It has to cost something to hide good content if you expect people to take the time to produce or submit quality content and engage with the community. Otherwise you'll end with the things no one cared much about.
Somewhat. The conditions are sort of awkward since you have to basically start a company, build contacts wherever you are for an investment and then at the same time build contacts in the US and move you company there.
I think a better situation would be something like a "mini E-2" where you with a lesser investment (say $20k) can start you US company directly, go there for a year and then after that show you meet similar requirements to an E-2, but with US investors. (there could be conditions that you can't hire people or whatever). I guess this is essentially what many people do instead of E-2, but with business visas and other visa schemes.
"People founding startups are a very small subset of overall immigrants."
True, even less create successful startups in a timely manner (even though they contribute overall). Which makes them so hard to target.
"Also, most people who do start startups are also competent, if not educated, enough to probably qualify under a more traditional points based system."
There's only so many ways to measure something and dropping out school to work for random Internet companies and starting your own before you have kids, which is a common profile for entrepreneurial people in Europe, tends to not tick a lot of them.
The US immigration system desperately needs reform, I just don't think any country has managed to create a formal system that is better for entrepreneurship than the realities of running your business illegally in the beginning (or at least pushing the meaning of a business visa). With some reservation for not having looked into the European startup/freelance visas.
"It wouldn't be hard to have an immigration system which is biased toward useful vs. not useful."
I think that's extremely hard in terms of startups. You're essentially expecting the government to select what is valuable and what isn't. I don't like unclear visa situations either, but I haven't really seen a country effectively implement "come here and do whatever for a bit as long as you can take care of yourself". Which is what I would think is most compatible with creating startups.
Or just monitor the stories that get flagged off the front page (~25 over several weeks according to the post) and take appropriate measures (e.g. restoring with relative time and penalize flaggers). Of course they first have to decide whether they want users who cares about the stories they submit and therefor think that non bad things getting flagged off the front page is a problem.
Does it matter? The author seems representative of exactly the type of users you want in a community like this. Long standing user account, high karma, produces decent comments and great content (the visualizations in the Swype article is another example [0]) and even puts HN comments on the blog. Whatever mechanism that ends up discouraging people like this in favor of trigger happy flaggers is broken. Fortunately for the community the author didn't go "fuck it", but instead wrote another sensible blog post which makes them an even better community member.
If they want to 'protect' the moderators they should use more neutral language focusing on the actions. You can easily say "This account has been x" instead of "We've x this account" or "x has been changed to reflect y" instead of "We've changed x to reflect y". It's less personal, but that's the point.
You can always find reasons why something has to be a certain way. But at the end of the day, you can't expect to attract and retain curious hackers/entrepreneurs in this way. The author presumably spent some time compiling the original story, the math symbols and graphs are quite nice for instance, just to have it removed without explanation. It's not a very good way to treat people.
I don't think the point is so much about taking them down, as not letting them decide the future. From a larger perspective 2005-2015 is almost like a lost decade of companies implmenting things on new platforms under properitery ownership. Like many other things, the discussion about social networks and reliable information is sort of early 00s. So I would say the goal is to get back to a less short term outlook on development of the Internet.
I guess one can say it's a similar system. But, while definitions might differ, I'm not sure how capitalist I would call one of the largest government run subway systems in the world [0], half century long water tunneling projects [1] or the longest running rent control system in the US [2].
Those good people would hopefully want people to hold MIT to a standard when it comes to things like admissions, community involvement, support of students and researchers etc. rather than formal prizes. But maybe (hopefully) this is important for internal politics at MIT and not the best they can do.
Something like WeChat really isn't like cards though. It's more like cash, cards and bank transfers in one. Like if most everyone would accept Paypal for everything without fees and it was integrated everywhere (web, store, phone, chat etc).
I don't see how that is adding anything to the discussion. If you want to be the leader you actually have to lead. You have to be the one that figures out "the future" and have the solution people didn't know they wanted before other people do. The "perks" of mobile payments should be fairly obvious to anyone who has experienced it, I suspect you and the parent just aren't one of those people. No one is going to stop the US to remain dysfunctional in infrastructure, but it still has a price.
Don't agree. I think that is like saying you can become a professional athlete by just working out everyday. We mostly know what works. It's comradely, career and cash. Most things worth doing isn't going to result in much professional progress or money in the beginning, so working with and showing things for your community is generally the most important. That's what driving every sports team, music group, enthusiast etc. in the beginning. You still of course need the time, knowledge and motivation to do something.
Shipping can be the result of, or one way, to do the right things. But if you look at projects on Github it's usually not a lack of "shipping daily" so much as a lack of packaging it as something useful. Often you see daily commits until the motivation wears off and the project stops. But the software is still buggy, there's no screenshots, it's not straight forward how to build it, lacks documentation etc. They haven't made it into something that is easy for other people to appreciate, so they don't get much positive feedback.
I don't see Vancouver "happening" (at least not more than it already is). Being similar to places like Seattle or SF isn't a good thing if you want to compete with them, because you'll always end up behind them in a comparison.
Spoken as the incumbent. Of course it's a technical problem, as least as much as other SV companies. Hard tech hasn't been the edge for SV for many decades and it's getting even less important today. All the big companies has tried to tackle payments, but with lackluster results. What's "perfectly fine" for the US isn't in most of the rest of the world. Some of the more prominent startups in the UK, Germany and Sweden are payment related exactly because SV is weak in this area. There's a great opportunity for Chinese companies here if they ever decide to go outside their own borders.