skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It would work in exactly the same way that the H1B visas work: Companies can vouch for a candidate to the government in an application, but ultimately it would be up to the government to decide."

I completely disagree with this characterization of the H1B visa. Clearly, the visa is controlled by the employer, not the employee. And while the government does have to "ok" the visa, the employee does not apply directly to the government. The employer has tremendous, overwhelming authority over who does and does not get to come into the country and get in the queue for a green card.

A "points system" like the one used in Australia (discussed in other posts here) would preserve the immigrant's freedom, but I would like to point out that an Oracle lobbyist argued fiercely against it when a congressman proposed this, saying it would be "communistic" to have the government, rather than corporate HR, decide who Oracle gets to hire.

Personally, I'm outright cynical at this point. At first, I thought this was a design flaw, but now I'm pretty convinced that the industry likes the indentured nature of the visa and the extraordinary power it gives them over their employees. Those pesky US citizens and permanent residents can demand raises, leave for other offers, even gasp! start companies that compete with Oracle! Well, we can't have that! But H1Bs need green cards, and transfering jobs is risky, so by and large, they'll accept their lot in life and stick around for 5 years under the conditions we dictate.

"VCs and investor would "gain control over the immigration system" with the founders visa no more than universities and tech companies have control over immigrants with H or F visas".

We have profoundly different perspectives on the degree of control tech companies have over their employees on H1B visas.
Motorola is going to need more than the 3rd Android phone on the 4th place carrier to save themselves. Hopefully they have a Verizon Android phone up their sleeve.

That said, it's great to see the flood of Android phones hitting the market. Time to finish up that little game I've been hacking on.
About "theory", if you go down that path, we can say the same about Newton's. Few high school teachers in their right mind will mention that this theory is actually false, displaced by relativity, but nevertheless a good approximation at relatively low levels of energy. They simply present the Newton's three laws of motion as a fact. Unlike Newton's, evolution theory is currently the generally accepted theory. To present it as a fact is even more legitimate. Now, what schools do lack is a general explanation about theories, the certainties (or lack thereof) we have about them, and the changes in the generally accepted set of theories, past and present.

About "silly", I never understood evolution as a path from less intelligent to more intelligent. I always thought it was the survival of the fittest — quite a different concept. For example, I've heard about a animal which at some point in its life just eats its brain, because it's isn't needed anymore (the animal somewhat become a plant). Now, talking about intelligence as such isn't really possible, since "intelligence" is hardly a well defined term, let alone a measurable quantity. Complexity, on the other hand is more measurable. Why do life became more and more complex over time, I do not know. however, I do know that some complexities gave an edge to the concerned species. One of them is the eye.

About Darwin's fake experiments, it already has been said: it doesn't matter. His theory was amended, we have more data, and more peer reviews. Without a relatively high level of plausibility, the evolution theory would have been rejected by now. Even if it means proving the Church wrong. Now, I have not read how the book you linked addresses this catch.

About the perfect intelligence on the beginning of everything, it doesn't matter. It is just beyond science. That this begining was the Big Bang just fits the current observations best. Pretending that life on Earth allways was as complex as it is now is too convoluted right now to be considered a valid theory.

As a final note, I must add that I am not as specialist. So my only choice is to take the generaly accepted set of theories for granted. I have no right to contradict them without a great deal of knowlege in their respective domains. If the author you cited is right, that is sadly not my job to listen to him. That is the job of specialists.
Mitchell vs. Githyanki
Wow, the covers for these two great works are stunningly similar.

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

http://www.mst3kinfo.com/satnews/dvds/mitchell.jpg
It's up for me now.

Looking forward to reading the book, Peter.
I've had to use faxes to interface with bureaucracies. They trust them, in a way that they won't trust email attachments.
It will be interesting to see how the adoption of the syntax for blocks plays out. According to the wikipedia entry for GCD, the proposed C++0x standard has a similar concept, but uses square braces [] instead of the caret ^. The former could be brought down to C, but Objective-C, which is defined as a superset of C, already uses the square braces for object messaging.

Are there any C++ experts who could speak to whether there is any reason that the caret would not work in that language?

(Edit: spelling correction)
I think Harry Browne's "permanent portfolio" deserves a lot more popular attention than it gets.

In Fail-Safe Investing Harry said to allocate your wealth equally between: stocks (broad market index), bonds, gold, and cash (CDs, money market). Rebalance back to equal allocations roughly once a year. Try not only to diversify a fraction of this internationally, but make sure to have some wealth entirely outside your home country out of reach of your government.

This portfolio has the critical property of stability, which is very important yet underrated for most personal investors, who are told to go heavy on equities. It captures inverse correlations so that it tends to grow steadily, rather than shoot up and down along a growth trend as equity markets do. It underperformed equities during the late 90s, but never nosedived in the early 2000s and actually continued to grow.

It has done very well historically. It grows steadily in each of an inflationary, deflationary, or high growth macro environment.
I think it's because of overexposure to category theory. It gets to the point where they see a name, the see a type signature, they assume the developer isn't pathological, and figure out what they need.
I don't think it's a strawman; it's a response to the frequent argument that artists ought to be compensated for their art via copyright mechanisms... as she stated in the very first sentence, as a matter of fact. If that argument was never actually made, well, maybe then it would be a strawman; but it is made all the time.

The article hurt my head too, by the way, but that is because of the Weird Capitalization.

I think there's a bit of conflation across several questions going on, both here and in most discussions on the topic:

* Is an artist entitled to compensation merely for creating art?

* Is an artist entitled to compensation by those who view their art?

* Is an artist entitled to compensation by those who redistribute her art?
The general consensus seems to be, launch as fast as possible. Don't put a year into something only to find that your idea isn't as monetizeable as you thought.
Wait, what? You're saying you don't sanitize your database inputs?
This seems to be a natural thing to do. What are the drawbacks that you see from this approach?
But good luck getting congress to force all private and public companies to publish their salary data ;).

On a political level, I agree, it's a longshot. However, a company that claims it can't find qualified workers at competitive salaries and is asking for a special visa program certainly should be willing to make its salary information public.
It was compatible even for Darwin (me too, there's just nothing to really say about "beyond" the physical).

I've read the original Darwin and there is many a mention of the "creator's breath" (that put everything into action) and things of this nature.
So Domain Pigeon is just a side project for you?
Exactly. Having a three year timeline allows you to have an overall strategy that you can incrementally build towards.
I see in webos more potential than android. But google has a far more open/aggressive approach than palm.
Twisted.web vs Tornado, a Performance test
Announcing Heechee: "a transparent mercurial-as-subversion gateway"
there are billions of JavaME phones out there, and yet very few people actually profit from them...

Same for the Symbian and WinMO phones (comparatively)
I agree that it's offensive, but it's also honest. If companies are going to pay MBAs more than they pay PhDs, then they should lose their right to claim that there's a "shortage" of PhD's!
This just isn't a substantial cost any more. With the latest kernels, thread per connection servers are competitive with event driven servers. This was not true a few years ago.
I hope Motorola or somebody else will put a low-cost android phone in the market with the ability for the owner to replace the whole operating system and public full specifications.

In a closed environment Apple will win because the iPhone just rocks from the point of view of the quality and design of the UI, the amount of applications, and so forth, but something really open can contrast the iPhone using the Apple everything-close policy against itself.
I read the documentation he linked to. It seems odd to me that there was no mention of a N-Pivot quicksort. Unless I missed it. It seems like the burden would be on proving that 2 was the optimal value of N
Yes, primarily to learn Rails, among other things. Before I only had limited web development experience, mostly with some simple PHP sites.
While I agree that we shouldn't be paying for it, and that it is the government's fault for making us pay for it, once the "system" is known, shouldn't the overeater be as much to blame? While an individual is still responsible for paying for their own healthcare, then how they abuse themselves is up to him. In a world were others are responsible for his healthcare, he has a social responsibility to not abuse himself, a social responsibility that I am all too sure will be ignored.

This is the fundamental issue with paternalistic programs. If you give the public responsibility over a person's well being, they will also require the means to control that person's activities.

Unfortunately, I think national healthcare is a foregone conclusion, and not just single-payer-health-insurance, I mean full the "doctors are government employees" thing. Too many people have conflated health care with a right.
Yes, this was a really good book. I suspect that Coders at Work will be a little better though because the interviewer(s) in Masterminds seemed a bit weak and not really able to keep up with the interviewees in the discussions.
Yes, this was a really good book. I suspect that Coders at Work will be a little better though because the interviewer(s) in Masterminds seemed a bit weak in places and not really able to keep up with the interviewees in the discussions.
Would be nice to know what technologies Dropbox is using.
"Effectively, there is no marketing."

Just because these engineers don't know what other responsibilities were being handled does not mean there were none.
I was nearby under the dust cloud as well -- living in our loft/office in Chinatown where we were still folding our startup up after the market collapse a year prior. I was taking a shower when I heard the first plane hit. I thought it was a construction accident until my roommate knocked on the bathroom door and told me that the world trade center is blowing up or something. I remember thinking, "Again?"
I second this! I've taken to multiplying my time estimates by three as a way of working around the problem, but things will always take longer than you expect. There's debugging time, dealing with bugs in other peoples' code time, brain reset time when you need to stop and think, and let's not forget girlfriend time (they need attention, too).

The way that I've figured out how to deal with this, is to punt absolutely everything that isn't absolutely necessary into the next 'version' after launch. Throw all of those cool features into your feature bucket, and only implement them once you've gotten the existing feature set working.

Your mileage may vary, of course. :)
Is Microsoft as Free as Open Source?
There's certainly something to learn about entrepreneurship from some of these guys.

I'm really looking forward to reading about Brad Fitzpatrick. He founded Live Journal, and made or started a lot of the software that powers many giant web startups (Memchached, MogileFS, OpenID...etc).
Programming isn't that hard? Writing code is easy, writing good code is hard, otherwise more people would do it, right?
Thanks, this is great advice and likely what I'll wind up doing.
All problems in Computer Science can be solved by another layer of abstraction, except for too many layers of abstraction.

-- Butler Lampson
The C++0x feature you're referring to is for lamdas (anonymous functions). It might be possible to use another syntax, but it would make parsing (even more of) a nightmare because one can use "&" or "value" inside the square brackets to indicate if values should be pass by-value or by-reference.

In practical terms, I doubt the C++ committee would change the already delayed C++0x standard to accommodate a feature which may (but probably won't) make it into C.
The Campaign for Entrepreneurs
So my first thought on this Tornado stuff was: why not glue twisted and tornado together? A quick look at the code suggests it is doable, and could help fix the "web mess" in twisted.

My second thought was: Why didn't they build this on libevent, and pyevent, which has a built-in non-blocking webserver which is pretty darned fast.
A 25 person startup is 22 people too many.

Actually the students would learn more if the class was broken down into 5 startups all competing for the customers work. This would give you 5 small tightly focused groups. Each would have to nominate a leader and or agree on a unified vision for their approach. Then fire the gun, BANG and get to work. Break out your roles, do yer thing, but most of all focus on that customer and learn about the problem.

The problem with one big class is that now you have to have 25 people agree on the vision/course of action, good luck, and you stir up the pot to get 4 folks or less to basically lead/do/all the work and or you ignore people that had good ideas but maybe not the best communication skills to bring/push those ideas to light.

Plus the customer suffers with just one vision. Why not produce 5 in a class, bounce around perspectives, ideals etc, and have people reflect on how their group performed- challenges, successes and weaknesses.

Sure the client sorta gets a taste of spec work startup style but the students can potentially learn more and feel like they have more skin in the game due to smaller groups.

The competitive edge makes it fun as well.
" Programming isn't that hard"

Whoa! doesn't that depend very much on what exactly you mean by "programming" and which specific program you are trying to create ?
care to elaborate why?
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Peter, this is really good advice, thank you.

I'm not sure where I'll be in three years, but it does help to have a direction. I am married and we do want kids around the same time so that would obviously complicate things, which is partly why I'm trying to figure this out now. Again, thanks for the comments.
Details on Factery.net's funding and search product
It's too easy to tease, but I will try to resist.

But, seriously, they've been talking about this GPU work for upwards of a 1.5 years now. Usually we get something to play with, even if it's pretty badly broken (I'm thinking NDP here), so the lack of code here is pretty atypical. The accelerate link above is news to me, though, so that's helpful. Hope to see more soon!

* EDIT (to back up my 1.5 years claim):

earliest mention, May 15, 2008:
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/svh/Slides/may-...

Chak's own work, Jan 10, 2009:
http://www.citeulike.org/user/iff/article/3872848
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/LCGK09.html

and, of course, accelerate ("reference implementation") was only released Aug 17, 2009:
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate
Disasters, Resilience and Self Reliance
Thanks. I'm halfway through Four Steps to Epiphany. Great book--made me realize I've been doing a lot of things poorly. I can't tell you how many times I've spent months working on an app with high expectations only to launch it and realize it didn't solve the user's actual needs. Doh.
You'd guess wrong -- there is an over supply of art teachers, and under supply of math teachers. If you are in math, you can get a job teaching. If you are in art, you probably can't get a job teaching [art].
China's UFO Insanity
'really open' is also a huge headache to support: could you imagine the level of training the telecom operators would have to receive in order to take calls from users of this open phone when they accidentally hid the SMS function, deleted important system files by accident or even formatted the phone?

Also, openness is not necessarily a good thing - specially for mass markets. If people really, really wanted to 'replace the whole operating system', wouldn't they all have migrated to linux (on its thousand formats) already...?
Your genes also tell you you should be getting some exercise equivalent to hunting woolly mammoths and then dragging them home.
The map is meant to show relative GDP per capita. Tokyo is very dense, and has an extreme GDP per capita compared to most other comparatively dense cities in China. Your man in an oil field is not part of this exercise, except where of course, he is. But if you know your intra-China geography, the "oil fields" are pretty obvious.
Interesting, thank you.

FWIW, it looks like the concept of a block is also an anonymous function, although it looks as if they only allow passing into them by value, not by reference. The developer documentation at Apple indicates that they also support these within C++, and has a small section on how they behave within it. So, at least, they went the extra mile and worked out the C++ parsing issues.

http://developer.apple.com/mac/articles/cocoa/introblocksgcd...
Ask Professors for Rebates on Assigned Textbooks
Tom Murphy - how a broadcasting startup bought ABC
Alright. Sorry... Programming is about as hard as mathematics I'd say - you can just learn it, and if you have the talent and perseverance, you can be a good programmer.

So yes, perhaps this book will be more interesting to non-programmers, or people who are just starting out programming.

It's the other things I find more interesting, that were covered in founders at work - the things that seem like luck - how do you get people to use your product? How do you make money? build a team? etc etc.
What markets/industries are you interested in?
Hi Matt, I understand your scenario. I am working a project on a part-time basis that might interest you. My mail's in my profile if you want to discuss it or anything else.
The whole problem here is that "Evolution" means two things. It's well-verified scientific fact that natural selection drives change within a species. What creationists dispute is that natural selection drives organisms to change from one species to another. There is very little evidence for this. If natural selection (and therefore stepwise refinement) is responsible for the creation of new species, the whole idea of a "missing link" would not be novel.
From Tracking the Experience of No Results to Cross Platform Clouds
This article seems to be making a flawed assumption: that people reading news online would only choose the web site provided by the publisher of a printed newspaper.

But many news sources are now only online. And it's extremely common for people to start with aggregators, to effectively read parts of many sites instead of being dedicated to one.

To me, you can't say "print is still king" without at least examining the trends in total subscribers over the past several years. Suppose a newspaper now has 1/10th the subscribers; if 3% of the remainder is online, that's hardly a victory for print.
What I love:

- canvas
- svg
- css3
- web fonts
- web sockets
- local storage
- geolocation

HTML5 tags? It could've been better with custom tags.
Would be interesting to see mochiweb and a few other things thrown in there (maybe nginx for raw throughput).
FYI, they also put up the updated XNU
http://www.android.com/about/ says Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone's capabilities providing users with a broad spectrum of applications and services.

But the question is how much willing the operators are to let the user customize their handset. Operators are definitely not going to like android's statement of openness to users.
They are apparently releasing an Android phone on Verizon later this year: http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/30/motorola-sholes-android-p...

I'm definitely going to be watching that. I have an iPhone 3G right now and am fairly happy with it -- but I would really like to take advantage of Google Voice's voicemail transcription, as I'm deaf and if works even halfway decently it would be a huge thing for me.

That, and I do think Android does notifications (the drag-down notification panel) far better than the iPhone does. The potential sticking point for me is that for work, I need Exchange support that's at least as good as the iPhone's.
F*ck 3D - the state we're in
"NaNPlayer is using private APIs, ... These APIs are also used by the stock music player application, and aid in indexing and querying the metadata attached to music files."

So Palm gets to use private APIs for its apps, but 3rd party devs get jilted for it. Doesn't seem like a balanced policy to me. Seems like Palm could use this policy to block any type of feature it wants.
Screen Casts of my startup Hybir Backup (Now supports Private Key Encryption)
Economists did not lead the economy off a cliff, the financial firms did. Big difference.
Comedy implementation of the observation that there's a sizeable section of society that prefers the 2D - Facebook/Twitter method of interaction vs. real, 3D, interation.
Have Facebook Put the Last Nail into Twitter's Coffin?
At what point does it "make sense" to continue developing and supporting APIs for a product? Arguably, Skype has a huge user base and thus huge "custom application potential energy". But here we see them shaking off any ties, without mention of possible future offerings.

So, what metrics should they be aiming for to prove viability?
Tech giants suggest ways to charge online