skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Hundreds of thousands of mostly very smart and highly educated workers who could be starting companies are not.

Alright, but millions of Americans could be starting companies as well, but are not.

In fact, America is _not_ as an entrepreneurial country with lots of little small business owners as we'd like to think. That is the propaganda bullshit we get fed on every election cycle "we got help America's small business. We gotta help Joe The Plumber...blah...blah."

In fact America businesses are mostly large behemoths employing tens of thousands of minions.

There was just a recent report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research ( http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/int-comp-... ) that compared employment in small businesses among the developed nations. US is consistently at the bottom when it comes to self-employment or employment in business with less then 20 people. The biggest reason -- the high cost of health insurance.

So I don't buy the bullshit about "if immigrants could only start their companies, then our economy would boom..." Unless, of course, the author is implying that immigrants are going to run sweatshops where employees don't get health insurance...
(U.S.) Public radio's model has always been "open" and "opt-in" (aside from the tax dollars -- which, by way of comment, I do not personally begrudge). This seems a better alignment with their overall model.

Regarding that, social cooperation seems to have been under/de-valued as a organizational model, in recent times. Maybe it's making a comeback.

Locally, public radio stations have significantly reduced the length and intrusiveness of their fund raising drives, by communicating to their audience that they are trying to achieve precisely this. It seems to be working, so far. I don't know how the contributions break down, e.g. more from pre-existing donors versus new donors.
This article links to a draft research paper by the MSR social media scientist Danah Boyd - "Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter". Available at http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf
Do We Need Foreign Technology Workers?
What I would need would be a simple way to auto-update some cells based off an SQL query on the rest of the data. Can your tool do this?
Banks "too big to fail", now bigger
Manton Reece: Go without food
Ray Kurzweil - Future of Man and Machine
I am the author, and this is not one of my posts. It's something I wrote and put in my dumping ground. That's kind of like a trash can on OS X. I never posted it here and it never showed up in the RSS feed.

As the read me for the folder says... If you're just snooping around, have fun. Nothing in this folder is meant to be a permanent addition, it's just a handy place for me to dump stuff that doesn't have a home yet.

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree/master/dumping_g...

It reflects how I felt at the time but it doesn't reflect what I wanted to post, so I left it unpublished. I didn't try very hard to hide it or anything. But it is an "unauthorizd" post and should not be construed as overt advice to anyone.

p.s. Even though this is an unauthorized post, I am upmodding anyone who criticizes it. They are my feelings, so it's perfectly valid to disagree publicly.
H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and the Brightest
How To Set Up Software RAID1 On A Running System (Debian Lenny)
yeah that's what we need, more H1Bs...after all its not like we have a lot of unemployed. The job growth rate has dropped significantly, why should we increase our population when we don't have the jobs to support them?

these were posted on TC:

1950’s
Population Growth = 11,516,000
Employment Growth = 7,215,000 (62.65%)

1960’s
Population Growth = 19,449,000
Employment Growth = 13,862,000 (71.27%)

1970’s
Population Growth = 30,811,000 (Depression in Mexico)
Employment Growth = 21,224,000 (68.88%)

1980’s
Population Growth = 20,865,000
Employment Growth = 17,685,000 (84.76%)

1990’s
Population Growth = 21,667,000
Employment Growth = 16,998,000 (78.45%)

2000’s (Mar. 2009)
Population Growth = 26,254,000
Employment Growth = 5,137,000 (19.57%)
Agree. I was willing to roll with it through the couple of introductory paragraphs, thinking this was just how the writer chose to set the stage for their piece. However I abandoned reading half-way through after realizing that every sentence in the article was going to be a throbbing, oozing purple jumble. Metaphor should be the spice of writing, not the base, otherwise it loses all power and simply becomes cloying.
I think you are making assumptions about the costs and motivations of the German healthcare system that neither of us can possibly know.
Reminds me of PGs "Founders Visa" article - http://www.paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html

It is a win-win for America and hundreds of entrepreneurs in other countries where the startup ecosystem doesn't exist and ofcourse many would want to build businesses for developed economies than attempt to run something in their home economy which probably can't pay enough. They might go back and build something few yrs down the line or invest in their home countries nevertheless America would have benefited in the mean time.

And this is not even converting all H1-Bs at least the capable ones to start their own firms.
The "press" has been deteriorating into opinion and spin, so I don't think we'll notice much difference between the "opinion blogposts" and "the press." There won't be any single event that future generations could say "here is where the press died" any more than one can definatively state that "this was the event where the Roman Empire fell."
I don't so much think it's the size as it is the extensibility. Managing plugins can be a pain. I mean, say what you will about emacs, but what other editor has plugins to play chess, check your email, as well as chat on IRC or jabber?
What percentage of those figures actually relates to the technology industry?
HNScore - another look at post quality on Hacker News
Totally off-topic, but this is the first thing I saw after getting my new shiny US visa. Couldn't help but share.
The article advocates "freeing" existing H1Bs, not expanding the H1B program (though that might be good too).
You may not care, but Apple (and the other platform creators) should.
There's two issues here -- one is that there's a brain drain in the United States. The best and the brightest are leaving. They can't stay, because we won't let them. The fix is letting them, by reforming H1B policies.

Second is H1B abuse by large corporations. This is a legit problem -- some IT firms bring in people they shouldn't (sometimes thousands at a time), and this takes up H1B's from talented people who should get them. Again, the fix requires the government to figure out who is abusing it, and changing the policies to prevent them from doing so.
Free Membership -- Pirate Party of Canada
They need more members to become a Canadian political party... Make sure to consider filling out the second form, which is the one needed to become a political party.
Outlining the factors without showing how they are measured is misleading. According to the WHO, the HSP (health system performance) is measured via:

* measuring the health system's contribution to socially desirable goals;

* measuring the health system and non-health system resources used to achieve these outcomes;

* estimating the efficiency with which the resources are used to attain these outcomes;

* evaluating the way the functions of the system influence observed levels of attainment and efficiency;

* designing and implementing policies to improve attainment and efficiency and monitoring the effect.

Check out http://www.who.int/health-systems-performance/about.htm

This is more or less directly concerned with measuring the performance of healthcare systems. It would, however, be completely fair to argue how effective this measure is, as it's very difficult to try to quantify something as complex as healthcare. That's why the WHO stopped making this index in 2000 apparently.
> the count is very useful in gauging how large the problem is.

While I upmodded your comment, I disagree with this. There are a lot of problems with using social media as a metric for anything. For one thing, it suffers from information cascades. The presence of articles on a subject encourages others to write articles on the same subject and there is teh appearance of a snowball effect. But there may be absolutely no change in what people are doing, just a change in what people are discussing.
Even within YC, our own Summer 08 batch, there are several startups by non-Americans that have been very successful at building useful products, raising money, and altogether creating value for the US economy.

But those same startups have to jump through a million hoops just for the right to exist in our borders. So this effect is real. I don't claim to know to what extent our economy could be affected positively or negatively, but it is real.
Safari Flash-Plugin using 15%+ CPU continuous, unexpectedly crashed during session.

Firefox behaving well
i don't buy the brain drain issue, sure there are probably some geniuses in the millions of H1B people, but majority are not that much better than the average American worker. So out of those few geniuses, what tiny percentage leaves?

They aren't leaving for the sake of leaving, they are leaving to exploit the opportunities in their home countries
Congrats :) didn't realize you were from abroad - where from?
So true. I learned this the hard way just like the author, by making some very bad hires.

I had always thought it was insulting to ask interviewees to write a simple two-line strcopy() function. Of course they can -- they've got a CS degree! So I would take that as given and move straight to more abstract non-coding questions.

It took me a long time to accept the fact that many people can talk about programming very glibly but can't actually do it. At first I felt like a jerk by making people write so much simple code in interviews, but it's led to much better hiring results.
All economies depend on trade and division of labors to be prosperous. So money going back to India and other countries may help increase global trade.
This is bullshit. Here's actual data: http://www.businessweek.com/table/08/0305_h1b.htm More (I don't know the source, but seems correct): http://www.myvisajobs.com/Top_Visa_Sponsors.aspx

Lookit, a lot of the H1-B slots are being taken up by consulting firms. We don't have a shortage of H1-Bs; we just allocate them poorly. That's what we need to fix.

As to the (what I consider a minor) founding issue, that's pretty simple: find an American co-founder. Form a company, apply for a second H1-B, and you can work for the NewCo from the minute you file (if you already have an existing one). Work on the side, make something people want, then transfer over the main H1-B once the NewCo has revenue/investment. Hell, I'm happy to sign on as a co-founder for as many companies as I can until INS stops me.
The author Vivek Wadhwa, iirc, used to be a very prominent H1B critic. Wonder what's made him change his mind ?
What case are you using? Also, what are you using for cooling?
I've seen H1B essentially lock up some of the brightest people I've worked with... for years. Even a decade or so. You have to get sponsored, and you can't leave your corporate home. It's a strange, watered down form of identured servitude.

The fact that H1B's have no mobility also depresses wages and reduces the incentive for corporations to be a great place to work because the switching cost for these workers is much higher. So hiring a lot of H1B's actually do offer corporations an incentive that is more insidious than you might think.

That's the bad form of H1B. Corporations bringing worker drones for cheap. But that's why this specific reform can affect the system for the better.
www.citeulike.org - one more alternative
Not necessarily. He's one of the leading figures in CS, his opinion on major projects like Wikipedia strikes me as significant...
Indeed. Exploration brings hope and advances humanity. I never understand why some believe that we cannot advance until we fix all current problems.
Good idea.

You might want to get a professional PSD designer to sharpen the overall look. It has a template like look for design, though for this concept design might not be as important as selling it's functionality.

Good luck!
And of course the depressed wage / indentured servitude plays into the xenophobic / "dey tuk ur jerbs" crowd as an argument against immigration reform.
Maybe just anecdotally I know more entrepreneurial immigrants, but I just have not seen that to be the case. n=1, ymmv.
I wouldn't have thought it could get faster until I actually tried the new search. The difference is quite noticeable. Now I'm back at the same point thinking they'll never be faster than this! :)
Exactly, the next post in line is going to be:

"I don't care that you don't care why I don't write software for $HOTPLATFORM"
I notice this version ignores any value I give (set-frame-height (selected-frame) ...), however, it's better than running in a Terminal and I could never get Aquamacs to work with my .emacs (just hangs).
Canada, I believe?
> (from the article) I have a suggestion for our President on how to boost economic growth without spending a penny:

Really? What about the additional man power needed to process the "millions" of pending applications?
My brain hurts after seeing those piecharts, "Yes" in red and "No" in Blue. I had to check the legend twice to make sense of them (and still seems counter-intuitive)
More programmers to free the economy? Come on...

To REALLY free the economy we need a million of doctors from France, India, UK and Cuba competing here, locally, against our home grown millionaire surgeons. The #1 reason companies are outsourcing and people are leaving is this enormous burden of medical racketeering.

Come on, the world is so much larger than the information technology sector and most problems that can't be solved by coding.
Yes, I'm Canadian, nominally. I have dual citizenship (+Irish) and have lived in a bunch of different countries.
According to their own response, they never cancelled with DNA. All the rest of their post is irrelevant.
Ask HN: Startups in DC? 
I am planning a move to DC by the end of september where I will be looking for employment. I'd like to focus my search on startups as I am coming from a mature startup and really enjoyed the experience. I'd ultimately like to find a dev position with an early stage startup.

The problem, I can't find the DC startup scene online. I've checked startuply and npost and the other usual suspects, but there isn't much. Which I think is just an indication startups in DC aren't advertising jobs. I'd like to find the "scene" and approach the ones I find interesting to see if they have a need for someone like me.

OT: I feel like I am abusing Ask HN, so if there is a better place to ask such a question downvote with a link please.
> But those same startups have to jump through a million hoops just for the right to exist in our borders.

> I don't claim to know to what extent our economy could be affected positively or negatively, but it is real.

The question then is, who are we trying to help here? Do we want to help the immigrants or the American economy?

Unless, we can show how the hassle of immigrants trying to setup startup is seriously damaging our economy, then this starts to look more and more like we just want to provide some convenience for the immigrant workers. Of course, we should provide convenience, and should certainly not make it difficult on purpose, but that is not a top priority. We shouldn't be called xenophobes if we don't push this task to the priority of our things to do at the moment.
A lot of people don't use Twitter the way you do. If you follow two thousand people including Guy you might never notice that he is repeating tweets. What's wrong with optimizing for those people? You are free to not follow.
I think a lot of his points are somewhat true, but he is a bad judge of degree, and a worse judge of valuation. I'd bet money that if they raised another round it would be valued at far less than $5B.

That kind of number is incompetant from a journalistic perspective because it will never be openly validated.

I fucking hate that pundits can bloviate without consequence to their reputation.
It will increase consumption in those countries, but not necessarily consumption of american goods.

I think that money will benefit America more if it stays in America. This will happen if we employ more Americans who spend all of their money in America, rather than sending some of it to family members in other countries.
There is real opinion against a tool/platform and there is FUD, payperpost and propaganda disguised as an innocent blog post.

In this days of information overflow we need to learn how to differentiate both. It is really easy to create fake blogs, and easier yet to pay pseudo-journalists to publish your propaganda for a few bucks.
is definitely a fuzzy metric, I didnt mean that people should sit and count all the pro vs con posts, but the cascade works on both sides, everyone is talking about the iphone right now, if a bunch of people werent criticizing it I would see one article explaining the cons and 50 talking about how awesome it it.
Who is this guy, and why do we keep listening to him? Really? Who the hell is he?
I can't help you re: your DC startup search, but I'll vote for you because of your OT comment. Well done. ;)
And, it was uncited. If Knuth wants to have a documented opinion on WP in the WP, he should write a page on his own site and cite it. WP isn't a primary source.
I recommend NetBeans to Ruby developers who, for whatever reasons, can't get into Vim. It has really nice Ruby support, which is especially handy if you're doing Rails and want to get a grip on the mass of directories and files.

Plus the GUI editor kicks ass for doing JRuby Swing stuff.

Icing on the cake: There's a vi plugin. :)
Underhyped? scoble is wrong

10B dollars? scoble is wrong again

I guess we are used to scoble being wrong all the time
I hate it when an interviewer makes you write code on paper. It's like asking a truck driver to run around the room and make "put put" sounds.
I agree. This is like trying to fix the high rate of injuries by getting more band-aids.

To me it seems the article is advocating changing the legislation to make it more convenient for immigrant workers. That is of course followed by a stern warning to us 'xenophobes' that if we don't our economy will be ruined.

They should instead advocate for punishing large corporations for gaming the system, underpaying H1-B employees and depressing everyone else wages. For every 'smart' and 'bright' H1-B visa candidate there are a thousand of unqualified ones, with flaky academic or employment history record. The reason they are here, because they are willing to work for %30 less than Americans are.
This is where one should inject a joke about his skepticism and his famous expressions thereof. Here's an unfunny example of one: "He doesn't believe in the cancer and is offering anyone a million dollars who can prove the existence of it."
Just an average case, Gigabyte 3D Aurora full tower. Here's a review:

http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/cases/gigabyte/aurora...

HDs are both in the internal HD bays, which have a dedicated fan, and in 3.5/5.25 adapter in the 5.25 bays up top, with active cooling, it's something like this:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2313
Stealing (i.e. being a pirate) will always be pathetic and selfish act, but it has a very trendy, positive connotation these days on the net ("itz cool, them just bits"). Here's a tip: if the wares you're stealing are that precious to you, stop being a loser, stop whining, and start paying for them. I don't want to hear how study x or y show the macro affects of piracy may or may not be bad for whatever industry. Just realize that on a micro (personal) level, you're a selfish douche and you've failed at least one person you should care quite a bit about: yourself.
Would You Sign a One-Year Contract With Twitter?
Avoiding this discussion was why I danced around the name issue by pointing to its referent.
According to their website, they are in favour of: copyright reform, reform of the patents system, better respect of privacy, net neutrality, open government.

That's very vague. I know I'm not going to stick my head out and affiliate myself with a party that doesn't describe their platform in more detail than that.
I agree. I think that those who feel that Linux should be a "main stream" OS (for whatever definition of main stream you choose) are missing the point that it was, and always has been, primarily a hacker's OS.

That's not to say that distros like Ubuntu don't have their place, but there's so much automation going on in these "modern" package management systems that you really aren't going to learn anything. Sure, you'll end up with a very nice, very functional computer, but that (IMHO) isn't the point of Linux. I'd go so far as to say that I feel like Ubuntu is no longer "Linux", just like Mac OS X is no longer "BSD". Based on? Yes. Is? No, Slackware is Linux.
He's famous for being famous which, if you think about it, means he is a perfect match for Twitter.

In more ways than one.
It's nice to help India's economy, or China or Russia. Unfortunately, US is not in the charitable business of helping developing economies.
No offense but if you're not currently implementing this the way the guy suggested you can make the product a ton better if you take his suggestion (I'm guessing you yourself aren't a power user, again no offense intended).

It sounds like what you're doing is generating a new worksheet and populating it with (static) data generated by running the user's SQL query.

This is fine for sharing static data but b/c you're apparently not using excel formulas in generating the 'resultset' worksheet (it's just raw data, again) the 'resultset' sheets aren't going to be auto-updating if the underlying data got changed (on the 'sourcedata' worksheet, if you follow).

If you can compile SQL queries into excel formulas that'll stay updated as data change this goes from an A to A+ produce.

You should start by looking at the documentation for Vlookup and Hlookup, as those are the built-in functions people use to (fake) selection.
The curious appeal of miscellanea
By the 'true and useful' standard, yes. If someone wants to write it, why stop them?

Whether your app dies in obscurity or explodes in popularity, if Wikipedia could collect true and useful info about it, why exert extra effort to exclude or erase that info?

If there's a topic that only a dozen people in the world (currently) care about, but one or two of them are willing and able to write neutral, reference-style articles about that topic that will be of interest to the next dozen people, why exile that work elsehwere because of traditional standards of 'notability' based on the idea of limited staff time and print-page column-inches?
NY Times on Evernote and Freemium
“Just because money doesn’t buy happiness doesn’t mean money cannot buy happiness,” says Elizabeth Dunn

I think this is incorrect. The correct phrase, in my opinion, would be: money doesn't buy happiness, but it can prevent unhappiness.

Likewise, if the means through which you are earning money makes you unhappy, you're totally missing the point.
Better Null Handling Strategies for Java
I use Twitter for all sorts of stuff. It's been awesome for me. I filled up a cryptography class I wanted to give, I ran 2 different surveys, I crowdsourced the content for a poster, I've started innumerable conversations on things, I've directed people to blog posts I wanted to highlight, and I've got 3 months of marketing plans that all hinge on getting the word out over Twitter.

Twitter is useful.

Now, can someone explain how Scoble is useful? Because again I don't know why the hell we've ever listened to him.
Real World Web: Performance & Scalability
At 16:50 : A Good Metaphor for the Open-Source idea. (1985 Video)
Neal Stephenson interview on SlashDot (2004)