skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi,

I've lived in India for the last few years working as a web designer/programmer. I worked for people in the US - a few clients and would make about 15K per year USD. This was more than enough to live and do as I pleased in India as well as travel around the area - it's really a great life style.

The price of living in India varies based on location - I once rented a house from a family in the Himalayas for 30 dollars per month - add on the fact that I cooked most of my own food and probably only spent $100 max per month. I've also taken $100 hotel rooms in really neat little boutique type hotels in places like Ahmedabad and Delhi - so as you can see anything is possible. Generally, though, you can hire a nice room in a guest house for 10 dollars a day (max) and eat for $10 as well - this would be living pretty nice. If you can handle it you could get by for much less - not as little as you used to - but $10 a day would be very easy $5 is possible but you might not like what it entails.

But again - it just depends upon where you are. India is very nice but living in New Delhi or Bangalore would be akin to insanity. Living in the Himalayas or on the beaches in the south or the any other small town is an amazing experience - and cheap. Also, there is a HUGE traveler scene in India so you are never alone.

I've worked some for people in Asia and generally would hire myself out at $500 per month. It's not really worth it - you'd be much more satisfied in doing volunteer work for a project you have a passion for - and then maintaining a bit of freelance work back home that pays you real money. This is what I've done and it works quite well. You'd be amazed that even half way around the world you can still get jobs - and the fact that you spend about 4 or 5 times less than you earn means the downtime between jobs is just like a long vacation.

If you are thinking about it - just go and do it. I know that it's the same in the rest of asia/se asia and south america: everything is cheaper - 3 times less, 5 times less, or even half the cost which is how i've found mexico. But these cheaper prices make the work you get stretch that much further.

Once you get the people you work for used to the idea that you are not in the same country it is really not a big deal at all anymore - it's the same as you are in another town. One thing which really helps is to just call them randomly and check in or clarify something which is hard to explain via email - and skype makes this trivial and cheap.

Let me know if you have specific questions and I can elaborate.
Surprised I'm being down-voted. This story is real. Both cars have the same Lidar scanner and other hardware.

http://bit.ly/d8nIZp

Trace through the people in both stories and you'll see the connections.
"At the very least, the only one I've heard of is on newsgroups, and most of what I hear about that is that if you asked a question some Norwegian guy would flame you so hard you would actually die."

That's the most hilarious description of comp.lang.lisp ever. Yeah, it's pretty much like Mad Max when it comes to programming language communities. Now minus Erik Naggum and plus a lot of spam.
I spent three years in Asia, with no income. So I was looking for cheap places to live. Here's the monthly rent for one bedroom in a "decent" student shared flat:

- Montreal: 300$

- University town, Germany: 250$, 180$ for the dorms

- University town, Turkey: 120$

- India, monastery guest house: 60$

- China, Kunming (mid-sized city): 80$

In my experience, the other expenses are roughly proportional to the rent, except for manual-labor, which is even cheaper. I get a haircut for 1$ in China.
I have received notifications that I have received it from FB.
It's a pretty bizarre claim. How can anyone credibly claim that the housing bubble had anything to do with science? But I can see why the Wall Street Journal editors like this guy.
I thought the same thing going in (I played for a living for almost 6 years) but discovered that you can't lead a perfectly healthy and otherwise normal life. And I'm pretty sure it isn't just that I couldn't, because once you get to know them you realize not one of the hundreds of successful professional poker players (much less the thousands of unsuccessful ones) have managed it. Some have gotten part of the way there, some have become sad junkies, but nobody's ever anything that even remotely resembles normal.

My theories as to why would be too long for this forum, but the two big ones are the losing streaks and lack of respect for money.

Losing streaks are like nothing you can understand until you've been a professional poker player. Imagine if you went to work, performed flawlessly, far better than all of your coworkers, and instead of getting paid your bank account got debited and your boss told you "you really sucked today". Then that happens every day for a month.

Humans (and especially poker players, who study probabilistic decision making as a hobby) are conditioned through life to believe outcomes are a direct result of actions. Do a good job at something and work hard at it, you succeed. Do a bad job at something and slack off, you fail.

While this is true in poker in the long run, the long run can be a long time. I broke even for a year at one point, and that's at cash games. Meanwhile donkeys without the slightest clue what they were doing were lucking ass backward into multimillion-dollar tournament prizes.

You can't even fathom what this does to you emotionally until you've lived through it. It engenders self-doubt, which gets you off your game, which probably makes you play worse, which you know you're doing but aren't sure exactly how, or what to do about it, which in turn prolongs the losing streak. There is no end to it.

The lack of respect for money is universal in a world where thousands of dollars change hands in minutes. It's impossible to think "I shouldn't buy that Lexus I've had my eye on" when you just made enough to do it in the last 4 hours. Everytime I played a pot I was risking far more than I was playing credit card roulette for dinner for 4 at Craftsteak. (BTW, my luck at credit card roulette is legendary. If my luck at poker had been half that good I'd have won the WSOP.)
+1 on accuracy of figures, Melbourne is pretty much the same.
Starting a company is a walk in the park in comparison. My stress level has gone down enormously.
Yes it is!
That's pretty accurate. I'm still a dumb noob about programming generally but I've been using and lurking in #lisp and the "community at large" for ~2 years now.

The best thing to do for new users is probably to show up on #lisp and solicit recommended libraries for X, I'm afraid. Or google and read extensively, selecting for newer information where possible.
One of the few episodes of Friends that I watched was where Chandler and Monica were planning their wedding. Chandler told Monica how much money (cash) he had and she said something like "Now we can go with my Plan A wedding" and Chandler said "We're not spending all my money on one party", to which Monica responded "Don't call my wedding a party!"

It'd be nice to think that this was intended and took as a spoof of the conspicuous consumption that big weddings are, but I suspect that, considering the target audience, there was a lot of nodding all around.
> Once I had a cop have a chat to me about jaywalking but I've never been fined. I would be pissed if I ever was. In a fight between a car and a pedestrian the pedestrian loses (big time) so pedestrians have a higher vested interest in their own safety. I know what the light changes are at intersections I cross a lot. Where are these cops when cars sail through red lights or nearly run over pedestrians when turning when the pedestrians have right of way?

So pedestrians can do whatever they want because its more dangerous for them? Did you know that a flashing red hand means "don't walk"? You can be ticketed by entering the crosswalk when it is flashing. How many of your close calls would that eliminate?

As a driver, what is your first instinct when you see someone in the middle of your path on the road? I also hate people who jaywalk onto medians - how do I know they're going to stop when they get there? Especially if they're running at full speed. I've also had several pedestrians almost jaywalk right out infront of my car before, some not noticing me until I honked at them (too close to stop).

We would all be safer if we all followed the rules. Not just cars.
Apple iPhone travels to the upper stratosphere and back, doesn’t skip a beat
wow, it's been a while since I posted that question. Can't believe it has so many views...
That's another interesting element of customer service:
1. Is the customer service standard high.
2. Is staff trained/have the understanding that deviation from their primary tasks is OK and good.

On #2 I agree Japan sucks, but I think the US sucks on that point as well, especially in places where young people (~16 years of age) are working. Understandably it may their first job so they may be overly nervous and cautious with what service they agree to (only ones dictated to them), but it does damage customer relations.
Also of possible interest is the link to the actual interpreter source code.

http://www.t3x.org/s9fes/index.html

Only problem is, you have to navigate your way through a maze to get to the actual code from there.

I wrote a quick hacked-up web crawler (in emacs lisp, of all things!) to solve it because I was too impatient to do it for real.
What do you mean by "ecosystem"? I'm Singaporean and AFAIK there's a shitload of people doing startups here, though of course not as much as in Silicon Valley. You're probably right, though, about the culture being traditional if you're referring to funding. Please note, though, that these are just opinions based on personal experience.
Well, the two prominent web frameworks are Weblocks and UCW but their documentation is...wanting. I'm working on a Weblocks tutorial right now but I gave a bit of a survey of the CL web landscape recently: http://redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=1232

Damn shameless self promoters. Anyway, seeing as UCW and Weblocks aren't well documented a lot of people just grab Postmodern or CL-SQL for DB stuff (there are some NoSQL solutions around if that's your fancy), then CL-Who or HTML-Template and Hunchentoot (web server) for the rest.

All the above libraries are easily installable via quicklisp. God bless Xach. And Amazon AWS. :)
Cool, also like the auto-tidy on the arrows.
Ask HN: Do "idea guys" willing to learn to program have critical paths to demos?
I have "an idea" and I'd like to learn enough programming to implement it myself. For various reasons I figure I have 2 years or so to run a flag up the flagpole and see who salutes it before "the big guys" roll into the territory. So I figure I have 1 year to devote to learning to program and 1 year of "misc." including going live, getting feedback, tweeking, etc.

My quesiton, for anybody that cares to answer: Knowing what you know now, what path would you take to implement the following, keeping in mind I'm starting from scratch and am just trying to build a demo, not become a professional:

A site where:
- Users setup an account
- Users can email/invite friends
- Accounts have a variable, let's say "experience points ala WoW"
- Said variable can increase/decrease actively based on pre-outlined user behaviors
- Said variable can increase/decrease automatically based on administrator rules
- Users can "gift" said variables to each other (exchange)

On a scale of 1-5, 5 being highest:
- Uptime: 5
- Security: 3
- Scalability: 4

The reason I ask this is my own attempts at self-education are very slowly getting me to understand things that have very little to do with what I want to put together.

I don't even know exactly what I should be studying and trying to ask what few programmers I know only leaves me even more confused as there seems to be very little agreement on anything, especially how exactly I should start.

Am I just pipe-dreaming, or is there a way to focus in on the toolbag I need to build this project? And if so, what should the toolbag look like?

Any suggestions/books you started with/books you would recommend to someone starting out/online course etc. would be very much appreciated.

Thanks to anybody who cares to respond.
"For example, if a C programmer asked HowToSumFromOneToTenInLispOrScheme, he might start thinking along the lines of...
for (int i = 1; i <= 10; i++) ..."

The correct SmugLispWeenie reply is to say: "n(n+1)/2, now get out of here and don't bother coming back until you've learned some math and have come up with a real-world problem."
Evil, but ingenious.
Good luck finding a decent one bedroom apt in Sydney for $200/wk.

Most places you'd want to live (eastern suburbs, inner west, northern beaches) will start at $350/wk.

To get something nice in Alexandria or Newtown will be $450/wk plus.
Neat! A few problems from the beginning of the stream I was just watching: it was oversaturated (too bright on left), too zoomed out, volume too low, couldn't see the presentation he was referring to. Basically, I just couldn't get much out of it.
This is covered in Micromotives and Macrobehavior, in a section dealing with clubs/meetings/etc.

http://www.amazon.com/Micromotives-Macrobehavior-Lectures-Pu...

A similar book focused solely on online phenomena would rock.
This article does a pretty good job. Much of what you read about poker misses the mark. Also the credit card roulette caused me a large bit of nostalgia.

I got a lot of the busto rumors when I quit too. In fairness, it's a lot more frequently the case than someone successful walking away, but I'm always glad to hear of other people doing it. A really young kid named Jason Strasser became one of the best tournament players around and then gave it up to go back to school.

It's a seductive lifestyle, but often not a healthy one, and rare is the poker player who realizes there's much more to life than money while they still have some of it left.
Unfortunately in my case it took my mom dying to put it in perspective for me. I hope for him it was something less traumatic.
And that's why high-frequency trading should be deemed illegal because it is technically insider-trading; the intermediary makes a commission and masks the true positions of buyers and sellers, profiting at the expense of both.
In High School Chem Labs, Every Cameraphone Can Be a Spectrometer
I actually had someone say something close to that in an interview for a sysadmin position. The guy claimed he had experience configuring Cisco routers.

For this particular job configuring routers was not a primary task, but because I had a passing knowledge of Cisco routers I asked a couple of questions since he had brought it up. After 2-3 questions which the candidate couldn't answer, he finally admitted that his experience in 'configuring' Cisco routers consisted of plugging the network cables into the port at the back.
At appears this may have been resolved (at least for me). Thanks for getting in touch with them.
NY Times articles usually fall into one of three categories for me: 1. good, 2. closed-minded liberal that thinks he/she is open minded but really hates Republicans and everything they stand for, and 3. pompously intellectual. This fell into the latter category. I should've known this when the writer wrote naive as "naïve".

Thanks for sharing. I love literature.
R&D: Short-term focus, cynicism hampers us
I'm not the author...

I thought he made some good points re: people who are not on technology will become increasingly annoying, and knowing everything will become much less important. I agree the advice has varying value
You know that and I know that, but I don't think a lot of people realise it (certainly not in the flurry of planning). Every chick says "I don't want it to be over the top, I just want it to be more like a party where everyone has fun." Fast forward a few months and the bill includes chair covers, marquee, crockery and cutlery hire, catering, lighting, and the list goes on and on.
Well, yes, I understood that immediately - but the basic functionality of CPAN for me, the reason I stuck to Perl in the first place and stayed there, was the ability to search CPAN, find a module that does more or less what I want, and load it, no worries. That seems to do this for LISP.

Now, if you wanted to provide all the rest of CPAN for LISP, that would be really cool. Automated testing across platforms, some kind of standardized documentation of projects so you know what each one is (even without POD, surely something could be done - doesn't LISP at least have docstrings or something?), a search facility, etc.

That would be fun. If you want a volunteer who's not guaranteed to finish real soon but who has a clear vision of what could be done, feel free to email.
The assembly line concept was as far as I know applied to the automobile first by Ford, if you wish to dispute that I'm fine with it but that's what just about all the sources I've got say about it.

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

Whether or not his was the very first assembly line ever or whether it was the first mass produced automobile is of no consequence, then you can replace Ford with whoever was the first in the paragraph above to satisfy your needs.

Another thing that Ford pioneered was the living wage for his assembly line workers, which created a much larger market for his products. That probably was the bigger accomplishment of the two.
Being rich is an enticing prospect. When I consider it, I often imagine it as "the freedom to do/buy/go what/where you want, without delay".

But then the following warning comes to mind and I'm reminded to carefully scope the bounds and purposes of my worldly ambitions:

"Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied ... But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger." (cf. Luke 6:20,21,24,25)
Can you link me? I don't see that anywhere in the law.

http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-Complia...
A Cob Oven and the 36-Hour Dinner Party
The new Web is connecting us back to ourselves in an invisible feedback loop
Sorry if it came across like that, I thought we were discussing water, which is pretty much the example of resources necessary for life (the others being air and staple foods).

Trinkets and cell phone subscriptions are a different matter. (and in the case of cell phone subscriptions you could even wonder if the market is doing its work or not).
That's because:

* Boomers are old and have grown their fortune enough to spend some of it.

* Younger people have to worry about kids going to college and an unstable economy. You think we'd be spending right now? Fat chance.
I live in a small town outside of Nagoya, Japan.

I live fairly comfortably at $2,000 a month. The ramen profitable number for a single self-employed twentysomething is in the neighborhood of $1,500.

Some costs:

- A month's rent for a capacious apartment (by Japanese standards): $450 (This would be $700 inside of Nagoya, and you'd get a third the size of the apartment.)

- Utilities: Gym ($100), phone + Internet + cell phone + gas + electricity + water + sewage = ~$300

- Health insurance: $300 / mo, assuming your income is in the "typical Japanese twenty-something" bracket

- Pension: $200 / mo, ditto

- Food: A cheap meal at a restaurant runs $8. For Western food (pizza, Italian, etc), budget $15. My best friends manage to make $300 a month work for a monthly food budget -- I don't cook at all and spend closer to $700.

- A bowl of ramen: $1 if you make it yourself, $3 from a convenience store, $7 at a restaurant.

- Sundries: Prices are similar to expensive metropolitan areas in the US.

- Typical monthly wage for a programmer: if you work at a certain Japanese megacorp in Nagoya, you will earn $100 per year of age per month. All engineering salaries within five hundred miles of Nagoya are pegged to this number. Individual circumstances may vary (particularly for foreigners).
Paul Carr Hates Millennials too? Join the club. http://twitter.com/#!/Jason/status/12621363849
It is in response to his post, just not about him.
What did you live off without an income? Savings?

That sounds like quite the adventure! Did you write about it somewhere?
How many years ago was that? The rents were low until few years ago. The $500 rent I mentioned includes electricity and other utilities.

When I moved to New Delhi, my rent was $100. These days a livable apartment in New Delhi will cost around Rs. 15,000 ($330) + add cost of electricity($100), water and maintenance. In summer, electricity bill shoots up to $200 to $300.

The estimate of rent is very modest, a good two bedroom house can cost $2000 per month in Delhi or Mumbai. India tops the most expensive real estate market in the world.

A coffee at Barista or Cafe Coffee Day will cost between $1 to $3. Most hackers will require at least one coffee day if not beer. $100 per month will get you only two modest meals a day. Food could cost more than $200 depending upon what you eat.

Yes, most of the Indian population survives on less than $1 a day. They live on streets and barely get a single meal a day.
I think the problem is not spending the other 80% of their income, it's spending the income they never had, or spending all of it and not realising that there can be unexpected hiccups.
Yep. I live in Newtown and I pay $510pw for a 2 bedroom apartment. I started living there 5 years ago at $420pw (AUD).
The plan is to have a web directory for projects included in quicklisp that besides showing the metadata and project info (which projects depend on what etc.) also includes something like user feedback and reviews.

The Cliki recommended libraries list is a really good idea (I dusted it off and put it on the Cliki front page because of things I read here on HN), but you get flamed for editing it because there's no attribution, Lisp weenies don't like subjective opinions, and I'm guessing certain people get miffed that not everyone loves their library. But please don't let that stop you from using and contributing to the Cliki recommended libraries list in the meantime!
Recycled Paper's Beautiful New Future | Co.Design
That's really cute, but since you've solved the maze, can you tell me what the copyright encumbrance on that code is? Is it open? (By which I mean, is it worth my while to write my own crawler?)
RSpec-2.0.0 is released
Quoting someone summarizing the CAN-SPAM:

If your email list isn't opt-in or double opt-in ("prior affirmative consent"), include a clear notice that states the email is an advertisement or solicitation in commercial messages (section 5(a)(5)(A)(i)). If your list is opt-in or double opt-in, you're exempt from this provision.
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/

Numbeo has lots of crowdsourced data. They ask contributors for city data, so you can even compare between cities in your target country.

Hyderabad, India is at the top of their Consumer Price plus Rent Index for 2010.
Difficulty of porting to WP7 has little to do with the lack of OpenGL ES, particularly for a game like Angry Birds which in terms of hardware dependence basically just renders sprites. Assuming similar hardware capabilities and a sensible abstraction layer this part of porting is surprisingly straight forward.

The big issue is that all WP7 development must be in managed code. Unlike the PC You cannot mix and match managed/native code and libraries. This is a big problem for companies with existing games and tech built around C/C++, and a huge problem for smaller companies who have built their games on free/OSS libraries (Bullet for example) and do not have the resources/skillset to develop managed alternatives.

So you are right that porting to WP7 requires a rewrite, but it's entirely due to the requirement of managed code and not because of OGL ES v XNA.