skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only problem I have with bloggers like this is they don't realize the Air Force is being benevolent with this policy. This guy wants to get people all "pumped up" about the unstoppable nature of social media by making it seem like the Air Force had to come up with a policy. But the problem is half the people he convinces will get fired because Social Media is not unstoppable.

Social Media is not going to destroy bureaucracy. If you work for a monolithtic company or a government they probably haven't discovered what social media is yet. But when they do management is going to treat it like any other form of media and threaten to fire anyone who uses it without permission. If you post anonymously they are going to hire a P.I. to track you down (like they do with news leaks now)

Social Media is a great tool and I personally suggest companies use it. But thinking huge companies and governments will be brought to their knees and forced is unrealistic.

Oh, and those who think there will be "too many social media users" to block are also being unrealistic. Once the threat of firing comes down 99.99999% of people won't do anything. Because the people who work for these huge bureaucracies are almost always the people who really need the job.
They do, but they basically cache (although I'm told Akamai is allowing servlet-ish stuff to run at the edges now). If you want to make back-end RPC calls between data centers, you're eating at least one round trip.
Summary: Springfield, MA is where it's at.
Java Googles Upsizing
Products like this make me wish the iPhone had an API for writing custom keyboards.
Using Mathematica to generate Web 2.0 company names
Thankyou pg for writing on this topic!
It was also a suggested addition to ECMAScript 4, although I think it's out now.
President Obama, Where’s Our CTO?
This line made me smile:

I think this would have such a visible effect on the economy that it would make the legislator who introduced the bill famous.

It reminded me of "Law 13" of "The 48 Laws of Power":

uncover something in your request... that will benefit him, and emphasize it out of all proportion.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555691
If someone did apply under false pretenses, get here, and do nothing, then what would be the negative impact on the country?

PG's suggestion was that they cannot work for other companies, so they are not depriving anyone of a job. They will have to live somehow (on whomever's money they have), and that will go into the local economy. If you add a clause to the visa that they cannot claim any type of social welfare, then I think the potential downside of 'gaming' nowhere near outweighs* all the potential upsides.

* - opportunity cost of the 10,000 spots excepted, which is why you have the right folks picking the 10,000.
I suggest that playing in person would be a better introduction to D&D than any computer game. The publisher, wizards of the coast, organizes D&D game days at local game stores around the country. They are free and very newby friendly. A key ingredient of D&D for many, myself included, is the time spent around a table with friends. Online interactions don't fully capture this experience.
That's a good idea. The visa system generally makes it hard for hard-working highly-motivated highly-educated foreigners to come to the US and create value. PG is right that we should be attracting these people instead of throwing random obstacles in their way.

-- American-born son of an immigrant Indian scientist
This is more the architecture that the W3C TAG would like the Web to have rather than the one that it has in reality. (There are substantial differences of the "no piece of software would actually do it that way because it wouldn't be able to handle the content on the Web" sort.)
I'd seen this before, but not with the age being adjustable. I see that the male to female ratio is significantly worse for my location, sexual preference, and age range than it was just for the first two.
I wonder how many of those billionaire top dogs he describes would take a $208,100/yr civil service position?(Ok, they aren't all billionaires, some are probably only millionaires.)

In the spirit of helping though, let me explicitly exclude myself. I will not accept the position of CTO for the federal government. That reduces the search process at least.

[edit: changed the pay to $208k to match a supreme court justice]
Free-Range Trichinosis
No, but indentured servants did enter into contracts to make themselves slaves (for a limited period of time) and that's no longer allowed by law, either.

I agree with you that "slavery" was a sloppy argument, but indentured servitude is a better one.
Like Google Chrome?
"Spec-and-implement doesn't work."

Spec-and-implement only has two parts, creating a spec and getting the spec implemented. Which part doesn't work?

I'd readily admit that it's not possible to create a web startup based on a single iteration, but I think it can be one box on a much larger PERT chart.
Probably true when you look 4-5 years into the future and some of these seed companies start growing out into real, profitable, sustainable businesses.
Surely it's more an example of Rule #1.
After edit: On second reading of your article, this differs from the existing investor visa category

http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f...

in asking the would-be immigrant to put up talent rather than money as the sign he will run a successful business. That's in line with your usual take on how easy it is to start up new businesses in today's economy.

It's an intriguing idea to broaden the talent pool available for seed-stage investors to invest in. The political objections will revolve around

a) What happens to the people who start up but flame out, failing in their businesses? It's expensive to deport people who have already arrived, and they sometimes disappear from the view of law enforcement.

b) Why shouldn't the United States start-up investment market be preferentially granted to persons who have legal right to work in the United States? (My bias is toward free movement of people across borders, but the only reason immigration law exists at all is that not everyone shares my bias, not in any country.)

P.S. I am a lawyer, and used to practice immigration law, although the bulk of the cases I worked on involved different visa categories.
Great article. Thanks for that!
Nice idea. Feels like a version of the E-2, brought in line with the new realities of the cost of starting a web based business - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E2_visa (government is always slow). Rather than requiring applicants to bring monetary capital into the country, they'd be required to bring start-up capital, as measured by those who will invest in it.
Anyone who missed it should check out the etherpad link:
http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/slider/foundervisa

Very cool.
Very cool! I'm not complaining, but I do wish they provided more formats than just PDF (PRC, LIT, etc.)
Can you point to an example where a politician has received unequivocal credit or blame for something he or she did 4-5 years ago? It often seems that the look-back period is only about two weeks. The enormous cost of Sarbanes-Oxley to US competitiveness doesn't seem to have adversely impacted the careers of Sarbanes, Oxley, or the numerous other legislators who voted to enact the regulation.
‘Snoop Dogg TV’: The Reason They Made The Internet
Finding this essay made me glad I read Hacker News today! I don't think I would have found it any other way.
Care to elaborate on how you got through the hoops?

Many (or most) of the people taking advantage of such a visa might be those already in the US on student or work visas.
Quick Look for Groovy with Syntax Highlighting
How to enable Quick Look with syntax highlighting for Groovy in OS X.
How do you pay a pirate's ransom?
Adjust the age range to be 18-44, and you see that ALL cities are lopsided male below 44. Since there are roughly the same number of men and women out there, how can this possibly be right?

"Single is counted as being never married, divorced or widowed."

Aha. So this is ACTUALLY a map of when people first marry, and females tend to uniformly marry [and divorce] earlier, versus men who sometimes wait until later. Thank goodness, the map was really starting to worry me.
Maybe add a requirement to hold in escrow enough money to ship the person back, for the case where their startup fails?
Iframes: thinking outside the box
A link to a PETITION where one can register support, might give this some political traction.

I think pg+hn+/. etc could generate 50k signatures.

ideas?
Similar, but different:

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/D...
In case you need a minimal scalable twitter to install inside your company servers for internal usage, take a look at Retwis http://retwis.antirez.com

It started just like an example for Redis but actually it's pretty near to be usable with a bit of hacking on it.
flagged: now hosted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556942
It's just like driving a car

It's nothing like driving a car!

That aside, I've heard of dasher before and tried it out on a few occasions. I like the idea, but wasn't impressed enough to use it for more than a few trials. It might have been different if it was a fully integrated keyboard on the PDA rather than a separate app.

One thing about using it is that it's not fast. There is (was) no way to autocomplete a word as the iphone does - you're stuck either trundling or doing a speed-up-slow-down-whoa-whatnow dance which isn't helped by the lack of clarity of what's coming next. There are lots of letters flying about. You're faced with doors a-z and every time you go through there's another set of doors a-z, each one in a different position, size and colour to last time.
One danger is that the accreditation process for recognised investors could be hijacked and used to give special privileges to a small number of firms.
Why unhappy employees stay
By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn't be taking jobs from Americans

"But, but, but: their companies will compete with and disrupt established American businesses, destroying American jobs! Why, a 4-foreigner web news or classified startup could put dozens of (unionized, citizen, voter) newspaper employees out of work!"

Of course I don't believe this is true, nor would it even be a good reason to restrict entry if it were true. (Better to have the new disruptive companies here, than elsewhere.) But that's the sort of deranged logic used against broader immigration. The neat trick of limiting the visas to those starting companies will only help a little against anti-immigrant emotions.

They wouldn't all grow as big as Google, but out of 2500 some would come close.

I suspect close-to-Google-scale successes come more like 1-in-100,000-tries than 1-in-2500. There's a tendency to see every startup as a potential little Google -- we could call this 'Google Goggles'. But Google is one-of-a-kind, and it shouldn't require even one success of that scale to make the case for broader immigration.

For example, shouldn't these visas be available to immigrants whose 'startup' is a donut shop, nail salon, or bodega?

(I also suspect such a program could be easily gamed... but as I'd like to see more immigration of anyone ambitious, I suppose that's a feature not a bug.)
Here are some details based on my personal experience (I have been under 6 different visa status over the last 15 years).

There is a misconception that an investor visa requires cash investment (in the order of $500K to $1M). That's false. This number comes from the EB-5 green card route. The E visa is a temporary visa, but it is valid 5 years and renewable pretty much as long as you want. There is no minimum cash investment required in the statute.

You do need to convince the US embassy of your home country that you have a good business plan. Actually, to be convincing, it better be more than a plan: early customer interest, letters of intent (LOI), etc. all constitute strong elements to include in your application.

In line with PG's idea, letters from prominent VCs about their interest may work as well.

For about $6,000, you can get a good, proactive immigration lawyer to prepare your case, assuming your business opportunity is real.
Implementation questions:

Do the investors have to be Americans, or is it enough that the investment is spent in the U.S.?

When the money runs out or the startup fails, are the founders asked to leave?
My mind is screaming: "Just Fix It!".
IBM Virtual Worlds Conference
IBM recently hosted a two day conference within Second Life called Beyond Blogging which was mostly an IBM on IBM look at using virtual worlds in social media.
My E-2 interview (at the US embassy in Singapore) is scheduled at the end of this month.

Cost me more than $6K (in attorney fee, etc) and countless number of hours to prepare all the documents without any guarantee that I'll get it.

It _is_ more scary than applying to YC, now good luck to myself.
I don't understand why the concensus seems to be "Let's show digg users we mean business and give them a fuck off message" rather than let's see if they're coming from digg and simply redirect to my regular url.

Or possibly, modify your page with a slim bar on the top saying Hi to digg users, minus the diggbar, still showing your content.
The problem with both the E1 and E2 is also the list of 'treaty nations' you need to be a member of. For example, India is not on the list
Unfortunately, this doesn't work for non-treaty countries. India is one of them
The beginning of the end of the retailing of content
Sure, I can envision some scenarios where I'd sell. I haven't gotten even one offer yet, so I don't think anyone will ever make an offer that is in the ballpark of what I'd consider.
I notice that they left Objective-C out of their examples, which is curious because of how close it is to what they're advocating.
Skype Founders Seek to Buy Service Back From EBay
This is why Hacker News is so awesome - due to the amazing input from everyone and a tremendously good suggestion from Blogimus, I've got a .com now that is pretty great (and I'm definitely excited about).

Thank you all so much!
http://developer.nytimes.com

Actually there are more than two APIs...
I'm just happy to see the karma going where it belongs. I "found" these essays three days before my first trip to Bombay, and read all of them on the 14 hour nonstop. I showed up only slightly tired from the travel, but extremely optimistic on the world, the future, and myself. And that made a difference in convincing my now in-laws that I was a worthy son-in-law, deserving of their daughter, the most wonderful woman I know.

Thanks, Paul, for another excellent essay.
There's also the whole breaking out of a frameset. But the link, or maybe an informative message (Hi, you're from Digg, visit here for the permalink etc etc), would be better than rejecting Digg visitors, where many may not even be aware of the Digg bar. They just click on links on the homepage and see what's what.
Is that still a feature made available only to PG?
Hear, hear. I couldn't agree more. I have a foreign-born friend who has inspired similar thoughts in me. I'm convinced this friend could found an incredible web startup here in the States if only the Federal Government wasn't making it so difficult for him.

I wrote to my congressman expressing this sentiment. He replied saying in a nutshell: "Don't worry, I strongly support protecting American jobs from foreign encroachment."

I wrote back to say that this was nearly the complete opposite of my concern, and I asked him to respond with an indication that my original email was not misunderstood. Of course I never heard back.
I wonder, how could one turn this idea into a lobbying effort? Who else realises the benefit of it and would support it? Whom should be contacted and what representation should be made?

I think it's a great idea, btw.

Of all people BillG has actually been before congress and represented on this issue. He had said that Microsoft had often been naive with regard to the contact needed in Washington to get things changed.

Modernising this idea, how about Eric Schmidt?
The accreditation struggle was tough! Now I want a list of every investors Ronco number.
An e-petition will do diddly. Write your senator, congressman and governor on paper, sign the documents and mail them.

Paper letters are the currency of elected representatives, and a stack of 10k letters descending on numerous offices would do infinitely more than a lonely web page with 50k e-mail addresses.
Just use an E-1 and educate US investors that if they invest in overseas company X then they can get E-1 status.
How refreshing.

As a recent refugee from Reddit, I've seen far too much of the tiresome practice of using "fail" to mean "let's belittle & humiliate someone". So I was a bit worried when I saw this on the front page of HN. It's nice to see the word used to mean "this didn't work well; how can we do better?".
Sorry, but I don't think that this makes much sense. INS already has their hands full, and it wouldn't be much fun for them to have to check up on thousands of startup founders to be sure that they're in fact running their business (1) viably, and (2) according to their agreed business plan.

The system would be unbelievably easy to cheat. It also would be stupid easy to turn a "startup" into a money laundering scheme.

Don't take this the wrong way: I really wish that there were an easy way to let legit founders into the US. But it just isn't practical.
Take a look at the nu programming language:

http://programming.nu/

It's an s-expression language built on top of the Objective-C runtime. I'm not enough of an FP guru to tell you if it's a suitable stand-in for Scheme, but it's written and working on the iPhone.

From the looks of it you can use any editor you want to write your .nu files and they you load them at runtime with a small stub of Objective-C.

And there's also a Linux version.
The concensus isn't in telling the digg people to fuck off. The concensus is in cheering ONE man that's telling digg to fuck off.

The reason everyone is hyping it up is because we get to see someone else be 'daring' by saying what we want to say, without having to bear any of the possible side-effects. Not that there would be any side-effects, considering most of the digg crowd is of the 'mindless, illiterate' type.

Just put up a couple lines of javascript, bust out the iframe, say hi to the visitors from digg and move on. Time for the next story.
I worked full-time is a freelancer for quite a while. Nobody asked for my papers, and I won't say anything about taxes. I could've easily laid low when (the few) clients called asking for info (SSN, etc.) for my 1099s, as income was distributed well enough that none would think it a big deal to not send me one.

There's an underground economy, and it doesn't always involve narcotics/guns/prostitutes/dog fighting/etc.

While I deposited checks (one potential obstacle), I don't think anybody would have quaffed if I asked them to pay me via PayPal, where I could transfer the money to a friend's ("accomplice's") bank account.
Obama says economy showing 'glimmers of hope'
Schizophrenic Brains Not Fooled by Optical Illusion
BTW, a lot of your emacs key bindings will work on a Mac (at least in Cocoa apps), and you can add more. Here's an in-depth explanations:

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....

But things like Control -Previous, -Next, -Back, -Forward, (forward) -Delete, -A (beginning of line), -End of line, -Kill, -Yank, and -Transpose work out of the box.
Do we really need yet another article about how getting into college is hard, but a little easier for rich kids? This one doesn't seem to be saying anything new.
I agree with the general discussion here. Asynchronicity seems reasonable.

The word that first popped into my mind was "flexible". Developers should be free to utilize open, collaborative spaces when necessary (by communication with each other about that), as well as take time in the office or elsewhere to dig deep into a focused design or implementation project.

It depends on the work, of course.
> you are not likely to get funding until you move here

I think it's likely that if this visa existed, VCs would adapt to it by becoming more open to funding people who haven't immigrated yet.
Domain Pigeon article hits cnet
I remember reading about the launch of DP on here
Neat idea except for the part about using investors to validate which startup counts. What about the plenty of viable and compelling startups that have decided to bootstrap?
Also see: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice for a more in-depth article about why we need more regulation and why the government is unlikely to go through with it and discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=534679
It seems like this might be more viable politically than most attempts at immigration reform in the US because it neutralizes (if not reverses) the "they're taking our jobs" objection. The objection could hardly become "they're starting our businesses".

On the other hand, it's hard to underestimate the irrationality surrounding this issue.

Edit: What meaningful changes could the Obama administration make without having to go through Congress?
Grow a sense of humor! :)
I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk making one

If your goal is to persuade as many people as possible, insulting the previous administration and by extension those that voted for Bush is a bad start. I was already opposed to your idea before the second sentence, despite the fact that I'm an advocate of increased legal immigration.
Creating the spec.

All specs are buggy - they don't spec something out fully, or they spec it and it's wrong when you put it in front of users, or they specify two features that when you try to combine them really don't work well. You can only discover these problems by trying them, because there're basically infinite ways to fail. If you rack your brains trying to think of everything that could possibly go wrong with your spec, you'll inevitably get bitten by something you didn't think of.
Original Skype Founders Trying to buy back Skype
If they pull this off it will be the steal of the century. I’m bullish on Skype in terms of overall value both strategically and on the execution side of current management. Ebay might just give it up..$2 billion is est price
If CS were taught in as many classes as English in K-12, what would 12th grade CS look like?
Would you expect to see parallels between English and CS teaching as students progress to courses in higher grades?
You can support it at White House 2.

http://whitehouse2.org/priorities/1948-visas-for-startup-fou...
Facebook's Software Stack
+1 for Matt's comment-- for a lot of businesses, the fundamental problem (or at least the first problem that you need to solve) isn't a technical one. Famous example: Digg. Famous example #2: TechCrunch (or any content play, really).

I know of a guy who is minting money doing long-tail adwords for car buying phrases, collecting contact information of the people who click on the ads, and selling that contact info to car dealerships for $20 per. It's not evil-- the pitch is: "enter your contact info any we'll get you three quotes from local dealers".

Bang, no impressive technology required (to prove the initial theory).
Did you get better?
Painful to watch how long the 'four' went unedited to '4'.
anybody remember webshots.com? They sold the company twice, coz they bought it back from excite when it went under.
how'd you get coverage?
I don't see how the order they're in could possibly matter.
It is bad that E1 is only available for certain countries. My country is not in the list.

Is there any other options?