Interesting read and I've heard similar stories, as well as know one person who got in, but still talks about how terrible it was even after admission... this is of course terrible and blatantly stupid of any nation to discriminate of bright minds on questions of faith or origin... but what does it have to do with Hacker News?
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"
