skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you aren't really bothered by the _present_ effects but instead the long term conditions, then I would suggest moving some assets overseas (foreign bank accounts or gold), so that you've got resources to flee should the need arise, but otherwise staying put and pursuing what you'd like.

I see most of what is happening in the US (militarized police/information privacy/corporate rule) as a greater worldwide trend. Running away from the leading edge is only going to buy you a little time.
Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
I always hear good things about Argentina/Buenos Aires; if you speak passable Spanish you'll be up to fluent in a year of immersion.
Flipping Web Sites, Selling the Niche
Oh, wow. Now I see the Skype/Kazaa connection. Brilliant.
Let me try to sum up your summary:

"The world is changing, and I don't like it."
It is a serious improvement for the law to reflect the culture. The US has a schizophrenic attitude towards many vices -- the Puritans write the laws, but the sinners write the TV shows. Singapore is much more united, so you're not guaranteed to feel out of place.

A scriptwriter in LA feels like he's living in someone else's country when his friend gets busted, or when he can't marry his partner -- a gas station owner in Nebraska feels similarly alienated whenever he watches a sitcom or a big-budget comedy. This doesn't have to be a problem (though it probably doesn't scale past a city-state).
Wow, this is really nifty. I'm quite comfortable working on a linux system but the nitty gritty of hardening an OS install is something I want to know more about. Great find!
There is no place in the Western world that doesn't have

(a) politics that are even more mad
(b) a worse economy
(c) less police state.

Not reading reddit is probably the best advice you've gotten.
Good luck!!! You'll surely make it!
Some AOL Weblogs Inc. bloggers posting for free this month
The US gum lobbyists actually won. You can buy medicinal chewing gum (the sugar free kind commonly marketed as "white" here) from an approved healthcare professional, such as a dentist or a pharmacist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_ban_in_Singapore
Needs <noscript> tags.
To stoke the flamefire: you know Debian hasn't had the most stellar security reputation as of late, right? :)
That's already an option. Look for "speed variability" in the advanced settings.
Very negative. Curious as to where you get your expertise. From my (admittedly limited) research, immigration for skilled workers is easy if not encouraged. Take for example, NZ, which lists hundreds of "qualified" jobs on their immigration site that will get you fast-tracked toward 2+ year documents.
Ask and you shall receive:

http://liveink.com/demo_samples.php

And the slashdot about it: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/148220
>'Punishable by torture' is ridiculous. Caning is rarely used,

By any definition, caning is torture. There's no potential ambiguity, unlike waterboarding. Singapore no longer publishes caning data, but illegal immigration carries a mandatory sentence of caning and more than 10,000 people were arrested for that in 2004.

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

Edit: there is a torture exemption for pain and suffering arising from "lawful sanctions": perhaps caning is excluded from the definition of torture. I guess judicial waterboarding would also be legal. http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm
HP Halo rooms do exactly that. They are an arced desk in a room, with 3 giant screens in front of you. Exact same furniture, exact same lighting, exact same environment.

And it's amazing how well it all works.
It's a JavaScript-based personal wiki. What should the <noscript> tags do? Are you suggesting that there should be a fallback to JavaScript-less text areas?

Note that you can view the wiki pages without JavaScript. You only need JavaScript to edit them.
Silly Serious Ideas in Economics
Let me just say that if anyone hasn't regenerated their Debian/Ubuntu SSH keys by now, they don't deserve to remain in business.

But this isn't really relevant to the discussion..
The difference between 'or' and || in Perl
I don't read reddit, but I do read the news.

I shouldn't have mentioned the politics stuff in my post. That confused the issue for some. The top reason for me asking is that I'm just ready for a change. I know every place has its downside, but without ever living anywhere else - how can I know for certain what is important to me?
It works just like \ in standard unix parsing - you escape the escape character by doubling it. So in "%%%s":

"%%" -> "%"
"%s" -> "foo"

for a result of "%foo".
Hey guys - while I kinda dig getting a little traffic after a good year+ of toiling in obscurity, I totally understand if you'd prefer to keep every post off Hacker News. Anyone who wants to subscribe can do so here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AStartupADay
Friday Jul 25: http://valleywag.com/5029062/aol-asks-bloggers-to-stop-blogg...
Right, but the escaping by doubling does not work in Python unless it's in a format string. So "%%foo" does not count as escaped. That's what threw me off.
Correct, but it's phrased as if he's alive. Which helps make it sound more fishy than it really is (not fishy at all).
Gosh that's negative. I simply haven't yet worked outside the US, and thought perhaps some countries with national languages other than english might have english-speaking workplaces. Since News.YC has such an international following, I figured that others could answer (and they have). Sheesh.
Thanks for clarifying. I actually heard that you would get double taxed, but this was probably wrong.
Do you mean "unplug from reddit" or "unplug from the news"? Because while I know doing the latter would make me feel a lot better, I wouldn't want to live in a place where I'd have to do that to feel better.
Summers Vindicated (again)
Rumor: MacBook updates to include glass trackpad, other goodies
> - You're a web worker
All my adult life I've dreamed about doing this. But how many people actually do that? It sounds practical, but in practice, there is really no substitute for presence.
Cuil shows us how not to launch a search engine
Perfect! Though to be fair, a categorized review site wouldn't need to spend characters on @username and specifying the topic.
IPhone NDA: Doing more harm than good
IPhone, App Store problems causing more than just headaches
Is this the MindMap software you're referring to: http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/mindmap/main.php ?
When the 'Wisdom of Crowds' turns on itself: IMDB Edition
If javscript is unavoidable I always put in noscript tags that simply say so, but don't otherwise do anything.
Microsoft Research releases free software for academics
and it contains at most 42,374 bytes of information, no matter how verbosely it is spelled out once unpacked. compression doesn't hide information, it just displays it in the most concise way possible.

but call me up when you can archive information into thin air, such that the data can be smaller than the smallest self contained equivalent. there some ways to do this. for example, "the first million digits of pi" is a very concise way of referring to a number with a million digits. and pi doesn't have to be stored anywhere, it can always be calculated. so the information is compressed to pi[0..10^6] plus the overhead of the algorithm for calculating digits of pi. since the algorithm would be of constant size, there would be a threshold (likely less than 10^6) after which this approach would be more spacewise efficient than a self contained zip.

too bad there isn't an easily recognizable off-the-shelf constant for every million digit number one would want to compress. pi is transcendental, so EVERYTHING is theoretically in it, but it's tough to find anything in particular and, if you do, it's going to be REALLY deep. and referencing something at a random location deep in pi would probably take no less space than the original data we're compressing.

i wish there was something like that, though. it wouldn't be practical, but... for theory's sake.
> I am saying please please don't mind me, and go ahed and have fun.

You already said you'd make "chef dude" pick out the meat. That requires him to mind you and cater to your lifestyle. He said he won't, that you should eat somewhere else. He's standing behind his food and that should be applauded.
Microsoft Plays Practical Joke On People To Convince Them They Like Vista
Well seriously, forget about the news too. It's like negativity programming for the brain. See how you feel after a month w/o it.
Ask HN: Problem getting through Hotmail's spam filter?
Hi guys, last time I got really great advice on how to get through Yahoo's spam filter from this post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249886

So now I turn to you for your help again... It seems Hotmail has began to not just filter our Emails as spam, but rejecting them completely. I noticed a lot of Emails we sent to Hotmail accounts (as far as I can tell... they aren't made up), they are being rejected completely and bounced back.

We have reverse DNS, SPF record, and DomainKeys set up. And we are not sending massive Emails at all, just sending registration confirmation Emails and notifications. I was wondering if you guys have any experience with Hotmail and how to get through their spam filter (if it is a spam filter problem...)?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
The problem with (Not so) OpenOffice.org
The imperatives of the link economy
Oh okay. I have such a <noscript> tag on some pages, but not all of them. For instance, see https://luminotes.com/sign_up with JavaScript turned off.

I guess I should add similar tags to the other pages as well.

UPDATE: Added <noscript> to main wiki page.
NZ is exceptionally positive toward qualified immigrants.
Reddit doesn't show up on Cuil
Keep up the good work!
Chile, perhaps. Latin America is pretty insulated from the housing bubble, Chile in particular. It also has these innovative concepts called capitalism and democracy. As an entrepreneur, you barely pay taxes. I've met people who pay whatever you want (because of loopholes) or whatever your con, save VAT, which is at 18%. You can hire anybody, from anywhere on earth, with minimal amounts of immigration bullshit [1]. Engineers cost about the same as they do in India. Weather is as good as SV. On top of that, the elite is largely made up of engineer entrepreneurs, and they run the place. It more free trade agreements than any other country, and is the only Western country with a FTA with China.

However, you're far from big markets, and people are xenophobic, and the universities are not on a par with Stanford or Harvard. Plus, it's not Silicon Valley. Starting a company isn't easy, but it is less hard than it is at a lot of other places. Also, quality is hard to find.

I would never recommend going to another country to start a company because emigrating is starting from scratch, and you might know less Spanish than you think. But if you were really set on going somewhere else, and set on going to Latin America, Santiago's not a bad place to go.

[1] There's a limit: no more than 15% of your employees can be non-Chileans.

See also: http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=243269
I gave it a point, but I disagree.

I don't see google as a 800lb gorilla, I see google as the new yahoo - desperately trying to diversify their technology and revenue before the inevitable hits. True, with the amount of cash they have they aren't desperate, but the last few quarters of revenue have been a wake up call, (check 1 year returns on stock price google vs. yahoo - no different, in fact google seems a little bit worse).

People think google's ranking algorithm is some secret magic, but it's not, it's page rank, it's well known and public. They have salt & spices, such as giving weight to shortor domains, keyword in the domain, etc., but even these are fairly well understood (see http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-fact...)

As costs come down in the infrastructure space, I expect to see more people take google head on in delivering relevant search results. Cuil is just the first high profile attempt.

The software is practically already written too, Yahoo! uses and contributed a lot to Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org/core/).

And hey, the google guys started in a garage, you can beat the next big search will too.
I am quite surprised by this post and the majority of recommendations. I currently run a startup in the UK, the scene is quite frankly awful, staffing costs in the UK are possibly the highest around.

You need to ask yourself if your possible employees can count leading web/software firms in their CV as more than likely in the US, no is the answer.

We have had extremely bad experiences with UK firms and now outsource all our IT projects via Guru/elance to Eastern European countries like Slovenia and further afield to Kenya (fast becoming a call centre and data alternative to India) and India.itself. The UK currently is in a financial crisis, we are experiencing a hard knock on from the US housing crisis and our inflation is currently at around 3.8% which is well above average. Additionally you will find it shocking to note the Petrol prices here are near on the highest in the world - approx £5.42 per gallon at the moment (approx $11) an earlier comment about EU countries is very viable and moving around between countries is relatively easy within the EU.

From a startup scene perspective there are little in the way of the numerous startup meets and socials I see startups being able to attend in San Fransisco. There just isnt a central hub as you have in the US for technology yet, maybe in 10 years there will be but for now its diluted.

Personally I know of the beauty and appeal of New Zealand and understand the benefits but for the pure weather, excellent salaries and quality of life Australia would be my preferred choice. Suffice to say I have been looking at moving to the US for the reason of the benefits it would bring a new startup and the networking facilities. The Venture Capital reach alone is staggering.

Hope this helps. Additionally to note, setting up a company in the UK will require a UK bank account which in turn requires a permanant address and credit checks etc.
"They say it's hard to live in San Francisco and not take funding, but I beg to differ: out here it's easy to get lucrative consulting gigs and fill your bank account. Contract for someone else with funding, make some money, save it up, then spend it on your company. You don't have to sell your soul to a VC or live off of ramen. Just be smart."

Brilliant secondary effects of venture capital funding.
Google-wannabe Cuil: Worst. Launch. Ever.
Oh boy, those customers can spend those DRM dollars on, say, DRM'd music from Apple instead now.
Reddit is an extreme example of showing the world at its most negative. Sometimes you need to remind yourself that despite the corruption, the insanity, the maliciousness, and the violence of our globalized society, everything continues to function! Despite the best efforts of many, worldwide standard of living increases every year and you can start to see the system we live in as bringing about positive change, despite its imperfections. Try and look at the biggest picture and not the monthly debate about civil liberties: realize the debate itself is what keeps your civil liberties mostly intact.

If you're looking for a different, more serious, more pro-globalization news source, try the CFR. They are our friends, I think. http://www.cfr.org/
But anyone who has used the popular internet telephony
software Skype knows that it works as smoothly behind a
NAT firewall as it does if the PC is connected directly
to the internet.

Hmm. Someone who used skype a lot would know that its behaviour is not quite as robust as this article might suggest. You get 'ghost sessions' when people who are not online appear online, and sometimes the reverse - where people come online and you just can't see them. Although in truth I can't remember seeing any those or any other problems like that in six months now - maybe recent versions have conquered those problems.

But while I'm complaining, it's annoying that it opens up listeners on 8080 without asking. :)
Oh, wow, I didn't catch that at all on first glance. Confusing!
Maybe the majority of people would indeed get more entertainment out of "The Dark Knight" than out of "The Godfather"?
And, as we all know from TV and movies, any self respecting super-rich person stashes some of their cash in secret overseas bank accounts.
Fog Creek's Copilot deals with this by having servers that act as a middleman for traffic -- your interaction goes from your machine, to their server, to the computer of the person you're connecting to. The app directly connects to the other machine if possible.

That seems like a pretty simple way to do things although I'm not sure how hard it would be to keep servers running for a substantial userbase.
If you hadn't put a link there, I would have mod you up for being hilarious... "US gum lobby" "medicinal chewing gum"... But now I am not so sure.
If only it were true.

Yes, biologically speaking, women have an "expiration" date. However, no less biologically speaking, men need women to mate with, and therein lies a problem. If you cannot find a woman to mate with, your ability to have children is zero, and seeing as young ladies do not go for older gentlemen unless said gentlemen are wealthy (a negligibly small percentage of the population) the end result for men and women is zero sum game.

Sorry if the above paragraph comes out too callous, comparing men to walking wallets, but the truth is, money does matter, and in the end a man is only as good as his money, if he wants someone to marry him. Women just don't have this limitation.

P.S. I hope it's clear that the last paragraph was a parody on the post above. Personally, I think reducing women to their looks and men to their wallets is ridiculous. I was just illustrating a point.
Replace Online Ads With Art
Most important choice of a hardware startup - contract manufacturer
Summers correct: Boys' math scores have greater variance than girls'
Thank you! That works much better.
You could be right, perhaps I've been using Google so much that I've become accustomed to it.

But I still think that all search engines should make a lot of effort to ensure that the #1 result is the best result.

I'd rather spend less time looking through search results if possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kB78hM_lkI , for those who didn't get the humour..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_P._Fay
If you allow people to vote after they have seen the rankings, you have the wisdom of mobs. The only way to get the wisdom of crowds is to ask people before they have seen other people's opinions.
And since nobody ever names names, your startup gets to make these same mistakes over again!
Y Combinator Challenge #6 - More variants of CRM
This looks quite similar to Google Notebook. Is there a reason to use luminotes instead?
You could say the same thing about black hackers. Show me a black hacker who built a google/facebook/lisp/reddit/wikipedia.

The real truth is, in this year 2008, intellectually forward white males (i.e. the hacker community) have graduated past racism but still consider women a socially acceptable put-down target.

Sorry but while your earlier point that the computer-related news sites tend to be "gettoes" full of young males frustrated with their inability to score rings true, your current point on "objective" lack of achievement among women does not, since I can safely bet that you and other similarly minded posters on here are not willing to extend it to non-whites.

The simple fact is, these forums have a fair share of loud mysoginists and the community tolerates it. Shame.
U.S. citizens don't necessarily have to pay U.S. income taxes on income they earn abroad, depending on length of residency abroad and level/type of income:

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc853.html

Much clearer information at About.com:

http://taxes.about.com/od/taxhelp/a/ForeignIncome.htm

Short version: if you move abroad, you pay taxes only on income over $87,600, at least for 2008.

You can also exclude some housing allowance, but the amount is not as standard or clear (see About.com).

BTW - I'm an American living abroad; I agree that you should seek to solve the problems you have / perceive, and not expect anything close to perfect anywhere. I miss a good number of things about the U.S., and many things... not so much. YMMV...
That's just dumb proxying. Skype is saving millions of dollars by not doing that themselves.
Some people (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming) argue that in fact personal gain is the worst way to motivate people - it makes them game the system - and there's plenty of examples out there to back up his point.

Instead he has argued for "pride of workmanship" as the best way to motivate people, as long as you don't actually demotivate people by paying them too little, treating them like shit, etc.

I can see both sides to the argument, the problem with the gold at the end of the rainbow is that it's uncertain, and there's no better way to demotivate people unintentionally than for it to disappear.
Sometimes you have to realize there are by far worse things out there. Having been in the military and seen what real fucked-up circumstances are like in other countries, I much prefer what we have in the States over anything else.

And have you considered that the bickering, the analysis, the corruption, the this and that is part of the evolution of our republic and culture? That the introspection is required and Reddit being the lens is only one part of that? The only other thing that can make you feel better, albeit still hollow, is voting. Aside from that all you have left is to be personally involved in politics. I dropped what I was doing and bought a ticket to join the Ron Paul protest and rally. It made me feel better.
Glad you asked. :)

See http://luminotes.com/notebooks/74uqe3cecagabucmrvwls33b4?not...
Very interesting. I'm not sure if speedreader improves my reading speed, but I noticed something when applying it to my thesis. It's much harder to speedread poorly written text! So, on a handful of paragraphs, I've concluded that speedreader is a great "debugging" tool.
AOL Realizes Bloggers Will Work For Free; Stops Paying Them
GitHub: The Post-Apocalyptic Guide
How to Fix The Comments Section of Your Site and Set Guidelines for Community
Sad but I suspect true: if you really want to appeal to academic markets (as that one pull quote suggests), you'll need to remove the word "wiki" from your sell. The anti-Wikipedia prejudices run deep in academia, and they've attached the word "wiki" to all of those fears. You seem to have discovered one of the exceptions, which is great, but...
"I simply haven't yet worked outside the US" is much different than "I'm sick of the US"

You're asking about leaving the US to supposedly start a company. This is much different than looking for the change of scenery and experience of exploring a different country.

You're in the BEST place in the world to start a company. Not recognizing that fact and wanting to start a company shows, to me, a level of immaturity and short-sightedness that is somewhat frustrating.

Sorry if you didn't like my post, I write what I feel.
It's a good point. I have family in academia, so I'm familiar with the anti-Wikipedia bias.

The question then is what to call the product if not a personal wiki.
>Middle East: Abu-dhabi and Dubai (most happening place, no tax, you just need to find good geeks or import it from India).

If you are from the US, you can never escape paying income tax unless you plan on never returning. You can't legally renounce your citizenship.