skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is very little paperwork required to get a resident permit and register a limited company in UK. In the last 6 years the administration has taken measures to prevent abuse of unemployment benefits and child support by self-employed ppl (mainly immigrants from Poland). But as far as one can sustain himself and pays taxes he is trouble free.

My impression is that most of the Asian, African, Balkan, etc newcomers to London are self-employed or LTD owners. That route is far easier than getting a work permit.
Windows performance can suck on hardware well above the "minimum system requirements", and this has taught most computer users to know that new features come at a price.

Mac OS X's trend of new releases being faster on the same hardware is a shockingly rare exception to the norm, and due to Apple's habit of releasing features before they're optimized. (The whole Quartz system took several releases to get up to acceptable performance, and Spotlight also made very significant gains after the initial release.)
GOP to investigate "scientific fraud" of global warming
Certainly over the course of Apple's decades they've made many managing mistakes and it would be trivial for an insider to make a list of any five of them, without ordering of "the top five" or anything like this.

It's impossible to be around for so long and to employ many people and not make any mistakes. No company is perfect. Coming away from this presentation thinking "pffft Company X is so much better because they don't do this" is a huge mistake - if you aren't making mistakes, you aren't trying.
Let me tell you about my mother.
If someone is hacking something for nothing but some odd satisfaction, it is sort of a people problem in addition to a technical problem. The attacker could very easily point to the problem and say, "OK, I had fun while it lasted but here is the security bug: ..."
There is actually; Bloopsaphone is based on sxfr, at least if the COPYING file is to be believed.
The Effect of Flash on Battery Life
(copied from the dup'd thread)

Why this won't work: You can't build a startup cluster to "renew an area".

It doesn't work like that. Old Street works because the location is decent (safe and well connected), it's cheap and the other companies there. The area has to attract people who want to work there and you can't artificially build that.

The location they're proposing put this new tech area goes through the area known as "murder mile". Yes it's cheap, but it's high crime rate means startups aren't going to locate there. It would be like trying to build a startup cluster in the Bronx because it's near the NY startup community.
I've been fascinated with the idea of an ocean arcology being built in shallow waters and instead of starting 'ground' up, but simply start construction of several concrete boat foundations. When positioned, simply continue constructing. As the boat gets taller, it will displace to a greater depth until it eventually hits the ocean floor.

It would be a very modular way to construct an ocean city. Get them within 500m of each other and you'll be breaking no new ground to bridge the two modules. Get them within 200m and you've hit mundane in connecting them. What's more interesting is if you could use the span distances as agricultural land and keep the human sectors within the module footprint.

Considering the Petronius platform reaches about 530m underwater to a stable foundation and Burj Khalifa reaches 828m above ground, and the longest bridge is 552m. We could make a monstrous city without breaking any new ground.

Who cares if the ocean is rising if your city is built astride it?
Holy crap, anyone else notice the number of totally obvious paid links on that site? What not to do...
Same thing here. Stopped running, restarted 3 days ago, feeling better already.

Although I do think that doing something like painting a house or doing gardening for a couple hours would also do the trick.
Working in the UK seems to be relatively easy for people from Commonwealth countries, e.g. India. For EU citizens it's even simpler. I don't know about the conditions for Americans working here, though.

So, I agree, easier immigration is one point to base your leverage on, when competing with silicon valley.

The area around Cambrige, UK, already toys with the slightly pretentious name of Silicon Fen.
I've found using minimization to give up 40% smaller files even after gzip. Even so, combining multiple JS or CSS files into single one and using image sprites will probably be your biggest win.
It's pretty trivial to get a Tier-1 visa if your a programmer, you have a year or so before you have to get a job, and you can work for your own company as long as you're earning a competitive wage.
I really like the comment:

> “Facebook will create a permanent home in East London for
> their Developer Garage programme” – hmm, that’s news to us!
> [...]
> Dave Nattriss
> Secretary
> Facebook Developer Garage London

I wonder how that happened.
Having gone through the same process, for a small company, that "one extra level" is the key. Now I can check my code in early and often without worrying about stepping on anybody else's code. That encourages me to use SCM even more.
I'd definitely buy Learn C the hard way, I've been following the book LPTHW online few weeks ago and the way you teach IMHO is the best approach so no programming folks like me can grasp the language.

Way to go Zed.
Why not eliminate the possibility of something pretending to be a base station to a number of nodes in the immediate area? With a mesh network, a takeover of an area by a single device may be less likely. Still, there would be a chance of one or more of the nodes causing mischief, and if multiple nodes in an area are compromised that could certainly be an even greater issue. So, direct point-to-point communication is still more preferable.
I updated and expanded my article based on your feedback, and removed the wording 'forced'. Thanks very much.
Try some Philip K. Dick. Get one of his short story collections, they've put out several of these in recent years.
It's disturbing that (among other things) this programmer has so confidently separated humanity into "crowd"s, and feels free to deride and explain his superiority to at least two of these crowds in his quotes. I'm surprised that this degree of stereotyping and subsequent mockery was published by TR with no trace of criticism or meaningful commentary.
Haters are going to hate.

However, at the end of the day, people who attack their opponents like that deserves to be ignored, whether they are liberal, conservative, or libertarians.
>>the bay area will always be preferred over other centers

I can guarantee that in 5 billion years from now that won't be the case ;-) In this fast moving world it will probably take a lot less time for powerful technology business centers to emerge in BRIC and elsewhere.
Yes. I also caught an interview with Chile's president the other day. It contained remarkably little bullshit for a politician (almost nothing). The interview was about the miners' rescue.
For what it's worth, my vote would be for Learn C The Hard Way. Not having learned C in any formal setting and coming from a background of mainly interpreted languages, I've found it quite difficult to determine reliable, up to date resources for learning C. It's not that there's none around obviously, it's just hard to know which stuff to go with and hard to find something in between complete n00b and full master, which is what I'd be hoping for.
Thank you for this post. I lack the legal background (direct or indirect) to articulate what you have as well as you have.

My point, which was basically what your point is, is that the timeline looks very much like Arrington was positioning for the AOL sale and thus was (arguably) misrepresenting his position in dealings such as dissolving the TC50 conference.

Arrington claims he offered 10% of TC to Jason in 2008. That's interesting because it's a de facto admission that Jason did add value to TechCrunch (or, more accurately, the partnership for TC50 did).

So if the offer of 10% was made, the question becomes: was that a fair offer? Look at it this way: if TC generates $10 million revenue a year but $6 million of that comes from the TC50 conference (these are all made up numbers), then a 50% share in that conference is worth at least 30%, possibly more depending on the profit rather than revenue split.

Arrington's post is very calculated. It basically places all the blame on Jason. Nothing is ever that clearcut so that's what I mean when I say there is a real stink to this post.

Not that I blame Arrington for not being impartial. For something that may end in litigation you don't want to give away anything before you start. He's a lawyer. He knows this. It's why I'm somewhat surprised that he made this post at all since any good lawyer would normally tell you "say nothing".

It makes me think the real audience for this post was AOL.
Joe Stump: Your city sucks (And so does mine)
Ask HN: What is the potential of human technology?
What is the ultimate goal of human technology as we understand it at this stage?

Where will technology be in 1, 5, 10, 100, 10^3, 10^4 years?

Areas to consider:

* Locomotion

* Communication

* Agriculture/energy

* Infrastructure and social arrangements

As technologists, what are your thoughts on this?
We’re self-hosting SVN on AWS…on our webdev server. Having all of our revision history and development code on one machine, especially one as potentially ethereal as AWS, is terrifying.

You might want to investigate how to to set up an EBS backed persistent root filesystem on AWS as well as how to do S3 snapshot backups. EC2 instances fail. EBS volumes fail. You need to be ready for that regardless of the revision control choices you make.
A couple examples of how such a universal surveillance system might be used:

big brother could identify the people who meet with known peace activists or political rivals, find their meeting places, and disrupt meetings or capture participants. They could track a target user until he might travel to a less populated area, then dispatch someone or something to capture or kill him.
Look into Okasaki's "Purely Functional Datastructures" for an example on how to handle cycles. He talks about double ended queues, which can obviously interpreted as a graph with a single cycle.
Yet more source code I haven't read! Good to know.
Why is scaling a web application hard?
Depends where you go, I guess. My university was willing to acknowledge advanced coursework I'd done in high school, so I didn't waste the entire year repeating material I'd already covered (calculus, introductory programming, etc.).
Agreed. I use Python for heavy shell-scripting and text-processing (though R surprisingly does have respectable facilities for all but the most overwhelming of these tasks) and R for the rest of the analysis. I've thought about switching to NumPy/SciPy as it's part of Python to integrate everything, but R's data frame, factors, and reshape, plyr, and lattice packages makes you think very differently about how to approach the data - and hard to go back to lower-level manipulation of arrays; not to mention all the stats/graphics packages which are very easy to install and apply. And documentation of its functions is superb.
Advantage of Git: if your central repository fails, you can recover from any developer's repository.
Lawsuit: Apple Intentionally Crippled iPhone 3G/3GS w/iOS 4
I can't back this up with statistics but I'd hazard a guess that a portion of antidepressant subscriptions are entirely related to a sedentary lifestyle.

My world goes completely to shit if I'm not exercising on a regular basis, it changes everything.
True, but we must keep in mind that the definition of "nerdy" isn't static either. Nerds operate at the fringes (we can call them bleeding edges if we're feeling self-generous!) of interests and culture. MMORPGs may no longer be the exclusive domain of nerds these days, but there are other things to fill the void. The revival of old-school hardware hacking and homebrew hobbyism, for example. Or hard sci-fi. Or the latest and greatest tech in general (and obviously I don't mean mainstream tech).

Nerds are also defined by a sort of intense interest level in their given fields. (Not coincidentally, Asperger's follows a similar diagnostic consideration set). A non-nerd may play Civ5, but will a non-nerd ever mod Civ5? Will a non-nerd ever intentionally hack the AI to improve the realism of diplomacy in Civ5, or to script out realistic reenactments of the Cold War? I did those things, and I really doubt a "normal" would have done them. I'm sure you have similar passions, projects, quirks, hobbies, interests, etc. -- that unique combination of traits that will always set you apart as a nerd.

Yes, in theory, these days it's a lot more socially acceptable for you to wear that nerdery as a badge of honor. But that's theory, and then there's praxis. I find that most non-nerds pay lip service to nerd-chic, but they won't actually walk the walk. I really doubt a non-nerd will ever entertain a conversation with me about artificial intelligence or string theory.
I just want to say, I had this book when I was 9. I loved it. I spent hours and hours typing these programs into basic and then saving them to cassette. I'd change them and modify them and eventually learned to make my own programs. Thanks for posting! I credit this book as one of the catalysts for a life long love of technology.
Yeah, I'm a mobile + UX designer and my cofounder is an iOS developer and software engineer. I was surprised we didn't make the cut since we both specialize and can execute for both web and iPhone and have known each other since high school. Oh wells, next time.
I really like that this book was written but $30 dollars isn't actually cheap for a technical book, I'd much rather like to buy something like Land of Lisp, but I'm probably not the main audience and I don't know how well I fit into the target audience.

It is a short book for $30 dollars though, and I don't know if it is just Lulu's pricing that is causing this, but kudos for offering it for free.

Edit: well sorry that I called a short book short, it is short on content compared to the other beginning python books imo as it doesn't really get very far in depth (you will know basics but you won't really know how to program in python past the basics) so it isn't really teaching you the same thing in less time it is teaching you a subset of the same thing in less time.
Gorgeous documentary about craftsmanship of notebooks
Women's ankle socks
There's something about watching people who love their craft that is really engaging. What a gorgeous process, and a well done short film by Coudal.
Oh so $16/mo can cover The Times costs, while $60-80/mo can't cover for TV. (Also, afaik, TV has more subscribers than newspapers)
When I tried to use easy_install with the EPD it tried to take me to their repository, for which we don't have appropriate permissions? So I sucked it up and installed some from .dmg's and others from source (matplotlib was difficult). And I found out just because it's Python doesn't mean it's portable - for instance NumPy/SciPy is hardly ever installed on other machines (it's not trivial, as is written here many times), and I find that administrators won't update their Python installation so I've had to re-write bits of my code to accommodate Python 2.3-2.4 at times! But all said, it's a nice tool and hopefully these installation/ version issues will work itself out.
No, no, no. #3 is supposed to be "Profit!", and not an explanation of how you profit!
There are ways to be "non-profit" and still make a ton of money. "Non-profit" only means that the organization should not make a "profit".
A trivial example would be if you ran your own non-profit, and basically paid yourself all of the "profits" as salary. There are non-profits where the top leadership makes in the high 6-figure range.
We do use EBS, but AWS has a flag for "delete on terminate" where the EBS is automatically purged when the instance is terminated. Not 100% sure of the conditions for this to happen, but when you have a single boolean for something like that, and the only way to configure it is through their command line tools/API, and it's poorly documented, it makes me pretty uneasy.

Edit: We also have a script that takes a daily snapshot of all our EBSes, but we haven't tried to recover them (mostly due to lack of time to experiment).
"I suspect that part of the problem is that, at least with climate deniers, is that there's no real meat to their arguments. I know a few, and most of their arguments boil down to hearsay or "denier blog X says so, and who trusts Obama/the UN world government anyway". If they provided a link to something supporting their position I'd probably pass out from shock."

All of the global warming data is based on information that has been falsified. It's just as bad (can you show me proof that's not based on this falsified data?).

There is a lot of money in global warming. Al gore is not only invested in the carbon credit industry, but he is trying to get the US government to force businesses to purchase these carbon credits (the profits from these will go directly into his pocket). Nobody on the left seems to care about how unethical this is.

"Nigel's just automating away the drudgery."

No, Nigel doesn't actually want to defend his point. He would rather make fun of the "crackpots" because he arrogantly believes that he is right and everyone else is wrong.
Very neat! This would be a lot cooler if it could take a scratchy radio signal with station interference, recognize the frequency (or multiple frequencies if more than one) and isolate them. I've often heard fast morse code signals over radio and wondered what was being sent. If you added a frequency and amplitude scanner, then you could even find all morse code transmissions receivable by the radio and decode them all.
Ask HN: Is the iPad too cold?
I received an iPad as research project at my school. I have it to use it as my own and I love it. It is a neat device that overall (despite noted downfalls) has a great web experience when you are sitting at home. However, I recently got really sick and the iPad was great, because laying down and being sick is much better with an iPad to pass the time. But, I noticed something as I used it in this colder part of the world, as the temperature got colder the iPad did too and when you are sick you notice it. Cold makes the device less enjoyable to use and has even made me think of the device as almost a soulless device. The temperature the iPad keeps is a testament to Apple engineering as in the past they were known for their laptops getting too hot. They really manage the temperature on this puppy. But, when it is cold out it makes me less willing to use it, and I can see it being a problem in places where it gets cold. It mostly has do with touching cold glass that really just isn't comfortable.

Should Apple find a way to heat up the iPad so that is more inviting and should tech in general be less cold (figuratively and literally) to help people connect with their devices better. I haven't seen any complaints on this yet, but the iPad has only really been available in warm months, as we turn to winter will we see more complaints?

Thoughts?
My vote would be for C, but any one of those books would be a great way to learn something new.
Inside the Google Books Algorithm
I'd like to hear Paul Buchheit's take on this. He was thinking a lot about company culture issues at FriendFeed, and now at Facebook.
I also factor in age of customers in line when I pick which line to go to; as I assume older people move through checkout much slower.
I think that it is possible to build a culture where the grunchy unsexy work becomes much less un-thanked. Microsoft at its best did it: Raymond Chen was much celebrated for his heroic efforts at preserving backwards compatibility in Windows. In fact, when the Raymond Chen camp lost its political battle, Microsoft got Windows Vista, which arguably cost it billions. I think the stakes are very high in exactly this sort of political battle, and it is worth while for top engineers to spend their time fighting for precisely this sort of culture shift.
Get a gel case. They are super cheap:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_i_0?rh=k%3Aipad+ge...
The Future of Privacy: How Privacy Norms Can Inform Regulation
I use Smarty as a templating engine and sometimes I have to generate a few lines of javascript or css dynamically on the page based on php variables at runtime. I wouldn't want these to be stripped out and cached.

Usually I do a lot of optimization in the templates. For example, Smarty lets you wrap your output in {strip} tags to remove whitespace and newlines. And I have a script to concatenate and minify javascript and css. Plus mod_deflate on the server. I serve images from s3/cloudfront and there is a script that will use smush.it to compress everything in an s3 folder and set the expires tags.
Developers feel ‘betrayed’ by Microsoft’s Silverlight focus shift
I don't think so. Percolator does not support stream operators, and it supports transaction semantic. Streaming process engine like s4 will never handle the race conditions brought by multiple writers.
Couldn't agree more. Stated this in a previous comment but I would much rather a salary taking (and potentially equity holding) first employee than a co-founder just for the sake of having a co-founder.
I wonder if Calcanis didn't accept the 10% offering as his eventual intent was go for 50% with this sort of action. It's one reason not to actually accept anything, the belief that by leaving it materially open one can get more later. If he had accepted 10% would he still have the same standing to sue?
By "unable to sway" you mean "unable to sway everyone without any effort and with almost no delay".

How many people believed in evolution in 1500? How many people believed the Sun was powered by nuclear fusion in 1900? It's possible to convince people of the value of scientific inquiry and the truth of the results of scientific research, but sometimes it takes a lot more time and effort than anyone would wish.

On the plus side, we have it a lot easier than Galileo did. Our lives aren't in immediate danger merely because we challenge the dogma of powerful institutions.
Growing them:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/images/Romanesco/
Re: LCTHW, I am taking "Linux Systems Programming In C" course at ucsc extension. You are supposed to already know c before taking the course, but it has been a fun trial-by-fire to dust off ye olde c skills AND learn the intricacies of POSIX programming simultaneously.
You can work with much higher productivity in java...
Please cover GDB and ctags in your LCTHW book.
So does 3.89 suck?
Gateway MX7118 Laptop Keyboard
Item Number: K-GTW-08-G
Color: Black
Version: US Layout
Condition: Brand New
Warranty: 6 Months
Content: Ribbon Cable Comes With Keyboard
New High Quality Keyboard
100% Manufacturer Compatible
Equivalent Replacement Part
Product Rate:
Shop Price: $32.55
OSX Dock in CSS3
Nice story, but there's no need to categorize a switch from svn to git as optimization, especially as part of the phrase "premature optimization".

That refers to exchanging clarity or simplicity for performance. If a technique is fundamentally superior then it's just the way you should do things, and few things in tech are as unilaterally superior as git over svn.
Gateway MX7340 Laptop Keyboard
Item Number: K-GTW-08-G
Color: Black
Version: US Layout
Condition: Brand New
Warranty: 6 Months
Content: Ribbon Cable Comes With Keyboard
New High Quality Keyboard
100% Manufacturer Compatible
Equivalent Replacement Part
Product Rate:
Shop Price: $32.55
See the contextual blog post above and below this comment.
Thank you for your suggestion, I am referring to the front glass not the case, because I have a case. Unless you think some sort of invisible shield might make the glass feel less cold.
Paul "liked" the blog post on Facebook. :-)
$1.5 million — Jammie Thomas verdict