skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not true at all.

Auctioning off worker visas would make it possible for startups to hire talented people and to being co-founders to work together in the USA for a cash price. Today, startups are almost completely prevented from using H1 and L1/2 visas because of the paperwork requirements and because CIS examiners choose to assign those visas only to established companies.

The established companies in question usually pay millions and millions to hire the first tech worker because they have to set up a legal department that can deal with the obsolete, contradictory, byzantine, and nonsensical requirements of the law and CIS bureaucracy. Then each tech worker after the first costs only the application fee and salary of the worker.

The high initial cost eliminates startups while the low marginal cost for additional workers means InfoSys and WiPro can fill the quota with low wage, low profit per seat CRUD developers. It's the worst of both worlds.

Startups could easily outbid the body shops for a single talented programmer or founder if each visa were up for bid. Also, the cost would be much, much lower than today's system where you need to hire lawyers to lie for you (yes, it is required to lie; the law as written contradicts basic economic facts).

It's time to put this foolishness to rest: putting tech worker visas up to bid would be good for tech workers, good for startups, good for R&D focused companies, and good for the government budget. It would not be good for cheap body shops that depend on low-wage no-rights workers.
Most immigrants don't mind living in the valley. In face they would love to live in the valley.

Source : me who lives in the valley and practically all my friends.
Yep no one should under estimate how many people are using SmartPhones almost exclusively for FaceBook and texting. That's why Messenger is so front and center in FaceBook Home. It covers both of the 'killer apps' for a lot of people. As far as developing their own mobile OS or Android distribution I think that's still Plan B depending on what Google does. I think they see way more potential in this transformative approach with FaceBook Home. They don't have any liability of not being competitive/diverse enough on hardware. Buy whatever you want -- cheap, expensive, big, small, whatever. Dipping their toes into hardware partnerships is a smart Plan B. I've never been too impressed by FaceBook's strategic moves especially in mobile but this transformative approach is brilliant. I would be shocked if other companies don't embrace the same strategy. It's going to really change the SmartPhone landscape and put Google in a very tough spot.
Well, this is frightening. Common sense dictates that human genes should not be patented, but with the current climate in this country, I'm not sure if common sense will prevail.
New - Interactive Video Pages - navigate and get info with video tags
Ask HN: How do hackers make friends?
I've been a CS major at an engineering university for about eight months now, and I don't have any friends. I'm a web engineer who's really passionate about design and UX, and I've joined a few "computer" clubs, but I feel like I have hundreds of acquaintances but no friends. Everybody else seems to have a great time with their friends, and only talk to me about academic things (or how the weather is), etc. I've never been invited anywhere, hung out with anyone, celebrated someones birthday, had a meal with someone except my roommate, or just done something fun with another person. Sometimes I hate other people for ignoring me but mostly I just wish that people would accept me as a peer.

I've gotten so lonely that for the past three months, every Friday and Saturday night, I've walked aimlessly around campus for hours, hoping to find a friend since I don't have anyone to talk to. I'm just desperate for someone to like me enough to do something with me, or think that I'm more than just someone to say "Hi" to in class. It doesn't help that I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome when I was 16, which obviously makes things tougher, but I'm sure many hackers face related problems in finding similar interests. I have no physical impediments for social affairs (I'm tall, take care of my health and exercise regularly).

If you guys could offer any tips in terms of ways to turn acquaintances into friends, or how to be more social, I would be very grateful. I'm feeling more and more depressed every day because of this and it's starting to make me lose hope for my future.
I'm convinced part of Cambridge's challenge ahead lies in zoning. As someone who has lived in Cambridge the past five years, I've watched sections of Kendall Square (and even parts of Central, really) go from post military/industrial ghost towns to places where you'd want to go out to dinner and drinks afterwards.

But we've still got a long way to go. Pockets of warehouse owners are holding on tight to their empty, broken-windowed buildings knowing that they're sitting on a gold mine whose value only goes up with each new biomedical company or silicon valley branch office that moves in next door. So the result is this odd landscape of new buildings next to run-down two story structures.

We need to rezone for mixed use and people with an interest in Boston should rally together and buy out the warehouse hold-outs to build the kind of living/working spaces conducive to early-stage companies.
Nobody is saying the US doesn't take in a large number of immigrants. The problem is that they make it incredibly difficult for people to get in and also difficult to stay. The "nation of immigrants" comments refer to the fact that the US got to where it is thanks in large part due to immigrants (e.g. by 1860 1/4 of the people living in New York had been born in Ireland and another 1/4 were from Germany).[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City#Early_history
I think we can rule out Zooko. I've been reading his stuff and interacting with him for a while, and between his personal life and Tahoe-LAFS, I simply don't think he had the time; and his delayed reactions to Bitcoin are not at all what I would expect from the creator. He and Satoshi simply sound different.
I think a lot of technical mac users would be better off at least trying a switch to Ubuntu or one of the minimalist variations thereof (xubuntu). A lot of the reasons those people switched to OSX are evaporating and Linux as a desktop or laptop development environment has improved hugely. If you're using vim or sublime you don't even need to change your editor.
Hardware makers make this hard for themselves. Having expensive devkits and requiring NDA's for doing the most trivial things creates a dynamic where the only players able to jump through the monetary and bureaucratic hoops are large vendors. Those vendors are unable to deliver true innovation because they have so much vested in the status quo.
Drop support for old IE browsers, why are people still trying to fight to support them. I agree with the blog post, one day people will finally drop support for non-HTML5 browsers (IE8 and below) and they will see how easy it is to write clear, short native code that works fine in all browsers.

It will take time though as many people aren't even familiar with the native APIs.
Why not? URLs are pervasive these days, and loads of plain text files contain them. Maybe they are indexing plain text files, and while they are already there, why not apply some heuristics to try to find URLs inside of them.

Of course the result won't be perfect, but probably better than nothing.
The Internet has changed, to become the frontier of modern capitalism
> ... when you get 100-200 emails a day, every day (it doesn't stop), it's hard

Fair enough. In that kind of situation, the only hope may be to use an autoresponder with a canned message. (This would at least assure senders their messages were received.) And try to recruit some co-maintainers :-)
> To help them track money launderers and penetrate black marketplaces like Silk Road.

Which explains why the Silk Road is still around...? Creating Bitcoin would be incredibly short-sighted if that was the goal: if you read indictments of other drug markets or illegal markets like the Farmer's Market or the carder.su busts, it's clear that the government gets all the financial info it wants.
This is why medical and scientific research should not have profit motives attached to them. It creates perverted incentives like the situation you describe above.
Is there an extensible framework for processing Wolfram Alpha-like natural language queries (presented as text) locally on Linux?
As I understand it, Ripple's trust system works by selecting multiple third-parties that are unlikely to collude against you, and checking that they agree on a transaction before considering it "confirmed".

https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus
Also published today in the Boston Globe: "Time to leave the Kendall Square nest" by P. Shah, CEO at Mobee http://bostonglobe.com/business/2013/04/13/time-leave-kendal...
Hey bro hit up on my Skype still_x_i_rise. Lets talk about whatever lol
What difference does it make?

And first time I read the title, it reminded me of Colbert's saying, "Reality has a liberal bias"
I highly recommend Xubuntu. No frills, no nonsense. Just gets out of the way and lets you get your work done.
This AI “solves” Super Mario Bros. and other classic NES games
Why not base them off employee salary ? This will get in money in the form of taxes and make sure these companies pay big amounts to get skilled labor.

This also solves the whole TCS, infosys, services companies hoarding on h1b. They wouldn't be able to complete since it is not their business model.
Nobody "attaches" the profit motive--it is inherent. Nobody spends millions of dollars on research and dedicates years of their lives to it for free. They either do it because the government is bankrolling the endeavor (like much medical research), or because their is a potential for profit. I'm fully willing to entertain the idea that the government should be funding all this research that would otherwise be done by private industry, but someone has to pay for the R&D.
Let me out it another way - high school drop out commits to startup career, fights through years of slow growth, relentlessly resourceful in finding new ways to keep afloat, then has break through, willing to risk capitalising on break through, then manages cash flow from that to diversify and repeatedly identify and create new businesses, brining in talent and nurturing it to maximise return

So this is what the YC alumni should not do?
Official announcement by the Debian Project secretary: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/04/msg000...
There is also the problem of upgrading third party libraries as they may drop APIs or change their behavior leading to so many bugs that you spend more time fixing these issues then if you had written native code in the first place.
Deflation and volatility do not make bitcoin nothing more than "a lesson in basic economics for crypto-anarcho-libertarian-nerds".

Contemporary dogma surrounding deflation is broken in multiple ways. The idea that deflation is bad is only considered credible (imho) is because it is touted so loudly. There are very few examples of deflation in history to draw from (as opposed to inflation, which there are many more), and further, many of the existing examples of deflation, while "on paper" are bad are not particularly harmful to the median-income'd person.

One rhetoric for deflation-is-evil is predicated on this idea that if consumers know their capital is going to be able to aquire more tomorrow than today, they will wait till tomorrow "too much" for the economy to function. (The analysis tends to get very hand-wavy after this part..). Interestingly, for the past 50~ years we have experienced rapid deflation in computer prices. Consumers have not shied away from purchasing an iphone 5 the second it comes out because it will be cheaper next year and their iphone 4 is basically the same thing. The idea that inflation is 'necessary' to keep an economy going is essentially conjecture; and I disagree; I think a deflationary currency (especially when there are other local currencies competing) will be very good for the economy and encourage more businesses that create things as sexy as the iphone5 (or services equally as appealing to consumers) as it will be the only way to get that currency out of people's hands. When people are hungry or trying to imprss someone, or really desiring of something.. they will spend today even if next year they might be able to get a couple percent more.

Anyway, perhaps deflation is the nail-in-the-coffin, but I don't really see evidence of it, just a lot of people really insisting that it's true.

As for volatility; I think volatility both a) has a potential to lessen over time, and b) is not an insurmountable barrier depending on how much people want to use bitcoin specifically (if you need to send money somewhere privately) ; they can be exposed to exchange rate for only a few minutes, or, use an escrow service that is also willing to hedge (the silk road does this).

bitpay exposes merchants to zero% exchange risk; they get lower rates than cc's and zero charge backs.. no merchant account necessary.

However, beyond even all of that, these arguments are dismissed because by every measurement available: bitcoin is acting as a currency, despite deflation* and volatility. People have so deeply ingrained that 'deflation==dead' that when they see a functioning currency that doesn't have the characteristics it is "supposed to" they define it as a " a lesson in basic economics for crypto-anarcho-libertarian-nerds" as if they can predict the future. Quite pompous.

Bitcoin has had several major crashes which easily could have dropped bitcoin to zero if it were indeed worthless. Yet it continues on, acting as a medium of exchange between --hundreds-- -thousands- -hundreds of thousands- millions of people; some as a toy, some are betting their lives on it.
After Rails Girls, I can finally answer the question: Why do I love programming?
Time to leave the Kendall Square nest
I'm going to watch this entire video but what I find interesting in the first few minutes are Paul's facial reactions to the initial questions indicating what appears to be no idea at all of what he is going to be asked.

In contrast to the facial reactions of people who are asked questions on formal TV interviews who appear as if they more or less know what is going to be asked because there isn't as much facial twitching, or thinking, it's as if they've had time to think things through by knowing in advance the questions. Not the case here.
Show HN: CharityVid, a new way to donate to charity
> Science is like a religion: if something can't be measured, it is not real in the name of science.

That's exactly why science is not at all like a religion: "can be measured" really just means "affects the real world". If something affects the real world (and that includes the human mind), it can be studied using scientific methods. If it doesn't, well... what's the point?

As for chemotherapy, yes, most of it is really nasty stuff that can kill you (and in gruesome ways, too). But cancer is really nasty stuff that will kill you in gruesome ways. That's the only reason why such dangerous therapies with really bad side effects are used - because sometimes they're the only thing that can keep you alive. Quite often actually, though it may not feel that way at the time.
The text you put it quotes was not anything I ever said

Pretty close: He said "I wouldn't hesitate to use this library in production". You actually said "I would not hesitate to use the Go cypto in many production scenarios."
I've found memory leaks in long running single pages apps that were down to jQuery UI components so I wouldn't dismiss jQuery performance doubts so quickly.
Well, I suppose you could try reading this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cahbk/today_i_lear...

or this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548095
My experience was incredibly similar to his, though I felt like the poor one in high school more than in college. I studied physics at a top public school, so sure a different beast: but the dizzying (and awesome) exploration I did, the meandering searching, endless conversing, questioning etc: very similar experience. I never read a book until after college (that is, a non-scientific book)
There is only one answer to this:

I would be very happy to review and merge your pull request. I charge by day and my daily fee is 600 euro. Bank details are bellow, once payment is cleared we may proceed :-)

Now seriously: Every minute I spend on my OS project I have to cut from my sleep or from time with my family. I would love to review patches, have a chat and perhaps get a free beer, but it is simply not possible.

For project maintainers there is simple way to avoid this overload. You need to 'manage your community growth'. If it grows too fast you will be flooded with bug reports, pull requests and emails.

For my project I have not provided build system and binary builds for a long time. Users were forced to use IDE and study the code. Also I did not provided any documentation, just a code examples. Key is to attract people with coding skills, who can actually grog code.

Also be careful how you advertise your project. You should actually target co-developers (with commit access) instead of users. For example if your project is written in Coffeecript, you should avoid using word 'javascript' on front page and in readme.

Sure it hurts number of users in short term. On long run it increased number of power users who do bug triage and answer support questions. The key is to grow number of co-developers together with number of users.
While OTs (there are several variants) are a promising approach for distributed authoring, I think the complexity of implementing them is still prohibitive. Surely there is a better way...

I have been reading papers on this looking for a "clean" way to solve this (in the context of packet loss, latency, etc).

One good approach I was able to understand is Neil Fraser's Differential Sync http://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/eng047-fraser.pdf

There are other approaches out there. One example which uses character based changes and is worth checking out is here:
PAPER wikisym.org/ws2010/tiki-download_wiki_attachment.php?attId=15
CODE https://github.com/gritzko/ctre

I feel like it is time someone solved this collab. editing thing once and for all and shared the code with everyone. (Firepad? https://github.com/firebase/firepad/)
there's a false equivalancy in your arguments. inflation and big government don't necessarily go hand in hand.
Did any, or all three, of those individuals all of a sudden become wealthy over the past couple years? I imagine whoever created BTC is a multi-millionaire now due to having all the initial mined coins.
>I guess what I am confused by is that the transaction processing is much easier than mining (ie it's not going to get more and more difficult to do do over time)

Are you sure this is true?

My understanding is that the proof-of-work requirements will be the same even after no new coins can be mined. Otherwise, the integrity of bitcoin would be threatened.
I understand that its a make-work exercise, I was querying whether the output is just mined coins, or whether the output also includes verifying everyone elses transactions. My current understanding is that its the latter.
Already being used: http://litecoin.org/

Only more efficient in that nobody's throwing lots of chunky GPUs at it.
I don't think Linux has gotten any better on the desktop since 2007 or so. Hardware support still isn't perfect, sleep/wakeup still isn't perfect, battery life is still lower than on OS X/Windows, 3D acceleration is still iffy. It's a total disaster.
Mozilla’s latest experiment adds Google Drive-like collaboration to any site
Yes, but the person running the botnet is not paying for it, so they don't care about efficiency.
Actually, the only immigration legislation that will be considered by the US Senate as currently constituted is omnibus ("comprehensive") immigration legislation. It will address several guest worker programs, amnesty for unauthorized migrants, border enforcement, personnel issues at CIS and Border Patrol, fees and budget authority, naturalization,and more.

The leadership of the senate chose that strategy in order to require tech company management and others to lobby in favor of a bill with both benefits for them -- like driving down tech wages -- and other changes that are unpopular with the public -- like amnesty. It's a gambit they use to get both sets of changes through instead of only the popular or best funded ones.
I'll also admit ignorance here, but it doesn't seem valid to compare overhead as percent of transaction vs overhead as percent of market cap.

Current estimated USD Transaction Volume is ~$70 Million per day[1], so the transaction fees needed to sustain the $150k per day electricity overhead would be ~0.2%.

All of the parameters in this calculation are in high flux of course (and we're not including total cost to mine here, just electricity), but when I've run this same calculation in the past at various times I've gotten similar results.

Note also that mining is profitable enough due to new coin creation that transaction fees in practice are much smaller than this for now (average ~0.01%), but coin creation will gradually taper off over the years.

1] http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-u...
Not that the political meanings of liberal / conservative in the US are very strongly tied to the literal meanings of the words, but isn't "conservative" actually an antonym of "innovative"?
By easier, do you mean less competitive?

The transaction fees are won in the same fashion as the mining rewards, so given a high enough level of paying users there should be incentive to run nodes (the transaction fees might even overtake the mining rewards before the last new coins are awarded, if things play out in a bitcoin friendly manner).
Everyone should be shimming ES5 array methods so your good example could quite happily run on older browsers too.
How many different times can someone re-skin Zombie Dice? The (huge) d12s would add a bit more variety, though.
Perhaps you could build something like this using a social network known to be pirate-friendly, e.g., VK.com, as the music source?
Apple Is Said to Mull Closer Mobile Collaboration With Yahoo
Yesterday there was created topic questioning the initial amount mined by the founder, so see yourself, its not perfectly clear. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.0

Same with the reason behind creating this particular crypto-currency. Since the creator is not known to public we can only assume.
which is what Litecoin tries to do, I think, but for different reasons.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin
You don't need to call the slice method:

Array.prototype.forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll('thing'), function (elem) { value = somevalue; });
Hudak's 'Haskell School of Expression' is also full of much Haskell wisdom and spirit.
"Education has never been a meritocracy and it never will be."
> Never? In practice I think it could be. I think the crux of the problem the author has is that the merits that the education and society looked for was not actual understanding of what was taught, but in the ability to act a certain way that seemed like they were educated, an act. This is largely due to the decisions being made by humans. The further you can abstract that, with say, machines, the more likely you can achieve a meritocracy I would think.
> mining will have to continue even after "coins" aren't produced, to verify transactions.

That doesn't sound right - do you have a reference for that?
You want to know why people worry about older versions of IE? Because a large enough chunk of their visitors still use those browsers. It's that simple.