skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's up with the sign up form? What the hell does @name mean?

A twitter username? Does it have to be twitter? Is it just a regular username? Then why does it have an @ sign? Do I need to enter an @ sign or are you going to prepend it after I submit the form?

Edit: okay, so it prepends the @ as you type. Now I'm even more confused about whether or not it's supposed to be my twitter username or not.

Edit 2: Signed up, seems to be just a username. The website refers to usernames in the same way as twitter? The top bar says '@<username>' and links to the account settings. On the home page it links two @usernames to twitter, not a website profile. On the ladder, it shows more @usernames but don't link to twitter and look like they will link to user profiles.

Please don't mix twitter usernames with your site's usernames, it's confusing, especially when some are internal links and some are twitter links.

Anyways, awesome site, reminds me of the google ai challenges. I hope you keep this open perpetually though, or keep running different challenges. Sucks that the google ai challenges only run once a year.
Can someone explain like I am five:

Briefly, What is the current immigration policy?

Why is it so broken?

WHY/HOW did it get the way it is (who benefits from having it the way it is)?
Take a look at http://preyproject.com/blog/cat/recoveries

Pretty sure its legit, but thats just me.
Http://www.stargazerdigital.co.uk/best-books-on-inbound-marketing/
Pebble Now Having Trouble Getting Colour Watches to Market
Reading the article, it's not just Mark Zuckerberg who's behind this (there's also our Paul Graham, Marissa Myers, Drew Houston, etc. etc.). But if you really want to find an ulterior motive to go off on them, I suppose you could view the immigration reform as being something sinister. Why siphon all the high talent from all other places? I mean, for example, places like India need their smart people more than we need them, they have their own problems they need to solve. W're depriving them of resources to solve problems much more dire than ones we have. Why not just put all their might into putting their energy on properly educating our youth, our unemployed, giving them an environment in which they can excel (more financial help, grants, etc.). What truly would be a noble change to immigration policies would be heightening acceptance of refugee asylum cases -- let the homosexuals, atheists, etc. flee here from places where they're persecuted. The article says they'll push for 'higher standards and accountability' in schools... but you could view that as just a cover (if you're intent on having a cynical interpretation to all things Mr. Zuckerberg).
You guys are all so nice. My first thought was to gather as much personal information from these people as possible and then blackmail them into returning my notebook to me. This obviously only works when the stolen property is in a country like Iran; I doubt that you could get away with this in the US.

That said, I agree with earlier posters that this is probably a b.s. story made up for SEO purposes.
Geocities ran for about 15 years. That's longer than Myspace has been around. Let's see where Facebook is in 8 years.
Unemployment is still sky-high, though. Middle-class people on salaries might not feel too much of a pinch, but young people with university degrees entering the workforce do, in spades.

But I agree with you, there's no "collapse" here.
Suicide and Silicon
Yay, tech companies band together to benefit from importing more foreign workers to the U.S. to work for half of the prevailing wage.

I'd support this change to the H1B program: it's now totally unlimited, with this caveat: hiring companies must pay 150% of the prevailing wage to any hired workers.

This should be a win-win - companies like Facebook and Yahoo get to hire as many workers as they want, from anywhere in the world. And with multi-billion dollar profit margins, slightly increased salaries should not be a problem. After all, we know that good tech workers make much more for their companies than their salaries cost.

Any takers? No? Huh.
LOLCODE school
> reimplementations are typically removing historical cruft that made the old versions untennable for contemporary development or have solved a hard problem that made things work poorly.

Oh, definitely. Node.js wouldn't be anywhere near as popular without V8 behind it. Also, without the strides Javascript has made in recent years. I was messing around with a MacOS 7.6 machine last night and Netscape 3 was throwing Javascript errors all over the place when it hit modern code.

I think another part of it is cultural. Since I brought up CSS preprocessors as my other example, a lot of the animosity toward them "back in the day" was driven by the web standards movement. We finally had sane standards that worked across the big browsers, and then some upstart was trying to introduce something proprietary and the community reacted. Now, we have little hiccups once in a while but things are pretty much standard across the board and that makes a stable platform for innovation.
> I would be surprised if MtGox decides to refund you

I agree that MtGox shouldn't be doing any kind of refunding in this case.

> what happened is your own fault entirely

You're blaming the victim.

If I'm walking down a dark alley and someone pulls a gun on me and takes my wallet, is it my fault because I decided to walk down a dark alley? Not at all.

The only person at fault here is the cracker who perpetrated the scam.

The only thing you can say about the victim in this case is that they aren't very sensible. Just like walking down dark alleys might not be sensible. But it's not the OP's fault that someone stole something from him.
A blog called "Dom's laptop is in Iran" with two entries, one a picture lauding "hidden app" and the other a long form showing off hidden app. No social links to this person's main site or social presence. No indication there is a Dom who exists outside this ad. And at the bottom "© 2013 Dom's laptop is in Iran"

This is very clearly a (viral) marketing campaign and not news at all. Please remove from HN.
the number of FDA-regulated investigators running trials abroad has increased by 15 percent each year, while the number of U.S.-based investigators declined 5.5 percent annually.

Several forces are pushing trials elsewhere, the researchers noted: cost (a trial at a top medical center in India may cost less than one-tenth per patient what it would cost at a second-tier U.S. center); faster approval times; and less red tape. http://health.usnews.com/health-news/managing-your-healthcar...

PS: Of note: In the US, sponsors may receive a 50% tax credit for certain clinical trials. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial#Economics
If you look at the profiler screenshot at the bottom of the page, the time spent in the cuRAND kernel (cyan) is ~2x longer than in the numbapro kernel (purple). Even if the numbapro kernel is written in CUDA-C and suppose it will be a lot faster, you still won't hit 100x speedup. In addition, all kernels are double-precision, the 100x speedup is more common for single-precision kernels.
I think this is good concept - though I'm not sure if I would take it to the levels that they did (the Facebook part was a bit much for me...).

Even a small thing - a personalized postcard in the mail that arrives a few days before you start - would make me smile and feel welcomed.

There is a fine line though, and the difficulty is that the line is different for every person. Some people would love a personalized cake celebrating their first day, others would not.
Former BlackBerry Employees Join Competitors and Telcos, Not Startups
whoever captures more of the market gets those insane people too.
Can someone change the title? From the article:

Update: Earlier I’d described this as a
Series D, but as this is based on debt
and not new shares I’ve changed the wording.
Atari (old Atari, pre-layoff days) had an 8 byte sequence that they copyrighted, and that we were supposed to embed in our games. The idea was you could find the sequence in a pirated ROM and ask in court, "What does this do?" Since the bytes weren't executable code, or useful data, it'd be hard to support their presence in any technical way.
As others have stated, it's a single-purpose blog with a single out-bound link (to HiddenApp). It's going to send a lot of traffic their way regardless of whether or not they are the ones behind it.
It's not an excange, but does anyone know how secure blockchain.info's wallets are? Everything I've read says they're very secure, but I haven't seen any unbiased experts say that...
Your argumentation attempts to compare Bitcoin to the fact there is a very real possibility that the US government will declare gold illegal again in the future... I am sorry but this makes me see you as a lunatic. If you believe that about gold, you may just as well believe they will make wearing red shirts illegal on Wednesdays. No amount of arguing will make you change your mind.

You say euros and gold are "bad examples", but I could cite tons of other examples. For example the US perfectly allows holding and trading in all (virtually all?) foreign currencies including countries it has strained relationships with (Iranian rial, Burmese kyat, etc) and these countries have economies as large as, if not larger than Bitcoin. And because none of these foreign exchanges or currencies are illegal, I doubt Bitcoin will be made illegal.

I await your reply explaining in a convoluted way why each and every foreign currency or commodity is somehow a "bad example", and why the US would allow them but not Bitcoin.
Windows into lives of average Iranians are widely available f.ex. through books and actually good Iranian cinema (one of which won an Oscar). No need to spy with laptop cams, seriously, and politicians don't care that people are nice.
I find it interesting that companies like Twitter and Instagram were very focused on location initially (due to their founders interest in location) but have more or less have moved away entirely.

Whereas big companies that stuck it out with location - 4sq, gowalla, highlight, loopt, etc seem to struggle reaching a similar scale.
I think there has to be a middle ground between what you offer and what services like Virb and Squarespace offer. It's not that you're "less", but I'd say you're more basic.

Squarespace starts at $8 bucks a mont, but I would say gives you a lot more. I think you'd have to be around half that in order to get people to give you money.
Forked to see the power of SASS! http://codepen.io/imjared/pen/DhHCx

(help of: @brandon_vaughan)
Pictures worth more than a thousand words?
I would argue that Yelp drives far more offline traffic than Foursquare. If you're going to bet on a market leader, why not them? Have the tech elite written them off for their shady business practices?
Keep in mind though that since Europe has virtually no hiring-at-will the unemployment rate is actually a lagging indicator.
I think my most memorable first day was going around a track in a Tesla Roadster, and a pre-production Model S. It's going to be hard to top that one.
I thought Yelp is the leader in that?
Good guides for setting up personal email server?
I'm looking to buy my first server and setup my own email server and possibly host my own website instead of relying on Google and GoDaddy. Would I be correct in assuming that I would receive a lot more spam without having gmail's spam filter?
In a very brief overview, there are limits to the number of skilled immigrants that can enter the US every year. That number is exhausted extremely quickly, leaving many tech companies (an overwhelming majority of skilled immigrants are tech workers (1)) short-staffed.

It is difficult to say who benefits from this arrangement. At least in theory, it's US workers, because they are more in demand. But at the current time, demand outstrips supply enough that the limit could be raised without significant issues. The reason this hasn't happened is largely that "immigration" has become a politically sensitive topic- skilled immigration and "illegal" immigration from Mexico get bunched up into the same topic. Now that there is an appetite to tackle immigration as a whole, we might see a change.

(1) I had started an overview of US skilled immigration- I currently have no time to finish it, but it does contain an interactive chart breaking down the immigration categories: http://experimenting.alastair.is/immigration/
And exactly what data structure do you suppose is appropriate for Bob?
Someone else mentioned that the app in question suggests opening up a guest account for this purpose on their site (i.e. your personal files are protected, but the thief can still use the computer).
Yelp, not Foursquare, is the clear leader in driving traffic for offline commerce. From my experience, Foursquare isn't even close. Look at your life, look at the people around you. Look at the stickers stores put in their windows. Yelp is what people are actually using to make offline purchasing decisions.

Nonetheless, I like the overall idea of the article about the power of this category, and I hope Foursquare succeeds in doing something great.
Django-deployer - generic deployment tool for PaaS providers
Any citation of "half the prevailing wage"? I've seen this cited time and time again, but with little evidence to back it up. I am an H1B holder and I know a number of others- we are all paid very well.
Ask HN: would you still encode your videos using webm?
Recently Mozilla announced that Firefox nightly is supporting h264 when you're using Win7 (Win8 too?). I really like webm and an open video format for the web would have been great, but I feel that this is just the last move that will kill webm in favour of h264.

The only webm-only browsers will be opera, which has a very low usage compared to other browsers, and the non-windows versions of firefox (at least for now).

Would you still encode your videos in both webm and h264 if you'd have to run a streaming website? Or would you go just with h264 and using a flash fallback for those not supporting it?
Can't we just keep everything unregulated until it's inconvenient for me that it's unregulated?
The difference is onclick="doSomething()" runs doSomething() in the global scope. Not good!

ng-click="doSomething()" runs doSomething() in the scope of the controller that contains the element. Good!
NOTE: This is what is called a 'rhetorical question'. I'm not trolling.

> Shouldn't he be able to use it as he sees fit?

Say it ends up in the wheelhouse of an old oil tanker and the Captain prefers its GPS and maps application to the 1980s-era thing built in to the ship. If the legitimate owner of the laptop "saw fit" to modify the displayed GPS coordinates such that a catastrophe ensued, "shouldn't" he be able to do that?

After all, it's not his fault that a coastline packed with baby seals was standing in front of it.
And... the (mandatory) fun at work movement reaches a new low of creepiness. Guys, what happened to professionalism? privacy? letting employees decide how much (if any) of their personal life gets meshed up with work?
The location of the laptop has nothing to do with it. It is the behavior of the publisher that is unethical and/or illegal. If the Iranians have a cause of action against the publisher in the UK based on privacy laws, they would have standing to bring a suit in court in the UK. They don't have to be citizens to do that.
Appsify.me launches solution to help create Objective-C iOS apps easily
In other news, the locks on my door are useless because nobody has ever broken in, and password protection on my online accounts achieved bugger all because nobody has ever hacked into them. Right.
I just see this as somehow linking the manufactured labor shortage tech companies have been trying to whine about for years with the very real problem of illegal immigration and the social consequences that brings... consequences which I do not think anyone on that list of people cares about. They would have better luck creating this need out of no where when the country was closer to full employment, but the US is a long, long ways off from that.
Down round?
It really depends on the lighting in your office. I use both, toggled by a hotkey depending on time of day or night.
@elliptic's complaint is not about embarrassment, it's about respecting people's conceptions of appropriateness. For example, if he likes to keep work strictly separate from the rest of his life, having anything delivered to his home that isn't strictly necessary would be a violation of his principles and therefore a gesture of disrespect.

For another example, people with Asperger's can look embarrassed when you violate their rules. But the symptoms that neurotypicals tend to interpret as embarrassment can just as well be a sign of deep indignation.

Actually caring for a person means respecting their opinions and preferences, up to and including a preference for an utterly unmemorable day at work, or a preference that their boss does not exploit unfair advantages.
I never thought of them as an 'unauthorized user' - which would them make them guilty of violating the CFAA, wouldn't it?
Is this supposed to happen? http://youtu.be/vndQFnesPT8

edit: specifically, the part at the end when the moons fly off the screen, the world shrinks to nothing, and the counter on the right expands wildly.
Yelp is written off because they went public already. They just need to build other buzzes to get through next few years.
Your comment is unnecessary and I'm shocked that's sitting high on the comments page.

Trivializing the amount of effort and energy this fellow put in to producing/developing this cross-platform mobile app because you disagree with...well, I still don't know what your issue is with the quotes you pulled, care to share?

Read the last line of pg's comment from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5521286

You might have felt better after posting your comment but you also gave up your chance to add something constructive to the discussion. To paraphrase pg's reaction, it makes me embarrassed for HN when people include projects in their blog profile and this is the sort of response they get.
The Facebook thing struck me as kind of creepy too. I'm not sure I would feel all warm and fuzzy knowing that my new employers had been crawling through my Facebook pages.
How do you figure that the labour shortage in tech is manufactured?

In any case, everyone has been fighting to separate skilled immigration from ilegal immigration- them being combined is what has held back reform. There's broad political agreement that skilled immigration needs reform, but until recently no politician has wanted to touch it for fear of being "soft on illegals".
Ask HN : How can I re-enable my ability to flag spam posts?
My blood boils at spammy posts. They downright spoil HN's quality. Please help me help HN.
Then at least have a virtual machine snapshot of a clean install of OS+Java+Browser and always boot from the snapshot when doing internet business.
> Some people would love a personalized
> cake celebrating their first day, others
> would not.

Not to mention that you don't really know them personally yet. It would suck to show up for your first day and have a cake that you were allergic to or couldn't eat for dietary reasons (vegan, diabetic, etc).
Join the tech community in passing immigration reform.
Can't you just use the "Find iPhone" app for your Mac Book (Pro) laptops? Why would you use another app to locate your stolen laptop?
We’ll Work for Peanuts. But We Won’t Work Without Meaning
Well, on that note--your name comes off rather weird to me. I'm guessing it's supposed to read as "lanyard", but it makes me think "Lanyrd Skanyrd".
it just happens to be very quiet and obtuse for surveillance.
the NSA will have to install tin-can pineapples everywhere.
Round rects are everywhere
Here are a few of the problems (by no means comprehensive):

The H1B Problem

===============

* Foreign high-tech workers need a document called an H-1B visa.

* A limited number of H-1B visas are handed out each year.

* If more people apply than the limit of visas, the recipients are picked by lottery.

* H-1B visas go to two types of workers: (a) low-grade skills, underpaid, working in "consulting" sweatshops in Edison, NJ, and (b) mid- to high-grade skills, paid at or above market, working at reputable companies like FB, Google, etc.

* It's questionable whether people of type (a) are needed or good for the economy. It's pretty clear that people of type (b) are needed and good for the economy. However, the balance doesn't reflect that.

The citizenship problem

=======================

* A foreign student can get a U.S. undergraduate degree, go on to get a Ph.D. at a U.S. university, all the while paying federal, state, and other taxes. They can go on to get a sweet job at Facebook or Google, and get put on a "path to citizenship". If they happen to be from India or China, they then have to wait anywhere from 5-9 years to get their permanent residence ("green card"). For a portion of this time, if they switch employers, they get to start the process all over again, from scratch.

* A pedophile drug dealer puppy strangling wife-beater can arrange a faux wedding with an American citizen and get their permanent residence in less than a year, regardless of where they are from.
How is this a vindication of anything? Treaties don't get enforced in the US in a vacuum: they require a 2/3rds affirmative vote from the Senate.
Yeah, I was just gonna say this definitely should have been written with Sass.
ProTV Live Online
250 HTTP request per second of static files is peanuts (heck, my website can sustain 10 thousand). But 250 HTTP requests affecting dynamic content on bitcointalk.org is a bigger engineering pb: the average page is 100kB of dynamically rendered HTML supporting per-user theme, and most HTTP requests modify content (forum post) or are expensive requests (post searches).

Theymos has been improving the forum software, and is offering bounties to people to implement certain things.
If they drink Hennessy, you may want to file a report with Iranian police. They may be sympathetic.
The exe it downloads seems to be a compiled AutoIt3 script.

Here it is cleaned up: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=neP9qXGM

Seems like yet another dropper, not the actual bad thing.
I find it difficult to take at face value any claims of a "shortage of tech people" when huge numbers of engineering majors at top schools are still going into finance and consulting: http://web.mit.edu/facts/alum.html. At MIT there are still about 50% more people going into finance and consulting than computer technologies.[1]

When Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc, start paying comparable salaries to Goldman and Morgan Stanley, and still can't find enough qualified workers, then I'll believe that there really is a shortage. Until then, I'm going to consider this the latest in a long line of anti-competitive moves to depress engineering wages: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/September/10-at-1076.html.

[1] And it's not because financial firms make more money per worker. Google is at about $1m in revenue per employee, Apple is at about double that. Goldman Sachs is at about $1.25 million.
Tech companies are unhappy that technologists are treated like medical doctors: The US limits the supply. This has the side effect of raising wages for both professions.

The AMA is instrumental is keeping the supply of doctors limited. We wouldn't want those unqualified European doctors dispensing aspirin.

There isn't an equivalent strong lobby for tech folks; In short, their salaries are doomed, so make hay while the sun shines.
How to Navigate the Internet at Work
Iran Invents Time Travel
Totally, search is a big feature that is going to be added soon.
Being paid very well is different from being paid the market wages. Could you get a higher paying job with your credentials in your area doing similar work?

/former H1B
Show HN: Analytics / CRM hybrid