skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up in India. I can confirm whatever you said is true and is a euphemism. Few people talk about the poverty in India (it is almost similar to quite a bit of Africa) and how India was a socialist country where you required license to conduct almost any business. But even fewer people talk about how, culturally speaking, seniority has always been more important than the merits of what is being said and the fact how in practice everything - the law, police services, elections, etc. - falls under the government and aren't independent bodies. The main ruling party for most of history (called Congress) has always been run by one family alone. Nepotism?
What do you think that ratio of American citizens from the USA to American citizens from Canada was in Cairo? I'd venture that the Americans vacationing from the US out-numbered those from Canada. Just sayin' that the number of dual-citizens living in Canada that require US marines to evacuate them during serious situations in another country is probably so small that the funding for it is a rounding error.
> Hacker News is definitely turning into the monoculture Paul Graham said (here on this site) that he wanted to prevent.

It happens to all websites with upvotes and downvotes system for comments. Before Hacker News I've seen it happened to habrahabr.ru (russian website with similar audience, invite-only).

To have been upvoted, you need to say things everyone agrees with. If you are in minority, then you are downvoted. But talented people are in minority. Rich people are in minority. Business owners vs. wage earners are in minority. So, any community with driven-by-majority censorship quickly degrades to a totalitarian sect. A community built to select good ideas, to filter them out of dirt, must encourage outstanding people who are in minority by definition, not discourage them by downvoting.

That's why I'm against downvoting. Upvotes are OK for me, but I don't like the idea of downvotes on HN. They limit my ability to express alternative point of view here. They make me mimic "the grey mass". Probably it's not the system PG intended to build.
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There is no answer for a general "some country," each country has its own laws.

In the US, you need to meet with the State Department (possibly through an embassy) which takes care of the legal aspects of renouncing your citizenship. The second part is filling out all of the forms and paying all of taxes required by the IRS (which is not insignificant). It is not cheap to renounce your citizenship (unless you don't really have anything).
Ask HN: What are OK tasks for a freelancer to bill?
I'm currently working with a (good) freelance designer via oDesk, however she has spent quite some time installing/configuring her system in order to work on my project (git, python, mysql, installtion problems etc). She already billed more than $300 for that and given I'm spending my hard-earned money, it's a bit hard to swallow. She also billed time for looking at inspiration websites in order to get a feel of what needs to be done.

Do you consider it normal for a freelancer to bill for inspiration research/system installation?
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If you are so unconcerned with your storage that you're just mouse clicking around EBS setups, you don't' need 1-2 full-time people to run an array.
Link to 1978 HEXAGON overview, declassified Sep 17: http://www.nro.gov/foia/declass/GAMHEX/HEXAGON/52.PDF
I guess what was by suggested by viraptor is the absurdity of the situation. What stops Russia to say that any person born on earth is required to fill in tax returns on their entire worldwide income. You enter Russia without paying taxes? Bam -> jail.
Actually, many of them don't. I have a friend who is a dual US/UK citizen born in the UK who had never lived or worked in the states until she decided to get a summer job there in 20s; she was informed of the requirement to file back tax returns when she submitted her W4.

It makes absolutely no sense for the US to try to lay any claim to her earnings or expect her to file tax returns for any period of time before that.
Buy and destroy, just like yahoo.
> no doubt taking advantage of the laws and protections
> afforded by both countries as it suited them.

It's more likely that they just wanted easier passage into the United States for vacationing and/or visiting relatives by using their US passport than their Canadian one.

Also, if you lived in Canada since you were 13 and committed a crime in Canada, I doubt that you would be able to claim that you were immune due to your US citizenship.

On the same token, I've heard that the US enforces its laws overseas if your a US citizen. E.g. if you go to another country to have sex with a child prostitute, you can still be charged with a crime in the US, or so I was told on some message board (want to say slashdot.org) some years ago in a US/foreign discussion.
I agree that you can work really hard on the wrong thing, but in my opinion the Pre3 and the Touchpad are the right thing (and I'm not alone in this). The reasons why they didn't sell (in my opinion) are that they were priced wrong on the initial release, the marketing was poor to non-existent (in the case of Europe for example, where there was no marketing), and finally they were just not given enough of a chance (who cancels a new device about a month after it is released? And in the case of the Pre3 it was never released outside of Europe...).

All of these things are the fault of strategic management at HP, not the hardware engineers who are losing their jobs.
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That's one reason there's a limited window for downvoting posts. I think it's about 24 hours and the downvote arrow goes away.
Group-buying sites' valuations take a dive. 
Very interesting article but I don't agree on this sentence:

"While the technical barriers to entry in daily-deal business are low, and more companies are expected, scaling the business requires significant amounts of capital, which may prove harder to find."

As a counter-example the Adlibrium app has adapted Group-buying business model to mobile platforms making it "self-service" for merchants.

This approach may drastically cut the amount of capital needed to scale and most importantly the service is commission free, which means that Adlibrium offers much better economical conditions than Groupon & co. .

I think that the group-buying market is not saturated yet, but sooner than expected it will stabilize on Adlibrium approach, with obvious consequences for Groupon and clones.

Is it still a good idea to start a Groupon-like startup? Probably it is about time for innovation or simply for Adlibrium clones.
What you think?

ADLIBRIUM website:
www.adlibrium.com

ADLIBRIUM on TECHCRUNCH:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/adlibrium-launches-in-beta-on-android-to-help-smbs-close-the-redemption-loop-on-mobile/
One of the things I miss about the US, here in Italy, is that people care a bit more about the rules, and obeying them, or changing them. Yeah, you probably won't get caught, but that's ultimately not the point. The point is that it's a bad rule.
Reference counting has plenty of instruction specific atomic operations on common processors in use today (and no, GC routines need write barriers in most cases that atomic counting is needed). But you're right, it's tricky, but that's why it's important to make all of that automatic and transparent to the programmer.

Delegation patterns are complex for lifetime management though that is why they have spent a good portion of their documentation on helping people understand when to use zeroing weak references which is a very easy fix for problems like this. Their heuristics work better than I imagined here. Still trickier than GC but much more consistent.

So far the downsides are pretty small relative to manual memory management and close to GC without trading off the consistency of manual memory management. I'd say "garbage collection without any of the nasty downsides" is more accurate in this case than not.
PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) is a measure which adjusts the $1.377 trillion for what you can actually buy in India with those US dollars.

It's calculated based on prices paid in India and in Japan or the goods needed to live on; for this reason it's most useful as a measure when looking at per capita incomes to see what a typical person's share of adjusted GDP will buy them. PPP adjusting in theory shows that an Indian in India can enjoy the lifestyle of someone earning three times as much in Japan (provided he buys Indian goods at Indian prices). On the other hand, as soon as you start looking at GDP per capita [adjusted or not] it becomes obvious that Japanese people are on average much, much richer than Indians because Japan's similar level national income is shared between far fewer people.

As an aggregate measure of the economic output PPP adjusted GDP is not entirely useless either as a crude adjustment for labour costs: India can build a lot more skyscrapers for $1.377 trillion (or $1 billion) than Japan could and Indian output is arguably undervalued by raw GDP measures which simply looking at the prices paid. But effectively it's saying that India as a country produces more value than Japan if people were prepared to buy Indian goods at their Japanese value. As there's plenty of opportunity for trade between India and Japan, it's probably fair to say that Indian output probably isn't worth three times it's Indian value to the Japanese, otherwise they'd be buying it all up. Therefore the true value of India's economic output lies somewhere between the $1.4bn at low Indian domestic prices and $4bn at inflated Japanese domestic prices (trade isn't perfectly efficient), still behind Japan.
Ok, so he's not explicitly bragging about his blog; he's merely bragging about being able to throw money around and dick up other peoples' travel plans. That makes it so much better.
Well, it's a space with a lot of competition and the top paying ads go to the sites with millions of pages views. Ads are paid by CPM (cost per thousands) and the best paying ads are 10$ to 20$ CPM. So if you have 3 page views by Uniates, you can expect to make 600$ per month at most. In reality it would probably be a fraction of this. The ad market, especially in the US is trending towards lower CPMs even if the overall industry is investing more money.

Some models where you have a very targetted niche involve sponsoring content, reviews, videos, contests or events. But usually, you need a niche advertisers can't easily reach to make good money.

In general, don't expect to make a living unless you invest a lot of time in deals and grow your page views.
The laws of a country may say you can never stop being a citizen of that country, but it is of course only binding in that country. The issue in the article was that you may be unable to visit the US if you decide to just ignore this law. If you don't have any desire to do so, then I don't see why you can't ignore it. I doubt they'll get the Interpol on your case...
By the way, you can find loads of disgustingly miserable poor places in the rich USA too. Maybe they all have sewers and electricity but that's about all that separates parts of the rural US (deep south) or bad urban poverty (right nearby me in NYC) and some villages in India.

Even the poorest place in the US has access to electricity, clean water, sewage disposal, trash disposal, law enforcement, emergency response, phone service, broadcast television, postal service, and the list goes on. This is definitely not true in India or China, and there is a long way to go before they reach that level.
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Yeah, it's a client side framework. Though it seems like they're going to be rolling out a server as well -- though I'm sure it will not be required. That is, you'll be able to use Batman with any server you want.
According to the paper, this code was actually extracted directly from qhasm, which djb released in 2006. This is notable because any code becomes more worthy of admiration once we know it was written by djb. As Mark-Jason Dominus used to say, "I'd drink poisoned cool-aid as long as djb told me he'd made it himself."
hi, i'm one of the authors.

the scala school is mostly intended to be used in conjunction with a course we teach.

we're working on moving it towards being more self-contained, independent from the accompanying lectures.
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I think, in a way, they are.

The point he's making, in my opinion, is that while farming rats to kill them is useless, farming vulnerabilities is not. There's no real use in advancing our knowledge of rat slaughter, we know how to do that pretty well already, and these rat farmers are indeed gaming the system.

Researchers aren't necessarily injecting bugs in the system unscrupulously, but even if they were, would it be a bad thing? The nature of security is such that bug farming would probably help move the problem forward. The science of mitigating threats is far more complicated than that of killing rats. So manufacturing vulnerabilities will advance our understanding of computer security.

It's a loose metaphor, but I see it.
It's Iron Curtain 2.0: you're allowed to leave, but your money isn't. They fixed the bug where you had to shoot people who were trying to physically leave, but they still get the economic benefits.
My wife asked me why I still keep this one old laptop. I said it's the only way I can still play Thief. I've had no luck with VMWare, VirtualBox running XP or Windows 98, wine, CrossOver or native XP. That's Just Wrong and I'm going to change this state of affairs if it's the last thing I do.
Won't they come get you and then charge you for the privilege? Plus this only works ofcourse if you've registered and told them the precise location of your house to the embassy.
This question can't really be answered as asked. Different industries yield different CPC/CPM rates. Additionally, how your users interact with the ads would also effect your revenue.

If you can monetize your user base through other means, such as creating a paid Pro version of your service, or a SaaS app marketed to your users, you have the opportunity to make more money than just advertising.
Quote from the transcript: "If you had the influence, what would you change to improve US cybersecurity?" Answer: "I would require the major internet providers as a matter of regulation to filter the packets to look for signatures of attacks and blackhole them. I'd give the signatures to them. In a regulated industry - finance, power and telecommunications - I'd require all the software be vetted for all kinds of mistakes." - Richard Clarke

Just a lot of more security layers/patches in the form of regulations -> less internet freedom. Vetting software for mistakes is a big waste of time and resources. I read his book. And in it, Richard Clarke asks AT&T Cybersecurity officer, Edward Amoroso, the same question. Amoroso's response is the same: If her were the US cybersecurity Czar, he would like initiatives to look for software errors and make software more secure...C'mon, seriously?
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Ask HN: GWT/PlayN or Unity for a new Facebook/G+ game? 
I am making a game with a team of 5 other engineers as a school project. We would like to use either Unity Pro 3 - Education (http://unity3d.com/) or GWT/PlayN (http://code.google.com/p/playn/). We are making a isometric 2D game. It will have a front end on a social network, and a back end for persistence and multiplayer (probably Google App Engine).

Advantages of Unity: it looks like it includes a lot of neat features, including a beefy rendering pipeline and a powerful set of world building tools. (But would we actually use any of that for a 2D game?) It also lets us program in C#, which our team is more comfortable in than Java. It looks like it would make networking super easy (http://unity3d.com/unity/engine/networking).

I don't think our game will be too computationally intensive on the graphics side (no physics), but since it's in a plugin Unity could have fewer performance issues than JS running in the browser?

Unfortunately, Unity has to run as a plugin in the browser, which we're worried will reduce adoption. Also, no one on our team has really used Unity before.

Advantages of GWT: It compiles to HTML5/JS, which is "the new hotness" instead of the "old shittiness" of browser plugins. We have one person on the team with GWT experience, as opposed to no one with Unity experience. Also, GWT-RPC works really nicely with App Engine (most of the time), whereas in Unity I'm not sure how much support we'd have.

However, GWT uses Java, which our team is less happy with than C#. Also, in my experience working with it, GWT can sometimes get heinously obscure error messages, and the only way to fix it is to revert to an earlier version and then try your changes again (in smaller increments).

What do you think?
Large doesn't necessarily mean a lot for standard of living, because India's population is also very large, so the amount of economy per person is a lot smaller.

India's GDP might make it 4th (by Purchasing Power Parity) or 10th (nominally), but per person it's down at 129th.

(Figures via:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP... )
Now for the unintended consequences: I became a bore at cocktail parties.

I dunno, I think it'd be more interesting to talk with you than to talk with people about what they drank at the last party they went to--especially since "what" usually just means "how much".
That is true but you lose some of the most important properties of crit-bit trees, ordered operations.

If the data structure is unordered, I don't see any reason why it should be better than a normal hash table.
I just have to raise my head to see at least 60 new HP computers and 100 23' HP monitors in my office. I don't see any of all this people using an iPad (most of us have one) to do work. So no, the PC market is not dead and it ain't going to be replaced by some 10 inch media player. Hell, I even have an iMac sitting idle next to me because I can't get it to work as I want to.
Of course this is circular reasoning. It's precisely because America deploys Marines everywhere that Americans NEED to be rescued. Their country's actions make them targets.
Universal healthcare isn't free. Maybe it's not a bad deal, but it costs a lot of money.
For me, the bottom line is the end game. My contention is that if a client's goal is to build a successful technology company and this client is unwilling or unable to pay for the proper tech talent (whether in cash or equity), then they should not be in the technology business. Regrettably, this happens frequently, and all I am suggesting is that any developer needs to be on the lookout for the best clients with the best projects.
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Ok, let me apologize. "Laughable" and "benighted" are the kinds of uncharitable language I'm arguing against using. The charitable read of this statement would have acknowledged its substance -- the idea that after Darwin there was a 'clearing of the decks' so to speak, and to some degree that's true although not to the extent Dawkins claims. From a philosophical standpoint, certainly Teleology was seen to have been dealt a death blow, at least the kind of teleology advocated by folks like Paley, and that was a massive turn. I'm unaware of any serious philosopher or historian of ideas that would suggest it's wise to dismiss all prior developments out of hand, though. If that's not laughable, it's certainly dangerous.
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The problem is simply that without the curtain, it becomes possible to use this as part of an evasion strategy. When "Americans abroad" consisted almost entirely of the military and the millonares, the complexity of the system mattered much less.
Basic Web Technology - PHP/ Ruby on Rails or ASP.Net is not that difficult to learn. It may be a good idea to know the basics.
I am not a pure techie and am building a web app. It took more than a couple of months to find the right techie. In the mean time, I outsourced development on ODesk so that there is some momentum by the time I build my own tech team. Now we are almost at the verge of launching our first app.
It is certainly do-able. Takes a little longer and costs a little more. But in any startup, the cost of building the first iteration of the product is not the most significant.
But you absolutely must have clarity on what your product is and who is going to use it.
>if you go to another country to have sex with a child prostitute, you can still be charged with a crime in the US, or so I was told on some message board

Now you've been told on this message board.

Mann Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act

Protect Act of 2003 http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1467.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003
American Express is largely a transaction company; they make a tidy income on their lending activities, but their largest source of revenue is the "discount revenue", the fees they charge merchants for accepting each transaction. Their card fees combined with other commissions are also, in aggregate, larger than their net lending income.

http://about.americanexpress.com/ar/2010/financial_results.a...

Click on "Consolidated Financial Statements".

So I'm sure they are happy to jump into a system like this that facilitates using their systems for the transaction, but they will mightily resist anything that tries to replace them directly.
Just got my ticket and coincidently, my copy of the book is supposed to arrive today too. (BTW, this is one book you don't want on your device. I recommend dead tree version.)
I think that it might look something like William Gibson's sci-fi books. Well off clusters around corporations, not countries. Outlying economic niches. A lot of reality in people's desires to get good/unusual job skills.

I have always hoped that the world society would evolve into a meritocracy, but where people at the bottom would receive enough support to prevent excess violence. However, we are probably going to get a plutocracy with extreme differences between classes and absolute control of government, news media, etc. by a very small elite class.
Not all Linux distributions have ISOs ready for USB-usage. Some of them are still sticking to CD as media.
It's free for the people who couldn't afford it otherwise.

Which is a great deal that many of us who pay for it are happy to contribute to.
"Placebos are NOT effective in treating actual disease states or improving "hard endpoints" such as reduction of all-cause mortality"

Then how do you explain the metastudy that I linked to below in this thread that found that adherence to placebos reduced mortality as much as actual medications across a variety of diseases?
Oh I agree, probably should've stated as such in my post.