skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the Founders Visa idea totally reflects the American freedom spirit and it must be definitely tried.

I am currently holding a Highly Skilled Migrant Visa from the UK, and this was the only way I could start a startup there. After the visa was available, I quit my job and started my own business. I think with this visa, UK already went ahead of U.S. in this respect.

I agree that in order to reduce competition with American citizens, the Founders Visa may be limited to working in your own company. Founders don't want to be employed (I strictly don't - even was gonna refuse Google if they made an offer) and new companies create job openings. A Visa of this kind would be totally adequate for someone like me.

I didn't like the "Let investors choose" criteria. What if I am self-funded? If I bring my funds in, isn't that even better? Also it is highly subjective whether a founder is going to be successful or not. I think the election strategy should be based on founder's age, education, past earnings, work experience etc. just like in the UK scheme: http://www.workpermit.com/uk/hsmp_calculator.htm

Yes this is not the best criteria to select successful founders, but at least it is a "secure" criteria, i.e. you choose people elite enough that they won't hurt U.S economy. You could start with a "science/business graduate founders" scheme, and extend it based on success.

My last words go to Europe. Europe is living in the past. I wanted to attend FOSDEM in Belgium, was requested so many difficult documentation for Visa, that I decided not to go. I will probably never go to Belgium or similar countries, not because I hate them, but because its simply not worth the effort to visit those countries.
PG's post is interesting, as always. The bit that is worrying me is the linked Etherpad animation. Am I the only one that looks at the Etherpad DVCS using javascript functions as the delta data format, and think XSS sploit in waiting?
LG Launches GM Series 3 Music mobiles in India
Ask HN: Can I see your vesting agreement?
My partners and I are about to incorporate and we want to put a vesting agreement in place.

We've got an accountant who will do everything for $500 (S-Corp filings, vesting, articles of blah blah). Still, if we do it ourselves, we only pay the state fees of $150, saving $350.

But, I've never put together a vesting agreement before. Previous ventures were partnerships where we split equity up front.

So, does anyone have the legal docs necessary for creating a vesting agreement? Or, should I just pay the money and have the accountant do everything?
I think skilled individuals migrate for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic reasons. And not just for more cash.
Man-made protein 100,000x faster than nature
Granted, some of his theories made him sound like a crackpot, not that that means they were false.
Try finding this on twitter:

- who was Joan of Arc

- the first movie of Elijah Wood

- the capital of Somalia

- atomic number of Molybdenum

Twitter search is good for personal interaction.

Google search is good for everything else.
I sort of think of Google as a channel changer for the TV. When I need to go from one place to another, I use the remote, but the bulk of my time is not spent changing channels - it's spent consuming the media that I'm interested in.
Pay the money.

Not only will it be done right (hopefully), but it's good to build a relationship with a lawyer/accountant early on.

If you're personable, you can usually call up once or twice for a quick bit of advice/answers at no charge, and when you need it, that will be worth the $350 fee easily.
Google Ventures seems like a good proxy for this behavior.
The Endurance Running Hypothesis
With all due respect, this seems pretty naive to me.

I've met dozens of people trying to gain entry to Canada and the US, and it's common knowledge that you can game the system with money. This would just provide another entry point.

You would have to define what is a successful startup, in simple legal terms, and people would find ways to satisfy the definition and stay in the country.

I have experienced first-hand the difficulty of moving to a new country, adapting to a new system, trying to build a new social network. Any genuine startup founders would have to contend with all this, all the while knowing that if their business fails they're booted out of the country.

Anyway, I believe the reason entrepreneurship works so well in the US is because we allow people to fail.
This can give you an idea how essays are written by famous writers!
agree, but also he must have some information about what this accountant is doing this will avoind him of being scammed or rolled by the accountant.
Ask HN: best cheap easy setup for initial development
What is the best cheap setup for initial development? Low cost, easy to change to different languages (or web server) if first choice doesn't work, easy to move to a colocation site if that time ever comes and easy to administer. GUI isn't required.

My last webserver was circa 2000 with Apache and Redhat.
Computing in the classroom
I didn't understand what are you looking for, but I think you want to start a project on a given platform.

For that I recommand, Visual Studio.

1- It's 100% free of cost (express edition), you get the editor (Visual Studio Express) for free and .net frame work is free to install and compatible on Windows versions

2- It's very easy to use and Object Oriented. It also has a lot of power and by learning .net you can develop for windows, web or mobile interface.

3- You can code a program in different languages with Visual Studio

Also lot of videos and tutorials can help you getting started with it
Ask HN: Good architecture for web single sign-on?
I have a network of sites (each with unique top-level domains) and I'd like to share logins across. Any suggestions to support single sign-on (I'm using Rails)?
Why don't you try the Open-ID login, users can log with their Google account.

If your user account isn't much used (the site is a blog site), you can do a simple FaceBook Connect or Google Friend Connect.
I completely agree, our immigration system needs reform, badly. In fact, I see "low hanging fruit" that could really improve our economy and quality of life.

That said, I didn't really get an answer... you say you're in favor of increasing legal immigration - are you in favor of changing the mix, of do you think that we need to go way above the current level of 1.2+ million a year?
Functional Programming and Collective Intelligence - IV
what benefit would that give over (for example) Eclipse?

Ubuntu + Eclipse IDE = develop pretty much any language, for free.
Ubuntu Linux. You can use aptitude or apt-get to install pretty much whatever you want, it will run on whatever hardware you have at the moment, and it's free of charge.

If you already have a Mac you could decide to stick with the Mac OS for development instead (I use it; it works fine), though you will almost certainly not be running Mac OS on your server. So you'll have to figure out Linux anyway sooner or later. The Slicehost tutorials make it much easier -- a lot of the grunt work has been figured out and documented.
Is it just me, or does anybody else find it hard to make sense of phrases like:

> create a narrative about our relationship to space
I am not a fan of Facebook, I have never used Twitter, I am sure there are lots of others like me. There has been a lot of talk about semantic search over recent years, but just that TALK.
That assumes that VCs have a need to invest in people outside the valley or Boston. VCs would have to travel outside the country to meet potential founders (since they don't yet have a visa) There are enough founders in those two places that VCs don't have any pressing need to jump through such hoops.
Become an Editor
Agreed. The article implies that we all spent our time "hanging out" on Google before Facebook and Twitter came along. That's never been the case though. For better or worse Google has been and is just an extremely useful utility.
Avitae: Energy Water, Starting a Business in Tough Times
Find out more about the company at www.avitae45.com
Aha, it appears to be mirrored here: http://www.buildfreedom.com/content/reciprocality/
"I also realize that "quants" are utterly bankrupt. Paul Krugman is right - Obama has made serious error in trying to restart the finance machine."

I think you're painting things with a very broad brush. While it's certainly true that there's a financial crisis of global proportions, it's also true that there's a whole world out there outside of the U.S., and that world is not under Obama's influence.

Are quants bankrupt? Well, maybe in NYC. But NYC has not been the world's financial capital for a few years now. London has. And Shanghai is emerging pretty fast...

A friend of mine who's a grad student at a top 5 math department in the U.S. was invited to join D.E. Shaw recently. Another friend just finished her MSc at MIT and will take a quant position in an investment fund... in East Asia ;-) Circumstances don't look cheery for sure, but just because the U.S. is depressed, it doesn't mean other parts of the world are equally depressed.
A great deal of this is similar to the findings on management and creativity and/or stress and creativity.

Stress kills creativity because it creates a chemical reaction that forces your mind to focus intently and over-rely on previous experience. This might help if you need to run away from a bear, but might hinder if you're trying to solve a tricky problem that requires exploring and potentially letting go of assumptions.

Similarly it's very tricky to "manage" creativity or any task where you can't specify and measure either the process or the outcome (preferably both). You may sadly realise this covers most white collar work but it only really gets talked about in relation to obviously 'creative' things like advertising and R&D.

The basic of management there is "don't", though there are some things that help such as "clan controls" where you hire people with a particular value set (e.g. scientists or open source programmers) and encourage them to be evaluated, outside of work, by their peers.

It might be worth pondering a comparison between an leading advertising agency work areas and Google's famous playgrounds.

This guy proposes that the bits of the company that can be managed traditionally (sales, clerical workers) thrive on (or are even addicted to) continual stress and this causes a hidden rift between them and the programmers (etc.) who absolutely require at least some time in the stressless mindset in order to do their job.
I invited her to Chicago.
Life of Mammals persistence hunt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wI-9RJi0Qo
I develop on a Mac and deploy on Slicehost (Ubuntu), it's easy as pie and cheap as chips.
If it's such a big industry how come no one has written something that translates COBOL to a modern language?
2500 times thinner than human hair
I am a former Facebook skeptic, but after playing around with it a little I understand it's appeal in connecting and updating with friends and family. Don't know how they will monetize it, but when they find the right model, it's going to be epic. I no longer doubt it can be bigger than google -- in fact it almost certainly will be.
Having experience in this field, I'm usually very cautious about the sort of over-exuberance displayed in this article. First of all, the title is misleading. The 100,000x speed up is vs the uncatalyzed reaction, not vs some other enzyme. As enzymes go, that makes the man-made protein still about 4-6 orders of magnitude (10,000-1,000,000x) slower than the best enzymes.

There is a lot of interesting research going on in this field, but I worry that, like much of modern science, the focus is too much on "how can I turn this into a product" and less on "have we answered all the questions". The way I was taught was that Scientists answer the questions, and Engineers come up with the applications. What we have today is a lot of Scientists acting like Engineers.

One such unanswered question: How do we factor in entropy? (I did my Ph.D. prelim exam on that topic... If anyone is interested -- http://github.com/jballanc/prelim/raw/9a4ab5287b6776b9987834...) What's interesting about that topic is the way that we're applying new approaches and algorithms to the questions being asked. So, while the future of this field is certainly bright, we're still at the head-down keep-pushing-forward stage...

...keep the champaign on ice for now.
btw, just tried both twitter and google with above queries and here is the result:

- twitter = nonsense

- google = right answer in first page
OK, you're pretty ambiguous on what you want, but based on "easy to move to a collocation center" and "GUI isn't required" it sounds like you're mostly asking about servers.

For initial development, you probably don't even need a server. There's pretty much always an easy way to have a local server run on your computer for development.

When you are ready for a server (probably not until you're about ready to go live), I'd suggest Slicehost. They're well-documented and cheap ($20/mo. for their smallest server!), and you can scale the server all the way to 15.5GB of RAM in just a couple of minutes.

You could look at Linode too though. It seems like you get a little more RAM for your buck, especially on the smaller end, but you can only go to ~2.8 GB of RAM on one server.

As for your development computer, I love Ubuntu, but it really depends what you want. If you want to do everything through an IDE, it depends on your language, but the best IDE may be for Windows. If you want to do much of anything through the command line or think you might in the future, develop on either Mac or Linux. Their shells are just way better. There is always Cygwin, which sorta fixes the problem, but I think true Unix works better.
And I am certain this comment will make some people's blood boil even faster:

"If you want to start your own company, you don't even really need an idea, as long as you can do stuff. I have done so myself (and am pretty happy doing it). YC is, of course, almost completely retarded; anyone with a job and a bit of ingenuity can provide a deeper pool of funding than that, and the "connections" are worth zilch, based on their track record. Just save some money."
A well-dressed man meets a really attractive woman at a bar. He approaches her and then propositions her. "Would you be interested in having sex with me for a million dollars?"

The woman thinks for a while. And then says, "For a million dollars? Yes."

Then the man says, "Well, actually, I don't have a million bucks. How about I pay you $50."

The woman then becomes indignant and says, "What? $50? What kind of woman do you think I am?"

The man retorts smartly, "We already established what kind of woman you are. Now we're just negotiating the price."
The next question is, for the sort of search that you can sell ads against, where will people go. And the answer is still google...
One thing that took us a while to figure out, but helped immeasurably once we did was getting good, at VM/image based development.

So in our case we wrote the code on whatever laptop we liked best (I did most of the coding for first few versions our software on a 12" PowerBook, other folks used ThinkPads or Dells with Windows).

But having a beefy server box with enough memory/disk to host a few different VM environments (various QA, staging, multiple different DBs etc.) and the ability to rapidly set up new ones was killer. It makes the laptop choice more a matter of personal preference, and keeps a consistent environment where it counts.
"One of the country’s most popular television programmes, currently being recycled as a film, features the USS Enterprise boldly going where no man had gone before."

Actually, two of the country's most popular television programmes feature people singing and dancing their way to stardom. Like entrepreneurs, some fail miserably, some exit disappointed but graciously, and some make it big.

Still, point taken.
what was the robot made with?
What about the sort of search like 'recommend a good restaurant in SF'? That's the sort of search you'd do on Twitter, where you know you get human replies not machine ones, or possibly a custom site like Yelp (still not Google). It's also the sort of thing you can sell ads against.
Not only does it not work, but at least in my case the bot was hammering the site with many requests per seconed.

I blocked it with ModSecurity over a year ago.
Not very likely to happen.

To put things in perspective: most (non-European) foreign nationals are required to hold a transit visa just to make a connection via an US airport. To obtain that visa you need to go the local US consulate and schedule an interview. Not for study or tourism, mind you. Just to step off a plane and board another 2 hours later.
Confirm.

Went through everything from old office computer used as web/subversion server while still on windows xp to slicehost. It all depends on the details... but if you're not sure what they are keep it simple.

Depending on what you feel more confortable with you could either slap ubuntu on an old computer, or take a small slice at slicehost. The second has less bandwith (then a local computer) but overall it's much more flexible.
Hey Andrew, Lu,

We do take notice. It's good to see a lot of other apps come into the market with different ideas and approaches. It's definitely no good to end up in a market of one.

P.S. Andrew, it's too bad we didn't hook up when I was out in Victoria last summer. Are you coming to Toronto any time soon, by any chance?

Lu, similarly, I was just in SFO in January but I didn't reach out. My bad. Next time I'm down, shall we have a beer?

-- Sunir, Chief Handshaker, FreshBooks
agree I'm facing the same problem. I can't get VISA to USA or Europe and thus start a startup there.

Many people are facing the same problem
The first thing that comes into mind is old Roman military. Infantry and long marches - on a regular basis they could out-march cavalry.
Not that I have enough money in any case...

And, presumably, also too much.
Or if the robots weren't anthropomorphic -- just a box with wheels.
Definately useful, but it seems a bit sparse at the moment. Are they planning to add more books?
Strategy: Linux under Xen. (just copy disk image or dump/restore FS) Amazon EC2 for production.

Tactics: Fedora (It will become CentOS after polishing) everything already packaged - Django, Ruby, nginx, apache with tens of modules, etc.

Hint: Forget Java.
I guess they said "Holy cow, we started a phone company with zero overheads and sold it for less than Verizon!"
Friendship is supposed to be non-transactional. That is, a true friend is someone who values the relationship itself over what s/he gets out of it. If you want a rational explanation for this, think about how, in an alliance, you need to be able to trust the other person not to backstab you if you are temporarily weak.

Most people pay a lot of attention to figuring out whether the other person values the relationship over what they're getting out of it. (Citation: all gossip, every Shakespeare play, all of literature generally).
These days it's pretty negligible, at least in my experience. If you every get to the point where the SSL handling CPU load is a problem, you're driving a TON of traffic and hopefully can afford another box or two, or an F5 to off-load the SSL.

I've been involved with some REALLY big sites, and SSL didn't really impact performance at all.
This is good because it opens the door to advertising that goes against the consumerist grain.

This is very bad because it limits the rights of people and businesses to choose who they do business with. Imagine being forced to run an advertisement from the KKK or the NRA or any other social group you disagree with. Imagine a pro-immigration website being forced to run anti-immigration advertisements. Whichever "social causes" have the most financial backing will control all advertising on all outlets--worse than what is already happening now.
VirtualBox (free from virtualbox.org) running on top of whatever Windows, Mac-x86 or Linux system you have.

Debian or Centos as the operating system that you run as a VM inside VirtualBox.

You should be able to easily install Python, Ruby, TCL, Lisp, etc. on either platform for development language; Apache or NGINX or Lighttpd as the web server; Emacs or Eclipse or whatever as the editor.
Bill Joy muses on what's next
If you were in the hospital for an extended period, you could pay someone to sit and talk with you. But you couldn't pay them to do it spontaneously because they cared.

You can pay someone for sex now. You can't pay someone to think about you all day and be consumed with anticipation just before you meet.

You can pay someone to go out with you to a social occasion. You can't pay someone to share a knowing glance across the table when you have some shared observation of the behavior of a third party. When you know before you look that you're going to have this shared observation.

And I'm not putting sex work down; it also has its place. It's just not the same as a relationship.
Non-competes are basically a source of friction in the employment market. They create inefficiencies because employees can no longer go to work for the company to which they will provide most value (which will presumably reward them commensurately).
Designing Social Interfaces
They're looking for the convenience of a prostitute, without the hassle (logistical, legal) and the "worry" that might come with a normal prostitute (guilt, higher disease risk, whatever).

I'm happily married, but I don't think calling these people "pathetic" is appropriate. Everyone's sexuality is different, and their own. Judging someone else like that doesn't seem right.
Design is an island
How does Ubuntu compared to Debian on the server side, these days? Will the new FreeBSD kernel support get moved to Ubuntu? The admins I know doing this for big installs swear by FreeBSD. (I've only managed my own desktop for quite a few years and have no clue. No O/S flamewar, plz! :-) )

Edit: I went Ubuntu-only on my desk a few years ago, previously Debian-only (well, one computer still have a Debian partition too and I also have a Mac). I'm asking about servers.
The article also says that no known natural enzyme catalyzes this particular reaction, so it's still a nice achievement, even if the artificial enzyme is a poor performer.
I find this business model much more agreeable than the adultery-only sites, which seems to me to only be enabling dishonesty. Here, presumably, everything is on the table. It doesn't involve purposely lying to your spouse as much as it does making arrangements for, er, extra "services"

Not that I would go for anything like this. I've found from watching myself and others that the line between sex and emotional relationship is too blurry for to dance around for a long time.

I really wonder who is screwing whom here. Can you have a one-night stand and walk away? Sure. Can you spend tens of thousands of dollars on someone and then walk away? Sure -- it's only money. How about your time? How much of your personal time do you want to spend wooing and chatting up and getting to know somebody who's there only as a sort of human rental car?

It's the time investment that doesn't make much sense. If you're paying for sex seems like you drop your cash and badda boom, badda bing the transaction is done. If you're looking for a relationship, you spend your money and time and build a knowledge of somebody. But this is almost like saying "I'm too insecure to meet people, so I'd just like to pay you and pretend we like each other for a period of time. Then we'll both move on"

I'm not buying it. I think these guys have emotional needs they're covering up by rationalizing dating into a business deal. Since their emotional problems aren't going away, and since there will always be young, attractive girls who want more money, it looks like a solid business model. I'm just glad I'm not a customer.
better yet, ask that on aardvark (vark.com)
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