skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I broadly agree with your sentiment that H1-B workers may not be bad for America. But I disagree with your line of argument. Even if I grant your hypothesis on the smartness of H1-B workers, it doesn't necessarily mean a value addition to America, especially if there are equally smart Americans available to do the job.

There might be other value additions though: people with diverse backgrounds generally means people with different ways of looking at a challenge, which is generally a good thing if your team trying to solve hard problems.
Terry Childs: Attempt to protect network gone awry?
BlackBerry Curve 8900 hits the hotspot with VoIP
Startups at this stage can certain move, but it's expensive (in time and money) to do so. Some startups at this stage have spouses and kids, which makes this a bigger decision. If the spouse has a lucrative job, this makes it more expensive (especially in this market, where there aren't big piles of jobs sitting around in the valley).

In our case, YC was worth it. We left working wives behind and they visited us occasionally to remind us that we were married.

But if there was a similar quality program locally, we would've considered it. (For the record, I don't think TechStars is good enough that we would've punted YC for it if it were local, but it seems to be getting better).

Geography is less of a factor for YC applicants, I'd assume, because YC is far enough above the competition that it's worth it to move.
Web 2.0 Security Threats
The App Store Business Model: Lite
Such a bad article.

Some programming tasks are boring, yes(no shit...).

All? No. Programming can be very challenging, obviously it depends on the task.

If you want a challenge I suggest you pick up computer vision, still 20-30 years down the line a largely unsolved problem.
Or create tools to make games programming more productive.
Or...the list goes on.
How to build a simple web app in 5 days for $300 and get mass coverage
What should companies look for in a candidate's tweets?
I know that companies already look at blogs, but tweets give you more insight into how a person thinks throughout the day.

Would you consider a candidate who tweets mostly about mundane matters for example?
I'm not entirely sure I see the value of this. Note that it doesn't tell us much about the state of the world, but rather more about the historical order in which these problems were inducted into the NP-completeness club. And by the time enough data points have been added to the picture to cover a meaningful fraction of the NP-complete problems that have been studied, will it even be possible to make sense of the humongous graph?

There are meaningful distinctions within NP-complete problems, such as whether they are easy to approximate. Perhaps if the graph incorporated that information, I can see this going somewhere..
It is definitely a step in the right direction for education. However, surgery is a very experiential type of learning so the true value is limited. If it could be integrated with a live video feed would increase medical value.

As far as a good way to get people to hear about their procedure, it is very effective. It got CNN and whoever followed it on twitter to hear about their procedure.
AlphaInventions.com - Read & Share Blogs In Real-time
The article is written as though it's journalism, but it does have a pretty clear political agenda. For instance, "President Clinton's tenure was characterized by economic prosperity and financial deregulation, which in many ways set the stage for the excesses of recent years." The author is making the claim there that the deregulation set the stage for financial excesses. More on that in a minute.

About Fannie Mae: "President Lyndon Johnson, who in 1968 pushed it halfway out the government nest and into a problematic part-private, part-public role in an attempt to reduce the national debt"

The article implies that the whole mess was a result of deregulation and more controls/regulation would have fixed it. Where in reality, it's really complicated, and there was some terrible abuses by officers of public corporations, and terrible judgment of government. The article implies American financial excess culture was created by deregulation - whereas a lot of people would contend that having the government slash interest rates to almost free money status was a large contributor to people spending out of control, borrowing so much, leveraging so much, speculating so much. And that's a government problem, not a private industry problem.

Fannie/Freddie - author implies the problem was the semi-private nature of the business. Whereas the semi-government nature of the business allowed them to take risks that private industry might not have.

Clearly there's lots of people responsible for the mess, and most people in the article do deserve some scrutiny. But saying - "Clinton: Deregulated. Bush: Deregulated. Greenspan: Deregulated. Fannie Mae CEO: Deregulated back in 1968..." whereas there wasn't any citing of ridiculously low interests rates, government backing of bad mortgages, and so on - well, it's an opinion, but it's certainly not objective journalism.

Edit: Actually, it does mention interest rates on Greenspan. It's just it mentions deregulation 3-4 times, mentions libertarianism and even Ayn Rand once each, and mentions "super low interest" rates only in passing, then concludes with: "The maestro admitted in an October congressional hearing that he had "made a mistake in presuming" that financial firms could regulate themselves.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=450460
+1 furyg3
The most interesting and difficult part about business programming is that your clients rarely have a good idea what they want. They say they want searching, but what searches will they commonly want to perform? What type of data are they looking for on a daily basis and is there some kind of daily report they didn't think of which would be useful to them? They claim that such and such will never ever change ever, but what happens when it does, and how can our system adapt to that?

Taking a VERY vague description for a database frontend and fleshing it out into a useful, intuitive, fast website actually IS fun and interesting and non-sucky to me. Seeing a client visibly pleased and impressed with my work is very fulfilling and rewarding. Experimenting with new technologies (in moderation) to accomplish these tasks is fascinating and educational.
TechStars requested videos this year, before YC's latest application opened, which also requested videos - are we to now start saying YC copied TS? Get over it.
It's an interesting assortment of evil doers, but I think some were added to make the list go to 25. Many were evil but didnt directly contribute a lot. Marion and Herb Sandler invented the ARM, but were out of the picture a long time ago. Ian McCarthy is a poster child for aggressive home builders. David Lereah is just a minor economist. Burton Jablin is a network programmer. I blame congress more than Clinton. And the "American Consumer"? Give me a break. We're left holding the bag.
I think the purpose of these plans are to raise awareness in the mainstream media. This article is a good example of this tactic working. It doesn't matter if the decidion makers know what Twitter is, they know what newspapers are.

In Canada when the government introduced their new copyright laws about 100,000 people joined a facebook group overnight. Alone that group wouldn't achieve much, but all media picked up the "100,000 people Facebook group" and it was headlines for days, causing the government to backdown on the bill.

I do agree that if people want to change the world they should get out and do something to change it directly, but if they aren't willing to do that these small online protests still do affect the real world.
It's a poll of readers (i.e., site visitors). Don't look for analysis of any depth. At least it's giving millions (assuming the ever-refreshing count is not heavily spammed) a chance to ventilate. Be my guest: join the madding crowd.
Any idea why they wouldn't let customers use the headsets they already have?
I think I would prefer not to hire folks who spend their days trying to cram their insights into 110 character textboxes instead of working on the hard problems.
Future Shock for Internet Ads?
But case law blurs in the context of Facebook.

I post an album of a friends drunken birthday party. I tag my friends. They start tagging their friends and commenting. Once people are interacting through my photos on facebook, the question comes down to who owns the interaction?

Since we have "weak" laws for dealing with this, or our existing laws just do not seem practical in the scope that Facebook transmits information globally, its probably the simplest means of getting around the legal framework: Assign ownership to the corporation, since you cannot fairly create a legal representative for each "network".
Think of *nix as Lego. You can build anything with just plain white bricks but it's fun to play with the special brightly colored ones too.
Sony Ericsson Z555 Unlocked
Sony Ericsson Z555 is here for you with totally entertaining gadget and multi featuring. It’s a perfect match of the latest feature existing and an innovative equilateral design, proposed to make one big style statement.
The number of tab hits is a better indicator of how many elements are in the interface. Using a mouse, you can often skip past several steps or options. Once you're familiar with the interface, you don't notice how much you're skipping past. Nevertheless, when first confronted with an interface, your eyeballs and brain have to read and process the whole mess. Sticking with Jakob Nielsen-like conventions reduces the user's feeling of needing to examine every interface element. That's nice, but the elements are still all there, and you must "deal with" (author's term) each one when tabbing.

The author says: "There's nothing complex or confusing about iCal's event entry UI. And with specific fields for each item of data, it is more obvious than Backpack's--but only for a first-time user, which is the wrong case to optimize for. But to me iCal's date entry UI is clearly worse, much worse, and the reason why can be expressed by the fact that it forces you to deal with about 10 user interface elements, versus just 2 for Backpack."

In summary, an interface with many elements which follow conventions might be fine for first-time users and those who use prefer a mouse to keyboard navigation. But the author wants an interface with fewer elements--even if their meaning is not obvious--because he likes to hit the tab key, not click a mouse.
True. I knew people who were born in Switzerland and lived in Switzerland their whole lives, and still had Spanish passports only.
I always thought this was the cornerstone of UI design, something everyone knows, so it's a little sad that someone has to blog about it.
You're right. Its Facebook's picture.
It's good to see Clinton making this list. I'm not a big GW Bush fan, but it seemed a bit unfair during the election season when so many ads put blame on him for the financial crisis–when, in fact, some of the policies which led to this were already in place.
It's 140 characters, not 110 characters; and the best insights are the short ones.

For instance, "Pondering password hashing techniques", "Decided that bcrypt isn't good enough for tarsnap", and "Loving the random oracle model" tells quite a story. :-)
Flagging it. They don't need more press for this lame stunt.
Dr. Craig Rogers, the lead surgeon in the Henry Ford surgery, said the impetus for his Twittering was to let people know that a tumor can be removed without taking the entire kidney.

Why not write a journal article?
Google's PowerMeter. It's Cool, but don't Bogart My Meter Data
See also: Facebook and Myspace

How many millions a year do they spend? 4chan is a lean one person operation, probably costing less than 100K a year to run. Given the traffic he's getting, he could be getting miniscule CPMs and still be doing ok.
"I think I would prefer not to hire folks who spend their days trying to comment on social news sites instead of working on the hard problems."
Shocker of the century. Flagging.
nc is also great for redirecting *sqldump over the wire and importing directly on another machine. Using "nc -l" (for listen) and pointing a browser to it also let's you know plenty about what headers a browser is sending. (Yes, you can get a tool made especially for that, but when you don't, it's a great two second hack.)
Vitamin Pills -  A False Hope?
Silicon Valley's next challenge: Retraining
You should not introduce complexity into software for the sake of adding complexity. That goes without saying.

Most business logic problems are not inherently complex -- the overwhelming majority of programmers in the world will spend the overwhelming majority of their time on the routine practice of their profession, not pushing its boundaries. Same with doctors or lawyers for that matter.

This categorically does not mean that the routine parts of the job suck. I write CRUD code for Japanese universities. Sample: there is a table which holds session data into it. Take the number of people who are currently logged in and record it to a file every 5 minutes. Make the file accessible by FTP for another system.

Is it going to set the world on fire? No. Is it an opportunity to practice my craft, to carefully design around the obvious issues and the not-so-obvious ones? Yes. Does it improve the lives of my customers? Yes -- that file makes a graph possible and that graph is going to get one forward thinking administrator a raise because it will demonstrate that the project he staked his organizational capital on is a success. As it should be, as the project (which is MUCH bigger than me) helps the university and its students out scads.

It doesn't have to be a multiorgasmic thrillride EVERY day of the week, you know.
My guess is the masses will not read articles. While Twitter has not hit critical mass yet, it will at least reach a wider audience?

I for one don't read medical journals.
Social media resume (www.social-resume.com) - quick tour guide
The Stimulus Plan Update
well here it it ... http://social-resume.com/smr/sr/sr.html
Lame stunt? I think the fact they managed to get all their haters to generate traffic AND sales for them shows an entrepreneurial spirit that we should all aspire to.

You don't have to like their product to appreciate their tactics in the market segment they are in.
Please fix the title. 25 should be changed to say 6 billion.
Sometimes handy for me: if you have information that you've sent in an HTTP POST, and you need to recover it for whatever reason, there's often no easy way to get at it from the browser interface. The browser will send the data again if you reload the page, so:

1. In a terminal, startup netcat as a listener:

nc -l -p9999

2. In your browser, configure the connection preferences to use manual proxy settings of host "localhost" and port "9999"

3. Hit reload on the browser, and tell it "yup, send the POST data again"

4. Look at the output of netcat

(Don't forget to change your proxy settings back!)
With No Budget, California Cutting 10,000 Jobs
Well, this seems useful. How about 25 policies to blame for the financial crisis? Or maybe 25 ways to prevent another similar crisis in the future? Or maybe 25 ways to alleviate the current crisis?

Blaming people just seems petty and unhelpful - especially since macroeconomics is still half voodoo. Macro is hard. You have studies, but there are always too many variables to make them very scientific. The studies aren't plentiful since it's a relatively new field of study and one where it can take a decade of collecting data to create a study of one thing. And beyond that implementing public policy can be a ridiculous thing since so many parties wish to bend at least a part of it.

Blame might make people feel a bit better having gotten their vengeance in a public outcry against those who possibly didn't do wrong, but it doesn't help us.
Dog gait is fascinating. My dog "single tracks" -- his front and rear prints converge. As he walks faster in snow (so I can see it), the prints converge from : : to . .

You can kind of see the principle in a photo on his (very old) page: http://corvis.catell.us/

When he runs free, it is a straight line of four prints and then a body length: . . . . . . . .

I'm surprised I can't easily find pictures of this. German Shepherds do this, as do many other dogs.
http://www.dpca.org/JEC/illustrated_standard/Gait/gait.htm

In snow, it is obvious why this is advantageous. And yet I've never seen a museum use this print pattern in their "follow the stickers to a display" tricks.
From a business perspective it doesn't seem too intelligent to announce your closing down, but good for him if it generated traffic and sales.
A lot more women and minorities work on Wall Street today compared with forty years ago. Is this a coincidence? Perhaps not.

Why is this drivel on HN? Not only is it off-topic, it's based on very tenuous logic.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=450460

I totally called it.

(So did everyone else with half a brain.)
"Of the 7, the amounts requested range from about $20k to more than $100k"

Interesting. I was not thinking that the investments would be this "large".
Yes, for hackers, “Get 'er dun” means, “Get it released.” ...which means that the real test is the response of your product's intended audience in its intended setting (not just a focus group, etc.)
Rechargeable Batteries with Flexible Solar Cells - DIY prototypes
"Honestly, they'd have done better to just fund 20 startups in Boulder"

I've heard they might do that as well.

I'm guessing the difference between techstars and YC is less about going regional to source applicants than it is about spreading around the mentor pool, sort of like franchising the "learn from elders" experience rather than concentrating it. YC's a bet in the other direction, sure, but I'm also interested to see how this plays out because I just can't imagine the bay area has a complete lock on all of the previously successful entrepreneurs willing to advise the next generation of hackers. At the very least, there's a certain amount of mentors and potential investors that like being away from the echo chamber and prefer to talk in Boston about Derrida rather than in SF/SV about virality, or in the case of Techstars and Brad Feld, about Lance Armstrong, beer and whatever else people like in Boulder.
Name recognition/branding. I otherwise would have never heard of this Dr. Rogers. Now I've heard of him and I am probably more likely to think he is "with it". Not that this branding will ever help him much with me, but I think that is what is going on.
I'm a "use tables for layout occasionally" kinds guy, but this isn't the same. This isn't a CSS replacement for tables, this is a standard set of styles to assist in doing a grid-based design.
I do admit a great bias in favor of stem cell research and consider it the new frontier. But "morally contentious" is highly subjective, whereas the applicability of bio research is not. That is also to say that you have more wiggle room in interpreting what is contentious research, whereas research results have no wiggle room (well, there is for bio, but there is always the option of disproving something).

Which means that it is easy to muddle the issues by drawing hazy borders around themes that vary from person to person, which is likely a source of impediment for bio research. Therefore, it isn't far fetched, at all. Funding is certainly good, but restricting what areas can be done, or even having a say in it, when it comes to pure research, is not helpful.

But, I am not very educated about these policies and you do make a good point. This is just a mostly personal interpretation of it, which I believe has a good likelihood :)
Another result is less wiggle room for design error. Hence, modern bridge’s predilection for collapsing.

[citation needed]

I don't know what else to say about this. Plenty of bridges failed catastrophically before we had computers. Remember the Tacoma Narrows bridge? Computers would have given us a better understanding of the forces at play. (Notice that the present-day Tacoma Narrows bridge hasn't collapsed? Interesting coincidence :P)

Anyway, this article had no citations for the "facts" it stated, used the word "probably" when there were no facts, and wasn't even written well. (Notice the misused apostrophe in the quote?) It was also boring.
Agreed. This is one of the worst articles I've ever read.
I don't think there is any animosity between founders for TS vs YC. I've intro'ed TS startups to our investors before, and if/when we need to go back and raise another round, they'll do the same.
I'm surprised to hear that people have forgotten about Netcat!
"Don't we have too many normal people out there already, saying the same stuff in their lookalike blogs...? "

False choice. There are smart, innovative thinkers expressing themselves with a notable lack of quirk, and a better signal-to-noise ratio.
If Mac, Windows and Linux are anything to go by, no one else will really make something quite as nice as the iPhone. What they will do is make things that are good enough looking, open enough, and diverse enough, that they will grab segments of the market that Apple will never even go after. That's my hope at least, I'm just not interested in being locked into Apple's world. And the fact that Android is open source is seriously cool for people who want to really do interesting things.
So let's say you have kidney cancer, and need to have surgery. Your doctor says he needs to remove your entire kidney. Is he really going to change his mind when you say, "I saw on Twitter that that's not true."

No. Probably not.

At least a journal article seems more legitimate, although I doubt anyone is going to risk their medical license on that either.
In Defense of Readers
Wanted: Layout System
socat is better IMHO

http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/
How Not To Make A Commercial Linux Distribution
Personally, I'd prefer someone not be 'with it' whilst poking about my guts. Of the skills I'd be seeking in a surgeon, multi-tasking tweet-master is not among them.

Aren't brief audio-notes (or a full video) enough reference for composing a detailed account of the operation after-the-fact?
Wakaleo Consulting to contribute 33% of upcoming bootcamp profits for bushfire victims
Design In Progress: Choosing the Right Product
This is what every professional services firm says in every situation ever. "You get what you pay for". Two problems with that: first, like you said, you don't always get what you pay for. Second, and more importantly, you don't always need what you paid for.

90% of clients "awesome, non-cookie-cutter shit" would do just fine with mediocre, pedestrian work. And of course, work doesn't become mediocre just because the client doesn't pay agency rates.
Who is your carrier, if I might ask?
If they just need this for inbox messages, why don't they just expressly list that as the exception. I would be fine with that.
5. Tedium is Inescapable. No O/R-mapper or code-generator can ever solve the fact that records, fields, validators, etc. need to be defined, by hand, in at least two places (front- and back-end). A UI generated from the database is just as bad as the database that’s generated from the UI.

Not true. Look at systems like Magritte (or my Perl variant, Ernst), for example.

http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/smalltalk/magritte

The idea here is that you define everything once, and then generate the storage and interface layers from that. It's a really good idea.

Code mostly Business

FWIW, ignoring this approach has saved our company hundreds of thousands of dollars. Every minute we "waste" writing reusable libraries ends up saving hours on all of our future projects. And it's fun too.

Who says you can't have fun for the sake of fun?
The most important public part of your company is your graphic design? I'm sorry.