skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the author's thesis but I'm bothered by the way the numbers are presented. Other articles in favor of making immigration for skilled workers easier usually are guilty of the same number fudging.

In the article: "My research team documented that one quarter (http://ssrn.com/abstract=990152) of all technology and engineering startups nationwide from 1995 to 2005 were started by immigrants."

The linked source says it more precisely: "We found there was at least one immigrant key founder in 25.3% of all engineering and technology companies established in the U.S. between 1995 and 2005 inclusive."

The key words in the second quote are "at least one immigrant key founder"; there are typically 2-4 founders in a startup (YC's avg is 2.5). If we just calculate what fraction of founders are immigrants across all startups (=total_immigrant_founders/total_founders), the number should only be ~ 11% [1], which sounds less dramatic but is more accurate in terms of how much credit immigrant founders deserve for the startups.

Similarly "more than 25% of U.S. global patents had authors who were born abroad" should really mention what fraction of inventors listed on patents are foreign-born, since patents typically have many coinventors.

[1] - There's probably actual data on this somewhere, but if we assume the probability p of a founder being immigrant is independent of other founders, and the number of founders per startup = 2.5:

=> 1 - (1-p)^founders_per_startup = probability_that_startup_has_at_least_1_immigrant_founder

=> 1 - (1-p)^2.5 = .25

=> p = .1087
What's changed is not the publicly available data, but the cost involved in searching it.

20 years ago would it have been worth the resources required to put a 'search agent' (a real investigator) into the social network (every pub) to recover a four figure sum of taxes owed?

People's expectations haven't yet caught up with regards to being caught for low level crimes that were routinely not enforceable in the recent past.
Some blogger catfight over an Apple fanboy apologia?

How on earth did Apple manage to turn consumer electronics into a drama-rich soap opera? And more to the point, why?
"Soon", maybe, but it will take a long time for it to be Generally Recognised As Reliable. (For all I argue against buying I to a brand just because, I do like ZFS more with Sun's name behind it)
Interesting. I don't have #9. Ofcourse I sometimes re-use code I've written for previous projects, but mostly by forking and adapting the code for the task at hand.
if a person can't code in front of another person it is just because they can't code at all

Never thought of it that way before, but it makes perfect sense. If you can ride a bike, change a flat tire, or balance a checkbook, you can do it alone or in front of others. Why not the same for programming?
How Nested Functions Work, part 1
That's a great word. It's really fascinating how certain words need a sentence-long definition when translated from other languages to English. So much is captured in one word!

And that's an incredible TED talk. I recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it that they watch it when they have a chance.

The best part in my opinion: "That's not what my creative process is - I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too."
Thanks. Could be really great if someone posted in pastebin or whatever the output of that command.
Sorry, I must have misunderstood.

how do you know WHAT to work on

For me, that's easy...

"What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?"

From http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

If being with your friend or working at a coffee shop keeps you from doing this, then decouple your friend/coffeeshop time from your work time.
Looks like an amazing opportunity for spammers to hammer a specific neighborhood ... or for teens to crank call the whole neighborhood.
That reads like it ought to be on a blog called Fake John Gruber.
Language Based Software Engineering
Upload image to S3 via right click on Snow Leopard
Kobe Bryant is the best example of sprezzatura in sports, especially when you see him drive to the rim with four defenders on him. Kobe also speaks italian.
Critics want Ikea to go back to the Futura
Except it costs money, so that would be a big deterrent.
User support differs from many other roles in that a standard interview actually can be a very good way to evaluate a candidate: it gives you a chance to demonstrate clarity and succinct answers to questions you initially have no control over. Remember that your interviewer (should) be looking for someone who can quickly & clearly answer a question - so always be brief rather than expansive [which is not always good advice for other roles].
I recommend mentioning the importance of gently (but firmly) controlling the direction of a support conversation to identify the core issue & efficiently identifying the best response - resolve/escalate/apologise/whatever. Then if possible demonstrate that skill within the interview - so if subsequently asked a vague 'open' question, politely ask 'closed' questions to narrow down the real substance behind that question, and then answer that decisively.
Good luck!
Why the drama?

Edit: oh -- http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/08/dear-gruber-youve-been-pwne...

Not entirely undeserved.
Preventing Cat Cancer With Daily Supplements
Custom Firmware 5.50 GEN-A Build 4 Released: CFW for the PSP-1000 & 2000
I know this problem. The last time someone asked me to write a sort in an interview I ended up implementing bubble sort. "You know", I said, "I remember knowing how better sorts worked, once. But I'm blanking on it now, so let me just write the stupidest thing that could possibly work, and then after that I'll see if I've had time to remember anything."

It didn't seem to be a big deal. Nor should it be -- the goal of your interviewer is to watch you do things like: test your code, remember to check the edge cases, manipulate pointers correctly, be able to figure out how your brain-dead bubblesort algorithm is likely to scale as N grows larger, knowing what exceptions are and understanding their proper role...

It's possible that the interview is better if you're missing your higher brain functions while you're writing the demo code. You're trying to demonstrate your everyday habits, the things you do instinctively, when your memory, your cram session, and Stack Overflow all fail you. It's like asking a trumpeter to pick up their instrument and blow a few notes: according to Malcolm Gladwell, some orchestra conductors claim to be able to detect expert players with nothing more than this one test.

ADDENDUM: Oh, look, Reg Braithwaite already said this, more or less:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/dont-overthink-fizzbuzz....
Although there probably is a lot to be learned about just what Apple et. al. are doing in terms of fucking developers around with their app stores/etc, I do think that the attitude of "shut up and code" is also quite valid.

Hopefully people are just reading the articles on Hacker News to have a break between work, but if they're not your article does suggest what they could be doing - shutting up and producing something.
For frogmetrics interviews, we did screen sharing sessions. You get to watch them code in their native environment, and see how they tackle the kinds of problems you'd be paying them to solve. In fact, the project we gave everybody was the next big feature we needed to implement, and the guy who won the job just brought his already-completed code along with him.
Evangelism and Scrum
> So while you're claiming that the author can't use America as a free-market example to bash on, that's not the real point.

I'm claiming there's problems with the American system that everyone, regardless of party or political affiliation, can agree with. I'm further claiming that they have fairly simple fixes that would reduce cost and increase quality. That means healthier people with more options. Here's one such way:

Tax-advantaged health insurance is one reason the system is so expensive - frequently, all health care purchases are routed through insurance if a person can afford health insurance. That means there's these huge administrative costs and conflicts over treatments.

There'd be lots of ways of addressing it: You could gradually remove the tax break on it, you could give everyone the option to receive any of their benefits in cash tax-free instead of the tax-free benefit, you could allow people to deduct all health and medical spending regardless of insurance. I don't know where those three ways of changing things would fall in the political continuum, but one increases taxes, one lowers taxes, and one keeps the tax yields about the same while reducing the reliance on the inefficient insurance system with its associated bureaucracy.

> The general debate out there is that a lot of people are saying "we don't want socialism" and "the free-market is more effective" while refering to the American system.

Yes, I'm intentionally sidestepping that debate, pointing out three issues that are not backed by either party, that everyone can agree on. We can fix those and be more prosperous, and then continue to the general debate in which people have been having a very hard time of agreeing.

The American system is more expensive than it should be for the quality. There's a few elegant, low cost, simple improvements that can be made. I think we ought to make them.
A mystery man awakes in Discovery Park
Unfortunately, many other companies are already doing this (Time Warner/Earthlink/Road Runner). Comcast is just following a growing trend.
You can get at them if you enable the menu item, then select "Mobile Account Preferences" from the dropdown. However, this is as far as I've gotten because I don't have the ability to test to see if this works.
I think that wishing death/suicide kind of crosses the line for me. I agree that I think the college loan industry is a bit ridiculous, but something about this comment just went a bit further than I'm comfortable with.
This is a great example of a business where the revenue opportunity when sold as an insurance policy may be much higher than when sold as a per-incident/per-claim service.

Reposition as lost pet insurance, with differing rates based on type of pet, age of pet, whether or not pet has a homeagain RFID implant, etc. Perhaps also offer a standard response or a premium response, where the standard includes robocalls, craigslist posting, notification to local pet shelters/SPCA/dog catcher; premium level includes posting 'lost dog' flyers in local area using craigslist-recruited 'street teams.'

Sell it through vets, a PetCo partnership, dogster.com, etc. $29/year or something affordable like that. Get a special tag and everything "this pet protected by Pet Guardian" or whatever. See also AAA, TowBoat/US, Lifelock for insurance programs that target unlikely bad things like broken down car, grounded boat, or stolen identity.

"Do you care enough about your doggie to protect him with Pet Guardian?"

Market size is big: 60% of American households own pets. If just 0.50% of these pet-owning households bought lost pet insurance @ $29/year, that's an $8mm/yr business. If you got 3% of the market, it's $50 mm/yr.
The first web framework and ORM for C++
A custom mouse cursor on a website! Haven't seen that in a while.
Design is Open Source
Mark's a great designer. Interesting to see his thoughts on design / development in the open source world. A bit long, but a pretty good read.
Pretty sure that if teens didn't tweet, Jonas brothers wouldn't be trending multiple times a day.
I hate "n things" lists but that was pretty good.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Sprezzatura

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Nicoll

It's ours now! Mu-hu-ha-ha-ha!
JSON RPC is looking for a new maintainer
http://books.google.com/books?id=WuHYXm4tH3EC&printsec=f...

I can get hooked in a book then on the left is a link to Amazon for me to buy it... I think this is potentially more beneficial to Amazon then threatening.
I've worked it out ...

Average life expectancy in countries where most people die from old age or incurable diseases is around 80. Slightly higher in Australia, lower in the USA. So if 55 is still middle aged, then 60 or so will probably be the boundary into old age.

Dividing things up equally, we get that old age is 60 to 80, and middle age is 40 to 60, and the age where you don't think about it and don't name it is 20 to 40.

That fits.

So what about pre 20? I've always held that children are aliens that mutate into humans. I think we pretty much would all agree that teenagers are not properly human, and so that ties in. Up to age 13 we are aliens, then 13 through to about 20 we mutate into humans. 20 to 40 we're simply "people", 40 to 60 middle-aged, 60 onwards old-aged.

I'm not sure I find that comforting ...
Posterous for journalism: Documenting the hottest summer in Austin's history
I am not wishing anyone death. I am just saying that I don't care if he jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn't say I hoped he would jump...

Ruslana Korshunova's death [1] was disturbing. If this guy committed suicide, it would not bother me the least.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruslana_Korshunova
Little Portugal can't take on the huge surplus of doctors from Eastern Europe -- many still end up construction workers as well (although the salaries compared to back home end up being worth it).

Definitely a shame we can't get them to the US. It is insane that we have roughly the same number of doctors as we did 30 years ago, despite increases in population and average age.
The kind of browser games I'm referring to are no more demanding on your internet connection than the average News site.

I seriously can't see how you can disagree with this. Having to not downloading something lowers the threshold to give it a try. That's so obvious to me I can't explain it any more clearly than that, sorry.
Do you have any links or resources about focus training?
I'm interested to see what someone could do with this, if they pushed the idea a little harder. I'm also just curious what people who've used JSON for REST services a lot think of this. Is it just a fancy way of describing what people are already doing with JSON? Or is there real value in this standard for making communication with JSON over a network easier?
Scheme Cookbook: Common idioms and recipes in Scheme
Now I'm wondering if they count as design patterns or not...
Are you saying her death was tragic because she was a hot young model while he would just be a dead old loser? That's the vibe I'm getting from this thread generally.
ZFS allows RAID-5 without the "write hole" (google it). That's the killer advantage for me. The rest is just gravy.

I'm amazed you found set-up cryptic. Once I understood the concepts of ZFS pools and filesystems, I found the toolset among the most elegant and well-designed out there.

I think it might actually be a little daunting in it's simplicity, maybe. ("that's it?!")
Ask HN: Realtime chat engine
What is the best technology to implement real time chat engine ?
Fed makes $14bn profit on crisis loans
how it doesn't result in everybody dying

I doubt this.
I’m not sure if it’s “drama” or “teasing fun”. With those 2 it can be hard to tell.
That is one of the best TED talks I've ever watched, and I've seen it many times. I read her book, "Eat Pray Love" and googled her, when I came across the TED video. If anyone reading this hasn't watched the video yet, please do.
Follow up:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009702921_j...
The Eqyptian pyramids were clearly 'a place of honor', made with a perfect shape, and certainly infused with riches galore. They're trying to convey the exact opposite here.
Geography plays a strong role as well. In the US AIM is super popular (until it was supplanted by gchat in my clique). European friends used to use ICQ (long ago), and I think MSN has been generally popular in Asia forever.
I'm not sure what exactly OP was referring to but I can tell you that the main employer in this area is the US Gov't. The rest of the market is largely gov't contractors and subcontractors and various other service providers to the entire infrastructure. I worked for a small company in the area for a number of years, not a startup but it was a good experience, but it takes a lot of searching to find something that's non-gov't and a decent gig. I haven't run across a startup scene per se but then I haven't really looked.
Ask HN: Share your long-term travel experiences
I've been thinking about going away on a long trip. Driving from Toronto to Vancouver to Panama over the course of about 6 months, then flying to Asia and Europe.

I was curious about this crowd's experiences, since I'm pretty nervous about going.
I'm not sure I like the idea of inventing external imaginary beings that grant us extraordinary powers for no other reason than it makes it easier to accept those powers.

It seems dishonest.
"This program was developed over the past 7 years just by me. 5 years in part-time and 2 years full time, living off my savings and spending almost all of them, just to accomplish this dream."

Great story. Thumbs up!

But have you ever asked a question: "why there is no competition in C++ web frameworks?"

And I personally wouldn't use framework which is not open-sourced, no matter what technology is it using.
Cool. On most platforms we used a bookmarklet for the "push" function (works great) but on Android we needed a native client because their bookmarklets don't work yet. dannyr actually wrote most of the Java for that.
Oh please oh please oh please oh please use this for your next big app. I need a new car. ;)
Where does this nonsense come from? I can't take being silent and just flagging anymore. This is exactly The kind of story that made me stop reading digg then reddit... I really don't want to finish that sentence with Hacker News. I don't care if these stories are submitted but I do care that there is an opaque process around how I can make my actions against these stories more effective. I would also like to know the general stats about the community. I wonder if this is just a natural communal process as the community grows or a flaw in the structure of the community design.
A sudden outbreak of common sense, in contrast to the current discussions among the major media conglomerates of how to monetize their online content. Not the same thing but the attitudes of NPR vs. Murdoch in particular couldn't be more different.
I'll second Social Matchbox as a good place to learn about startups in the DC area.

I've recently started a software company with a friend from Mason, but unfortunately we can't afford to hire.

Hit me up if you want to grab coffee/beer (contact info in profile). Good luck and welcome to DC!
Well, if flagging isn't enough for you, you can try submitting other things or upvoting other items to try to push it off the front page. Not a great answer, I know; but that's all I've got to offer.

That being said, the weekends always have a worse signal-to-noise ratio than weekdays do.
I read in a Norwegian newspaper that a part of Oslo "Grønland", there was a guy who thought that Norwegians should follow certain muslim norms because it's a muslim neighborhood. This was in response to some people that had been assaulted in the neighborhood.
Comet?
Stop posting reddit/digg material here!
There's already Wt: http://www.webtoolkit.eu/

Wt is setup the way that a C++ developer would expect to write web applications. TouchIdeas seems to be set up the way a web developer would expect to write C++.
Freeing the H1-B wouldn't just help out programmers, but all disciplines, including doctors.
PDF: http://develooper.com/talks/rww-mysql-2008.pdf
What about the new law about robo-calling? Will they be affected by that?
I've been wondering, couldn't missing pets be tracked with dogs? Like they could find them via their smell?
I have the same problem as the parent comment. (http://news.ycombinator.com/news doesn't work while http://news.ycombinator.com does).

If it doesn't break anything for you to add the wildcard, you should tack it on.

edit: you also seem to have forgotten to add it to userscripts--that's where all the cool greasemonkey kids hang out.
Yes, and we could also get rid of the requirement of an undergrad before med school, as well as increase the caps on med school enrollment.

There is so much low hanging fruit that has mysteriously remained almost completely absent in the current USA health care debate.
Does it sound right to you that your next big feature can be implemented during an interview, before the candidate is even hired?

I know, you didn't mean that it was all completed, but still... how much free work can you get from people before it's called abuse? If you had said "the guy who won the job just brought the best ideas with him", I'd be all happy.
The funny thing about the "I'm a Mac" commercials is that they remind me of high school, where the jocks and cool kids would entertain themselves by mocking the nerds and geeks.

I watch these and side with the PC character because I hated that behavior in high school and identify more with the geeky guy.
Oh, snap. Nothing burns like six days later.
Gruber’s reply was unbecoming and mean-spirited. Gruber routinely awards people the title “Jackass of the Week” for having opinions he disagrees with or for making erroneous predictions. When he himself whiffed hard on his Google Voice post he had to know that some ribbing and criticism was headed his way. He should have been prepared to handle it graciously.

Capitalizing on Gruber’s mistake, John Lyons writes a post that primarily ridicules _Apple_ for its obsession with secrecy and for its contemptuous relationship with the media. Yes, he does make fun of Gruber, but it’s from the point of view of Fake Steve. Lyons himself isn’t saying Gruber is a “dipshit”, he’s saying that he bets that’s how Steve Jobs thinks of him.

In return, Gruber seems to really scrape the barrel to find ammunition for a purely ad hominem attack, ridiculing Lyons’ day job and implying that his writing is disingenuous. I takes a serious lack of perspective to call the creator of Fake Steve Jobs a tool of old media.
I am implying that the death of a young person is more tragic than the dead of an old loser, yes.

Ruslana had a life ahead of her. This guy is in his late 50s, he has already exceeded the life expectancy of a few decades ago. He made a career as a parasite. Now he has no job. He could have moved to some remote place in Central or South America, or Asia where his savings would allow him to live (albeit frugally) for a few years and start a new life. Instead, he moves to NYC, which is not exactly cheap, tries to get a job in the dying financial sector, tries to publish idiotic novels, and when that all fails, he goes whining to the NYTimes, thus humiliating himself in front of everyone. Newsflash: the world does not owe him anything. He made bad life decisions, now he's paying a price. To each, his own.
Do we live in a computer simulation? [pdf]
Ask HN: How to - Looking for work?
I am currently a high school student with a few years programming experience and even some work experience, so I was wondering:

How would someone in my position go about looking for work?

Work meaning part time, probably remote programming job.

What are the various methods to try? What's successful? Any suggestions?
Twitter could do bit.ly links only when sending via SMS, and then do normal links via the API and web interface, just shortening the link text with ...

I don't see any reason for them not to do this.