skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi, Andrew,

Thanks for engaging in the conversation with us here!

I think my story is not a horror one, instead I am luck to be able to go through the EB-1A (Extraordinary Ability green card) path.

I started 3 companies in China, worked in Europe (Ireland) for a few year and then move to US to work for Microsoft Research. I tried several different path in order to get a visa status do my new startup, and found it's nearly impossible. It's a chicken and egg problem: you need a visa for yourself to be able to work legally for your startup, but it's nearly impossible to get yourself a working visa for a startup without enough capital, it's also nearly impossible to get funded if you don't even have a legal status to work full time for your startup... it's basically a dead loop. Our project as a moonlight side project got traction, got users, got reported in major US news (USA Today, ABC, CNN...) but sadly those only made my life tougher since I was in the risk of losing my job which keep my visa status -- which means my whole family will have to go back to the home country within a few days.

Fortunately I found EB-1A was a potential path and I went through it successfully, and I am now full time on my startup. But it's no fun at all to spend all the time in preparing immigration papers works instead of working on your startups when the momentum was there. Many of my friends find it's so entertaining to see my GC documents looks like, here is just a half part of it: http://discoverful.com/photo/30461/

My story was covered by Immigrant Exodus last year: http://immigrantexodus.com/robert-mao-discoverful/

Even though I went through this EB-1A process, I was just lucky that I did a lot of other stuff (published papers, got media reports, received awards, played critical roles etc.) which made me qualify for those EB1A criteria.

I would like to share my stories to help improve the US immigration system, to allow more entrepreneurs like myself to be able to have freedom to innovate and start new business here in US. The United States is build on entrepreneurship, let's make it better for entrepreneurs.

Robert Mao
Virtually no mainstream economist advocates a perfectly hard currency. This is either an indictment of hard currencies, or an indictment of mainstream economists. You can probably guess how I feel.

Unfortunately, discussions on this subject can rapidly become arbitrarily politically incorrect. If you're interested, I'd be happy to send you a link to a very non-mainstream source (but would rather not post it here). My email address is in my profile.
Anaconda snake eating calves
Yes, a conference is different than a workplace setting – you're surrounded by people you don't know and therefore, you need to watch what you say because you don't have any rapport to fall back on when you (possibly accidentally) cross a line.

It seems especially sad that we're willing to allow the marginal at best behavior of a few be reason that others should have to get up and leave.
SoundCloud introduces SoundCloud premium
Do you still think it was a good place to start?
The problem is the way company structures are currently set up, where founders get the majority of ownership, and employees just get the pool.

What does this mean? To me it means that the way a company structures itself needs to change. More ownership needs to be given to employees, and founders need to get less.

That how I want to start my next company. Double the options pool, and lower the founder equity. Just because your employee #1 and it was my idea doesn't mean I get to dilute your share of the company but that big of a margin. We'll all be doing a ton of work.

That being said, can someone tell me why this might be a bad idea? :)
In a production environment with real applications and important data people are not allowed to make tons of mistakes. Experiment and learn all you want, but I hope you eventually understand that what professional software developers and database admins do has very little relationship to weekend hackathons.

I know my clients won't tolerate "tons" of mistakes. Not even a few. In fact I am usually hired because the person they just let go made one too many mistakes with important data.
Spend some time with monkeys or apes and you will no longer be surprised by the "insights" in this article. Pieces like this are written periodically but they say nothing new, original or intriguing. Diamonds are a status symbol in many cultures much like a tree full of fruit is a status symbol if you are a gibbon.

What is really interesting in this type of discussion is the way people build up massive internal models to describe and explain concepts that really are very simple and repetitive in nature. It highlights the way many of us are driven and controlled by our tendency to seek a narrative in data and to see complex patterns in place of a simpler pattern.
It strikes me as illogical, inconsistent.

Inconsistent with what? Only with the position you have projected on your readers. You can't say to your readers, "I assume you believe this. Therefore, you are illogical and inconsistent". That is illogical.
Sold my car, cashed out my 401K. That was 5 months ago.
If X is the price of the rock then for sufficiently large X it can be guaranteed that he won't have any money left over for what's coming "after it" anyway. In some cases a large value of X simply proves that he doesn't apply common sense when managing his finances.
Out of curiosity, I started looking at what a three-months salary engagement ring would look like if I proposed to my wife today.

Man am I lucky I got married right at the end of college and we purchased the engagement ring and wedding bands together to negotiate the price down, for far less money. I can't ever imagine my wife wearing rings like that. When we bought them, the sales lady told us we "can always upgrade the stone later" and we both laughed at the idea. We're still laughing, actually.
Page 134 of "Changing How the World Does Business" (search on google books):

"by mid-July our funds were so meager that on Friday we were down to about $5,000 in the checking account, while we needed $24,000 for the jet fuel payment."

...

"you mean you took our last $5,000 -- how could you do that?"

Original headline was factually correct (even though, as you correctly point out, the $5,000 part wasn't mentioned in the article)

IMGUR screenshot: http://imgur.com/itzcF3Z
If you devalued the diamond, something else would just step into the void, whether it was another gem, something synthetic, whatever.

It would just have to be shiny, small, expensive, and easily seen.

The need for displays of status are common to many animals, humans included. There is a fundamental need there that will be filled if you devalue the predecessor.

Why pick on diamonds anyway? The fashion industry is just as bad - thousands of dollars for garments that cost a fraction of that to produce - and all because people wish to show social status by the clothes they are wearing.

A diamond is no worse than an expensive holiday, a new car, a new suit - whatever. At least a diamond is very durable and can be with the wearer for a lifetime if they so choose.
No one has a "right" not to be offended insofar as such would trump any right to freedom of speech. That said, any company under the current circumstances has a "right" to fire an employee who might afford them negative attention one way or the other, and certainly under the conditions of sexual harassment.

Please note, I am not saying that I agree the company should have done so, merely that they likely have the right.
Thunderf00t is a bit snarky with his commentary but I don't really see the leaps in his logic. I also don't see misogyny. I think his voice here is motivated not by his (nonexistent) veiled hatred of women but rather his really obvious hatred for what he sees as bullshit.
(I'm an economist, not an ethicist or a lawyer)

Morally: you've paid into unemployment while you worked and you're cutting short the safety net you'll get if the startup bombs and you have to look for another job later. You're probably internalizing enough of the downside that you can take unemployment with a clear conscience.
Thank you, thank you & thank you! There is nothing better than this for code review & git management for team.

I love this on Mac but had to compromise on Windows! Looking forward for ubuntu too someday :). Great job guys!
Not really a Java guy, but could you subclass BigInteger in such a way that when .divide is called and accesses root's representation of the data, that property access reflectively examines the calling expression to find out n's representation of the data, then just square roots that and sets it as its own representation before allowing the expression to evaluate? Or something along those lines, anyway?
I find it shocking that there are people that think that a woman wanting financial security makes that woman a 'gold-digger'.
Sshlurp - Retrieve SSH public keys from remote hosts
If a synthetic diamond is a significant saving and your future fiancée must have a diamond, maybe just get the "fake" - if they run off to have it checked or otherwise discover the truth when trying to sell it, you have bigger problems.

Reality is they want something to gaze at when it catches the light and for friends to fawn over. Perhaps fight the giant diamond fraud with a sneaky play of your own?

Your endless research and fretting about whether the microscopic flaws will be visible will barely count unless you're marrying a diamond grader.

(GF wanted a diamond. I was not so keen to buy one. Split my budget between a legit stone and surprise trip to propose overseas. Third wedding anniversary is today. In hindsight, I wonder if I should've looked at synthetic stones and gone on a longer holiday...)
Yup, I've had a similar conversation.

Basically came down to some variation on "I don't ask for a lot (she doesn't), but I want the diamond ring."
You just don't see that type of founder in SV anymore. Everyone watches the latest conference talks from VC's and entrepreneurs that exited, which teaches them a few common things.....fail fast, make sure you grow by x% week on week, you need a co-founder, ask yourself who could you see trying to acquire you?

Staying power and testing monetization from day 1 never get mentioned. Oink had a 150 000 users within a quarter i believe but still shutdown, Pinterest were stuck on around 11000 users for a long time before they reached a tipping point. Life happens in spits and spurts, even looking at a stock chart, a companies stock price moves in a contraction expansion pattern. Bottom line we all get taught that the startup lifecycle follows a normal distribution but it is actually fat-tailed so is VC returns coincidentally. I think the last chapter of Emmanuel Dermans's book, 'My life as a quant' can apply to the startup industry as well.
Liking and respecting someone are two mutually exclusive things though. One can dislike someone and still respect the job they do for its merits (and the fact you are not able to do it well yourself) or the person for other qualities.
Quick project I made last night -- an SSH public key scanner. Mind your P's and Q's and only use this on networks you have permission to scan.
While I basically agree with this article, it mainly added some stronger opinions to an Atlantic article from 1982. It didn't discuss synthetic/cultured diamonds, which recently became available at 'low' prices. DeBeers needs to convince people that a cheaper diamond is worse, even though they're really better quality! Also, how come the internet hasn't shaken up their hold on the re-selling market? If diamond sellers won't buy back diamonds from people, why can't people sell to each other online?
I love mine too. I have it set up so I can ssh into it from anywhere using my cell phone. I use it to write python code for an edx class I'm taking on artificial intelligence while I'm commuting by train or bus, and to remotely play music hosted on my desktop through the speakers in my living room. It's a lot of fun.
The fact that investors are diversified and you're not is not a reason to value your equity stake differently than their equity stake. However, another valid reason to undervalue your stake relative to investors: the fact that investors get liquidity preferences.
I think I am going to hold at least until summer, just to see what happens.
Someone thinking it's utter bollocks but doing it anyway somewhat demonstrates that a partner is worth even more to them. ;)
>So the world is filled with gold-diggers? No. Not true.

Wanting a mate who is financially secure doesn't make a woman a gold digger. It's no different than the vast majority of men who want a physically attractive mate.

>You'll find it shocking that in some parts of the world people are happily married without any jewelry at all.

Yes, different cultures have different standards (and there are outliers within cultures). In some places a herd of goats functions as a status symbol, in the US a diamond serves this function.

That doesn't mean that every woman here absolutely requires a man who can buy her a diamond, but the majority do.
I think he's speaking of degree, not frequency. Surely you've heard some of the stories coming out of India and Egypt in the past year?
Do we really expect the most equal minded generation of men in history to take the blame for every other generation who wasn't?

What blame is there on a whole generation? These people attended PyCon, they broke the PyCon code of conduct which exists to make the conference a pleasant place for everyone, in doing so they made someone uncomfortable, they were called out on it, and the PyCon organizers asked them to leave.

Which bit of this is blaming every man for the actions of previous men? Which bit of this is unfair against men as a group? Which bit of this changes because other nonpresent men are more 'equal minded' than their parents?
Let's not bang our drums over something that wasn't even made. I've had plenty of stupid ideas too.
We (co-founders) all saved up for a few months runway but we also didn't launch the business until we had a committed client which meant we were close to cash flow positive from day 1.
> Granted, a female strength athlete will generally drastically outperform Joe Q Couchmaster on something like a snatch or a bench press. But compare like with like -- powerlifters with powerlifters, weightlifters with weightlifters -- and men lift more than women in every weight class.

Even if you compare average men with female volleyball or basketball athletes men seem to have higher upper and lower body strength.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7253873
> This is dangerous as it looks to add credence to the concept that it is okay to portray women as weaker because under some averaged metrics they perform less than the average man.

I'm not trying to add credence to anything. It's objectively verifiable that on physical tests of strength, men outperform women on average and at the elite level.

> "Women are weak" isn't exclusively in their ability to win in combat, its their ability to outsmart, to plan and problem-solve, and ultimately to look out for their safety.

I agree with you. It sucks.

But to me, "... and need men to protect them" implies pretty clearly that the article was talking about physical strength and/or personal harm.
I haven't finished the video yet, but bear in mind that (at least as far as I have seen) challenging feminism is frequently labeled misogyny, in good old-fashioned "If you aren't with us you are against us" form.
Right, it's not consumption but rather distribution.
Where is this secondary market that you speak of?
I liked Sim City 2000 enough (and bought it a second time recently on http://www.gog.com/ ) that I would have bought the new one had it not been for the AI issues. The DRM sucks but this is one game I would have put up with it for. But it's a shame the DRM basically makes it more of a disposable game where you'll probably not have the magical experience of loading it up 20 years from now to relive good times.
>This, of course, requires that you live in one of the Nordic countries, or another welfare state. We don't have many advantages in the Nordic startup circles, but at least there's this :-)

Hardly. I lived on UI in America after being laid off of the Evil Empire in Redmond. There I planted the roots for my startup, which I run today.
James Stevens | Press Release: What is RSS?
Nike+ selects 10 startups.
Maybe there's a source for it and it's not generalization. I'd believe that a "large" percentage (not the majority, but double digits) of the population thinks that women need some level of care/consideration by men, and that there would be quite a few women in that group.
I always get a kick out of it when I see job ads that make a big deal about applicants having experience with 'Agile' or 'Scrum' like it's some sort of hard-earned skill that's it'd be worth using to filter applicants.

I can just imagine some recruiter or HR person looking at resumes:

Applicant A - dozens of accepted to commits to the Linux Kernel, or leader of some 'known' open source project.

Hmm.

Applicant B - Scrum

OMG! We have a winner!!!
Often these contractors, with experience in getting and administering federal contractors, will hire other contractors to do some of the other work. It's quite possible that's what's happened here.
Its' really hard to live life stepping on eggshells worrying about injustices to other people.

It's also really fulfilling. Just don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yeah, the things that women do in order to outdo their female friends are expensive and pointless--almost as much so as the things that men do to outdo their male friends!
I would lend a little credence to his statement.

As someone in a corporate setup, used Pharo since three years as the introductory environment, I realize the pain he feels. It was really brittle for a newbie, it took a while for newbie's work with crashes, recovering code, red boxes with a cross over it, lack of decent FS access, lack of access to code snippets they could simply copy paste and feel good about having some working stuff. There are operations it was slow in..

I then focussed on principles of programming, OOPs, showed them the beauty inside Pharo, feel of the debugger, ironed out the issues they faced with stuff they should not do, how to quickly recover lost code etc..

Showed some cooler stuff like tablet like interface, new IDE interface for code browsing/ writing, interactive UI creation as quick hacked code in a day... that they experienced the difference from Java / C / C++.

Showed Groovy as the Smalltalking Java.. and why its even more cool in Pharo if they bite in deeper.

Even for algorithms, they picked up greater ability than they had in C, but despite it all, there is still peer pressure, some rough edges Pharo will probably take the year ahead to iron out. Then we can stem critical reviews of this kind naturally.

"Pharo-Smalltalk" is a nice, comforting IDE, platform and a language and should be as inviting, easy and natural language to everyone, which is the target the Pharo Team has in my opinion leaped over to since 2009 in great measure. More power to the team to do better in the year ahead.

I will try to do my bit in this year certainly to bring in the past years effort, refactored as required.

Love to see if we get the tide rising by next year, for hordes of converts and new developers.
thunderfoot is fundamentalist reasoning with that tangy atheist flavor we all know and love.

Let's unwrap that lovely 171K subscriber foil cover and get into the package!

He starts by showing feminist frequency promising to deliver thoroughly researched compendium of games that use tropes to marginalize women.

He then cites one example (@0:54) that happens to break from the fold AT THE END, that she didn't mention (she uses ~20 unique examples in her video). He then harps on it for 30 solid seconds, and then concludes that because she failed to account for this surprise ending, that all of her research is shoddy, incomplete, and halfheartedly done.

So oh well, that was a bit of a wash. Luckily we start getting into the juicy nugat of thunderf00ts reasoning, as he outright states that tropes vs women fails to acknowledge that these games were designed to make a profit. (@2:26) This is of course wrong, but he doesn't substantiate it any way, and meanders on to say that having men go after women is healthy because it shows how much men care and are committed to taking care of women.(@3:05) (I encourage everyone to watch this to see what an emotional appeal looks like. It's so textbook it's kinda funny)

Yup.

Yup.

and yup.

no.

I wonder how much more I could pick apart from thunderf00ts reasoning in the space of 3 minutes.
It's a moral obligation under the social norm of reciprocity. If they wanted it to be a legal obligation, they would ask for it up front (which the GPL does).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_of_reciprocity
> If getting that many bots in an evening is so easy

According to the report, designing the botnet took six months.
I did not know SIP was in the works. That's very cool.

I've had an OpenVBX running for at least a year, but I haven't actually logged into it in months. Haven't needed to; the calls just come in. Back when I was configuring it, there were a number of things I thought could've been more intuitive. I'll have to go log in and make a list.
A few feminists are probably batshit insane, as I'm sure are a few HN posters. Don't generalize about entire groups based on limited examples.
off point comment ahead i am wondering is bing <strong>smarter </strong>than google i search for "how is 0x11BA equal to 20k resistor" and got nothing in google but bing return at least some useful pages!!!!!!!
That's a bad precedent.
For a simpler and more out-of-the-box device, I've seen these things all over Hong Kong recently http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=android+hdmi

$30-40 for an Android 4.1 device with Wifi that plugs straight into your TV, and can be controlled with a USB mouse/keyboard. Storage on microSD. They claim to have dual-core ~1.2 GHz ARM processors and ~1 GB of RAM (but with stuff coming out of there you can never be sure if the specs are real)
Yet somehow, FU money is not on the poll. So I don't see how that settles anything. A more interesting poll would have been to ask that question specifically.
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley tells great stuff about YouTube
1.2 Million page views, and $33k in revenue. That is a $30 CPM. Wow.

I wonder if they tried buying traffic for some of best performing articles. Probably not cost effective, but not far off.
Bitcoin doesn't have built-in deflation; it has built-in hardness: a(n eventual) strictly fixed supply. Deflation comes from currency concentration; inflation comes from currency dilution. Bitcoin has neither.
thanks for your reply. Although I have experience in data-related technology, I would enter at any role to get in a VC firm.
I concur with you on the networking advice. I am trying very hard to enter their network but its not easy to prove my worth without facts backing me up. Its just that I can pretty accurately predict looking at products and startups about their future looking at the data from the market they play in and few other signals :)

thanks again for the advice :)
How does "You have enough saved up so that even if things blew up you could last a year or more" not cover that option?