skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These people probably already get H1-B Visas - which is one of the few (only?) work visas that also implies intent to become a permanent resident, so they can file for a green card if their company sponsors them.

H1-B Visas aren't exactly what's being proposed because there's still a limited number of them each year, but there is a cost to the company for sponsoring someone.
Currently, how difficult is it to get overseas founders into existing startup programs such as YC, TechStars etc? Is YC, for instance, turning down foreign applicants due to visa restrictions? If not, I don't see a problem.
By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn't be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldn't work for existing companies,

This is a good idea because the expected outcome of adding 10,000 new people to the "pool of workers" by existing companies would be to see an increase in unemployment claims (even though not all unemployed people would file).

So by adding 10,000 Founder Visas to the pool of workers and then tracking the rate of decrease (or increase) of unemployment, a metric of immigrant-based job-creation startup foo could probably be determined.
NYC finance vs. Silicon Valley startup scene
How many folks pass the teleportation practical?
So now I'm curious PG, what's your Ronco number?
hd radio is dying because ibiquity charges $50 per receiver for decoding. ibiquity is dying because hd radio is dying.
That's not a bad idea, but I think you approaching it from the wrong end.

Specifically, the twitter-less monitoring interface (e.g. a daily email) would make lot more sense. At least to someone who is not a Twitter user, but would like to track what's being said there about the product/company/etc.
Right now, it's just blogs, digg, news, and twitter, but we have a slew of services that are in testing right now that we hope to launch in the next few weeks.

Aside from that, I'd say that there are a few benefits over RSS:

1. It's faster to setup and start tracking something, as all you have to do is send us a tweet. This might work especially well for stuff you just want to track for a couple days, when setting up a bunch of search feeds is overkill.

2. A lot of people still don't use RSS, but use Twitter.

3. I tend to only check my RSS once a day or even every other day, while I'm likely to be on Twitter all day, so I'll see stuff more quickly than I will with RSS.

This is just off the top of my head...as I said, this is an experiment for us, so all feedback is useful :)
"While I, too, fell under the spell of Paul Graham, I refuse to drink any more of his kool aide until he comes out with his magic language he's been promising us for the last half decade or more. Yes, interpreted languages with compilers and fancy debuggers are great. That doesn't mean it has to have a bunch of parenthesis, or that you should waste your life with horrible crap like Common Lisp. "

I have the impression that this kind of comment will make some people's blood boil...
Twitter may not be the right tool; we just don't know yet, which is why we threw this thing together. Our main web app is http://MightyBrand.com, and is a better example of a full-fledged brand tracking app.

As to your 2nd question, Google Alerts doesn't track everything we track now, and tracks a small slice of what we'll be tracking in the next few weeks.
I've found that Wikipedias references are usually really good and then just using wikipedia and wikibooks to become familiar with the subject enough too investigate further is quite effective.

Although if I want to really study something beyond introductory reading I use scholar.google.com and looking at the articles published in the last decade or so as well as looking at the papers citing them too be quite effective. Although that is most effective when you are researching a narrow subject and it does sometimes require you too pay too have access too the journals, something which my university provides.

Lastly there are quite a lot of recorded univerity lectures published online that cover just about any subject you'd want to study from the comfort of your computer. I'm verry happy google has made an effort to gather them at: http://www.youtube.com/edu recently altough there's other places. For computer-science in particular I've found this blog to be highly good at gathering the interesting ones: http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/

I realize you might already know all of this but as a student I personally am quite pleased with what the Internet provides for me especially as I like (and it enables me) to go far above and beyond what is assigned as course work, when I study something.
They're taking a page out of IBM's "Peace, Love, Linux" campaign. I think nerds are fairly easily appeased. There's nobody that seemed more borg-like than IBM a decade or two ago and they've won over the hearts of lots of geekier folk.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kino-eye/39036635/
We have it from the other end at http://MightyBrand.com

Quick poll: if we added an email-only version of MightyBrand where you got a daily email of all of your social media mentions, would you use it? How much would you pay? $5 / month? $10 / month?
It seems he's let the Reciprocality.org domain expire, and only put some of it on the new domain. There was some interesting stuff there, including the original Programmer's Stone book. I wonder if I still have the .zip of it.
Design Patterns in PHP (PHPCon Italia)
I like it. I guess it's just personal preference.
I think there are strong parallels between PhD research and invention (though most startups these days don't have that basis). A patent requires researching prior art (literature) and describing your idea formally (papers/thesis). A PhD must be original and substantial (novel and non-obvious). In both cases, you are need to obtain your examiner's approval. :-)

In other words, formally describing a new abstract idea in the context of what has gone before is common to both - but actually creating a working technology, that people want, is different from a PhD.

That said, the beginning part of a PhD is great fun.
And I would like to respond with this: http://www.boltcity.com/copper/copper_023_waterfall.htm

I don't think you know it's beautiful, it just is.
Pentagonal Ice Discovered: Could Be Used To Modify Weather
Annapolis Restaurants
Check out this guide on restaurants and other services in the Annapolis, Maryland area. You can search the Annapolis Calendar of Events, visit their Annapolis Maryland restaurant guide, and submit your restaurant reviews.
Watch friday night lights season 4 online
Google in the middle
MORE HAPPINESS NEEDED :)
This might be a strictly American "politically correct" interpretation, but I think your last sentence assumes that being Mexican and being an engineer is exclusive, which it obviously isn't.
I'm always curious when people say they advocate increasing immigration. Right now, the United States takes about 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year. Does this seem too low a number to you? If so, do you see a practical need for some kind of limit, or are you in favor of limitless immigration?
The US is already selling the right to immigrate, in the form of H1-B visa holders who are willing to accept indentured servitude in the hope that they'll eventually get a green card. The difference is that, unlike the scheme proposed by this author, the benefits flow to a few private companies rather than to the state.
Wow, who up-votes this junk?

Let's see:

The INS has their hands full...

PG said: 10,000 people is a drop in the bucket by immigration standards

For comparison, there were 591,050 student and exchange visas granted in 2007 [1]. If the INS can handle checking up on individual students following educations via Universities, they can do the same with 1/200th the number of startups via investment firms.

The system would be unbelievably easy to cheat

Oh, how? And why is accreditation a viable solution for Universities, but not investors?

I really wish... but it just isn't practical

Give one shred of evidence aside from senseless pontification and I might consider it.

1. http://www.studyusa.com/English/articles/visa2.asp
Is there really a lack of people in the USA today who want to start companies? It might be a zero-sum game -- X dollars available for startups; if you let in a bunch of people, the startup dollars will go there rather than to people already here.
Support The Founder Visa at Whitehouse2.org
Terrorists don't think to put big smiles on bombs.

That's the only thing that's keeping us safe.
SSL isn't necessarily $30 / year total, there's the extra load of encrypting/decrypting all SSL traffic as well. That may be negligible, I don't know.
Sooner or later super transparency would turn into super opaque.
btw, MetaLab designed the http://280slides.com landing page (not 280slides itself though) and http://280north.com
Disclaimer: I'm the author of http://www.roninapp.com (also an invoicing app)

The designer for ballpark is definitely top-notch - the folks over at metalabs are good at what they do. Keeping invoicing sexy is something that is hard to do (but we're trying our best as well!)

Congrats on the launch - I'm sure the folks over at FreshBooks (who are the obvious market leaders) are taking notice at all these invoicing/time-tracking apps hitting the market (cashboard, invoicemachine, letsfreckle, among others). It certainly speaks for how far we've come in Rapid Development and how accessible good UX/design has become.
The problem is that the majority of illegal immigrants are at the low end of the tax spectrum, often taking more out than the put in. The people who we'd ideally want in the country are at the other end, and they usually aren't here illegally. That is the group PG is trying to target here, and I'm ALL for making it easier for them to immigrate.
But that is where the beauty of having the market decide comes in. If a person from India but founding a company in the US has a better idea, then the money SHOULD go to her. That is best for the investors, and it is best for America, because a better idea will build a better company that will create more jobs.
I liked the evolution of persuasion: it would be easy, just use Erdos numbers ... detailed explanation ... to finally, just hiding the details entirely.

The best writing advice I ever received was this: When you are writing for a general audience, any time you find yourself agonizing over the correct way to word a certain detail, delete it entirely.

Extra details scare off casual readers and anyone truly interested in your idea can approach you for a further explanation. On top of that, it's nearly impossible to anticipate how details need to be described to get through to any one individual. If you let that individual come to you first, then you can tailor your response to the way they form their question.
Also, how long did it take from idea to implementation?
Will It Lens ?
Wonder if the results would've been different if the robot had a frown or mean face.
Generating data analysis programs from statistical models
Its got mostly to do with their closed platform. However, recently they have started opening up things (i.e. their codecs). Skype has established a phenomenal brand image that is under-utilized right now because its still chained to the computer. Nonetheless, Developments like the iphone app are a breath of fresh air and shows their strategy of truly mobilizing the app.
This seems like a fantastic common sense policy. Not responding to trolls and rager's is "old ecnonomy"? If so, count me as one of those fuddy duddies.

This isn't a big bureaucratic dinosaur at work here. That policy is a simple heuristic which lets the end node make correct decisions without any central c&c input.

Rather than the uncoordinated/incomprehensible
written diarrhea you get from many bloggers this seems
positively enlightened.
The better question would be: If CS were taught in as many classes as English in K-12, what would 12th grade English look like?

To address the question posed, though, I would posit that 12th grade CS would not benefit substantially. Very advanced CS relies on topics from math and other areas which can only be developed gradually. There's no point in teaching efficient algorithms for Newton's Method or Runge-Kutta to a student who hasn't even had entry level calculus.

I would advocate more teaching of CS in elementary education not for the virtues of CS, but for the structure it brings to much else that is taught at that level. Teaching principles of logic in English or Science, and then putting those principles into practice with a simple program would help to reinforce what's already being taught.
FWIW there are plenty of well-off people in any number of third-world countries.

Consider the Philippines - current population is 90 million; thus top 10% of people (who will have money) is 9 million. Given the wide disparity in income, it is reasonable to believe that it would be trivial for any of those 9 million to raise $50K.
This is easy enough to do yourself with ttyrec:

http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/index.html.en

Maybe I will write a small web frontend for playing back the recorded sessions. It compresses better than video ;)
I heard fish trawlers regularly stole ton of fishes from local African fishermen, forcing them to turn to piracy.

It's a Tragedy of the Common thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine
"PG said: 10,000 people is a drop in the bucket by immigration standards"

Yes, in terms of people. But you fail to understand that it's an entire new process and system that would have to be invented and executed.

You just don't think like a con-man. Universities have quite a bit on the line, such as accreditation. A private company has next to nothing on the line. Anyway, here's how I'd do it:

1. First off, I'd need to know somebody in the US who has a viable business and would vouch for me. Because immigrant communities support business focused on their interests, this wouldn't be very difficult. Of course they'd agree, because of the benefits for the home country (sending money home, etc.).

2. Have them offer fake investments to me and a pool of founders. Get approved by INS/State.

3. Once in the US, work as I please. Funnel this money back into the "startup" as profits. Plenty of startups can't even turn a profit, so financials wouldn't have to be impressive.

4. Rinse, repeat. The same business would only get approved so many times, but there are tons of businesses here.

Now, for the unscrupulous way (since there's nothing particularly immoral about the previous scenario). Note that I'm for the legalization of drugs, but that's not the point: The US gov't is sure as hell against that.

1. Have associate(s) in the US prop up a shell of a business that appears to be legitimate. Have them offer a huge investment for what appears to be a startup's credible business plan.

2. Move in under an alias with fake documents.

3. Funnel drug money through the "startup," which would be an ideal money laundering node. Because the plan is intended to produce successful businesses, nobody would blink an eye at the eye-popping profits. Just bullshit as much as necessary...if YouTube cooked the books, they could convince people that they were turning $150M profit annually easily. Show your cards as you please, since you're holding the deck.

4. If things get even remotely hot, leave the country. So much money's been successfully processed at this point that it's undoubtedly a net win. Hell, say you're flying to Lima to make a commencement speech on business. Nobody would stop you. The associates could claim ignorance obviously, as you were just some entrepreneur they put their hopes and dollars in. Even if the startup were irrevocably linked to money laundering, you're back home and extradition isn't happening, since you used a false identity.

5. Rinse, repeat with other associates.

"Give one shred of evidence aside from senseless pontification and I might consider it."

Evidence on a virgin immigration plan? I'm sure there's plenty out there!

Let's flip this: Tell me how you prevent either of the two previous scenarious, short of having the gov't handle the entire recommendation/approval process, which would pretty much defeat the purpose.

Sigh ... people are so naive.
Bendy laser beams fired through the air
1) Just do it. Check it out, use Objective C + Xcode + IB and get familiar with the frameworks first. You can launch Emacs as an external code editor working with Xcode.

2) Write part of the app as a web service.
I'm sure he knew that, given how http://userfly.com looks - the layout is pretty much a de facto standard.

I think cte is pointing out specifically the color scheme and buttons, etc.
A rev="canonical" Rebuttal
Downvote for the "Mexicans" reference. Perhaps saying, "There are over 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country. Would 1 million engineers and scientists be a bad thing?"

And, 1 million engineers and scientists would depress salaries in the US. That's a plus for founders, but a minus for engineers and scientists trying to find work.

I'm almost always on the side of greater immigration into this country, but I can see the downside of it as well.
I don't think this is what won over the geeks. It is more of a mutual relationship -- IBM needed to take on Microsoft, and Linux was the easiest way to do that. So, IBM gives the open source developer time, money, and their patent portfolio, and IBM can compete better with Microsoft.

The Thinkpads are also mighty fine computers. (I know it's not IBM anymore, but times have changed...)
Yeah, perhaps. It's just a ton of money to tempt people with, relatively speaking.

Putting it all in comparison with a table of purchasing power parity ( ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita ) is revealing.

The average Somali income is apparently 600$ per year. So an average 2 million $ ransom is 3,333 times the average yearly income. Using the same chart, 3,333 times the US number (47,500) is 158.3 million $.

According to the article below, a low level pirate makes 10,000 a year, which puts him 17 times above average. Using the same US comparison this gives him an income of 807,500.

Edit:
Updates after reading http://www.marinebuzz.com/2008/11/20/somali-pirates-have-lav... . Adjusted the ransom to be the average of 2 million and added comparison of low level pirate.
How to boost your online security
Boston has an overabundance of great schools pumping out well-educated CS majors vs a single college in Boulder, and, I believe that if you're started a web company, there's probably a bigger pool of talent in the Boston area to choose from if you want to grow big fast (but that's just a guess).

But, if you're planning to stay small for a while and grow slowly, Boulder is difficult to beat. Some reasons:

- I know some of the major players in the Boulder investment community and they are great people down to the core.

- Boulder is a lot closer to California than Boston. The flights are a bit cheaper, there's only one time zone change and, assuming they keep schedule, the trip won't take a whole day. This can, in some circumstances, make a measurable difference.

- The weather in Boulder is amazing. No humidity, sunny 300+ days a year, and you'll have days in the winter when it's in the 70s (and other days where the snow piles up fast). But the summers are something else -- the weather, the scenic beauty, etc. is some of the best in the country if you're into sunshine, breathtaking hikes, and world-class skiing. Sure, you can't take advantage of it every day, but if you do have a day off, you can drive an hour or less from Boulder and reach trails that will take you to views like this one, hike back, and be back home (or back at the office) in time for an afternoon snack: http://10101010.net/hikeview2.jpg -- apologies for the slow load. Its a large image (you might have to click to see it full size) and it's hosted on Dreamhost. Need I say more? :-)

(I took that photo myself. It's a view from the Forth of July Trail. I believe we left Boulder at around 7:30am and were back by 2:30 or so).

I've worked for startups in Boston and was an entrepreneur-in-residence in Boulder. I would personally pick Boulder if those were my two options.

I guess there's no wrong answer and it's more about personal preference than anything else. My only gripe about Boulder is that it trails behind Boston and other larger cities from a diversity perspective, but so does our industry to some degree no matter where you go.
I managed a team that gelled once (not because of any skill of mine; it was an amazing team). It was surprising how much antipathy there was from other people in the company. Even though everybody on my team was happy and they were being amazingly productive, I somehow got labeled as the bad manager.
if that the case it will be real SPAM and a shame for a such company!
chrome is fast and simple. and it kick you to google search, that's a good point.
I vote + for chrome
Yamaha FZ1 Fazer May Hit the Roads in India
More easily tracking your brand (or your competitors) = helpful.

Doing it through Twitter DMs = not so much, imho.

Twitter just has way too much noise, so it's not a great interface for receiving alerts about important information. I'd rather get alerts via RSS or some sort of custom dashboard. Better yet -- offer the alerts as many different ways as possible: RSS, Twitter, web dashboard, iPhone app, email, etc. and let users use as many different alert methods as they want.

For my last job (community management at a startup), I had a ton of RSS feeds set up pulling in blog searches, Twitter searches, web searches, etc. on our brand. I also had email alerts set up, and a Twhirl running in the background on our Twitter account pinging me on @ replies. My goal was to make sure I had as many different ways to catch, filter, and alert on all that info as possible so I didn't miss anything important. (Something to filter out the redundancies would have been nice, fyi! :)).
i don't prefer to send me a DM. I already have a lot of SPAM on it and I don't read it no more.

So why not create a site, where i can log and find my alerts?

This option is already available with Google Alert (have you tried it). It sends me daily reports of keywords mentioned on the web.
The metalabdesign guys are amazing!! I'm assuming you got the design for less than $10k? If so I need to contact those people!!
Between 1996 and 2004 it created an average of 550,000 small businesses every month.

I think they mean every year? I have serious doubts that 6.6 million new businesses are started a year.
http://digg.com/u1iHj
hehe...all part of the joke, my friend :)
Just posted an update to the site. The API is now available (via http://hapylink.com/hapify.php?link=) and links are also shorter now.
wow it's great! It seems also to have many features.

But I don't have much work online to go for it :)

-- Not accepting PayPal is a bad point --
> you are not likely to get funding until you move here

Not so: people could do the initial work for startups on student and H1-B visas, which they could then convert if they got funded.