ramanujam

The H1B abuse discussion comes up once every few months on HN and elsewhere but things have gotten a lot worse in the past 2 years with the lottery. There are a number of definitive and progressive steps that USCIS can take to prevent misuse by TCS, CTS and other consulting companies.

Just establishing a cap on the number of visas per company as a percentage of the workforce will solve this issue. This will work well for everyone (large tech companies, startups, small businesses) except the sweatshops. If i had to take a guess (not hard to verify), 95+% of employees of the consulting companies will be underpaid visa workers. The prevailing wage is a joke ($70k in the bay area for someone with 5 years experience) and enforcing salary based bidding isn't really a practical solution. It can easily be gamed or it will only be beneficial for a certain group of employers.

I wrote an essay two and half years back on how to fix this and it is sad that all those are still true http://ramanuj.me/fixing-the-high-skilled-immigration-proble...

I was an intern at the UNHQ in New York city in 2010 and as a computer science grad student, i was definitely the odd man out. Right from my middle school days, i have always been intrigued by the UN and no one understood why a CS grad student would pick the UN for an unpaid internship instead of a typical tech company that paid $25-30+ an hour.

- My batch had 300 interns from 70+ countries and almost every intern was very talented and went to one of the top universities in the world. The internship selection process was similar to grad school admissions (essays, recommendations etc) and it was selective (around 5%). There were only a handful of tech people and it wasn't hard for me to get in! Unlike me (someone in tech), the internship was coveted for those in economics, international affairs and several other fields.

- Most people only see the irrelevant parts of UN where world leaders give prejudiced talks in the general assembly but there is a lot more to UN than that. UN plays a very important role in the world's peacekeeping, social development, human rights and several other things that aren't very visible to people living in developed nations.

- As a programmer, i built some internal publishing tools using PHP but i also got to wear suits and sit in group discussions at the world bank and with ambassadors of several countries. I loved that part. Out of my own interest, i also built an internal profile network for the interns and i learned a lot of new things doing that.

- The department that i worked at had many talented people who were well qualified and were passionate about what they were doing and i am still in touch with some. Of course, it is a large organization with a lot of red-tapism with many inefficient departments. My internship made me realize I didn't want to spend my 20s and 30s at the UN or any similar organization.

I probably spent around $8k-$10k out of my pocket to do the internship (travel, food, rent etc). I wish the UN paid me for the work but looking back, it was a very memorable experience and i would definitely do it again.

I replied to a posting on the 'Who's hiring' thread back in Jan 2011 and landed at my first real job out of college. I just left that company after 4+ wonderful years. I was an international student who wanted to work for a startup and very few startups were willing to take the risk back then. I had very little to prove and also came along with strict visa requirements. I am so thankful to this thread, i was able to connect with a person who identified my potential and eventually became a great mentor for me.

Capping the price at $150/mo isn't really a wise decision. If a big customer like MLB wants to use Tapalytics for their iOS app which i assume has millions of MAUs, you will still be forced to charge them $150/month because that is your top most tier and it comes with unlimited MAUs.

In the long run, there is a good chance that a significant portion of your revenue might come from enterprise customers who would be willing to pay you multiples of the $1800 ARR. Adding an enterprise/custom quote as the top most tier is a vey common practice. Looking at the pricing page of similar companies (Kissmetrics, VWO, Optimizely, Mixpanel) might help.

On a related note, this has a very interesting significance in the world of privacy and anonymous tracking.

http://33bits.org/about/

The index and score from Mattermark are great for consumer facing companies and mobile app companies but are pretty useless for most other industries. I checked some companies that are making making millions in revenue and they had a double/triple digit mattermark score. I am pretty sure that isn't a good representation.

Also, a note for those signing up for the trial, there is neither an option to cancel your subscription directly nor information about billing inside the application. You have to email them to cancel the account and i got a response after 5 days(3 working days) when i sent an email asking them to cancel my trial account. While it is totally acceptable for an early stage startup to not have those features and i am sure they have it in their backlog, just make sure you don't send that cancelation email the day before your trial ends.

The bad part: The investment has to come from a canadian VC or angel firm. It doesn't clearly state if it is a requirement though [1].

The good part: As many have already mentioned, it is a permanent residency status and not just a temporary visa. It comes along with all the health care benefits and social benefits as what Canadian citizens get [2]. So even if your first business fails, you will have the opportunity to start another one or find a job.

[1] http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/helpcentre/answer.asp?q=653&t=6

[2] http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/newcomers/about-pr.asp

Many companies in the A/B testing and optimization space publish a lot of resources in the form of blog posts, case studies and white papers that are well researched and based on real metrics. Here are some links to get started.

http://monetate.com/resources/ http://monetate.com/blog/ (Disclosure: I work at Monetate!)

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php

http://blog.optimizely.com/

http://unbounce.com/blog/

In enterprise sales, setting a common open price is very hard. If you look at the current offerings of Optimizely, they want to call you if you want to buy a package that is > $360/mo. The reason is, it might be based on the site traffic, level of service you are picking and a few other factors. Also, each sale will have legal contracts that might drag on for months with pitches to several members from the buying organization and negotiations.

In addition, your product offerings keep getting better every quarter and you also want to test varying price points, offer discounts and compete well against several competitors in the process. If you are going after a market trying to acquire 1000s of customers paying $xxx/month having a transparent open pricing works great but it doesn't when you are targeting enterprises.

Disclaimer: I work for monetate and we do have a pricing page that explains to the buyers on what to expect. http://monetate.com/products/packages-and-pricing. Also, most of the enterprise buyers are used to this kind of setup and putting a price tag on your website doesn't really work.

http://www.mutetab.com/ is a chrome extension that solves this problem but in a different manner.

First of all, this article is from Oct 2009. I missed the date at the top and i scrolled up after reading this line.

> Google Wave team also chose to drop Internet Explorer support

3 years is a significantly long period of time in the browser world and Chrome was a 1 yr old browser and there was no IE9. Also, there was no windows phone 7.

Once in a few months, an article pops up telling how a startup saved $100k by not supporting IE or how hundreds of developer hours were saved by not caring about the things that IE failed to render properly. It narrows down to the number of users an app or service has and also the demographics of the users. If you are building a hipster social network or a video post processing tool, ignoring IE is going to save you significant time since it can be assumed that a good percentage of the users are going to be on macs using the latest browsers. On the other hand, if you are catering to e-commerce, finance or any other common industry even thinking about ignoring IE isn't wise at this point. With jQuery and graceful degradation, fixing the major issues shouldn't be really hard.

PS: Can just-launched-starup ignore IE for their app? Probably.

Can Pinterest ignore IE8? Of course not. Even if it is 10% of their user base (I bet it will way more), they will be ignoring a few hundred thousand or may be a few million users!

Monetate - Conshohocken, PA (Philly suburb) - No remote, but we will help you relocate.

Monetate is a SAAS provider of testing, targeting and personalization tools (e.g. A/B - MVT testing, recommendation engines etc). We turn data in action on our clients' sites by doing real-time DOM modification to put the right experience in front of their users. We’re looking for engineers who want to do highly visible work on great brands and solve tough problems with great coworkers.

What we're looking for:

* Problem solvers who like to code - we take things apart, figure out how they work, then build software to solve users' problems

* People who like to ship - we're focused on building and shipping great products - if you like to see your work in production quickly you'll see it here

* Use the source - Google Closure to Python, Hadoop and Mahout to Solr and Lucene - we're open source across our stack

* People who like hard challenges - we have great problems across our products - data, UX, 3rd party JS, high volume / low latency APIs - we have no shortage of fun problems to work on

About us:

* Founded in 2008

* We pay market rates

* Respect - it's our core value. We have a great team and we work well together. Our vacation policy is the same as Netflix (we don't have one). Our technical teams have full authority over (and responsibility for) the problems they work on.

* Funded by First Round and OpenView

We're looking for people not positions. We have people who have joined the team with no background in our primary languages and people from non-traditional backgrounds. Check out our blog at http://engineering.monetate.com/ and see more about our open jobs at http://monetate.com/jobs/

I got hired via HN about two years ago and we do have a good number of engineers in the team who found Monetate through one of these threads.

Feel free to email tjanofsky <at> monetate com with any questions or to apply.

"Uncaught The Javascript Facebook SDK must be loaded before calling init.". I have Facebook Disconnect installed and all i see is a big blank page. http://i.imgur.com/KlK8n.png

It would be great if it let me import my playlists from Youtube. Also, option to close the video pane when the song is playing would be nice. Congrats on the launch. Very nice implementation.

Draw a heart and it'll spell it out. Nice!

Can't you just call your phone? If you can't find another phone from which you can make a call, you can always use Google voice from inside gmail or use http://www.wheresmycellphone.com/

It is actually $185,000 for the evaluation fee. There is an annual fee ($25000 or a % of each domain registered) and other dispute resolution fees.

Section 2.2 on the FAQ page http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faq...

Interesting to note that Google has applied for 101 TLDs (search for @google.com in that list) including a lot of generic words like car,book, dad, dog, eat, family, film, fly. While some words are related to Google's business many aren't.

A little over $21 MM[1] in application and first year fees. $185,000 for the application fee and $25000 for the annual fee.

[1] http://mashable.com/2011/06/20/icann-top-level-domains/

For those who are not on Facebook, here is the press release http://newsroom.fb.com/News/App-Center-A-New-Place-to-Find-S...

It is true that having it as the only option to apply for the job or even having it as a totally separate option wouldn't be the best idea.

I can see this as a useful tool for pre-phone screen or post-phone screen evaluation. At the startup where i work we do send the candidate a small code problem after the phone screen and before the on-site interview. I know lot of companies do that. Gives you a little more insight about the candidate and also ensures that you are not wasting your teammates' time as well as the candidate's time.

Also, submitting the resume/github link along with a solution to a programming challenge increases the probability of getting to the phone interview stage. Highly applicable for famous companies like FB or twitter where they receive hundreds of similar applicants every day. Of course it is a stupid method if you are trying to hire a team lead or senior engineer but for fresh graduates or junior developers it works well. I don't think they will mind spending an hour solving a problem.