skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm so lucky that I got my visa last year. Then I did a transfer to work at a start up and didn't count in the cap either.

Having to worry about potential deportation in addition to the risks of a startup seem like an overkill. I'm probably going to move to Canada if my current startup fails (unlikely that it will). It is much easier to become a resident there. Additionally, I don't want my dating life to influenced by such decisions.
877,000 TPS with Erlang and VoltDB
This project is solving wrong problem. JavaScript is not very popular because it is the best programming language in the world, it's popular because it runs everywhere. Any solution for making better web application (including new programming language) that breaks it will fail. Period.
An interesting article but was overly verbose. Could have said the same thing in half the space.

However, a big FU to Arstechnica for prostituting the name of Apple to get more visits to the article. The headline did not need to imply that Apple.com was hacked or that Apple was somehow unaware of what's happening at their site.

It's sleazy journalism and beneath the usual ethics of Arstechnica
Excel is absolutely standard in accounting circles. It has the benefit of allowing accountants to do all sorts of things without knowing how to program.
Coinofglory.com : showcase the things you like with your bitcoins
8. 25 years.
"They both have their place. In SQL Server land the things that they limit to enterprise edition generally are functions that only really benefit data warehouses (partitioning and compression being two of the most obvious), and given that they know that the people who use data warehouses tend to have warehouses of cash, it comes with a cost."

Redmond could throw column level encryption into the lower tiers as a security measure, but oh, no!, that's "enterprisy".
That is kind of like saying, "cryptography has long been broken," because simple substitution ciphers are easily broken. It turns out steganography can be designed and analyzed using techniques borrowed to modern cryptography theory:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/PSS.pdf
ProPublica recently published an article (with an unseemly title) about the nightmare of scraping data from pdfs and putting it into tables. [1] They wrote some custom software to do the scraping. At the end of the article they mention some software released recently by a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow, Manuel Aristarán, called Tabula, which is a PDF data table scaper.[2] I haven't tested it yet.

[1] http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/heart-of-nerd-darkness-...

[2] http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/introducing...
I think most meat has more calorie per kilogram than plants. If you could grow it without having to feed the plants to the animal it's a win-win, no?
Look at what happened to the guy who was able to access Sarah Palin's account, because her secret questions were basically googleable.

(Today,) that's just cruisin' for a bruisin'.
What you have described sounds like the opposite of a stable currency.

Also, the fact that the supply of bitcoins is fixed by the population of the human race is not means that bitcoins are inherently deflationary.
You Can’t Afford to Work More Than 40 Hours
i mostly use the cli, but i use a gui (git-cola) for interactively committing only part of the current diff. it's way better than git add --interactive. also gitk is nicer than tig, though tig is easier to use when sshed into another server.
good god good riddance
Their revenue source is ads. They are not going to give up their ad revenue to get a tiny, tiny bit of retransmission revenue. This is all a bluff and the only correct response is to roll your eyes so sarcastically that they hurt a little bit afterwards.
Sweet! I would love to use this with my visual novel game framework (http://rubyai.org). Right now, it converts all of the logic from Ruby to JavaScript.
The US went off the gold standard before the great depression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act
Do other browsers support Ruby? I've never heard of this, but the line "if your browser supports Ruby, click here for a sample" implies that Decaf isn't alone in this.
TapIn.TV (YC S12) Evolves Into Framebase To Make Video Development Less Painful
Absolutely. Re-purposing is the ultimate recycling, it conserves both materials and energy.
I'm with you about CSS. It seems the target market of this app is geared towards Web->iOS devs, but that seems like a smaller slice than something like "Bootstrap for iOS" should be made to do. Bootstrap is great because it makes web development so much easier through native uses. It doesn't add another language paradigm to make web development easier - it does it inherently.

1) If you're gonna' call it "Bootstrap for iOS", have the analogy end there. The site is way, way, way too much like Bootstrap already. Brand it better.

2) Good native code should be inherent! Nobody should have to learn CSS to make better iOS apps! A beginner should have a framework for her/him that allows something easy like [view fadeIn] and it work. Then, if they want a little more control something like [view fadeInOverTime:seconds]. Adding a shadow should be as easy as [view addShadow] or [view addShadowWithCornerRadius:radius]. Rounding corners is already extremely easy using QuartzCore, but let's make it even more intuitive for people. [view roundCorners] and then [view roundCornersWithRadius:radius]. The whole point is to make development exponentially easier for anybody to come in and start making useful, beautiful things.

I'm working on a class to include that does all of point #2 plus a ton more - and seeing this post will probably be the catalyst to releasing it this weekend. I have a huge plan in the works for making extremely easy to use UI elements as well, but I think open sourcing this in chunks, then releasing the whole thing as an example on how they all work together is gonna' be the route I go. So far, I've released one part of the project that makes choosing good colors to use in the app a breeze (https://github.com/bennyguitar/Colours-for-iOS). The next one will be for UI utilities like the fade in and shadow code mentioned above.
I had heard second-hand that international employees of reputable companies like Google etc. have preference for H1-B applications or for Green Cards, I forget which. But in case you happen to be working for a (large) well known company, there is a chance that the immigration team could leverage this (if they aren't already) for your co-worker.
Third party spreadsheet programs (at least used to) have poor support for XLSX. That's from when it was new, I'd think that popular programs have improved, but that the reputation stuck.
oops - good catch. Actually, it should have been {{video}} - it's been updated. thanks.
That's a nice, solid feeling product. I'm going to check it out properly soon.
If there's such a shortage, then how come wages are stagnant?

Norm Matloff ( http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html ) points out that "The H-1B work visa is fundamentally about cheap, de facto indentured labor."

Cringely points out ( http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/23/what-americans-dont-know-... ) that "H-1B visas are about journeyman techies and nothing else."

The evidence that the wealthy need more guest workers is just not compelling.

We need on the job training and good wages.
She's certainly a big part of the reason for that. I think it's quite sad that the criticisms of Southern European countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, by Northern European countries about the state of their economics and politics were seen as nothing but xenophobia. Now that Germany is forced to bail them all out I think some of those critiques seem prescient. Of course no-one will ever know if the added weight of the UK in the currency block would have strengthened the whole project, but right now it's looking like it's on the verge of collapse. Not sure Britain will steer clear of any fallout though.

That being said she lost her job for a lot more than that. Poll tax was a much bigger social issue at the time. Her rough style had left her isolated in her own party and then she mishandled the challenges to her leadership at a crucial moment. The EU element was merely the trigger, the gun was already long in place.
A big complaint seen about H1B process is that it's used to import cheap workers instead of great workers - i.e., not increasing USA quality, but allowing employers to decrease average wages by replacing supposedly expensive locals with cheaper H1Bs.

There can be a simple solution - instead of measuring requirements for "highly qualified workers" by forced advertisements where companies try to get no 'qualified' people to apply, and having an "adequate" salary with the current principle "average of the same job in US", which can be manipulated and abused, why not just set simple absolute criteria?

Make sure that H1B positions need to have a salary minimum of, say, $100k (or some fixed multiple of USA median salary to be future-proof). That immediately ensures that (a) H1B's are used for all professions where high skills are needed, without a need to enumerate them in laws; and (b) H1B's are used to import skills instead of cheap labor, as for less-skilled jobs it would be cheaper to hire locally.
A bidding system would inevitably favor businesses with more resources to spend on employment. I'm not sure whether that would end up being a good thing. It's already extremely expensive to hire someone on an H1B visa, despite what myths may have been spread, due to legal and logistical expenses.

There is an abuse I have however heard of (sorry no citation): obtaining H1B visas for employees you never intend to bring to the US. This is due to how difficult it is to get work visas to the US, so you end up with an H1B "just in case" you need them to travel.

The right to switch jobs is another tricky one. The remit of an H1B is to place a foreign worker in a job role which has been demonstrated to be difficult to fill with a citizen. It does not replace an individual job. You can switch jobs with an H1B so long as the other job is the same job role (very much the same job responsibilities). This seems ok to begin with, but after several years it turns into a shackle because it's difficult for H1B workers, who by their nature are specialists, to switch to another job with the same specialist role. Combine that with the huge amount of time it can take to convert to a green card (5-10 years for some countries), and they're stuck in a job for most of a decade in an era where job hopping is common.
Don't be creative. Be honest.
A good detailed analysis but don't overlook the first-mover disadvantage in that the first network to defect and throw the local channels to the wolves, has maybe a 25% chance of bankruptcy, but the last guy to drop locals won't lose much, so there's little motivation to begin the inevitable transition. So you're most likely to see the phase transition begin when an existing network is almost about to go bankrupt so there's not as much to loose, or perhaps right after a bankruptcy. Maybe if someone pays 10 billion for the olympics but only pulls in a quarter bil of advertising, that kind of disaster. Or a campaign finance reform law limits commercial TV spending. Maybe the only way it can happen is something like PBS dropping the locals to bootstrap the infrastructure.

I'm not sure what the point would be of a large number of independents... in 20 years there may only be PBS affiliates out there and empty spectrum. Where I live there's only enough independent viewers (mostly syndicated) to keep two quasi independents alive, so tossing another 4+ onto the fire might well result in all of them going out of business.
That same logic has been used for decades to discourage programmers from learning any language other than C...
The fact that the cap was reached in a week shows you how silly it is.
I suspect part of that may be due to lower market penetration. At some point, the FTTH market will reach a point of critical mass where it has to be competed with nationally, not just regionally.

That said, the cost estimates are just infrastructure expenditure to reach 20 million homes. If 1/3rd of those subscribed to Fiber @ $70/mo, 1/3rd at $120/mo, and 1/3rd did not subscribe, or subscribed at $0/mo, that's $15.2 billion in revenue annually, ignoring the $300/install offset from $0/mo customers. Those are totally BS, made-up numbers with wild assumptions, but it's a huge market and there's a lot of money to be made in it.
I worked with a startup that wanted to do something similar to Aereo (they had an even better clever hack on the law, in my opinion) but they stopped after calculating the cost of the inevitable lawsuits and appeals.

> What is the broadcast area?

It's called a Designated Market Area or Television Market Area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_market). I've only hear TV people use the former term.

> What would be acceptable in terms of customer is in the broadcast area?

I've heard it suggested that a current GPS location is the only thing that would stand up in court. But that idea has not been tested, as far as I know.
Performance of single-assignment ADT oriented code on modern CPUs
I might try to learn Ido someday. I probably won't talk to anyone in it, but it might be fun. It has one advantage over Esperanto: its vocabulary wasn't chosen by one guy arbitrarily, but by a committee that analyzed various European languages and tried to find common word roots. That way knowing Ido might help me to dig some meaning from French, Spanish, Italian texts.
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I rather feel like campaigning for a living was IS asking for a raise.

although the comment that I was responding to (yours): "How moral is it to not earn a living wage, but expect others to supply it anyway?"

presents asking for--or rather receiving-- a raise as immoral.

I was pointing out that people are already earning a living, they are just not being paid it.
Looking for a CTO?
India Joins the International Trademark System
Perhaps. I have one (I backed it on the first day) and I use it occasionally. Right now (at least with iOS) it's highly limited and is causing a huge battery drain making it impractical to use every day.

However, the guys running the Pebble venture are making some very serious mistakes. As with any Kickstarter venture, backers expect some (and maybe lots) of issues and startup problems. But they've made the fatal error of not communication their progress (with manufacturing as well as software) with the "rabid" early adopters.

These are going to be the folks most vociferous in their complaint and will still be around when (or if) the Pebble becomes a commercial product.

The popularity of any future consumer version will depend on good word of mouth and even better social media and tech media press and I for one are not going to be on this bandwagon.

I do hope they get their act together as I think the Pebble is a useful device for any connected person in the 21st century.
The downside is that it's unlikely that all of the 50 million Americans that use an antenna for broadcast television can afford a computer and internet access. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and what content is on the public airwaves in five or ten years.
My experience is that open-source implementations like LibreOffice have much better support for the older file formats. docx/xlsx/etc may be a "zip of XML files" but it doesn't really matter if the original data is stored as XML or a blob when it comes to the end user's rendering experience -- it's about how the system can interpret that data. And the interpretations of the new file formats are mostly severely lacking.
I don't know anything about growing meat in the lab, but it doesn't sound very appealing and I've lost any desire to eat meat long ago so I don't really care either way. The theoretical potential to grow meat isn't in any way a convincing argument to make eating meat right this minute either non-cruel or energy efficient however.
"Probably will never happen" is a phrase that has been applied to human flight, walking on the moon, the internet, just about everything we take for granted now. I tend to dismiss someone's opinion when they utter such words.
It's great if you are making it for the sake of studying.

Designing a framework AND building an application using it will teach you many valuable lessons and surely will make you a better developer.

Have fun.
Which is terrible UI. I don't think we're disagreeing so much as diverging on the definition of what constitutes an issue here.
The code change (and risk) can potentially be quite substantial if you're relying on default SQL server behaviour (i.e. not MVCC/snapshot isolation). Code that relies on blocking when it hits rows that are locked by another process get a bit of a nasty surprise during that kind of switch :-).
> A big complaint seen about H1B process is that it's used to import cheap workers instead of great workers - i.e., not increasing USA quality, but allowing employers to decrease average wages.

It is illegal to do that. As part of the H1B process, an employer must demonstrate that a temporary H1B worker will be paid the prevailing wage, using the hiring record of others in the same job role. It is extremely expensive to go through the H1B process and certainly not worth it to get "cheap labor". If there's abuse like this, it's certainly not from the big employers, because it would never pass audit and it simply isn't cost effective.
http://www.impredicative.com/ur/ has a very strong type system that claims to statically prevent any kind of code injection outright.
Burden of proof is on you to prove that. Objective sources only, please.
Bad Tech Job Interview Questions (and How To Answer Them)
I'm not sure it is quite that simple. The article seems to indicate that it isn't about hiding information per-say, but to keep the people, who come with the specific intent of destroying the farm, away. You will notice it is not just about videos.

I think most farmers respect, and even often agree with, with normal animal rights activists, but they also have a real fear towards the "crazy PETA types", and with good reason. I think you'd find any industry trying to push for similar laws in the presence of similar activists, and we do have laws for similar cases that have come up.

Its unfortunate that those who have a real concern for the well-being of animals, and actually want to work with farmers to see improvements, get wrapped up in the spectacle that others bring.
It's insane. So if I'm a truly passionate and talented but I'm not a US citizen I don't get to play with the best because only the first 65k get to do it?
I bet most of them are applying to big companies and the percent of startups is really small.
'CSV save as format does not properly handle Unicode'

[MS-XLS] ends up using special codepages (e.g. http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/WINDOW...) for representing characters, so you need to make sure the same codepage is used through all of your applications.

Example: For those that have access to windows and macintosh excel, CHAR(240) is the apple logo on mac but something different on windows.
Weren't those both trillion dollar markets at the time? Bitcoin is tiny by comparison.
Only $11 billion? That's nothing (we probably spend more in month or two on Iraq). Why can't the government roll out high speed Internet to everyone and lease the lines to ISPs? Somehow we have gone backwards, there was more choice and competition in the dial-up networking era than now.
Indian Billionaires doing the same.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/CorporateNews/Am...
"On the other hand, how do you distinguish in a principled way the spectrum between an individual receiving the content with his antenna and what Time Warner Cable might do, with services like Aereo in the middle?"

Isn't this a bit like asking why I can read something from a particular website online for free but someone can't take that free content and have me read it in it's entirety on another website? (Or am I misunderstanding the point you are making?)

One point though regardless that matters is that is that if I have a service that I charge money for and I use your product to provide value to my customers (even for free) shouldn't you be compensated for that even if those customers could have gotten the same content another way?
This would help so much. I only wish the government were actually receptive of such suggestions. Basically, my future along with thousands of others is dangling on immigration reforms by the congress over the next few years.
And then you get sent the file:

Statistics on 100000 UNIX shell one liners!
If the value of Bitcoins is bound to go up, no matter what, then why don't we all exchange our dollars and euros to bitcoins and stop spending completely?

I think the mistake people make when comparing Bitcoin to historical counterparts is that they don't realize that Bitcoins are easy to split up and exchange. This is not the case with physical currencies. Splitting for example copper coins is not very practical so it is much easier to run "out-of-money" if the supply is limited.
Everyone that's wondering why this doesn't happen, the answer is simple: private enterprise.

The ideal network is publicly owned and privately operated/maintained, but that will never happen because the state would be impinging on the liberty of corporations to profit. In a reasonable state, the gov't would connect every home and operators would compete on service. Instead, we take the tacit monopoly granted to early operators and extend that into the abysmal dystopia we live in today, one where carriers control all.

You could have ubiquitous 10Gb links to every home, if only some one would let you, and then folks start to say "well why don't we do this for every industry. Why if everyone paid their fair share we could all have cheap healthcare!". And therein lies the problem.

Profit and public interest are diametrically opposed in the case of utilities. Nevermind that most carriers operate over publicly licensed spectrum, or send cables along publicly owned land; a monopoly is the epitome of capitalism and Telecom is printing money.

In short, ubiquitous fast internet access has never been a technical problem or a distribution problem, it is a social problem; just like healthcare and, to a lesser extent, power and water.

::EDIT:: I am not saying that profit or capitalism is wrong, only that in the case of utilities, on which we all rely, it is a bit strange.
Wow, I had no idea the H1B system reverted to a lottery at some point. I thought it was just a first-come first-served system. That just... sucks.

Just a note for those of you who are looking for foreign workers or if you're an Australian citizen: you can get an E3 visa (2 years, multiple entry, renewable ad infinitum). There is a cap for these too but AFAIK it's never been hit (in the 5+ year history). The E3 has two advantages over the H1B:

- there is no need to "prove" you can't find a domestic worker for your position; the only step required is the same LCA step H1B applications must do; and

- unlike on an H1B, spouses of those on an E3 visa are permitted to work (they get an E3D visa).

Also, you don't need to return to your country of origin (being Australia). You can do apply from Canada, the UK or wherever is most convenient (but you do need to leave the country to apply; you can't adjust status while in the US).
Good article - thanks for sharing!
Awesome! Feel free to ask any questions.