skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One crucial advantage is that we have the examples of others to follow or avoid. In this respect, particle swarm optimization (as referred to in another comment in this post [1]) may be a better model.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832163
Because:
1. If you work on tourist visa, your defintely need to exceed the allowed period of staying, let's say a month, and you are destined to become illegal _resident_; but when you come as startup founder, you will be _legal_ resident, inot matter if you __work __ illegaly.
2. Now you came as a startup, what you can do - instead of making a new unique product you just go and work with a software giant, doing let's say testing. Who is gonna watch what you are actually doing?
Not a lot.

The founders get it all and later parcel out pieces to others, with investors taking the huge chunks.

I'd say you're looking at some figure between 0.2% and 4.0% depending on when you sign.

There's also a big difference in having shares or options. Then there's the dilution factor to take into account when new shares are issued (unless you have anti-dilution agreements in contract).

If you have to ask this question at all, you're probably new to the game.

It always boils down to 'it depends'. Every situation is different. Ask around and everybody will tell you something different. Most of them will give you very stupid and aggressive advice.

If the startup was founded yesterday and has no tech but you already have it and are bringing it in to the company you're in a very different position than where you're being brought in as the person who might be able to develop it.

Ask around (like you're doing here) and decide what you want out of the deal. Do you want a decent salary? A position where you can do some new work and vastly broaden your experience? Maybe you want to take a gamble on a web startup that maybe, just maybe will make you rich in a few years (or more likely - out of a job with no savings if things don't pan out)?

Lots of factors to consider. Get some feedback and mull it all over is my advice.
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/09/the-founders-visa-mo...

look for "10%" in the text
> Skype is a pretty good product on top of a nice piece of networking code but nothing that could not be done again.

It's about the network effects. That makes it almost impossible to duplicate.
I remember that even when Jordan was making a $ million a week from advertising alone, he'd stay after practice and do that turn around jump shot for two hours, like he was some raggedy-ass kid who was going to wind up bagging groceries if he didn't make the team.
On the contrary. Compilers written in a high-level language are at a distinct advantage: they're easier to optimize (significantly so), easier to debug, and support forms that are difficult to deal with in a low(er)-level language like C or C++.

I do compiler development every day, and I no longer touch low-level compilers. Everything I write is Boo (for my OS), Ruby (for my startup -- by far my favorite language for compiler dev, despite not liking it in general), or Python. As a result, I have far more maintainable code than the majority, and the code I output is incredibly well optimized.

Edit: To clarify, by 'support forms that are difficult to deal with ...' I mean things like using a pure S-exp structure. Rather than a traditional intermediary form, you can represent your compiler state as an S-exp and iteratively optimize and compile it. Standardizing around a form like that, when it's easy to deal with, greatly simplifies code. (This is actually the reason Ruby is my compiler language of choice these days.)
Imagine their next deal, the counter party is going do a year of due diligence.
Will Amazon Become the Wal-Mart of the Web?
Actually I think it was by a minute, not an hour. Not that it really matters now...
The administration has always gone through the motions of trying to stop hackers. Evading them has always been part of the game. Those caught usually get a citation for trespassing, but certain professors have a history of covering the fines for them.
For Writing Software, a Buddy System
How is your general health level? Are you physically fit? Do you take allergy medicines (or anything else that might cause your sinuses to not react normally)?

Are you a smoker? Overweight? A consumer of a poor diet, poor sleeping habits, high-stress, any other poor health practices?

I'd look at your health first, lots of things can make it easier for you to get sick more frequently. If you've moved recently, you may be getting new strains of rhinovirus and flu that your body doesn't know how to fight.

Any way you look at it though, getting sick that frequently tells you that there is something that's just not right. I'd really recommend a visit to your doctor for a checkup / physical. It could be nothing, but it could also be a symptom of some underlying malady.
It saddens me to see so much effort put into this kind of proposal. I favor loosened immigration conditions but this is a poorly thought-out scheme that seeks to create private initiative via government intervention.

It doesn't just threaten to pollute the 'immigration space' with folks trying to seem like 'founders', it also pollutes the start-up space with these folks. If someone is 'creating jobs' with the goal of securing a VISA, they could put out ads (which real job seekers will try to answer), then hire only their friends, get the wages paid kicked mostly back to them and have a VISA pretty cheaply since they would get back a good proportion of their money.

Sure, you could have regulators looking for people who did stuff like this but it would get clunky and I'm sure folks could think of umpteen other schemes to get around this. I'm not a Austrian or free-market nut but I think the Austrian arguments are most plausible when governments try to micro-manage enterprises.

It would simpler to elimenate h1b's, skip the 'founders' and give N VISAs to individuals with documented skills and M to individuals who just pay a million dollars directly. That would bring skilled workers and investors here without a lot of falderal. If you wanted to make sure they were never unemployed, make them put up a bond.

And Taxi drivers can make up to $100K/year if they are committed (a lot of them work literally 24 hours/day). A beach-head in the States is worth a lot in many parts of the world since once you arrive you can bring your entire family. $100K for ten people to immigrate here is a good deal. It's not something I'm even opposed to as such - my father and ex-wife were both immigrants. In fact, the main thing I oppose is the way present system creates distortions which helps neither the economy nor the immigrants.
Or confirm you as a nation that puts an expensive, small return mission as priority over more pressing internal problems?
The internet empowers many with an opportunity to be part of the conversation - to the extent that they're able and willing. It brings together collaborators and ideas that might otherwise never have met. It opens opportunities to explore facts and ideas, and for self-expression, that have never existed.

"Destroying the English language"? I think not. More likely, there are those who are afraid of the empowerment of the many. So, as they so often do, they throw up FUD. The times, they continue to be changing, Mr. Jones.
There are a bunch of issues with the proposal, but hey:

#Let's say someone comes over, starts a company with $500K and it fails. Then what? Legally, they would have to leave at that point, right? If not, why not? Brad says no, they just have to found another company. That makes me squeamish; while they may be working for themselves, it's not that different than bonding to a trade.

#How many founders can you bring over for one company? What's going to stop them from setting up a consulting shop instead of a product company? We've seen that consulting jobs are very clearly 1-to-1 displacement of American citizens.

#There are a lot of issues with the verification of "bona fide founder" status. I get that VCs are OK with being gatekeepers (yeah, I plead guilty for my one year on the dark side), but it's really distasteful to hand over any part of immigration to non-government officials. More here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556908

#The pro arguments now are based on anecdotes, not data. There is no data on how many jobs we're "losing out on" by not having a more founder-friendly immigration system.

#Lastly, there's a solution that works right now: find an American co-founder. It's not pretty, as you have a distributed company in the early days, but it works.

I acknowledge the intelligence of the tactical decision to give up on H1-Bs and go after changes to the EB-5, but America would be a better place if we actually reformed the H1-B process. I do wish Brad, Eric, Dave, etc. would tackle the H1-B elephant in the room publicly. We shouldn't be trying to steal startups from other countries; we should be trying to cultivate an environment where everyone here legally - citizens and immigrants on their path to citizenship - can start one and have it thrive.

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. VCs/investors from outside SF/NY (cough Brad Feld cough Josh Kopelman cough) would especially be credible, useful voices on a matter that's actually front and center right now.
Interview with SpecWatch - a Watchdog For Design Contest Sites
The media had nothing else to write about . . . they decide to make it into a "Jordan is still bitter and disrespectful" show. If you've been competitive in any sport, you recognize how Jordan worked, What made him tick. So he used anything slightly negative as a motivator. If you listened to the beginning of the speech, he was walking us through things we never knew about him.
Hmmm... the Internet seems to have helped develop in me a very strong level of cynicism such that I'd put the chances of this being genuine at < 5%, and the Granny Coder at about 40%
I do not see anything bogus in my reasons. There a lo mor important problems to be solved for making the market for software/internet startups better place. Namely - fixing pharmaceutical industry which is main reason why such an evil corporation like USPTO exists, which inflicts problems on software/internet industry by means of issuing bogus patents for buttons on webpages so on. I kno many American people who suffered a loot from patent lawsuits. Heck, even Reaearch on Motion has been bitten by bogus patent.
Wonder if they could scale this up a bit... =)
The C++ guide interestingly recommends not using a number of language features (exceptions for instance) and advises a more standard-like approach on Windows. I wonder what seasoned windows programmers make of it http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...
I call horse manure.

Mars and the Moon are well within reach. They are not a priority.

Now you can argue that the priorities are wrong, and I'll agree with you, but don't spin it that somehow it's a matter of "reach". It's a matter of will.
"Job lock-in is real and affects many, many more potential startup founders than immigration policy. VCs/investors from outside SF/NY (cough Brad Feld cough Josh Kopelman cough) would especially be credible, useful voices on a matter that's actually front and center right now."

Totally agree.
Percentage, not absolute, I'd guess.
Call for more babies as China turns to grey
Unfortunately in some cases the mind deteriorates too, not just the body. I knew a 90+ year old women who was pretty sane, but after two years she became retarded. She was asking me something, I was answering and after 5-10 minutes she was asking the same question again.

Btw, I think that Grace Murray Hopper can be considered a model, too.
It came off as funny and heartfelt and it sounded like people were laughing and smiling from the camera views of the audience. I can only see having this impression of Jordan if someone didn't watch the video all the way through or only listened to sound bites. The story reads like Rick is still holding a grudge against Jordan from denying his second comeback.
Prune That Prose
Just like in this graph http://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/lisa-simps...
That's because conditionals are implicit in the underlying selection of targets. Trying to force explicit conditionals into the language gets cumbersome and ugly. You don't see explicit 'if's in Prolog, either.
As long as we continue to be human we will always have 'internal' problems.

The big picture is that Earth is a single point of failure and the clock is ticking away.

Mars should be a higher priority but I don't expect the government to solve it. They've grown too big and dumb for that it seems.

This hopefully will be tackled by more visionaries like Buzz Aldrin, Elon Musk, and Burt Rutan...
The early versions weren't so much of a flight simulator as a first person camera with plane-like controls and trivial physics. I'm sure they had a first person camera already for debugging and then just stuck a couple force calculations on top just for fun. For anyone who has done a 3D video game or simulation before, F=M*A level newtonian physics can be implemented in < 1 hour.
Quick start to creating a simple API in a Rails App
Because as everybody knows, just as the correct way to learn about weightlifting is to jump straight to benching 350lbs, the correct way to learn compilers is to write a complete gcc replacement as your first project.

If you can't manage that, then, geeze, what kind of crappy programmer are you?
Too bad there's no .vimrc :-)
Just a few quick notes on getting an API running with a rails app.
this is a logical fallacy. Other more important issues don't make this issue less important. This is a hackers website not a health care/doctors website.
Internal problems always will be. By this logic we should cancel almost all pure research projects.
Plus a lot of a tree's mass is in the roots. Wouldn't be surprised if it would be over 50%.
The huge response Posterous gets from their fans for every micro feature they release is because they already have a fan base. The more community or users you have who depend on your service, the more they want a feature. If you start off with an empty blog platform with every feature wordpress has, nobody really cares. OR, if you start off with one really distinguishing feature (Post by Email) and you instantly gain a huge user base who like that, they wait in anticipation for all the small features you can find elsewhere.

Posterous has an awesome foundation to build off of, and because of that they have a real advantage. They can get feedback from a lot of users, including requests for features. What to build? That is easily solved just by listening to what people have to say. They can validate features to build, and are justified in their time by the constant requests for these features.

As soon as they release a feature, they know it's going to be big since the community has been asking. And when it's there, the community feels that they were just given what they've been wanting. Nobody blames them for not having it in the first place, knowing this is a growing app, and are glad to be early adopters.

These guys (garry and sachin) are in a great position, and it's nearly impossible for them to NOT build a great product with all the feedback they are getting.
I wonder over say 10 years how profitable this is. Fruit bearing trees can't really be a bad bet, and considering how low the pay is... In a few years the income from this might completely finance it - which is probably what they should aim for from the beginning. Over all, a very nice scheme.
Thanks for the tip. I assumed that this existed, but hadn't gotten around to looking for it yet. My point, however, was to confirm that defaults do, in fact, matter :-)
I disagree. Writing multiplatform makefiles without explicit conditionals is cumbersome and ugly, mainly because the problem space contains so many exceptions. In this case, purism isn't really practical.
Hot? Or not? They do not seem to understand RSS feeds. Feeds are not linked to in meta tags nor anywhere on the page. When I inquired by email, the guy responded with a bunch of false URLs. I managed to fix the typos and find the true feeds, but it didn't even use media RSS, so the feeds were useless anyway.
As pointed out by gruseom below, if somebody wants to game the system, they will come on a tourist visa and simply not leave. I don't think these convoluted scenarios of possible abuse are realistic at all. Furthermore, if the founder's visa law is any good, it will not require the founders to create jobs. It will simply assume that from 2500 startups a year, many will create a lot of jobs.
terrible article from a terrible writer.
Unless it shuts down.
if you read carefully what I said, i never said that hig-level languages are bad - I said only this:
1) Compiler written in python, ruby and other "slow" (do not beleive that pyruby is slow?) languages going to take eternity to compile linux kernel. 2) You need to have _precise_ mapping between types in compiler and the language you implement. It is so important that gcc use a software library for floating point computation, otherwise you are locked-in wit you cpu's FP implementation and can not write cross-compilers.
How do you figure?

If anything space exploration is research intensive. We have done a lot of research in space and even on the ground before we got there.

I'm curious as to what you mean by pure research.
Hey Rocketeers, cool that you guys got covered in NYTimes! I was lucky to work with these guys last year. Pairing really does help improve code quality, but I still prefer to code solo or have two separate work streams going at once.
If you do so, could you also post a link to it here? Thanks in advance.
No. The advertising is.
Drink Coke.
Random aside (and probably an indicator that I'm an old fogie). It's impressive that newspapers will use drug-originated phrases like "buzz kill" (last sentence). I think it's progress, of sorts.
You said they were impractical, then went on to explain why. I then explained why they are not impractical. The speed I'll give you, but the type issue is nonsensical. GCC's use of a software FP implementation is in support of this. Regardless of the language, you'll need to have an FP implementation that matches the target, which is nearly always done in software.

High-level languages for compilation are, 9 times out of 10, a better choice.
Agreed. It really is a matter of prioritizing.

With the way things are going on this planet one would think this would be a higher priority.

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.

We have developed the means to destroy the planet, yet we have no way of escaping should that ever actually happen. It's not the kind of situation you'd like to find yourself in considering all the political and religious strife prevalent across the globe.
Andrew Appel's _Modern Compiler Implementation in ML_ is probably what you want. (http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Compiler-Implementation-Andrew-...)

While it uses SML, it's not hard to follow if you use OCaml, and the bibliography / references are also quite helpful. The Ghuloum paper referenced elsewhere in the thread is also quite good (and uses Scheme, for better or worse).
Study Gives High Marks To Retailers' Clinics
Speaking of PEP8, I find it strange that the guide mentions "Indent your code blocks with 4 spaces.". AFAIK Google used 2 spaces for indentation.
'tis a sad state of affairs that they couldn't put a good song up there and had to result to trolling.

At least it didn't pop up in one of those boxes where you can't close it and it jumps around and stuff..
He did that because he wanted to be, and was the best in the world at what he did.
'Pair programming' would get a bit frustrating, don't you think? I suppose productivity would greatly depend on the personalities involved.
so tree is capturing carbon for what, 20, 40, 80 years? And then when it dies it slowly starts releasing some back into the atmosphere? Seems like a better plan than anything we have now.
I used to have a very weak immune system, it turned out I was gluten intolerant which was making me exhausted and susceptible to colds/flus. Taking vitamin D and avoiding all grains worked for me.
I don't understand your comment. You're saying that certain research should take priority over solving internal problems, but space exploration shouldn't...? Why?
I agree that they shouldn't be punished or anything.

They shouldn't be punished in any way severe enough to screw up their future or their academic career. But I think it's important to keep hacking illicit and therefore require that it take a bit of courage to pull off. It serves as a quality filter and keeps the art from degenerating into stupid frat pranks.
Uh, while some folks may bring up racist or otherwise ridiculous objection to this idea, sachinag, bokonist and others have brought up well thought-out objections that I haven't seen answered with much thought (the claim that tourist visas are the only thing subject to abuse seems hardly creditable but I'll argue more if someone fleshes out this one existing counter-argument).

It seems like the founder's visa already has a lot of emotional traction with people but immigration isn't something should be decided by emotional resonance but by well thought-out arguments - if you take the discussion to the emotional level, things won't go well for those favoring immigration.
Comments from joe_the_user and sachinag do a good job of summarizing some issues previously discussed on HN.

I do believe that affordable health care attached to employers is a huge problem for enjoying a larger pool of U.S. entrepreneurs of every variety. Fixing this, which is an issue on the table with current Health Care reform, should bring far more new entrepreneurs than any new visa program would. Since the Health Care legislation is currently in process, why not write your congressman about this instead?

This current founders visa proposal sidesteps fixing what's already abusive with H1-Bs. Skilled immigrants deserve a better process than they current have. It would seem to do more good to fix this than inventing some new category and ignoring the existing problems.

Another problem is this agenda may not get a lot of love from U.S. entrepreneurs or would-be ones as there is a subtext to the founders visa agenda which says 1 - there are not enough good entrepreneurs in the U.S., which is very insulting; I've never seen any credible evidence to support this and 2 - VCs get to be "accredited" providing various leverage problems as discussed.

Last, but not least, how many of these visas do you expect to create each year and at what cost to the government? Just to issue the first visa could have a fixed cost of hundreds of millions. Have you ever worked in government or anything related to INS? The rules and documentation and training required for this program would be costly. Do the investors plan to give the gov shares in these startups to make up for these cost? You can say that the reward will be job creation. Maybe, but I have seen interesting numbers on this.
I'm saying that it should be more of a priority amongst the general public. I didn't say it should take priority over other forms of research. =)
This page gives me good feelings about the future of the company, http://dailybooth.com/ijustine/969074 (see the comments)