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Comment by waxman | Hacker News Reader

Three, concrete steps Obama should to take to redeem himself with the tech crowd and revive the economy:

1) Immigration reform. If smart engineers from abroad want to study here or work here we need to let them, and let them stay as long as they want.

2) Better science and math education. It might be a long slog to catch up with some other countries, but we need to start. One suggestion: A national "learn to program" initiative in low-income elementary schools.

3) Focus financial industry reforms on making life easier for small businesses (i.e. startups). We create the most jobs and account for the most innovation, and yet the bulk of Obama's economic policy has helped big incumbents. Easier access to credit, federal startup grants, and small business tax reform would all go a long way.

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I probably want to disagree on all 3 accounts. While they do sound good in principle they are not, in my opinion, major hurdles for anyone, lets see:

1) It is borderline trivial to come to US on an H1b visa and has always been so: as a former H1b holder I can hardly see how can government do anything here except to be more efficient (more streamlined procedures).

2) What is government supposed to do here exactly? If science and math graduates had comparable earning power prospects to law, finance and medical grads we wouldn't be discussing it. Besides, on a university level US schools are top notch.

3) Like what? I own a small business and haven't encountered any obstacles caused by the government. Getting customers, press and funding are by far my biggest headaches. And keeping in mind how notoriously inefficient governments are I'd hate to see them decide which powerpoint gets my tax dollars and which doesn't - leave that to VCs.

I'd ask Mr. Obama to invest into fundamental research, the kind of expensive, risky and long-term stuff VCs don't invest into. They built Internet to fight Russians and look how much mileage we've gotten out of it. Startups aren't building "new internet", they're in the business of making products on top of the existing one. Mr. President, give us some new shiny tech out of NASA/CIA/whatever and we'll get busy building next generations of googles and facebooks.

The H1B process has gotten considerably more difficult in recent years. We've had two very frustrating rejections recently.

>2) What is government supposed to do here exactly? If science and math graduates had comparable earning power prospects to law, finance and medical grads we wouldn't be discussing it. Besides, on a university level US schools are top notch.

What about doing things to help more people reach this level? I don't have any suggestions in particular, and I think think that this is a hard problem, but it is certainly a worthwhile one.

I completely agree with a the need for more fundamental research. What about another generational project akin to the space race or the Manhattan project? These efforts did an amazing job of mobilizing both students and professionals around big, hairy goals, and the work that ensued sparked an untold number of innovations and new technologies.

Also,

1) Only larger companies can sponsor H1b's, not startups. The so-called "startup visa" would be a small step forward, but it sets a pretty high bar.

2) We rank towards the bottom of developed countries in math and science, and by college it's too late; by then you either got a good education in these areas, or you didn't.

3) I agree that government is super inefficient, and in some ways it may appear incompatible with the near-opposite agility of the startup world. That said, small businesses of all kinds need capital, and often credit, and the short-term effects of banking reform was to tighten capital markets even more.

Nonsense. We sponsor H1b's. I'd be surprised to hear that we were more than a stddev larger than the mean 2-year-old YC startup.

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