skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone else hoping this will eventually allow coding on the device itself?

Of course someone would have to come up with a more programmer-oriented virtual keyboard. I've already messed around with using bash and python without a physical keyboard and you really want easier access to all your punctuation and braces.
Indian here. There are a few leaders in India who can't speak one coherent sentence in english, even though they have a masters degree in english,
Great idea. Hopefully the site will flourish and avoid turning into a spammy front for self-help products. It's a shame the content of the suggestion cards is only available by purchasing the physical cards.
> This may be true, since neither death or rejection are bad. They are portals to other places.

Would it be wrong to take the meta-contrarian position on this one? Rejection, like death, kind of sucks.
GitHub has massively reduced the amount of work needed to start contributing to a project - click "fork", make your changes, send a pull request. That said, actually learning how to use git in the first place is quite a bit of work.
Try http://polarhome.com

They offer (beside usual linux/bsd flavors) QNX, IRIX, AIX and HP-UX shell accounts.
One thing I like about Hipmunk's interface is that it doesn't need two extra clicks to make the calendar inputs appear.
I for one would like to see interoperability with http://store.makerbot.com/toolheads/makerbot-frostruder/fros....
That's very nice and how it should be.

Still,if noone knows about your ideal workplace, you're still stuck trying to differentiate your firm from hundreds of others vying for attention with all the same marketing-speak.
This is about to change. Due to the way seniority and retirement ages are respected by the Chinese leadership you can track very clear generational shifts. In 2012 the fourth generation is going to mostly give way to the fifth generation, which has a much wider educational background. There will still be plenty of engineers in charge, but also many with majors in the social science -- e.g. Li Keqiang, expected to be the next Premier, has a PhD in economics.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt#Disputed

Its still a nice quote regardless of who its attributed to.
Silly question: Are we talking gross salary or the net pay that the employee perceives?
Does China have have many American style highways? When I visited Beijing and area - the multilane roads weren't connected with overpasses and ramps like the American system. This resulted in incredibly slow traffic. Also results in things like the 100km+ traffic jam they had this summer.

Their subway system in Beijing was very large and well connected but was still overcrowded to the point of being unusable during rush hour.

Such a large population - must be an engineers dream.
Unfortunately the race to the bottom has not been nearly quick enough. There are still .8 billion living (starving\dying) in unseen rural poverty without the royal luxury of a sweat-shop manufacturing job that provides enough to not go hungry.
Someone needs to check the Constitution into Git so we can see how it's changing over time.
That's awesome, thanks! Looks like shell access is a $10 one time fee per system though (but still reading their policies). So the initial cost would be a function of how many systems you want to port to.

Still looks like a great service though.
Initially, it was just me. Every once in a while I'd manage to convince a friend to fly out and tag along for a few weeks, thus putting one of those dreaded dates on the calendar, but in a good way. Along the way, I picked up a partner who was doing pretty much the same thing. We've scaled back the traveling a bit recently, but I did manage to drag her around South America for 7 months this year.

I'd recommend going by yourself if you have the choice. You just plain meet more people that way, and you don't run the risk of killing off a perfectly good friendship. On the road, you'll notice the same pattern a lot of times: two English girls who have been traveling together for a couple months and have clearly tired of each other's company but are too polite to suggest they go their separate ways. They're miserable, neither one getting to do what they really want, and forced to eat every meal together even though they've already exhausted all the conversation they could ever come up with. Sit down at their table and you'll instantly have two new friends.

Another benefit of traveling alone is that even as an introvert you'll periodically go into "emergency survival social mode" where you realize you haven't spoken to anybody in four days and you need to make some friends Right Now. And you will. It's as simple as walking up to any random gringo and asking "where are you from?"
Try and have most data in the cloud (dropbox/live mesh/Amazon s3) and applications with cloud storage (google docs/basecamp/pivotal tracker).

I do carry a Windows 7 install disc and a 2.5" USB drive with all the various apps I need. (I code for .Net, so do require quite a few installed applications)

Total loss of a laptop while travelling would be a pain, but not insurmountable. Worse would be to lose the install media, but that's recoverable through MSDN, so given a day or two, would be up and running once more.

Would recommend having a virtual machine accessible from anywhere that you can fall back to if needed. That's saved my bacon a couple of times.
Don't forget that as a UK citizen you can live anywhere in Europe without a visa.
Nice advice for the original target audience of people with lots of spare time who have already sorted out where the rent money is coming from.
For the other 90%+ of us not so relevant.
i have been impressed by your blog/comments, etc. what are you working on/where do you work at?
Enough people already chided you for 'gauge' :) but I'll change it to Helvetica if you promise to email TED & request Salman Khan.
Responding to all the comments saying "engineers are better" or "historians are better" or someone is else better, I think all those arguments are just moot.

To effectively lead big nations or corporates, doesn't one need to be able to comprehend and deal with issues much beyond just ones education or work background?

Wouldn't it require an engineer who understand the non-engineering aspects or vice-versa?

Once, I got a list of CEOs of fortune 100 companies compiled with their education background researched. The education column was half full, my contractor could not find the education of all (nor I think, I could). Of those, whose education we could find, it was all over the place, engineering, psychology, accounting, law, chemical and what not.
Awesome Windows 7 Keyboard Shortcuts | Latest Cool Tricks Tips Window
I've been thinking about this on and off for a couple of years. I reckon there's a case for a highly syntax-directed touch-based editor for scripting on these devices. Freeform text is too awkward.

Imagine the program as a tree of nested boxes: a leaf node / box for each single-line statement, an inner node (= outer box) for compound statements. Introduce some modalities: insertion between nodes, selection of node subtrees. Edit and create nodes using aggressive code completion. Complete initial keywords, consider using 'let' and 'call' or equivalents for assignment and invocation expressions (avoids starting statements with an identifier). Complete identifiers aggressively, starting with params, locals and most-recently-used, being able to browse up into an outer scope, possibly converting long lists of potential identifiers into Patricia trie navigation to avoid laborious scrolling.

A typed language would probably be better, though with inference wherever possible, because completion has much higher quality there.
I've participated in several programming contests and think it's a lot of fun. what I dislike is when a company is hiring and expect applicants to do free labour. it's bad for everybody, the company doesn't get to hire people who have got a life or are too busy with other things. and the applicant is welcomed by the
message - we expect you to work for free. having a programming competition in the open might alleviate some of the problems of doing work and sending it off into the void.
it merely reflects what professions attract the smartest students (or at least the most ambitious) in the different countries. (by the way, Chinese here, living in China). In the States, 30 years ago, the most ambitious kids went to study law; in china at the time, the most ambitious/intelligent studied engineering. A friend of mine from latin america pointed out that in there, political leaders tend to be medical doctors.

at any rate, I certainly have no problem with china rising, but i sure hope the China model doesn't gain credit and acceptance, with economic growth at the expense of sacrificing the environment and personal liberty. I don't know if the US was anything like this at a comparable stage of economic development, but lving in beijing for just a couple of days and you'll realize the heavy environmental toll that the Chinese are paying.
I second that. India desperately needs better quality leaders.

(me injun)
Infrastructure Scalability Pattern: Partition by Function or Type
Looks good but its virtually identical to serverdensity.com , which also monitors windows servers in a similar manner.
Cost isn't what you're maximizing though. Sure, RTW ticket will run you $1500, whereas three one-way tickets will cost upwards of $2000, but compared to the $12k you'll spend all in, it's just not worth the constraint it places on you.

As an example, five years ago I started a trip that would start on the beach in Thailand, then go up through China and follow the Silk Road across to Turkey. 3 months in, I ended up detouring down to Australia to do a couple month's surfing with a girl who I'd eventually follow back to England and marry.

Had I booked, say, a flight from home from Istanbul ahead of time, I might not have wanted to blow it off and follow that girl who I'd only known for a month.

Traveling is all about freedom to do whatever you want with absolutely zero constraints. Keep that in mind before you buy a piece of paper that forces you to be anywhere at a given time. Even if that anywhere is "Asia" and the given time is "Sometime in the next six months". It's still a constraint, and it will still mess things up.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I mostly contribute relatively small patches to programs that I use myself and see an itch that I need to scratch.

Sometimes it's really hard to get started, but usually the problem you want to solve is in some fairly isolated subsystem and writing a sane patch only takes an hour or two at most.

Of course you sometimes step on someone's toes, but more often than not my patches just get accepted.
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Nice work, John.

I believe I've said this before, but I think the best way to get some (serious, lasting) media traction on this is to get a donation by a big-name figure; if Hawking were to give £1000 with a few suitable quotes, the stories would write themselves.
Last month I got $310 (text-link-ads) + £50 (adsense) from a site with (almost) no content, just a high pagerank and a well-known url.

The world is bonkers.
It might be something unique in time of history. I read somewhere that people in China worry about the rising labor cost ten and twenty years down the road, and they are rushing to build all kinds of infrastructure now when it's cheap. For the high speed rail projects, they are advocating to speed up the spending now since the projection showing they can't afford it in the future.
Ask an accountant. I suspect you'll be more or less free to choose your primary residence as long as you actually maintain an address there. But seriously, with any of these things it's best to talk to someone who knows the ins and outs of the tax laws of the countries you're visiting.
Yes, you are correct. When I thought of this idea a year ago, Server Density only monitored Linux servers. Recently they also added support for Windows servers.

Server Impulse is more tailored towards system administrators (it includes events logs, updates that are available and services running), where Server Density seems to be more tailored towards web server administrators.

Thanks for your comment!
Somehow, without knowing the details, this makes me excited. Could there be a school where you actually learn something useful? It seems like an earth shattering concept.
Conversations like this make me wonder what is the nature of mental issues. Why do we decide that if a person is born completely as one gender but somehow has this feeling that they are actually the opposite one that their body just chose the wrong genitals while if someone is born with a mind predisposed toward murder they are insane. What is the criteria that decides it? Obviously feeling like a man when born a woman doesn't hurt anyone, but does washing my hands "too much" hurt anyone? Personally I just consider you all filthy.
> "converted a database to a CSV file".

I just did this a couple of days ago:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3710263/how-do-i-create-a...
I have found that it helps sometimes, but not always, to right click the Moonlight plugin and choose "install microsoft codecs" from the menu.
China will most likely prove the communist model to be the best model of governance

That is a joke. I read somewhere that the US is more socialist than China these days and I would have to agree. US has social security and apparently China has done away with the state income to people or something like that.

China is just an authoritarian(currently) country marching towards capitalism and actually democracy also - they have started experimenting with some low level elections. It cannot sustain itself as a authoritarian nation in the long run. When people start being materially well, then they will focus more on demanding intellectual freedom. With increased technology it will also be difficult for the government to control people forever. The electronic great wall of china will fall down sooner or later like the berlin wall.

Moreover, communism, as great the ideal of equality is, in practice it simply cannot survive the most predominant characteristic of human nature - the 'self'.

Would have to admire the way the Chinese leadership does things in measured increments but more or less sure footed way. Russia is too much of a bad example on what will happen when a government system changes suddenly without preparation. It took them almost 10 years to recover.
British Telecommunications and Next Generation Broadband Democracy
Silverlight is like Java applets, not like CocoaTouch or Android. With such bizarre unrelated comparisons why didn't you also point out that Ford still makes the Mustang?
The Wisdom Of Insecurity by Alan Watts

^ it's tiny, easily the best book I've ever read.
Same reason Apple's products are loved so much by their users - made with keeping the users in mind, not the shareholders.

Not that Apple's shareholders have any reason to complain.
Total agree, giving a damn is probably the best filter ever. Of course, the converse can be applied effectively too; not giving a damn to things that you're not willing to invest wholehearted in, streamlining your productivity instead of trying to give a damn with everything.
Real Analysis! OMG that brings back bad memory. Got a horrible teacher as well. Somehow Complex Analysis was easier. Sadly I have forgot all of them now. :(
Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG
This is the class system rearing its ugly head - managers are "white collar" and for all our technical skill, workers are still "blue collar" (even if you wear suits).

It's why banks pay developers well, which really means, market rate - a hotshot trader is just as likely to be a barrowboy as an Old Etonian.
Very interesting but not a small task by any means.
Such a large population - must be an engineers dream.

Love those words. I think the same. All those deficiencies in India and China, they are great technical and business opportunities to be tapped. Just massive opportunities that will keep growing at a fast clip for decades to come.

Now, now, don't get me wrong guys. There is nothing wrong with helping people and making money in the process. That's also the sustainable way to make lives better.
It's no big deal but use a professional voice-over (costs about $500) in your video, it'll look much more professional.
(Thankfully, I am not a lawyer, but I've lived outside the USA for all but 30 months from age 18 to 31. This is not legal advice.)

For US citizens, you need to be aware of a lot of additional regulations -- US citizens are taxed globally, and if you make more than the $6k or so minimum, you must file a return every year. You have a certain exemption (approximately $95k now) on your income, so if you make less than $95k per year, you don't owe any tax, but must still file.

If you are in a location which has its own taxation, you may need to pay, and then use a tax treaty with the US to deduct foreign taxes paid, avoiding double taxation.

Basically, if you have substantial income or assets, you should use an international tax attorney to handle these matters for you. Only an attorney has attorney-client privilege, and your average US tax preparer (or even worse, H+R Block or something) has no clue whatsoever. If you make <$95k/yr and have pretty much just regular taxes, and are not subject to foreign tax (due to traveling on tourist visas and not really establishing yourself), you can probably file yourself -- you don't have a whole lot of deductions, etc., so it's actually fairly straightforward. If you have your own business, it becomes really complex, and I'd really go the tax attorney route.

There are lots of weird and non-intuitive special case rules built into the tax code, such as a restriction on "controlled foreign corporations", where >50% or so of the equity is owned by US persons, and are then subject to lots of extra US reporting requirements. This prevents a lot of the naive "keep all income in the corporation, pay yourself a trivial salary, expense all your personal expenses through the corporation" schemes, but also complicates legitimate foreign businesses owned by Americans. This is the kind of stuff you want the tax attorney for.

Right now I am personally stuck outside the US for the rest of 2010 due to taxes -- I worked in Iraq until August, making more than $95k, and thus it is a net savings for me of about $20k in taxes by remaining outside the US for the rest of the year, thus keeping my 330 days out of 365 out of the US, than it would be to return to the US. I have 6 days left in the US this year, which I might use for YC interview if I apply.

I plan to do my next startup in the US (maybe in tax-advantaged TX or WA vs. CA, but possibly just in the default of Palo Alto); taxes are annoying, but living outside the US is even more annoying.
That's way too intellectual for me... I refuse to go to an art museum until they offer free wi-fi!
Id like a simpler feature - to be able to upload a photo from the iPhone via Safari Webkit [upload file form field]. Its such a pain to have to work around this in web apps.
You need a new excuse!:

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

http://www.lacma.org/visit/HoursDirections.aspx
I had the same feeling when visiting New-York. Their highways have overpasses. What you saw in Beijing is probably not highways, it is just the normal 8-lanes roads that squares the city. Traffic is a mess in the city, for sure. I heard they sell 1000 new cars everyday in Beijing, so it is not an easy task to dissolve the jam. They have a law forbidding every car one day per week, based on your plate number, so wealthy people buy two, and less wealthy use public transport or bike once a week at least.
China curbed exports and Japan develops electric motor sans rare earth metals
I once bought an SGI Indy for $20 just to try to run that one program, but I got bogged down with the complex process required to install IRIX and threw the box out when I moved.
brownegg has a good response, but I'll also point out that you're not the only one trying to start such a business, and you're more-or-less chasing the same opportunities as everyone else. There's a lot of money to be made, and thus a lot of highly-qualified people working on this. And you need to be better than them to make money.

Secondly, you'll need a lot of money to trade with.

Finally, you're asking rather basic questions - you have a lot to learn, and asking for help (on HN or elsewhere) won't get you far.
What about looking for VCs in EU?
There have been many attempts at this kind of thing before, e.g RecommendBox. The trouble is it requires active participation. If I want to share the love I'm far more likely to shout out on facebook or twitter. Perhaps what you need to do is scrape your friends/followers feeds for their likes?

Also - how are you going to stop spam? THe first wibbler I checked was this: http://wibba.com/thisiskewl/
A startup idea - "Virtual World Users - 1 Billion, Roughly Half Under Age 15"
Following this article in readwriteweb, I got an idea.

How about starting a venture that combines real world jobs(part time jobs for kids) that could be paid for with virtual currency.

What do you think about this? what else can be done in this regard?

I have just started analysis. If any tech folks are interested to join me in this, please respond

-V
I genuinely meant this.

Better wording might be "I think his work is worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize", to avoid the impression of sarcasm ?
On the other hand GIL is an issue of the CPython interpreter, other interpreters don't necessarily have it, e.g. IronPython.
Taiwan's first election was in 1996, though there was very gradual political reform from 1978 onwards. Before that the Guomindang Party ruled Taiwan using the sort of party-state capitalist Leninist system that the Chinese Communist Party rules mainland China with today.
Thanks, I suspected it was a catch-all term, then. It also turns out that my side-business is consulting, but I wasn't aware of the term. Now that you've explained it to me, I can better market my skills, thank you.
That it will very likely make code less clear and readable, though it would probably be a necessary step to reaching realtime performance on his decoder.
I never really get bored, but:
* Go shooting (IDPA practice, high power rifle (which requires driving to Sacramento), teaching other people to shoot)

* Reading books -- I have about a thousand Kindle books (yes, I went overboard) and have only read about 200.

* Personal hacking projects (hardware more often than software; my new area of interest is ROV or autonomous underwater vehicle on the cheap to use when scuba diving)

* Learning something new: SCUBA has been the new thing for September. Trying to become a semi-competent designer (or at least being able to ID someone else's design) is my goal for the rest of the year, plus understanding more about TPM and hardware security modules.

* Maybe one or twice a month, some kind of party. As I've gotten older, I've gotten more into 5-15 person dinner parties or other low key things, vs. big raves, but both can be fun.
It's a big topic, but in a nutshell: when you can make calls across processes, simply and efficiently, it opens a world of possibilities for interoperation between applications. You can't fake this with sockets, no matter what you layer on top.

Surprisingly, it was the legacy BlackBerry OS that made me realize this. It has seamless IPC too, but only as a side effect of a horrifically insecure and unstable memory model.
This doesn't make any sense to me. You can't take a shortcut around understanding the systems as they are now.

Also, it's not clear to me that in this case they were even trying to find someone to be so bleeding-edge. They also need sysadmins to do other kinds of work -- fight fires, deal with adding servers, handle local IT, administer testing environments, and so on. If they are looking at people with the OP's background I'd hazard it was more about the latter.