skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've done what you describe in various countries (minus the working bit), and while I'd definitely recommend this to anyone with an adventurous bent and who's curious about other cultures, it's not all wine and roses.

Here are some warnings, learned through experience:

As a foreigner you will often be treated as a second class citizen. That may or may not matter much, depending on where you go, what you do, whether you speak the language, and how many quality contacts you have in your host country.

I found it disheartening but eye opening just how poorly I was treated sometimes just because I wasn't a native, didn't speak the language, or was just being a respectful tourist.

Dealing with the bureaucracy in foreign countries when you're not a native could be a nightmare. It's even worse when you don't speak the language.

Again, speaking the language is also really important if you want to have natives as friends. Far too often expats socialize within a cocoon of other expats. And it's very easy to become very isolated in a foreign land, especially if you're not naturally very social and outgoing.

Flying and various other mechanics of travel might seem fun when you first start, but they'll become routine and maybe even onerous before too long -- especially with the ever increasing hassles of going through security and customs.

As a native in your own country you can frequently get away with a lot of things and talk your way out of many situations that you can't when you're a foreigner.

Foreigners and tourists often get taken advantage of because they don't know the rules, because they're afraid of getting kicked out of the country, and because they get little sympathy from some natives who look at them as nothing more than walking cash machines.

Of course, sometimes foreigners can get away with stuff that natives can't.. especially in the realm of social faux-pas, where a foreigner can be forgiven for being ignorant of local customs. But even here, not everyone is equally tolerant.

That said, I've benefited greatly from travel. It's been a very educational and mind-opening experience. Through it I've met many wonderful people and seen and experienced things I could not have imagined had I stayed in my home country my whole life.

I definitely encourage everyone to travel. But doing so long-term takes a special kind of person who's able to put up with a lot of inconvenience, hassle, and insecurity that you just wouldn't need to deal with if you'd just stayed home. (Of course this last bit wouldn't apply if "home" is some war-torn or economically depressed place compared to the countries you're traveling to.)
There is one minor difference in that many music performers may not make any money from the cd but use it as marketing so the tour rakes in the cash. In the VC instance, if the entrepreneur isn't going to make any money, the business usually dies, unless you're super committed like Westergren.
I like how this passes just a few years after it no longer applies to me...

Growing up in the heart of this ESRB rating era, I can honestly say I was rarely if at all effected. Like a lot of kids, if I wanted a Mature game, I'd get an adult to buy it in the same way kids buy booze. It wasn't a real deterrent and at the end of the day I was still playing the games that I wasn't supposed to. Right or wrong, doing dumb things, and seeing the world that you're not supposed to is just another rite of childhood and growing up. The only thing this new amendment really does is it makes things easier for kids--psh the kids today have it so easy.
Can I get a raise of hands from those people who have a mortgage and actually support this?
I find your characterization inaccurate. What this author did was tie together a blog post from a week ago with Google's recent algorithm changes. The piece she quoted was an example of the sort of thing Google is trying to combat. What she adds is this connection. Readers of HN probably don't need these dots connected for us. But most readers of the NY Times probably do, since most of them do not have the experience and understanding of the web that most HN readers do. This is the sort of thing newspapers have done for as long as they've been around.

I find your claim that 90% of the content on the NY Times is "not much better than the content farmed stuff" absurd. Most of the writing on the NY Times has a clear voice and purpose, and much of it is original.
I want to mount my desk on a stationary bicycle.
Building and Maintaining Community and Culture at a Distributed Company
Hey, adriannica - check out my comment above for some of how we create the list. And here's a bit more of our methodology http://www.inc.com/30under30/2011/how-we-made-this-years-30-... (although mostly it involves lots of reporting and much internal debating.)
Would it make sense to have an automated email to the effect of "Thanks for contacting us. Here are the frequently faced problems." ?
Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the past 10 years.
I don't think legalizing violent videogames for minors is equivocal to both a) legalizing drugs, dangerous ones (crack) included and b) legalizing drugs for minors, but I guess I do see your point.

At what point do we decide that someone is 'mature' enough to play a violent videogame? Is it a different age than when we think they could use drugs 'responsibly' (in a world where they were legal)? A more obvious example would be alcohol. I would let my children (n.b. I do not currently have children) play a violent videogame, but I would not let them drink a six pack. I see the drugs/alcohol as putting them more in direct physical harm (most likely where they would hurt themselves, or overdose, etc.) than violent videogames. People thankfully can't overdose on violent videogames (except the people who died in Korean internet cafes playing WoW, but I think that's a different topic altogether).

Given that someone can't physically hurt themselves with a violent videogame, I would allow a much younger child access to them than I would drugs or alcohol. We could argue whether or not there is any mental/emotional damage, but I think we can agree that whatever mental/emotional damage there could be from playing violent videogames at the age of 12 as much as one wants, it would be much less than the mental/emotional damage of letting a 12 year old have unlimited access to drugs.
"In my day when we wanted some mature video game, we'd pay a hobo to walk into gamestop for us"
Shortages are a sign of a flawed market.

What needs to be done is something similar to the radio spectrum; require a regular bidding process on a given domain (or, more likely, the set of domains that are in-demand).

Squatting becomes a less desirable business when you've got to pay $100/year for an in-demand domain.
I completely agree with you. In fact, I use Linode too and am very happy with their service even though there are cheaper options out there.

Webeiu supports reviews, but it's difficult to have a lot of reviews when starting out. If there was a reliable website with reviews (like Yelp for restaurants), I would show the ratings from that website. Most of the review information about hosts seems to be scattered around in forums, comments, blogs, etc. I have added Alexa and Google ratings to the website pages. These don't mean much for hosting providers, but if people are talking about them, then they will probably have better ranking.

I would definitely welcome any suggestions about a good source of reviews and ratings.
A) What do you do that is significant (by SV norms, not your personal, subjective standard for self-satisfaction)? B) A string of corroborating anecdotes is not proof (notwithstanding a cliche about anecdotes * N == data for large N)

Let me be more clear about significance. My statement is that people don't do what is done in SV by trotting around the world, working from their laptops in internet cafes. What is done in SV?

* Start or work at billion dollar startups.

* Create disruptive technologies and build businesses around them.

* Network with the most brilliant minds in business, engineering, etc.

Creating an app that can pay the bill for a bungalow in Phuket (for example) is a great achievement and congratulations on being able to do it. You deserve all the awesome titles that you've listed in your profile.

However, it's not what I would call significant, by these standards. I'm sorry if you feel offended by my choice of the word significant, I really am, but I am saying that there is a difference in scale between what a globetrotter can do and "the rest of us" -- and there is a limitation on the former.
Bump's Visual Refresh for iOS
The medium definitely matters.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.ful...
Thankyou so much for creating and running SearchYC, sad to see it go. It was a really great resource and well executed!
Just bought a standing desk. I really like it. It isn't as comfortable (obviously), and my legs, feet and back are sore by the end of the day. But they're sore in a good, used way and fine by the next morning.

It definitely feels healthier then the sore back and thighs I'd get from sitting still all day.
This is one of the reasons why I'm moving away from Gmail and starting to use a European email provider.
How many downtowns are livable and enjoyable after 6pm? Some have pockets of activity, usually built with lots of subsidies and great effort (and they often have an eery feel of the-city-as-imagined-by-suburbanites). Skyscrapers are density without any of the advantages of density (http://newurbannetwork.com/news-opinion/blogs/michael-mehaff...). Even Manhattan, a kind of endless downtown, is at its best in the somewhat lower density areas that have fewer skyscrapers.
LulzSec Disbands
IOS Partnership
I'm looking for an iOS programmer to partner with in building an iPhone app for a dictionary project I've been working on. I already have a website and sqlite database of words.

Let me know if you're interested. Feel free to email me at ian at leximo dot org.
Here's the point: video game violence develop a shitty moral compass. It's just shit. I don't care if it points in the right direction or the wrong direction. I, your comrade in arms, don't know where it's going to point next time. And that's not the guy I want be sharing a tent with.

That doesn't seem to be the point of your anecdote at all. You just magically created a correlation between the anecdote you started with and your suggestion that "video game violence develop a shitty moral compass".
I'm not arguing for imposing morality by means of physical violence. But you can be sure I would be happy to impose a hefty fine on Gamestop if they start selling AO games to my kids.
It seems overly anti-police just starting with the headline and not quite about how the apps are giving journalistic abilities to people.

Just my opinion. I don't dislike/avoid the police here (Australian).
I can only see a designer thriving at one of the Linux distribution companies. Companies given you a structure that will let a designer thrive if it is the distributions focus.
I like this advice, a lot. My startup's not really a web startup -- per se -- it requires a lot of hardware, licenses, etc. All of which we're ready to get. If it were a simple web service I'd launch it now and just see what happened ;)

Obviously, spending a lot on hardware and licenses up front means we need more than a trickle of customers to make it profitable, which in turn means we have to spend more on marketing. So what should be about $60k worth of annual fees for us turns into about $200k per year to pay the fees and draw the customers to make it worthwhile.

There are...cheaper ways to start, but they hazard our safety and put us at greater risk. E.g. starting in a country where we can do this without a license. Or starting with cheaper hardware. Unfortunately, that's the nut of what we'd be talking about, to speak of investing in our customers and only spending enough to achieve profitability. (In theory, we could spend a few thousand and achieve profitability, but it wouldn't scale).

Anyway, thanks for the ideas and input... it's the first truly positive view of loans I've heard as an option against VC, and it's something to think about.
Show HN: My side project, meaningful supplement price comparison
Looks a lot like my little task manager, t: http://stevelosh.com/projects/t/

You can integrate t with Mercurial through a shell alias:

[alias]
task = !python /path/to/t.py --task-dir `$HG root` --list tasks

I'm sure you can do something similar with git.

This will let you do stuff like:

$ hg task Fix the data-eating bug.
$ hg task
e - Fix the data-eating bug.
$ vim myproject.py
... fix the bug ...
$ hg task -f e
$ hg commit 'Fix the big data-eating bug.'
A friend of mine got it into his head that there was money to be made from setting up a system to generate bullshit sites in the hopes of attracting users and creating "communities". In fact, he had a couple of these bullshit sites up and was generating a surprising amount of income from them. Of course, he insisted that they were not bullshit sites and that his intent was to turn the promising ones into "real" sites.

I declined to take part in the venture because I felt this was deeply wrong. I also predicted that Google would do their best to stomp out these sites despite selling ads on them (to stop selling ads on them first they have to identify them as bullshit) and that his business might evaporate overnight. And rightly so.

I hope he didn't invest too much of his own money in it. Or better yet, that he scrapped the idea altogether.

Because it is a really terrible idea.
I don't have a problem with them shoving crap on my phone as long as I can remove it easily.
Thank you for running searchyc all of these years. It was a tremendously useful service.
You were taught a lesson, it wasn't supposed to be pleasant. I hope you learned it well.
It's really cool to see that users of rpg maker xp can import their work. Unfortunately, using the rpg maker xp graphics for a web game is a violation of the license agreement the art is provided under - enter brain reserves all rights to the art and the license explicitly states that it is for use in rpg maker only.
This is very cool. It seems like a well thought out process too. Any plans on doing languages other than Ruby?
And part of our burden is having the conversation. Part of our burden is trying to make the society we want our kids to live in. I frankly have no problem with slapping Gamestop with some hefty fines if they decide to start selling scantily clad, dripping-with-blod warrior princesses to my kids for $19.95.
This one is interesting:
http://testingbenfordslaw.com/most-common-iphone-passcodes

I wonder what influence the 'spatial' properties of a number pad password has on this data. For example "5" gets a nice little spike... and "5" is the center key on the 10-key iPhone number pad. The "1" is still the winner by far, but I wonder how many of those are the easy-to-remember "1234".
We're a football site (NFL/College) so virtually all of our audience is American males...18-50-ish.

IE: 35%
Firefox: 25%
Chrome: 22%
Safari: 11%
Android: 3%

In terms of operating system:

77% Windows
12% Mac

26% of our visitors are running at 1280 x 800 resolution or below.
Go all the way with it. Gamestop refuses to pay the fine because it is immoral or unconstitutional or whatever.

The directors of the corporation are jailed.

That's the force.
Know Your Digital Rights: one-page summary
Moving forward from Failure using ideas from DevOps
In systems at scale, failures are inevitable. It's a waste not to get everything that you can out of them - to learn everything that you can from each failure, to make the team and the system better and more resilient. Ideas and techniques from the DevOps community show how to understand and learn from failures, ideas that have real value in Web site operations and beyond.
Curl + mailx = real-time site monitoring with notifications
So true. I've offered my services to several OSS projects in the past, and they were extremely pleased when I did... and then they fought over every single trivial tiny thing I laid out in my plan, and ignored me, til all I could say was "fuck it." I figured that if I was going to go through all that pain, I was going to get paid for it.
If standing desks ever take off, I wonder if we'll eventually face news articles with titles like: "Standing for hours can shave years off life"...
Well, I wrote the software, not the article. It's a catchy headline sure, and the apps are called Cop Recorder, which a lot of people see as anti-police. But, there are lots of cops who use the software too.

We are not an anti-police project, we are a pro-data project! There are good police and bad police, and we publish recordings of both.
Comparing c/java/python performance and memory usage
I would love to see something along these lines come from the EU, I don't trust the UK government on this.
Selling to 100 users inside of one company is a lot different than selling to 100 individual users scattered all over the place. Company IT is likely to be the first point-of-contact for issues, which would decrease LastPass's support requirements by quite a bit.
The California Dream is fizzling out
> If we protect them from making difficult decisions when they're 12, they'll be forced to learn to make difficult decisions when they're 18 or 21 or 22, when bad decisions have MUCH worse consequences.

But, when they are 18, 21, etc., they will have developed more mentally and emotionally, and should (should) be better equipped to make those decisions than when one is 12.

(note: in this post I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the topic at hand, just providing a counterpoint to what you said)
This idea has been done to death, and when has it ever really worked?
Three Myths About Developer Effectiveness
I believe your estimates are overly optimistic. Then again, if you look at just the US, there is a huge gap between how people think wealth is distributed and reality.

The distribution is only going to get worse. I don't see the 0.1% at the top suddenly growing altruistic -- nor do I think any sort of political disruption can change this tendency in the long term. Such disruptions now seem to, more often than not, result in more assets being secured by those of means.

Whatever illusions of a democratic and fair society the 1900s instilled in us are just that: illusions. I predict that within my lifetime western society will indeed continue a trend towards the sci-fi predicions of the privately owned corporate state. To a large degree, this is already reality.
i have had a standing desk for a while and i dont like the hurting feet at all. gotta fix this somehow. :(
I didn't work on this year's list, but I've worked on them in years' past. The bottom line: It's a subjective list--based on reporting by Inc.'s editors and writers (basically we talk to people and ask them who they admire/who they think should be on the list). We assemble a long list of names and narrow it down to 30, based a sense of who we feel is most impressive and most interesting.

One of the cool things about this list is that it's a one-shot deal, so we'll be looking for 30 new names next year. You can send nominations to 30under30@inc.com

Or put them in the comments here and we'll find them.

Thanks for reading!
It cites studies from the '70s for its most important claim:

"Prolonged exposure to such media portrayals results in increased acceptance of violence as an appropriate means of solving problems and achieving one's goals.14,,15 "

It then spends several paragraphs treating the conclusions of these studies done in a very different era as a modern given.

And later:
"Research has associated exposure to media violence with a variety of physical and mental health problems for children and adolescents, including aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, fear, depression, nightmares, and sleep disturbances. More than 3500 research studies have examined the association between media violence and violent behavior; all but 18 have shown a positive relationship.26"

Look at the title of #26 and honestly tell me you'd trust its claims if you had access to it.

I don't know if I want to keep going with this. It doesn't seem worth the effort with how shoddy it is so far.
>>Sadly, the situation is different from Python's.

>>Python 3 is well-defined, with a stable and usable implementation.

It is hard to compare.

The main similarity between Perl 6 and Python 3 is probably the age. The main difference is that Perl 6 is really, really ambitious.
Supreme Court Takes Important GPS Tracking Case
SearchYC was an invaluable resource and a great tool - thanks for the work!
Is this a story about a story, from the same day?
I'm in a start up that's developed techniques using UDP to allow someone to roam across wifi - in other words we have managed to reduce the tcp delays and time outs to provide consistent and reliable handoffs between wifi zones and devices - regardless what of the network provider. The technology also allows hot handover between femto and wifi too. Right now we're mostly focused on a mobile app to improve broadband delivery of content to mobile users in shopping malls, commercial zones, etc. but that's low hanging fruit. Eventually we believe that this can be integrated in mobile apps to let others us this for true mobility while running broadband services.
Does sitting on an exercise ball have the same deadly effects?
But, like alcohol, violent media does lead to physical injuries

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.ful...
You are familiar with the intimate details of Mr. Zuckerberg's childhood habits and education?
The fundamental assumption here is that having an empty inbox is a desirable goal. Why? Is it just the satisfaction of seeing an empty screen? I don't get it, seems basically pointless. Is there any real evidence that achieving that goal would improve my productivity or make me more successful?
Instead of shutting down, can't you hand it off to someone? Please!
I think we are done for now though. Does that mean we have to write more Silicon Valley stories :)
Ashton Kutcher On Kissing Other Actors in a Scene
Your help needed in the Battle for Control over the Internet
Benford's Law really only applies to numbers where the growth rate is a function of the current value (ie. exponential growth). It's not some magic property that can be applied to any dataset.
SearchYC was no less than kickass. Thank you so much.
You make it sounds like if Autocad had involved a designer in the process, they would have wound up with google sketch. Sometimes things need to have features, even features that 90% of users won't need 90% of the time. A good designer shouldn't be the person who decides to cut features, he should be the person who figures out how to keep the features, but in a manner that allows new users to start with a minimum of pain, and expert users to keep growing into the product. That's hard work, and it takes a lot of cleverness and creativity, but I think anybody willing to do that work would be welcome in any sane open source project.

EDIT: on re-reading my post, it looks like I'm saying Autocad didn't have designers, which is completely the opposite of how I feel. What I was trying to get it is that (IMO) Autocad is an amazingly approachable product with tons of features, just presented in a way that isn't terribly daunting to a new user.
Yeah, the AC is about 40kWh/year. Its not doing much for about 3/4 of the year in the UK though. Economies of scale do make a big difference. In a large building with 1000's of peeps air supply fans (fan coil units), chillers and heat rejection would be separate pieces of kit. Heat rejection is generally done by rooftop cooling towers sometimes supplemented by ground sink borehole. Supply air is cooled at the fan coil units, which are supplied by with water cooled by the chillers. There are lots of variations for a system like this but as described above is a pretty typical office building set-up in the UK building industry at the moment.