skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad the author mentioned the disparity between work visas and immigration and visas for the "arts" (fashion models, actors, etc), which seem to be trivial to get. I don't understand that at all.

I will say that the last thing a startup visa program needs is discretionary government oversight. That has disaster written all over it.

My opinion is this: you should be able to come to the US and "pay your way". By this I mean demonstrate that a) you can support yourself and b) you are paying for things like health insurance. There probably needs to be a package for (b) such that, from the perspective of the government, you aren't "freeloading".

It should be up to each state to determine what that means. If you reside in NYC perhaps you need $30,000 to support yourself. In Iowa? Maybe $10,000 will do.

While residing in the US on such a visa you can't take a job (you need a visa for that) but you can start a business. This is where it gets tricky because you don't necessarily want to open the floodgates for people who are in de facto employment through a small business.

The packaged health (and other) costs and keeping sufficient funds to support yourself should ameliorate that possibility.

As long as people are willing to pay to reside in the US and work on their big idea, why not let them?

At some point if your company gets funded or you have sufficient revenue and/or employees, you can convert to the appropriate immigration status.
Ah ok, got it. This sentence was a bit misleading though:

> Dotcom took to Twitter recently with a new-found passion, promising that he would relaunch the “Pacific Fibre” project for the country and deliver “free broadband for all [New Zealanders].” How exactly does he plan to do that? By suing the pants off the American movie industry.
I think you're referring to this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeFo4ytOk8M

At the time of that video, the indexing team was still working on one (very minor, corner case) type of issue, but I believe that was resolved. I'll double-check with the indexing team, but at this point I'd say feel free to go HTTPS.

As always, I'd test it out first, ideally with a lower-traffic domain name. But if you like the results you get, you should be able to use our existing tools like 301s and rel=canonical to help Google discover that the site has gone HTTPS.
Sometimes, the urbanites on HN will pile on suburbia, wondering how anybody can live there. This is one of the reasons I often feel the same way, only in reverse. As I sit here, I can not hear any sounds not originating in my house. While I certainly visit the places with Musak, loud bars, et al, I don't live there. It isn't as grating when there is surcease.

I'm not saying that Here It Is, The Reason Suburban Living Is Better Than Anything Anywhere. I'm just saying, if you're one of those people who just can't imagine what anyone would find appealing about the lifestyle, but were also nodding your head in agreement with this piece... now you can.
Buy some earplugs. Same effect, much cheaper.
Wow. Scathing:

One of the worst aspects of Windows 8 for power users is that the product's very name has become a misnomer. "Windows" no longer supports multiple windows on the screen. Win8 does have an option to temporarily show a second area in a small part of the screen, but none of our test users were able to make this work. Also, the main UI restricts users to a single window, so the product ought to be renamed "Microsoft Window."

I wasn't aware of this "feature"...what a disaster.
Even though it makes sense, I think the biggest problem with this solution is preventing people from taking up low paying cash jobs. The US doesn't have an effective way to enforce that yet.
Unfortunately the GTK theme it is shipped with is a little off putting on OSX.

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/4600/screenshot20121119at...

The save dialog is standard GTK as well, not OSX.
Even the games I would have held up as shining examples of "doing it right" sucked six months later.

All but the greatest $60-up-front retail games suck six months later too. Most games just don't have that long of a shelf life - they just aren't designed for such replayability.
wouldlovetohearmore.com is available
Kbee
Where are you guys located?
Everyone who's worked with computers for any length of time has seen inexplicable, unreproducible crashes, lockups or reboots.

We're just conditioned to ignore them if they're neither frequent nor reproducible.
Israel beat back 43,999,999 and a half cyber attacks
There are very many car "trips" under a mile, but virtually zero in aircraft. You need to compare on a more useful metric, like time spent travelling.
> but client support isn't good enough yet.

I'm aware of SNI (and rely on it myself), but haven't found it to be an issue yet.

As far as I can see it's IE < 7 and XP. How big can that market really be? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Browsers...

If it's the "some corporations require IE6" argument, then it sounds like it's a business, and should be able to charge for the extra IP needed. But maybe I'm just horribly modern.
> Everyone who criticizes the TSA (and with reason) should also think about what they would do if they were given the task of trying to prevent Black Swan events with minimal disruption to the 99.9999 percent of normal travelers.

I was thinking they should probably reinforce and lock the cockpit doors. That would eliminate all attacks that are more deadly than hitting a high school football game or even a crowded mall.

If they ever do that, they can get rid of all of the nudity scanning devices and we'll be back to the same amount of danger as walking around in public.
Feedback -- not of the 'comments and criticism' variety.

Think of any successful project like a nuclear chain reaction. If you are not familiar with nuclei, some of them are "too heavy" and want to fall apart, spraying neutrons everywhere; they especially do this when they get absorb an extra neutron flying around, but quantum mechanics always gives you a spare neutron eventually.

The system transitions from negative feedback (no chain reaction) to positive feedback (chain reaction) according to a very simple principle: the number of free neutrons that a free neutron creates (call it N) must be more than one. (N=1 is the replacement rate; it's a metastable state of reaction. If you like, the reason why some nuclear reactors have been risky is that horrible accidents kill the safeguards which are simply designed to force N ≤ 1.)

This principle is so fundamental -- it's why there's a 'meme' analogue to the 'genes' in the modern theory of evolution, why countries become bureaucracies, and why nuclear reactors are hard -- that I hope everyone working in startups starts thinking about their products this way. It's not signups which you need to have a successful product. It's that every free customer must convert, on average, greater than or equal to one new free customer. Even if you cannot get all the way to one, you boost your marketing effects by a factor of 1/(1 - N), so if you can increase N from converting 0.25 people per person to 0.30 people per person, it's as good as spending 10% more on marketing.

And it applies, yes, to any open-source project too. The open-source projects which succeed are those which help hackers to help those projects, just like the genes which succeed are the ones which help their species to spread that gene. I'm not even sure that this particular project is open-source. (I believe it falls into a special case where the GPL is used as a closed-source license. That is, GPL requires me to provide a copy of the source code when I distribute the code -- but I do not have the source code, and I cannot coerce the author into giving it to me, so I am not actually free to distribute the binary either until they give me permission to do so one way or another.) The author's claimed reason for not providing a way to "Fork me on GitHub" is, "I have not made a major effort to put its code on any of the open source repositories as it does not currently seem the right thing to do. Just not worth the effort." And that's probably the deepest reason why it's fallen into neglect.
What confuses me is the (relative) sophistication of some of these scams juxtaposed with some really shoddy website designs that scream "scam" to me.

When scammers and phishers learn to put together a semi respectable design or even simply copy the designs they are trying to imitate more precisely they would be far more successful.
"why all the cussing?"

The OP may have exhausted his verbal capacity constructing warnings to co-workers about buying houses while depending on any start-up, without suggesting _his_ startup was in any difficulty. Then pondering this additional reminder of how many people depended on him. Maybe while deeply discouraged, still called on to project confidence, reassured only by the knowledge that deep discouragement happens in any project of real uncertainty.

Then he thought about folks like yourself dismissing the stress of working at the confluence of Transparency and Confidence. At which point he started swearing.
Show HN: Chrome Zoom Text Only
Thanks. I was wondering when Jakob Nielsen would review Windows 8's UX. I agree the mono-color icons are a mistake. Icons exist for a reason - to differentiate between each app, and have its own unique identify. It's much less the case with Windows 8 icons because they are all white and mostly undifferentiated. It just makes it harder for the brain to process which is which, and where is what you're looking for, or what an icon means.
This is CPA marketing, not really a scam, they're just being smart about preying on stupid Australian's - I live here, trust me, there are many.
How to make money with Mechanical Turk without being scammed
Why is the converse also true? I hear people spout off the most racist and sexist crap imaginable then complain their "free speech" rights are being trampled when others call them out on it (also see any administrative policy ever implemented by Reddit). It's so embarrassingly prevalent it's become a meme within the social justice community.

Here in Canada we have the hate speech restriction. It works out well. No slippery slopes has been slid down, and also no Westboro Baptist Church. I for one happily take that tradeoff, if you can even call it that.
Ha! Didn't even think about that.
Maybe because Amazon prices windows 8 pro upgrade at $66.99 while you can get it from Microsoft Store for $40?!

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-8-Pro-Upgrade/dp/B00...

[2]http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232961/Microsoft_sta...
I see, I was primarily commenting on their situation in the PC world. Things get a bit blurry depending on whether you look at tablets and PCs as being in one market or two, and a bit more so when thinking about which category to place some of the hybrid Windows 8 devices into.

So to clarify, my opinion is that they're probably pretty safe as far as maintaining their position in the PC world even if Windows 8 bombs as a PC OS. Losing entrance into the tablet world for two extra years on the other hand is a lot worse since it would be very difficult to get those two years worth of tablet buyers to switch to their platform after having already bought into another during that time.

How the second part actually plays out in the real world is really hard to predict since a lot of it will be based on the hardware that runs the OS. For example, I personally think Windows 8 is a pretty poor Desktop OS, but I'd definitely consider it when buying a tablet. So my problem isn't so much the OS but their current flagship device; the Surface RT looks to have too many deal breakers for me and I don't think I have a need for the Pro version.
An ideology is only as rigid as those who adhere to it. I'm a libertarian, but I make exceptions as I recognize that there is no perfect political philosophy.
If you are publishing serious accusations based on a rumour or a guess I'm not sure that you shouldn't face some consequences. The British libel laws do have real problems but I'm not yet certain this is one.

That isn't to say that a tweet to a small number of followers should be enough to cause massive damages. Maybe if the total damages are similar to what a newspaper would pay shared amongst all the libelling tweeters in proportion to their follower numbers.

The law in this area isn't yet tested so may end badly or quite sensibly.
Respecting shared public space is becoming as quaintly archaic as tipping your hat to a lady, now that the concept of public space is as nearly extinct as hats, and ladies.

-- QFT
The concept of early detection or screening is very attractive, but for many cancers the results have been disappointing:

Prostate cancer: (not effective)
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004720/screening-for-prostat...

Breast cancer: (evidence conflicting, minimal improvement)
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001877/screening-for-breast-...

And as other commenters have noted, early detection does not mean the ultimate outcome will be improved -- some cancers have a spectrum of presentations, with some persons having more slowly growing / indolent tumors that can be detected and treated (but may not have actually been likely to harm the person harboring the lesion), while other persons develop rapidly growing and very aggressive tumors that will be fatal (but are hard to detect with screening because they develop and spread rapidly). Only carefully constructed and controlled studies can determine if screening for a particular cancer with a particular screening test actually improves survival or reduces morbidity -- short term or uncontrolled studies can be very misleading.

Also the whole subject is subject to anger and political correctness issues -- some good hearted persons want to believe that some screening metholodogy must help because they want it to help, the evidence be damned! So there can be more heat than light ... anybody who says a specific screening test not helpful can be accused of running a "death panel".
That's what I was thinking. Clicking around a few more of their apps, I noticed a self review on Patriot Dash from the husband in the article:

"I'm very proud of these high school students and their hard work. I can't wait to see what else they do."

Did the wife need to quit her job in order to help develop these games? They look fairly simple. Why didn't the husband keep doing contract work on the side the whole time? Was their any real thought into a business plan? Games are a tough, hit driven market. Kids games can be even harder because of competition with well known names and characters from the likes of Disney, Lego, etc...

I noticed a mini-golf game on the web site. I'm typically a sucker for those types of games, but when I opened it realized it's only a score keeper! Sigh.

The app store gold rush is over, but the article confused the gold rush ending with too many poor business decisions.
I am nearly driven to madness by the torrent of noise in public environments. I don't expect places full of people to be quiet, per se, but I do not understand why every such space needs to have eight screens and speakers every ten feet pumping some kind of inane music.

I spend a lot of time in airports, and I'm always amazed at how hard it is to find any space that is not subjected to either Fox/CNN or whatever insipid music they've decided would be "good for this space." I'm always grateful to find one of those ridiculous chapels that tries not to offend anyone of any religion while still being "spiritual." Because -- praise God! -- at least it's quiet.

Honestly, I just want to read and think. I respect those who would rather talk, or sing, or whatever; I can move away from that if it's bothering me. But how do you move away from environments that are deliberately designed to make sure you are never without noise?
Not every Amtrak line even has a quiet car - long-distance lines don't have them, and even some regional lines don't have them (such as the Pacific Surfliner).
The proportion of those under twenty that are interested in, to put it generally, 'creating things' has not significantly changed over the years. There will always be a large number that are passive, that simply want to be catered to.

The difference is that with the internet and social media we can actually see how large that proportion is. In the age of television, newspapers, and strictly controlled publishing you wouldn't hear from these people at all. They'd be invisible.

The ability of young people to interact directly with the creators they admire has never been greater and we're seeing a lot of achievement in that group that wasn't possible before. Instead of being shunned by publishers, these kids are just going it alone and self-publishing and in some cases, succeeding, something that would never have happened twenty years ago.

There always has been and always will be lazy people.
Healthy Living And Well-being Tips - If Only You Do One Thing This Week
I use "white" noise (ocean waves, rainfall, etc.) to both block out distractions and improve concentration. It works very well for me.
The Gaza Bombshell (2008)
> Out in the civilian world you would never understand why this man was stopped but in the military world i would yave done the exact same thing.

The airlines exist in the civilian world, so there are civilian expectations.

> They will also do dry runs to see if tsa is doing their job before they bring in real explosives.

What is their job? Security theater?

> Liberties have to be sacrificed at times

You assume we will get our liberties back at some point. If the TSA expires, I would agree with you, but it looks like they've taken our liberties from here forward.
Selling the car and cashing in 401K is generating cash flow.

So is selling a kidney, but that doesn't make it a good idea. The wife had a job and quit. The husband appears to have some IT skills that he could have used to bring cash in on the side while looking for that hit game.

Heck, if they both kept working they could have had someone make these games for them for way less than they loss in money and opportunity costs.
Fixing Silicon Valley before it craters
No, I suspect that he likely doesn't realize that he is "that guy." I'm almost certain that he believes he is one of the elite, civilized folks who recognizes the "moral reality" of those around him, and that this is just an exceptional situation, which is not a typical example of his behavior.

In reality, he's probably a jerk that ignores others.
Yeah I'd tend to agree here -- a lot of this stress in this article can be mitigated by a) attacking an idea that leads to revenue quickly, or at least can be market validated clearly quickly and b) only raising the stakes (ie, raising money, going after "whale" purchase orders) once this revenue or validation has materialized. As a nice side effect, the process of raising money or landing sales once you've got some validation not only reduces the risk of failure but also makes the process a lot easier and less time consuming anyway. (Kickstarter is a hell of a way to do this nowadays.)

It's still going to be a stressful ride but getting a few things like this right early on can basically "de-leverage" your risk profile in starting a company from being (metaphorically) 100x to "merely" 10x.
This was incredibly evident during the election. They're really leading the pack in terms of using newer technologies as more than a tool to draw attention to their articles, but to actually add depth to them.
Congratulations to the Meraki team. I was hoping to see them make more of a run on the wireless incumbents, but I can understand that 1.2b was too much to pass up (considering Aruba's market cap is only 2.1b).
Bullshit. Start menu is a prehensile tail. MS has better sense than this.
Oh, wow, that “Change PC settings” button (if you can call it that) is abhorrent. How can something like that happen? How are you even supposed to know that’s a button? Is it more often the case with Windows 8 that buttons have zero indication that they are buttons?
I've never been, but have read that Germany has very strict laws governing when and where noise can be made. In fact, only 2 years ago there was an amendment to the law giving children in Berlin the right to make noise, but only during specified hours: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8520941.stm
I suspect some people can't type quietly because they don't know how. (The secret is to relax the fingers and hands by paying attention to the sensations coming from the fingertips.)

I totally support the quiet coaches. However, they do come loaded with the risk of confrontation between the quiet and the noisy, which is far more disturbing than mere hubbub.
You guys might also find this github project useful: https://github.com/splaice/py-bootstrap
What do we do about untrustworthy Certificate Authorities?
maybe slashcode.git.sourceforge.net ?

old site:
http://slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/
Yeah, in Japan it's considered rude not to slurp noodles, because that means you're not enjoying them, which would be an insult to whoever made them.
Metro apps, or whatever they are calling them nowadays, do take over the entire screen, desktop apps are as they have always been and can be opened as many as you like, and arranged as you like given your screen real-estate. I routinely have 5-10 windows open at any given time on my desktop that is running Windows 8.
Show HN: I'm 12, and I made this social music sharing app
Well, looks like pg called it on this one.

"MAKE HARDWARE WITH NON-SUCKY SOFTWARE."

"okay"

"Here, have a billion."

Obviously, I am omitting all of the actual work for entertainment value. Edit: isn't a YC company, I don't want to confuse things.

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

"27. Hardware/software hybrids. Most hackers find hardware projects alarming. You have to deal with messy, expensive physical stuff. But Meraki shows what you can do if you're willing to venture even a little way into hardware. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in hardware; you can often do dramatically new things by making comparatively small tweaks to existing stuff."
Holy fucking shit, this is a good list. A lot of lists happen on Hacker News, and we're all like: ha ha good list. BUT THIS IS A GOOD LIST.
I'm glad to see this blogged about as it was on my todo list. I have numerous previous examples of this scam as well if people want to compare and contrast (free sunglasses [Oakleys], free headphones [Beats by Dr Dre], etc).

What annoys me most about this is the scam is only spread through exploiting human nature and not advanced technology. The code is literally almost exactly the same each time yet nothing has been done by Facebook to prevent it. Fingerprinting this is certainly not impossible (every example I've seen is formulaic and even starts the counter at 973) and I'm surprised Facebook doesn't have an advanced spam fighting arsenal that's effective against it.

Does anyone know what tools they use to combat this sort of thing? Machine learning would work really well here considering numerous past examples and the fact you're only interested in links that are spreading virally. Even if you needed a human being for final confirmation before blocking the site, you'd knock out a link once and it'd positively impact tens of thousands of people. I'd be shocked if using bit.ly and a few other obvious spammy redirects was all you needed to trick Facebook...
doesn't work with iceweasel, don't care enough to work around
Calling their solution "non-sucky" is an understatement.
That's exactly my point. Give everybody a visa, but reward them with GC only when they build a successful business. If they can't - they go home when the visa expires.
My experience with suburbia was that there was always yard equipment going, plus dogs and teenagers. These loud, punctuated sounds always bothered me much more than the regular, low din of a city. Moreover, most of the noise in cities in from automobiles, which are mainly a problem inflicted upon us by suburban development.