skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I second starkfist's note of caution. How about finding a job in a semi-rural place (if you don't care which one, there are options - eg. check out astronomical facilities which tend to be in relatively isolated areas) and trying it out for a year? That way you avoid the loose-loose scenario of deciding you don't like it and burning through your savings to find that out. If you do like it, you can always quit later.

Grass is always greener at the other side of the fence; I'm in the opposite situation of having worked for years in a semi-rural area and thinking about getting back in a city.

Like the OP said, there are upsides and downsides to everywhere. I think if you want to try this, you want to set some milestones for the various scenarios, like at what point to bail out if you don't like it, at what level of savings should you start looking for work again, and so on.
To prove this I "borrowed" a busy but insignificant site belonging to a friend and changed everything below the scroll bar in the TOS box to the text from a Postman Pat story :)

I think over 6 months we only ever got one person querying it....
My usual approach to the first one in Python is:

a = "apple pear orange".split()
Put your toe into the water, cheaply. Take one idea and start building your thinking around it, on 'paper'. Think about problems you'll have to solve, look at the market for it, maybe write some code. Think about what success with that idea would feel like - some ideas you might not want to follow for a few years.

This way you can try a few ideas without committing too many resources. Just keep moving forward every week until you find something that really grabs you and where you think you have an edge. Then hammer it.
Yeah that's a very good point. I've wondered about this. For example, the Southern Utah desert is my favorite place in the world and there are some very inexpensive towns to live in down there but the culture is very conservative.

Main or Vermont are definitely possibilities. The winter sounds horrific but I was in Vermont in the fall a while ago and it was totally stunning. From what I understand Vermont and Maine both lean much more to the left politically so it would probably be less of a culture shock.
I think that you will have less success than you think you will trying to underbid projects because of your lower cost structure. For work that is truly local (some law practices work this way), there may be an established regional price point that may indeed be lower than the wider market. But you aren't going to get lucky trying to sell iPhone dev or Django projects on the cheap; people don't buy projects that way.

The most important rule of freelancing/consulting/selling-to-companies: your customers aren't paying with their own money. There are plenty of things that are more important to them than an abstract dollar number.
Unladen swallow is still based on the 2.x series: http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/source/browse/trunk...

What I'm writing today to distribute is targeted at 2.x, where x>=5. If I didn't want to distribute it, I'd be using 2.6 and writing as close to 3.x as it allows.
From Fortune 500 To Open Source: One Man's Adventure
I use this a lot in debate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

(Not itself a fallacy)
Very cool, Amir. We're flattered that a busy hacker such as yourself would take the time to write this up :)
I've been trying to get an idea of how hard it would be to make a living entirely through remote contract work. I see a lot of job postings along these lines but I have no idea how well they pay or how competitive the contracts are. I've been salaried for 10 years now so I have no first-hand experience.

On the flip side though, I'm beginning to see the opportunity costs of a 9-5. It's hard to find the energy to spend another 3 hours hacking on my own ideas after working in front of a computer all day and the company I work for puts a lot of roadblocks in front of open-sourcing any of my work so I'm increasingly cut off from the open-source community and all the job networking that comes with it.

My ideal would be to find a way to spend no more than 6 months of the year working to pay the bills and to have the other 6 months free to work on my own ideas. I'd happily trade a lot of material comforts for the freedom and time to follow my own muse.
I live in a rural college town--Pullman, WA.

Monthly living expenses for me can top off around $1000/mo comfortably. I have a car but don't pay for the insurance (though I do pay for repairs, gas, etc.) so $1500 is definitely doable. Rent for a single person can be had for $300-$400 with some looking, and not necessarily in bad conditions. $500 will get you plenty of space. You will likely need the car, though the town bus system is very good (supposedly one of the best small-town public transit systems in the country). It's a college town so you have a younger population than some rural communities--it's not quite "truck stop", in other words, but having a large student population has its own problems. There are quiet parts of town, where families and grad students tend to live, but the "student ghettos" have loud parties, crappy apartments, and predatory lending practices aplenty.

The next town over, Moscow, ID, is about 8 miles east. It's also a college town, plus it has a nicer downtown (complete with hippie food co-op). Haven't lived there, though.

If you like variable weather, where the temperature goes from -10 to 110 over the course of the year and you see wind, rain, snow, hail, and sunshine in the course of about the same week, you'll like the area. Speaking of seasons, summers are a lot nicer and quieter than the school year, at least in Pullman.

Not sure I'd recommend living here to anyone, to be honest, but if you want to feel isolated from the real world for awhile it'll do the job.
I had something a little smaller in mind but Grass Valley looks pretty nice. I should visit that part of CA sometime.
right on. Many disasters can be easily avoided if we challenge the faulty logic involved.

I'd like to see more real debates amongst our decision makers. Everything today is designed to avoid them. We would certainly get better decisions and the mental demands alone will make for sharper leaders.
Vulcans and Apes
Anywhere in central California (the central valley to be more specific) is cheap to live compared to SF. For example Madera, Fresno, or even Clovis you can rent a decent looking 3 bedroom house with yard for about $1000/month. However, these cities are mostly agricultural and do lack the "techy" feeling you'll find in bigger cities like SF or even LA. The summers are quite humid and hot, but it's nice that it only takes about 1.5 hours to drive up to Yosemite National Park.

Clovis, CA has a population of about 100k. Recently it has been trying to bring the technology atmosphere, for example a couple of days of go we had 59daysofcode conference (http://59daysofcode.com/). Quite exciting!
There's definitely significantly different methodology here since, Buenos Aires is one of the cheapest cities on the numbeo list and most expensive on the article.
Wow, check out Household debt. I'm not surprised to see Brittain, the United States and Canada top the list, but can anyone tell me what is going on with Switzerland?

I always thought the Swiss to be a wealthy, financially conservative lot.
I really dislike the term "scripting languages". While you could describe Python and Ruby this way, it does them a huge disservice, implying that they aren't capable of large scale application development. I think this term should really be reserved for Bash et al.
Meh... This geolocating is standard procedure, like with much other software that doesn't have readily available locale info. Also Bing, Altavista and Google perform geolocating to serve you the "appropriate language", all depending on where you browse from (they don't check the browser's language setting). If he just logs on to the US iTunes Megastore he gets the contract in English.
That's an interesting observation. I have no experience in the current freelance dev market so this is definitely useful information. I guess I could at least take advantage of a cheap location in that I could live off the revenue from handful of smaller personal projects (apps, facebook games, etc), but this is definitely the big unknown in this plan.
I think you guys have a cool service. I was about to setup nagios+Clickatell for service notifications, but 30 mins into the configs from hell I dropped this idea and started to work on a custom solution.

Happy hacking, I am keeping an eye on notifo :)
Wait. Be patient.
No Django support, no Python 3.
HTC EVO 4G to get Android 2.2 - Samsung Moment and HTC Hero will NOT
After much experimentation over the years, I've found the best approach as follows (using git):

- always ship master

- always develop using topic branches (branches dedicated to a single feature)

- deploy topic branches to dev/staging (with large visible footer label text)

- don't leave old topic branches around on your central git server (delete as soon as its tested and merged back into master)
Someone commented "You obviously logged into the Qatar iTunes store. If you log into the US store you will get the US agreement, or the French store for French agreement." -- If he's not shopping in the US, he shouldn't be logging into the US iTunes, should he?
The latter. In my contrived example, I meant that "Customer" was the main object you would use, with methods etc. to work on customer information. Then the data that would pass between objects is encapsulated in its own (very simple) class.

Edit: I didn't parse the "ouch" the first time I read this. Sorry, I'm not trying to be an ass about it. But when I first started trying to figure out the "right" way to do it, I came across something (probably by Allen Holub) that confirmed something I was suspicious about: There is no sense in having a private variable if you are just going to expose it with public getters and setters (except for sanitation purposes). The real point was to pass in the data through data objects, and keep the private members unexposed. This also means (typically, at least for me) a lot fewer getters and setters. It's completely against the Java Beans "way," I think, but it works well in real life. I use Java Beans only for persistence, because I like the automatic JB-xml conversion. That is, I make data objects out of the data that I want to store into a Java Bean, and do the automatic xml storage and read thing. It took me a while to figure that out. My first app, I hand-coded the xml. Ugh.
I live about an hour north of San Francisco in Sonoma county. It's quiet, beautiful and in Sebastopol, there are only 7,700 people. You could find a place on craigslist for not a decent price... you're 10 miles from the beach and 20 minutes from several parks and beautiful areas. It's at least worth a look.
AIUI, the explanation is that they wanted this idea of "declaration follows use". For simple things, this works kind of nicely:

char *foo;

Says that *foo will have type `char`. This sounds good in theory, but famously breaks down when things get more complicated (arrays of function pointers, multiple declarations at once, &c.).
"What in your life would you pay for, that does not exist?"

Oh, hells no. Geeks should NOT do this. We have enough dating sites and bug trackers already, even if none exist with their ideal feature set.
You don't actually need to freelance. A lot of big companies these days will let you work remotely. Especially if you've got a niche set of skills that they need.
I'd love to see you produce so data for any of these claims. People in Japan get access to MRIs for much cheaper than Americans. How is that a bad thing?

The median real income has been hardly been growing at a fast rate. You'd need it to get growing at an incredible 10% a year for your explanation to be at all credible.
I didn't mean to imply that lacking a sorted set datatype wasn't a pain in the ass; I was pointing out that the lack of multiple set implementations is a tradeoff that we make for all built-in datatypes that could support other operations but don't. (Personally, I would love to have the ability to pick a random element from a set. That would be great.)

By the way, in case anybody was wondering, here is a (relatively inefficient) way of making a sorted set in python:

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576694/
I read Wikipedia. I follow links as I please. I sometimes visit the main page for the featured article or the "Do you know?" or the news articles. Now I am also a Wikipedia editor (as of April 2010).
I disagree, the following:

int* foo, bar;

could be interpreted as declaring two pointers, whereas:

int *foo, bar;

makes it clear that only the first variable is a pointer.
Bioengineers make a cancer detector from digital camera
Hasn't anyone attempted to simplify the UI for the ToS? Is it because a UI can be misinterpreted or anything?
I start with one tab and continue with only one tab. Going previous page is permitted but openning a new tab is not. For instance yesterday I started with google's wikipedia entry and spend approximately 2 hours. Now i know who wrote lex
SQLite 3.7: WAL (Write Ahead Logging) for better Concurrency and Performance
An overview why file locking is broken in Linux
1- Pick a technology that's going to change a >$1B industry or create one.

2- Go talk to people in those industries to test out product ideas. Don't do this haphazardly: read 4 Steps to the Epiphany. Its editing is brutal (well, non-existent), but the ideas are vital. It doesn't matter if your original idea is shit; talking with people that have problems and money to resolve them will give you more.

3- Find a co-founder with complementary strengths. They can't just be a business person.
Ask HN - Rate my startup: Gigayo.com
For the last several months I've worked on a site that helps businesses create online display ads. http://www.gigayo.com
Our goal is to help non-Fortune 500 businesses quickly and affordably create quality banners that can be used on most ad networks. We currently have about 60 templates that you can customize - more on the way. The price, at this early beta stage, is free. So feel free to make as many ads as you so desire.

Would love your feedback!
It's not that easy. Ideally yes, but when you get into it you find the scum of the earth will grind your property into the ground and laugh at you as you try to collect a months back rent and damages from an unemployed single mom in court while your newly trashed and un-rentable home sits vacant because her 5 kids ripped it to shreds and it will cost the thousands you spent on repairing the last place to repair this one. But otherwise right on.
from __future__ import print_function

map(print, [1,2,3])

def test(*a, **b):
print(*a, **b)

test(12)
with open('t.out', 'w') as f:
test(12,13, sep='--', file=f)
Here are a few cloud providers I'm aware of that offer "fully managed" or advanced support options:

EC2 (with premium support - pricey)

Storm on Demand

SoftLayer

Storm on Demand is a new IaaS platform backed by Liquid Web. Pricing is reasonable, support is good, and they really know what they are doing. I've been using their service for about 3 months now with no issues or downtime.
It's almost like it, and that is an awesome gadget. You basically lower your body's frequencies - more like into a theta state. And that's when you can easily get into superlearning mode and/or eventually fall asleep.
Also, The Planet has a cloud service in beta with some advanced support options like monitoring and pro-active downtime response
Really cool and awesome concept !!
A lot of us don't like Python. It's a language with a mediocre design, a somewhat frustrating syntax, and a stubborn refusal to commit to such essentials as real closures and lambdas.

It's basically a language written by a group of people who don't trust you (as a Python user) to be knowledgable and educated. Decisions have been made based on the assumption that you are bad at your job.

Now, everyone seems to comfort themselves with the notion of making it “easy for maintenance”; repeating “I am smart, surely, but not everyone can be as smart as I am.” But this is ultimately a dodge that feeds into the problem endemic to our industry: a disdain for everyone else and everyone else's methods if they differ slightly from our indoctrinated best practices.
Lots of wealth, or the appearance thereof, is directly due to debt.
IPhone 4 FaceTime without Wifi
To shop the US store, you just need a US credit card. He must have a card specific to that region.
Very interesting post, thanks.
If you are on MacOS, the package contents contain the memory settings in eclipse.ini. I'd recommend bumping them up, particularly the maximum memory.

Here's what I am using:

-Xms512m
-Xmx700m
this general idea is good.

there are a lot of rural colleges where living is cheap and parks are close. i went to school at clemson, and the situation is quite similar.

plus, if you're working on a project and want to hire people, there are lots of students who would jump at the chance.
Thanks, looks like you may be right. I just found a post by Steve Yegge in 2007 where he said it was C++, Java, Python and JavaScript. I'm pretty sure I found references elsewhere to C/Java/Python though. Close enough.

I had forgotten about JavaScript, I guess I considered that one a no-brainer on the browser side. However, the line blurs between C and C++, especially if you use the extra stuff only tactically as needed rather than a hard-core-always-OO-and-templates approach.
> Space travel for our civilization is like a poor person putting gold-planted rims on his shitty car.

Well, that's one (wrong) way of putting it. I suspect you may be trolling, but here's some reasons that we might /want/ to pursue space travel:

1) Right now, all of humanity's eggs live in one basket -- literally. One large asteroid strike, sufficiently virulent pandemic, nuclear war, etc, would wipe out our species. Planting a self-sustaining colony on a non-Earth body fixes that.

2) A self-sustaining orbital technology (necessary for a colony) would allow us to build enough solar power satellites to give everyone on Earth enough clean, cheap energy for the next thousand years.

3) Putting a large chunk of our manufacturing on the Moon or in orbit would allow us to reduce the environmental impact of industry.

By the way..."a drug that would make us all happy and compassionate"? Huxley called it "soma", and I would not want to live in the Brave New World.
When looking into this, I've found a lot of people blogging about trying to do this. Usually they talk about how great it and then quietly drop it.
Who said anything about using robot.txt for security? I just use it for keeping Google from indexing my print pages, for example. Anything that I don't want the world to see, can't be seen without authorization.
Ask HN: Media Temple [GS] Alteratives
Media Temple [GS] Alteratives?
That's a good approach, but sometimes you can't do it in C++. (At least with C++03.) Consider:

template <class T>
T* new_align_1d(size_t d1, unsigned int align)
{
void* ptr = _malloc_align(d1 * sizeof(T), align);
return new (ptr) T[d1];
}

So, I'm defining a function new_align that takes a size and an alignment. I allocate enough space for a 1-dimensional array of the given size on that alignment, then use the placement operator to construct the actual objects in that place. Then return the pointer. Pretty straightforward. So let's generalize one dimension up:

template <class T, size_t d2>
? new_align_2d(size_t d1, unsigned int align)
{
void* ptr = _malloc_align(d1 * d2 * sizeof(T), align);
return new (ptr) T[d1][d2];
}

You can probably see what I'm doing here. So what's the return type? And what's the syntax for specifying it? Since it's a template, we can't define a typedef to help us. (C++0x should allow that with parameterized typedefs.) The answer surprised me - I really had to look at the grammar and mechanically figure out what it was going to be.

(Yes, I have to pass d2 as a template parameter - it's part of the type of the array and must be known at compile time.)
If you have many idea and interest and whan to start a business (earning money), then you are in a good position. My advice would be to sort the idea by ease of testing and potential benefits. Use this sorting as heuristic and try them out and see what sticks.
WakeMate Android Demo
I wrote my PhD on this, actually, but focussed more on EULAs as a case study (though they're much the same thing), looking at whether the consent given is actually "informed consent" from an ethical point of view. Unsurprisingly, it's not. :)

If you're curious and want to read through my PhD I put it up on my website at http://liedra.net/thesis/

Toward the end of my thesis (final chapter) I give some suggestions on how to improve the user interface of EULAs to make them more ethical, but I've had some issues trying to actually make this a reality (stuck in post-docs for now, and haven't been able to break through the academic funding barrier as yet :( ). When I'm further in the academic world I'll have another go, but if anyone's working on this I'd be happy to lend my experience too ;D
Can someone please explain why when I zoom in with Chrome on this page the text size remains the same? I've never seen anything like it.
Tell HN:  Comment ranking in Hacker News takes your history into account.
It's not just based on votes for the comment in question. It takes your history into account as well. I don't know if it's automated or hand-tweaked per user though.
I as well like central California, but I would be wary of the central valley unless you can deal with heat well. I live on the coast, which I love, but it is no where near as cheap as the valley, it at least has weather I can survive in. The other issue is that most large/modern cities are four to five hours away.
Sebastopol is pretty awesome, And it has a decent tech scene thanks to O'Reilly Media being based there.
I wonder if the fact that noone reads Licensing Agreements anymore means that they have become less (or even un-) enforceable in courts.

In Canada, for example, there is an "average person" test, which deals with evaluating the reasonableness of one's action by comparing it what an average person would've done in the same circumstances. If on average noone reads T&C before accepting, then perhaps this may invalidate this T&C agreement model.
True, I missed the point in the first part. Thanks for pointing that out.
I've done it and I didn't find it at all cultlike. They had a donation booth at the end with no pressure to actually donate, and that's it. Nobody's tried to contact me or pressure me or anything like that. Most of the retreat is spent in silence.

As for the links you posted, the first one had a bad experience at an incompetently run retreat (it was tl;dr so I didn't finish it - maybe there were more problems). I can say that I was well fed at the one I went to. The second one is by an obvious lunatic who was mad that they didn't recognize that he's many times more egoless than they are. Other reports trashing the retreat that I've seen (and I read a ton of them before signing up), with the hindsight of having actually done it, mostly come across as people who feel like losers because they couldn't finish the retreat, so they blame it on anyone but themselves.