skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Where's the escape hatch? I'd like to leave the US, but to where?
I'm sick of the US. Politics gone mad, an economy driven by greed, police state evidence all around - I'm ready for a change.

1) Are there any countries where I can emigrate and start a company? If so, what are some startup hubs around the world?

2) What about any countries that are simply looking for high-tech web workers?

3) As someone who speaks English and only passable Spanish, how easy would it be to get a job in a non-English-speaking country like Japan? Is English typically spoken in the workplace?
DISC is awesome. Is there a link to it somewhere? I've never managed to find it online for some reason...
I've just started programing myself and I'd love a more concise answer then this article. (it rambled and didn't answer the question!)

For the most part I want to design webpages and mashup social networking API's. Of course I've been picking up my HTML and CSS, should I jump straight into PHP at this point or should I go another route? (Python/LISP/etc)
True, but the simplest way to do that is to get rid of the damn things altogether.

I think 25 is a bit high of a cut-off point, but at least 5-people businesses should escape somehow...
Arguing for one language over another on the basis of how the syntax looks is basically worthless.
Agreed, with an exception for when frequently used constructs are needlessly verbose or awkward. Something really minor, like the Python slicing notation, can make something so convenient that you find new uses for it. This is big. (For example, someStr[1:-1] means, "drop the first and last char".) It works the same for every ordered collection (lists, strings, tuples), so it's easy to remember. Dictionaries also support dictname[index] notation, but aren't ordered, so slicing is meaningless. (Lua seems to do something similar with its "tables".)

I'm not especially fond of the Lisp parenthesis, but I don't know of a better solution for a prefix-notation, nesting syntax. (Switching parenthesis for another paired symbol, e.g. curly braces, would just be a meaningless detail.) Postfix/stack languages can drop them, though.

Perl is sort of in-between; on the one hand, it is trying to build on the considerable power in the terse syntaxes like sed and awk, which are remarkable for quick scripts, but it is also trying to be usable for mid-to-large projects, which need to be relatively clean or they will become an unmaintainable mess. The latter is true for any language, of course, but it seems like good habits are harder to stick to in Perl.
Singapore. Orderly, English-speaking, low taxes, tax breaks for startups (your corporate income tax on your first $100K/year for your first three years is zero).

Although if you're worried that the US is a police state, you might not like it there. It seems to be a country where you're free to do whatever a sensible adult would do, and you really shouldn't deviate from that norm.
From the "About This Blog":

"The rantings of an arrogant, cynical, egotist programmer"

This pretty much sums it up, except that usually this kind of description tends to imply that the blog will be humorous.
Try Bahamas or Hawaii, at least the weather will be good.
Google may not index them because if you have one entry tagged 'cats', it is the only entry for January 2008, it is the only entry in the 'misc' category, etc., the same content will show up on three or four different dynamically-generated pages.
What We Use: The Lifehacker Editors' Favorite Software and Hardware
I don't get it. The author starts by explicitly saying that the tax rate has not been a big factor in his decision to start a business, and ends by suggesting that if taxes on small businesses were eliminated, it would stimulate the economy.

In between, he mentions the paperwork and regulatory hoops that you have to jump through to start a business, but lowering the tax rate isn't going to make the paperwork less annoying, and many of the regulations only apply to businesses with a certain number of employees.
Debunking:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=406
Alan Kay on How We Teach Computing
I totally agree with him - all the paperwork and bs involved with getting a company started is an artificial barrier to entry because it has nothing to do with the company making money. It's just a test to see if the founder can push paper through a broken system and I'm sure it has stifled a lot of innovation in the US.
Seems a bit of a stretch to me. If I was interested in cookery, I'd be at a cookery site.
We're talking past each other.

The author said that Apple presents an image of being open, and in the same sentence, said this is ironic, since they are not open. So what are you objecting to?
I'm a hacker in bed.
Seriously... has hacker taken on some new general purpose meaning these days?
They're pretty big in automotive lighting.
Online communities are nothing like the still vibrant IRL communities. The best of both worlds is when they intersect.
Virgin Galactic Unveils Space Liner Mothership
A beginner should start with a language in which they can see instant results and quickly build applications. This way, if they get a cool idea they want to try, they are eager to dive in and pump out that program rather than struggle with syntax, compilers, and GUIs. I'm hinting at Visual Basic 6.
Kampyle Ties User Feedback to Website Analytics
Blippr Is Twitter For Micro-Reviews
There'd have to be more metrics than that, but again, I don't think it's paying that worries people. Most startups with a good accountant won't pay much in taxes initially, but maybe if you set something like:

If you are not a subsidiary of another company, have got under 5 employees, under $50k in the bank and under $200k in annual revenues, you have the option just paying $1000 in taxes for up to two years.

Basically a 1040 EZ for small businesses. I bet people would jump all over it to just have it done without worrying.
wooops! :)
I sympathize. In an attempt to help I wrote and submitted the item below, but I think it got zero visibility on the site due to my newness and lack of karma. As far as I can tell it's the sort of thing you want to see more of, but if not please tell me.

Why Hacking Exists: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247513
I can't wait till everyone starts using Adblock (Plus) and it completely throws off the Internet economy.
http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=1137766258&chan...

Damn.

Blippr is executed much better, though. Interesting to see where I was last year.
If you need to pick a country right now, sight unseen, I say Ireland or Scotland. Probably hard to break in without an EU work permit, but if you are talented enough or can telecommute, then you might not have such a problem.

I add Scotland because Dundee seems to attract a lot of IT types, we had dealings with folks in Dundee and they were all whip-smart individuals.

If you want to do a little research before you go, you can pick something a little neater, like Estonia. Estonia would be choice #1 for me, just because it's actually a not-bad economy, good ties to the rest of Scandinavia, orderly/not corrupt, and definitely part of the startup world (Skype and Kazaa, hello?).

And then you could visit Russia and Ukraine and say hello to a real police state...
i've worked at only one company in my life that i'd personally describe as A-level. i was pretty close to the stupidest programmer working there. not coincidentally, it was also the only place i've ever worked where hiring was very definitely not based on ego and pride.

having said that, some of the follow-on comments are showing me how you guys might get something out of this article that i didn't. it sounds to me like a place where i'm glad i'm not anymore.
I found myself reading faster without this. It doesn't account for variations in how quickly I can recognize a word, or whether I had to think about what was just said. It just blats out the words in a monotone emphasis, demands complete attention (someone calls your name, and you turn around? gotta start over, or at least spend plenty of time seeking) and fails with images.

I just tested my reading with both this and the original text of an article (for those curious, it was some random chunk of text that was posted here: http://abstractgeneratorfactory.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-jav...).

When reading the article over (2nd time, avoiding pauses to think) I managed to get the 2072 words read in about 2:20 (so, between 850 to 900 words/min).

When reading with spreeder, I couldn't keep track past 600 words/min.

This was done a couple of times with consistent results (so it wasn't just me remembering what I'd read beforehand)
"My whirlwind tour will cover C, C++, Lisp, Java, Perl, (all languages we use at Amazon)..."

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babel

Other than that, I'm not sure. I heard that eBay uses C#, though.

If you want to put this together, I would recommend looking at their job ads.
Here is Thoreau's full quote in context:

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done."
Not quite the same. That's an update, this is a callback.
Oops - I was thinking pingback/trackback.

Yes, you are right. This would be a lot like registering for a short-term ping subscription.
Sure. So it'd be like finding this in a Windows Vista system call...

if (appName.equals("firefox")) {
sleep(60);
addSomeBugs();
}
For some reason, there are ever larger numbers of C# advocates in most hard-core programming forums. This can only be explained in one of three ways: 1) astroturfing by Microsoft; 2) good old-fashioned trolls trying to start a flamewar; or 3) the "too easy" crowd have fallen for the hype

Is it not even conceivable to the author that members of hard-core programming forums advocate C# because it is actually a decent language backed by a well-implemented runtime?
More like, they don't care about it, and accidentally forgot to update a table entry.

This is why Linux lies and says it's Windows to ACPI. I strongly doubt that it's malicious, they just don't care enough to test it and keep it up to date with Linux, so stuff breaks.
Haha. Better yet, how about send an e-mail and have it transcribed to a real letter?

(And of course a quick Google search reveals www.postful.com)
Yes, and Cringely (oddly enough) makes the same point that I was getting at-- when we were using AltaVista, we didn't know we needed something better; it sure seemed good enough at the time.
To introduce programmers used to a C-like syntax to Lisp, I like to show how s-expressions are really just ASTs. Write a small function in C, show what the AST for it looks like, and then show the Lisp verison. The mapping should be obvious.

I've seen plenty of introductions to Lisp talk about the code-data equivalence, but most don't explicitly say that writing Lisp is the same as writing your programs directly as ASTs.

Disclaimer: I only dabble in Lisp.
I actually liked the grid view, it fits a lot more results on one screen so I can scan them quickly. They should make it auto-fit the screen width.
Well they are in the media business. With the complete lack of journalistic integrity in the MSM today, we can only expect them to spin it for their own divisive purposes.

I read a few articles, none of which mentioned the anticompetitive concerns of throttling streaming video and VO/IP.
Sweden or Iceland would get my vote. New Zealand is a popular option for Brits. Ireland I'm not so sure about; their massive economy growth was funded by EU grants, and now the EU is turning its attention to the former Warsaw Pact countries. Romania or Estonia would be a good bet. A lot of Western companies are buying their IT services there now, where you can fly in for a lunchtime meeting, rather than India. They're stable and everyone speaks English for business.

The big risk to the Scottish economy is that the SNP finally win Scottish independence and Westminster cancels the GBP 45Bn (approx USD 100Bn) subsidy from English taxes. At that point, unless the EU steps in, the Scottish economy will plummet like a rock.
The "economy driven by greed" is, in essence, what also makes the US the best place in the world to start and operate a for-profit business.

Good luck finding another country that is hospitable to a non-citizen starting a business, presents a ready market (all the Web2.0 stuff aside, it is still helpful to be close to the majority of your initial user base), has a legal system that affords you some protection, and lastly - has a tax system that allows you to actually keep a fair percentage of the money you earn.

I don't really care if you mod me down or not, but your post sounds childish and naive. You want to "start a company", but you don't even know where in the world to go, or where English is spoken? Have you done any research at all on this topic (and I wouldn't count posting a question here and expecting people to do your homework 'research')?
some sites hide their implementation language for obvious reasons, but for those that don't, you can at least tell what their front-end language is with http://www.builtwith.com
One really annoying thing is that page up / page down / arrow keys don't work (sometimes). Maddening.
Searching for 'cuill' (two 'l's) works - which is what they apparently changed their name from, seemingly at the last minute.
Scotland's fairly lenient; I've a Canadian friend whose (IIRC) great-grandfather was Scottish and he got in with no problems. Not long after that I signed his citizenship papers.
What Is the Motivation for Editing Someone Else's Knol Article?
Ask YC: Some feedback before we launch NewsCred publicly
Hi guys. As always, coming to HN community for some feedback for new features that we're pushing out on NewsCred soon. There's a sneak preview live on http://www.newscred.com now for you guys to take a look.

Please let me know what you think. Specifically, we've added the concepts of 'Topics', which can be people, events, places, companies and organizations. We have automatically generated 'Topic' pages, as well as breaking topics within each category page (business, world etc).

My favorite: clicking on any article, we can tell you what related topics are discussed in the article.

Also, we pushed out search, and we now offer search on articles and topics, as well as figuring out related topics to your search.

Would love to hear what you guys think. As always, thanks so much...
Thanks guys.

Seems like a standard host might be a better solution than EC2. I have been looking at SliceHost. Any other recommendations?

I was thinking of buying two slices upfront. One since running the MySQL5 backend database and the other running Apache, PHP, SendMail, DNS.
Well -- you are right. I'm leaving a company that began as an entrepreneurial venture for me, but then morphed into something where I was to wait several years for my shares (~15%) to vest, during which time I'd basically be a professional manager, grinding the 9-5 without control of the business.

Sucked my heart right out from my rear end is what that did. So it is indeed time for me to find something that makes me more happy!
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. It captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit."

- Gordon Gekko
Also seems like a misunderstanding of C# features:

> type safety is loosened and a few keywords are borrowed from JavaScript (var)

C# is strictly and statically typed. The var keyword is only similar to Javascript's in using the same three letters. What the author calls loose typing is derived by the compiler, at compile time, in a completely static fashion. However, you get the power of being able to type variables even when you cannot name the type (for example, anonymous types).

> with LINQ, they decide to borrow the single most verbose language on the planet (SQL), and add that too

LINQ is about SQL about as much as Javascript is about Java.

edit: Oh yeah, and Java never really added generics. It's just some syntax sugar which in no way actually closes a hole in the type system.
Of course, it's also possible that they can replace those with EU grants as well.

However, looking like continued devolution is much more likely than independence in the near future. I believe the polls show only about 1 in 3 adults supporting full independence, but most support continued freedom [e.g. continuing in the vein of having a parliament again].
Perhaps we can compromise on "Never assume anything that affects Israeli interests happened by accident."
... Except for the fact that Hawaii is in the US.
Five reasons Cuil won't kill Google...yet
Check out the Wikipedia article on speed reading:

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

Even if rapid serial visual presentation improves reading speed (which is dubious), it has enough negative aspects to counteract any benefits. For example, going back or doing any controlled skimming is difficult. You also lose all the contextual and landmark cues of page layout.
Isn't the Israeli government partially funded by the U.S. government? In which case he is funded by the U.S. government, in order for the U.S. government to influence the media.
I think he just changed his mind halfway through the post - he started out talking about taxes but realized that he really meant regulations.
This is silly; what does he think Grand Central is?
From the comments:

"I read about half-way through this, but I had to stop because I couldn’t really handle the prose. Is there some sort of Non-profit organization that helps needy programmers learn how to write?"

I think I just got an idea for a startup.
The elephant in the corner is the West Lothian problem.

And over and above that, the Scots have got nowhere to vote. They can't vote New Labour, they won't vote Tory, the Lib Dems are a joke, the SNP is about the only way to vote up there right now. If the SNP force the issue, the West Lothian problem may not be resolved in a way that favours the Scots...
When I hear a hacker say he only wants to work with hackers like himself, I think I detect a faint note of ego and pride.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This qualifies.
Already with the speculation?

Google got there first, and is friendly enough to consumers to keep them coming back with free email, free photo sharing, free web applications and so forth.

So did MySpace. Then along came Facebook.

First impressions matter a lot and while Cuil's search results may be better, more complete, or even more aesthetically pleasing, the fact that the site is stumbling in its first day out will leave a lot of potential users unimpressed.

Anyone who looks at a new piece of software, web based or desktop branded and expects it to work flawlessly out of the box needs to get out of this industry right now.

Analyzing searchers may not be popular with the public, but it's insanely popular with advertisers who, after all, are search engines' real customers.

Summize, an analyzing searcher was popular, and it got acquired.

It's unlikely that making search results better, even a lot better, will be enough by itself to capture the attention of users. The Google toolbar is already well established on tens of millions of search browsers.

Taking something good, and making it better wont attract users. The thought behind this is laugable, but wrong. Ex-Google employees make a search engine that techies are going to flock to. When techies flock to something, they're going to be the first to point out flaws, suggest improvements and make it even better. That way, when the rest of the world catches on, it's a much better version than the oh so elusive one-size-fits-all debut release.

However dubious Google's privacy protections may be, it has yet to prove evil enough to topple Microsoft in the annals of technological villainy

This isn't even relevant to anything.
Cuil: Color Me Unimpressed
So do you normally shout "Call me root baby! Who's your root!" when you're doing your bed hacking?
10 most overpaid jobs in the US
Microsoft Backs Apache and Open Source
"... and greed will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation, the United States of America"
Steve Fossett may be alive, investigator claims
Twitter engineers learning Scala
I love the conclusion:
However, I think this calls for a new villian in the third movie of the trilogy: The Game Theorist. Much like the riddler, but deadlier and requiring Batman to use mathematics to fight crime.
I should add, my least favorite part is the slowness. We are working on memcaching now...
Welcome to the human condition.
The address is at Google HQ.
Programming IQ Test
This would fail to create the hysteria he was looking when the ship that didn't detonate the bomb also didn't explode. The hysteria he wants comes from getting people to actually commit things they wouldn't normally do.
This sounds like a business opportunity for someone.

In fact, there are people who have done this. I believe Intuit has a pretty good package for that matter.
Two small things I found:

1) The javascript scrolling for the top articles is not always reliable; I was able to break it by clicking furiously. Also, the scrolling can be distacting; I would vote for a simple hide and appear, along with a distinction that you have selected a particular article, like on Yahoo's front page (Featured, Entertainment, Sports tabs).

2) In the "buzz" section, the tinyurl's are not linked:
http://www.newscred.com/topic/show/name/barack-obama

Overall, I love the idea and applaud you and your team on your work. Site looks great, easy to get to the content and understand. Great work!
Don't the same laws that apply to Scotland also apply to England and Northen Ireland seeings as they are all states inside of the United Kingdom?
Interesting. How do you define "quality of work"?
(guessing) sites like hackernews are indexed primarily by recursion (few direct inbound links to specific stories).

Correct. Notice that it is difficult to find old HN comments on Google, since after a while there are no short paths from the home page to them. In practice & all else being equal (quality, length, spamminess, speed, age, uniqueness, PR, etc), the maximum depth a page can afford to have is about 6 or 7.
7 Rants about the Red Sox | TechJaws
if i were you i'd do more research on what countries are open to people in your situation. there aren't really that many countries where you can just walk in and get a work visa or citizenship. some specific examples are japan and italy. if you want to live/work there, you're going to need to know some of the language and a minor mirale.
TWIB: This Week in Blogosphere | TechJaws
TV Censorship is all wrong | TechJaws
Maybe Google can find him, they're good at finding things. If not, try that new search engine, Cuil.
correct, confirmed by Owen here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257732
Stop reading reddit. Wait a month. See how you feel.
Ironically, I stopped reading her post halfway through for the same reason she skipped Spolsky's talk.
Too bad he was writing in pen the whole time, eh?