skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These "objections" are just getting out of hand.

How many founders can you bring over for one company?

That's hardly an issue. The optimal number of founders is basically known. You can argue about 2, 3, or 4, but it's obviously way less than 10.

The pro arguments now are based on anecdotes, not data

The proposal is based on reasoning, not anecdotes, and it seems like pretty clear reasoning to me. The anti arguments are a lot of spaghetti thrown at a wall. The current thread is a good example.

There are a lot of issues with the verification of "bona fide founder" status.

That's not an argument against the proposal, it's an argument in favor of sensible policy design - something that is lacking in the status quo.

there's a solution that works right now: find an American co-founder.

A profoundly ignorant statement. Arbitrary co-founder relationships are a predictor of failure. "Marry an American" would be better advice, and it's horrible advice. (Edit: I mean horrible advice for startup immigration! I'm all in favor of marrying Americans generally :))

We shouldn't be trying to steal startups from other countries

Yes "we" should. That's one of the most intelligent things a country that wants to build wealth could do.

this group would do a lot more for startups if they channeled this energy into healthcare reform

Visa issues are a huge obstacle facing startups (edit: and startup investors); there are many, many examples. How many times does "health care" appear on such a list? I've never heard it cited once.
The videos of the speech I found on YouTube seem to be edited and missing some of the quotes mentioned in the article.

You can see the full speech (approx. 23 minutes long) here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/15/michael-jordan-hall...
Also, the fact that everyone knows that it's a bit difficult ($500 fine for being caught on the roof, locked doors, etc.) makes the hacks more impressive when they do happen.
Also, if you can generate rocket fuel with internal labour (not imported), you can outdo the Americans in rocket fuel cost by a maybe 10x factor (I mean India here, or any economy like Thailand, with a different 'gearing' from the US dollar).
Which is a faulty argument, because you flat-out can't work in the US on a tourist visa.
Also, and everyone's heard me on this before - this group would do a lot more for startups if they channeled this energy into healthcare reform. Job lock-in is real and affects many, many more potential startup founders than immigration policy.

Absolutely. The "founders visa" thing isn't bad because it's scary policy; it can't be scary since it will never happen. It's bad because it's diverting our attention from the real issues.
It's hard to tell. For salary info go to: glassdoor.com
If there not willing to give NASA more funds there almost better off pulling the plug on the thing and instead giving the money to private space companies, or retaining NASA as a purely research/ robotic exploration company.
> To me, pair programming is the only way to work. Writing code is not only scientific, it’s also a creative process.

I agree with the statement about how programming is creative work, and I disagree with the 'only way to work' statement. Pair programming is a great tool, but it doesn't have to be always used. When you adopt a methodology or process like XP or Scrum, we don't always have to adopt it wholesale - just pick the pieces that work. Pair programming, in my experience is excellent at solving difficult issues under deadline and/or implementing brand new features. For everything else, it may be overkill. Plus, with pairing, it's hard to get your mental breaks in while you simmer a problem in your mind (e.g. check out News.YC).

It's kind of like the concept of scrum rooms. We had a critical iteration and flew everyone in for a conference room-based intense week-long session. We got a lot done - much more than we could have done over WebEx. However, at the end, I wanted to kill the guy with the noisy trackball. Close quarters can become trying over time (extended family meetings anyone?)

Hashrocket may be a notable exception to the norm of programmers working in isolation/cubes (especially
in larger companies)
The topic is a visa proposal which proposes to "hack our economy". Although I don't completely agree with likhd2, bringing up health care is of relevance if fixing certain of those issues would create more jobs and startups than this visa proposal.
> How many times does "health care" appear on such a list? I've never heard it cited once.

It comes up occasionally. Here's an example I found with searchyc:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764255
I know you just picked a random number, but to be clear, it's wayyyy high.
It'd be really cool to see the responses, only of course, if Jon is comfortable with this.
http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html

You can read the article as a reference. But, the real answer is:

It depends.
Jolicloud, a cool new OS for your netbook
I've never experienced pair programming, and I'm dubious that I'd work well in it, but I'm amazed at employers that would prevent employees who were interested from working in pairs.
Yes, as a startup founder, I also don't support the principle of special laws for "startup founders".
The purpose of a start up is to serve their customers. I think that we at HN tend to downplay the importance of business guy's role in this task. They abstract many of the "mundane" tasks of scaling a business and let the technical guys focus on coding the product. I can't find the essay, but PG did mention that a business, in its simplest form, is a product that serves customers. Though there has always been an "us vs. them" mentality between the two, the ultimate goal is to best serve the customer.
As much as that senior engineer is able to acquire through skillful negotiation, probably not exceeding 1-2% in a company on the VC track.
Checking Username Availability with Mootools and Request.JSON
they have one; I might have it around somewhere but it's probably missing a lot
I grant you that it's a data point (well, sort of), but what I meant is that I've never heard it being cited by people who know a lot about startups, and they cite visa issues all the time.

Anyway, bringing up health care in this context is the very definition of a red herring. Nothing stops one from being in favor of both sensible health care and sensible immigration.
Heh, I wonder if "she" used my example iPhone + Chipmunk Physics project:

http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/02/21/chipmunk-physics-engin...
Well said, if something like this actually got passed, which I doubt, it wouldn't be one of the many things that I "fire" my representative for come election time.
Ultimate Edition 2.3 | Ultimate Edition
I hope this spurs some entrepreneurial growth in the affected areas, such as gardening services.
We need type inference, or just a better syntax for type declarations?
Wal-Mart++?

I've ordered lawn mower parts, (kid's) toys, a laptop, a Kindle, hard drives, etc, etc from Amazon this year.

My local hardware store didn't have the lawnmower parts I needed but Amazon did.
Thanks for pointing to that thread. Bokonist makes a strong case against accreditation bodies in general, barriers to entry and the associated slippery slope.

While I am sympathetic to that idea, we have to remember that the Founder Visa is a type of liberalisation, not a type of barrier. The solution mightn't be perfect, but it could be better then no founder immigration. While accreditation is possibly bad in general, it may be worth it if it pokes a hole in the immigration barrier.

However, I think that there is a strong case against startup visas specifically. I think you would have to be willing to live with quite serious market distortions if you are prepared to support something like this.

I made this argument on a previous thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823006
1. FP is almost never done in software, it hurts performance big time, The only reason gcc uses it - it wants to be cross-platform, otherwise it might have perfectly used native FP.
Also a lot more convenient to use different floating point point formats whene they are supported by language and hardware you running on, than messing with libraries.
2. Another example : OCaml. It has no "single float" type, and that is a reason I am not gonna use it for making a compiler; I'd choose haskell or F# - both of them have float32.
3. Depends what kind of HLL we are tslking about - Python and Ruby are defintely very poor choice for a compiler : lack of strong typing, only one type of FP is used, needs explicit watch for integer operations overflow, poor performance, lack of mature, bug free implementation (compared to C++ or ML for example).
ML derived languages, however are very good for making compilers.
And it improves the conversation by adding metrics and filtering. In my personal experience it has induced me to improve my writing and become a more reasonable, less ideological, person.
Spot on, but at this point it borders on a personality disorder. He was genetically fit for his job in both the way his mind was wired and his physicality.
I think in the longer term we'll see storage that does read repairs continuously and so can tolerate out of sync redundant data. Where exactly to place this in the file/volume/block hierarchy isn't clear.
Change Of Fortunes? Pay Gap Narrows For Early, Late Stage VCs
Uh,

While one can overestimate the number of folks gaming the system, there certainly are some.

It is much more desirable to attain the legal right to reside in the US and/or the legal to work in the US compared to simply getting to the US and residing illegally. Thus there are those who attempt to gain these things under false pretense - sometime they succeed now. Sometimes they are even people we'd want here but even then, it would be better if they come in an orderly fashion rather than scheming up ways to work legally here.
If I were an immigrant from China or India under this new visa program, the first thing I would do in hiring programmers is fly back home and crank up a top quality, low cost team. As things progressed, I would take it further: anything not absolutely necessary to be within 50 miles of my investor would be done back in my home country.

As an investor, I would fully expect/encourage these founders to behave like this.

The typical cultural and communication problems of outsourcing do not apply in this case. You are taking someone from their home country that will have experience working with their own people and processes.

> "Visa issues are a huge obstacle facing startups (edit: and startup investors); there are many, many examples."

Can you please provide these examples?

> "How many times does "health care" appear on such a list? I've never heard it cited once."

Quite a bit actually. Given how much Health Care reform is in the news, I find it surprising the proponents of the founders visa didn't think about this issue already.
RIP Facebook Beacon
> Increasing our chances of survival as a species should be a high priority but it seems we can't see the forest through the trees.

Why should this be a priority? There are better things for NASA to do than satiate some folks' religious beliefs.
I ordered a Wii from Amazon, got a better deal and extra crap with it...Amazon is the only place I shop online.
I knew that not especially bright people would read my post and think that is about doctors. No, my post is about patents: USPTO is US Patent authority, that gives patents for all industries; it is carried/lobbyed by pharma, that itself have millions of questionable patents, and very interested to leave thing as they are; attempt to dismantle software patents would disturb the swamp, and as side effect should be prevented.
Do we have to do so much just to make people read a book?
... legaly. As a janitor or on gas station - perfectly can.
I can't arrange for an in-store pickup when I order something from Amazon, and I can't order a copy of any Marilyn Manson CD from Wal-Mart. I was shopping for a Magnavox DVD Recorder (model: H2160MW9) and found it for $290.99 at Amazon vs. $229.00 from Wal-Mart's site.

IMHO, both sites will continue to serve their respective niches. I don't think either juggernaut is going anywhere anytime soon. :)
I don't care what anyone wants to think of Amazon as. They are just Amazon, the best retailer for practically anything
the claim that tourist visas are the only thing subject to abuse

I didn't say that or anything like it, and I don't see how the point I was making could have been any clearer.
In a philosophical sense, no. Realistically, though, the more important aspect is not whether one partner is more important but what the team dynamic is like. If one partner perceives they are more important, or feels under-appreciated, then it's likely the partnership will get in the way of business and, ultimately, success.

My belief is that in a successful partnership (as in marriage), both people must be comfortable in their quite different but equally important roles.
That's not entirely true. If we're at the block level, it's more difficult for us to optimize recovery. If we're at a higher level where we have access to some sort of summary information, like the checksummed tree of blocks in zfs, then we can quickly isolate mismatched data and copy only that from the available to the recovering drive.

If we want the same capability at a layer below the file system, say the raid controller, than we end up needing a much more complicated implementation that is in effect a layering of two filesystems. Given general trends towards clustered commodity hardware I'd expect the software to keep getting smarter and the block level devices to keep getting dumber.

It seems like there's a role that's missing in the storage hierarchy. Something like an extent manager that doesn't maintain all the actual metadata, leaving that to the file system above, but that does have a concept of a tree of indirectly referencing extents.

Something similar to how allocation and garbage collection can be provided by libraries in c++.
Balderdash. Watch the speech. This article is pure nonsense.
I would hardly call increasing our chances of survival a 'religious belief' but if it is than sign me up.

NASA should focus on buying rockets from Elon Musk.
Social networking federation: why not use .tel?
What you are saying is logical fallacy, in fact.

1. More important issues do make other issues make other issues less important after the have been taken into consideration by definition of word "more" and less.
After more important issues are taken care of - well yes, the do not alter the priority of other problems.

2."Hackers" are people, and the topic of this talk is not about computers either; if you are about to start political campaign you can not tal about RoR, hadoop, clouds or whatever else technological; you gotta take into account, real old like humanity issues - healthcre, fraud, flee of capital; externalities of robbing countries of enterpreneurs.
> You need to have _precise_ mapping between types in compiler and the language you implement.

No. You don't need that. You can treat your data however you want until you place it into the final binary. Before that, you can even treat all your numbers as strings if you really want to. If you need some constant expression evaluation, you just have to replicate the target machine's math operations in software - no magic involved here. As long as you get the right result, noone cares what you do internally.

If your compilation machine == target machine, you can even construct a function that calculates the expression and actually run it to get the result.
Your right, it would be great to fix both health care and immigration. But this founders visa plan doesn't do either. It attempts to create a new category of immigration to fix one issue that certain investors have. If you really want to fix immigration, at least start by dissecting the problems with H1-Bs. I do see that the current proposal claims that an easiest route would be to modify the EB-5. But this is really creating a new type of visa for this special purpose.
I've pair programmed before, and in my experience it's great when the codebase and job at hand is so terrible, that when working individually it's hard to have the will to live, let alone be productive.

In this environment, pair programmed got us both past the logjam we were both experiencing on this codebase and we were able to get things into the sort of shape that working alone became not only palatable but enjoyable again.

We also did some API work together, and I think if you're writing interfaces and the like, working on that with someone who will be using it can be helpful in getting a good initial API out there.

There are also other sorts of programming tasks where I don't feel pair programming was very productive (for me/us anyway).
Can you please provide these examples?

I know at least a dozen people who have personally experienced this, but I'm not going to name anybody. I also have read and heard many statements by people like PG, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld - people who really know about startups - who mention this as a key issue. I have not ever heard anyone bring up health insurance as this specific kind of impediment before, until a few moments ago when people suddenly started mentioning it on HN as a way to monkey-wrench a completely different issue. Find me someone who's made 20 or more angel investments who agrees that the visa issue is less significant to new startups than health care, and I will grant the legitimacy of the objection.

(This is not to say that health insurance isn't a big issue in general, though personally it strikes me as more of an issue for people who want to switch jobs than found startups - that's important, but not the same thing.)

Edit: in fairness, I should add that many of those people I know personally did eventually get visas, but it was expensive, difficult, and distracting - to such a degree that everyone who goes through the process says it is insane.
Why don't we just give them some of ours.
Buzz Aldrin has said that if we send men to Mars and back once - it's an accomplishment but if we can do it three times, then we've proved that we have solved the problem. Russia is already training men to live in isolation for one hundred and five days (the duration of the Mars - Earth flight).

http://pda.physorg.com/_news157702743.html
1. Any compiler that supports cross-compilation supports a software FP implementation. GCC, MSVC (CL, that is), and many others. You take a speed hit, but it's downright negligible in a compiler.

2. Having never used OCaml for compiler dev, I can't speak on this.

3. The lack of strong typing has no effect on the ability of Python or Ruby to handle compilation. Like the Lisp family, these are very, very flexible languages with strong benefits to compiler developers, and I wouldn't trade them for anything else I've used.

TBH, I think ML-based languages are poor choices for compiler development. You spend as much time worrying about your own code as you do the code you're compiling, which you just don't do when you write a compiler in Scheme, Ruby, or another 'dynamic' language.
I think it already has
Yes, in practice, everybody pair programs, on an as-needed basis. When it's not needed...well, you shouldn't be doing it. I seriously think that non-stop pair programming is just a way to keep people from goldbricking (as the article hinted at the end).

And really, 90 percent of programming is more "typing" than programming because the work is straightforward.
Except that it's not. Time is relative to each observer.

Creating a consistent global view of time requires communication to achieve this consensus. Not just that, we know from FLP that we'll need to use failure detectors and timeouts to simulate a globally synchronous system.

This approach (namely Paxos) has such a high performance cost that it's important to understand alternative perspectives that do not require a global clock (in any form). This was the entire point of Rich's talk: that we gain advantages from having a more nuanced model of time.
That's not an argument against the proposal, it's an argument in favour of sensible policy design - something that is lacking in the status quo.

It is if you are arguing that a sensible policy is not possible.
I think that the rise of Amazon as the primary retailer leaves the delivery market ripe for upheaval. The current delivery model is kind of awkward: they do a first delivery when you're at work, and then trying to coordinate with them becomes a huge hassle. I usually end up having packages delivered to my parents' house, since they won't leave packages at my door at my current apartment (and rightfully so!)

To me, it seems like it's in Amazon's best interest to use a delivery service that is more convenient for the end user than the current model, like picking from available delivery dates and times.
How To Appear To Be A Sophisticated Programmer
> FP is almost never done in software, it hurts performance big time

During the compilation? Would you even see the difference if the compiler did 0.1*0.2 by emulating cpu processing, instead of via one instruction? The cost of register allocation for a simple function will be greater than optimising many constant fp expressions. It simply doesn't matter here. If you have a convenient type, you use it, if you don't, you download any libieee754 and interface with its functions...

Seriously - if you're writing a compiler, there are so many more important problems than lack of mapping between the target and local types :( It may not be an elegant solution to handle fp expression evaluation via an external library, but it's only done during the compile time (so only once) and it's easily solvable.
Seems fairly obvious; one child per family/couple will result in the population decreasing over time (it's not even enough for replacement). Added to the cited 119 to 100 ratio of male to female children, it's a pretty major issue.

Not to say that decreasing populations are a bad thing, of course.
Wal-Mart is the Wal-Mart of the web. Their online holidays' sale numbers are higher than Amazon.
edit: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/walmart.com+amazon.com
well this shows Amazon gets 20M more traffic than Wal-Mart during peak of holiday season, but I am pretty sure Wal-Mart's sales were higher on 06
The Hierarchy of Attributes for a Product Person
The thoughtful objections have not been against the idea as such, but mostly against the proposal that a board of investors or government officials would decide who is good enough. That would indeed a problem - startups that VCs or government approve would likely be the ones immitating the previous big thing, rather than building the next big thing. But I think a board is not necessary. In my opinion, all that's needed is that the founders

1. have bachelor's degrees,
2. register a corporation,
3. start with at least $X in the company account.

The value of X is up to debate, but it should not matter which investors they received the money from. Details can be worked out.
They're all generally similar yes. They're also similar to the naive approaches for tree like persistent data structures.

Generally these fall into two approaches: fat nodes and path copying. With fat nodes, each node maintains it's own independent history of update operations. With path copying instead we create a new modified node, and then walk the path from it back up to the parent creating new modified nodes as we go, finally resulting in a new root (uber/super block in a file system).

Traversing a particular snapshot in fat nodes is complicated, but is simple with path copying. With path copying however updates are more expensive and we tend to have more duplicate data (depending on the fan out of nodes).

Interestingly, we can do better than both of these approaches. I'm not aware of any filesystems that use this schemes, but you may find this paper interesting:

http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Electrical-Engineering-and-C...