skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Others have said it, but I'll say it again.

Maybe in 1989, this would have made sense. But capitalism has had enough converts that most countries have pretty low barriers to high tech startups now.

IMHO, people who are already entreprenurial in their home countries will be the last people who will want to immigrate to the US. Maybe pg looks at the number of companies founded by immigrants and thinks that he can increase that number by creating a new visa class for founders. Immigrants start businesses because American culture is much more stable, open to startups, tolerant of failure, and gives people second chances; so many immigrants let go of their previous cultural biases and become founders.

If you're already an entrepreneur in a poorer country like India and China, why would you immigrate from there to a country where all expenses are vastly higher. I mean, American companies are setting up development centers in India and China. For richer countries like France and Germany, you give you any existing networks and go to a new place. Seems like a net loss to me.

You have stay in a culture for a while before you recognize business opportunities there. I bet that most of the immigrants who start things do so after staying in the US for 3+ years. My claim is that a new immigrant will do worse at business than average.

You'll have to let in lots of smart people and hope that some start companies. Maybe you can set up the rules so that it's easier for the smart new arrivals to start a business as soon as they're ready.

Currently, due to various rules, the most common route to permanent residency takes approx 6 years of continuous employment with the same employer for an immigrant to gain unrestricted rights to do business (this requires permanent residency). So for somebody who arrived for a Master's degree (being simplistic and using Master's as a proxy for smartness), it will be 8 years after arrival. This same person may have understood the culture well enough in 3 years and be ready to start a business.
Additional recognition. Sometimes an 8-20 character long name may not suffice.
What bothers me about the immigration caps is that they appear to be completely arbitrary, as opposed to being in tune with the industries they "serve" or based on some up-to-date metrics. At the very least, they are not rechecked frequently enough.

Is it really good for the economy when a company is unable to hire 10 people, because of a "cap" that sounds like it was pulled out of a congressman's left ear? They market these restrictions as trying to "save U.S. jobs", but ironically the caps will kill U.S. jobs when whole companies fail to remain competitive.
Reminds me of this game I used to play called Creatures - a sort of life sim with monkey-like animals that you were supposed to nurture, teach, protect. There were a few people, though, who played the game by 'torturing' the 'animals', slapping them constantly, starving them, and drowning them. They had sites detailing their creatures' little misadventures.

This caused a lot of people to get up in arms, complaining about cruelty to animals and whatnot. I mean, these people were -pissed-. It was very strange to me, considering that they were a bunch of electric signals in a machine and had no personal wills. It must have been because they were cute - if they'd looked like starfish, nobody would have cared.
Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs
Sexism, at least in the workplace, is about: unequal rewards for work of equal value; hostile working environments that target individuals based on gender; and more besides.

Sexuality is so complex that I hesitate to define it here, but do you really think it necessarily includes paying a woman less, promoting them less, listening to them less? Or puerile insults?
You speak the truth, but hesitate to enumerate on the reality.
Sure, cheap idiots shouldn't be allowed to immigrate into the USA. I'm totally against the trend of mass produced know-nothing "programmers" who were imported into the US in the late 90's and early 2000's. But there's a lot of legitimately intelligent and capable people out there, and it's in our best interest to try and get them to play for Team USA.
> but in order to accelerate, a deer goes anaerobic, while the man remains in an oxygenated jogging zone.

Anaerobic exercise is where you get close to red-lining your body's limits.

The Ironman is arguably one of the most difficult single-day athletic event an individual can participate in. Training for the Ironman (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, 26.2 mile run) requires at least one year of up to 20 to 40 hrs of concentrated training every week. The whole point of the training is to build your body's endurance such that when you do the actual race you do not go anaerobic. Even the people winning the race in 9hr times do not venture into the anaerobic zone while racing. Once you go anaerobic (lactic acid), your ability to complete the race (or even continue) goes seriously downhill. Going anaerobic is also the reason why most people cannot swim more than 100m without training (simply put - their technique is so bad that most of their energy is expended and wasted into fighting the water - so it's like running 100m sprints).

Also, check out the Marathon Monks of Japan. 84km/day for 100 days.

http://www.howtobefit.com/tendai-marathon-monks.htm
If you had actually bothered to read the article, you will find that the person featured has been educated in US from when he was 14. He went to Harvard. Now do you want such a person to be just sent back because he is an "immigrant" or that his skill and intelligence be recognized and make it such that it is easy for him to work in US, contributing to the US economy.

The US attracted the best and the brightest. If you insist on sending them back because they are "immigrants" then the loss is not just theirs.From the article "Many innovators in Silicon Valley come from overseas; 42 percent of engineers with master’s degrees and 60 percent of those with engineering Ph.D.’s in the United States are foreign-born."

Do you know why Chinese and Indians population in Universities are increasing? Because in those cultures being a geek is cool, unlike in US. In China and US, the topper in the school is the super star unlike in US where it will be the college football captain. The toppers from such places come to US because the US universities are far ahead in higher education. But if you send these people back, this lead in education will slowly evaporate as the best students go back to their country instead of staying on and becoming entrepreneurs and professors.
I guess I am already down voted so I don't want to get into debate in here..but to answer your question..what's wrong ..the global and (in turn sustainable US development) will happen if more startups succeed..and that has to happen on global basis because global opportunities are huge.. I feel startup teams can succeed only if they understand market and have necessary resources in terms of human capital not just money (that too just seed stage investment).. and with an very insider's view I don't see how someone comes to SV/SF from outside gets that just because they have visa..and what kind of magic we have that makes them overcome handicap of being in foreign market when now there is really opportunities everywhere.. if they really develop business targeted at markets they understand there is more likelihood they will succeed..everyone wins that way.. so better option my view for America's growth is to investors and entrepreneurs here to go out and meet right people/sponsor more business visas/open up more cross-border trade channels/form symbiotic relationships with mutual respect (not like quoting word startup when it comes to the company in India :) ..getting stuck in the idea that we have the opportunities and just that once we open up our door right people will come rolling in is not valid..
Open source is just as much an ecosystem to build a product in as Microsoft products are. Having an open source project that you develop in your spare time does not mean that you depend on MS for your income. I haven't touched an MS product in years, and I don't plan on ever doing so again.
Here's why it is not stupid.

What you mentioned explains the current. But it doesn't imply that the future will be like it.

Another example: you spot a rock moving in space. Hey, it has been moving along this path, because it always has been. We can stop talking about it, and expect it to move in the same direction. Or, we can talk about it, and decide to exert force on it to change its direction.

The fruit of an intelligent discussion on this topic can lead to positive changes in behavior. Many people tend to overlook this, which I find to be an unfortunate side effect of the growing number of people who study, in some form or another, evolutionary psychology: that's how it is now, that's how it's going to be. They complete the first step of explaining why, but they don't go a step beyond that and think, knowing this, what can we do about it? In my opinion this is one of the most important traits of humans and human-related discussions: their ability to learn to self-evolve. /rant

To preempt any rebuttals, notice that I am not making any assumptions about positives and negatives here.
Rejected By VCs, Rescued By Angels
Thanks for your insightful answer
It seems I should really check out the new title from O'Reilly, thanks folks
Too much complaining, too little ideas.
Oh, wait...
But exactly the same thing happens in other instances...
"Awesome new image matching written in Java"
--> "hahaha Java is so crap!!!"

If someone can't make a good argument, they look for other things to respond to - language choice, photo, silly sounding name, etc.

It's just a fact of life and I don't think anyone should take it personally.
Everything Art De Vany says could easily be true of the people running recreational marathons today. Many of them are much heavier than the San and the Tarahumara, both in build and in body fat. Many people who run marathons never run more than twenty miles in training, and then run the marathon extremely hard to get the best possible time. Most of the people in an amateur marathon will be in pain for at least a week afterwards. They only say they "hurt" themselves if it takes more than two weeks to recover.

An endurance hunter wouldn't run so hard (because he knows time is on his side) and would take much better care of his body (because he depends on his athletic ability much more than a modern person does.)
Well, you know what they say - on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. ( http://randomknowledge.wordpress.com/2007/12/30/on-the-inter... ).

A part of the problem is that on the net you're usually not held to account for your comments, as they're usually posted anonymously (or somewhere on a site with like-minded people). (Mind you, the existence of anonymity on the net is overall a good thing in my opinion).

4chan.org (parts of it very nsfw) is of course the prime example of what happens when you remove all constraints and let anybody upload and comment anything anonymously. A seething cesspool of sexism, racism and a bunch of other -isms.

Another relevant comic is a recent PVP thread, with this one pretty much summing up the article in question -
http://www.pvponline.com/2009/04/03/no-comment/ .

And to round it off, John Gabriel's Greater Internet Dickwad Theory can be found here,

http://us.st12.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/yhst-34640480252896...

(Usually not big on linking to images, but just this once I'll go with the one pic equals a thousand words saying).
I can see what you're getting at, but I think the point Tom was trying to make was that even if 99% of men are non-sexist and make reasonable on-topic comments on female bloggers, the vocal sexist minority is still going to be there and make stupid comments.

Indeed, it's not very optimistic. I think a solution would be if more sites implemented HN's rating system which hopefully would increase the ignorability of crude comments.
Your resume seems pretty impressive. Are you having trouble finding an internship or just one in NYC?
Steve Jobs maintains grip at Apple
That's like saying that because men are more testosterone driven and prone to violence, society should just accept it because any discussion about it would be "stupid".

Your assumption is that your opinion that violence (or crudeness) is socially unacceptable implies that opinion is shared by everyone. Clearly it is not, as is evident from the fact that these things happen. Do not underestimate the power of a strong community response to influence the behavior (if not opinions) of individuals. You should also not underestimate the value of a strong condemnation to the victims of such crudeness/violence. After all, how should these women know that the majority of men consider this behavior unacceptable if that majority doesn't pipe up?
NTFS-3G: The Universal Filesystem
http://www.maneeshsethi.com/about.html
"Also, I have a big interest in programming. Although I don't plan on doing it as a career, I enjoy it and computers in general."
Why you shouldn’t use XDomainRequest
There was at least one talk at Defcon last year about this kind of thing. Escaping VMs is not as hard as the article suggests.
Lead Acid Batteries: How Cheap Beat Cool at Google
I've written a bunch of programming books (some international bestsellers on game programming), spoken at conferences around the world, developed a couple startups, and done lots of awesome projects.

Why would you want an internship? This is much more than most "senior developers" have done.

FWIW, if you'd like to "cash in" on your reputation, you might want to consider teaching training classes. You spend a month or so developing a course, and then you get $10-20k spending three days presenting it. It's not programming, but you can do that in your free time ;)
>> "Sexism is discrimination."

But our minds are programmed to discriminate. If a nice looking lady is doing a presentation on SSL, most mens brains will be in a struggle over what to concentrate on. Her body, or the content of the talk.
Our company has not experienced this paradox. In fact, it seems easier to hire good people right now because few other companies are hiring. Maybe this is more of a problem if you are hiring outside your network. So far, I don't think anyone we have hired has been layed off. They all are top people who see the writing on the wall at their less successful companies and are happy to find a better job elsewhere before things get really bad.
This is great news. I know how frustrating and difficult it can be to get the right message out if you are a social activist.

It is not about the money. My organisation (wpirg.org) has the money to spend on a quality advertising when it's warranted. We're generally limited to the newspaper. Public television likes to stay away from anything contraversial. Why lose viewers if you don't have to?

Fortunately for us, the airwaves are public assets meant to contribute to the wellbeing of the citizens first and foremost. Companies like CBC and Global are bound by that requirement. Since the government fell short on enforcing the public interest it ends up in the hands of Canadian communities to get the job done -> which is why access to public advertising is so important in the first place!

Can't wait for the first public Canadian Adbusters ad!
Is the resume at http://www.maneeshsethi.com/resume.html current? What have you been doing for the last 6 years?
How Nokia (Impact) Tests Cellphone Durability
This is pretty much true at any level of supply (increase supply and the price will drop). You could just as easily argue that if more students study engineering its hurts those currently in the industry, that alone is not a reason to be against it.

From talking to my other friends with startups in the Bay Area it is apparent that there are not enough good engineers here. I had a conversation last weekend with one of my friends who always struggles to find good Ruby engineers, even at above market prices, and using every recruitment method available.

As the founder of a company originally started to help companies hire technical talent I've seen this firsthand. Everyone is frustrated with recruiters piping them lots of unqualified resumes, Dice, Monster, and Craigslist also provide high volume, but often low quality. Even the niche boards are underperforming.

If there are really "lots of great programmers" in the US where are they? I know a lot of companies around here who would gladly pay $150k+ for a truly "great" programmer, if they could only find them.

Maybe part of the problem is the vast difference between "decent" and "great" in terms of on-the-job performance and the unwillingness of many companies around here to settle for less.
I'm so impressed by that whole conversation between competitors. I'm speechless. Best of luck to all of you...
Google Update Goes Open Source
I guess "summary" was the wrong word :)
Thinking about it, the founder visa idea that pg proposed is aimed at the kind of people like the guy featured in the article.
I think opening the jobs page here to non-YC companies would be really useful (and lucrative).
Australia is a huge continent, but only a small proportion is arable: most is desert. Creating mountains in just the right places could increase rainfall.

But I don't think even the most powerful atomic bombs built so far are sufficient for this modest engineering proposal.

EDIT and why would a hack like this get downvoted?
Thanks for the update. As the above comenter says, apparently Iran is a treaty country but India is not. Nothing against Iran, I'm just referring to the recent anti-Iran rhetoric in the US, but it's definitely sad. Wish Indian bureaucrats were more effective at their jobs.
If it really is valuable, I don't think Google would have a problem paying however much a license costs.
I came in 2001(18 yrs) for my BS in Comp Sc and I am currently in my H1-B. The Green Card process is long and far away, so I don't even think about it. However, I see a few drawbacks of being on H1:

i. It hampers my capability to jump jobs to risky startups, because if that startup goes bust, I need to find a job in 2 months to stay in the country. Especially with a recessionary season, it adds to the risk while your existing employer is pretty strong.

ii. I am always looking for avenues to work on Ideas, and I do that too. But, because I need to be employed to maintain my Visa Status, I can only devote my evenings and weekends.

iii. I am also worried about the Laws (Immigration and other) that may prevent me from having my own venture etc.

I have been in the US for close to 10 years(8 years now and 2 years when I was a Kid). So, I have lived most of my decision making, understanding the world, ups/downs of life here in the US and I feel really connected to this country and really love it. I even pay good amount of Tax dollars plus work for a US company that works towards the growth of the US economy even in this downturn. But my fate still lies
on the Immigration Policy.

Another point I wanted to mention was about my experience in College. In my freshman year I realized hanging out with kids that went to Highschool here that being Smart in school equates to being a Geek, which is not considered Hip and Cool. On the contrary back home in India where I grew up, being smart(not necessarily Geek) was considered Cool and everyone wants to be friends with the Smart Kid. Luckily, it worked out good for me as I had a solid academic background from India and then had cool friends out here.
They are indeed arbitrary. Moreover, there is no ranking of the applications; Apart from requiring they meet the minimum requirements they are just processed in the order received.

Since the minimum requirement for an H1B is just a bachelor's degree, it seems hard to motivate that all those are essential. It seems the process could be improved by either ranking the applications by merit or instead of a quota establishing a higher minimum standard such that those accepted are really outstanding. Another alternative would be to simply uncap the category for those with US advanced degrees -- that cap truly makes no sense. (I should disclose that I'm biased here -- I was denied an H1B last year because of the quota.)

That said, none of that would help the person in the article. The simple change of letting H1B dependents work would fix that.
A VISA?! Are you f..ing kidding me? Do you know what a fragile status one has while on a VISA? Any day you your visa can be revoked and you can be thrown out.

Do you expect me to risk everything, to pour my life and blood into a business while under the stress that if anything goes wrong I am on a plane with a one-way ticket to a place where I have nothing anymore, together with my family and away for any of my friends?

Do you want founders? Do you want INVESTORS? Anything less than a Green Card is a spit in the face. Take an example from Canada or UK who both offer directly residency under a set of qualification rules, not $1m.

Stop treating us as we're nothing more than students happy to receive a couple dozen k as if that was an actual serious investment. Oh wait...
Here's a copy of my more updated resume: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/153216/ycombinator-resume.pdf

This is the OP posting, sorry for the different username.
Thanks for that. Error on my part.
I work with many Indian co-workers, each in various statuses of their citizenship process from H1-B/green card/naturalized. I can honestly say that, as someone born in the U.S., I don't truly appreciate what it means to hold U.S. Citizenship, even after seeing the paperwork/"identured-servitude" to sponsoring company stuff I've seen. In America, the freedom to quit your job and find a new one, does not necessarily translate to those of H1-B status.
> Should examples--even beginner examples--include the error-handling code?

> Brian: I'm torn on this. Error-handling code tends to be bulky and very uninteresting and uninstructive, so it often gets in the way of learning and understanding the basic language constructs. At the same time, it's important to remind programmers that errors do happen and that their code has to be able to cope with errors.

The lesson we learn from this is that we should design languages so that error-handling code does not have to be "bulky".
Rather than mathematics, you could try using a multi-agent model. Set up a set of "rules" each party follows and give it a go.

NetLogo is something i've used before to do similar stuff.
Thanks for the suggestions, but it sounds like there still aren't good (simple) solutions for web single sign-on (where you don't have to log in to multiple sites separately).
The OP has the bio of a "rockstar developer"; Joel (or any other shop) is not likely to pass on such a promising candidate; since they did, I have to infer that there are some obvious faults that the OP is not owning up to.
What-aboutery
> Makes me shudder just to think about the legal expense.

Good thing there are countless software engineers and mathematicians working on new ways of indexing and retrieving this kind of information in meaningful ways for fast, efficient, and low-cost electronic legal discovery systems.

Makes me shudder at how un-creative lawyers are.
I think the ability of any person to jog a marathon even after being couch potato for long periods of life shows how well genetically predisposed people are for running.
I think I would rather just read the finished essay.
As I understand him, DeVany is against long, constant-paced runs, of which marathons are the most extreme example. He likes short, varied sprints, as in competitive sports.

Chasing prey across mixed terrain likely had more pacing variety than a marathon. Just navigating around plants and rocks could provide more rhythmic variation than a modern marathon on a paved course. The optimal chase may have also involved trying to drive the prey to a convenient final resting location, so some of the chase would involve overtaking the prey from different angles at different times.