skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seminars About Long-term Thinking at the Long Now Foundation: http://longnow.org/seminars/

BBC World Service documentaries: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/
It looked at the other URLs the users bookmarked UN the same way, normalized partially for popularity.

So I never looked at the global tags - user1's use of tag x was distinct from user2's.

Man, I miss that dataset.
"Veterans of even 20 years in the federal prison system could not recall anyone being bailed in mid-sentence like this, and particularly not on the heels of unanimous Supreme and Circuit Appeals Court decisions."

The justice system evidently works in mysterious ways for rich, connected neoconservatives. Conrad Black's fraud was blatant, he hid and destroyed evidence of it, and has shown no remorse. After siphoning more than $6M of money from the company, he served a little over two years. $3M/year is a pretty good salary for living in minimum security prison.
For those of you that have been through startups that involved investors. How important was the cost of living, office rent space? How does that importance compare to how easy it is to hire the right people? I can see how "lifestyle startups" prefer cheap places.

PS. I visited Vienna this summer and really liked it. A one-hour train trip to the east and you're in Bratislava (i.e. daily commute possible) which also was a nice city. Prague, Venice, Budapest, all reachable in over-night train trips or less with ÖBB (austrian railroads). The whole area is interesting.

Myself I'm from Stockholm and I doubt we have anything else to appeal startups with than well educated people and a beautiful place to live.
That episode is a classic, I highly recommend it too - DHH and Jason are a good match.
If I can be frank...what do you think of the work culture in India, and would you really recommend it to a foreigner? I've heard that people are frequently dishonest and unreliable, that agreements are often not honored, etc. (And I've heard this from Indian friends.)
I'm confused... why would they ever come up with a solution like this?
In other countries it is fairly customary for movies to be spoken in the original language of the locality where they were filmed. I didn't mean it as a research issue, I meant to use it as an illustration of it being a marketing decision.

Movies in German subtitled in English are not going to be very popular in the United States.
Energy Proportional Datacenter Networks
The article started off okay, but then when he suggested requiring licences to use a computer and removing infected machines from owners by court order it got completely ridiculous. We should be working towards making it even easier to get people online, not constructing more artificial barriers to prevent it. If someone choses to remain ignorant and not learn about their computer (leading to an infected machine) this is not a legal problem. Getting more people access to the largest information medium in human history is the goal, sure some will use it for trivial purposes, but that isn't our concern and certainly not our prerogative to regulate it. This article incorrectly assumes there is no future for both the computer as an 'appliance' and as a more powerful tool and I think we can be assured there is.
Definitely not. Emacs is the most popular lisp editor. I've recently grown to like vim though.
I use and recommend Webfaction.
I have seen this comment before, but I believe it is only valid for free accounts which get swapped out after a short period of no incoming requests. I think that for any paid plan, your app is always loaded so there is no loading request delay. You might want to give it another try with the lowest cost plan and see if your results are different.
Ask HN: Hiring tools/applications for small companies
I am trying to figure out how the small companies go about doing their hiring. What are the popular tools/applications they use to find, sort and manage applicants?
i think a crowd ...as in crowded. busy, jammed, confining.
Why?

Because it (also) places indirect costs and additional onus onto the submitter of the patent; costs beyond the existing filing fees and legal fees.

Because it also provides (some) tangible results for the community. (Now whether the covered source code is judged "good" or "bad" is another matter; there's certainly going to be some cases and some judgement required here around what's covered code, and whether or not the code is obfuscated, etc.)

Because it means all of the patent-covered source code eventually gets exposed and licensed, which then gives an advantage to the community.

Because even if your organization doesn't produce a product (and for whatever reason), you still have to produce functional source code.

And because it means that most closed-source organizations probably won't choose to patent their software.
As far as I understand the issue in this case is not the lack of end-to-end security, it is that it's possible to trick the phone to tranmsit without encryption for regular calls. Non-encrypted calls are needed because it is important to allow making emergency calls (e.g. 911) without a SIM being present or without a PIN number and it's the SIM card that has the encryption key, not the handset.
Ask HN:How do I find market info databases?
I am trying to compile a list of Real Estate Boards and some other market data. I am sure that a list like this has been compiled before. Is there a free or paid resource that I can use to look up this kind of market data?

A month or two ago I saw a post on HN that had sources of information databases, but I unfortunately cannot find it anymore...

Edit: Found the referenced HN post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1493768
The article is referring to the business cycle, a well-established economic phenomenon of unpredictable cycles of expansion and contraction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cycle

> This is extrapolating from a pretty small data set

I wouldn't call the last century of the US stock market a small data set. Perhaps what you mean is that the author's choice of decade-long windows is too arbitrary?

But regardless, the business cycle is a broadly accepted and easily observable phenomenon. Exactly what causes these cyclic fluctuations is hotly debated (at least it was ten years in my macro-econ classes.)

> it's quite possible average returns in the 21st century will not be as good as average returns in the 20th century

The article wasn't arguing that one should expect those exact returns, but rather that positive returns are cyclical-- good times generally follow bad times.
I like this only that it does not somehow capture the aspects of 'crowd sourced' that suggest that certain content will rise to a more visible status based on the activities of the community.

So "community sourced" might be a definite step in the right direction. Still wouldn't mind replacing the sourced part ... if possible.
I also hate UGC as a term - user generated content - again sounds very robotic, not fun or engaging...
I've been doing the same. Racket using Module language works so far for SICP, and is a good learning environment, as intended.

It might be better to take the opportunity to learn Emacs though, since it is the Lisp editor.
> The climate is 7 months of never seeing the sun ever + 5 months of the most gorgeous weather you'll ever see.

Hey, I vividly remember going outside on the day after Christmas in a short-sleeve shirt and sunglasses. Like many West Coast locations, the weather can be very random. Although it's dominated by drizzle and mist most of the year.

> The energy is "west coast" paced (meaning fairly swift but casual).

Have to disagree with you there. If you're from the east coast or the Bay Area you are going to feel like you're wading in molasses. People from Vancouver usually don't have that sense of urgency, perhaps because the lifestyle is so good. The startups I know that had real ass-kickers on staff tended to import them. ;) I'm not saying you couldn't build a team that moved quickly, but you'll have to spend time inculcating that as a value.
Ruby Benchmark
I find it highly entertaining, as long as I don't get too ramped up with all of the conspiracy theories. And like the BBC, it gives me a wider view of what is going on in the world than US media.

I also agree that it helps counteract all of the bias out there.
Historically, times of extremely high income inequality have not exactly been good ones.
Whether or not it's true, the overall sentiment is that Obama is bad for business.

That article didn't mention President Obama once. Would you care to cite a reference to back up your sentiment claim? After all, it was republicans who recently blocked a bill to aid small businesses with expanded loan programs, and tax breaks. http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/republicans-blo...
I chose a VPS b/c I wanted to run Python web apps, which traditionally don't work with shared hosting environments. Most shared hosts have daemons that kill long running processes. If you have a python script running for a long time (even if it is running your site) it would be killed. This seems to be the biggest reason in my mind for running a VPS over a shared host.

In terms of cost, a VPS usually will cost more as memory usage is something you'll have manage. For example, I would have liked to run MongoDB on my VPS but just didn't have anywhere close to enough memory. Not a big deal, but if you're using it for a business then it is important to understand what you're getting into in terms of memory usage and what services will need to run. You have to allocate resources for not only the web server, but any databases, scripts, etc.
Application Programming Interface Ecosystem
I wander how Dave's pitch deck look like, when he was raising these $30 mil from institutional investors.
I guess one single slide with the word "fuck" in 30pt font ;)
I have used PHP in a multi year project, and I think
that PHP is just plain godawful.

I am happy to use [LB]A[MP]P where [LB] is Linux or
BSD (BSD preferred), [MP] is MySQL or PostgreSQL (mostly
PostgreSQL preferred) and the final 'P' can either (1)
fall back to Perl or (2) spring forward to Python.

I have used Rails and Rails is fun but I am not
convinced that they have emerged from scaling purgatory
yet.
I'm sorry to say this, but that is a lot of text for basically saying: "no market -> no sales"
Michael Jackson to Entrepreneurs:  What is Your Core Competence? (in German)
A strange game :)

(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/quotes#qt0453844)
If your data is easily and completely partitioned by customer, it may make sense to do so. It's as easy a partitioning scheme you can come up with. It gives you the power to do staged roll outs and other flexibility in deployment, as well as security isolation that makes your life easier and some customers may prefer.
G-translation to English at
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...
google app engine, rackspace cloud sites, rackspace cloud servers, and one server left at serverbeach
I don't think it's President Obama specifically. The deadliest threat to a business based economy is uncertainty. The past three years have been awash with just that, and the past year it seems to be getting worse. People respond to uncertainty by hoarding.

Specifically, the Federal Government seems to be thrashing about with no clear message, no clear vision, and no clear plan. Lots of proposed, complex proposed new laws make things worse, not better. Spending bills to help businesses that are elaborate or have elaborate requirements, with unclear goals are an example.
I assume by "like this" you mean a separate db for each customer.

The reason is probably a perceived improvement in security. I've worked in systems where they've done this for security reasons. I believe Joel Spolsky did it for this reason when he was betaing a release of product (FogBugz?).

It certainly does jack up the maintenance overhead. I wouldn't design a system this way myself.

I'm really curious if this is in fact a common practice out there in the wide world.
We also use Azure. Deploying from Visual Studio is pretty slick. The biggest problem in general with Azure deployments is the speed. Perhaps its normal, but its pretty annoying to wait 15+ minutes to deploy and wait for a Web and Worker role to be 'Ready'

Its also VERY annoying that only 1 Live account can have permission to sign in and manage the Account and Services. Yes, I know you can do some stuff with the certificates to allow others to deploy, but its a huge pain. Especially for a startup with a few people who are trying to learn and manage our account.
Evidence, please?
Racket has a SICP language level that you can install from Planet.
Layar is from Amsterdam
(It also has beach, countryside within a mile or two, and a lot of nice pubs and restaurants. I'm in London now, but I'd be in Brighton in a flash if I was starting something with no ties.)
True, but you still have to build up a forest from which every parse can be extracted (as Alpino does). Of course, it does reduce the cost of ambiguity. E.g., I implemented packing in the Alpino chart generator, and there are very many edges with the same 'semantics' that can be packed, especially since Alpino allows for a lot of optional punctuation, and there are often roots plus subcategorization frames that give multiple inflections. With a beam search, unpacking is a lot more efficient.

There are also many other possible optimizations. E.g. with a left-corner parsers you can exclude left-corner spines that will probably not lead to a probable parse (Van Noord, Learning Efficient Parsing, 2009, and other work). And, of course, reduction of lexical ambiguity by restricting frames using a part of speech tagger.

Still, even in this best-1, optimized scenario, real-time parsing of long sentences is still hard. So, when parsing large corpora we usually apply time and space limits (which is easy to do in Sicstus Prolog, with good recovery).

Thanks for the link to the paper!
What I get from that is "The cost of living in Austin, TX is 26.4% lower than in San Jose, CA" and "Employers in Austin, TX typically pay 20.9% less than employers in San Francisco, CA." Pretend I make exactly $100k here and pay 33% tax. Moving to Austin costs me $14k in net income (0.209 * 0.67 * 100000), so my living expenses here would have to be at least $53k (14000 / 0.264) just to break even by reducing them.

But that would mean I'd been spending over 79% of my net income just in living expenses, which to me sounds too precariously balanced to be sustainable. In reality I make somewhat more and save half of it, so I'd barely come out ahead if my rent in Austin dropped to $0.
What about immigration? How hard is it for a foreigner to move there. I gather from the OP that that's one of the major problems with the US.
To be honest, I trust a democratically run government orders of magnitude more than I trust business owners.

I think top owners/ earners often buy luxury goods, invest overseas, buy land (switching ownership of land does nothing to increase capital), and otherwise aggrandize themselves rather than the community/ nation. I think this is especially true when said capitalists invest in enterprises with which they have no personal stake -- e.g., buying Ford stock because it has X rate of return and Y risk, not because they actually want to make cars.

One note -- socialist like myself hold the highest criteria to be the good of the collectivity, not an individuals' benefit. On this point I can't really argue, except to say it is my belief -- maybe merely because I don't come from a family of successful capitalists.
AFAIR economics, starting a company in a market segment with established competitors may reduce risk, but it may reduce profitability by the same degree. E.g. starting selling hot dogs in place where there are 5 other hot dog sellers has high chance for break-even profitability and low chance for exponential business growth. However this may not be true for some rapidly growing markets highly sensitive to innovations.
Yeah, that would make more sense than what is currently there.
With great startup scene, I mean there are bunch of cool startups within biking distance of each other (To name just a few http://www2.layar.com/, http://www.phusion.nl/, http://www.ebuddy.com/, http://www.supersaas.com/, http://www.guerrilla-games.com/). So you're bound to run into fellow entrepreneurs.

It also has a large number of headquarters of multinationals (Cisco, Philips, etc) so expat services are well developed.

I'm not really into generally accessible meetups myself, but I'm sure I've seen a few announcements come by of various functions.
Programming Contest: Find the People
If someone in the EU wants to distribute the magazine, perhaps a bulk shipment to the distributer could be arranged (to save on shipping)?

I know a flat-rate envelope costs something like $5 to mail internationally, and it can hold a lot of magazines.
we're all related eventually.
I can't help but imagine the terrible implications this has for new startups. Want to launch your awesome new webapp? Too bad, because your domain is "too new" and so nobody's DNS will resolve it yet. And so your first task will be to go around to all of the DNSRBL organizations and plead with them to put you on the "good guys" list; as others have pointed out, if the current crop of e-mail RBL groups are anything to go by, this will be a frustrating and opaque process.

The network infrastructure shouldn't be in the business of enforcing policy, period. This is exactly the same slippery slope as the net neutrality debate, and in just the same way, it favours the existing players and those with the deepest pockets. Do we, as startups, really need yet another disadvantage?
That article sounds like politics in general is bad for business with which I agree. I think government works best when it's basically staying out of the way and keeping the rule of law intact.

Obama is the President so it's easier to say him rather than the current government in general. As it stands there are many uncertainties around new regulations and costs (healthcare, taxes, potential cap and trade). I'm not saying I agree or disagree with any of them, but business hates uncertainty. It's hard to play the game if the rules are constantly changing.

Here is more detail of the study in the original article

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/13/small-business-conf...

"Owners do not trust the economic policies in place or proposed and are distressed by global and
national developments that make the future more uncertain," the NFIB said.

...

"Nine out of ten small businesses reported that all of their credit needs were met last month, according to the NFIB report. Just six percent of owners said 'finance' was their single most important problem. Rather, poor sales, taxes and government red tape took the top three spots."
You can pretty much go to a startup event every day of the week now.

Even worse... there are overlaps between events now. You can go to several startup events every day of the week some days...

Which is, actually, awesome. Yay.
There's STIKK (http://www.stikk.nl), and a bunch of Ruby/Python/Haskell/JavaScript meetups. What's maybe lacking are a couple of big companies that buy/invest in smaller ones (e.g., like Nokia in Berlin).
Good points. I remember how weekly R&D meetings at a startup I worked for switched from Hebrew to English when a single, junior level American member joined the team. I didn't give it much thought at the time, only after a few years living outside Israel I realized how non-obvious this is..

I think the hunger for risk & success is a good point, and perhaps the main characteristic of Tel Aviv, from business to art to nightlife. Though it takes a certain kind of person, especially if you grew up in much safer Europe/North America.

Good luck with your startup! Will be happy to buy you a beer if you pass by NYC, en route to SF :)
Because normally the financial, cultural, and governmental centres of a country are in the same city. In Germany that's not the case as the financial capital is in Frankfurt which means in Berlin you don't have the high-end of the market driven by bankers, executives and professionals like you do in other capitals.

Throw in high-unemployment, a city which is huge physically compared to it's population (it's bigger than london with a third of the population), lots of low-income self-employed artists, writers, etc.

All of these factors combine to make it a cheap city. I'm currently staying in a 4 star hotel in a nice fairly central area for £35/night. You'd pay more than that for a smaller studio flat in london.
Actually, those are CLR (.NET) objects, not COM objects. Sorry for nitpicking.
% uraniacast -lv | grep -v ^pol | sort
biz.econtalk http://www.econlib.org/library/EconTalk.xml
biz.ft.digital_business http://podcast.ft.com/rss/21/
biz.ft.listen_to_lucy http://podcast.ft.com/rss/18/
biz.harvard_ideacast http://hbsp.libsyn.com/rss
biz.mixergy http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mixergy-main-podcast
biz.the_economist http://www.economist.com/media/rss/economist.xml
biz.wsj.the_journal_report http://feeds.wsjonline.com/wsj/podcast_the_journal_report
comp.37signals http://feeds.feedburner.com/37signals_podcast
comp.agile_toolkit http://agiletoolkit.libsyn.com/rss
comp.bsdtalk http://feeds.feedburner.com/Bsdtalk
comp.coderpath http://feeds.feedburner.com/coderpath
comp.entrepreneurial_thought_leaders http://www.stanford.edu/group/edcorner/uploads/podcast/EducatorsCorner.xml
comp.floss_weekly http://leoville.tv/podcasts/floss.xml
comp.grady_booch http://csdl.computer.org/rss/podcasts/audio/onarch.xml
comp.hacker_medley http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerMedley
comp.security_now http://leoville.tv/podcasts/sn.xml
comp.software_engineering_radio http://feeds2.feedburner.com/se-radio
comp.stackoverflow http://rss.conversationsnetwork.org/series/stackoverflow.xml
comp.technometria http://rss.conversationsnetwork.org/series/technometria.xml
comp.the_startup_success http://startuppodcast.wordpress.com/feed/
comp.twi.startups http://feeds2.feedburner.com/twist-audio
comp.twi.venture_capital http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThisWeekInVentureCapital-audio
eng.bbc.6_minute_english http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/how2/rss.xml
etc.bbc.thinking_allowed http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/ta/rss.xml
etc.twi.comedy http://feeds.feedburner.com/twicomedyaudio
hist.dan_carlin http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/history
psych.the_psych_files http://www.thepsychfiles.com/feed/
sci.omegatau http://omegataupodcast.net/category/podcast-en/feed/
writ.writing_excuses http://www.writingexcuses.com/?feed=podcast
University of Maryland discovery may lead to 'smart pill'
I doubt you connect users at all. With bots you can control your cash flow.
Is vim support for scheme/lisp good out of the box or does it require a bunch of plugins to get any type of workflow?
The point is that

a**b

may occur in existing code, and mean

a * (*b)

Introducing a double-star operator would break this code.
The obligatory quote is "Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me" (David Thornley).