skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a great spreadsheet comparing a lot of countries around the word:

http://www.doingbusiness.org/documents/Simulator_2010.xls

It's from the World Bank, comparing how easy it is to do business in different countries. Last time I checked, US was 4th, the UK was 5th, and Ireland (where I live) was 7th.

If you want to consider Ireland, it's got a very 'pro-business' attitude, strong US connections, well-educated, English-speaking workforce, political stability, little bureaucracy, many grants and supports available from state agencies to promote entrepreneurship, and a very low corporate tax rate of just 12.5% (there's further tax breaks available if you are doing R&D). However, it's expensive here.

As regards taxes, Accenture moved their Global HQ here from the Bahamas because of tax advantages, and many multinationals have their European HQ here also (Microsoft, IBM, Google, Apple, Pfizer & most of the Big Pharmas). Also, from what you have said, I'm guessing you are Eastern European - well there are many of your countrymen here, so you won't feel totally homesick ;-)

Despite all that, I'm actually considering travelling to Silicon Valley in September to scope it out, and to try to determine if I would like working in a startup (i.e. if I would be suited to doing my own startup at some point). My work contract expires then, and I've taken on board some good advice from a successful American entrepreneur who strongly recommended it.

So I'm in a somewhat similar position to you. I'm seriously considering moving to Silicon Valley to at least give it a shot, the odds of success are much higher for all the reasons mentioned in pg essays and the articles on 'moving to Silicon Valley' that appear from time to time here on HN.
Saving OpenOffice text snippets to an Apache Sling repository
The Bootstrapper's Bible [pdf]
There's no way to scroll the page when viewing in Android browser. The page just gets chopped off and doesn't extend beyond the visible area, meaning no scroll. If I zoom out I can see more, but even on the linked page that means it's kinda small to read.
> Now in the end, we might look at Onoda as a fool and worse, a murder of innocent people. In the end, he was both of those things, there is no denying it.

Funny thing is that at war time being idiot murderer of innocent people is just fine. I think there should be much more footage from war zones. Maybe then people would stop looking at war as sane and sometimes appropriate option.
Announcing CPAN Testers 2.0
It pays to be extrovert in any way.

Some natural extrovertion, as a way of life is called Buddhism. ^_^
I responded to the Chomsky quote above.

when you ask them to explain what they have just said in a prior statement, the usual response is a change of subject, even though I am genuinely interested in understanding their point of view

This is quite understandable, I'm afraid. Trying to explain Heidegger to someone who hasn't read Kant is a very difficult game indeed. If you're genuinely interested in learning the more elevated parts of a discipline, you need to put in some time on the basics.
The two framework examples you give are not at all on the same level. CodeIgniter has a lot of stuff to structure your application, but many experienced PHP developers wouldn't bother with it (and I, personally, don't think it's worth all the extra code you're importing); web.py, on the other hand, merely gets you partway to where PHP starts, with regard to writing your application. If those were your only alternatives, then I'd say you probably want to use web.py, but if using web.py is one of the choices, then you might just as well use PHP without a framework at all, which is one less piece of third-party software to go wrong.

One thing I've really liked about PHP is that (using Apache) if the webserver is up, PHP is up. When I developed most of the applications in Python, it seemed as though I was constantly worrying about the application process failing, even though this happened very rarely.

PHP really is an ugly language, but you eventually get used to it. :(
Good thing it got resubmitted, because those 2 have 2 votes each
Pffffft. I can beat that.

PPARS, the "new" payment system for Irelands national health service (new in 2005, the health service is called the HSE).

With a set budget of €9m,the total cost was €220m in 2009, and the system isn't even bloody working.

Remember this is not Canada, it's Ireland, with only 4m people and a much smaller income.

The problem is that this isn't an exception, in Ireland it's the rule.

More info here:http://www.independent.ie/national-news/ppars-fiasco-as-cost...
Are there likely to be the same lowest-common-denominator problems as you get with cross-platform development of console games, or those seen with Java apps like OpenOffice.org?
Chindogu: International Chindogu Society : Unuseless Inventions
Yep that's it. Next meetup is June 23. More info at http://wiki.python.org/moin/LondonFinancialPythonUserGroup
I think it's more 'we' is used when it's 'we' the team need to do stuff.

And when it's launched it's looked what 'I' did.

Cynical? Moi? Never ;)
That's not a big number ... these are big numbers ...

http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html
In particular charges of obscurantism, intellectually-vain tail-chasing, being 'epistemologically challenged', his metaphors of 'genetic drift' and 'peacock feathers' where academic communities evolve to fill the vacuum with linguistic puffery, jargon and self-referential bullshit in the absence of any clearly-stated objective or externally-imposed goals and success criteria.

This may be how it looks to an outsider like Chomsky, but it's not an accurate description of the academic communities that he is not a party to.

"Jargon" is what an outsider calls another discipline's terms of art. "Generative grammar" is jargon to a ballet dancer. "Battement tendu" is jargon to a linguist.

I'm sorry if Chomsky expects philosophy to have a "clearly-stated objective" or "externally imposed goals and success criteria" beyond what they've had for the past couple millenia, but there you have it.
Even if it did, bloody why? Why why why would you do this. I'm sorry but I'm no fan of Erlang syntax.

Wouldn't it be much better to port another language to the Erlang VM (like Ruby) than the other way around?
"Im sorry? I must be missing the point. How does the presence (or absence) of a particular language feature prove or disprove the point that bkrausz made originally?"

Yes, you are missing the point. I refer to closures, the feature at the core of functional programming, not just any "particular language feature". Functional programming is an extremely powerful tool to wield, and has been absent from PHP since its inception until very recently.

A great developer with a functional programming tool in hand is able to well outperform a great developer who must work around its absence.

Here's a paper that surfaced to the front page of HN recently on the importance of functional programming: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482797.

This is just one example, but a very potent one, of why language selection matters.
A* is not just that. The way it is said seems to imply that it is equal to Best First Search. Best First Search only relies on the heuristic function, so for the following graph, where A is the start node and h is the heuristic function:

+---A---+

|...........|

B h:1....E h:4

|

C h:2

|

D h:3

The traversal order according to Best First Search would be:

{A, B, C, D, E}

While A* will search by g(x) = h(x) plus d(x), the latter being the distance function from the start note to the given node. So, assuming the distance function to be equal to the depth of the node in the tree it would traverse it this way:

{A, B, C, E, D}

g(D) = h(D) + d(D) = 3 + 3 while g(E) = h(E) + d(E) = 4 + 1 = 5, so E goes first.
I did a bit of cleaning up of the Wikipedia page :) r.e. the quoted text, it actually seems a reasonable description of the site (from a quick look).
I accept that I am insufficiently knowledgeable to continue discussing philosophy. As a final question, what benefit could I gain from understanding Derrida? Is there an elevator pitch or value proposition?

> So, why is it so much to ask that someone actually read a philosopher (and the prerequisites he relies upon) before dismissing him?

It is indeed not too much to ask. However, if a pure scientist says to me, "I can't explain it, but we're discovering something we think is interesting," I have more faith in her than a philosopher saying much the same thing, and I'm more happy for e.g. the government to fund her research and not the philosopher's. Is that wrong?
Of course it will be taxed, and probably at a higher rate than other products. The trick is to tax it at such a level that fraud (smuggling) is contained within acceptable bounds. For example, normal VAT here in the Netherlands (only country I know the rates of by heart, I have no reason to believe that it's significantly different in the rest of Western Europe) is 19% ; cigarettes are taxed at close to 300 % (VAT + excise). Yet still smuggling cigarettes is a relatively small problem, which indicates that this level can be borne by the market.

Note that I support nor advocate 'sin' or 'health' taxes, be it for moral or utilitarian reasons, I'm simply saying that even at 300% the amount of people that turn to the black market is fairly small. But even when taxing them at normal rates (VAT only) they would already bring in money - everything is better than the 0 they bring in now, or negative if you take into account the costs that arise from situations that exist only because drugs are illegal.

(edit: added missing half sentence)
The beta went live at the end of 2007, and I started charging for it in February 2008.

S3stat goes squarely against one of the biggest pieces of advice I give to fellow startup kids: Never base an entire product off a missing feature in somebody else's thing.

Thus far Amazon have been good in keeping their AWS reports in the same state of disarray I found them in 3 years ago. I don't expect it will stay that way forever.
If that were the real problem, the solution would be better enforcement of tax law rather than making the competition flat out illegal.
ping from new-delhi, india
I love PDF. Just last night I synced the revised report on Haskell 98 (as a PDF) over to my iPad and stayed up late reading it in iBooks. Having the format baked into a platform helps, I'm sure (anybody remember the days they called quartz "display PDF"?) so anybody who only knows about Acrobat Reader is forgiven for the bad impression they have of the format.
The equivalent of an app store fee is a pay-wall to the application. It would probably drive away more customers than the equivalent app store fee, but I don't think it is defeating the point at all.

Offline access is a problem.
> Even though the title says the employees succeeded to bypass Facebook security, it seems they did so by breaking into the user's home network.

It's a great reminder that security can often be easily circumvented when using a "human weakness" (ie: corruption on so who has access to the system, passwords on post-its), than the system itself.
As far as Japan is concerned, the theories about how they would have fought for every house, etc. are false.

One of the most astonishing facts about the Pacific War was how few Japanese soldiers ever surrendered to the Allies (before the war officially ended). The Japanese sense of honor demanded that they fight till the end and never surrender. I no longer have the exact number, but IIRC, the total number of captives was less than a few thousands. Compare that with the number of German, Italian, Croat, Romanian, etc., prisoners taken.

This was so extreme that on Saipan, Japanese troops murdered ethnic Japanese civilians by forcing them to jump off cliffs to their deaths.

The Japanese were trying to negotiate a surrender even before the first atomic bomb fell.

One minority faction was. Bear in mind that, even after the first fission bomb fell on Hiroshima, they still didn't surrender. It took another bomb to force them to quit.

Also, even before Hiroshima, the Japanese has already trained millions of civilians to fight against the Allies. Many were expected to use nothing more than bamboo spears. BTW, as I recall, the Japanese government expected ten million Japanese civilians to die fighting the invasion. The US expected to take up to one million casualties.
Low taxes, little bureaucracy, good programmers, good startup culture (skype, for example, was programmed there), business-friendly place, good ties with Finland and Sweden, wifi everywhere, widespread use of the web.

The thing that impressed me most, however, was when I read that they are a nation of only 1.4 million people, so they have to go after every opportunity they have in order to make things more efficient. The Government's goal is actually to make the public sector so efficient that they can fire state employees and "free up resources", i.e. workers, for the private sector. Of course, this policy must have created some problems in the last 2 yeas, but overall the impression is that they are a country on the right path. Finally, the three Baltic Republics - I have visited Estonia and Latvia, but not Lithuania - are countries that share many traits with Scandinavian countries and that look up to Scandinavian countries. I personally expect them to do very very well.
I'm sure by then you will find other successful niches :)
there was a film with this in, or at least inspired by it. Remember the image in my head of a japanese soldier in dishevelled clothes looking out at the ocean from a bunker.
I'd like to see our new overlords impose a windfall tax on Accenture, EDS, IBM and all the rest. Start by clawing back the £20Bn the useless, unwanted NHS IT system cost.

Tho' to be fair, sacking civil servants (with no pension) when the projects they oversee overrun by an order of magnitude would go a long way to restoring some semblance of order. Remember that the British civil service once administered the Empire - most of the known world - with a fraction of its present staff and no IT at all...
So their examples are someone illegally subletting their apartment (find me a Brooklyn waiter whose lease allows subletting) and someone who benefits from the taxed, regulated high hotel prices to by renting their spare room short-term. It's not terribly convincing, noble as the cause might be.
How To Set Up Software RAID1 On A Running System (Ubuntu 10.04)
> Anyway I don't like bills that restrict people's free will like this.

Isn't the point of all legislation to restrict people's free will in one way or another? (Just a quibble; I realize this statement is not central to your comment.)
I don't get your point.

A poor person sells drug because it's the only way to make money. He doesn't make a lot of money out of it and any job would be better as he would get health care and pension on top of it. He would not also risk going to jail or die from a gunshot.

Now there's no more "illegal drugs" to sell.

What does this person do to make money? Remember there's no job for him/her and he somehow needs to eat to live.

I'm not saying the war on drug is fought properly, but between putting in jail all people who sell and/or consume drugs and let everyone do as they want there's probably stuff to be done.

Heroin was legal when first discovered, it was removed from the market because it's a lethal substance.

The "let everyone decide" doesn't work. Food education doesn't beat the commercial from Coca-Cola & the like. You would get the same problems with drugs, except drugs are not only lethal on the short term but somehow make you unproductive.

Then you're going to tell me "but we would regulate these drugs and they would have to comply to strict regulations". Boom. Crime opportunity.

My point is that legalizing some drugs wouldn't change the core of the problem.
I study the startup world and the most interesting I liked to know from this article is "If I were to found a tech start-up and aim for the fences (IPO or sale), I would do what several successful tech CEOs I know are doing right now: give 3-5 bad-ass advisors 1-2% each, depending on time required, and self-fund until you hit break-even or profitability. Then, go out to raise $500-750,000 from key angels who can open doors to potential acquirers and help you get to “scale”. “Scale”, in this context, meaning the point at which you can go big, as in millions of users or nationwide, with the simple addition of money: the costs and revenues of your customer acquisition are predictable. Money in = more money out."

Thanks Tim !!!
I think you've misunderstood me. I want hardware that's stable. I don't want to be forced to buy new hardware every 18 months, because I don't need hardware more powerful than my Droid.

I'm saying that a smartphone is a commodity item to me, and adding features beyond what the Droid does does not interest me. I want a cheaper, more reliable Droid.
The extent of my experience on the topic is in half-comprehending hobbyist's awe and the inclusion of okmij on my "personal heroes and demigods" list. The only word I could half-heartedly associate with this structure is the incredibly lame "hylomorphism"... which actually kinda generally expresses the pattern of much of computing. It's 5 AM and I'm going to sleep, but I'll leave you with the the most plausible leaves of a very brief search towards finding some recognized formal name for this structure:

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/07/monad-for-combinatorial-searc...
http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/mike/search-jfp.pdf
http://www.cs.au.dk/~gerth/papers/jfp96.pdf

If you really don't like yourself, try digging here:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pointless-haskel...
http://comonad.com/reader/2009/recursion-schemes/
I'm currently observing a government department that is in the process of attempting to put a little web portal on their mainframe, an approach that's adding seven figures (at least) to the bill. That's the way they do things in the government. Choose the most cumbersome, inefficient, insecure and technologically arcane approach and run with it.
A lot of people swear by Org-Mode (http://orgmode.org) under Emacs.
Everything is contained in a text file. Org-Mode adds tags, lets you
collapse/expand sections like a folding editor, lets you search on tags, etc.
As you might expect from an Emacs addon, it's exceptionally powerful.
Nor it has anything to do with Gnu/Linux for that matter. The command's older than your grandma.
Contrast with Britain that started WW2 as the most powerful country in the world with the largest empire, and lost it all.
Driving theory test- Special needs
As Neal Stephenson says in Cryptonomicon, the only Japanese soldiers who understood that banzai charges didn't work had already been killed in banzai charges.
How scientific group-think forms and grows
An Interview with Twitter co-creator and DollarApp CEO Dom Sagolla
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. :)

I will make time to check out 'On Writing', I've always avoided it basically out of snobbery. Still, I bet Stephen King can actually throw a sentence together reasonably well, despite turgid prose and bad themes!

If you haven't read it, I'd also recommend the essay "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell. You can even read it online for free: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm (or for a couple of bucks at pretty much any second hand bookstore, as part of a collection of Orwell's essays!)

You have also called my bluff on history. I don't actually have a 'history degree', I have an Asian Studies degree with majors in Asian History & Indonesian. I shorten that to 'history degree' cos it gets more mainstream approval, and most computer people don't care less about the difference. It gets less negative responses than 'arts degree'.

So, most of the non-Southeast-Asian history study I've done has been historiography (theory of history writing.) A lot of which borders on the deconstructionist stuff that you posted the discussion of, today. So, given that you seem to be interested by that, I'll try and remember some good reads or at least ideas...

Max Weber's Ideal Type is an interesting idea, and an important one in the history of postmodernism's precursors. I also find it a useful conceptual tool to keep in mind when generalising or reasoning. I can't remember the name of the essay of his that I read, sorry, but there are a few linked from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_type

I've only read a chapter of Foucalt's early work Discipline & Punish but I'd like to go back and read the rest. It's pretty heavy going though, from memory (translation from French doesn't help.) His ideas are really interesting and influential (at least the ones I can follow.)

Orientalism, by Edward Said. This is, from memory, another really dense book but it also has some really illuminating and rewarding sections in it.

The best "real" history book that I've read since uni is probably Howard Zinn's Peoples History of the United States. It's politically fairly extreme, and unashamedly biased. It's the unashamedly biased part that I really like about it, even though I don't always agree with the politics. I think it's both healthy and honest for an author to give up any pretext of being "unbiased" or "objective" and admit "this is my theory, this is what I believe, here is my thesis laid out, make your own mind up." Which is exactly what he does.

Homage to Catalonia, also by Orwell. Not really a history, but a personal account of a historical time.

History of Modern Indonesia, by Adrian Vickers. A very readable history of Indonesia.

I'm actually embarrassed at how few other authors and book names I can remember. I know that in my notes and reading bricks there are some really good books and articles, but I can't remember any names...
Most of those objections are adressed at the bottom of the github page.
Setting up a base Ubuntu install as a django development platform.
"gives me a great deal of faith that he is in fact technically inclined, technically able and has some development experience."

I'm sure he has development experience. But too limited an amount.

It is a valid question, but I don't think any response provided here can properly demonstrate to him the value of a language like Python over a language like PHP. No more than someone could teach him to fly a plane in the span of a post like this. It's not a simple subject, by any means.

The best anyone can do is point him to resources that he could study and learn over a period of time -- or advise him to listen to someone talented that he trusts.

I'd be very careful listening to anyone advocating PHP for a project starting from a blank slate. Yes, there are talent developers that prefer PHP. And there are many more poor developers that prefer PHP as is the most popular default choice for those that lack experience, are not comfortable with their own technical judgement, or believe that all languages are more or less equal.

Many on HN would argue that a top-tier developer would not choose PHP, period. But you may not be able to get hold of a top-tier developer -- and in that case a team of solid PHP developers may be the best available choice, if not the best possible choice, particularly if you've worked with them before, and the project is technically simple and limited in scope.
I agree, but that's still an assumption at best.
A good DBQ essay requires solid critical analysis
Students have to be thorough with gleaning information and answering questions based on these questions. A DBQ essay is not a difficult essay to write. If you understand the question asked, writing your essays based on them will be an easy task.
I would have to see some figures. Maybe I'm wrong about the iPhone's longevity.

Of course, I also might be wrong about my Droid's longevity.

The primary reason I say forced is the US's carrier subsidy model, in which you are forced to pay 2/3 of the cost of a new phone whether you buy one or not.

So your friends on first-gen are already making payments on their 4