skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your "scaling Ruby" experience is in great demand in Minnesota, as one would notice from the volume of postings on the Ruby Users of Minnesota (http://ruby.mn) mailing list. At least in the Twin Cities, there are a lot of developer jobs now. Most of them suck, but most jobs suck everywhere. There are fewer startups, that is very true.
Duly noted. Markdown isn't a priority, but it's been added to the wishlist.
What's that place in Seattle that you're comparing with a ground floor apartment in a brownstone in Park Slope (the hot place to live for families)?
TINSTAAFL -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_aint_no_such_thing_as_a_f...
Ah, very cool. Thanks for answering. I'm kind of curious how you would do it. If you could post your idea or privately email it I'd be interested.

I'm not dying to know and have no interest in actually doing it but I'm just intellectually curious to hear your idea because it sounds like you know what you're talking about and I bet it's neat.

Also, that interview link you posted with the GSV CEO was really good, thanks.
Well it produced the same result in Sweden. And I am sure that “everyone” hates the incumbents in the US too, so the result would possibly be similar.
There are so many of these bland, one-sentence + email box sign-up landing pages that it's hard to really care about your product until you give people a reason to. I would try to do something more original than this, maybe taking a cue from the fact that your product is centered around email, maybe design the splash-page like an inbox? (this is just one idea, the point is to differentiate yourself from every other landing page that took 2 minutes to make with existing one-click "create a landing page" services).
Also, a video or snapshots, or a few use-cases/scenarios would be good, possibly in a separate "about" section.
My 0.02$, in any case good luck!
Finally someone noticed the important paragraph of my post! +1
I made a reddit subreddit that did this. I used CSS to hide names and comment scores (yes people can still see them if they want, it was just a prototype). The overall response was pretty negative.
http://psd.tutsplus.com/ but don't over do it.

Just grab something off http://themeforest.net/ , minor tweaks, and call it done.
Also the "average" person won't maintain 2 social profiles and will gravitate to where the users already are.

The MySpace to Facebook transition shows that exactly this happened. I was in high school at the time, and I definitely remember people mentioning having both a MySpace and Facebook account, and wanting to get people to switch over to Facebook. I don't mean "tech people", I mean normal folk.

As for compelling features, I think Circles is a killer. When your relatives are on Facebook, a good portion of your personality has to leave Facebook. You have to think about what you're going to say, and generally stick to the blandest possible expression of who you are. If Google+ enables people to say what they want to who they want, it will be a hit.
Cool, I'll check it out. However, I live five hours north of the Twin Cities, and am not really looking for a job unless its something really cool.
Because in the US, they own the loops, in the UK they'd get access to them.

I think a factor in making this easier in Europe is that all phone lines were put in by entirely government owned and operated enterprises, and it can't be argued that the public doesn't own them. In the US, if I'm not mistaken, most of the phone companies were and are at least somewhat private entities that invested private money in putting in the lines. Although often protected by exclusivity etc. this makes the "public owns it" argument much more murky.
Don't assume any technological knowledge at all, most small business owners I've dealt with know just enough to run their businesses. As such they don't like switching even when their is a solution that could save them a fortune. The key is to automate as much as possible.
This is why I really don't like it when people treat "government regulation" like it's something that you have "more of" or "less of". Government regulation created the slow, expensive Internet access in the US, government regulation helped create faster, cheaper internet access in the UK and Europe. Government regulation isn't an atomic entity that either exists or doesn't, or there's "more" or "less". There's good regulation and bad regulation, and sometimes the best regulation is none at all but that's not always the case.

As a little-l libertarian, I observe that when markets have real competition, consumers and society benefit and even the providers globally benefit. When the free market is allowed to be monopolized, consumers and society loses. I believe that it is a valid use of regulation to force markets to remain non-monopolized, even if it is a "natural monopoly". Regulations to encourage this are good; regulations that enhance the monopoly rather than busting it are bad, and there's no way in which I am being a hypocrite about the goodness of regulation.

(The general metric of good regulation is "benefits exceed costs", and the general metric of bad regulation is of course the opposite. However, there is legitimate room to argue about some of the details, in particular costs and benefits to exactly whom. But even within those constraints, it's hard to crash your economy with regulations whose benefits routinely exist costs, and easy to crash with the other way around, so you really have to have a pretty freakin' sweet system before these arguments are really the biggest problems you are facing. We do not have a such a system.)
I quit my 100k a year job to learn programming from scratch. Ask me anything.
The government doesn't have to create these monopolies. Utility (i.e. telecom) companies naturally tend towards a monopoly because of the absurdly high cost of rolling out duplicate infrastructure. Usually the first mover is able to fend off any real competition by lowering its prices below that which its competitors can afford, given that they still have an infrastructure to build.
You're not in the real world yet, and coding an iphone app for fun and you're whining about being burned out? C'mon.
I'm not attacking 37signals; I'm offering a nuanced opinion. Notice that I highly recommend much of their work. As for the examples I chose, I suppose it would have been better to choose blander ones, but no bland examples popped into my head as I wrote — nor have any occurred to me in the hour since I originally wrote my comment. There must be some example of a baseball player who had great hitting ability yet insisted on trying to steal bases despite being universally acknowledged as a horrible base stealer. But I don't know who he is.

Shockley, Ford, and Lindbergh possess precisely the sorts of nerd, capitalist, and ballsy qualities that we as HN readers often admire. They serve as disquieting reminders that people like us can be guilty of terrible lapses in judgement, perhaps because of the success they experienced doing the things we (reservedly) admire them for.

P.S. You completely changed the content of your comment over a half hour after originally posting it. Is that considered a faux pas or is it a completely legit thing to do?
I'm sure it's great - however a link to the product that's not impossible to find without reading through this big sea of promo crap might help in getting people to try it out!
real world analogue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule
That's mostly because in the US they're incumbents, whereas in the UK they're challengers.

Because line sharing and (then) local loop unbundling makes new entries into the market significantly easier (as there isn't the cost to build a whole physical network upfront, and the network can be implemented over time instead) it drives competition in the sky and fees into the ground. It lets challengers challenge, but it's awful for incumbents as they can't just fleece their customers unchallenged.
" The other option is being a remote worker for someplace cool but you usually need to have a career somewhere else for a few years to make connections."

I thought this was true, but a recent job search proved this to be quite wrong (at least for me). There are plenty of telecommuting jobs out there now that do not require previous experience with the company or telecommuting in general. Additionally there are more and more purely distributed companies out there that don't even have an office (a possible solution to you start-up problem). You may not get paid SF/NYC salaries but you can get close enough (especially compared to the average pay for your area).
I tried it with your comment, and it came back the same. However, English-->French-->Polish-->English came back with something altered:

Perhaps start every message by the Google Translate or something similar (eg English -> French -> English) to hide the writing style. Otherwise, as already mentioned, this is very revealing of who the author.
i hope you also have a sweet australian girlfriend! and now unplug your computer :o)
One of the biggest challenges with our school system is that while you're immersed in it, it becomes difficult to imagine anything outside of that experience. You can't get a "big picture" view of your life and how your unique talents and interests can fit into the bigger world -- high school is your world.

You will eventually graduate and move on, and realize that most of the stuff that you did in high school was really not all that significant, in the big picture. Your lack of motivation is probably because you're starting to realize this as your time in school is almost finished and you (and your peers) begin to ask questions like "What comes next?" and "Why can't I get there already?"

Luckily the answers to these questions don't really matter all that much either. People take all kinds of paths through life, and there is no right next step, or important thing to work on. You can be forgiven for thinking this way, because school trains you to think this way by putting you into grades and preparing a curriculum that advances you forward towards an arbitrary finish line "graduation".

So what should you do? Do whatever interests you, as this is where your motivation will come from. If you're not motivated to code, don't code. Take a part time job, or exercise, or socialize, or take up a new hobby, or volunteer. All of these things will make you a better person (and a better coder). You'll meet people who are not coders, and it might remind you why you like programming so much - or you might find something that you like better.

However, be careful with the "Do whatever interests you" philosophy. You probably do have some standards that you want to hold yourself to, and you want to keep improving yourself, and you want to be a mostly free person (have money). So you probably shouldn't just sit around and smoke pot and play playstation because it interests you.

I believe that "adulthood" begins when a person consciously decides to do things because they are difficult to do and no longer decides to do things because they are easy to do.
Paul Ceglia's Big-Firm Lawyers Just Ditched His Case Against Facebook
Using Google Charts to display the QR code? OK, the code uses HTTPS there, but still... I think it should generate the QR code locally.
This reminds me of an anonymous variant SGI & Netscape's bad-attitude newsgroups:

http://everything2.com/title/Bad-Attitude

Failures of those newsgroups were attributed mostly to changes in company culture. I'd be very interested in seeing how this works anonymously.
'going viral'
Defending Skype and private equity
I'd love to read the article "Moving to San Francisco: a Guide for Software Engineers" ... moving there in august.
Not only would it actually be challenging, but more likely than not Facebook would actually get hate for breaking the Facebook, just like every other time they've implemented any change more visible than an extra link somewhere.
Sarbanes-Oxley seems to be a pretty solid example of a regulation whose costs exceed its benefits by quite a bit.
Very good response, thanks for sharing.

I'm a value investor but my investment philosophy when it comes to tech stocks is slightly different. When it comes to tech stocks I look at the fundamentals, but most importantly I look at the leadership. If the founders are still the leaders, and if I believe that the founders will be there until they die or get really old, and if I believe the founders care about building timeless, excellent products above all else, then I'm willing to invest as long as the P/E isn't above 100.

This is my strategy because I believe the best tech companies will keep growing over the long term until technology completely transforms the world.
Likewise in France (see FreeTelecom, pretty much the poster child for line sharing and local loop unbundling)
I have to agree with this. I recently moved from Green Bay, WI, to Seattle. Back in Green Bay, the only programming jobs are .NET or Java positions unless you find a place using far older languages like COBOL and friends. If you're unlucky, you'll be doing php for $10/hr or less. There are some system administration jobs but it's all support on a shoestring. The midwest is largely manufacturing and insurance, industries that don't value programmers very much.
It's not a silver bullet, though. In Denmark, electrical utilities (semi-private) spend obscene amounts of money digging down fiber, but when fiber arrived at my in laws, it took all of a minute comparing their offer with what they could get over DSL before ticking the "no thanks" box. (The price was at best comparable, and then there was the several hundred dollar connection fee).
> It doesn't explain why I need to pay $500 an hour (well, $300 an hour) to get a lawyer to look over the contract when I buy a house.

Agreed. I paid $75/hour to get a lawyer to do the work when we bought our house. I'm not sure why you chose to pay someone that much. Only you can answer that:)

I'm Canadian, living in a large city so i don't think location factors into the lawyers fee's.
Ah, sorry, I didn't mean a grid in a table. I meant a "snap to" grid so you line up elements like you were using 960.gs, for example.

Also, control+click isn't working for me (Firefox 5/Mac).
Just for trying it out once or twice, sure.

But my world depends on my primary email. I get notifications on my phone from it. I have my calendar, my Picassa, my documents on it and I also use Google Talk quite a lot lately.

And because I did the recent migration, I cannot have a parallel regular Google account tied to this email address; it used to work fine this why with some minor pitfalls.

If you don't have a Google Apps account that you really depend on, you can't feel the same pain I do :)
The real mitigating factor is the car. When you cut out car payment/car depreciation, insurance, gas, maitenance and take that money and put it towards your housing, it evens out.

I own my car outright, but I expect maybe $100 a month in maitenance, $100 a month in insurance, $200 in gas, and probably $100-$200 a month in depreciation. My current rent for a 3BR house with a yard is $1400. I don't need a 3BR, but I literally can not rent anything smaller that isn't a shitty apartment, so basically I can't spend less than that.

So what can I get for $1900 in NYC? From what I've seen, I'd like it better than what I have right now. Will I get exactly the same square footage? Of course not. I will have someone living above me and below me where now I have a single family home. But it's an apples to oranges comparison, it would take millions of dollars to buy the amount of land I'm currently renting and build a single family home - becuase its a city. It's just inherently different.

I want enough room to have a bedroom, a bathroom, an office with my computer and a pull-out couch for friends, a kitchen to cook in and a family room/dining room to have a couch, a TV and a table to eat at. I can pull that off on my current salary whether its in NYC or elsewhere. So a cost of living calculator doesn't take into effect the fact that although the dimensions of the room are smaller, the NYC apartment is functionally the same as my current one that is far, far, bigger.
And even if the first mover does not end up alone on the market, after some time the market tends to undergo significant consolidation (once most of the organic growth has been achieved). And you end up with a natural monopoly anyway.

You can even see that in very recent history: the US government broke up Bell in 7 in 1984, it's already merged back into 2 companies (AT&T and Verizon are composed of 3 baby bells each, the 7th is part of Qwest/CenturyLink)
EekDaCat: "I am entirely willing to cooperate" denies ties to LulzSec
The important part in Node.js is not "js" it's "node". The design pattern encouraged is a network of micro-utilities nodes.

Ryan Dahl (node.js creator) did not choose javascript because it was cool but because the language was the most suited to its needs. In fact we started several project based on the same principles in different languages (C, lua, and others). Javascript is a good fit because it has no previous history on how to do I/O (which is the main focus in node.js design) except AJAX. It sure has been very helpful in making it popular. But the point is that there could have been Node.whatever. [1]

Now if you choose to use Node.js because it's cool, that's fine, but you're missing the important points :

1 - It is easy to write. Yes it is. Not only because it's javascript (or coffeescript) but also because the API is very well designed. Because of the agreed on convention of coding, it's also very easy to use modules even when these are not as much documented as node itself. It also would not be as easy to write if it were C or Java. In this netty example [2] you need 4 different classes to write an echo client/server which sums up to approx. 120 lines of code without comments and imports. The node version is 15 lines long at best [3] and clearer.

2 - It is efficient. Sure, in raw calculation, lots of other languages are faster. What makes node efficient is asynchronous I/O. You can do async I/O in any other programming language. It's just not that easy and most importantly you don't have to if you are lazy. The fastest language to write async I/O in is probably C. And you can do just that using libuv, the C library behind node.js which is incredibly faster without the Javascript layer.

3 - It works at the session/presentation level. Of course it's not as convenient as writing your php file, but it's necessary to ensure that the async model is respected (which is what makes it efficient, which is the reason why you came here in the first place). If you want cool javascript to replace php/JEEE/asp, you can use Jaxer.

Of course there are other important points that I'm missing here both because they don't come to mind at the moment and because you should experiment by yourself.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_JKb61EalQ
[2] http://docs.jboss.org/netty/3.2/xref/org/jboss/netty/example...
[3] http://nodejs.org/
If you wouldn't mind compiling the info, I'd be happy to add it to the page.
I was thinking the same! Moving to SF in a couple weeks
I'm curious if you have any evidence to back up your assertion that high end restaurants are calculated in the averages?

In any event, this generates a more detailed breakdown:

http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...

A few interesting examples (I chose to compare to Brooklyn, since Manhattan was over the top ridiculous):

- Austin Brooklyn
Home Price $232,059.83 $944,473.13
Rent $926.30 $2,249.13
Doctor Visit $84.28 $105.09
Pizza $10.08 $11.33
Beer $8.43 $9.81
Ground Beef $2.54 $3.39

Etc...

Weirdly, optometrists are way cheaper there (94$ vs 56$). Hmm... I'm going to have to co-ordinate my checkups with my vacations...
Yes, but I have been hearing that for literally years now ;)
This is creepy. I'm working word for word on the exact same thing.
Reader shared items only appear in buzz if you've "connected" reader to buzz. I don't have it connected because people I know hate seeing stuff in buzz they've seen elsewhere.

Plus, I've got hundreds of reader items I shared before buzz existed. I don't think google even keeps them though they imply that they do.

I just used "save web page, complete" in firefox on my buzz feed and got something better than what the takeout buzz download gave me.

The Cloud^TM - because all filesystems should be stochastic. Is my file there? Maybe!! We don't know, honestly. Your query timed out? I guess the system doesn't know either. Try again later!
No. That's up to the OS.
I've looked through and tried to follow some tips on psdtuts.
Most of them are over my head too (unfortunately).

I started looking for courses in community colleges around my area but haven't found any that are geared towards web designers.

Yeah, themeforest is the route I usually take but to customize anything, I am still lost.
Great idea. As others have said writing style, grammer, punctuation are the biggest threat to anonymity.

As a tangent I wonder if there's some sort of lossy compression you could do with English that would mangle this enough to make text anonymous. People have suggest google translate a few times, that's using a translation tool to hide some of the original meaning. Has anyone done a dedicated library to mangle text this way?
The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle
Read the article. No tax money was spent.
I'm sorry, did you not read the article?

> Not government spending. The UK's administration hasn't invested a penny in broadband infrastructure, and most of the network in the Netherlands has been built with private capital.
Accel Puts $34 Million In Online Payments Platform Braintree
They don't let you do simple things ...
you can't search your posts, you can't search your inbox (used to be able to, but it never worked right, and now they've taken it away) ... hitting enter submits your comment so to make a paragraph you have to hold down shift when you hit enter (wtf?) ... sometimes links open in new tabs, sometimes they don't so if you're scrolling through your news feed and get to, say, 2 days ago, then you click a link which doesn't open in a new page ... you lose your place and have to scroll through 2 days worth of posts again ...

Little inanities like that.
> On the other hand, European telecom companies are allowed to charge extra for higher bandwidth usage.

These are getting rarer and rarer these days. And the countries which raced ahead dropped quotas early, or never had quotas in the first place (France for instance, second ADSL market in Europe, standard ADSL contracts are all unmetered and metered never represented any significant portion of the market).

Even Belgium, historically one of the worst countries in europe quotas-wise (supposedly due to the very low level of computer-based production, meaning ISPs can get no peering), is moving away from quotas.

> Once these two barriers fall (cloud based home TV management and tiered pricing) there will be more competition in US.

No.
I wonder, not relevant enough or is the liberal arts education of hackernews so lacking we don't know Shakespeare when we see it?
4 Website Template Resources For Businesses
what if a site like this integrated a system that identified an individual's writing patterns and alerted the person to them, prompting changes in text they submit, thus attempting to ensure anonymity?
I think all conversations should be run back and forth through Google Translate until they reach equilibrium (a la Translation Party). For added awesomeness, do a multi-way equilibrium instead of just two languages.
Sounds great but,

"There is no amount of training that would make up for the talent we’d extinguish by teaching them how to write annual reviews."

Leadership has nothing to do with writing annual reviews.

I heard that leadership means gathering people's power to accomplish a goal.

So while leadership may mean management, management is not inherently leadership.