skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not exactly surprising. I remember a similar study done on men and women IT employees, and they were also similar; similarly disinterested in social interaction (the one trait I remember distinctly.)

The women who end up being entrepreneurs have already been selected (probably mostly self-selected) by those traits.

The question isn't what those people look like, but what the people remaining look like. How do men and women swimming out in the general population look? Are there a lot more potential men with those traits waiting to bud into entrepreneurs than women? How do men and women compare in those traits in general? I find that a lot more interesting.
I think you both failed to make a distinction between resources necessary for life and optional resources.

When it comes to water, healthcare, minimum daily amount of food, leaving that up to the market (especially one where monopolies form over time, and I believe monopolies will form in any "free" market over time) is tantamount to a country abusing their own population and shows a disregard for human life.

When it comes to designer clothes, jewelry, eating out, entertainment, sure let the market work its "magic". When it comes to peoples' lives, the market will not put their interests first and a "free" market will end up producing lots of suffering for lots of people.

Also it is worth pointing out that a centrally planned economy is also not an option. The answer if probably somewhere in the middle.
Prime numbers and Numpy – Python
We're talking about upgrading from the 10.10 release candidate to 10.10 final, right? That shouldn't require "do-release-upgrade", surely.
Essentially it's what german engineers built in the 60s. ;-)

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahlbuschbombe

http://www.bergbaumuseum.de/web/Dahlbuschbombe
I set up my LLC around a month ago, very painless and cost me $160.

I think the distance thing is a factor, however for internet based start ups it's not as important.
Well, that put numbers around my recent decision to return from Spain to the UK. I love Spain to bits, but doing business there, legally, is utterly impossible even when fluent in the language. It's very easy to do business there illegally and cheap, if that's your thing.
It's not that self-learning can't be good. It's just that it has no intrinsic trial-by-fire, so there's no way to tell the good from the bad, outright.

If you took a class, then you got a grade. If you were in a job, then you had the potential to get fired. If you're self-learning, there's no one way to get punished for not learning well. There's no way to measure what you've done.

I personally know some successful self-taught programmers. But I only know they're good because I know them well. If I had to pick a stranger I'd want a reference or a GPA.
Whoa, I will. I seriously wrote that movie off in the past just based on the title, thought it was some Scottish "Braveheart" type movie..
I haven't read the book but are the scores really that low?

These are rankings compared to other nations, the scale is not linear. It's easier to startup a business in Iceland and more difficult in Norway, the two counties on either side of Israel.
Scheme 9 from Empty Space (new edition)
I think it depends on the nature of your business. If you're licensing something, or another type of venture that requires contracts, you'll need to be incorporated and have a lawyer look over your contracts early on. If you're just providing a consulting service, it probably isn't as necessary.

A generic business tip that I think is worth knowing and very tough for newbies to accept: be wary of any deal that isn't cash based. If someone wants you to do them a favor and they do one in return, watch your back. If it's truly a valuable arrangement, cash should underlay the terms.
Sounds like he depends on international cloud services, which is ominous for a business in a landlocked country bordered by two nations which practice extensive internet censorship.

The endemic corruption and two coups in the last five years aren't reassuring, either.
Story submitted 3 times w/ 150 points & no comments. Bug or someone gaming HN.
I'd be interested in your service but only if it was cheaper than me spending an hour to do the same thing with a limited selection of blogs/journalists/sources.

Perhaps you could make money at both ends of the deal by allowing journalists to list themselves and "making a match" for a given story - i.e., reporters say they are covering green technology and someone with a green tech startup would be matched with them.
Find the least intrusive way to hit them. Email or voicemail.

Really brief pitch. Story, what's in it for them. Offer to supply relevant contact people and backup data.

Only only only do this after you've read their body of work and you know for a fact that it is up their alley.

Think of it from the reporter's POV and make them able to understand and say yes or no in 5 seconds. Be prepared to give them all the info they need to research your story but don't write it for them. If they turn you down this is a sign you might need some #custdev work in the media field. Or maybe the person had a bad day. You never know.

Don't spam. Research the person first.

That's what I do.
HN seems to be listing duplicates sometimes lately, which all go to the same actual submission. There actually are comments on that one also: if there were no comments the link would say "discuss". If it says "comments", it has comments, but news.arc is for some reason not showing you the count of how many (seems to have something to do with whether it has the comment count cached or not?).
Maybe rather than push the startup visa act we should push the: create a company in 5 minutes act and the pay less taxes on your company act :)
That's funny, as I also avoided it for years based on the title (and Alec Baldwin's presence).
It's interesting; lots of the complaints I got to are in fact addressed by Clojure.

Syntax: code is still data, but there is additional syntax (like {} for maps, [] for vectors) that makes reading coding a bit easier; I don't particularly thing Lisps are hard to read anyway, but it is nice.

Function names are less obscure; we have first and rest instead of car and cdr, for instance.

I also hope we're a nice community to be around! I've certainly enjoyed my stay so far.
Ask HN: Cost of living across the world (Ramen PPP Index for hackers)
HN users,

Technology has made it possible for us to become truly mobile and I think that gives us a tremendous opportunity to travel, explore new places, and meet new people. Relevant data on purchasing power parity is very sketchy, however.

I think it would be interesting to compare the cost and quality of living as well as earning potential in various cities/countries for programmers/designers. Instead of the Big Mac index, we could have our own Ramen Purchasing Power Parity Index. :)

Reply with the following:

Place(City and Country)

Monthly expenses (details will help a lot)

Typical monthly wage for a programmer / designer
Your comment is somewhat misleading. On that list, Nepal is ranked 123rd in ease of doing business, and 87th in starting a business.
I agree, it's not an easy thing to fix and there's no broad panceas or it would already be fixed. I tried to put in some very broad level fixes in the article but it's really something that needs to be figure out on a community by community level and many communities are intrinsically designed so that it can never be fixed.
I place a high value on treating all people with respect and making information equally accessible to all, yet I am increasingly frustrated with the outcomes that seems to get me. I find that a lot of forums have serious problems rooted in the fact that one or two or a few people set the tone for the entire forum and most folks line up to agree with one side and vehemently disagree with the other. This does not allow for a free exchange of information and ideas, which is something I also value highly. I tend to stand against that clique-ish trend, which frequently puts me in hot water. Yet it seems to me that the fact that I don't have a big ego and don't want to be treated like top dog on some list drastically undermines my credibility....but, I also think that the appearance of popularity I once had on a few small lists was more facade than reality. Spin-off lists I started never attracted more than a few members and my websites have never attracted much traffic. I suspect that a vocal minority made me appear more popular than I was.

This article is much food for thought for issues I have long wrestled with and couldn't seem to get any good info on.
I overemphasized the fighting element in the system and neglected to mention that each of these classes have very specific roles in the ecosystem and that they mesh together in a (sometimes healthy) symbiotic way to form the social structure that is the university.
The thing with spare batteries is, they're only useful if you also have a standalone charger, and most people neglect that. If you have to use the phone itself to recharge them, then any time you've used up several spare batteries, getting them all charged up again is a huge pain.

I have a standalone charger that plugs into the wall, and half a dozen spare batteries. Rather than plug my phone in to charge, I swap its battery with the fully charged one in the charger. This means I never worry about discovering my phone is almost dead when I'm about to leave the house; recharging to full is instantaneous, rather than tying my phone (and by association, me) to a single spot for hours. Doing things that drain the battery quickly are no longer a big deal. And if I'm going to be traveling for awhile without the ability to plug in, I can take as many batteries as I'll need.
Ask HN: Finding a Co-Founder at a Hackerspace
I'm wondering what people think of "Hackerspaces" such as Noisebridge in San Francisco. I've got ideas, a slowly growing code-base but no-one to work with. None of my friends are either business or coding people. I was thinking of hanging out some at Noisebridge (maybe even just bring my laptop and code there during week-ends) with the hope of finding people with whom I could make something happen. My question to you all is: Is the crowd at Noisebridge made up of the right kind of people? I'm a tad afraid that the name Hackerspace attracts a lot of "posers."
Making software is an inventive process and invention is just as much about tearing down ideas as it is about building them up.

Entire phases of development, tracking systems, and personnel are dedicated to fixing defects. In other fields of engineering, it would be considered a failure for such defects to exist in the first place.

Mistakes and criticism are fundamental to software development. Accepting this and not turning it into an emotional roller coaster is one of the biggest hurdles for new developers and for managers.
> The first iMac was much more compatible with PC peripherals.

I could be remembering wrong, but this sounds like revisionist history. The original iMac was compatible with USB (and relied upon it); most PCs didn't come with USB ports, and most peripherals didn't support it. Since USB is a universal standard, however, it gave manufacturers an opportunity to make one device that supported both systems (vs. making one that supported Mac-specific printer ports and parallel ports).

This was part of the appeal of USB in the first place, but when the iMac was launched that was not a huge selection of peripherals that suddenly worked everywhere.
I'd disagree with web workers needing to access the DOM. If you're storing application state in the DOM, you should reconsider the design (or lack thereof) of your application.

And sure, I'd like IE9 support too. And a pony.
Insane proposal. Please don't let game developers turn web development into a living hell.
In the real world, we take these elitist power structures for granted. Corporations, Politics, Churches, PTAs, they all unthinkingly replicate a power structure as they grow.

What's interesting to me is that this same pattern appears not to apply to the web.
If this thread was posted to ridicule the OP then I really hope that it doesnt get any more upvotes, thats pretty certainly "unhackernewslike"

If not, having concurrent access to the dom is an extremely hard problem and would mostly likely have developers writing extremely inefficient code as the dom api would then need to manage transactions, whereas its usually best to figure out how to collect you changes into a large single edit.
Having access to the DOM from all your Web Workers would require much more overhead with synchronization on access, which I think might be an undesirable overhead. Threading is hard, and I think this programmer doesn't seem to understand that.

Web Workers are great because they let us break our computation out to something separate from the front end, without incurring the performance penalty of always having the DOM around.

Message passing to a front end that does the drawing is a reasonable design, and I think that this is a correct choice. Of course, if somebody could propose a design where multiple threads have access to the DOM without overhead, then I'd like that along with my unicorn too.
Sparrow for Mac: a study in minimalist e-mail interfaces
Best Startup Failure Post-Mortems
I certainly derive a lot of pleasure out of driving a nice car and drinking a good wine.
There's a lot of causal ambiguity in this article, particularly due to the fact that no small percent of millionaires likely come into wealth by way of inheritance or marriage. For example, the author cites the presence of 350k millionaire teachers as contradicting the statement "you won't get rich as a teacher." "get rich" implies causality, but "are rich" (the cited fact) does not.

But yeah, conspicuous consumption is tacky.
These are rankings compared to other nations, the scale is not linear. I made the comparisons to other well known nations to put its rankings into perspective.

I don't know about ease of doing business, but the topic covered in the item, starting a business, shows that 87th doesn't seem to be all that bad.

Part of their methodology (http://www.doingbusiness.org/MethodologySurveys/StartingBusi...) includes per capita income; overall Nepal is poor enough that that alone is probably dragging it down somewhat.
The reason Web Workers do not have access to the DOM is because that would create a pandoras box of problems to solve, mostly revolving around concurrency and efficiency.

If you have a loop where you are setting and reading dom values, then that loop should be protected from other scripts modifying the dom, and hence there's a good chance one thread will have to halt making the web-workers pointless.

What happens if a DOM object has JavaScript values attached to it (bad practice but can happen), does the web-worker have access to these? If not then each web-worker will need a separate dom representation possibly creating a huge overhead.

The best way to take advantage of multi core processors is to allow each thread to have largely their own local memory and pass messages asynchronously between them, most architectures short of this will suffer greatly.
One of the big things we did at the tech incubator is tell people how easy it is to start a company -- there isn't a significantly higher paperwork burden or capital requirement these days than there is for a US LLC. (That did not used to be true.) The problem is that this has not hit the mainstream in terms of cultural acceptance yet.

I knew this and I was absolutely amazed by the amount of time it took to get my health insurance, pension, and taxes squared away when I went full-time: 3 hours. Two hours of that was bike riding to and from city hall.
I like this.

Not very many people have studied probability, whereas a lot (relatively) have heard the good effects of A/B testing.

I think A/B testing is a very good method, but you need a lot of data. I'd say, when you're just starting up, don't try A/B. You won't get the data you need.

It's very easy to be seduced by statistics. It doesn't matter if the stats are wrong.

EDIT: seduced, not deduced.
This post would be useful if it told us (1) the actual numbers of visitors vs successes along the timepoints that you mention, and (2) the formula that you used to calculate confidence. Without knowing those 2 facts, it's hard to conclude anything. Also, is that confidence interval corrected for the multiple peeks that you took at the data? Etc. I'd like to know much more about the particulars of the methodology here, because it sounds like statistical methods might have been misunderstood or misused (perhaps by the A/B software or anywhere else along the chain).
Not sure how accurate this list is. Thailand, for instance, requires all businesses to have at least 51% Thai ownership, and I've heard Thai courts are fairly heavily biased towards locals over foreigners. Foreigners can skirt around this a little bit by having 10+ Thai silent partners in different parts of the country that don't know each other who collect a dividend or payment each year without active involvement, but still a hassle and reflective of the lack of trust Thailand has for foreign investors and entrepreneurs.

Also, I was surprised by some of the rankings. I'd have expected UAE and Israel to be higher than Germany and the Scandinavian countries for instance, but maybe I'm biased by experiences with small sample size. I've had German friends complain to no end about the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the country, and generally I've had Israelis and expats in the Emirates tell me doing business is easy in those places.
Ubuntu 10.10 arrives with impressive new netbook environment
Science and religion aren't friends
It will take only a few of these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNi17YLnZpg (volvo crash avoidance failure)

to shake people's confidence in these systems.
You can start by finding out what your "best" people want from the community and try to find a reasonable means to ensure they get it. (At the risk of sounding like an egomaniac:) I have left a number of online communities and seen evidence that amount and quality of conversation went way, way down after I left. In almost every case, I could have been kept if people would have just engaged me in conversation without turning it into either "let's kick the crap out of Michele" or "let's fawn all over and idolize Michele". My need is for a social (and intellectual) outlet and being idolized and then attacked for it doesn't remotely meet that need. I need people I can talk to who will actually speak to me like I'm a human being -- like I make mistakes and don't know everything but don't deserve to have the living crap kicked out of me because I made some stupid mistake. Letting forum members pounce on little mistakes made by your best members and blow them all out of proportion and turn it into a fucking federal case is a great way to encourage them to leave.

Other people will want other things from what I want. And you will need to find some healthy means to balance meeting their needs with the needs of the forum. I have seen forums go completely to hell because it got all twisted out of shape to meet the need of one or more top members in a really unhealthy manner. So while trying to find out what your best people want, don't let it become their personal pond to piss in either. You want to foster an environment that is highly likely to consistently provide things that more than one top member is looking for without specifically making it about them as an individual. Don't prostitute the forum to them as an individual but shape the forum to be highly likely to provide X, Y or Z so that most of your current top members are likely to stay but fresh blood will also be attracted.

HTH.
It would be pretty nerve-wracking to be the last one to go up.
not, that I would know anybody there (nor from San Francisco, since I'm german :)
but have a look at their website: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge
the projects they are doing show, that there are at least some people who know, what they're talking about. So if I would live there, I would visit the place for sure. At worst you lose a few hours, but I think you will find a few cool people there
Don't blame 'game developers'. Blame 'bad developers'. They develop everything, not just games.
150.9 here.
> Instead why not just make sure that your site works on the iPhone[/Android] in it’s [sic] ‘normal’ state?

This site works quite poorly on my Android phone. There is no left margin and there are some issues with the links from the homepage. Even the title of website is mangled.

I find it hard to take this article too seriously.
I'm in the US too, and it sucks. That's why I said "countries with functioning infrastructure" (because with anything bigger than a small town, driving around isn't functioning infrastructure). But you're not going to have any kind of sustainable infrastructure when it takes a 1-2 ton vehicle to move a 100-300 pound person any distance, whether or not the vehicle is automated.
It's very easy to use the wrong statistical method or to do things with your data that you shouldn't, which causes you to misinterpret the output of statistical methods.

Which is more likely: (a) that this was the 1 in 1/(1-0.998) times that the correct method incorrectly rejected the null; (b) that there is actually a cryptic difference between A and B in the AB test; or (c) that the wrong method was used, or the right method was misused, or something along those lines?

I would say that those are arranged in increasing order of likelihood.
Their methodology assume the company "Is 100% domestically owned" (http://www.doingbusiness.org/MethodologySurveys/StartingBusi...).
You should have warned that it was an audio link.
Perhaps one page was loading faster than the other?
I just started a relevant Ask HN thread for cost of living across the world:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1778185

About your question, the recent "Who's Hiring?" thread had a few companies offering remote work as an option.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748045
Ah, that changes things quite a lot. Good info, thanks for pointing that out.

Unfortunately, this makes the list less pragmatically useful for choosing places to live abroad... I wonder if there's any reliable info like this for how well treated you are as a foreigner doing business in a country.
Of course it's not linear, it's a ranking. I made no claims as to objective truth, after all, the list is compiled by the World Bank, and ignores any consideration other than the cost of doing business.

And to put it into additional perspective, some of Nepal's neighbors on the EODB list are the Russian Federation and Nigeria.

The thrust of the article was that if you are Nepalese, starting a company in your home country is not as bad as you would expect, but the data would seem to indicate that it would be utter folly for a foreigner to do so.
Agreed.

And that's why I liked this post -- it's highlighting the fact that it's easy to misread statistics.
RSpec 2.0 Released: Ruby’s Leading BDD Framework Grows Up
Agreed. Also, sorry if it came across like I was disagreeing with your post; I meant to supplement it.
It happened to me in Providence, RI. Fortunately, they missed.
Deploying updates to production sites when the US is sleeping is a massive boon, it was one of the reasons my previous employer did all their R&D in New Zealand. The downside is that pagers tended to go off in the middle of our night when server load was highest.

The company has been extremely successful, but the software is complex and recruiting and retaining skilled employees here has become an issue for them. I think they've been forced to move some R&D over to the US as a result.