skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi there. I hope that things can be resolved quickly for you and I'm sure that there will be someone on here who has enough work to help you out, even short term. I also hope that your wife can find another job soon, to enable you to work on your startup. I've just dropped you an email also.
But aren't all desktop applications built on proprietary technologies? I am curious.
I agree with you specifically on the mindset issue but it is not just true for India but rather for all cultures. Here in India, business people can delay and prolong release of payments for long and people have come to expect that. So if you get payment (along with apologies for the delay) that would surprise any Indian for sure!

Similarly, as much as I despise and loathe it, majority of Indians will not hesitate to throw stuff/wrappers out of their moving cars on roads and highways. It is pretty OK for them. But I am sure it will shock and surprise Japanese and many other cultures.
Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_People_Believe_Weird_Things...)

Or just about anything by Martin Gardner, along with a note to write him sometime before 2010.
I had Lasik on both eyes in 2005. Before that I had ~6 diopter short-sightedness in both eyes, with slight astigmatism. The difference is magical and 5 years later it still amazes me. At a check-up one year later I had 20/20 vision, and haven't noticed any degradation since then. I never particularly noticed the halo effect at night. I did have very dry eyes for a year or so, but nothing that artificial tears couldn't fix.

That's not to say the procedure is without risks; but it worked out very well for me.

The reason for the dry eyes, I was told, is that the cut in the cornea kills some nerves, reducing sensitivity, so you don't _know_ your eyes are dry (and hence don't blink enough) until they are _really_ dry. The nerves eventually grow back.

I stare at computer screens for 12+ hours a day, and I do get dry and irritated eyes -- but I think that has more to do with the staring at computer screens, and not blinking enough, than the Lasik.

I had my operation done in Colombia, a country with strong expertise in Lasik (the microkeratome, the instrument used to cut a flap in the cornea, was developed in Colombia). At my one-year-post-op checkup (in New Zealand) the doctor recognized the name of my Colombian surgeon from journal articles. At the time the operation cost US$1000 (for both eyes), less than 20% of what it would have cost back home, and probably better quality.
Dr. Mark Mandel
http://www.optimaeye.com/
He's done more than 40,000 eyeballs, including mine and my optometrist's wife's.
Don't forget "If You Give Pig a Pancake"!
They wrote a ton of top X lists about things that are highly relevant to their audience when top X lists were the thing to do. They have excellent SEO, and being an early player and highly linked to gives great Page Rank. They leverage social media quite well (I'd wager a significant amount of traffic comes from SM sites like Reddit/Digg/HN/etc). They produce a lot of content. Their content seems to be edited well, meaning it is well-written, well formatted, and usually not terrible. (I don't particularly care for it, but can see its appeal.) Lots of internal linked to and from related articles and a somewhat well organized site. They allow for readers to comment and they respond to the comments.

On top of that, they don't make any fatal mistakes. Their site does not take forever to load. They don't serve too many ads. They aren't on bad terms with any search engines.
Wasn't The Economist available online long before the iPad was even a twinkle in Job's eye?
Do you know any startups that take H-1B candidates? I looked into it because I very much wanted to hire a particular candidate, but the fees, time, and legal expertise required are nearly insurmountable to a young company, in my opinion.
Diễn đàn, Máy chủ, Server, Giải pháp mạng
imo.im is hiring.

https://imo.im/jobs.html
> The German government expects that 20 to 30 percent of these businesses will fail.

Wow, a 70-80% success rate looks very impressive to me!
Paywall bypass: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/0...
There are two issues:

1. Will memristors give a performance improvement? Yes, they probably will. Will this be helpful to AI? Yes, it will, because at least some aspects of AI are limited by performance right now.

2. Are memristors particularly well suited to modeling the brain? Though there are small scale similarities, I think this is akin to saying a mechanical computer based on gears turning is uniquely suited to doing CAD for automobiles, or a wooden keyboard helps with furniture design.

The brain consists of a huge number of slow processing elements. Electronic computers consist of orders of magnitude fewer processing elements running orders of magnitude faster. Even if we approach AI from neuron-level simulations, we're better off using the ~1000 floating point op per second per transistor to simulate a set of neurons serially than to waste 5 or 10 memristors per neuron and enormous interconnect bandwidth to try to build an electronic analogue of the brain.

Edit: You quoted one thing I said, but you cut the crucial word "pure". If memristors are uniquely suited to AI, then this is not a "pure consequence of performance improvements". When I say that I mean that performance is fungible. Memristors or transistors doesn't matter for brains any more than it matters for high frequency trading or rendering graphics.
Yeah, I'm wondering what the holdup was. I've been reading Economist articles online, without a subscription, for years.

Also, it seems an odd Peculiarity of Indian people that they tend to Capitalize the first Letter of random Words. I'm not Sure why this is.
Your explanation is great!

As a third option, if you'd like to have the relevant CS terminology, see Matt Might's derivation, also in JavaScript, at http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-recursive-f....
Look up patio11 here on HN. He runs bingocardcreator in Tokyo.
I think it is almost more meaningful to compare Luxembourg to lower Manhattan than to other countries.

Its 'problem' is that it has a huge banking sector for its 500k inhabitants. That brings in lots of money (Luxembourg is the richest country in the EU), but also imports risks.

I do not know where their banks invest their money, but chances are that a fair amount of it is in euro, and that they have been bringing down their investments in the weaker euro countries.
Reading Asimov is time well spent.
I would give myself every newspaper from now until back then so I couldve known every lottery ticket number and sports score so I could gamble and be a billionaire. =)
Hah, that was great!
Prometheus Rising - Robert Anton Wilson
WOW

Forget about being a foreigner, companies wouldn't do that to even a native around here. I think I like the Japanese.

Of course even from a business sense, it would've made sense to do just what the company did. They pretty much guaranteed loyalty from that employee, probably for life. And the good kind of loyalty, one based on respect rather than fear.

I'd like to think that I'd treat my co-workers the same way when I am running my own mega-corp.(fingers crossed)
I agree with the headline point (it's more a matter of navigating laws than technology), but I'm not as sure about the argument that Assange ought to be forced to choose between not using the protections of various jurisdictions, or choosing one and submitting to its laws fully.

Isn't avoiding that precisely what anyone with sufficient power does in today's globalized world? Large corporations purposely site different activities in different jurisdictions to take advantage of each jurisdiction's benefits and avoid each jurisdiction's pitfalls, as the company's self-interest dictates. Why can't Assange try to engage in the same sort of jurisdictional arbitrage, living in one country, running servers in another, accepting mail in a third, etc.? If there's something inherently objectionable about that (because it shows a sort of divided loyalty and game-playing), then it's far more people than just Assange who are guilty of it.
Dup:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727 <- Many many comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1594021 <- Blatant steal
Boston (US) as well as London (UK) - youDevise, Ltd.

We're a 60-person financial-software firm committed to learning and improvement as well as great web software and agile development. We're hiring developers and other smart folks of many kinds. See http://www.youdevise.com/careers and https://dev.youdevise.com.

We help successful candidates relocate to London or Boston including arranging visas where needed. For example, earlier this year we hired an HN reader from Denmark and we moved a Polish employee to Boston.
Why Is The WikiLeaks Twitter Account Only Following TweetBackup?
Why shaken, not stirred?
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. I read this book during college, but I wish I had read it earlier in my life, like when I was in junior high. This book set my priorities straight.
smart.fm / Cerego is in Tokyo: http://blog.smart.fm/en/about/
Is expecting expertise unreasonable?
Truth and Beauty (Aesthetics and Motivations in Science) by S. Chandrasekhar
I got to know of this book much later than I would have preferred !
It's more popularly referred to as "Google bowling." A couple years back, Matt Cutts acknowledged that it was possible, though he also stated they have countermeasures making it very difficult to do in practice.
I had lasik in my late 40s and , while I had great medium and long range vision results, I could not see thing 3 feet in front of me - including a computer monitor. Now I have to carry glasses everywhere I go to read a newspaper, smart phone, labels and so on. If you're 40 or over be careful or you might trade one problem for another...
flyRuby (see http://www.flyruby.com) is hiring aggressively and considers H-1B sponsorship on a case to case basis. We also try and leverage the OPT period if possible before transitioning to an H-1B as required.
'The Fountainhead'. It would have assured me that there were many other people with the hacker mindset (which ultimately is what the book is about), it would have helped me prepare for a world where that mindset was not the norm, and hence would probably have avoided years of agony and depression later.
The Gay Science - Nietzsche - Age 16

I and Thou - Martin Buber - Age 18

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand - Age 17
As a newbie, which among these should I be reading first?
Indeed. Say you were an employee with a mere 1/10 of 1%:

$6b * 0.001 = $6m

I'd say $6m would be life-changing for most employees.
Laptopistan: A Buzz of (Quiet) Activity
Probably "Man's Search for Meaning" by Victor Frankl... Although I'm not sure that the book will have the same impact without the accompanying life events.

So short of that, i'd give my 16 year old self the missing pages from the Dabs C book which I spent far too long trying to figure out!
Indeed. Though I prefer his nonfiction to his fiction.
A friend of mine owns a startup (2 people) and he is going through the H-1B process to hire a European programmer. If you'd like to get in contact with him, drop me an email and I will see if he is willing to answer questions about it.
What you don`t know about PHP sessions
A lot has been said about how Plan9 is "Unix with all the design issues fixed", but as much as I like the idea of "everything is really, really a file", I'm not sure whether I could get used to the Xerox Star style GUI (which you can't easily replace, since it too is exposed to the filesystem), or trade my lovely Vim in for Acme.
> this becomes a lot more useful when I can use it in a tablet or mobile environment

Air is already available for a lot of mobile environments and should be a pretty good universal cross platform technology across nearly every mobile and tablet environment soon. I would have picked that as a big advantage of using Air rather than a downside.
K&R. I discovered the book at age 17 by myself but that was the book I really wanted when I was 12. Not just because it teaches C -- it teaches the core of the systems programming and design experience. If you're interested in systems development I can't recommend K&R enough. You haven't really been taught C until you've been forced to implement malloc in C.
IP address blocks are allocated by IANA, which is managed by, you guessed it, ICANN. Just sayin'.

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

It all is top-down at the core. (And it kind of has to be, because as much as we think of the Internet as "decentralized", it is a communication network, and so centralized administration is often the most efficient and sane way of doing things.)
Actually why not looking for a job for your wife? What is she up to? It looks like she has more available time than you at the moment.
Please add your code snippets. Thanks in advance
I agree completely with The Gay Science, although I may have wished for an accompaniment. But really, Atlas Shrugged? Nietzsche and Ayn Rand just aren't even playing the same game.
You're in luck. There's a tech event happening tomorrow: http://tokyobiggesttechpartyever.com/2010/
Thanks for the link. Really nice resource on CS stuff.
Agreed. With $5m in the bank you basically never have to work again. Retire early. However you don't really have enough to be a philanthropist or start capital-intensive startups. Could become|continue a serial software startup guy, since no risk to your retirement. You have a nice house and nice car and lots of savings.

With $500m in the bank, you get the above plus you can be a philanthropist and personally fund many sorts of capital-intensive startups. You have a mansion on an island, and a yacht and a helicopter and many exotic cars.

The difference between any two orders of magnitude is never inconsequential, I'd argue. There's always so much more you could do at higher levels. And not necessarily talking about self-ish pleasure-seeking things but world-changing, humanity-improving sorts of things.
"If I knew then what I know now?", but that would have spoiled the fun.

You are a product of what you did and read at the time, different influences would have produced a different person.
Tonchidot is in Tokyo: http://www.tonchidot.com/en/contact/
Also Mobile Monday is going to be on tomorrow: http://www.mobilemonday.jp/
And maybe it would be a good idea to subscribe to the Tokyo list of StartupDigest: http://startupdigest.com/
When I was about 17 I was told, in no uncertain terms and by someone I respected: "You really need to learn how to get along with people."

I took that at face value, and tried to find a manual for how to interact positively with others, and I found H2WF&IP.

I treated it like a text book, and it changed my life completely. I was happier, more able to be sociable, and I could get along with people.

Now, after a further 30 or more years, I can still see the book's influence as I negotiate deals, manage employees, broker agreements, and generally "do stuff."

It's now out-of-date, but if you can make the effort to read it in the context it was written, and to ignore the obvious anachronisms, it's still valuable. The more recent versions try to be more up-to-date, but they lose something as far as I can tell, and I return to the original.
The most recent profit number I heard was $50m. Not sure if that was for 2009 or per some recent quarter, or for 2010.
Erlang and Erlang programs?
While our jobs page doesn't specifically say that we sponsor H-1Bs, we do. At least 3 of our current employees have H-1B visas.
Behind the Power Curve
Is Jumo down?
http://www.jumo.com/
Oh nice! My Japanese is pretty weak, but I'm definitely interested (nothing ventured nothing gained, right?).

If any HN alumni are going, wanna meet up?
I'd go so far as to say that this is one of the best technical books I've read. I'd been interested in Erlang for a while, but found building anything in OTP somewhat baffling. I read this and it clicked. I just wish the rest of Erlang's documentation was even half as good as this.
Yes.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.jumo.com
Facebook is the big story of the decade, but I wish publications who do these puff pieces do a better job for covering the company.

The quote below is enlightening:

"This is a somewhat different Zuckerberg to the one the public knew just a year ago. In recent months he has transformed from an awkward wunderkind with a preternatural ability to anticipate where the web is going, into an amicable executive unafraid of laying out his grand plan."

So, Mark has become better at communicating the vision of where the web is going. And what exactly is this vision? It is that Facebook will grow and expand and with one of the largest audience platforms in the world, any move it makes into adjacent domains (places, deals) will be instantly successful. Talk about self-realizing prophecies and stating the obvious.

Next:

"In other words, the world will be experienced through the filter of one’s Facebook friends."

If you think this is a strength, it is actually not. On the open web the universe is the set of all indexed pages. On Facebook, this universe depletes to what your connections know/discover and now the pages that have the opengraph data on them. I do think that we are quite safe from a world which is exclusively experienced via Facebook because it can't, as things stand, represent the actual universe of information out there.

Facebook is a big and important company, but it is also at the height of a frenzy in a domain that is desperate to realize some of the potential it holds - thus the breathless accounts from media, bloggers and of course, the investors. We keep hearing about 500MM active users, but last I checked, they had about 130MM visits in a day, which is not too far off from what a Youtube gets at 103MM. Some degree of perspective is badly required in analyzing these companies, especially when you have nearly zero public data to rely on.
I agree with most comments, especially Toastmasters, but it sounds like you have another problem: You don't know your subject well enough.

You say you speak comfortably with your friends: compare the subjects you discuss with friends and your level of knowledge of them vs your what you know about your job. Do you know enough about the industry? Do you know what you're selling? What it's worth to the client? Strengths, weaknesses? Would you spend your own money on it? Why?

I've been in your situation before, where I barely could get a word in edge-wise even though I was expected to given my position. It was always my comfort level with the subject itself, not the setting. Imagine being in that same room and the client asks you a question about something you're intimately familiar with (your favorite topic, whatever that is). Could you answer confidently then? I bet you would.

If I had to guess I would say you need to do your homework more. You need to be able to anticipate questions and have good answers on hand. That will raise your confidence level. Internalize your company's industry and product as much as possible and then build out a plan for handling more responsibility in client meetings.

You can discuss your approach to meetings with your boss first. It would help to go over the subject matter in private (especially if it's new or constantly changing) and it would be helpful to decide which parts each of you will present.

You can also do this about Q&A: decide beforehand which areas you will cover and all questions on those topics will automatically go to you. Clearly defining your responsibilities will take a lot of the anxiety out of it.

I used to do this with my (quite senior) business partner frequently. We'd take the time to do trial runs in our own board room. It's not magic (meetings are still tough) but it helps.

If you are struggling, presenting a plan on how to handle meetings to your boss will also give you a lot of credibility. You're acknowledging that you need to contribute more and most importantly presenting a solution that will help you do that. If your boss is a good boss he/she will run with it and you'll both get what you want.

FWIW I've been through it before and came out on the other side. I'm a former marketing exec turned software engineer (the latter of which I'm infinitely better suited for) and probably share some of the personality quirks you've inherited. Before I got out of marketing completely I was considered a strong public speaker and could chair just about any kind of meeting successfully.

You're partway there by asking for help. Now you need to build out a plan and involve the people around you. It won't take long to improve the situation beyond that.
Does anyone know of a similar program in the UK?
We did it at an early funded startup, I don't completely remember but I think it cost us around $20k including the lawyer we hired to take care of it. The guy was a superstar though, he was more than worth it to us.

I also saw it happen at a startup that initially relied heavily on outsourcing, after a couple years they started bringing some of the best Indian guys in-house.
As a self confessed Martini nut I can tell you two things, one of whom was told to me by Allesandro, head barman at the Duke's Hotel, London where they have a special Vesper Martini that's as close to the original as you can get.

In the old days people didn't mix vodka and gin in cocktails as they were much stronger than they are now. In Casino Royale Bond acts a particularly flashy, arrogant show-off type gambler. In the early 50s when the novel is set (although please do bear in mind that the story was heavily influenced by wartime events in the Naval Intelligence Division) people never mixed Gin and Vodka in a Martini, and a Martini was always stirred with a special spoon to avoid chipping the ice.

Bond, being the flashy type ordered his Martini with Vodka, which would then need to be shaken in order to avoid the oilyness that came with the potato-based vodkas of the time as per the wikipedia article. The act of it being shaken would've aroused much interest from people who would have asked what the gentleman was drinking, to which the response would seem incredible in a kind of 'who does this guy think he is' type of way. The casino is supposed to be a high brow csaino that will have seen better days, Bond was breaking etiquette to show off how big his balls were and to attract Le Chiffre's attention.

The other thing on a more technical point is that a modern vesper cannot be made with the same ingredients as the original (as the formulas have changed). In order to get something close you need a strong but fairly easy drinking vodka (at least 43% ABV), a neutral Gin as close to 53% as possible, Lillet Blanc (a white vermouth) and either a tincture of quinine or a dash of orange bitters. My personal recommendation would be for Berry Bros No. 3 Dry London Gin, Potocki Vodka, Lillet Blanc and Orange Angostura Bitters. Stirring takes longer to cool the drink down to the right temperature (around 1-3 degrees C), whereas shaking takes considerably less time, but you'll get ice particles in the resulting drink. As the drink cools more water melts into the drink, diluting the cocktail. Thus a shaken Martini is generally slightly stronger than a stirred one. The oxygenation of the mix also gives the drink a sharpness that you don't get in a stirred martini, but most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

The TL;DR for all of this is, vespers should be shaken and not stirred, or poured and layered (as per the Duke's bar), no other martini should be shaken - unless it's pure Gin and Vermouth in which case it can be gently shaken to waltz time.