skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi, I've been in the same shoes as you.

As far as your options: having an American co-founder or business agent is a good start.

However, regardless of what option you choose to pursue to enter the US as a Canadian, I would recommend if you are bootstrapping your own venture, that it would be best to get to profitability or at least a promising product before exploring your options for working and living in California. It is not only expensive, but very time consuming to work out the details. It's definitely worth all the trouble, but focus on your company and product first.

I hope it works out for you.
Can a boss send an employee to procrastinator jail to make sure they finish their task by deadline?
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I've seen steveb speak quite a few times at both internal and external events covering a variety of topics. My opinion of him is quite a roller coaster ride. Sometimes he fills me with inspiration and renews my confidence, other times, like this one, I don't find anything he has to say very compelling or insightful. I think that there is something endearing about him, which makes it hard to accurately evaluate his performance.
How amusing. A Briton thinks that a corporation is a danger to privacy, instead of his own government.
yeah I use that too
http://www.montastic.com/

Been using it for a few years for monitoring my personal website.
It seems to me that eloquent writing actually makes it harder to skim and decide that it's worth reading. I used to read things because I liked how they were written, but now that it's become clear to me that there's more than I could ever hope to get to in years, I just want to get to the point and on to the next thing; I find myself skimming even novels I'm reading while on public transit, looking for the conclusion.

My point is just that great writing takes more attention and time, and so will simply have a smaller audience. I wish writers would worry less about putting together just the right turn of phrase and simply say what they want to say.
Ballmer says, right time for entrepreneurs
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The problem with Winnipeg is that they built a new hockey arena a few years ago and it's too small for NHL attendance standards( it's around 15,000), as well as having problems with it's luxury boxes( not enough and the existing ones have been sold for a price way to low for having a profesional team there).

They did a study to look into expanding the arena but it came out to almost as much as the original stadium.

By almost all accounts NHL hockey will never return to Winnipeg, the facilities and money just aren't there.
HTTP and You
Twitter for all things non-human. Like my coffee machine tweeting me that the pot's empty or the new brew's ready.
Added the link to my list of reading. Looks very interesting. I do share your cynicism that we have no tolerance for real change politically. The charge of socialism meets every single proposal that involves a little more government involvement.
This might actually be a problem that politics just fails monumentally as a tool for fixing. Like trying to repair an MG with a herring.

There will come a time when technology will make it possible to keep someone alive indefinitely so long as you spend exponentially more money to do so. Everyone has been conditioned to think that they deserve the best healthcare regardless of what choices they've made in their lives. They will not accept that someone that has more money lives longer.

The only option is rationing. Either the naked market does it or the government does it. The perceived (and often genuine) inequality of the market practically guarantees that the voting public will demand the latter. This means that someone steps in and essentially decides who lives and dies. Some agency will perform the brutal calculus that decides that a Nobel winning scientist is a better investment to keep alive than a retired truck driver. Historically this has a terrible track record. Anyone willing to wield this power is usually the last person you'd want to actually do so.

Eventually technology will take us through this transitional period into a better time where healthcare, like food, is cheap enough that everyone can have as much as is needed and the only shortages will be caused by politics as is the case for food now.

It seems the best thing we can do as a species is knuckle down and drive through this transitional period as fast as we can. I'm kind of hoping that this current recession produces a few more of the "knuckle down and drive through" types as they seem to be in short supply these days.
Some people do not work like that. I look stuff up constantly (if only to make sure there's not a function already existing to do what I'm doing, or to run an error through Google; searching for a quick answer is almost always my first response to any problem, after which I figure it out myself if there's no such answer. Trying to figure out a solution to something that's already solved is make-work, and I have actual work to do.
I would love to see a news service based entirely on fact. No journalist emotional interpretation. Headlines would be generated based on user criterion. A search.

Give me headlines new headlines (today) sorted by number of deaths in incident. Filtered globally, by country, or by city. etc etc.
The GOP has already targeted "rationing" as the evil word of the debate. Any talk of it will be demonized. I still have no clue what the answer is, but you are right, at some point we have to make calls at what point in the exponential cost curve do we say, "it is time to die." that is a tough one.
Alertfox is great. I think their basic service is free. I got a free pro account via TechCrunch when they launched.
slap this on a host external to your monitored infrastructure: http://github.com/dustin/whatsup/tree/master
I think you're missing the point. I'm not denying that EMacs is great at what it does (I use it extensively).

However, if I had RSI problems I would switch to something else - it's definitely worth learning a new tool if it helps my health and well being.
This is for advertising: Have devices in public places where people are likely to sit down (bus steats, benches in Airports, bus stops) that listen in and automatically pick out keywords from conversations. Ads are displayed directly in front that is relevant to the conversation.
The reasons to stay in the Bay Area are mostly personal. I have more friends here than back "home" now. I can demo to people every day of the week if I want. I like the city and the culture. And this is an amazing area for the concentration of talent that I'll eventually want to bring on board.

I have lived in Vancouver and I'm not going to knock it, all kinds of cool things have come out of there, and the lifestyle is great too. But where is my Maker Faire? My functional language discussion groups?

To me, this is an attempt at lifestyle design. If I just wanted to grind away at something without my friends and preferred hangouts in close reach... well, that's not enough right now.

Perhaps the idea of 'lifestyle design' is incompatible with starting a new venture. I suppose I have to just sacrifice everything for the good of the idea?
This makes for quite the manly place to work out. I mean think about the costs here (no need for expensive equipment either, their junk!)
Micro-payments considered for WSJ website
Redirect to get around cookie/registrationwall. (Thanks nickb: http://www.newmogul.com/item?id=9837)
A friend of mine got physically attacked by an old woman in a supermarket because he was wearing his scrubs. She didn't stop throwing shit at him until security took her away.
Could One Stop You From Being Hired?
Background checks are utilized by companies today to decide whether or not you will be permitted to work for them.
Well, I don't know what you mean by "doing business" in SF. If you mean the LLC is technically founded in Canada and just happens to have an SF branch, maybe that would be fine. But, that seems legally dubious to me.
It seems awfully ironic to see an article lamenting that newspapers don't "get" the internet right after the New York Times buys iht.com and immediately breaks all its incoming links.
Kinetic Recharger for Laptops.

A laptop with a shake-to-recharge system. You can make them fit in your CD Drive bays. Since you carry your laptop around a lot, it's constantly moving, the kinetic-drive keeps on charging the battery.

Actually would be badass for cellphones (their ALWAYS being moved around).
I wonder what they would say if she used a precipitator to get moisture from the air?
Hmm, no citations, no real references. The graph is 50% "estimated" from 2005 and pre-estimated values doesn't have the exponential growth thats demonstrated on the graph. Lets also keep in mind the new medicare/medicaid restrictions that is drastically effects what is being paid for by the state and what hospitals are now footing the bill for.

"Social security can be solved" sweet, lets get on that. glad he had some solutions in this article.

why is this on on HN btw?
This is indeed because it is graduate level and not undergrad.
http://gangplankhq.com/ kickass guys and gals doing this in Phoenix, and http://jailbreakomaha.com getting started in Omaha, NE.
Just browsing the contents on parsing (what I"m working on), it seems little different from the Dragon book. Has the simplest way to construct a parser really not improved after all these years? What about the LL(*) class of parsers that ANTLR uses, and packrat parsers (I don't use these, have just heard about them).

Or has "parsing" become a pedagogical foundation subject, whose content is determined not by pragmatic usefulness, but by the its role in the curriculum?(e.g. so if you say you've studied "parsing" people can assume you know about LALR, even if no one uses it.) I'm not saying the latter would be a bad thing - we need a common vocabulary - I'd just like to see progress at the core as well as the edges.
An engine that scans forum posts for factors like "emoticon content", builds a network of who replies to whom, and uses that information to establish a hierarchy of social status among the participants.
My girlfriend says she would stick them on her shoes too, and that's a lot of shoes.
These aren't the forums you're looking for.

You can go about your business.

Move along, move along.
That has been done in the sense that it has been designed, not in the sense that I can buy a pair of beep-stickers to put on my shoes.
The whole point of the post is I don't have solutions.

Try to refute the point that healthcare is the massive piece of our unfunded liabilities. You can't. Good resource: http://www.pgpf.org/

What I am concerned with is I don't think the coming debate will get very far. We have a visceral fear of change in this arena and it will hurt us.
No. If the market for a less expensive good is there, it will happen with or without a company. Intel's fortunate that they can make a product for the segment and dominate that segment, even if it means a smaller overall market for the rest of their products.

Compare and contrast Microsoft's position in the netbook market: their entries into this segment to date have fought the inevitable (such as a 1g cap on RAM). Other similar efforts they've made, such as Windows Starter Edition have an arbitrary fixed cap on concurrent running applications. There's presumably no elegant way for them to handle this wave, and I believe _they_ are in trouble (to the extent it matters) because of it.
I would use it. Can you also include a cross-browser javascript library to listen for these events? Push over http sucks and this could fix it.
Too true. Especially considering that we ourselves are in many cases not even allowed to make this decision for ourselves.

Right now, I'd settle for just the right to say "I'd like a quadrupal shot of morphine please so that an extended stay in a miserable nursing home won't bankrupt my whole family."
I'm actually working on something a bit like this. It's a super early prototype, but it'd be cool to hear what you think.

http://eric.drumsti.cc/

It's designed to be public or private, with one or many users. No search yet, but it's definitely a major feature.

EDIT: To answer your question more directly, google notebook and drop.io are two functional services that are doing this type of thing right now.
Andrew,

How about letting the people on here vote for what startup you should talk about each week?

Collectively as a group this bunch is going to be way ahead of the mainstream press as to what's hot.

Saw both shows this weekend and they were strangely compelling.
But I can't buy one. A startup that solved this problem would have to solve a lot of legal issues as well as technical ones.

Also Stanley can't drive in traffic. What I really want is something that can commute for me from San Francisco to Silicon Valley while I play video games.
I just finished "In Defense of Food." Michael Pollan makes a pretty good case that the health care issue is driven by processed food - causing obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer. Essentially if americans ate less processed food (and less food overall), there wouldn't be a healthcare issue.
I had Hack - my dad bought it for me from a mail order catalog in the 1980's and they sent us a 5¼-inch floppy. I remember printing out the manual on my dot matrix printer. I don't think I have ever loved a computer game like I did this one.
Seriously, I still can't understand what 'inspiration' has to do with Facebook's success at all. There were dozens of already popular social networks when it arrived - apart from timing/market positioning (read: luck), what's the big deal?

Please enlighten me...
> The only option is rationing

This would be less of a problem if physicians weren't part of a guild that artificially reduces supply.
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Why not just startup in Toronto? I'm actually a Bay Area boy who lives in Toronto; I came here to do his Master's at U. of Toronto. I've stayed ever since working for a startup, and my roommate is about to start a company with his fellow labmates as well. There is a great community of startups here, and lots of amazing talent from U. of Toronto and Waterloo.
Why does the bad trend only start in the Estimated part of the graph?
How have I been misled regarding popularity and marketability? That is, what information do you have that I do not?

Note that I said, with added emphasis, "the practice of computer science has fundamentally changed." This idea rings true for me, as a systems researcher. I have to do as they describe to do my own research. "Library use is relatively easy" greatly underestimates the difficulty of accomplishing non-trivial tasks with new hardware, even in the presence of published specs and available library.

Also, answering your own rhetorical question even though you don't actually know the answer is not support for your argument.
It will be interesting to see the adoption rate of this micropayment system among casual readers. It's likely that serious "business users" will stick with the full-service subscription packages and ignore more complex payment systems, as they do now with news analysis and research services.

In the end, we're probably still waiting for the "killer app" (or adoption thereof) at the center of casual payments.
baby boomers hit the 60-80s. and most healthcare costs are in your later years.
Cocoa with Love: Variable argument lists in Cocoa
But don't these problems exist regardless of your approach? Git and it's way of handling trees of old commits is a decent place to start. It clearly isn't a final solution, but building on top of it seems like a worthwhile direction, at least to me.
that's just taxis online
Can we discuss health care without the science fiction and doomsday scenarios?

I realize that the USA is used to looking inward for solutions, but other governments are solving these problems, better, today.

Every discussion I have with Americans about healthcare leads directly to these imagined totalitarian futures, as if "everybody" knew that this was what happens. I don't understand it. Where did you all learn this narrative? Was there some nursery rhyme about the evils of socialized medicine?
This is a step in the right direction. They have to make it easy enough and cheap enough yet profitable enough.

It's like a previous discussion on ebooks: for intellecutal content, hit the spot where people want to pay money for it, but think it's cheap enough to just throw a bit of money at it.

Case in point: I don't care if I have to pay 10 cents to view an article. 10 cents is nothing to me. The content and satisfaction of curiosity (given an excerpt, of course) is worth it.
I disagree with your statement. Even if all you do is use the camera in auto mode the ability of the better lens to let in more light will produce the better picture all other things being equal. If you also have a camera that has a larger light sensitive "film" area you will also get a better picture with the same inputs. Size is a factor in the enjoyment spectrum but the point-and-shoots do not have the clarity and depth that a decent digital SLR has and that is also a factor in how much you enjoy using your camera.
I'm in the middle of taking the undergrad PL class at the University of Washington and I've come to the conclusion that classes of this sort can be whatever you make them. We spent the first five weeks learning/using ML, recently switched to Scheme, and will dive into Ruby for a few weeks before the quarter ends. While I'm sure many of my peers will leave the course thinking of functional languages as a quirky set of under-developed relatives to the tried-and-true OO family, I've spent the last 6 weeks breathing functional programming, both in my coursework and in places like this thread. I feel that I'm taking more away from the class and that much of introductory computer science works this way. The burden of learning is on the student to become engaged in the subject matter and make use of the resources the school and professor provides.

At the end of the day, the department won't make the student great. To a degree, a driven and talented student can succeed anywhere, regardless of how many ooh's and aah's a name-dropping of their school will produce.
As I see it the major problems of our current healthcare regime have very little to do with radical life extension and any perceived unfairness in end-of-life care.

The major problem is that we are in the hands of a criminal syndicate that is structured around extracting money from people when they are at their most weak, vulnerable and uncertain. That this criminal syndicate, which spans the health insurance, legal and financial industries and for which health care is merely the bordello on which the operations cash flow depends; is regarded as a legitimate business is merely one symptom of how corrupt our society really is.

There is an entire industry devoted to extorting money from people under the threat of illness and death. And yet those who run it are considered fine upstanding members of society; always good for a donation to a good cause.

If you go looking it's not too hard to find instances of people who paid in to health insurance for decades, only to be stripped of their coverage when they became ill.

Tying it to jobs makes it even worse, if you know you need medical coverage, you basically can't leave your job; even if it's to start a company that would produce much more value for society than the job left behind.

As it stands now, on average Americans spend twice as much and get worse health outcomes compared to the citizens of any other industrialized nation. It is a disgrace and a crime, and we need to start labeling it a crime and treating it as such.
I believe these are called Taxis.
Ask HN: Just me, or are there more [dead] submissions on Hacker News lately?
I'm newish to HN, but this week it seems I've seen more [dead] submissions (right now there are 5 on the New page), and more [deleted] comments.

Did something change recently on the administrative end, or is the difference on the community side?
The most difficult problem to solve is the method of payment. Just the fact that one has to enter his/her credit card (or other form of payment) information is going to be an enormous deterrent. I just don't know if there's a good enough mechanism in place for micro-payments to be practical.
Care to point out a few examples - just genuinely curious. In 02 things seemed pretty dry - mostly finance or glorified IT gigs.
I think you mean "dictatorial" or "totalitarian". "communism" is something quite different.
That Rails video was the first thing that came to mind when I read the title.

Actually, that screencast was exactly what stopped me from indulging in Rails the first time I came across it. I don't find 'here is how you scaffold an entire app in 15 minutes' is a selling point for any framework in any language.

This might appeal to some people who are not programming inclined, but not the ones who are going to contribute and build your framework further.
Jew Haters Welcome At Facebook, As Long As They Aren’t Lactating
Lack of government involvement is not the problem with U.S. healthcare. There is government intervention everywhere. My rule of thumb for determining whether an industry is a free market or not, is that I ask the question, "Can I start a business to solve the problem? Or am I legally prevented or constrained from doing so?" In the U.S. I am legally barred from implementing most of my business ideas that would fix the healthcare system, so I do not consider it a free market.

The problem with U.S. politics in general is that it is fractured. Policy is determined by the interplay of powerful, organized factions. Any government intervention gets captured by these factions, and the policy ends up hurting the general interest rather than making things better.

Here is a comment I made a while ago where I explain how American politics works in practice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557298
Very true on all modern OS's. Has anyone here looked into the firefox source to see if they are using threads in a parallel way?
Because I am from Montreal. Living in Vancouver is one thing, but going to Toronto means I'm a vendu. ;)
Oh come on, enough already. Who wasn't thinking about Facebook before Facebook came out?
From my experience, this last paragraph is an accurate description. Any solution to the problem is going to require somewhere in the low to mid six digits to make it work.
Nope you've got it spot on.

Facebook is like Google: it rocks and is extremely popular, but at its roots it doesn't really have much of a story to tell — it's not that revolutionary, if Facebook didn't become popular, another social network would.
I better slit my wrists right now then, I have no future.

Oh, wait.

Completely forgetting the "making of things" and living absolutely in ideas land is a dumb idea that I hope doesn't gain any more traction in this environment.

I estimate that the author hasn't had to work with software architects that don't touch code any more.
As far as I know, the only benefits of being Canadian are the TN visas and a slightly faster route towards H1-B status. But both of those are for professionals working for some sponsoring company.
I agree. I'm dealing with the same problem in one of my startups too, which deals with consumer micropayments as well.

I think Tipjoy is taking a step in the right direction; the problem is just payment fulfillment. And without a ubiquitous micropayments provider that has access to a lot of people's credit cards (like PayPal?) it's always going to be an unfortunate obstacle.