skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Echoing an observation from this interview by the chairman emeritus of Greylock Partners (the Boston area's premier? VC firm, first limited parter VC firm, etc.): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547204

The hook of that article is Greylock moving their headquarters to Silicon Valley a bit more than a year ago....
"These rules are also very difficult to discover and very difficult to implement correctly. From the situation with healthcare for your employees through to filing your taxes correctly, the amount of paperwork is insane and complex."

Sorry, but reading this is raising a question if the author of this blog article has experienced this himself or just hearing about it. The bigger your company is, the more complex tax forms and other things will become. But as a small startup company it is very easy to do taxes etc. You don't even have to fill out a standardized form for declaring your business income if you are a small company (EÜR in Germany). I was afraid of all this as well, but starting the company here is really easy, there are a lot of government/local institutions that help you with everything, even the IRS answers your questions if you have any.

I cannot judge on the other things, but they sound - as other said here - like the other grass is always greener.
while the Startup Visa is a good thing, it's still difficult for people (who are not born here or who don't possess a GC) to start a venture here. Even with the startup visa, there's a lot at stake and a lot of pressure to meet the demands about a certain $ of investment, turnover, operating capital, etc. Not every startup is going to fulfill those criteria right off the bat and the cost of failure is too high.

That's one of the reasons why I'm thinking of moving to India or somewhere Singapore/ Hong Kong in the near future.
> A good first step would be to completely abolish fishing subsidies.

Especially if you couple it with some form of jobs or welfare for fishermen, so as to decouple the political issues from the goal at hand (saving our fisheries).

But if you refuse to do that, you willingly bolt the battle to save our fisheries with other political issues that can and should be debated independently.
I don't think you can call one of the inventors of D-Trace a luddite, and the article was hardly a rant.

If you agree that many resources that require serial access are not memory then I also don't see how STM is making your life significantly easier. Composing locks and transactions in the same system sounds much harder to me than just using locks.

I think the jury is still out on the effectiveness of Clojure's concurrency model. It makes for nice short examples but I'm not aware of anything of any real complexity built on it yet.
I think you are confusing two separate issues. One is the probability of debt repayment, and the other is debt lifetime. The two are not necessarily related.

Payday loans have a relatively low level of debt repayment (necessitating high interest rates) and also a very low debt lifetime (days to months). In contrast, many AAA corporate and govt bonds have long lifetimes and high repayment rates (until recently, mortgages did as well). There are also low repayment probability, long term debts (subprime mortgages) and high probability, short term debt (commercial paper).

I don't think debt lifetime is that important a factor. Long term debt makes sense to finance long term investments.
We are currently using Clay for a few projects within Tachyon for performance sensitive code. It's simply being used as a better C, and since Clay can generate light-weight C compatible DLLs, it fits in very well.

Quillpad itself predates Clay and hence doesn't use it.
An AMA would be great. Would you mind posting it when you have the time? Greatly appreciated.
this is really really nicely designed - nice one.
I agree with PaulJoslin's criticism.

It was a good film, but I didn't think it was great, by the end I had a certain hollow feeling, same as I had after Dark Knight or Memento (not after Prestige).

Like in DK, I felt that the plot was overcomplicated, there were too many dream layers, too much was going on. I also missed somewhat longer, continuous action sequences. In Inception, every action sequence was over in 30 seconds, with everything happening in a dream (death just means you wake up), so it removed what little tension these sequences carried. (But then sometimes the in-game rules were broken, eg. the Jap. guy get shot but he doesn't wake up, so from then on shots are lethal? Well I guess not, because at the end everybody is fine after all.)

Interestingly, the overall plot's tension, whether the act of Inception succeeds remained, but the action sequences just didn't work. The plot's overall tension worked for me exactly until they went into yet another dream/coma state called limbo, at which point I just lost interest.

As PaulJoslin said, a much more effective film could have been built on these core ideas.
If a patent is transferrable in some form, and has some value, then there will be a market for it - one can hardly fault someone for exploiting this to commercial advantage.

The patent system itself is broken..... let's fix that...
The SaaS Customer Bill of Rights: Part One
Yeah, the same arguments against garbage collection. They are always leaky abstractions. It doesn't mean you can be a dumber programmer, it just means you can spend less time focused on problems ancillary to the core purpose of your software.
If you are not U.S born, it's
QUITE difficult to simply
walk in and start a company
in the U.S. And you'd spend
a lot of time just solving
those problems, and have a lot
less time to setup your company.

Not only that, you might have a hard time even getting to the US in the first place, as one of the requirements for even getting a visa is to show that you have "sufficient ties" to you current country of residence (e.g. a job).

If they suspect you might try to immigrate you won't even get into the country.
These questions have a very deep and important meaning. They also are an occasion to make an attempt at defining the qualities of our jobs. On par with naming your variables correctly, defining what are the jobs and what they mean is important.

Here in Quebec, to be an engineer, that is to bear the title, you need proper training and you need to pay your due to the corporation that legislate the profession. The reason backing that is that engineer have a legal liability into what they build. They must take responsibility for their decision.

I don't believe that programming at large as attain this level yet. Perhaps hacking at Mars Rovers for the NASA approaches or is it, but in web dev I think we are far from that.

As for programmer and developers, I'd venture the following:

A programmer is someone that implement the big picture created by someone else. That doesn't deprive her of expertise or quality, she just works at a different level than an engineer.

A developer is a loose term to qualify "working in the field". It's used in every which way to mean: "Hey, this is the far-west, one of the few knowledge work field where you can learn by yourself and reach heights which are regulated and unattainable in other knowledge fields". I definitely am a developer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerd vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek. I'm not saying this is the only explanation - languages evolve - but it's an accepted definition and has an history.

Language exists for a reason, precise language denote precise thinking, what is not defined we should strive to define correctly.
I've been programming for forty-five years. I've always called myself a programmer.

"Developers" are people who build subdivisions. Anything else is pretentious.

"Engineers" are people who, if they make a mistake, other people die. Engineers need to be formally trained, and licensed. Other than X-ray machines, aircraft and space shuttle software, not a lot of programmers can make this claim.

"programmer" is good enough for most of us.
Harsh lessons about online data storage
A similar program for automatically changing the color temperature, Redshift [1], was recently highlighted by Lifehacker and others as an alternative to the commandline-only XFlux, inspired by F.lux.

EDIT: One advantage Redshift has is that it automatically determines your lng/lat based on your current "home" location in the Clock applet.

[1]: http://jonls.dk/redshift/
Looks great! Now can someone get me more hours in the day?
Some examples:

Skype uses PostgreSQL for their VOIP services.

Yahoo! has a customized PostgeSQL for their data warehousing storing a couple of petabytes of data.

I believe IMDB is another quite prominent user.
Graph visualization on the web with Gephi and Seadragon
I'm currently working my way through Derek Sivers list: http://sivers.org/book

I would also recommend reading PG's essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
A Chat with Andy Payne
I am glad to see somebody new working this niche. The way you go about handling payments is relatively straight-forward, which is good. However, I wonder how you (plan to) handle stolen phones being used to send money to accessories to the crime. That is, Alice steals Bob's mobile and uses it to send money out of Bob's account to Carol, who is using a throwaway phone for the purpose. The texting of a four-digit pin would be in the history of the phone. So how do you mitigate against such theft?
You'll be chasing that feeling forever, friend..... about all you can do is go buy some old amiga gear and/or emulate and play your old games and whatnot. That magic you remember was a combination of the times, place, market, and age of computing when you had that equipment, and I pine for it daily :)

The thing is... the stuff we have access to now is enormously faster and more powerful in all respects - so what do we need to get that magic feeling back?
Yeah, that was a poor choice of words.

Calling that video "Collateral Murder" promotes their view that the airstrike was "murder", which is not clear.

I'm only saying they should present the information and leave their opinion out of it.
Is it at all possible to change the title from Europe to Germany. Most of his complaints are German specific and don't apply to everywhere in Europe.

Bureaucracy: I've heard regularly bad things about the German bundes. I've heard good things about UK, Sweden, Romania, Hungary.

Labor: Whether you get it here or there the price of labor is only going up, but in China it's going up faster. Programmers are expensive. I'm expensive. If a better offer comes along that you can't match or even come close to I'll be out the door faster than the computer can shutdown. (Of course with my 2 weeks-1 month notice first). Don't expect anything less from the chinese. I don't know what you are working but have you ever hired anyone straight out of college? Experience costs money and mistakes costs money. Just make sure the latter costs less than the former.

Costs and Taxes: Depending on the European country you may not pay any taxes on revenue while in the startup phase (generally 2 years). After that it's country specific, the rules that apply in Germany don't apply in the UK.

Travel: Maybe as a German these things don't matter to you, but, as an American, I find Europe to be fascinating, so many different cultures, so much history, and its all packed in one half continent. When I speak to other french or english friends about SE Asia it's generally "which beach should I visit this week?". Little interest in the culture, history, or the language (I love ordering food in thai, but that's all the thai I know). I think a lot of people have a very romantic idea of what SE Asia is about but that's it. Plus it's huge region, you need a plane to do all that traveling and those flights aren't short.

It looks like you've traded one set of problems for another. I don't know what the startup will ultimately be about but I wish you luck. Also be careful, lots of people have startup ideas that fizzle out, can't get funding, or can't get any promotion because it's not from the right place. One thing I've learned about a company is that it's the people you know as well as the idea that make it a success. If you are doing it in China, then have a chinese focus because no one in San Francisco is going to care about it, until it's too big to ignore.
KTM RACE Series | Bike shopping guide
how much money do you need to move there ?
Years ago I worked for a company that used Exodus and the facility in which we rented space was very similar. The only problem was that all of their security could be bypassed if one entered through the delivery doors, which is how one brought new equipment into the facility. There was no man trap there and if one brought a cart of equipment in someone might even hold the door open.
I'm trying to read as much as I can about the topic too so here's what I'm reading:

-Books-

Lifecycle of a Technology Company by Edwin Miller

The Game by Neil Strauss (you laugh but it's basically all about getting more confident)

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyasaki

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell

They Call Me Coach by John Wooden

-Magazines-

Entrepreneur

Fast Company

BusinessWeek

Fortune

Money

Inc.

-Websites-

Hacker News

Fred Wilson's Blog (www.avc.com)

FoundersSpace (www.foundersspace.com)

A lot of these titles are more focused on leadership or business in general, but I think a successful entrepreneur should have a general knowledge of a lot of stuff out there. I'm sure that I'm forgetting some, and these don't include the books I've got for the MBA program I'm taking. I'd have to dig those up, but I can post the titles if you'd like.

[Edited because the formatting was really screwy]
I look at it as a battle scar, or a really cool limp or something. I've been there, done that, and now I know my own limits better than almost anyone else. To me it's an advantage. I also admit to worrying I wouldn't be able to accomplish what I have in the past, but you know what? I simply don't want to ever, ever do that again...so what did I lose exactly?
From what I've read it appears to be the same in the U.S., but there is no consistent ruling. It varies state to state as the previous person mentioned.
I think you need to be careful distinguishing the issue of overfishing apex predators like the Atlantic bluefin tuna and the Newfoundland Cod, where we suspect they can go effectively (or at least commercially) extinct because other species go to the apex and keep their numbers down, from the implication this might decrease the total animal biomass of an area.
I certainly didn't mean to insult the author of the article... I just meant that the tone of the article itself had the sort of curmudgeonly tone that a lot of really good system programmers have towards fancy new technologies in their infancy.

All I mean to say is, some of those fancy new technologies do grow up to become quite useful.

And STM is designed around memory access. If you're attempting to write a concurrent program, and you have heterogeneous resource types, shouldn't you use a strategy which is optimal for each one? An IO socket is a fundamentally different sort of thing than memory, and ought to be managed differently.
Weekly Hacker:  We're accepting nominations
Shenzhen is Hong Kong without the terrible apartment costs, but with slightly better internet.
> challenge requirements

I'm imagining an American Gladiators room.
Great solution and glad to see how you expanded it to other thresholds. I think this might be the best automated way to track the best of Hacker News (of course I think my http://www.hackernewsletter.com is another great way with more of an non-automated feel + other content.)
DELIVERING Happiness by Tony Hsieh is an incredible book, especially concerning their customer service focus. (If you're especially interested in their culture, they give their culture book away for free at request).

Also, Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston is a great book with some great insights by early entrepreneurial efforts.
Many thanks! I've added the feeds to Pulse on my iPad and its working like a charm!
Apple has been collecting iPhone-user locations secretly for 3 years
Create value and it will suck to fire you.
I'm very excited :)
The book is a combination of developments from the author's phd thesis and a likewise named course that has been run the past few years at MIT's iap term, and is chock full of great tricks and habits to do sophisticated calculations mentally (or at least with greater simplicity)!
As someone who typically has a Clojure repl handy, I found it convenient to be able to copy-and-paste and play around with the model.
In most of Europe it seems ~20 euros/night for a dorm bed is about the standard.

I'm used hostels (& couch surfing) quite a lot and never really had problems, but I guess it depends on the region you are traveling in.

Tallanvor's approach seems unnecessarily paranoid to me, but I don't know where he travels too.
If you are trying to immigrate to the US on a non-immigrant visa then hell yes they will put you through the wringer.

Do the proper paperwork and apply through the greencard lottery. There are plenty of empty spots for French and German greencard seekers. Since we share the same language the UK slots are perpetually full. Australians get a special immigration visa (R-1?) just for being awesome.
In "real" engineering, every project is slightly different. If they were the same, you wouldn't need an engineer. The engineer knows about many projects involving similar components, the details and the way they are put together will be different on each project.

Wholly new software projects are not as common as you seem to suggest. Genuinely new stuff gets published in journals (just like "real" engineering), not many software engineers are creating new type systems, file systems, concurrency models, etc.

Some engineering disciplines may move more slowly than others, especially those for which the cost of failure is extremely high, but it's not as radically different as you suggest.
The taxes that German paid go toward the social benefits that the German enjoy. What if you get sick in China? Who pay for the medical cost? When you are out of work in China, who pay for the unemployment benefit? The statement that students graduated from university being competent engineers is not truth. You will find turnovers to be very high.

You are just trading one set of problems with another. I'm sure it will be a fun adventure. Good luck.
Better to take it one step further. Find people like this, interview them, put the videos online and let everybody share in their wisdom.
There is no evidence to suggest that software can be engineered, therefore someone who is a "software engineer" is selling snake-oil.
Very good project. I would love to see, in the rss feed, the real article (the HN text or the link the story points to). This would be great so that we don't have to get out of google reader to actually read the article.

Example : http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://steveblank.com/2010/07...

Hacker News reader for mobiles, created by toadjaw, is using a scrapping script which will extract nicely the article from the linked webpage.
Ask HN: What host do you use for Python webdev?
I've looked around on the web and seen some wiki's listing all the python host etc., but I was wondering of those of you here that do Python webdev, what host do you use and why?
Does anyone have experience about what to expect for 600$ a month?

I am in favor of hiring outsourced Chinese programmers over Indian ones: it is possible to find ones with decent Japanese proficiency, which means that when Tokyo discovers the latest... curious engineering choice I don't have to spend a day doing the needful to communicate our displeasure about it.

We told our outsourced team to write four functions to be accessible via a REST service, using RestEasy. I anticipated this to be approximately a 20 ~ 30 line job. Two weeks later, we received a scratch-built HTTP client which supported precisely one verb and two handwritten serialization schemes, with half the code containing precisely one comment in English by way of Babelfish and the other half containing very literate English comments like you would expect from code developed at a multinational with a legal department better funded than the armed forces of of most NATO countries.

I pray your mileage varies.
Why would you want to work for a place that wants to fire you but can't because of governmental regulation?
How to Focus
More than just an opinion. For example, your Panglossian summary failed to mention that bankruptcies are through the roof. Elizabeth Warren is not stupid. She didn't come up with that opinion for no reason.

I doubt anyone else is reading this anymore so I'm not going to go into detail. I just wanted to correct what you said so others wouldn't be misled. You can have the last word.
I work on aircraft software. We call our people "engineers", though no-one has a license. I'm not aware of a license we could usefully get.

However, the aircraft software industry is deeply immersed in process and layers of review. Rather than licensing our engineers, we "license" our product, through internal reviews, customer reviews, and FAA reviews.
While I agree with you for Labor and Costs and Taxes, I beg to differ about the travel part. With all due respect, the knowledge you and your "french or english friends" have about Asia is obviously limited, and equating them to the culture and history of many Asian countries is ridiculous. It is like saying "what does Europe offer other than museums?"
How will moving to SV help with his number one concern (programmer cost)? In the EU he pays $5000/month for programmers. In the valley he will be paying roughly twice that.

(The valley may have higher quality programmers and a better tech ecosystem, but I'm guessing the author is looking for grunts rather than artisans.)
Query-by-Humming Musical Search Engine Launched
For those who aren't familiar with the author he's Atul Gawande who worked on Gore's 1998 presidential campaign and was Bill Clinton's senior adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services.
Another words this is a political piece and has no business IMHO on hacker news.
The ACM article he links is worth a read. It discusses the pitfalls of STM in greater depth and includes some real-world benchmarks.
This may actually prompt me to keep a Twitter client open again (for the first time in a year). Thanks!
I wondered, reading the original article, how many of the security measures were to impress potential clients and investors and how many were really there to keep bad people away from the boxes.
Tangent: The irony of a blog post discussing FYO point with the branded Oracle O is quite something.
If by "engineer", you mean "software engineer", then I say they are all the same. They all seem to be used interchangeably in job postings and job titles across different companies.
Based on Gosling's blog, "enrage" might be a correct characterization ("an awful lot [ of my time ] has been taken up talking to people about life at Oracle. They need a place to vent, and I try to be a good listener.", that's from about a month ago and the whole short item is worth reading: http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/escaped_from_reality)

One very simple thing we do know about is that many/most?/nearly all??? of Sun's software people have seen their salaries significantly reduced. Even if this didn't hit directly people at Gosling's level it would substantially change a whole lot of things and certainly sends a number of negative messages.

It's not completely grim, the Maxine (JVM in Java) research group seems to be very productive and not losing principles, but they're working on an area that Oracle considers to be critical (JVMs in general and JVMs on top of VMs in particular).