skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depending which part of the city you want to live, it is far from being cheap. But there are a lot of places where it quite affordable, but I am not sure if this suits everybody (travelling distance, "neighborhood").

I am partly living in Berlin for 4-5 years now and now moving there with my startup completely.
Radiolab and You Look Nice Today are already mentioned several times.

Lately I've really been enjoying Risk: http://risk-show.com/ Honest stories people thought they'd never share.
ESR = Eric Stephen Raymond.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

Here's the "How to Become a Hacker" essay that contain's ESR's definition of a hacker vs. a cracker:

http://catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
speaking as someone who's only income is selling VPSs, if your application works under shared hosting, and you can find competent shared hosting providers for a reasonable cost, you are probably better off with shared hosting.

Now, personally, I consider hiroku and google app engine to be shared hosting. very expensive, high end shared hosting. (in fact, carefully consider the expense... if you have low revenue per compute cycle, or if you plan on scaling up your usage before scaling up your revenue, they may not be suitable just on cost.)

Now, the advantage to shared hosting is that it actually has all the upsides the cloud promises. You actually eliminate your SysAdmin. VPS hosts (or "cloud" hosts that just give you an *NIX box) only eliminate the need for a hardware guy, which is the cheapest sysadmin role you can have.

Also, there are some performance and reliability advantages to having one large box dedicated to, say, running php, etc... vs setting your tiny private stack up on some 256MiB box. It's extremely difficult and expensive to give you a live 'hot failover' VPS without your help. It's pretty simple to have hot failover with a shared hosting setup, hot failover that the customer need not notice.

Now, the downside of shared hosting is control. While /in theory/ shared hosting should kick the shit out of a vps for anything shared hosting can do, here in reality, that's not always or even usually how it works. when you outsource your sysadmin duties, you are dependent on the people you are outsourcing to being both competent /and/ caring about your problem.

The thing of it is, if your provider doesn't care about you, then you are /much/ better off with a xen vps. with a xen vps, the other hosts on the box aren't going to mess you up nearly as much as on an OpenVZ or a shared hosting system.

This is why I sell Xen VPSs rather than OpenVZ, FreeBSD jails, or shared hosting. Yes, running a xen host takes more hardware, but it takes a lot less sysadmin time from your provider.

The only real solid "do this no matter what" advice I can give you is to have off site backups, and practice bringing your system up on a new provider every now and then. All providers, shared and vps, make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes wipe out both live data and backups- see the hypervm disaster.

Always be ready to switch providers, and you will always be with a provider you are satisfied with.
Bangalore.

Cheap, when you look from the dollar perspective. Lot of startups, lot of socializing, lot of expertise.
This one. Here's the S&P 500 since 1950 (as far back as Yahoo has data, but the stock market as a whole looks pretty much like that back to 1800):

http://is.gd/dWQmU

See if you can find a 30 year slice of that chart where it doesn't average 10% annual returns.

If you're investing for retirement, that's how much time you have. Patience...
I've followed this case over the years and it's completely in character to see that he has no remorse whatsoever. He had been draining funds from his company, Hollinger International, into his own pockets for years. Shareholder pressure forced an investigation by the board, upon which he resigned, and was subsequently convicted for securities fraud. And of course he now describes himself as one of the "people, who, like me, would never dream of committing a crime...".

Notwithstanding his personal shortcomings, he's right about sentencing and the public defender system. Not that he has to worry about that!
I've been going 10 years so far at something similar, and while I've taken a lot more than one photo a day on average, I'm still working on a mechanism to extract the interesting ones from the documentary chaff. I am trying to attack the problem by using extensive metadata to organize along different dimensions, but the resulting explanatory notes sort of ruin the magic of the mystery:

http://james.lab6.com/photos/
Move to a place you are familiar with. It would take too much time learning the language, learning the culture, getting used to the local way of doing things, building your network, having support from friends/family. I don't think that the place where you found your startup is really that important.

It surely depends on the kind of startup you are building, but knowing the local industry / companies (names, people, market shares) has helped me a lot more then the actual (lack of) regulations/startup "feeling", cost of rent, size of town.
Lots of very good stuff mentioned by others already so I'll just mention others:

Astronomy Cast: http://www.astronomycast.com/ I saw someone else mention it, but it needs a second vote. I love the "not just what we know, but how we know what we know" format.

All in the Mind: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/default.htm

For amusement, The Bugle. John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman BSing for a bit is fun.
I was going to write a perl script to download all these but after I discovered that the naming scheme wasn't consistent throughout every file, I gave up and installed iTunes to download everything. I then promptly removed all hundreds of megabytes of it. An advantage is the naming scheme is pretty good; nothing that a novice shell-scripter can't fix.
Nearly half of US small business owners are Republican.
You have to take into account that in the earlier days more people lived in an appartment then nowadays.
Slightly OT, but I got distracted by the strange Aphex Twin cover they used as background music. Followed the link, and now that group (The Bad Plus) has at least one new fan. I like seeing new business models like that in practise.
Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
TODO: Upgrade hosting account.
Ask HN: Any ideas for a better term than "Crowd Sourced"?
I can't stand the sound of the term 'crowd sourcing', however the meaning that we all seem to grok is very useful and important.

'Crowd sourcing' sounds very technical and cold. Crowd... negative connotation... Sourcing... very robotic.

Just wondering if anyone has come across any other phrase that can evoke a similar concept with a more fluid and human feel?
Thanks! Completely overlooked the cname. Was struggling with A records all the while
The secret that everybody ought to know is that "It seems your account is currently using too much CPU / Memory time"? :-)

Mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=ubuntu&#...
Top 25 Free & Freemium Web Apps for College Students
I have it on good authority that the U.S. military uses similar technology overseas for monitoring terrorists.
Wordpress to drop support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4
hah. yes, some people look down on you for not driving an ostentatious car. Personally, I think you are best off completely avoiding that sort.
I can guarantee that there isn't a person in Canada that reads the National Post that doesn't know who Conrad Black is. I actually appreciate that they didn't waste my time with any backstory. I think in this day and age people can google shit if they want backstory.
One of the best I've seen recently is by blippy, http://blippy.com/
Just very simple animations that make it easy to quickly grasp the concept and answer potential questions about the product (security, privacy etc.)
Everything is really hassle-free. Support is great. Print quality is superb.

But they are still new and obviously a lot of rooms to improve:
- Cheaper international shipping rate (currently sets at $13.45 to ship outside UK/US/Canada).
- Print magazine subscription option.
- API
FWIW, here's the information on the Start-Up Chile program that was mentioned:

http://www.thisischile.cl/Articles.aspx?id=4387
http://www.startupchile.org/
From my experience in London I'd say a major factor is the financial sector pulls in lots of ambitious talented developers and pays them well enough that they can easily afford to take time-off to work on their own thing.

In London at any startup event you go to in London I'd say around ~20-30% of the founders have backgrounds in the financial sector.

I think investment banks are more nurturing of that sort of behaviour than many other firms, they're willing to let people go off and experiment and then rehire them back if stuff doesn't work out for them. I left the bank I was working for, and they became my first client (on a consultancy basis) to help finance my startup and after the consultancy contract was over they gave me an open invite to call them if I ever wanted to come back. I know many other people who have similar stories.
@blatherard LOL. Do you guys have any recommendations on a hosting account? Sorry for the inconvenience...

I pay about $20 a month for Hostican, but still seem to be having problems when my stories get on Hacker News or Digg...
Seconded Singapore. Been there once for the Barcamp. The community is awesome and their HackerSpace is happening as well.
It's so beautiful.

Those polaroids aren't just moments frozen in time, but memories immortalized. I know this sounds quite corny, but in a way this is a crude summation of the things he truly left behind. It has everything his moments of happiness, sadness, people that made his life worth living, his work. Everything.

Beautiful.

[edit: This is something so obvious, but it takes time to sink in. Is this what life is? When you see his choices, the women he fell in love with. How he married that someone a few weeks before his death. It just puts everything into sharp perspective. Is this life?

Wow.]
A similar concept is presented in the time management section of The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. He suggests minimizing reactive tasks and confining them to pre-allocated slots of time, rather than letting them interrupt you throughout the day. It's an obvious suggestion, but few people adopt it in their daily life.
what is the negative connotation with crowd? if it was herd sourcing i could see the negative connotation- with crowd not so much except when use along the lines of "i don't follow the crowd". still that use of crowd is spot on for what crowd sourcing is- following the crowd.
Chapter 1.1 Understanding the Application Landscape
Three words: Out Of Scope
How To: Subversion Backup
And you can't compare WW2 Numbers with today. A lot has happend since than.
It should more be considered as an opinion/ccolumn, as opposed to a news story (you'll notice it's in the 'Full Comment' section of the paper). It's also not a one-off piece; since he's been in jail, Conrad Black has continued to write these columns for (what was formerly) his paper about life in prison, what he's been up to, and general news issues of the day.

In short, this shouldn't be considered (and wasn't intended) as a news report on life in prison, but rather one person's account of what life was like for them.
Slicehost and The Planet's Server Cloud.
More than half of US small businesses think the economy is better off or about the same.
Django and SaaS
Download the file using the Tor Network (https://www.torproject.org/). On linux all you'd have to do is "torify wget http://www.example.com. If you are worried about storing the encrypted data, you could use a 'plasable deniable' encryption system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption)
Why the Desktop Gets No Respect, and Should
Is there any competition in this space? What other alternatives are there besides MagCloud?

What happens when you get beyond the current price you are at, which seems to be about the most people would be willing to pay? What is your next step when you hit 50+ pages?

Thank you.
Often work on several projects at a time here.

Keep two text files on the desktop to sort them out, one small file (~200 lines) for concrete ideas and another large file for "future" or less defined thoughts.

Inside each are project code names and a list of notes underneath each one. That way it's easy to add and keep additional ideas to the project, but doesn't require me to log in to a project management app, commit to a repo, etc.

An unexpected benefit of keeping ideas from many different projects in single files is that an idea from one section often leads to an additional feature for another project.
It is an interesting list, worth reading, but in the end I did not find anything compelling. Most of the wishlist of features are concerned with syntactic sugar that would clutter up the language, not with anything that makes the language a better way to express programs/algorithms. It would be nice to see use cases and some arguments about why adding a feature will make some significant change in the quality of programs coded in the augmented C rather than standard ASCII C.

C has its share of design flaws, but it is relatively clean and elegant language. Much of it's power and efficiency comes from its simplicity.

Programming language design easily gets lost in special case syntax and enumeration of syntax for special cases rather than adding new composable syntactic elements. Modifying or extending an existing language is very difficult because it requires a deep understanding of the rules and concepts used in the original language and its implementations. Some of the rule and concepts are documented, but others are part of the folk knowledge shared by implementors and users. As a case in point, consider the transition from C to ASCII C.

The range of languages that a programming language designer would find helpful to understand in detail is very large. My personal list of favorites includes FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, C, C++, Python, Perl, Lua, Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Prolog, Erlang, Haskel, ML, BASIC, Algol, BCPL, Bliss, Smalltalk, SQL, Snobol, BASH, and, of course, a handful of assemblers and macro-processors. It also helps to have a good understanding of machine architectures and the theories of machine independent (and dependent) optimization. Programming language design for general purpose use is one of the most difficult of human intellectual tasks.

Suggested reading: Elements of Programming, by Alexander Stepanov and Paul McJones, published by Addison-Wesley Professional in June, 2009.
> I would have an exponentiation operator.
> That operator might be: **
> [...]
> It might be possible to add this to existing C now
> since the operator is not already used.

a ** b == a * (*b)
$40 Wii controller = digital whiteboard, touchscreen or head-mounted 3-D viewer
London, UK. It's expensive, but it has a startup culture that's probably only second to the Valley now. You can pretty much go to a startup event every day of the week now. The scene's still developing but the growth's been huge over the last couple of years.

Another alternative maybe Cambridge, UK which is cheaper, has it's own startup community, has a good talent pool because of the uni, and is only 45 minutes away from London using the commuter train.

Elsewhere in Europe, Berlin and Stockholm both have startup communities. I'd look at Talinn in Estonia if cost is a major issue, the government offers grants for companies hiring developers which can be of significant help in reducing labour costs.
For a month in the spring my route to work took me by bicycle past three of the embassy in Copenhagen. You could see some radio antennas on one of them (I think it was the Russian one, but I am not entirely sure) - it didn't take that many brain cells to figure out what that was being used for.
My understanding is that it can be pretty hard to get an appropriate visa unless you're jewish (although this may have changed recently).
> The yellow background however is stressing.

Agreed. It's a lovely shade of yellow, but in front of maximized window on a 24" monitor, my eyes physically squinted a little when switching to it. :)
Convertible notes can have a clause that they turn into preferred at a specific valuation after a set amount of time. So this is not correct.

I'm really not sure how preferred acts "like" convertible debt. They are radically different things. The main value of a convert is a) nobody really needs to lead, as it is usually drafted by the startup, b) it is cheaper and easier on the leg a side, and c) it doesn't set a valuation on the company.
Dont click on that kroosma link, it started thousand windows in chrome.
Systems like these (tactical SIGINT, vs. the kind of strategic collection of everything. like NSA does) have been part of war pretty much ever since radio was invented.

Most of Rommel's awesomeness in North Africa was due to his superior radio directing finding units. No need to necessarily translate enemy communications if you know where they are and when they're sending.

The premier tier-1/special mission unit in the US military (Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), aka "the Activity", Gray Fox, Torn Victor, Cemetery Wind, Centra Spike, ... they have a lot of code names) was basically the key piece in killing Pablo Escobar (the book "Killing Pablo" is a pretty good account). They're obviously extensively involved in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the major reasons the military was more effective in 2005-now in Iraq, vs. 2003-2004, is that cellphones spread out to cover the whole country, and insurgents and their friends used cellphones (although this is more "strategic" vs. tactical/field gathering like this system).

I'm just waiting for the first fully autonomous weapon which combines signals intelligence and killing -- flies around listening for a specific IMSI, then drops down on the target and blows up.
A patent for a new crankshaft might cover if it's 5% larger; it depends on how specific the claims are. There's a balance between too specific (thus useless) and too broad (thus not granted unless it's for freaking software); for machines this seems to be understandable, while for software the PTO just throws caution out the window, takes the money, and runs.

The thing is, only a court decision will determine whether a patent covers a given use or not; I see a lot of documents written from both perspectives, and the real winners in the patent industry are lawyers (and, when all goes well and the case is sufficiently international, we translators get some nice money out of it, too).
Warsaw Poland!

I live in San Francisco, but I have to say: Warsaw is a super cosmopolitan city (though half of that is Turks), still relatively affordable, very high level of education, and it's the fastest growing economy in Europe.

Not to mention, the amount of foreign investment pouring into Warsaw is just ridiculous.
I want to say 'why has it taken this long?' but I also understand they're not a small project that can make changes willy-nilly. Still, WP3.0 seemed like the most logical time to be making those changes - major version number, etc.
This reminds me of one of the points in the End-to-End Argument by Saltzer. The network protocol offering to encrypt the payload is broken, because the two end clients should undertake to secure their communication if it's necessary. In this case I have some sympathy though, because it's not easy for two humans speaking with their voices to come up with a way to encrypt it. Maybe the responsibility should fall on the local code running on each phone?

http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoen...

Of course, I know close to nothing about radio security, so maybe the world as it exists today is optimal but the phone makers blundered in ignoring the insecure warning?
And the other half?
Certainly not Democrats, none of them.
True, but you have to take into account that Tel Aviv is one of the few places where terror attacks aren't just something politicians pull out of their bags to scare voters - their are an actual thread.
Wow, Objectify's documentation manages to describe how the GAE datastore works and how to use it in a single wiki page which is much, much clearer than any of Google's many pages about it. Thanks for the recommendation.
Immigration and California Wages: Zero Correlation?
By way of comparison, it's got similar search volume as Algol: http://www.google.com/trends?q=common+lisp%2C+algol&ctab... . It loses to Erlang and OCaml: http://www.google.com/trends?q=common+lisp%2C+erlang%2C+ocam... , and Clojure: http://www.google.com/trends?q=common+lisp%2C+clojure&ct... . It's well below Haskell: http://www.google.com/trends?q=common+lisp%2C+haskell&ct... .
Chic Geek: The ground rules to separate yourself from the unwashed nerds
Depends on who you are... Know anyone famous?
NPR's All songs considered: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=37
Great music podcast

CBC's And the winner is:
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/index.html?newsandcurrent#andth...
The best documentaries from the Canadian brodcasting corp.
If you know Python you can experiment with some graph algorithms using NetworkX (http://networkx.lanl.gov).

Check out the tutorial:
http://networkx.lanl.gov/tutorial/tutorial.html
Not a Day Over Infinity
Community Generated?
Not sure I agree with cost of living being good (low) in Vienna. Rent & transport is cheaper than London, but more than Berlin or so. Taxation on income is sky high - social security is ~24% on gross income for the self-employed and only decreases once you hit ~€60k (though the first 2 years are ~16.5% plus a fixed amount instead); lowest tax band of 36.5% starts at €11k yearly income - which I guess is OK as long as you're burning existing capital but really hits you once you've got revenue. The available R&D tax breaks, grants and such are clearly designed for larger corporations, not early-stage startups.

Bratislava should indeed be much, much cheaper, though.

Re: talent pool in Vienna, I can't say from personal experience, but I doubt it's better than London (though admittedly cheaper)
It's worth pointing out that Black sued the Government of the day over blocking his peerage (Black v. Chretien) and lost. So while he may say that it was a personal vendetta that caused him to renounce his citizenship, it's not like he didn't have a recourse to due process.

As for his conviction, it was both for honest-services fraud (which SCOTUS is in the process of unravelling), as well as for obstruction of justice - brought on by, among other things, being caught on a security tape removing (with the assistance of his chauffeur) a number of boxes of documents from his former office without court permission and in the middle of an investigation.
Could you enumerate the reasons? I'd like to know why "open books" hasn't taken off.
Not Milan and definitely not Italy.