skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are missing an important part. There is low barriers for your job to be shipped abroad.

A doctor's job is hard to ship, especially the emergency ones (you still hear about people going abroad for cosmetical work), and lawyers have barriers (you have to pass the Bar, laws changing constantly by state etc.), therefore they can command higher salaries.

But for software engineers, the barrier of job shipping is really low. My company has a team in Argentina, doing decent work. If I was twice as expensive as I was now, the company probably would have just hired all the engineering there, and maybe one or two "architect" types in the US.

Eventually american engineers with less experience would have to lower their salaries, to get into a level where the efficiencies that are gained by having somebody with the same culture/understanding on site is worth the extra cost that the average american programmer commands.

1. Remember, you are competing in a global pool of talent. Doctors/lawyers have an huge local advantage that engineers simply don't have.

2. H-1B is an recent trend (late 90s trend). I doesn't explain the lack of interest in engineering/math for american graduates. (see number 1. Even if your salary was so high to spark interest, your job it would be outsourced soon, or your company will go bust as so many did in 2001-2003).

3. In the late 90s salaries were really high. It motivated the wrong kind of people to get into school. I remember, a lot of "I am in CS for the money, not b/c the passion" types in late 90s (when I started school, and the dot com was all the rage. Within the year a lot of them were in a different major, b/c they couldn't handle it. Information technology, or business being the fallback majors of choice.

4. Even until lately, salaries for engineers have been really good. CS is one of the few majors where you can command 50-70k right after college, and where by 25 you can easily be pulling 6 figs. (I was by 25).

While I agree, that H-1B should be used to bring really skilled people in (and not used a simply a cost control school), eliminating it, is a sure path to Detroit-ing Silicon Valley.
I have a copy of Nigrini's book. I've tried getting copies for my company, but other than the occasional $200+ used copy on Amazon, it appears like this book isn't just "out of print" but withdrawn from the market (the publisher sells training now, not books that anyone can read).

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-analysis-using-Benfords-Law/dp...

http://www.nigrini.com/data_analysis_books.htm
That's a ballsy move.

Not at all, it's just plain old PR. Any PR is good PR, remember?
Okay, it's a fun campaign and kudos to the agency for talking them into it - but I don't see anything earth shattering behind the smoke and mirrors.

the public controls Skittle's web site, to some degree.

Well, if that's what gets you guys so worked up then you'll be in for a disappointment. The flickr and youtube streams are owned by skittles - no public control. The wikipedia page is (predictably) already protected and will probably stay that way for the time being.

So what's left is the twitter stream, which is basically an animated wallpaper with the occassional bit of foul language.

Hm. Sorry, as said, nice little PR stunt and reasonably executed - but I don't see anyone talking about this in 4 weeks. In fact, expect skittles.com to change back to the classic marketing look once the little hype has worn off.
Unfortunately, mocking of delusional fanboyism is hard to discern from actual delusional fanboyism.
I regret my college loans... like I said elsewhere in this comment thread, if I could do it over, I'd make it as cheap as possible for myself.
Are there any valid reasons as to why you would still want to move to the US?
I'd vote against this. I don't think the fact that some people gain karma by being the first to post popular articles is so terrible a thing that it should be offset by auto-submiting all that stuff. Most of what 37signals post is trash, anyway... one-liners and quotes that really don't belong here.

If you really want to deal with the "karma problem", then make submissions from those sources karma-free - i.e. they don't influence the submitter's karma. But since I don't think that there is actually a "karma problem", I think this is a non-issue and not worth dealing with.
Set it free. If it crashes the program, it was yours all along.
We don't have great age demographics on our traffic but in general it is weighted relatively heavily towards men as well but older than I would guess Kongregate's users are which probably explains the level of IE usages we see compared to yours as I would guess the older the user population skews the less likely they are to go and download something other than what came with their operating system.
But the border with Mexico is huuuge. Also, this article is about Indians & Chinese. Are they high or low IQ? My understanding of the racist consensus is that that of the Chinese is at least as high as American whites; Indians, it's more mixed or unknown. What was your angle, that the US should make it easier, /for the better educated/?
But doesn't Azure have a much worse limitation: Microsoft?
I would like to see how she would explain commodity valorization. If she does not subscribe to the Labor Theory of Value, how is that extra value imparted, if not from the labor (variable) acting on constant capital? It's a mistake to attribute it all to money. Even she say money is an expression of this value.
Yahoo Fined By Belgian Court For Refusing To Give Up E-Mail Account Info
Continually blogging about the courtcase, partying, inviting livebloggers and sending live feeds from the court is an excellent PR strategy for Thepiratebay.

If they're found guilty there'll be an uproar, and the Swedish authorities and judges know they're being watched closely by an international community.
Actually, I'd argue that TPB winning would be a good outcome for the rest of us, but even if they don't, it's only a matter of time. Patterns are not things, and the only way to paper over the difference is to make it harder to work with patterns... but that's not the way technology is going.
I don't remember seeing "infinite" in any marketing material. I'm not trying to be snarky... I think both Google and Amazon are upfront about this.
You dont need a fence.

The problem is not crossing, it is the hiring of illegal immigrants
Books and Music That Make You Dumb
Is it any good fried?
I would argue that while this certainly sucks for the US in the short term, it's awesome for the world in the long term. This is exactly what globalization is good for -- expose talented people from all over the world to the free market, get them to our level of expertise, and then have them go back home and start the arduous process of improving local standards of living.
End of the free ride
Damien jokes about this, but he wrote a great article about error handling: http://damienkatz.net/2006/04/error_code_vs_e.html
"Returnees said they were generally making less money in absolute terms, but they also said they enjoyed a higher quality of life."

That is exactly my case.

The only thing I miss about living in the U.S. is the opportunity to work for the very smart companies. (e.g Google, Amazon, etc.) But in any case if you are successful in your start up, you can create the smart company atmosphere yourself.

The barriers to migrate to the U.S. are absurd. I know people that have been waiting for ten years.
I dont buy that. Please explain why that would be good?

If the music companies win then perhaps the idiot pirates start to acutally get scared. Then us sensible lot can sit down with the companies and get them to do things right. Stuff is moving in the right direction (Apple going non-DRM for instance) these guys are dinosaurs and holding things back. Send em down.

I fail to see how anyone can condone TPB ever.... they damage the file sharing community like nothing else before.

(ps am amused at the downmodding of my comment.... way to support piracy.. ;))
Im 16 and I dropped out of school to go learn CS at a university (tau.ac.il).

1. Some of the professors are not interested in teaching- they do it because they have to. They rarely answer questions and go way to fast over the material.

2. We have to take many math courses. I was very interested in math until I got to university. Why? Because if you have a bad teacher you cant learn a lot.

3. Out of the about 300 people that learn with me in various courses there are probably less than 10 who are actually interested in CS (ie. program outside of school...).

4. Because of (1.) it is actually easier to learn from a book and much more efficient. You just need someone to answer the questions that you get here and there.

The whole thing just isnt fun at all... not even close.
I really dont know what to do.
I know about --color-words, it's reasonable. But not optimal. Sentence diff plus color words would be great.

(and a pony--I know, why not implement it myself?)
Good point. Looking at the other side of the coin. This may be an opportunity for many countries. I hope they realize it.
Could anyone estimate the costs of running The Pirate Bay? I've heard that the site could be grossing millions a year from advertising, but I'm also assuming that the costs are extremely high. I was interested in finding out financial information for the site, but it looks like it won't be released.
There are a lot more stay-at-home moms on Facebook than you'd think.
It might be just my personal prejudice but I'm a little scared of China; mainly because of the fact that its own citizens don't enjoy freedom of expression, God knows what might happen to a foreign national.

What's your experience? Are my fears unfounded?
I agree with Rod. I witnessed this first hand during the dot-com boom. (i was in school then). I attracted a lot of types "I am going to retire by 25" types, which had no talent. They would soon quit within the year when they hit the wall on the mid-higher level CS classes. My school had a notorious class that you had to take either second semester, or first in Sophomore year, which was challenging, but it went deep down in CS concepts. A lot of people failed that class.
They will either try again, or just switch to Business, or Information Technology (watered down CS/bussiness combination. Good for somebody doing IT work at some large corp).

Just raising salaries is not a path to get more great engineers. More mediocre ones, yes. I think there is a hard limit in the general population on how many good engineers it can produce.
Technologically, it is very easy to start a competitor to Facebook/Twitter (the scaling is the hard part, not the starting). So, there will always be competition until the biggest players can somehow raise the cost of entry by a few orders of magnitude.

Socially, I don't think it is that hard for people to migrate from Facebook/Twitter or something else. I think a lot of people think about competition in this area happening like a huge number of people stop using Facebook/Twitter and start using a competitor almost simultaneously. That is kind of what happened in the past, but only because the old social networks had serious problems. Now, significant shifts will still happen but they will be a lot more gradual. A lot of people are on multiple social networks already (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, Mixi, Linked In, Flickr). Over time, each user's the proportion of page views on each site changes gradually but often significantly. Facebook/Twitter might remain the site (almost) everybody has in common, but I doubt it will continue to enjoy the huge share of users' attention it has now.
Charging for content: The only way journalism will survive
As far as I knew since the '03 (I think 03) raid their servers are located in a different country anyway.
Yah except that I.E. 6 is 25%. The weekend drop should be much larger if the corporate effect was really true.
Rogue code led to Gmail shutdown
Well,
If skilled immigrants are leaving U.S., and consider that there are many skilled workers that are not in U.S., then maybe it's the time to make a virtual Silicon Valley on the internet?

So regardless where you are, you can enter "the virtual" Silicon Valley, and you won't have to apply for a visa!
I wouldn't say it is the classes though. College transformed me as a person and forced me to grow up. Maybe it helps that I go to Drexel where we have co-op (school for 6 months, work for 6 months, repeat). Anyway, I would not have been prepared to lead a start up right out of high school. Today, I think I'm ready.
I hate to say it but, the ones with options are the good ones. The US is likely still the more attractive for those who come by the shovel-full.

Also, this was surprising:

> Chinese complained of pollution, reverse culture shock, /inferior education/ for children, frustration with government bureaucracy, and the quality of health care.

That Chinese elementary education is worse than the US' would come as a surprise to most people I'm sure.
Go to a state school if you live in the US. It's cheaper and you are more likely to encounter professors who are interested in teaching, rather than their classes being a distraction from research and getting published.
Ask HN: Tell us your problems
Ask HN: Tell us your problems

I'm out of ideas for my startup (well, it still exists only in my dreams). I've been brainstorming for a week. Still no results. I'm sure there are others out there like me.

So tell us your problems for which you think we can find hackable solutions.
Sure... I meant participate in a startup/project, not lead it right away.
AIG is really no longer with us
you're not being downmodded because everybody here supports piracy. it's because you used the word "idiot," among other things.

you can make almost any point on hacker news and get away with it, if you're respectful to all involved.
Valid points. I guess I just get hung up on the relationship between things society values economically, and things of intrinsic value to society. Personally I believe the relationship between the two is too loosely coupled to let the market make decisions for us.
You nailed it. I'm about 5 miles from Plainfield.
Does A/B testing lead to crappy products?
I'm also going to Beijing, albeit for a short trip, this summer -- my business partner is there right now doing a year of study abroad, and I've been thinking along the same lines as you. Although I don't think you get $60/hr for teaching English, unless you mean the equivalent of that in local wages.

That said, how do you plan on coping with the Great Firewall? We've had nothing but problems with connectivity outside of China...
Freemium and improvements seem like a good idea.

Nonetheless, what I see here is that you have an audience, but no visible business model and possibly an inadequate revenue model. Having this will help you develop a unified plan and maybe even give you a few ideas on what changes to make on your website.

You might want to experiment with some of the ideas you receive on YC as well.

(Disclaimer: I have little experience.)
I'm not saying that professors aren't interested in teaching at state schools, but I have found that pressure is as high or higher for professors to publish.
Why Media Must Charge for Web Content
3 Day Startup 2009 at the University of Texas at Austin
2008, Egypt

(http://thepiratebay.org/blog/102 , it only took a few seconds to find, and bests AFAIK-ing)
In university I made a lot of friends in the CS common room (and unfortunately played too many card games) and that helped me a lot. I became friends with some older CS students and they were sort of mentors to me.
Capezio dancewear at best possible prices
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Oh goody. The web was crashing without him.
Too Risky for Venture Capitalists
I like that article!
I use linux extensively, but no, no it's not.
I actually like B a lot more, and not for the reasons you cite. It's not that it's more "professional", whatever that means, but that it's shorter and more to the point. The A version is riddled with apologies and "but this" and "but that", lots of preconditions on what kind of work and conditions you'd be qualified for, etc. Overall, A is very convoluted.
I'm going to go out on a limb, and guess that you're in your first year. Stick it out -- the first year is the worst. The classes are large, the students are just exploring (and aren't "interested"), the professors are teaching boring introductory courses, and no one is particularly inspired.

Stick through this part, and you'll find that things rapidly become more challenging and interesting.
I wonder how much of that is due to difference rather than genuine inferiority. My understanding is that the learning style in the US and China is very different.
Disclaimer: I've never visited China and I've spent a grand total of 3 days in the US. This may limit my ability to comment.
Don't laugh, but it's a kind of patriotism.

I love the country. It's beautiful. I like its philosophy. American values resonate close to my values. In the years I lived there I grew to think of it as my home much more than the country I was born in. I could see calling myself American.

When I went there I was received well. I was helped. I made friends. Now I think I can help in return. I would like to contribute, especially in a downturn. I would buy a house, I would create jobs.

Now, I travel a lot (including in US) so I live all over the world. And financially I'd have little to gain in States (no extra income, higher living costs, higher taxation, higher business costs). So it'd be mostly an idealistic gesture, a way for me to participate in building something larger than myself and what I've already built. Something I truly believe in.

But I am not getting myself again in the Kafka's nightmare that US immigration is. Waiting years for some bureaucrat to decide if your life will go on or will be completely changed "just because". No thanks. I'd only consider another country if I'd have a clear, legal and quick path to residency. Otherwise... I'll only be a tourist.
I read that three times and don't think I got anything out of it. So did he make any money off of it, or not?
Is it a good idea to put adsense ads on a start-up promotional blog?
I started a blog primarily to promote my start-up company (it is under a ".blog" sub-domain of my start-up site) by helping the page rank of the site and by driving more traffic to the site. It is still in its early stages and I only have 2 written posts up, but in the future I aim to get more authors to contribute on topics that relate to my start-up. I also want it to personalize our start-up company since we are only 2 hard working hackers trying to make a go of it, and I think that will appeal to our customers.

I started working on putting Google Ad-Sense ads on my site to see if getting some extra revenue from ads would help pay for server costs of the blog and the main site. Is there really a huge backlash against start-up blogs that show ads?
Bottom barrel shared hosting companies like www.myhosting.com and www.dreamhost.com top out at about 50/requests/second. Compared to that, 30,000 reqs/sec seems reasonable enough to me.
I'd wager that Io has the shortest:

block(x, if(x == 0, 1, x * call activated call(x - 1)))
The difference between the two is that Amazon isn't free. Its pay-per-use.

Provided that you stay within the "free" quota, an AppEngine app can be developed/deployed for free.

One is more "hobbyist" than the other. S3/EC2 is used all over the place by professionals, whereas AppEngine has yet to to really achieve that same kind of ubiquity (in terms of developer mindshare).
I'm confused. Are you claiming that the populations of all countries score the same on IQ tests? Are you saying that it's all explained by culture and that all that culture goes away when someone immigrates? Do you believe in creationism? What?

While I'm sure that your conviction is sincere, I doubt it's based on any actual evidence. Instead it's an expression of how you'd like the world to be.
Safari 4 is a pretty good user experience for me.

I used to use Firefox...but the new Safari just became my primary browser.
How is the path to residency for the kind of visa you get when you start a capitalized business?
Some progress w/ this:

SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law. [1]

This is also prominently featured on the PubMed search page:

Does NIH fund your work? Then your manuscript must be made available in PubMed Central [2]

[1] http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/
Haskell now has official commercial backing : the Industrial Haskell Group is launched
It would be good because it will cause far more attention than the reverse verdict, and there will be some people who would otherwise have feared unspecific consequences for sharing who will thereby be reassured. It's a PR victory for the forces of anti-copyright (and, to a lesser extent, copyleft), and a conviction would be a draw (there's no way that the music companies can actually win, as far as I can see).

I'm interested to hear what you believe the endgame for copyright is, given that you think that those currently ignoring copyright are in the wrong, but that Apple, et al, should go non-DRM? I'm against copyright, and I dislike DRM, but I don't have anything in principle against DRM, as I do against copyright.
Sure, education is a fairly good indicator of IQ. Could you care to explain what you mean by "racist consensus"? Why don't you explain to me what right-thinking people believe about the genetics of intelligence.
who the hell cares?!
Play the Morse Code Challenge
Fun and exciting Morse code contest with great prizes for adults and young adults from Canadian mystery author Barbara Murray
Educated Chinese Americans send their kids to private and very good (i.e. high property tax areas) public schools.

Something nobody ever mentions is that there is a huge rich/poor divide in public education quality, it's not universally terrible. The best public schools are just as good as private schools, and this is represented at elite universities.
The Chinese education system has a ridiculous variance when it comes to quality. In rural areas "education" is often close to non-existent, and even in cities parents constantly push their kids towards private schools (even at the elementary level), since the state ones are often of questionable quality as well.

As for the people with options - the US would do well for itself to retain the ones with options. These are the people your economy needs to most; you can do without a lot of the ones without options.
> virtual Silicon Valley on the internet?

Yeah, that's called the Internet.
I'm not a hirer but that was the same impression I got. Put it this way, I read A and got bored by B - despite the fact that B is considerably shorter.
You can say just about anything as long as you never question the ultimate ruling authority of the Communist Party of China.

As long as you aren't going around encouraging subversion, you're fine. And the internet police won't care that you are VPN'ing your traffic, they only care about locals and those that are actively spreading subversion.

So yes, it is a situation of "as long as you aren't doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear."
But what are the salaries like: before taxes, after taxes, after rent and chauffeurs?

By the way, do you think a typical C++ programmer on Wall St. suddenly changed his lifestyle recently?