skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having a package or two on Hackage (or even better, in the Haskell Platform) will demonstrate effort and aptitude at learning, and give the opportunity to review your work.

If you want to become strong enough to leverage yourself into a Haskell job, stop writing in anything but Haskell for non-production-work tasks. All your shell scripts--Haskell. All your recreational coding--Haskell. Picture yourself in a Shao Lin temple of Haskell.

Also, think about the flip side of your question. Haskell is a pain in the ass for the first few months. If you haven't climbed a substantial part of the learning curve by the time you interview, you might discover that you hate it[1]. Part of the interview process is not just seeing if you can do the job, but that you'll stick around for at least a year and not quit because you don't like the environment.

I normally wouldn't worry about someone trying to make a transition from Java to C#, but I would worry about someone trying Java -> Haskell without having broken through the "difficult" parts.

[1] There's a lot to hate. Imagine, on the flip side, if you had to program in RPG II. You'd want out as soon as you realized you made a mistake. Admittedly, RPG of any flavor doesn't sound sexy, but you get the idea.
I'm a programmer that saved up money, quit my job, and traveled around Southeast Asia for four months (in 2009). I blogged almost every day. I took some great photos, too.

Have fun browsing my stuff...

Top 100 photos: http://billpaetzke.smugmug.com/Travel/Best-of-Southeast-Asia...

Travel Blog: http://www.bp321.com/travels/

(I'm back in LA working, by the way).
What do you think of my eLearning startup?
Must be pretty small. I have a small backpack that can be used as a satchel. It fits a 13" Macbook Pro (or, obviously, an iPad comfortably).
Starting a company in New Zealand was pleasantly surprising. First you sign up for an account at http://companies.govt.nz, then you use the web app (which worked fine with Opera) to fill in the details about your new company. Consent forms are emailed to you, which you fill out, scan in and upload. A few hours later, after being reviewed by a human, your company is formed and your certificate of incoproration is emailed to you.

In fact the only trouble I had at all was that PayPal wouldn't let me sign up with a business that had been started that day - I had to wait until the day after to start taking payments.

One of the few government interactions I've ever had that left me in a better mood afterwards.
$400-500 = 1100-1400pln, these are prices for a single-room downtown, currently I'm looking for one and that's it for me (quick proof: http://goo.gl/q0uB ), I mean you can find better and you can find worse, but that's a reasonable price for a reasonable location.

You mean 9kpln too low or too high? I said 'from' and know people who make more (10-14k java certificated dudes with enterprise background) if that's what you're implying.

Official median salary in PL is 1500PLN a month.

Official median has been around 3000pln for years, not 1500pln, where did you get it from? Although, the truth is that the most common pay is still around 2000pln gros (GUS stats) for Poland overall, maybe that's what you're talking about. Warsaw is always a bit higher.
I was in Ho Chi Minh for the last two months. Its certainly a great place to live in and do a startup out of. How long are you planning to stay there?
Except it doesn't actually work.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/27/volvo-pedestrian-avoidanc...
I am very happy to be an engineer. I would be very uncomfortable turning the world over to robots if I was some other kind of job, but as I am an engineer I will hopefully be the one MAKING those robots, which is the only end of the stick I want to be on when robots reach the critical point in taking care of us.
Fun fact: that $13K limit can actually be a lot bigger. That is the limit from one person to another. Mom gives daughter $13K, mom gives son-in-law $13K, Mom gives kid #1 $13K, dad gives daughter...

Not a good way to rid yourself of millions, obviously.
Can you imagine if government had tried to pick winning information technologies the way its now trying to do with electric cars?

Yep, its all over transportation. And you can see from the daily block long backup in front of Apple's global headquarters of cars waiting to get on the clogged highway 280 that innovative entrepreneurs aren't allowed to fix it.
Crowdsourced:

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/city_result.jsp?country...
It's surprising how the disease crept up on him despite the annual checks. One of the benefits I imagine successful executives must have would be super-duper, executive-level healthcare. All the check-ups and screenings the rest of us miss out on because they're not quite cheap or statistically significant enough to be worth rolling out for the general population.

And yet the CEO of a biotech firm slips through the net.

Does executive-level healthcare exist or is it just in my imagination? Is there any significant advantage to be had if money is not an issue? Or perhaps he already had all these advantages (he already knew about the genetic marker) and that's how come he's in remission now?
From friends in SF, the rent is similar to that of NYC where I live so I'm happy to share my experiences to see if it's similar to yours.

When both my co-founder (formerly in Investment Banking) and me (previously in Public Relations) left our jobs, we split our savings of $70k where the majority went to rent, food and other necessities living in a big city like New York. We also began to set up the necessities of the business, i.e. legal entity, website development, etc. and then went into product mode. We managed to start the company and live off our savings for thirteen months before we took outside funding.

The biggest thing to think through regarding savings, like cpercviva mentioned, is figuring out where the largest amount of your money needs to go. For us, and any other person thinking about taking the leap in New York, is usually rent.

I'd map every single expense you've had in the last year in a Google Spreadsheet so you can trim any "financial fat".
Thiel also invested in a seasteading initiative to build sovereign offshore floating colonies. Maybe its his technological answer to the housing bubble, as well as a libertarian Shangri-La.

http://reason.com/archives/2008/04/28/homesteading-on-the-hi...
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2008/05/seaste...
But in an earlier post, you seem to imply that you don't have a major problem with buying something that hasn't been "rightfully earned yet" so long as it's a home. Make up your mind, please.
While the majority of Saudi's economy is not private sector, they have recently been trying to rapidly grow it with pro-business incentives. Basically the government realized oil is 55% of their GDP and needed to diversify their portfolio.
Cnelsen, the major problem with the listing is it lacks any detail about the project or how you expect to execute it. If you think a program is summed up by 4 bullets you have no understanding of what is involved, thus, you are in short 'the nightmare client'.
1) Future taxes were made inevitable by a) the unfunded Bush tax cuts b) the unfunded Bush Medicare part D prescription drug benefits c) the unfunded Bush war in Iraq. To spend is to tax. If you (as a government) spend, you are going to have to tax, either now or in the future, either directly or by devaluation (inflation) of the currency.

Presently, there is zero indication of any decreasing ability of the US government to borrow money.

The reason there isn't any consensus on increased stimulus spending at present is mainly because of Republican lies, and the economists like Mankiw (a Bush advisor) who spin in support of them.

As you may gather from this post, I'm somewhat pissed off at the situation, and probably vented at you because of my anger. Sorry for the overreaction.
Tumbl.in Is StumbleUpon For Twitter
Is this useful? Shuffle through top content from Hacker News
According to the BBC just now, the miners are trying to decide who will have the honour of being last out.
Also not to take anything away from NASA (they are the reason I became an engineer) but they only assisted in the design by suggesting improvements etc. We sketched out the original capsule shape right here.
Full readable text here: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://online.wsj.com/articl...
The laureate behind bars
What market are you thinking of approaching?

We work with a lot in our space (group buying) and the ones that I see as most successful are those who make the user experience as delightful as possible. Where someone can simply put up an image, some copy and some deal details and then pile on deal after deal so the user has to keep scrolling through the webpage is backwards UX. If you can capture the best content available, and then surface that content in such a way that's intuitive and interactive to your end-user, you can build a great service.

How are you thinking about the monetization perspective?
This piece is amazing. It masquerades as a critique of science, but at bottom I would argue it is really just a very complicated smokescreen for Obama-hating and anti-Keynesianism. I bet this guy Thiel just wants lower taxes.

Thiel admits that we could print money without fear if our future looked brighter. And the 20th century saw such amazing progress that we did just that successfully. But he says that things are different now. We cannot print money because growth will not support it unless we get sentient robots and nanotech red blood cells, FAST! We better support the Republicans because at least they talk tough and hate Keynes, but it doesn't matter who we support because shit will hit the fan anyway.

But really, how much has technology failed us? Of course we must agree that the Jetson's world is not yet manifest. But the hardest problems that humanity faces are not technological. If anything, the 20th century's lesson was not that we need to get deeper into tech faster, it is that we need to approach the problems in a different way. We built airplanes as soon as we could, and Hitler turned them into blitzkreig. Einstein and Bohr pushed the limits of physics and we built A-bombs. Tesla gave us AC and Radio; and we built coal power plants to power Air Conditioned McDonalds advertised on TV via mass media.

The reason we don't have undersea cities is not because we cannot build them. I believe that we have the technology. But if 100 rich people could live forever in an undersea bubble powered by green nanotech, would it really change the global situation? The real technological problem is bringing the billions of people who eke out a stone-age existence in tribal towns all over Asia and Africa into the modern world. And we are making progress every day at an accelerating rate. Tell Google that AI is a pipe dream. Urbanization, digitalization, communication; these are the things that are accelerating like electrons and oil were 100 years ago. Don't give up on Keynes just yet, HN. Of course it will not be easy for our species to survive another 100 years. But let's not give up on ourselves either.
In my area, it takes no fewer than three different licenses just to set up a consultancy that doesn't even sell products (pure service oriented business) -- and that doesn't address any of the issues aside from licensure (tax ID, ensuring your business name is not a trademark infringement, et cetera). The worst thing about it, though, is not the complexity of it. The worst thing about it is that, because one has to check everything at local, state, and federal levels, and because each of these levels is often very poorly organized where the "end user" is concerned, it took me an afternoon just to find out about all that stuff. In fact, some of it I stumbled across by accident while looking for something else, and was surprised to find it. I'm pretty much positive that I missed some things before I gave up.

It requires a lawyer to be even reasonably sure (as opposed to completely sure) you aren't doing something illegal. If I have to choose between paying for a lawyer I can ill afford and wondering for the first three years of starting the business whether I'm going to end up in court for doing it wrong, the process of setting up a business is not easy enough.

edit: There is a difference between "setting up" a business on paper (so you can claim to have one) and being able to start actually conducting business without running the risk of pissing off government.
That would be nice for commuters, but not practical for parents of small children. They need a bunch of stuff in the car all the time (child seats, diapers, clean clothes, sand toys, stroller, etc.).
How about, "Shoddy Software, Inc.".
http://getbizen.com.

It is hosted on Heroku and is Rails 3.0
Can some experienced founders shed some light on how to handle situations when you or your team might not be available for some unavoidable reasons for some time.
Suppose a robot driver is 1/10th as likely to hit and kill a person as a human driver. It would still be something that would happened. And when it did, the results would very messy since the law presently sees any accident through the lens of finding a person at fault. When a robot kills (and a robot will kill if they are "out there") is the fault that of the owner or the manufacturer or the programmer?
We just added support for shuffling between links shared by a specific user and links shared by users from a specific list.

Try out these as examples (or the link submitted).

http://friendshuffle.com/browse/t/techcrunch

AND

http://friendshuffle.com/browse/t/techcrunch/team

These links can be changed to work for any Twitter user (browse/t/twittername) and any Twitter list (browse/t/twittername/listname)

We would be really interested to know how the experience is when you shuffle through your own lists / users.
It is pretty small: http://www.zappos.com/tumi-alpha-travel-small-flap-body-bag-...
Python CGI scripting: Use a dictionary for print subsitution
Yet another reason I'm sort of glad that I don't have a computer capable of running SC2 well; otherwise I'd have an annoying moral dilemma.
Italy and Germany have their (recent) roots in fascism. France has its in . . . well. I'm not going to go there.

Note that the UK produced Adam Smith and, to a nontrivial degree, the US, and Canada. The culture and early government of the US in particular was notably influenced by the ideas of Adam Smith as well. What Smith called "economic individualism" is pretty much the foundation of a strong economy, and to the extent that we stray from that two things happen:

1. individuals find it more difficult to start and run small businesses

2. the economy suffers

I am not surprised at all at the relative rankings of these G8 nations.
Very interested actually. Shoot me an email at eric@esft.com?
Good point. Thanks for pointing that out.

Still . . . that's within 5% of the top of the list, which is shocking given the obstacles to entrepreneurship in the US.
Or, it's like leiningen/cake for clojure.
Just a thought: how about text message check-ups?
This is such a strange and pernicious thing to say. Marxist-style class anger combined with blaming the enabler combined with a complete lack of understanding of the numbers and the character of the various families of loans in the US. Also, it's all poorly written.

So how are you wrong? Let me count the ways. You seem to blame a facet of capitalism (banks) for conspicuous consumption. One, all capital is handled by people. Two, all transactions are voluntary. Three, long term supply equals long term demand--a borrower does not change the allocation of goods simply by borrowing, and does especially not changing the temporal allocation thereof, unless he has a time machine... so you're going to need to change your mental model of how debt and credit work if you want it to make any sense. If banks stopped lending and borrowing, do the big vacation packages and luxury cars just go poof and disappear? How about all the money that was invested before, but now no longer is?
I find it interesting there's no mention of luxuries such as freedom and travel. IE: Paying more to rent things than own them, touring various cities, flying out to see friends for a week. Things that aren't easily placed into rampant consumerism, yet still require something of a luxury budget, and can enrich our lives to no end. (Also food, for that matter)

Hm.
> São Paulo isn't cheap.

Truer words are rarely spoken. To live a fairly "average" standard of living compared to any North American or European city, São Paulo costs way more.

But I guess what I'm trying to say is that São Paulo has a very high degree of variability. It can be cheaper, if you are willing to let go of certain things.

For instance:

- why living "by the rivers", you can live on the East Side or closer to the South? Saúde, Ipiranga... good neighborhoods but much cheaper. Downtown (Centrão) São Paulo also still has a lot of stigma, so prices are lower than the West side.

- The R$250 phone plan is a luxury, if you enjoy it and can afford, more power to you. But it isn't a necessity.

- I wouldn't go out at any place where a beer costs 6 bucks. I wouldn't go to a place where they have a minimum charge of R$40, like many do in the neighborhoods you mentioned.

- Why buy a Mac, if you can go to Santa Ifigênia and get a more-than-decent box for R$800?
Page 1 of the article: http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/sh...

original Palmisano/Dell op-ed: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/43188.html
He also could have been staked for the high stakes and so didn't necessarily lose his own money. From what I hear this is not uncommon for winning players taking a shot at the higher stakes or even a high stakes regular who found what he feels is a good but risky spot.

Actually the article headline seems inconsistent with the text, which suggests he decided to quit to pursue other things and is not in fact "busto" as rumored.

Not saying you're wrong but it's another possibility.
Why I Code
That's the female narrative, we're on hacker news, I was assuming he was asking the male point of view. I certainly don't know any men who thought "this is my perfect day".
New Yorker Profile of Nick Denton
Zed, I think the narrative in your docs is partly to blame.

It starts with an awesome sqlite config engine, and continues, almost as an afterthought, to a possible application: a python-like configuration file (section 3.3).

It seems to me users want to know about that configuration file first. Sure, some of them will evolve into power users, eager to hear about the internal sqlite3 engine and its endless possibilities. But that's later, and frankly is not as important. What proportion of mongrel2 users will programmatically drive its configuration? I'm guessing not that many.

I for one am an automation freak and am very excited about this design. But you can't blame everybody for misunderstanding it. After all, the very first command in the tutorial has "config.sqlite" in it. That's before you talk about the actual config file format!
Microsoft's Productivity Vision [video]
MS always comes with awesome ideas. I hope they execute as well :)
You can play the game in guest mode (single player only) if you want.
Countries ranked by "Ease of doing business"
Yeah, there are some shady practices.

But I still think there is room for an honest service with good intentions.

There are plenty of ways to prevent people from abusing such a system that is in discussion here.

But it does look like it is legal to email someone who hasn't asked for the email as long as you follow the rules about disclosure.
China attempting to block all communication regarding Peace prize winner
They say Windows Mobile 7 launch is premature. The documentation is not complete and many things are not at all described and have to be asked to a marketing person, who asks a tech guy, etc

This is not unusual when working on a new or unreleased platform. I was the lead engineer on a PSP launch title and parts of the docs were still in Japanese, we had both windows & Linux tool chains that were buggy in different ways, and getting answers to most questions involved asking a guy in the US who would have it translated and sent on to Japan. Oh and we had one devkit between every two engineers for most of the project :)

PS3 was better, but still nothing you would describe as ideal.

Working on the first wave of software for a platform can be fantastically exciting and very rewarding, but on the flip side you're pretty much guaranteed to run into bugs and situations that no one foresaw.
I had 20k, but I also had no rent (very advantageous). SF is going to be really expensive — what about moving to cheaper Mountain View which still right in the middle of the startup scene (location of YC), and a train ride to SF?
My impression was it used to be a haven for large business. But due to rising costs they are moving nearby to Malaysia and Indonesia and just keeping management offices in Singapore (ex. memc.com). I haven't heard of it attracting young international people looking to do startups primarily because it's not a very liberal society. Chewing gum is illegal and cannabis possession carries a penalty of execution. A sharp contrast to Silicon Valley\California.
Just wanted to mention the process of registering a company in India has mostly moved online using the Ministry of Company Affairs website (http://www.mca.gov.in/). The most time consuming thing is acquiring a Digital Certificate (which is how most financial filings are done in India these days), which involves in-person verification.

India recently introduced Limited Liability Partnerships (http://www.llp.gov.in/) which is a much, much simpler way of registering a company, especially in the software field, than anything else (most of it online)
About 100k when I started Shopify, that meant I didn't have to take a salary until we had enough revenue 2 1/2 years later. Urg, don't do it like that.
Can someone please do it for Prague? Or Budapest?

As someone who used to live in (very expensive for non-basic necessities, cheap for basic necessities) São Paulo and moved to (reasonably cheaper for non-basic necessities, way more expensive for rent and food) Boston, when I went to Prague it felt cheap.

I found 4-star hotels in Prague 1 for the price of not-that-great hostels in London, €18/day. I'd go to a bar or a club and pay €1.50 for a pint of beer. I could get a day pass at the tram/bus for Czk 100 (about €4). I heard that a 2-bedroom downtown goes for about €600-700. Internet would be €50/month.

If someone can give more accurate prices or tell me how it's going for Budapest, I can guarantee you one karma point. :)
Good point about the age of the page. From what I've observed, things have changed a bit in the last ten years or so, no argument there.

"Learn You A Haskell" is very good, and I haven't seen anything like it for Common Lisp. However, Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp" is quite close in terms of target audience, and also very good.

I won't argue with the assertion that Common Lisp is hard to learn. PCL, pg's "ANSI Common Lisp" and "On Lisp", and "Let Over Lambda" that I've mentioned are a good start, but it can be difficult to get from the text book knowledge to good, practical, useful programs.

That said, I don't think that it's the fault of Common Lisp. C is easy to learn because it is small, but it is also C. (I'm programming C and Ruby in my day job, and I love C, but there are times when I wish it had more of the expressive and abstractive power of Ruby or Common Lisp.) Common Lisp is hard to learn, but once you've learned it you get to program in Common Lisp.

Regarding LOOP: some people consider integral calculus difficult to learn. Does that mean we should excise it from mathematics, or at least not let high school students know about it? LOOP is part of the standard, so it's not going away any time soon.