you pay someone to perform a specific task:

* Contract employment

* Hired staff

Any time you pay a company for a product, you're doing just that. You pay for the product, and the seller gets to do what they want with the profits.
Watch,resident evil,online free,megavideo
watch,resident evil,online free,megavideo
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City for a real third person shooter game teams in a dark and gloomy world of the Resident Evil, and re-interpretation of the events described in Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 Resident Set the universe Evil is not only rich background activity
It is difficult to agree or disagree on the basis of a few paragraphs of anecdote. For example, I have often heard programmers say they don’t understand some code. When I probe, what I discover is that they have figured out what it does, but they disagree with why it is built the way it is built.

So they may explain that making such-and-such a change will take two days instead of a few hours, thanks to all the FactoryFactoryFactoryAPIXMLDescriptorSchemas they have to write. That is obviously a hugely different thing to having no idea how the code works and what they need to do to add or change features.

Or for another example, say instead of understanding a system in a day, it takes a week. The system sucks. But if it is relatively stable, even six days of lost time is trivial compared to the time needed for a rewrite and the risks involved.

I am not saying that this particular rewrite of Google’s XYZ is correct or incorrect, just saying that sometimes we might be right to leave well enough alone. Development time is not free, and in addition to figuring out the ROI of writing a new system, we should consider the opportuinity cost of having Mr. Brilliant rewriting a working but terribly written system vs. inventing something else that might confer a greater benefit to his employer.
And yet, these days, performing such undefined operations may cause your compiler's optimizer to assume that such code is e.g. dead, and behave unexpectedly.
Robot Love in Fukushima
OK, I just tested with gcc 4.6.0, and unless I've screwed something up, it looks like (at -O4) it actually optimizes these into the exact same code. As in the generated ELFs are byte-for-byte identical. Impressive.
>Except that in the USA it's probably illegal to fire workers who won't work 16 hour days and it's also illegal to expose workers to toxic solvents.

Wait, you think this is bad?

Do you really think America can only compete on being the lowest cost manufacturer?

And the scenario shows, the iPhone could be manufactured in the US and still be profitable (50% margin).
Hot Wholesale OEM i300 Mobile Music Headset
I think the unlimited detail refers to rendering speed, not memory requirements. The data has to be redundant to fit in memory. He also claims it runs on a laptop without GPU. So it can't be just octree or any other regular acceleration structure. So if it isn't scam, it's something new.

From the author (old post on Beyond3D): "firstly the system isn’t ray tracing at all or anything like ray tracing. Ray tracing uses up lots of nasty multiplication and divide operators and so isn’t very fast or friendly.
Unlimited Detail is a sorting algorithm that retrieves only the 3d atoms (I wont say voxels any more it seems that word doesn’t have the prestige in the games industry that it enjoys in medicine and the sciences) that are needed, exactly one for each pixel on the screen, it displays them using a very different procedure from individual 3d to 2d conversion, instead we use a mass 3d to 2d conversion that shares the common elements of the 2d positions of all the dots combined. And so we get lots of geometry and lots of speed, speed isn’t fantastic yet compared to hardware, but its very good for a software application that’s not written for dual core. We get about 24-30 fps 1024*768 for that demo of the pyramids of monsters. The media is hyping up the death of polygons but really that’s just not practical, this will probably be released as “backgrounds only” for the next few years, until we have made a lot more tools to work with."
The i300 features a sleek in-line remote with microphone that gives you complete control over volume, answering/ending calls, iPhone Voice Control and music playing options like play/pause and skip. Its stereo speakers and noise-reducing in-ear design deliver dynamic sound that gives your music an impressive boost. In addition, the snug fit reduces ambient noise for superior music quality in loud locations.
The updated memorandum still talks about the control issue of having an employer-employee relationship. If you can't demonstrate that you can be fired (amongst other things), it doesn't pass the employer-employee relationship. You can be the sole stockholder, but you still need an entity within the company that has control over you - the example they give is a Board of Directors.
'My biggest challenge in NYC has been the availability of dependable salaries for coders and designers from non-startups.'

I can't speak to programming/engineering jobs, but there's plenty of design jobs from non-startups. Almost every agency (including tiny ones) are based or have an office in NY. DUMBO has a ton of digital agencies. Motion graphics firms are centralized in Manhattan or in LA. Small ones can be found south of 14th or in Brooklyn. Easily the best city in the U.S. for design jobs.
I am both a client and host with Airbnb and know from whence I speak. Airbnb offers a really great service, and the guys who founded it are genuine. Many learning experiences are painful, as was this one. Missteps are inevitable as a company grows. It's unfortunate what happened, and their response could have been more immediate. I think they will make steps to adjust and and protect their most important commodity, their hosts.
Advisory Opinion Says, “E-Books Exempt from New York Sales Tax”
Bill Atkinson: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...
Hackers Needed-U.S Government in search of cyber warriors 
Are you that super fast and brilliant mastermind hacker, well the National Security Agency has a challenge for you- to work on the “hardest problems on Earth.” “Computer hacker skills
Nobody has advanced Notch any money. To claim that is disingenuous.
I love how they mock other game dev companies for using skyboxes (they call it card board cut-out buildings in the distance @04m52) and then proceed to do exactly the same thing in their demo. Hell they even managed to do it wrong (their sky texture isn't stretched & compressed appropriately to hide the fact that its a cube @2m27).

To many bold claims & deception in that vid. Colour me skeptical.
OP looks like a spammer for bostinnovation.com:
http://news.ycombinator.org/submitted?id=pgatzke
There is no asprintf function in my copy of the C99 standard.
Addictions, Anchors & Solitary Focus
"Please note that when you buy the game, you're paying for the game as it is right now!
You will also get the full version of Minecraft when it is released. Read the copyright information for more information on your purchase."

http://www.minecraft.net/prepurchase.jsp

It sounds like you misunderstood what you were spending your money on.
Growth flat? Better raise $800mm!
Groupon's Worst Nightmare: Amazon Entering Daily Deals Space