skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> the U.S. agent bombarded me with question on what i was gonna do in canada, where i was staying, on a not so friendly tone as if i was lying<<

This seems to be pretty standard. They are trying to catch you on a lie. I don't know about the "not so friendly tone" though. I guess it depends on the agent and what kind of day/issues he is having.
It's worse.

If the Euro breaks up it will break up into two. The currency of the top half will skyrocket and those countries will quickly become uncompetitive and so their economies will crash. The bottom half will find that they earn is some useless currency but that their debts are denominated in Euros. They will find themselves crushed under an impossible debt burden. Think negative equity on a national scale which last decades.

I know which half I would rather be in, but it's gonna be horrible for everyone.
Are the dots larger than average chunks of ice from the fuselage?
Do you know of http://indiegamemusic.com/ ?
I find GitPop to be really useful for finding the most popular fork. It shows you the number of watchers, forks and issues for each fork, which makes spotting the "best" one a lot easier. It even has a handy bookmarklet!

http://gitpop.heroku.com/
I agree that US needs an entrepreneur visas. But I disagree with author's suggestion that all US-educated graduates must be given green cards. A lot of them came to US to study because they could afford it (often via wealthy parents). I don't think it's fair to give green cards only because they graduated from a US university thanks to their rich parents.

Foreign students have one year after graduation to find an employer, convert to H-1B and then ask the employer to sponsor the green card. Nothing wrong with this.

However, of course H1-B to green card to citizenship must be done in a more timely manner. In many cases it takes too long. The time spent on waiting for the green card (sometimes as long as 4-5 years or even more, due to slow bureaucracy) must be in some way counted towards the citizenship requirement of 5-year residency.

I think as baby-boomer generation starts to retire en-mass, U.S. will have no choice but to liberalize and simplify its immigration policy. It is competing against many other developed countries for younger workers and talent, and the earnings disparity is becoming less of a factor in many developing countries. There's just no way out but to make immigration process faster and more attractive if the U.S. wants to win.
It is incredibly short sighted to say that the sum of the jobs created by a data center is the people reporting to work in the building. This data center likely created hundreds, if not thousands of jobs. It's just that most of them aren't in hicksville, NC.

There are hardware engineers designing the facility, software engineers maintaining the software infrastructure, product managers scheming of ways to use Apple's cloud facilities, etc.
That wouldn't have fixed the problem. Did you know Germany broke Maastricht spending limits well before most other countries did? That Ireland had a debt to GDP ratio of ~30% before the crisis - and it never burned any failed bank bondholders because of pressure from the US Fed's Tim Geithner, as well as the ECB? In Ireland's case, the US and the ECB coerced it into forcing its citizens to take on private debt owed to foreign bondholders.

And Germany would still not acquiesce to letting ECB become a lender of last resort. FWIW, Germany didn't want Italy joining the Euro, much less Greece.
if the EZ fails, there will be a liquidity crisis, and IPO runways will have to be extended, so all seed to mid-stage startups will go bust over the next 8 months, as their cash dwindles, and they can't get financing. Expect massive layoffs in the web 2.0 space, if it happens.

Cash is king. Conserve it.
If a data center produces only 50 jobs, then I find it hard to believe that a CD pressing shop produced 150 jobs.
Why not read both?

What is this "read these programmers who have build interesting things" street-cred has anything to do with Robert C. Martin?

Are you saying we should not listen to instructors and don't bother reading books that are being written by someone who haven't "produced" anything in its respective industry?
Very valid points. I think that "facts" in the political dialogue are an illusion and politics has always been interpreting reality. Of cause some "truth machine" could spot misconceptions of obvious facts (e.g. how many states are in the Union) but with anything slightly more sophisticated it is going to be a subjective mine field. Just take some basic question and get studies drawn up by different ideological thinktanks and I am sure they are able to produce the most beautiful statistics arguing that their ideological position always has been and always will be the right one. Especially since PolitiFact attempts to "rate" gray areas beyond just true and false their neutrality will, and has to be questioned.
The main thing that seems like a huge stretch is that those are good examples for an idea of a "parental visa", giving visas to immigrants with children who you think are likely to be good parents, whose kids will then grow up in U.S. society and be highly successful. Not as good examples in support of the "entrepreneur visa" idea, which expects the people receiving the visa to themselves start a company in the short term, something that didn't actually happen in any of those examples.
For 101domain there's a simple reason: For some exotic country TLDs they are the only provider that even has a web interface (seriously).

Apart from that: Avoid them when you can. I have a couple domains there and the experience is terrible. Inquiry roundtrip times are measured in weeks...
When you say overcoming cognitive bias, do you also mean it will help being able to step back from a problem and think outside the box?
Pasos Para Quemar Grasas R�pidamente y Obtener un Abdomen Plano.
Someone should modify the post to note that this is from Dec. 2009. Not sure what to think here. Google is endorsing, but IEEE is slamming. DWave actually has a reasonable looking dev kit on this page, but Scott Aaronson is quite critical.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/loser-dwave-does...

http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dev-tutorials.html

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=306

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=291

Would be nice if a real expert weighed in on this thread.
Ah yes I see now, my bad. It pays to Google first I guess.
There are two questions that have to be made now.

First of it, Do you really need to make this decision now?

Second, Does your new web service has any revenue stream? See, if you launched a web service, that need to be monetized later ( as tumblr, posterous, facebook), 100k visitors will not pay your dinner. But if it is a freemium model, maybe you can think of quit your current job.

My two cents for you: Wait a bit more, if its something that has potencial, start looking for investors, and after this you go full time.
100% of my jquery-ui experience can be summed up with "I don't know why this is so hard and why is this so ugly? Ugh, I just want this plugin to work already."

Bootstrap on the other hand is a great way to go from 0 to "For something that a developer slapped together this looks really clean and composed" in no time flat.
Devs are used to learning new technologies regularly. Libraries that reduce the work of 5 people to the work of one are common place. Before RDBMSs, database queries had to be manually programmed on a case-by-case basis, including disk access etc. When one bottleneck has been solved, devs simply move on to other, more awesome tasks.

Unfortunately most of the population does not share this constant learning philosophy.
"As an outsider, I feel like the US is the opposite of an "agile" government."

For about every aspect of the US federal government, you're right: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/us-government-blows-20000...

It's /really/ hard to manage the world's largest GDP effectively. Governmental gridlock tends towards the status quo and institutional inertia is huge. This is Vernon Vinge's 'to scale, you need complexity, but complexity inevitably leads to collapse' theories in action.
One thing to watch out for is JavaScript performance on the iPhone, it's abysmal. This makes it hard to do physics games, but not necessarily a show-stopper. For instance, you could probably make a good Scrabble-like game in HTML5.
Alice in Wonderland laughs at non-Euclidean geometry
Technology is about making things easier. Computers, in particular, are about automation. We're finally starting to figure out this automation thing in operations. Cool.

If you're not figuring out how to make you redundant the guy beside you, then the guy beside you is trying to figure out how to make you redundant.
> Can we equate it as the ability to conceptualize a Turing machine? This would be the same as the ability to follow arbitrarily complex instructions, given enough time and memory.

I don't quite follow (who is being compared to whom?), but FWIW, humans are not always very good problem-solvers. There is a very obscure vein of research developing IQ tests which are basically just Turing machines; see http://www.vetta.org/2011/11/aiq/ - one of whose developers says:

> There is an agent called Manual.py in there. It’s pretty primitive, but I did use it to see how well I could do. I seem to recall that I was around 70… but I didn’t manage enough samples to get a good statistic (I spent a few hours doing it before I started going crazy). Anyway, if you’re used to using Python I’m sure you can hack up something better…
Sovereigns are exactly that: sovereign. They create the law. What court do you think you're going to take a country to when they default on a bond? Which court is going to force them to pay? And under which set of laws? Sovereigns can rewrite the law to change the terms of these contracts. What they can't control is how (allegedly independent) third-party ratings agencies rate their bonds, and declare whether a credit event has occurred or not (triggering insurance etc).
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It's an interesting question: how those who work on quantum algorithms think about quantum algorithms. As someone who worked on quantum algorithms for many years, the interesting intuition that I developed was not what made quantum algorithms tick, but more along the lines of "when is a method likely to NOT yield a quantum speedup." That is I found I could pretty quickly tell when I was doing something that had a nice classical analogy and was therefore doomed to failure. Classic examples where when your intuition about why you might get a speedup involved exploring an exponentially large solution space without some reason that interference could be used to help dig out the interesting parts of the global superposition you created.

An interesting example of how one discovers a quantum algorithm is the story of the NAND tree algorithm (See http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=207 for a nice explanation.) Quite literally the quantum algorithm was discovered by thinking about interference of particles hoping around, combined with physicists uncanny ability to calculate scattering cross sections. Crazy stuff!
Excellent post.

1) you can't have a currency union, without a fiscal union; - correct.

2) you can't have a fiscal union, without a true political union; - unknown, but history is on your side.

3) the euro area is a currency union with neither a fiscal or a political union. - correct.

There may be a way to incentivise independent states to act in their collective interest and thus create a fiscal union without a true political union. However, if there is such a way, it has certainly never been applied to date for the Eurozone. This is the grand experiment ongoing in the EMU.

In a sense, the experiment not only already failed, but failed from the outset due to states choosing to ignore leverage rules in the 1997 Stability and Growth Pact, including even Germany.

The probability of this ending well, or without Germans paying in some shape or form and potentially severely against their long-term interests, is low.

If Germany had any sense, they will be making preparations to leave at any time, possibly taking the few remaining Germanic (+Switzerland) and Scandinavian creditor nations with them too.
I hate Unity for various reasons:

* Stability: I've had issues on multiple different hardware setups. Trying to configure compiz plugins -- hung. Reboot then failed to re-log in to "3d" Unity. Only "2d" unity, where all the key shortcuts were different. Sigh.

* Stupid UI design: Maximized windows get the top panel as their title-bar, but that panel displays a different name if a different window is active.

* UI glithces: Double-click of title usually [un]maximizes. That is, unless you're trying to unmaximize a non-active window.

* Winkey behavior: Type the full name of an application, hit <return>, and a different application is executed! That is because the search happened to find that different application, and not my application yet.

* Slowing me down: The time it takes to un-hide the bar is extremely long and slows me down.

* No fast way to minimize a window with the mouse (I used to be able to click a task bar item)

* No easy glance to see which windows I was working with

* Crappy workspace switcher: requires multiple clicks to switch workspaces, cannot drag&drop windows between desktops, etc.

I really cannot hope to remember the hundreds of annoyances I've had when trying to use Unity. I find it to be really incompetent design.

Apple may be competent enough to decide to throw everything away and design something nice. The Ubuntu guys are not. They should have stuck to incrementally improving the Linux desktop as it was. I think that now, they're going to become irrelevant.
God I'm sick of snide pseudo-artistic snobbery.

vs

The second are what I call "lifestyle artists". These are people who aren't really artists but are simply attracted to the lifestyle.

Sounds to me like you've scored an own goal there.
Sorry, I meant shop as short for workshop (ie. factory) It's probably not common now that I think of it.
As far as I know (but I'm not the person to ask), their goal is to swap a new (Guile-based) Elisp implementation into Emacs that is 100% compatible with existing programs. That seems like a sine qua non if their plan is to have any chance.
I think one has to be careful about the engineering challenge of scaling (which I think D-wave has heroically succeeded at so far) versus the question of whether the adiabatic algorithms in their system (finite temperature, imperfections, etc) will scale. I think they can pull of the first challenge (again, an amazing accomplishment), but the second is a question of whether the physics and computer science of their device will scale. I think the good news is that they will probably be able to answer this question in the next few years (thanks to the purchase of one of their devices my Lockheed Martin), but I do worry the answer they get won't be the one they are hoping for.
Couldn't he have given someone permission to take over the original repo via pull requests? I was working on a ruby web app with a guy from Italy and the project is dead but I gave him access to the repo and now he can commit and push all he likes until I get the time to work on it again. Would that work for your friend? Maybe he could appoint someone to take charge of that particular repo and keep the original project alive without giving him access to the whole account.

Edit: after reading some other comments I'd also like to suggest that creating an organization would help. Once the project is abandoned by the creator someone else can take over and the creator just drops off. Of course this only works if people put it into practice but it can possibly mitigate some of the problems you have.

If people would be thinking of these things and put these solutions into practice then your criticisms would be a little less necessary. But alas, you can't always rely on people. It really comes down to a choice the way I see it. The way things are and the way you wish they were both have merit. What if GitHub just supported viewing forks differently? It would be cool to see a list of forks without a master for some and a hierarchy for others depending on how you want to filter the page. That would be cool and do a bit of good.
I heard Nick Begich say today in an Alex Jones interview that rocket launches punch big holes in the ozone layer, and have done far more damage than CFCs have ever done.
Toilet paper physics
I have worked on healthcare software for the last decade. Healthcare technology is really not something that one can understand from the outside. It is also not an area where web startup knowledge is as applicable (eventual consistency is entirely unacceptable, any caching of data must be very precise to avoid showing stale data to users and is generally not done, all sales to hospitals and most physician groups are "enterprise" sales). There are many different standards for data transmission, but none of them are required and most people see them as more of a recommendation. Non-technical people are put in charge of technical projects.

That being said, it is not a technologically challenging industry at the moment. Most of the work that is being done is just automating existing paper-based systems. The regulations that everyone worries about are really not very onerous. Complying with HIPAA is mostly common sense and the FDA does not yet regulate most information systems unless they control medical devices or provide specific types of alerting (vendors are preparing for the day when they do).

Two of the biggest challenges that I see are the caliber of the technologists in the industry and the absolutely disgusting new interoperability standards that are being developed by people with questionable technical skills.

The company to watch at this point is Epic (I do not work for Epic). They are really crushing a lot of other companies and they are somewhat progressive.

http://www.epic.com/

If people are interested in some of the technology that is being used in the industry outside of the standard .Net and Java stuff take a look at InterSystems. They even have all of their product documentation online, which is a bit of a rarity for enterprise vendors.

http://www.intersystems.com/
or, those individuals could form an even larger group to ensure equal coverage for all people. could call it a state or a country or civilization.

the government is people.
Agreed - I have a .do with them, if I could get it somewhere else I would. Lucky I used PayPal for payment!
Yes, we all yearn for the days when cloud computing data centers were run by thousands and thousands of operations engineers. Sadly, those times are no longer here - mostly because they're a figment of your imagination.

But don't let that stop you from assuming for no good reason that the software industry is about to die. People have been making that assumption for 10 years or so now, so you have plenty of good company.
At 7:32 Seth mentions how someone said this could be placebo effect, and he said that his friend (Tucker) stopped taking flaxseed oils and that his gums got worse. I feel like placebo could easily throw away all his results into nothing, and can only hope that maybe one day he will try experiments to try to confirm if placebo is just as effective instead of trying to disprove placebo effect ineffectively by stopping flaxseed oil for a bit.

I've experimented with several sources of omegas and antioxidants, and have in turn become very skeptical about these sort of things. I've noticed a lot of people really talk up a lot of different supplements and how they greatly enhance certain abilities only to be very disappointed after paying buckets full of money for them.

I think exercise and a good (varied) diet are way more important then supplements (or uber strict diets), but even then haven't noticed any huge performance gains from such things.
What Mustache can learn from Clojure
The point wasn't whether people do or don't need Windows software, it's that you can't just throw Linux systems on the market unless the consumer feels they have some compelling reason to buy one.

And MS does scale their license prices based on the system costs, but I think you've demonstrated one can always find a cheaper PC without switching to Linux.
I hear you, there are significant flaws in the examples she uses. I still think they're valid in demonstrating a different point than "entrepreneur visa." Her point is that there is an 'immigrant' demographic, and this demographic makes for good founders. Then, and only then, she makes the point that an entrepreneur visa for founders is a good idea.

The author uses immigrants' children/very young immigrants not immediately connected to the plan of starting a company to reference the entire immigrant demographic as a whole, since current US policies make it extremely improbable we can come up with good positive examples of a young immigrant starting a company, because US immigration rules prevent this situation from occurring.

Her logic is as follows:
-Fact: "According to statistics from Partnership for a New American Economy, 40% of Fortune 500 companies were created by immigrants or their children."
-Examples: Immigrants' children starting Fortune 500 companies

The logic here is using the immigrants' children to support the point that both immigrants and their children start companies, since the only direct immigrants who started the companies were either much older and already gone through the green card or broke the rules to start their company.

One of the major problems in our advocacy is that there is this big negative space that we /think/ can be filled. By definition, because it's a negative space, there are no positive examples to point to in making the argument. Positive examples strengthen any abstract argument, so they must be made. In this case, the author goes to young immigrants not immediately connected to startups to make the case that immigrants as a class make for good founders.

From there, the author makes one of her major points:

-Argument: US immigration prevents people from starting companies shortly after entering the country due to current visa rules
-Example: Amit Aharoni/ABC story
-Conclusion: Therefore we should change policy to allow more people like Amit in, hopefully creating more successes in this 'immigrant' demographic.
I see a potential for it.. I am talking about 100k visitors as a start.. is it a good sign to make it in full?

I will rely on Amazon AWS to reduce costs... and I can fund it for the next 1 year.. so I can cover it as well.. and I have a hope that it will reach 2Millions by the first year..

I am just afraid and worried.. but I want to do it quickly, because I had ideas very similar to friendfeed, and other online startups, but I was surprised that these ideas grown quickly and I was still thinking about it.. although I thought about it before it appeared.
It reminds me a lot of the music folks who abuse anyone who doesn't listen to whole albums: "You're not listening to music right/the way the artist meant it to be heard".

The right way to listen to music is to listen to it the way you want to. Sure, if you're unaware that albums are a series of tracks worked together in a sympathetic whole, you might benefit from trying it out and seeing if it appeals to you. But if you don't like that, then there's nothing wrong with picking and choosing what you want to hear.