skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pointless post
What's my response
Flag it!

[I think I got it right, never done Haiku before]
Principles of social agitation
"Unholy Rage": Eve Online bans 2% of accounts, sees 30% drop in CPU use
Ask HN/PG: Have startups here sponsored H1B visas?
I've heard that some YC companies have hired foreign workers, which implies they've gone through the H1B process. Care to share any experiences? How much does it costs to sponsor an H1B employee?
I'm pretty sure you're being sarcastic and expressing your point in that manner, but the downvotes show that here on HN many people have a sarcasm detector that doesn't work. Think "Sheldon" from "Big Bang Theory."

Of course, I choose to believe that you are intelligent, therefore cannot possibly mean what you appeared to say, and hence must have been being sarcastic. If I'm wrong, then perhaps you could clarify.
I think "Dragon's Den" is a better name. (the Canadian version)

I think it can be a great deal because you get to broadcast your pitch on primetime TV for free - I probably wouldn't go on it for the money, though.
The advice boils down to "let's never learn from mistakes of other people, let's make our own mistakes!".

I doubt humanity as a whole would make any kind of progress this way past the middle ages.
In my understanding the video highlights 2 problems:

a) csrf: Basecamp search results page could reject input that didn't originate from the respective search box. But it's useful to be able to send someone a link that will perform a search - it isn't a state changing operation after all. So everyone allows that.

b) xss: the main problem of course is that the search results page prints the search input without any filtering...
Hackers push boundaries.
Haikus limit sentances,
so you have to cram!
I think I'd have to add "general-purpose" into the mix. Complex proprietary niche languages seem to be able to survive a long time without competition. Especially true when the users of the proprietary language are not themselves computer programmers and nobody has the skill to just start creating competition. (Which is why mathematics does have some open options; there's enough skill crossover to make things like Octave possible.)
Consumers Boycotting Whole Foods
it will fix that one particular blind xss vulnerability, but from 37signals' response ("[their] users find great value in it") it sounds like they are allowing arbitrary html and javascript to be run everywhere else on the site.

other vulnerabilities would probably require that one has a basecamp account to be able to post messages to the site or something, but they allow privilege escalation and need to be fixed just the same.

37signals' response that users should be trusted is just stupid. think of a customer logging into their vendor's basecamp site, being able to take over the vendor's account and then see all of their other customers.

users (and their input) should never be trusted. even if you trust the users, you can't always guarantee that the trusted user is the one in control of their web browser.
Did you read the title?

I love reading too, so I couldn't help myself from hitting the business books before starting a startup. They haven't been completely useless, but not far from it. There are a few useful strategic ideas that I picked up, but the value relative to some of the really great mentors that I've picked up along the way isn't even comparable.
To unit test an asynchronous operation, you need an asynchronous language or library. In Erlang you hardly even notice because the language natively supports it. In Perl I've hacked some stuff up with POE but it's way more painful. But once you have the asynchronous capability, it's not much different than writing a normal unit test.
This reminds me a lot of a previous NYTimes article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/technology/start-ups/14sta...
"Weary of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own"

Which I thought was discussed here, but I can't find a link.
LOL. That's awesome :D

As an immigrant / entrepreneur trying every thing I can to legally work for my startup full time in the US, I'll seriously consider Canada if I fail.
Note that this post is in part a response to this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779812
Oh Haiku OS!
Thou art minimal and grand!
Unlike this poem.
The problem with drugs are their side effects. It's not ethical to allow human experiments when the only positive of a drug is "it's fun."
I'm not saying he isn't guilty. I'm saying 11 years is a very long time. 2 or 3 or hell even 5 years in a prison full of non violent criminals. With good attention making sure he doesn't fall back into crime when he gets out, best he should have a job waiting for him in Verizon or law enforcement.

And Gary Mckinnon shouldn't do time either. He should get more like detention and again best have a job waiting for him.

And Adrian Lamo should have gotten a stern talking to and a job offer.

Simply because these kids are brilliant, non-violent, and socially inept, doesn't mean we should be putting them jail.
I call bullshit. The purpose of making a forecast is not to predict the future, it is to identify errors in the logic of your assumptions. The experienced business guy is simply putting together a model based on obviously fictional data to help understand the financial dynamics of the business - probably to see if there even IS a real business.

It's nice rhetoric to proclaim that since user adoption figures cannot be predicted with accuracy, they should not be predicted at all. Even without accurate forecasts, it is trivial to calculate the required breakeven users and examine scenarios where that breakeven is achieved in a short,medium, or long ramp period. Other valuable metrics are also more easily discerned from a model than by pure guess.

It sounds like me that that business guy is simply doing his job - and it sounds like he knows his job better than many readers here.
Holy mother of #$%#. This is one of those "Skynet" (or, to be less alarmist, "Data") moments I've been seeing with increasing frequency over the last few years.

The first was Big Dog.

This level of dexterity is just incredible. But the speed and precision is what really brings home how incredibly superior robots will be in physical activities soon.
How To Publish a Scientific Comment in 123 Easy Steps
Please don't try to post
this kind of "story". It has
been flagged (this is fun :))
There was an old man
From Peru, whose lim'ricks all
Look'd like haiku. He

Said with a laugh, "I
Cut them in half, the pay is
Much better for two."

Found on the net. No idea who's it is!
"So the number one reason my startup failed was: I was distracted by a cool and shiny feature that didn’t solve anyone’s problem. "
The best sales pitch is a great talk - interesting and informative. Use anecdotes to tell a story. Ask yourself: What's the one question you're answering for the audience so the next time they're thinking about similar stuff you, and your answer, come to mind. Then provide all relevant contact details. Be sure to save time for questions then have a few slides in your back pocket in case you have extra time. If your talk is good enough, that's your sales pitch right there. You're selling yourself through how you convey the main idea.

If you don't know people, conferences can be somewhat lonely. Just keep putting yourself out there. Try to arrange meetings beforehand and then try to spend meals talking with new people. Worry more about exchanging thoughts than business cards. It's easy to forget that you're there to learn. Find out when meeting people what they're learning there. It's a good opening and you'll soon find like minds.
I always get incorrect results for anything that uses the location feature in Firefox 3.5. This time it put me in Chicago, but I've been put in NYC and San Francisco before as well. I'm NEVER in the correct location (Pittsburgh). I'm running Ubuntu for what it's worth. You would think that it would do a reverse DNS on the IP at least to make sure it gets the city correct...
Same thing with me. I'm in Amsterdam, and whenever I turn AdBlock off to experience the web it its full glory (rarely), all the IP-based targeted ads think I'm in weird places (generally still in Holland, occasionally in Germany).

The center of the circle on the map was about 4 meters to the left of where I am sitting on the couch, and the circle encompasses my block and nothing more.

Amazing.
Keep in mind he's valuing his time at 0$ for the title, in which case you can make your first game for $0 very easily.
A site too focused
On purpose, becomes mundane
Broaden your interests.
The US has to crack down on importing Austrians - look what happened in California
It's a ridiculous caricature of what investor-entrepreneur relations are like.

I find the show vaguely nauseating. But even if you enjoy watching, realize that it's an entertainment gimmick, nothing more. I doubt many of the "deals" are ever transacted.
Awesome read!

We're dodging this problem by shelfing most so-called shiny features till we are making money. Thing is shiny features can be really useful--but once they take off, you are too busy maintaining them than figuring out how to make dollars that will fund the shiny features.

In some cases the shiny features and the $ makers are not mutually exclusive and there is definitely a lot of gray.
But remember you will be subject to their socialist universal free healthcare system.
Hiding data, content and technology in real world games
There are several people I'd like to hire, but can't because they're outside the US. It's really too bad, because they're a perfect fit for our team. We've been looking in the US but can't find anyone that fits nearly as well. <sigh>
nascent RSI
100 emacs buffers
yet love at first hack
Mind Dimension 2
His first point "iPhone app development is not trivial." can be shortened to "development is not trivial."

A lot of people, including me, have made the mistake of thinking that creating the product is simple but fail to realise how much work debugging, polishing, designing etc. is. The devil is in the details.
Crockford should stop claiming he invented JSON.

Brendan Eich did, JSON is Javascript, part of it, its own data structure, it is javascript object notation.

What Crockford did was to spread its adoption among other languages, building libraries and encouraging people to use them.

To Caesar what is Caesar’s...
Arbitrarily
Pushing boundaries is not what
Hackers do, at all.

Random mutation
Is not usually an
Improvement. It fails.
You require the people you fund to spend three months in the United States, so there is a strong selection effect in this "trend".
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."

Give the contact and "here's what I do" slide at the beginning, too. If people watch the videos online to get your contact info after the conference, you don't want them to have to go through your whole slide deck/video to find you.
vaksel, Do you work for TechCrunch ? You seem to regularly submit TC articles. Just curious. thx.
I am reluctant
to upvote any haikus that
employ plagiarism.
It was much easier to get a green card when I applied (pre 9/11) than it is today. I know some people with amazing qualifications, successful track records, who've been in the green card process for years. Plus the "are you a permanent resident" question is far more of a blocker now than it used to be. Combine that with opportunities back home and in other countries and you have a problem.

I don't have numbers, but there is enough anecdotal evidence out there. It's not necessarily a bad thing for the home country, but not having options is frustrating.
Nick Campbell Presenting Server JS Platform
If you watch his talk he doesn't claim he invented JSON; he goes out of his way to say he discovered it -- because it was already there. And he even says that he wasn't the first to discover it either -- as many other people figured it out around the same time.
There's a lot to be said for having users pay real money right from the start, no matter how minimal your service, as a way to avoid getting seduced by cool but unmarketable features.
JSON as an interchange format was a unique invention. It may not be a very substantial invention, but it was still a new idea.
If anything I'll shop at Whole Foods more. A public option will continue to hide the costs of healthcare from the people who pay for it (in the form of lower salaries currently, and higher taxes if we get a public plan), and will not bring prices down.
Except that the total cost of investment is a $350 piece of commodity hardware and a free/open SDK. If it's not fast enough, just throw in more / faster cards. Using Caustic's platform means putting min. $4K into a unproven proprietary platform. If performance/price didn't matter, you might as well say "Not that impressive, considering you can just build a render farm".

No disrepect to Caustic, but I could easily see them going the way of Ageia if they're not careful.
The general answer for event-based systems is: reentrantly spin the event loop from the test and block waiting on the result.

The general answer for actor-based systems is: wait on a blocking message receive from the actor task.

The general answer for simple shared mutable state thread-systems is: Write a complex condition-lock and thread combination (which will probably be subtly wrong the first time) to block your thread and wait on the result triggering the condition.
China: Exactly Where Japan Was in the 1980s
Yeah, I get it's injected with lots of drama. It's a TV show, so that should be expected really. I doubt an hour of real-world entrepreneur/VC pitching/negotiations would appeal to the masses, other than us, of course.

However, I really do like the show. I'm a fan of the British version - Dragon's Den. Yeah, the stacks of money on the tables are a bit much, but I actually find a lot of the ideas being pitched quite interesting, as well as the questions the VCs do ask. They seem to be pretty quick to shoot down stupid ideas, and do try to find flaws, so although it is a dramatization, I don't think it's a gross misrepresentation of how any VC would view a particular idea.
Indeed. If you didn't reject the application, then you don't need to explain why you rejected it.

That's like saying "I didn't eat the cookie from the cookie jar; I was really hungry and it was delicious."
The point can't be taught.
QWAN will always elude you.
You code but don't hack.
Why don't you hire them to work remotely then?
Should the "are you a permanent resident" question continue to be a roadblock? Its my understanding the visa programs are meant to help out the U.S. long term by bringing in immigrants that makes the U.S. their home (my favorite reason) and short term to fill immediate skill shortage. If you do not intend to stay by being a permanent resident, why should the government lend a hand?

This is a serious question? Any answers on this?
Maybe a better question is what are reasons that people do not want to become a permanent resident?
LangId Tells You The Language of Your Text
each of the JSConf presentations have been exceptionally well-produced, and I'm sure this will follow suit ...

homepage: http://www.axiomstack.com/

See this blog entry: http://marcorogers.com/blog/08-02-2009/supporting-the-server...

... if you need to integrate with Narwhal/ServerJS ...
Has anyone jumping on this bandwagon even read the op-ed?

Where is our Galts Gulch?
This is Hacker News.

Not a place for your haikus.

GTFO NAO.
I'd be really curious to know what percentage of these boycotters ever really shopped at Whole Foods to begin with. That said, I wonder how passionately they believe in their cause, after all if they are such "single issue shoppers" they should be shopping at Walmart that is advocating the public option along with the SEIU (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02...).
>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.

I think mst's using Arc's do, which is progn.
I get a kick out of refreshing ideas but it feels like a horse kicked me when I see these people who have no idea of what their underlying expenses and scale are like.
It just appeared to me that perhaps you should have tried delegating the speech recognition to the iphone app. That way you would just be dealing with transcribed text which would have been much less of a load on your servers.

Anyway, it was nice to be reminded that features are always secondary. Hope you do better on your next startup.
I doubt it. None of the articles I've seen in major news sites discuss anything more than that he is against a public option. I would love to see some links to an in depth rebuttal of his points by an op-ed in a major news site.
I believe wal-mart support such a plan in order to drive out their competitors. Wal-mart can bear the burden of the cost of healthcare while smaller employers can't.

If there is a good reason to hate wal-mart, this is it.
it was for myspace
I'm not surprised that Walmart would be advocating the public option, as with most major employers that depend on cheap labor, they'll do anything they can to avoid paying for healthcare.
This is going to totally re^H^Hinvent social raytracing.
I REFUSE TO DO BUSINESS WITH ANYONE WHO DOESN'T BELIEVE EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS I DO REGARDING ANY ARBITRARY SUBJECT!

Seriously, though, this sort of senseless group-think annoys me. It also seems to stem from some sort of misguided belief that this is an 'ethical' company and that 'ethical' is a binary toggle that has to encompass everything an entity does or says in every regard - Suffice it to say that an increasingly significant part of me just wants to crawl into a hole and wait for the world to grow up.
The illustrious history of faked photographs
It's not free. ABC has an option to take 2% of your company, even if you don't strike an investment deal.
Interesting. I would think that they would support the plan so as to be able to offset their current healthcare costs in some way.
Close but not really close: identifies faroese as icelandic.
Keep the books. Skip the school. I think mentoring is both the past and the future, but in the present it's hard to find.
I agree. I'm glad they don't hesitate to let people know they're on the wrong track. On one episode, they mentioned that these people have probably never had anyone among their friends and family tell them its a bad idea. For a lot of these ideas, these people really needed a reality check.
"An influence was Rebol, a shame it’s not more popular"

Then the title is misleading. Rebol as an influence to what?

We should ask that question to Brendan to see what influenced HIM to design javascript as he did.
quote from grandparent: "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." ... I agree with parent, obvious sarcasm. Great point.
I probably disagree politically with a lot of CEO's out there, but WholeFoods isn't the one opposing this, their CEO is.

The boycotters seem to be demanding his dismissal. So are they basically asking a company to fire an employee for their political beliefs?
I hope that there is no intersection between those who believe that the free market can respond to ethical concerns, because people will make consumption decisions based partly on ethics, and those who find this boycott contemptible.
>> Suffice it to say that an increasingly significant part of me just wants to crawl into a hole and wait for the world to grow up.

Me too, but when I go out side and talk to real people I find very few of them are as simple minded as the group think they spout sometimes.
Agreed. Development is not trivial all around.

I think my original issue with iPhone dev was that POS NDA Apple had originally. It made the web a virtual wasteland for good info and advice on programming pitfalls and code snippets.

Coming from python and c# I was obviously spoiled =)
Here is the source for my argument: http://www.reason.com/blog/show/134470.html
OpenCourseWare - to access MIT courses over the Internet for free
Yeah I can't stress that point enough. Just get enough core features in your software, get some half decent design for it, and start selling..!

You can always improve incrementally but even just signing up a handful of payers in the beginning at a discount is huge. It proves that your idea is something people are willing to pay for.
Well, there's already Worse Is Better (what RPG called viralness is an integral part of WIB).

Or we could call it "Mark's Law":

> "In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end."

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0
You don't need to badger your devs for anticipated traffic figures in order to calculate those kinds of scenarios. It's one thing to calculate various thresholds and set up hypotheses that you'll test later, once you've collected real data. It's another thing to make numbers up out of whole cloth so you can fool yourself into thinking you understand more than you do about your business.
Even if it is true that we are in a bull market half the time and in a bear one half the time, this can still be viewed as encouraging statistic because it means that companies that start in a bear market do not suffer any excessive weeding out on their way to the fortune 500 as a result of starting in a bear market.
This is Hacker News.
A place for haikus, but not
lame internet memes.
Isn't Lou Dobb's thing usually rallying against illegal unskilled immigrant labor particularly from Mexico? What does that have to do with the skilled H-1B issue. I admittedly don't watch Dobbs, ever, but it seems like techcrunch is just trying to pick a fight.
Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science
Do screen readers read small text in a really soft voice? If not, I'm not sure how text size matters to the blind.
The most exciting defect that I ever had to debug was a dormant async bug that had been in the code for many years. I had checked in what I thought was going to be a fairly innocuous change in a component in our team's subsystem, but it ended up breaking the full build at the end of the day and was going to be backed out the next day if I didn't prove I wasn't responsible for it.

It was about 6AM after a night of constantly building debug ROMs with different instrumentation to try and get one that I could get both meaningful debug information out of but still suffered from the defect that I finally tracked down the problem. It turned out that a circular pseudo-dependency involving 3 different subsystems and five different components was deadlocking, and all I'd done is change the timing a fraction of a second to trigger the deadlock.

Asynchronicity is hard to test, and you'll always, always get it wrong. Don't sweat it too much. Unless you're building flight control software, just make sure the common use cases work 100% of the time and if broken edge cases turn up, fix them as and when.
Thanks. I also think it’s important to hear about the failures since it really is all too often we hear about the next digg or facebook..

I just hope this article can be helpful to those who are doing their own startup so they can avoid the same mistakes I made.
I wrote it in part to remind myself to never make these same mistakes again and in part to give back to the community. I know there are plenty more like me out there and I’d love to hear their stories as well…
Haikus need _kigo_ -
OP is not a haiku.
But neither is this.

Director's special edition alternate ending:

This is; summer rain!
This is bullshit man.
I refuse to write haikus.
And you can't make me.