skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article, or a variant of it, has been posted many, many times over the past few weeks. I usually chime in. I point out that 7 of the top 10 users of the H1B visa are Indian outsourcing companies that cycle workers through the US to learn a job before moving them back to India, and I provide a link. I express concern that the high number of visas may be discouraging young Americans from going into engineering and science at a time when we need them most. I link to an NPR segment with Ron Hira, where he mentions that the department of labor certified the prevailing wage at under $10/hr for a bunch of programmers, and another 70+ programmers at $24,000/yr. I've done this an embarrassing number of times now, though I am passionate about the issue, as I do think US policy is inadvertently driving young Americans out of engineering, and I think this is exactly whey we're in this situation where 60% of our grads

My question at this point is: how many people reading this are encountering a variant of this post for the first time? Are we all just gathering for a well-worn argument.

Part of the problem here is the concept of "news priming". This is done by PR departments and political groups - prior to a lobbying or legislative initiative, they'll try to frame the issue in the public mind. This is why the proponents of the H1B tried to get it termed the "innovation visa" (and probably weren't happy when India's minister of commerce called it the "outsourcing visa.")

And of course, many people here are passionate about the issue - on both sides, of course, so we jump in to make sure we are part of the "priming." But I am curious - how many people here are surprised with anything in my post? I'm starting to suspect that most people on hacker news are pretty well informed about this by now.
A Limited Love of Liberty
I'm sure it would be relatively trivial to make an activex plugin to support <video> and <audio>. The trick is getting the IE drones to actually install it... most of them are still using IE6, which is now 2 versions behind as of a few weeks ago.
I'm inclined to agree with this assertion, if only for the fact that MS has cycled in and out of browser dominance, historically.

What's interesting to me is that IE4 won for all the wrong reasons, and it looks like IE6 failed for all the right ones. It's real easy to see how MS could massively fail or succeed through their acceptance of standards, but I agree that tho they are teetering now, that doesn't necessarily indicate any future position.
Summary: ACLU has turned into a partisan left wing organisation.

This is not exactly surprising, and fits Robert Conquest's Three Laws of Politics perfectly.

1.Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2.Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left wing.
3.The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Has anyone besides yourself yet vetted this 'key derivation function'

Not yet.

perhaps you wouldn't mind shortly explaining the difference between a KDF and a cryptographic hash function

Cryptographic hash functions produce fixed-length collision-resistant output, ideally as fast as possible. KDFs can normally produce arbitrary lengths of output, and don't need to be fast -- in fact, being fast is a disadvantage, since secure KDFs are expensive to compute (because they need to resist brute-force attacks).
You are aware of the fact that there are also multiple languages for the JVM? For instance Scala has actors and can leverage any existing Java library.
more does not mean better. it takes quality to make quality.
The article is about the decline of MS. Statistical points that aren't rates or aren't compared to past statistical points are meaningless.
Is there a YC/HN startup analyzing neural data?

Or rather, when will there be a YC/HN startup analyzing neural data?
Michelle chia wedding to Shaun Chen
I am European, so the only thing I know about Coulter is that she is some form of right wing crazy; a less formally polite Chomsky... :-)

That is also more than I care to know; the US extreme left/right looks equally insane. I just wish neither was popular here. But I guess you get the good with the bad.

I agreed with a quote as a way of saying that they generate hypotheses that probably aren't correct, but potentially fruitful to work from.
The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt is pretty good. It is a business fiction book, so although it is not about startups, it applies well to start ups.
http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/08...

The book explains Theory of Constraints(TOC) in a novel. TOC is basically similar to profiling software, but instead of software, you profile a business. Find the bottlenecks in the system and work on them. Improving other things has very low return, and usually just waste of time. Improving bottlenecks improves the throughput of the whole system.

Here are my other recommended business fiction books:
http://atank.interlogy.com/blog/?p=15
Nokia 5900 XM as 5800 Successor
But you don't mind being guaranteed a speedy trial by a jury of your peers, do you?
Well - technically it's now no longer Mothers day here.. (And I don't think my mum would have appreciated a call at 11:40pm when you posted that message).. :)

(That being said - I did go and see Mum today - always worth doing)
FWIW, I agree entirely that the word of one person isn't enough in matters of crypto and security. I probably agree entirely with most comments on the actual issues of security, etc.

However, it seemed to me from your original comment that you proclaimed ignorance and didn't do any homework. I feel that that is at odds with what is expected of this community.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and I'll say no more.
And what did MS do? They disbanded the IE team and sat on their asses.
Astroturfers woke up early this sunday.

Go hug your mother and stop brownnosing M$
As an electrical engineering grad, I have thought about the option of becoming a Professional Engineer. The idea behind the PE certification is professional responsibility - I see very little wrong with requiring that an engineer stands behind their work.

Unfortunately, software does have the formal verification problems discussed above, so there may have to be modifications made to how this responsibility is handled.

At the same time, I find it very troubling that software engineers who produce shoddy products - bad security, unsafe control system code - are not held responsible. If nobody takes responsibility to "sign off" on a design, who is the one that is going to spend the time necessary to verify its function to the proper degree it deserves?
Nothing to do with technology, and link-bait.
Where I come from, mother's day is on March 8.
If they are all as equal as you claim roll for it. I suggest the d12. It is highly underutilized.

> at what point should you realize that you should move on to something else

When you or your trusted partner(s) no longer believe in it. (the trusted partner is needed because most everyone is susceptible to being blinded. Between the lot of you hopefully one can see the truth.)
The positive/negative rights thing is basically the libertarians adopting a simplified and less-nuanced reading of Isaiah Berlin's famous essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty"

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/twoconcepts.pd...

It's better to go to the originals on things like this then to read what they've become in the political folk mythology on the internets.
People actually have serious conversations on Twitter?

I just chat with friends and look for links.
And be thankful you can call your mother. Parents don't last forever: cherish them while you can.

I had the experience of losing my father when I was 17 or 18. It made a lasting impression, and I always try to send flowers/call the parents/grandparents that are left to let them know somebody is thinking of them.

I used to send my grandmother flowers every Mother's Day. Some years I was the only grandkid to do so, or to call. When she died a couple of years ago, I didn't buy a single flower for the funeral -- I had already done all of my flower-buying for her when it mattered: when she was still alive.
World will change ICANN's future, CEO says
I'm doing graphics research, and the numerical libraries is probably slightly different, but the ones I've found useful are:
http://math.nist.gov/tnt/
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://www.cgal.org/

Also, I can't recommend "Numerical Recipies in C++" enough. This is a great book if you're not a wizard already, although the seriously good numerical mathematicians complain that it doesn't necessarily show you the absolute best way to do everthing. Its a great learning and example-code resource though! http://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Recipes-C-Scientific-Computi...
These days more and more I realize that none of the people who comment on Microsoft are generally biased against microsoft and have no clue about Microsoft's business strategy. First the greatest fact of Microsoft is not innovation it is perseverance.

Generally they don't come up with any innovative products but they try to simulate other existing popular products but make them better over lots of versions by eating into competitors market share. (You can look into the history of microsoft products which will be easily proven)

The reason Microsoft can do is because they have lots of cash and they can take losses on the products for couple of versions. The greatest example is SQL Server with 1% market share in late 90's and close to 38 to 40% market share in 2009.

The revenues are generated for Microsof is because of volume of licenses. Every body knows that microsoft is microsoft because of Bill Gates who will be there for another 20 years to guide Microsoft just in case if it is needed. This is not true for Apple (Pancreatic cancer for Steve jobs) and also true for other companies.

--R
Caltech Observatory Dismantled So Others Can Rise
Check! Just got off Skype with my grand mom and earlier today talked with my mother.
I disagree with your interpretation: according to his reply, the inane questions come from the non-elites, people with "intellectual confinement", and so on.
Much of the way I express myself is via the Internet. Take away my net access, and I don't have freedom of expression.
Manual directory submissions to only PR5 & above...blended with deep link submission
100 manual submissions to PR5 & above directories plus 50 deep link submissions, just in $10!!!...I just cldnt believe on my eyes!!!...wasn't supposed to bookmark it here...but thought sometimes one has to go after social cause over competitive benefit!!!...so bringing it here for all of u...enjoy the service and say thanx!!!
10 points for using the term "availability cascade".

However, I wouldn't be too worried about Twitter. I do not see it having the significance to the nature of conversation that the author presumes. It's just another option, of easy to use but short format broadcast messaging, and I am sure that people will adjust their expectations in the fullness of time. It's really early days yet.
One of Chomsky's strongest works as a non-linguist is his "American Power and the New Mandarins." (1967, 1968) In it you can find sections titled: "On the responsibility of intellectuals" and "some thoughts on Intellectuals and the Schools."
He also co-authored "Manufacturing Consent."

In "Power" he relays an anecdote about seeing, in the Smithsonian, I believe, an exhibit wherein museum goers could interact with a (Vietnamese) jungle scene. The interaction was to take hold of a 50 caliber mounted in a mock-up of a helicopter and shoot at villagers. That exhibit was designed and constructed by someone. Presumably someone who had a "good job" at the museum.

We are designers, most of us. And I for one can't help thinking sometimes: How much designing do I really do?
Clearly if I define myself as a non-intellectual, my responsibility doesn't really change.
I know that I am both educated and trained but that has not yet made me free.
So what do I have: Theoretical freedom without socialism. Oh, and illusion...lots of illusion.
I know, but it brings 2710 results, and I am pretty sure the link to my and your comment (number 5 and ~15 in Google) are the only one related to this derivation function.
It points out that Microsoft is still a market leader in a lot of markets (including web-markets such as IM and email), they are earning lots of money in a bad economy and they are known to be excellent business people (some of the best in the market)... I think it's very naive to label one of the biggest companies in the IT industry as dead in any foreseeable future.

Btw. I also point out statical rates: Microsoft shares in IM, web-email, console market, developer tools market, web-server market etc. are all growing and aren't declining.
NASA Approves Partial Privatization of the Space Program
The best advice I can give you is: read Nuclear Phynance. It's a truly great forum for practitioners:

http://www.nuclearphynance.com

There you can read a lot about implementing numerical software in the "real world". My perception is that C# is starting to take C++'s place. But, then, it's just a perception. Moreover, take a look at LAPACK, LAPACK++, BLAS, and the like...
Boost.uBlas: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_39_0/libs/numeric/ublas/doc/...

A good C++ library for high performance computing is going to be more than just C-style functions wrapped in a class. Read the paper on Expression Templates by Todd Veldhuizen: http://ubiety.uwaterloo.ca/~tveldhui/papers/Expression-Templ...
God doesn't exist.
When I've sent flowers to a funeral, I intended it for the living people who were grieving.
It really depends on what sort of numerics you're talking about and how you're defining good (performance? api design?)
MapReduce?
Worrying about declining:

:: IQs
:: Attention spans
:: Standards of teaching
:: "Nuances of Knowledge"

is a pre-occupation soley of educated middle classers.

Other people are busy doing what they always did,(inanely communicating) just via any new method.

As an guideline to the mean, here in the UK hairdressers and taxi drivers are regarded as the benchmark "Man on the Street"[1].

How many Hairdressers and Cabbies Tweet??

Then ask yourself if they _all_ tweeted, would that materially effect how "Nuanced their Knowledge" was?

-------------

[1] http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=9053
It took a little bit of looking through your tour before I really understood it's usefulness.

To help get it across, it might be useful to have something that highlights the value a tad more concisely on the front page, maybe "it's the buddy system for researching online" or something like that.

I have to run to mother's day fest, but I'll give it a shot later. Looks like it could be handy for some uses-- probably not for our team "searching for help on forums", but for long multi-page research collections.
Emacs isn't the only source of RSI in the world. It just so happens that none of the emacs users in my office suffer from RSI, and several of the Eclipse users do.

I think it makes more sense to try to fix the problems the way Bill has than to give up on an editor which (we emacs users think) is incredibly productive. Besides, it may be that RSI will follow you to whatever other editor you choose.

That was the case for me, in fact, and I fixed it years ago by switching to a cheapo $30 Microsoft Natural keyboard.
It's worth doing good work.
Just did. Thanx for reminding.
Startups to support authors?
Twitter is no better or worse than say.. firing off a quick email to someone. Or a short telephone call.

Or any other means of quick, social communication.
I've been using Win7 for months, and I'm as happy as a school girl in a new Christamas dress.
"How about the 'OCDers' take a look at themselves from a 3rd person POV and notice that what they are doing is completely useless and can be stopped at the source: themselves."

People with OCD are well aware of this, but are unable to change it - hence the C in OCD.
Why right-brainers will rule this century
Your user experience really needs some fixing up. I won't talk too much about your UI, because you said you're working on that, and it has HUGE flaws right now (you sign up and the first page you reach is like a void).

Your user should be guided through the experience of finding out about and beginning to use your product. The big "click me" button on each page should lead on naturally in every step.

Hire a copywriter and an experienced UI designer (not a "leet gfx" designer). I would say with 99% certainty that all of you working on this are programmers. It shows.

The experience has got too much friction. In fact, I didn't install your plugin in the end, which means you've failed for me. The "Download" button just dumps me at the "this webpage tried to install an application..." toolbar, and a login prompt.

Really, the big problem is.. it's a plugin.

Plugins can be great, when used correctly. My definition (please correct me) of correct use of a plugin is to enhance an experience. So, if a user wants a faster/more convenient experience, they can opt to install your software to do that.

Requiring a plugin to be installed causes a lot of friction in the user experience. I don't know much about your site, and you're asking me to install your software? I don't know you, I haven't used your service and I don't have a relationship with your service, so it's not something I will do.

And, even then, if I do install a plugin, I have to relaunch my browser (okay, not true for IE). Huge roadblock. I have loads of tabs open, maybe some streaming media going on, I don't want to lose all that.

What if i'm using a browser that doesn't support plugins, or I'm surfing from school/work (two of your IDEAL markets) and the system doesn't allow plugins to be installed (likely). Or (just checked) what if i'm using IE? No luck.

You could implement everything you want to do here with javascript. That is my recommendation. Sure, you can have a plugin to enhance your features, but make it something you find out about after you've signed up and tried it, otherwise people will feel like you're forcing plugins down their throat.

Excuse the lack of co-ordination, I wrote this post as ideas came to me.

I've dropped you an email too, if you want get more feedback.
I don't think irrelevant means what you think it means. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but they are certainly relevant. And those "big corporations" are certainly relevant too - they spend billions of dollars on hardware and software.
Who is this James Stewart guy and why is he acting so dumb regarding monopolies?

First why redefine the standard economics term "Natural Monopoly"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Why then define this new thing he names a 'natural monopoly' as 'lawful' when he himself points out that monopolies aren't illegal, only abusing monopoly power.

Which is an interesting paradox, as this Stewart character claims monopolies aren't necessarily bad, when standard economics claims they are, and standard law allows them only to the degree that they don't maximise profits in a way that is not only allowed but encouraged in any other business i.e. you can be a monopoly, as long as you don't act like one.
We're stabbing at the same liver mate. ;)
web-email? Growing in share? wow.. Any links for that?

And does dev-tools consist of the paid market - or does it compete with free/oss/notepad?

I still like PG's clarification of "Dead" - basically that they're no longer growing / pushing the boundary.
I haven't gotten a chance to play around yet, but so far it seems like a good idea. One thing that I would suggest is that the left hand side of the main page is a little 'overwhelming'. Compared to the other two ('Share', 'Collaborate'), it is very busy with many pictures kind of stacked on top of each other. I just find it looks like the odd man out and doesn't match the theme of the other two.
Who did you learn from?
1. You would keep a pointer to the span, in each ChatUser object.
2. You would have *some* unique ID passed from server->client
to identify which user its talking about. A session ID say.
this could be used to lookup the ChatUser object.

>> "It's a contrived example, but I hope it illustrates the importance of associations. There are multiple workarounds for this situation. But they aren't elegant, which is why I think JS sucks :]"

Nope, and I actually think your proposed method - mapping ChatUser->span is incredibly ugly and inelegant. Horrible design. A ChatUser object should know what UI elements it is in control of directly.
That was my exact thought as soon as I read that line. At the same time though, it is important for google to realize that a/b[/c/d] testing referred to in the article will only get you to local maximums (as much as it can be said that designs catering to users can have optimal results) and to get a real leap more significant changes would have to be made.

Obviously testing major design changes with any of their core products is going to take alot more than a designer or two saying this or that design is better. I'd imagine the design process for smaller and new projects is much more open to changes on a designer's whim.
The pyramid of code quality (Part II), the 3 different types of codes.
MDC is a public wiki that anyone can edit. You can fix or change anything if you see fit (you don't need to fix it now, I fixed it).
Professional REs have been around for awhile if you look in the right places.

Nevertheless, I'd say he's young too if he doesn't know who +Fravia is. Kee-raist.
OK to clarify, Irrelevant if you're doing a consumer based web startup.

If you're doing B2B or corporate stuff, then sure, you have to deal with that rubbish along with everything else.
My first reaction to the site was "I have no clue what this is". Your tagline lets you know it has to do with search, but it isn't clear until you read everything on the page. I think the first page of the "Take a tour" explains it well in the first line.. If it were me I'd use something like this as your tagline: "Save and share your searches."

Jer
Most UK universities don't do it like that.

Usually, the first year is worth nothing, the second year is 1/3 and the final year is 2/3.

Sometimes you do an extra year inbetween the second and thid year if you take a year out in indsutry.

Also, college is a different thing to University in the UK.
Lots of utilities are natural regional monopolies. For example, it would be unrealistic and uneconomic to have two separate water companies, each with their own separate networks of rivers, sewage works, water pipes, etc.

The same is also true to some extent for electricity generation and supply, gas pipelines, and railway networks. (Incidently the railways in the UK were built by competing companies, which is why the network is suboptimally designed, with for example separate stations in a town or city that don't easily connect to each other.)
Good work is effort well spent.
Patent Filed for Domain Name Securitization
He's not living in a dream world. It's easy for a good student to land a job in one of the big companies right now (accenture, ibm, microsoft, campgemini etc) that's what I've just done.

The chances of him not being able to afford to finish school are pretty much nill, in the UK the gov pay for pretty much all your University fees and you pay them back over the next 25 years after graduation. This make Uni affordable to most people.

The only thing that was right in your enitre post was the face he won't get funded for a business idea.

What's happening in the UK right now is very different to whats happening in the US.