skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just downloaded it at: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/Download.html

Got to say, this thing has potential. I was typing about 12 words a minute after tying it for a short while. Kinda torn about the predictive nature of it, though. On the one hand, it lets you type faster in the beginning, but on the other hand it makes it harder for you to really speed up, as it is akin to having the 'g' button go huge on your keyboard right after typing the letters 'havin' but still. I was typing at 5 wpm when I first got onto a computer (I was 4) and now I type at around 40 to 60, after thousands of hours of experience.

If you are going to give it a try, definitely ramp up the speed or you are going to judge it on false pretenses.
The tricky part might seem to be how one defined a startup. But that could be solved quite easily: let the market decide.

As much as I support your position (I'm an open immigration advocate), the concept of "Let the market decide" isn't exactly a position I hear the government ever clamoring to support. The government wants control, and giving up control is it's antithesis.
There aren't the same number of men and women out there. There are a lot more older women than older men.

That said, I don't see why the definition of "single" makes a difference to you, unless your concern was that we're going to have a catastrophic shortage of women in 50 years. Women may simply marry earlier in life, but you're still just as screwed if you're a young guy (Or not, as the case may be.)
As a non-American who applied to YC twice the article was a pleasant surprise. However I'm not sure America is as attractive to non-American founders as some people think. I'll explain (my arguments are mostly personal perceptions...I have no practical evidence yet on any of this since my own startup is still at the "wrote some code" stage).

Let's suppose there are 2 types of founders: people who have enough money & connections, and the young "live on Ramen noodles" type founders.

For the "money & connections" type, a lot of foreign countries offer cheap but still qualified programmers and don't put too many obstacles on founding companies so if your country is like that it might make sense to stay. For the "Ramen" type, many of them may not afford America's often high living costs.

As for the argument that the US provides a better/more free market... even this is changing: The internet probably allows relatively easy selling to worldwide customers from any country.

All that said, the American dream probably still lives on and many people would likely provide counter-examples to my limited point of view. Of course pg didn't claim that coming to the US is a no-brainer for every single talented hacker. There are probably enough of those who are interested to satisfy the 10,000 founder/year goal.
From an employer's perspective, employees at a competing company are more valuable workers than employees of equivalent skill at companies in other product markets, due to their inside knowledge of competitors' operations. I can understand why some people might think this is unfair and be willing to enforce contracts that make an employee wait a certain time period before working for a competing firm.
How would the government decide who's a startup investor? The same way they decide what counts as a university for student visas. We'll establish our own accreditation procedure.

This part scares me. Accreditation boards are a bug, not a feature. Perhaps, like pg's idea, they started out as well intentioned. But today, their primary purpose is to erect arbitrary barriers of entries, thus propping of the salaries of professionals and the tuition of the schools. The tech industry is great because it is so isolated from politics and bureaucracy. I'd hate for that to change.
I find this almost more valuable for the list of caveats to the data than the viz itself.

It's really nice to see them break down why it seems to skew so male at the younger ages, as opposed to OH NO THERE ARE NO GIRLS.

P.S.: Oh no, there are no girls! =)
Thanks. The word "fail" is actually an allusion to the parking meter story, which used it to great effect.

I am a huge Reddit/Digg fan (though the new Digg bar is indefensible.) I think what those two sites have done is unleashed a generation of writers and publishers, confident that they now have a tool to find an audience when they make something really great.

But for those writers who want to dig into local issues, there is no tool like that. When I came to Chicago for j-school and was pumping out stories every day, I had no way to put them in front of people. And my stuff died a quick death on Digg because it just didn't belong.

That's not a bad thing, it's just how it is. So I've spent the last year creating a solution in Chicago. This post was written to celebrate a bit of a milestone and also to point out to local publishers that they should stop chasing the fools gold of Digg's front page and come join up with us. :)
Risk Management for Small Businesses
You and me both! By the end of next week, we hope to have some results to report back.

Media Kit? check.

Spreadsheet of leads? check

Salesperson who knows what they're selling and is pumped about it? check

Time to start hitting the phones...
We just launched a new invoicing web app for under 10K. Check it out: Ballpark
If anyone's bothered I made a simple framebreaker plugin http://alicious.com/2009/frame-breaker-wordpress-plugin-remo...
[pysqlite] Connection deadlock because of file lock
I was glad to see this post, since my tweets went missing recently, and Google didn't turn up much complaining. At least I am not the only one.
This idea is a special case of Gary Becker's proposal to sell the right to immigrate (http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/02/sell_the_...). In this special case, the investors in the immigrant's business would pay the immigration fee.

I don't see why the potential benefit to the US of immigrants with startup ideas is necessarily greater than immigrants of similar technical skills with no stated intention to start a company. But the immigration fee could help in sorting that out.
I thought the risk was in opening the floodgates of pure political discussion on HN.
VC's barely (meaning, almost not at all) adapt to citizens who haven't yet moved to Boston or San Jose yet.
Sell the Right to Immigrate
Incidentally, I was surprised to see such good advice. I expected "sic lawyers on site owner, send police agency to house of commenter", but instead it was "disclose your connection and reply with intelligent commentary that cites its sources". That is really excellent.
I believe there is a new interface waiting to be invented that, with this language model technique, start to approach keyboard typing speeds

I'm still awaiting a smartphone featuring this idea: http://www.xaphoon.com/dataegg/ (or a phone jacket/cover with it).
HD Radio Is Crying Out to Be Heard
First thing that hit me was "wow great design." I actually am looking for a designer for my next project. Could I contact you/metalabs about it?
I have been using MacVim and the Unix prompt for my dev environment, and it's working well so far. XCode is useful for running code in the simulator, and for the core library documentation. Here is a simple app I made using this set up http://pair.com/asim/itimeit
I like how you used Etherpad. Watching the essay unfold gave me even more insight into your thoughts on the issue. ie: what topics took a while to iron-out and how you formulated your sentences.

I'd like to see a few more of these in Etherpad.
This behavior also caught me at the C API. I was expecting sqlite to block on contention and continue when available but it just gives up. I resorted to wrapping my sqlite use in a rwlock of my own, but that is a less than general solution.
Mashable - Unmixed Up - Has Gotten Me
I think the intent is to convince Digg to drop their bar altogether by punishing their users. Whether or not that's a good idea remains to be seen.
That is a worry. It would have to be super transparent. Originally I proposed a straightforward algorithm for deciding: to use Erdos numbers with Ron Conway as the seed. I took this out because I thought it was better not to go into this level of detail in the essay, but I'd advocate using something like this to decide who was a startup investor.
As a free-association tool, this thing blows my mind when set on its highest speed. It's kind of like flying through a field of all possible texts.
I don't know how much of that $10k was for web design but however much it was it was money well spent.

Interesting choices in the pricing plans. I'm not sure I like using SSL as a differentiator -- I know it is quite common these days for many web apps, but particularly with invoicing you're putting third party (client of client) financial information out on an open wire because somebody was too cheap to pick the $50 a month plan.
Dugg for irony.

er, I mean upvoted.
The self-motivation you need to focus on one thing, working in near-isolation for months at a time, is certainly handy. Though I've found the startup side of things to be very unlike the single-target focus of a PhD; there's just too much going on in many different areas. (I prefer it like that.)

Learning to live on a PhD stipend or whatever the hell it is in the USA is also pretty useful when you decide to start a business and have no money.

Plus having specialist knowledge that applies itself to a business case is obviously a great advantage, as you can launch a startup out of more than just an idea; you can launch it out of research, most importantly research your competitors don't have. Be warned, though. If you find your PhD topic drifting towards the Real World(TM), your supervisor might try to yank you back to their specific obscure out-of-date minority application of it, and you might end up with a battle on your hands.

Not that I'm bitter. I quit.
Tweenbots - A social experiment of cute autonomous robots and crowdsourced help
That's simple. You just make the accredidation based on the number and size of US investments and you allow some small portion of those to be of this special class.
anyone know what he might have used to make this? looks like a java applet. processing? prefuse? something else? homegrown?
Looks a lot like campaignmonitor.com.
In the pricing plan page, the titles of each plan are a bit hard to read as they are black on a dark blue background.
Can anyone think of a wonderful business (think truly great) that couldn't get funding until they were in the US?

From what I have seen there is tons of money if your model is great.

I think the counter is true: it's much easier to raise money for bleeding edge ideas in the US. But, ask yourself whether you want to be doing a bleeding edge business (e.g. based on twitter or facebook) or one thats more likely to make you wealthy (B2B).
"All specs are buggy"

So then you start out with a buggy implementation. This could either create vastly more work in the long run, or it could be a huge head start. It all depends on your product, the resources you have available, your sticking points, etc. But there are too many successful examples, like Digg and Squidoo, to completely write off the model entirely.
"For the "Ramen" type, many of them may not afford America's often high living costs."

I think the algorithm PG proposes is something like this:

1. Produce enough that you would be able to convince someone to fund you. Maybe this takes a prototype, a convincing sales pitch, ramen profitability, etc.

2. Convince someone to [seed] fund you.

3. Move to a place with an environment favorable to startups.

4. Continue working on your product, now with access to investors, other founders, good employees, great weather, ...

The idea is to get to step 4 as fast as possible. In most parts of the world you'd never be able to find good investors or a startup-supporting culture, and that counts for lot. As PG has pointed out, there's a huge variance in startup-friendliness even amongst the major cities in the US.
Software Development Gone Insane
You Nailed It PG(an immigrant living in the US). Simple as that. Nailed it.
Agreed. I don't need the product but I would hire that designer.
HL7... what a nightmare! I remember having to work with it, and it was a convoluted solution where every provider and vendor had a different interpretation.

As bad as 2.3.1 is, it's still worlds better than 3. The best thing that can happen is for 3 to be scrapped. The worst part is its model. I worked with it for the purposes of PHIN-LDM, and I've never seen a worse clusterfuck. It made dailywtf look positively logical.
There are big companies hungry for H-1Bs; could they exploit this new visa by "investing" small amount of money and then outsourcing some of their work into this newly created "company"?
I vividly remember just graduating college and being seriously pissed off that guys I knew were getting paid a lot more than me to put the owners manual in the glove compartment on an automotive assembly line, and I was now a "Professional Engineer". Fast forward a few years and one financial crisis later and I have a great job and have received various offers for freelance work, many of which I have had to turn down for higher paying jobs or just to work on my own startup. My buddies that were making serious bank on an automotive assembly line for the last 10 years can't get a job at a gas station. I'll take the education any day, thanks.

When I tell people my monthly student loan payment they usually choke and sputter, and I always just reply that it was the single best investment I could have ever made and I love writing that check every month. OK, it's automatically withdrawn, but you know what I mean. ;)
You should have the pricing plans oriented to the top instead of the bottom. Because I want to look at "estimates" and look over to the other pricing plans to compare; with your format, the "estimate" is at a different eye level.
i was wondering about this literally in the sense of tipjoy. i suspect that deleting or removing tweets does not undo tipjoy tips, paid or otherwise. (which is a shame, bc that would make me feel a lot more comfortable as i develop :-)
I see some similarities to 37signals' layout design...
A visa type that is quite similar to what you propose does exist. It's the E-2 "entrepreneur" or "Treaty Investor" visa (http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1273.html).

I've gone through the process, and despite it being a lot of paperwork and requiring the help of a lawyer, it was ultimately a good experience.

In order to get such a visa, one has to submit a business plan, and show sufficient funds from abroad. Interestingly, the funds only have to be appropriate for the business to be started, there is no set minimum like a lot of people assume (e.g. 100k). An example my lawyer gave me was a woman that wanted to start a horse riding school, and who got her E-2 by proving an investment of ~30k into her company.

I started an internet business, and my investment was in the same ballpark.

Also, for founders already living in the US, it is ok to work on setting up the business, e.g. incorporating etc, while applying for the E-2, as long as no customers are being engaged and money is being earned.

A downside is, that there is no straight path from the E-2 to a greencard; other then upping the investment (which has to come from abroad) to $10^6.

Edit: There is another downside, mentioned elsewhere in this thread. One has to be from a 'treaty' nation.

Disclaimer: I'd strongly advise you to consult an immigration lawyer if you want to do this.
Skype is a company that should go public.

Imagine Skype integrating a money transfer layer into its application.

I would also think it is one of the biggest social network platform that has yet to be milked.
Weak ripoff of Cashboard.

http://www.getcashboard.com is way better.

You fail. Try again.
The same goes here. First word "WOW", then in my head "Nice design".
Unfortunately more attention has been drawn to the design of your site than its functionality.

While the design is great and you have all the reason to be proud of it, the long term success of your business will tie mostly, if not all, to the functionality rather than design.
How'd the brutesoft presentation go?
www.getcashboard.com
Not really, I think this layout is just very common for apps like these.
"Finishing what you start."

Is that really an intrinsically virtuous trait? I think it would be better stated as: Stick with it as long as the expected utility outweighs the opportunity costs, and don't let temporary challenges and random emotional swings affect your estimate of the expected utility.
You seem to have found a lot of implied meaning in that one sentence. You also have an extremely low treshold for what you consider an insult.
For the record, this was going to be the title but it didn't fit:

"The small company I work with, Metalab, has just launched a new estimating and invoicing web app for under 10k with no VC. It's called Ballpark, check it out."

Thanks for the comments on the design, all of the credit for that goes to the main Metalab guy, Andrew Wilkinson, see more here http://www.metalabdesign.com
I saw the site a few days ago when @mike9r talked about it on Twitter and I am impressed with it.

I have tried Blinksale and FreshBooks (who I guess are your two most obvious competitors) and neither of those really worked out for me, so I am anxious to give Ballpark beyond clicking around a bit. I am constantly looking for something that is only as powerful as I need and fits nicely into my work flow.

My favorite feature is definitely the "news feed" that shows comments / payments / etc. - that is a great way to visualize what has gone on with the project.

And yes, great design :)
Back up! http://vimeo.com/4095815
Really a good talk!
I like it, however I think you should allow more invoices to be sent at the lower level of the plans. Maybe just focus on the per-user limitations, and make the estimates generation more generous. Also everything should be over SSL - better for you and better for your customers, since if there is a data breach by the user they will still blame you.
This is an excellent point, we will fix this.
Trent said it in the context of incumbents and what he had to do to succeed in the music industry. With that context he was saying that the indie musician will have a hard time making any money on iTunes.
Cashboard is way better than FreshBooks, Blinksale, Harvest, and the myriad of other imitators.

These guys are just another "also-ran". You just spent $10k on nothing, dummies.
I've followed the "Programmer's Stone" concepts off-and-on, almost forgot about them entirely. This is definitely the best iteration of them yet.
Also emotionally challenged.
Acts_against_douchebar (Rails anti-DiggBar plugin)
The ugliest logo ever, but maybe it makes sense
This sounds like a horrible idea. I think it would tip the scales even further towards only allowing the rich in (for which the current system is already biased).

You want the best and brightest. It seems he's using this money as a metric for determination, but I suspect it'd be more a discriminator for wealth. I think Paul's idea of allowing founders in and his terms suggested sound like a better predictor of determination.
Making decisions in a rational manner is usually well regarded in business. Why not apply the same principles to one's sex life? It sounds sociopathic, I know, but it's a serious and honest question. Why is it cool to be a good homo economicus in one's professional life, but NOT in one's personal life?
Take a look at Rhodes.

http://www.rhomobile.com/

Here's the pitch:
"Rhodes is the industry's first open source framework for rapidly building mobile applications for all major smartphone operating systems. Rhodes allows developers to write a smartphone application once using simple HTML and it automatically builds native applications for all smartphones including iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and now Android."

The framework is based in Ruby.
There is a simple alternative – remove the stupid restrictions on H1B visas. The restriction that if you loose/quit your job that you have to be out of the country in 60 days is bad for three reasons.

The first reason is that the employer knows his worker is dependent on him – he can thus get away with a lower salary, etc... The second reason it is bad is that you cannot quit and start a start-up – if you do not have a sponsoring company you must be out of the country in 60 days.

The third reason is that it deters people from going to the USA. I really want to go to California next year – but with that Visa system it is not going to happen (probably going to London). Compare the US system and the UK's General Highly skilled Visas (e.g. http://www.workpermit.com/uk/uk-immigration-tier-system/tier...) – it is really no fuss and valid for a time period.

There are already more than 5 million Mexicans in the US. Would 1 million engineers and scientists really be a bad thing?
I am curious what program you created the screencast in?
That's because they share the same graphic designer.. look at the portfolio.
Report: Founders Want To Buy Skype Back From EBay
Here's a random attack vector.

Step 1. Pay lobbyist to add the following clause to the rules: "Treasury will provide 20:1 non-recourse loans to participating investors" -- to attract the 'hot money' and foreign capital, of course. Just copy the clause right from PPIP, in case you think it's not possible.

Step 2. Wealthy foreign investor: send random minion on 2-year luxury vacation to the U.S. Invest in minion's "startup" through some convoluted channel (perhaps a Wall St. Bank's unofficial immigrant startup investment fund).

Step 3. Sell "consulting services" to minion's startup using your U.S. shell company.

Step 4. Free Money.

Obviously there are good and easy ways to prevent this absurd little tinfoil hat scenario I've constructed in the bat-filled cavern where my brain should be. But considering the recent track record of our government botching up finance-related issues, I wouldn't expect anything less...
The international community's willingness to pay these ransoms is making the problem far worse...
Current TV Cancels $100 Million IPO
They wouldn't be certified as startup investors.
Great concept, great design, great execution.

How much is "ballpark.com"?
Not happening to me... try deleting your cookies for nytimes.com
Yeah, SSL costs in total $30 a year, for all customers. No company should be reckless with customer information, regardless of the tier they purchase.

Only charge for things that actually cost you time or money, otherwise your customers will feel ripped off.
Thanks, this will be useful. As I said on my blog in "The Web Is Still Not Adequate for Serious Study", one of the biggest problems with using the web for study is finding things, like this, that may be out there somewhere.
I believe the reference is to all administrations prior to the current one. Transparency has been a hallmark of the current administration since day one.
I was discussing building an internal payment management system over lunch today. Do you have an API that we could use instead?

As others have said, kudos on the design.
As someone with a site with mediocre design, first impressions mean a lot.

I read a lot into a design. It tells me how professional the people I'm dealing with are. It tells me if they're enterprise droids or if they're working with small customers too.

We'll be either doing a new one ourselves or paying for one soon.
pretty well! I had some good questions on security and the like. We need to get brutesoft.com live!
whats the breakdown of that $10K?
7 Underground Cash Secrets For Your Online Business