skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Working in Canada?
Hi,

I am in the process of shutting down my failed startup in India and am thinking of applying for developer jobs (preferably in Rails) in Canada. I do not have a Visa and was wondering if Canadian startups/ product development companies are open to sponsoring visas for the right candidate. I have a fair bit of development experience and come from a really good college here.

I read through the immigration websites and did not find anything that stood out to be such a massive hurdle. Now, given the realities of the US H1B visa lottery, doing something similar in the US is practically impossible right now.

So people who have gone through this, can you give me some idea of how feasible this is? Should I bother applying at all or is it too impractical for a company to go through the visa hassle? Anything else that I should know/ consider before I start applying for jobs in Canada?

Thanks a ton for your time.
I did something similar with the non-compete and non-disclosure agreements my employer wanted me to sign when our company was purchased. It was a four page document and I simply altered the terms to suit what I thought was fair (I had no intention of stealing their IP, but I also didn't want them owning everything I created).

The HR representative signed both copies, gave me one and filed the other. The funniest part is that when I left a few years later, they couldn't find the one I'd signed and asked me to sign another during the exit interview ... I declined ;)
I know Twitter did this (primarily) in response to the AP hacking, but I fail to see how this change is going to help organizations (say...news) with multiple people sharing an account for business purposes.

We want to secure with 2 factor here in our offices, but it involves giving 10 people the app and possibly getting spammed every time someone logs in. I realize they went for this approach rather than have your average user type in numbers but I can't help but feel confused by this move.
> How can it become cheaper than harvesting and packaging something that needs very little additional processing?

One way that's possible is if the processing is done close to the point of production and reduces the size (and increases shelf life) enough that the savings in transportation, packaging, and reduced losses on the shelf compared to less-processed basic foods is greater than the processing cost.
At common law, the heart of a contract is consensus 'ad idem' - agreement to the same thing. I can only enforce a contract against you if a reasonable person in my position, at the time of contracting, would have believed that you had accepted the contract (including the same terms that I want to enforce).

Usually, having a written contract that both parties sign means that condition's easily met. But pretty clearly, swapping some small print out just before you sign might undermine that, depending on the situation. See e.g. Hartog v Colin & Shields [1939] 3 All ER 56.

(Obviously, this is irrelevant to the person in the article, as Russia is not a common-law country. And I don't know if it's relevant to American HN readers either: my possibly flawed understanding (as a Brit) is that most consumer contracts in the US are not governed by common law, but by the UCC, of which I know nothing).
Ask HN: Thought Experiement: If HN ran ads, how much would PG earn
HN is a high traffic site. I expect that if they ran banner ads or contextual ads, like google does, they would make good cash. I am curious to know how much money they could make this way. If you were in charge of HN ads division, what kind of ads would you run and what CTR, CPM would you expect?

EDIT: Just from a traffic point of view. Lets also assume no one leaves the site because of that. Just trying to see how the traffic-revenue correlation works in this case.
I also took it to mean that it's not classy to smoke hash (i.e. 'you stay classy, San Diego' :D)
"Inexperienced founders... try to convince with their pitch. Most would be better off if they let their startup do the work—if they started by understanding why their startup is worth investing in, then simply explained this well to investors."

This advice applies to many things in life -- getting a job, proposing marriage, networking in general.

For instance, I've occasionally met people who obsess about crafting the perfect CV. For many of those people (not all) if they'd brought the same level of intensity to doing good work in the past, they'd be fighting off would-be employers, without any need to sprinkle pixie dust on their CV. Ditto people who try to find some magical method for networking. Do awesome work, and networking becomes mostly a matter of showing up and saying plainly and understandably what you've done.
So having had the experience of having a 'starbucks card' get charged to a compromised account, I asked Starbucks about this and at that time (a bit over a year ago) they didn't invalidate the card because it was causing a lot of customer service complaints. Given the prevalence of the fraud I wonder if that was a wise choice, perhaps they have changed since then.
I agree that just reading the headlines of the sections themselves is meaningless. What we tried to do with the post is identify tactical things we did to increase our MRR. Things like personally reaching out to every user, hand-holding them through the sign up process, figuring out where they abandoned the product, identifying the core feature set to build from our first batch of signups, figuring out how to deliver value within 5 minutes of signup.

There's never going to be a do x,y,z and you'll make $5k since every business is different, but instead tips like ours from what we've seen work for us.

Agreed on the title, a better one could have been, 'Our 5 Steps to $5k in MRR' to clarify.
This is probably partly due to Amazon's policy that the price you charge on their site is the lowest price you charge anywhere, for each item.
If you do localise content, make sure it's what your users want.

When it comes to Rotten Tomatoes, I'm glad it asks my location because I prefer US film reviewers to my local film reviewers. If I let Rotten Tomatoes know my time zone, I can't access US reviewers (that I'm aware of).
The grandparent runs (https://www.hipdial.com/) about which the parent and I are talking.

Those plans are far too lean.

Also, I don't understand what a "local line" is when I go directly to your pricing page. I also don't understand what a "toll free line" is. Specifically I don't know why I need 5 lines.

I don't run a pure SaaS (http://gridspy.com) but $9 / mo? These people are not employees. They have profits. We had to fight the same tendancy to offer unrealistically low prices.

Your typical "professional" will bill $80-$200 / hr while on the conference call. They'd swallow $40 +

You probably don't need a free plan, though you might want to consider a prepaid one. Bill on minutes or something. I'd consider eliminating it entirely.

Team should be about $200 and business you should be thinking $1000 / month plus.

I also think that segmenting based on max people per conference makes a lot of sense. It would also be simpler to bill based on "number of conferences" rather than "number of minutes" and trigger a new "conference" when a call extends beyond 1 hour.

Higher prices should support more marketing work. You'd be surprised - higher prices will make your clients think that your product is more valuable and thus more likely to try it out.

You've also got a viral element. Your users are telling others about you (to invite them to the conference). Ask them to put each person's phone number and email addresses into the system so you can send reminders to each participant before the meeting.

In those reminders, I suggest you offer a "coupon" for 1-5 free conference calls to that guest. You might only want to do so if the guest has an email from a different domain. Monitor for abuse. This will help you get natural viral marketing underway.

Another alternative is to build a followup email after the conference ends that has details on who joined the meeting, how long they talked, a downloadable recording (?) and their contact details.

I hope this helps. It looks like you have a nice product.
That's very good that "show dead" shows hellbanned, and all I could ask for. And it's not like I was worried about HN specifically, more the ability of smaller, more focused sites to self-AstroTurf by omission.
I am guessing it is short for WEI(ght) LOS(s) ? Just a wild guess.
I have been using Koding for a while. It's pretty awesome to be able to play with open source projects without setting a dev environment.

However, I haven't started a big project with it yet. Does anybody have experience working on a large project on Koding?
A court might not give him everything that he's asking for, but this situation isn't exactly like a EULA. Those are contracts of adhesion: drafted entirely by one party and offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis to a (generally) less-sophisticated party. Courts have special rules about construing provisions in those situations, but such rules wouldn't necessarily apply here (since the contractual language was the product of joint drafting). Of course, I'm not a Russian lawyer, so my 2 cents are probably worth more like 2 rubles....
I'd add another market category - people who are interested in a diet that has the correct ratios of fats/proteins/carbs (and the other nutrients) that will optimize one's energy. I've always been intrigued by the zone diet's claims that following the appropriate results in feeling much healthier and having more energy, but have found that cooking meals following that ratio is too tedious / time consuming.
You’re never the smartest person in the room
Whenever I am at a coffee shop I take out my iPad and turn on a prepared Keynote presentation that can be read from 10+ feet away saying something like "Mobile Engineer and Big Data Hacker - Come Talk To Me!" and then a URL at the bottom of the slide. I really like the idea of having the "Meet A Progammer" table at a coworking space though I suspect the number of "Can you be my tech co-founder and work for free for a year?" requests to be a little on the high side.
Interesting article.

In the past I've used the powerball simulator to get a feel for things. Buying two tickets a week for hundreds of years, and tracking profit/loss:

http://justwebware.com/powerball/powerball.html
The odds are beyond terrible, but they are exactly zero if you don't play.

My minimum required jackpot for me to play is a $320,000,000 jackpot. I increase the minimum every year. Keeps my maximum spending to about $4 or $6 a year, which is worth it for the entertaining daydreaming it provides.
> How?

I suggest you reread the sentence that precedes the one you quoted (and which is the one that "the same thing" refers to.) Because it answers your question.
Children's Advocacy Group Faults Learning Apps for Babies
Moz-git-tools: Tools for working with Git at Mozilla
s/both your time/both your time and theirs/
Sudoku Solver in 15 lines of CoffeeScript
Another reason I have low margins though is because my free plan and free trials also cost me real money. There is no way I can get around that.

Have you considered rolling back or sharply limiting your free trials? With the exception of people you've made commitments to, if they aren't accomplishing a business goal for you, you don't owe the world them. There is nothing intrinsic about SaaS that says there has to be a free plan. (Additional options: aggressively using the free plan as a viral spread mechanism. Your free competitors do this, as I learned the other day when on a sales call organized by somebody who would have happily dropped $50 to remove the external branding for that single phone call if they were aware of your option existing.)

We also run on Twilio, and have a 30 day free trial with CC required upfront. While we still have marginal expenses to service free trials in a way that many SaaSes do not, the costs are not terrible and easy to justify as a cost of customer acquisition. (We shoot for, and mostly get, 80%+ margins on the paid plans.)

If you're ever in the mood to chitchat about this, drop me an email. I'd be happy to share about how e.g. moving a bit upmarket and doing a bit of enterprise sales has worked for us.
I don't know if drawing a parallel between oneself and Einstein, Bohr, etc is the best way to draw sympathy to one's product.

Anyway, the product looks great, albeit I'm always wary of products that require to be online to use, having had a fair share of issues with my successive ISPs. Besides, how cool would a system that sync VMs between your computer and a server be?
> The way that it handles looping is idiomatic for avoiding certain kinds of common pitfalls.

Unless you're using native (or shim'd) map and similar constructs instead.

(Or, for that matter, if you're otherwise used to writing code where block scope isn't the rule.)

> The way that it creates "that" variables for temporarily holding on to "this" for a while is idiomatic.

Unless you're using bind instead.

I suppose it's true enough that people can in fact learn good things from the CS compiler output. But the JS that CS writes is not necessarily the JS an experienced dev would write or would have to write to achieve the same goals -- even taking into account the principles behind "best practices."
Ah, touché! I left out that part. I guess then it really only matters that the bank accepted the altered terms.
There you go: Start-up visa

http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/business/start-up/ind...
If they didn't initial these handmade changes (but rather just missed them) - i think they wouldn't be enforcable.
They "lost their copy" likely for this purpose - so that they could argue that you "added changes" after the contract was signed.
In light of your points, which I appreciate, perhaps I should recast my point of view this way: a person's opinion about politics is interesting or not (perhaps we could even say valid or not) to the extent that he is able to generalize his interests far enough to place them in a context informed by general principles and relevant domain knowledge, and beyond narrow self-interest. "Virginia should allow Gays to marry because I'm Gay and I want to live in Virginia and get married" is as meaningless, as a political opinion, as me saying "Everyone in the US should give me a dollar because I want a lot of money." Socrates took the hemlock not because he thought it would be good for him personally, but because he thought it was a good thing for citizens to obey the law.
This would help: http://ycombinator.com/images/hn6.png
The underlying concept I took from this post was a fundamental rule of marketing and sales...

Every decision made starts with an emotional trigger, and ends with a defensible position.
That's an interesting point.

We take credit card/bank card forms for granted in that nothing is returned to you except another copy of the same (hopefully) agreement, the card and monthly statement. Not the copy of the document you signed with their corresponding signature.

I wonder if this case will prompt some changes in the way they conduct their card affairs.
Yes that's right codegeek. Definitely did not intend to have the name sound like "whales"
"If you are a startup that has low scalability, but if you have traction, you will get funding"

To be fair, I think most people tend to underestimate the scalability (as well as the Total Addressable Market) of successful startups at the early stage. As PG puts it, the big winners often look like bad ideas in their earliest stages.

Take Rap Genius, for example. I'll freely admit that, when I first heard about the site and all the funding it received, I had no freaking clue why it was getting so much attention. I thought that this time, finally, unquestionably, the VC community had gone truly bonkers. Later on, when someone explained the potential to me -- that the underlying technology and platform could become X, Y, Z -- I was floored by the possibilities. And I felt like an idiot for not seeing it earlier.

I know a lot of people who had very similar reactions to airbnb, and to this day, a lot of people still have that reaction to Uber ("An app just for calling cabs??? Seems pretty narrow!"). Same thing with Tesla ("It'll never work at scale; you need to whole infrastructure of power stations on the street corners!").

Scalability is very hard for the average observer to gauge. It's even hard for the average tech enthusiast to gauge, and probably hard for the average VC to gauge.
A compile-time C++ LISP interpreter I wrote a while ago just for fun: http://pastebin.com/yz4XvYra (scroll to the bottom for an example).

It's a shame that C++ lacks proper support for compile-time strings, but it would be trivial to write a preprocessor turning a string into a list of char literals.
I didn't know that. Thanks for that heads up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
In reverse I would expect that the bank would prevail.

What I would expect would happen and what I believe to be the correct ruling and how the world should work in ideal circumstances are all different things, sadly.

So just because I think the bank will prevail doesn't mean I think it's the correct ruling or morally right or the kind of world I want to live in. It just means that I don't think a judge would slow banking to a crawl for the sake of rendering the correct judgement on this case.
> I asked the clerk at Safeway to sign off on an altered terms and conditions on their loyalty card

What? Why?
Some of it is word play. E.g. investor y invites person x to an event and they chat, person x then says he is meeting with investor y, which can imply it was a face to face meeting with just them, which then implies more interest than exists. If they compliment the idea at all then person x goes around saying investor y likes it. There seem to be a lot of defenses against this already, though. If you say something vague involving another investor you often get asked to clarify or expound on that immediately. That then breaks it down flat out to lie or tell the truth.
That says that Russian laws are fair - there's no difference between big companies and regular people. No one is protected. If a bank's client can sign a contract presented by the bank and be responsible to follow the rules in the contract the same should apply the other way around. Bank signed a contract without reading its contents and is required to follow what is written in the contract.

Contract is an agreement between two or more parties. You agree to the terms presented in the contract with your signature. Any law written in a way which protects companies is wrong. There should be no difference between a contract written by John Doe and a contract written by any company.
And I was so impressed by their work that I tried to sign up. But they demand too many permissions: not only to read from your accounts, which I was ready to grant, but to write to them! No way.
Tesla is building the infrastructure for a supercharger network. If Tesla has any common sense at all, eventually all electric cars, not just Tesla's, will depend on this network. To me, this makes TSLA an obvious buy. Who cares if Tesla sells any of its own cars? It will control the national, and likely global, infrastructure for all electric cars in the future. That is worth a lot of money.

I'm young. I have $4,000 in my IRA account. Based on my earning potential, in 15 years $4,000 will mean relatively nothing to me. So it's in my best interest to invest in high-risk, high-reward stocks with my current funds. I am going to invest 100% of this $4,000 in TSLA. I'm in this for the long play, and I believe in the company.
Fitbit - SF and Boston - Full-time, permanent - https://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oZJlXfwK&s=AddThis#.UgK-3eJfu...

Come help the world live happier and healthier!

Looking for engineers for:
- iOS
- Java backend
- senior frontend
- embedded OS and firmware
- data science
Ignorance is not bliss. You can't claim not to have knowledge of something and not suffer the consequences...
Indeed I do want it to be correct. Geolocation of IP's has placed me all over the country while I sit at my desk. My desk doesn't move.

You can reliably tell where a cell phone is by the tower it connects to, guessing by IP is nowhere near as accurate.
In fact the return is 100% if you don't play.
It is funny that in Canada, I cannot buy the N72013 from the Play Store but I can walk into Staples, The Source, Best Buy, Future Shop, etc, and pick one up for $249.

In fact, I bought my N72013 on the 31st of July and have been playing with it for a week. WTF Google?
I don't think so, I just mentioned layout since it's something that can be triggered by image loading.

I don't think progressive JPEG is worth the rendering overhead in general, but doing JPEG decoding in a JS worker is not as crazy as it sounds if you're serious about reducing jank.
Yeah, and if you live in a submarine long enough your eyes unlearn to focus on things that are far away..

Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive.

Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day.

-- George Orwell, "The Principles of Newspeak"

Yet he also wrote this, in "Politics and the English Language":

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

Of course brevity is generally good, and bloat is generally bad. But you can be concise even in 5000 words if the subject is complex, and waste space even in 140 characters. But one thing is sure, a hard limit of 140 makes discussion of anything remotely complex impossible. That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater... the mere possibility of bloat hurts communication less than the impossibility to elaborate, at all, ever. (posting links, or twee+ etc, don't really count IMHO)
Strange, I thought it sounded like Wales...I wonder if they're implying there's a lot of fat people there.
The people I've met who've obsessed over the perfect CV. were also, more often than not, the same people who gloated over how much success they've seen with minimal input work. Maybe they're related.
He's claiming that the number of people that don't want their time automatically change on their laptops is not insignificant. You really need a citation for that?
No one likes risk. Even early stage investors. A good investor deck should convince the investor that whatever risks are associated with particular investment opportunity are seemingly mitigated.

Team - not your first rodeo, know how to win, subject matter experts.
Focus - clearly stated value proposition.
Dream - big market, big value.
Plan of Attack - clear path to capture market share.
Validation/ Traction - customers!
Tech - solid, non-obvious, not easily replicable. (i.e. if your successful, someone else can't just hop into the market and eat your lunch).
Use of proceeds - not just pay my salary, but grow this business.
Next big milestone: profitability? another fund raise?

If you hit on these, then investors will want to put money in their favorite types of companies: the one's that don't look like they need it. ;)