skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So right now, the way the system is setup, you can in theory move from a PhD from a fairly popular university to a EB-1 Green Card. So it is not like the path to citizenship doesn't exist. (It is another matter that the process is convoluted and requires pages and pages of documentation.)

The article is sketchy on the details so I assume they are talking about extending this benefit to Masters students. I am not so sure how I feel about this. For every school that is highly competitive and tries to bring in the cream of the immigrant class, there are enough schools that use the Masters program as a way of injecting an easy $100K into their coffers.

Having said this, I can say one thing from personal experience though: Universities are way better at treating their students than the H1B system. At least at my university, the way the system was setup, you would have to really fuck up for you to get kicked out of Grad. School and this is one of the top ten C.S. schools. On the other hand, the way the H1B works, your manager might not like the fact that you sit and you get fired and you are immediately out of status. This means that you work constantly with that pressure in your head. If you are in the unlucky situation of having been born in India or China, this runs for a few years. This is not something you will hear people from industry clamoring for reform.
have to be twice as good in as twice as many ways as others to get half the respect

To have a really open discussion about this I think it's important to mention the disconnect between what people think is important and what get's people promoted. One of the least obvious examples is a willingness to leave.
I recommend Conversion Rates Experts (http://www.conversion-rates-experts.com). Mainly, the CrazyEgg case study (http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/crazy-egg-case-study/) -- love how they approach collecting qualitative data.

Also, the guys at Unbounce does a great job with landing pages A/B Testing (http://unbounce.com/blog/).

Patrick, a fellow HNer (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11) writes a blog on marketing for software (http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/) and other tips for developers.
> If you're willing to work more closely with your developers, and you're a cool person, you can skip wireframes altogether.

Totally agree, but it's so rare to find a client-agency relationship like that in the web dev space.

> Ever build an app for yourself? Did you wireframe it? I bet you didn't.

Yes, I have built an app for myself. I've definitely wireframed it. I usually go through a crapload of wireframes, HTML mockups, etc. It's incredibly difficult (for me) to just develop without at least a starting point either written or in my mind.
I interpreted the essay differently.

The article claims that, early on in the hiring process, women get filtered based on attractiveness. As they move up in the organization, they then get filtered based on ability.

So, the reason that we see so few female CEOs is that the survivors have been filtered for attractiveness and ability, while the men have only been filtered based on ability.

Sounds plausible to me, but I'm not in good a position to say.
"Depending on what's going on in the stalker's head, they may often fly off the handle, get angry, but then (fairly quickly) find a new target to focus their energy on. With many people, the longer you draw the rejection out, the worse it gets."

And your advocacy of confrontation is also highly irresponsible. Take your own advice.
Can you say more about these complaints? I would like to understand them better.

With respect to complaint #1, based on the Wikipedia definitions of lexical and dynamic scoping, MATLAB has lexical scoping of function variables. Can you say more about what you mean?

With respect to complaint #2, I think it might be based on other comments in this thread. Other commenters have suggested that "i" in MATLAB is a special kind of global constant that is prone to getting unintentionally overridden. That is not the case, however. "i" is simply a function in MATLAB, as are "j" and "pi".

When a user assigns to "i", as in i = 5, it has the effect of creating a variable called "i". The variable "i" shadows the function "i" based on the rule that local definitions of names take precedence over names defined further away. That's a perfectly ordinary and common programming language convention.

If you create a variable "i" by assignment and then call a function, that function has its own set of variables and doesn't see the variable "i" in the caller. There's no global override happening.
I'd be a bit concerned about the "American schools are not performing, and getting worse, and thus Americans aren't suited to tech jobs" message, politically, even if it is largely true. The us citizen voters who will lose out (if they believe the economy is zero sum and of a fixed size) will think foreign competition will hurt them as the primary effect, and thus will vote against it.
You are so, so misguided in your thoughts. I came to this country for graduate studies and took on a loan for a portion of it, amounting to almost $20K. Took me the better part of 2 yrs to pay it back. I came from a modest family background. While I didn't have an undergrad loan, I certainly didn't have any money to back me up.

Most foreigners grow up with far fewer resources than you did in this country. The USD is still stronger than 99% of currencies. While I don't dispute that college education is ridiculously overpriced here, that is a different, unrelated problem.
It's not really that scary that you notice something that seems off to you, everybody has that. But how do you confirm your "gut feeling"? It's not like you hire the people you dismiss in that manner to see if you're proven wrong, so what makes you so sure?
What Happens When Someone Steals Your Identity On Facebook?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotic_and_non-rhotic_accents

Interesting maps - significant portions of England were still rhotic in the 1950ies.

Incidentally, it's fascinating how much accents and dialects can change in such a short distance in Europe. Within a few hours bicycling distance from Padova, people can tell that someone is from here and not whatever town they're in. Compare and contrast with my Oregon upbringing, which no one could place anywhere specific in the Western US with any degree of accuracy.

Another fascinating tidbit is New Mexican Spanish:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexican_Spanish

Which became way more isolated from Spain than the US ever was from England.
I had more or less the same experience doing freelance work early on.

Clients who judge you based on your age, instead of the value you provide to their business.
Clients who are uncomfortable taking suggestions from a 20 year old, and instead, would rather get lower quality work from someone older, and more "experienced".

Glad to hear you're doing well now, keep it up!
I'm no expert, but this hasn't convinced me yet:

1. The author shows one anecdotal example of the effect being claimed, and then claims that it's a large factor based again, on wholly anecdotal factors.
2. The author uses as evidence that two CEOs that they can think of are attractive. I don't need to go into the statistics to point out how ridiculous this is.
3. Of CEOs who are women, there aren't any exceptional levels of beauty present, v everywhere else in the world.
4. There are several more likely explanations for this effect than this one.
5. That attractiveness is correlated with pay doesn't mean that attractiveness is being selected for. It can also imply that self-confident people are more likely to be successful, which I believe studies have shown in the past.
6. While claiming not to, this article feeds into the narrative of 'attractive women must be stupid,' by implying that attractive women, having clearly been selected for their attractiveness, will tend to be less intelligent.

I'm not saying this isn't something that happens. I'm stating that I'm not convinced attractive women getting hired is a primary problem, rather than, perhaps, sexism in hiring and promoting practices, which has been demonstrated at just about every level of employment.
Related thread from a couple years ago:
Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486017

And the follow-up:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489723
As a whole, I think that's definitely a good-looking group of women.
Is the next shift in computer interaction really gestural? Probably not.
I honestly hope you acquainted your colleague with HR.

That's completely unacceptable behavior. (And I know that I personally wouldn't want that job if those had been the hiring criteria)
> OP is not particularly interested in getting the job

It depends on what job you're referring to. A job that pays and keeps your profit margin and revenues consistent, or a job that could potentially end up costing you way more than you thought?

He's pointing out that many clients come to him with completely unrealistic views on developing, and yet are asking an expert (him) to advise him on how to properly develop something.
That way we only have to worry about the ill intents of the governments themselves.
AdBrite will cease operations on Feb 1, 2013
I've always heard of this happening but I never really had a problem with it. I thankfully learned early on about getting things in writing, agreements, etc. after seeing people getting screwed over. I learned that if people didn't want to work with you because of your age, you shouldn't want to work with them either. I heard Zeldman say that he only works with clients that he personally likes. Something to that effect, but it rang true for me even to today. Only work with people you like. Don't get stuck in a crappy job like OP. You can get out there and do it if you try hard enough.

I'm 19 now and it hardly affects me at all. In fact I feel behind. I am cofounding a startup and working full time at another startup, and I still haven't had my great succes yet. I work hard everyday and that's all that matters. Work hard, meet the right people, and use your gut. What really inspirers me are the ones that have gone out there and just killed it at a young age, it means that it is possible if you find the right way.
Show HN: Metabright -- an MMORPG for life, open beta starting today
Enterprises lukewarm on building Windows 8 tablet apps
Yeah, but it's a limitation.

Playing a file in another domain works with http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/ or http://www.jplayer.org/ (http://jsfiddle.net/Q4LMV/18076/)

https://github.com/CreateJS/SoundJS/ instead respect same origin security policy (http://jsfiddle.net/SeUD7/) like your library.

That being said, i like your lightweight library, well done.
It's useful advice if you discuss any topic or are a part of any community on the internet. There are a lot of people on the internet who are not capable of interacting in "proper" society,. Sometimes this provides a useful outlet to allow socialization, sometimes providing the opportunity to hurt others in ways that they might not do in person. These people are rare, but with enough of an audience, common. I helped run a fairly large (~200k member) private community forum and encountered these persons regularly, friends who did the same and had their personal information online for their freelance careers were not so lucky, threats were made, etc.
Yes. More generally, the principle here is you can only optimize for one thing.
At my company, the senior male executives are much taller than average. There is only a single male executive of mere average height.*

Nothing to see here. Just diet and environmental factors in our grand meritocracy, surely.

*EDIT: Removed semi-personal information.
Newsflash: tech industry investor wants immigration reform to increase supply of labor with tech skills, thereby decreasing cost.

Whether you're for immigration reform or not, let's not ignore the Econ 101 here, and let's call a spade a spade. There is no such thing as a "shortage of engineers." The state and federal governments have spent literally a hundred years subsidizing the technology industry by building massive public research universities that pump out thousands of engineers each year. My alma mater (Georgia Tech) is precisely one such institution. When companies talk about a "shortage of engineers" what they mean is that there is a shortage of people willing to work as engineers at the prices they would like to pay. Of course, it's Econ 101 that if they raised the prices they were willing to pay, the number of willing suppliers would go up.

I'm actually in favor of skilled immigration. My dad was an H1-B, and I have very bright friends who came here to study and struggled to get sponsorship. However, claiming that anyone who opposes the status quo is simply xenophobic is disingenuous. Let's not pretend that there isn't a trade-off between limiting labor supply to maintain wages and expanding it to make the U.S. a more attractive place to start a technology company.

It is the people of the United States that defend our borders, and it is therefore the right of those people to decide who gets in those borders and who does not. The people are entitled to decide for themselves what kind of trade-offs they want to make re: immigration, based on what benefits them the most. One can make a credible case that the U.S. is in danger of losing it's place as an attractive place to start a technology company if we don't allow more skilled immigrants. One can also make a credible case, without any xenophobia necessary, that we already do a lot to create a large supply of engineers in this country, and that the U.S. is not in any danger of losing it's attractiveness at the moment, and that we'd rather enjoy the higher wages that come from limiting the labor pool.
Divorce Statistics Infographic - Divorce in 2013
> If you look at immigration practice as being simply that anyone who wants to come to America and work hard should get a fair chance, then that is probably unfair. But there are those who argue that we should be selective and prioritize towards those who would contribute most.

Honestly, this happens today too. I recently acquired permanent residency through the diversity visa. The process was not fun for me and I am well educated and was able to hire a good lawyer. The number of inconsistencies in documents, the myriads of rules that one should follow all play into the favor of people who are already well educated, probably have deep pockets. This bugs me from a practical standpoint because if America is going to be anything other than a high-end service economy, you need the ability to let wage competitiveness to exist on all scales of the spectrum. Obviously from a ethical standpoint, this is highly unfair and a loaded die.
I wouldn't be comfortable with 90% necessarily, but at the same time if these 90% want to come to the U.S. and remain (for at least some nominal period of time) and contribute to U.S. interests then I'd rather that they were over here working to make the country great instead of wherever they came from.

Fixing education here in the U.S. is itself an important task but it's orthogonal to immigration. If our kids want to do basket-weaving instead of STEM then the next best thing is to let those from overseas who want to come to the U.S. and work actually do so. But there should be plenty of capacity in the universities for non-immigrants to get STEM majors if they want. At least I had no difficulty.

Despite all the mud the U.S. has on its name internationally, the country is still in a great position to execute a "brain drain" (for lack of a better term) and it would be pretty foolish to miss out on that, especially as the world becomes increasingly specialized.
I've put the (very quick and hacky) code up here: https://github.com/memespring/bicycle-barometer
I apologize if I am misreading your comment. Are you equating changing the size of the minute hand and/or other face customizations with watchmaking?
history of english http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3r9bOkYW9s
Not to mention that incidents like this debase the efforts of (possibly attractive) women whom are trying to compete on merits instead.

As far as I'm concerned blatant positive discrimination such as this should be treated as harshly as af it were negative discrimination based on race.
On the same note, I find it equally intriguing how Dutch and South African languages are similar. Afrikaans is a lot like 17th century Dutch, which is a lot different than modern Dutch. Unlike English, which changed to a much lesser extend. But I don't have to try hard to follow Afrikaans.
> Being a frequent user of BART (SF Bay Area Rapid Transit), I understand where you are coming from about how so many people have come to really rely on the public transit systems. But I don't think the NYC subway or BART is anymore critical than air travel. If you were not able to take the subway, you do have other options (bus, cab, walk, etc). Yes... those other options are a lot less convenient and/or more costly, but the same can be said of the alternatives to air travel (bus, train, car, etc).

These forms of transit aren't even close in comparison. They serve different kinds of traffic density, the cost to ride is not even in the same ballpark, and it is NOT feasible to travel around NYC without access to the subway unless you have a large amount of money to spend on cabs (chain bus transit is not time effective for traversing boroughs).

In fact, the NYPD relies on the fact that traveling in any way other than subway is so much of a PITA that people will mostly accept a subway search. Those searches are at the discretion of the officers present, which as we've seen with stop and frisk becomes a racist, classist implementation.
"Stripe’s engineering department would be at least twice as large if we could get working papers for the programmers we are eager to hire."

It looks like Stripe has decided hiring foreign workers is the only solution to the problem instead of trying to find another solution. There are _plenty_ of good programmers who could work for Stripe in the US, maybe they just aren't attracted to the company, to living in SF, don't know about the company, etc. Maybe they should think about their hiring process more generally rather than waiting on hiring some particular group.
I think it would have to be handled by the platform provider. Someone like Heroku could make it happen.

Or you could set up a cron-like worker to perform a pip-review (https://github.com/nvie/pip-tools) of sorts.

I don't know if I like the idea of a single point of failure; whatever service pushes the update would have a big, fat Wile E. Coyote target on its back.

I am currently trying to figure out something similar for a Django-based app at the moment. I include a version in the settings file that I plan on comparing against some sort of version array on a central website.

If a new security update is available, a conditional notification will show up for admins, but they will still have to update somewhat manually - I can't set up a cron job to trigger the whole procedure, especially because it might wreck their service, depending on how it works.
Web2py you can patch on the fly, and it is a full service framework similar to Rails. Of course, the issue with patching on the fly is that since there is no 'taking down, updating, relaunching' step, every request to your server has to re-process the same files over and over again. It's a trade off that you'd have to consider.

Also, upgrading versions (at least from 2.2.x to 2.3.2) is just a matter of clicking the 'upgrade' button. The only issue with that is, you don't get an updated scaffolding, you'd have to recreate your app in new scaffolding, or replace pieces manually if you want that.
Kinda crazy to think about, but when China gets up to speed and communications between our countries are open, the scale of what he mentioned at the end will be huge. Today, you could be one of the most sought out programmers in the west. Imagine competing against another intelligent millions of programmers from the east too. I can't wait.
There's a line in the John Adams miniseries where the Continental Congress had just selected Washington to lead the army. Ben Franklin turns to Adams and says: "he was bound to lead something; he's the tallest man in the room".

Apocryphal, sure. A clever mnemonic, you bet.
The question I am asking myself is, are those cool features enough for people to join G+. They wouldn't even have to switch from FB but G+ for Use Cases like this sounds just to cool (hi-res pictures, event coverage...)

As it has been stated a million times before, I dont know anyone of my non-techie friends who even considered signing up G+, I would bet most of them dont even know what this is.

There were a couple of articles a few months back (facebook IPO perhaps? I dont remember) that facebook 'doesn't get mobile'. Whether this is true or not, I sense there is is some missed opportunity by google here to promote their services. Sponsor big events and parties (SXSW, nightclubs, concerts) to establish themself as a better picture sharing service.

For me, the only use case currently for G+ is as a 'better skype' for videochat with multiple people. Perhaps its time to attack other seemingly niche use cases and grow from there.
One very important part that this strategy seems to ignore is one's passion towards the startup's vision. I think it's essential to work on something that you really believe in, and everything else is secondary.
Small But Important Details To Get Right On Your Website
Show HN: My Weekend Hack: An Email Contacts Extractor
I believe Germany (and most of europe) counts as part of the western world.
"In Silicon Valley, which has always been blind to any attribute other than ability." I look at what laughably passes for management and leadership in the valley, and wonder if anyone actually believes that anymore.
You can only take the height thing so far. From the OK Cupid data you link to it appears that there is a sharp falloff for men right after 6'6". I suspect that's the point where "wow! you're tall" kicks in and attractiveness turns to curiosity.
It may not be YOUR narrow definition of open and connected but clearly they are deriving value from connecting and sharing with their friends and family.

And that is relevant how, exactly? Even if it was: 6B people are NOT using it.
What's the point of hiring based on attractiveness? What's the probability of one actually getting the drawers?
Everyone can't be Keith Rabois you know....
The End of MS Office?
When the rocket hit 'em, they exploded, therefore they must have had explosives on them, therefore they're a combatant.
> It is the people of the United States that defend our borders, and it is therefore the right of those people to decide who gets in those borders and who does not. The people are entitled to decide for themselves what kind of trade-offs they want to make re: immigration, based on what benefits them the most. One can make a credible case that the U.S. is in danger of losing it's place as an attractive place to start a technology company if we don't allow more skilled immigrants. One can also make a credible case, without any xenophobia necessary, that we already do a lot to create a large supply of engineers in this country, and that the U.S. is not in any danger of losing it's attractiveness at the moment, and that we'd rather enjoy the higher wages that come from limiting the labor pool.

Although, I agree with your general point, I want to point out that the way the American system works, it is not exactly designed to figure out what the people want. Immigration is an interesting point where both Democrats and Republicans are under intense pressure by lobbyists to make sure high end immigration keeps flowing in (which cynical me agrees with you is for wage depression.). On the other hand, they completely ignore the fact that a huge swathe of the population has falled into the cracks with both border security broken and the fact that illegal immigrants have made a life for themselves here but have none of the benefits of a citizen.