skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's Microsoft for you.
I'm curious as one of the places Singapore highly ranked was the difficulty in starting a business. Yet it seems from the company formation services online, Singapore costs around $5,000 to open a business. (compared to $50 in Texas, for instance). I would think if it is straightforward (and really starting a business is nothing more than registering it with the government so they can tax you-- essentially the creation of a database entry) -- why is it so expensive?

Maybe it can be done online for cheap, and thus those who are charging all that money are people who are giving a lot of advice. (I haven't looked into it closely.)
It's the first Windows operating system designed for tablet computing which is largely portrait mode, and it's the first flag logo with panes wider than tall. I wonder if that was intentional.
Good question. I've done this a couple of times. Self-study can be incredibly useful. Being able to do it within the "distraction" of a full time job can also be extremely rewarding.

I have a very conservative financial point of view in that if I got fired tomorrow I would want to be fine for the next year without working.

This has in the past allowed me to work on my own stuff a couple of times without much worry (although in Australia, lack of health insurance isn't the issue it is in the US).

It's very easy to get distracted and not finish things (at least for me) without the external pressure of someone pushing you to finish. YMMV.

As far as "not earning" goes, these periods of self-improvement are pretty much directly responsible for me getting the great job I have now (at Google) so I'd say it was a worthwhile investment.

Pick something you want to learn. Don't be directionless and say "self-improvement" is your goal. As long as you can reasonably afford to do it.
Create your own Bucketlist at My Bucketlist
My Bucketlist - You can create your own list of life goals and invite your friends to participate via email or Facebook.
I don't think you'd need to quit or take off for a year, many people have full time jobs and go to school at the same time. You should be able to take these classes at your leisure while maintaining a paycheck. Or you can just quit and focus fully on this for a year.
Accessing an API using CoreData's NSIncrementalStore
'Tiny Tower' Ripoff 'Dream Heights' Hits US App Store; Zynga Employees "Love It"
Should we remove Trustwave from our personal browsers? Or as admins from our users' browsers?
agreed - nice insights - but those spaces where celebrity status isn't a requirement are so small. even in enterprise software where you can succeed with unit sales, it is hard to sell without either prior sales or a reputation.

do you have any good areas where you think young entrepreneurs should be looking?
There seems to be no evidence to support his allegations he was going to properly disclose his exploits to Facebook. OTOH, there is evidence he misappropriated data and deleted information that could be used to track him.

His hat is not impeccable white.
In the USA, your domain can be seized by the government at any time without any trial, and without any recourse. If you report abuse you received from a police officer, you risk being killed by that officer and it being made to look like you were in the commission of a crime at the time. I can't think of a single basic human right that is universally respected in the USA, and this goes from the right of self defense to the right of self determination or the freedom of association.

I'll take being caned over being killed any day.

There are always tradeoffs.
Actually, broadly speaking, I think math (think summation etc.) in general is usually 1-index based while programming is 0-index (due to memory locations so that the array index also points to the first element?).

Also see Dijkstra's take on the matter: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF for
Not to mention the dot on the i looks misplaced and misshapen.

My first emotional reaction to that logo was 'ewwww'. It's not a good sign when the best word I can find to describe it is gross.
I'm currently doing self education beside my full time job. Did not take time off for self study, but I'd like to if I get chance.
"but if VCs are already giving money to an established entrepreneur to do the same thing, why take a chance on a guy doing his coding in his house in a bathrobe"

Until you change this train of thought, you won't succeed. You need to convince yourself before you can convince others. If you can't even convince yourself, no one's going to buy into it.

If you can convince yourself that you have what it takes to succeed and that your secret sauce or magic formula is enough to staff off even the likes of google, then you'll still convincing others including those VCs you've mentioned.
The FSF interpretation is undermined by the existence of non-GPL Linux programs (that link, call and use data structures from the (GPL-licensed) Linux API).
From Apple: Happy Birthday, Your Developer Account Has Been Disabled
Have you had a chance to contact them? What did they say?
How do future employers look at this time of unemployment?
Arch Linux Cannot Open Firefox and other applications
I regret letting my last interview for a web development job turn into a "reverse this list"-type questions. An hour completely wasted, and lowered my opinion of the company I was interviewing with (formerly high)
This is very exciting - congratulations on the launch of Julia. Now good luck as you move towards building a strong community!
Totally worth it. Write open source code, it just might turn out to be the foundation of a career.
I presume you mean the Nano Quadrotors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4
i took 3 months off at the end of 2010 because my partner was on sabattical in the states and i wanted to travel with her (and can't work their due to visa issues). it was great not working (or more exactly, being able to choose what i did), but i don't think i learnt much more than i would have in, say, 6-9 months of doing stuff on an evening and at weekends. the biggest win was that it brought us closer together (another bonus, more particular to my case, was that living in the usa gave me access to new egg, amazon and adlibris, so i read a pile and built a new machine - mini-itx based - that came back as hand luggage) .

financially i didn't have any worries - i had a pile of savings, a job to return to, and my partner earns enough for us to survive on anyway. one thing i would suggest is talking to your employer about it - while they may be unhappy to have you take time off, it is also likely in their interest to take you back afterwards (assuming you're a decent programmer, which i would guess is the case if you care about learning) (although a year ago the economy was heading down, so it made more sense to give me a break then).
What else would you suggest?

I find that the @ syntax is amazing, since the reader (programmer) knows exactly which form is a macro (and can look it up), as opposed to introducing arbitrary, often very confusing syntax.
I'm a big fan of C418 for programming music: http://c418.org/

I also like the indie game music bundles. I posted this a few days ago but it didn't gain any traction: Game Music Bundle 2!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3573416
http://www.gamemusicbundle.com/
Authorizing drones to fly in US airspace is hardly insanity. There are lots of commercial (and hobbyist) uses for drones, and I think it's great that there will soon be a way to pursue them legally.

There are obvious concerns about the the use of drones by law enforcement, etc., but those can and should be dealt with separately. You don't control abusive surveillance by banning technologies, whether that be drones or cameras or microphones or GPS radios or whatever. You control abusive surveillance by banning particular uses of those technologies, particularly by the state.
This New York Times article by Charles Duhigg (whose book is mentioned in this story) is a much better read: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...
It would probably helpful to have a very clear goal with what you want to accomplish. And some way to force yourself to actually sit down and put in the hours. For me, it would be too tempting to have coffee dates all the time, or refresh hacker news every minute.
Make Money Selling Photos Online | 19 Ways To Make Money Online
Darpa F-BOMB: A Cheap WiFi Disposable Spy Computer
Tmux, dotfiles, and the joy of text
http://julialang.org/manual/metaprogramming/
Double Plus Ungood Day
I certainly wasn't holding up the US as a great example of human rights, and I didn't mention it at all in my post. :)
A number of programming languages allow an arbitrary range of indices for an array, including Ada, Fortran 77, and Pascal. See the "Specifiable Base Index" column in this table at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_langu...
Apple Removes X11 in OS X Mountain Lion, Shifts Support to Open Source XQuartz
"$5,000 to open a business" -- citation?
On sharing dotfiles, Josh around the 29:55 mark: "If you don’t think your dotfiles are the best out there, you’re doing it wrong."
The sweet spot seems to be online, paid subscription-based services, priced moderately, bought with a credit card by individual professionals or small businesses.
>You're making a huge assumption here that the way someone's mind works is fixed and unalterable.

Well first off, that's not what I meant by my analogy. I was making a point about causality vs. correlation.

Secondly people's minds are certainly alterable, but the extent to which they can be altered is not unlimited. Moreover, given a scale with A) altering your mind so that you can adopt someone else's habits, and B) adopting habits which play to your current strengths, it makes more sense to tend toward B when possible.
Have you looked at the HTML is it a direct rip-off or did he redevelop the same idea. Either way there is no way around the fact that it has been modeled after your page, so much so that it would seem that he grabbed your page and added his info. I am assuming that this was mostly coded by you? If it is the product of a few jQuery plugins glued together then it I can understand someone reproducing the effect, but if there was a lot of custom HTML to develop it then you have a clear case of plagiarism.
This article was a fail in that it failed to mention sencha touch which is the no brainer choice in this space.

Jquery mobile comes second after this.
Personally, I am hoping someone will setup a service where I can "hitch" a ride. I can't get out to the National Parks as often as I would like, and I'd love to be able to see the birds' eye view from one of these doing an overfly.
You touched on a number of points, and while I'm not an expert in Singapore, I have been operating my startup outside the USA for the past 4 years.

Entrepreneur vs High Tech Entrepreneur: This is a reasonable distinction, so I'm going to only talk about high tech. High tech, to me, means, the internet plays a key part in the product, and in my case, it is where the entirety of the product lives. So, software and virtual goods or information or services, rather than a factory and manufacturing, etc.

Labor Pool: The labor pool for a high tech company is global. I don't care where an employee is working, and the companies I admire are very globally diverse. This is becoming increasingly common it seems- for instance one engineer I know of is living on a beach in Thailand working for a US company ostensibly based in Boston (but with employees in at least a dozen countries and states.)

So, the labor pool is global, for high tech businesses (not so much when you need a factory.)

Funding Climate-
Yes, if your business is selling stock in your business, then you want to be located within an easy board meeting commute of Sand Hill Road. But one of the aspects of high tech business these days is that the funding needed is vastly smaller than before... you can self fund if you're a highly paid employee who lives frugally and puts away $40k a year for 5 years, for instance.

There does seem to be a segment of the population that thinks "high tech startup" is only that segment of companies that are trying to be the next facebook-- that is, bets on really long odds that require large amounts of outside capital. I think that's kinda silly when you can self fund and pursue businesses with much better odds, and thus have risk adjusted returns vastly higher. (would you rather have a %1 chance at being a billionaire, or a %75 chance at being deci-millionaire?)

The large, homogeneous, wealthy market of the USA: Can be addressed by businesses anywhere. There's no need to locate in the USA to address the US market. Further, in many business areas, the US market is less than half. For instance, I'm currently earning around %35 of revenue from the USA, with the majority coming from overseas, non-english speaking countries, because I simply took the time to translate the product into those languages. I don't even know the cultures, and haven't advertised to them, etc. But they are the majority of my income.

I think the USA wins on venture capital, sure, but loses in just about every other regard.

Plus, if your company has X amount in capital, would it be better to be located in the Bay Area where your burn rate will be 6-10 times as much as it might be in, say, Thailand?

I know americans think that America is number one in a large number of areas... but once I left america, I started to see that the american perspective on the world is pretty distorted.
After I dropped out of a theoretical physics Ph.D. program a long time ago, I decided to try to become a computer programmer. I had not taken a single computer science course in college. I was lucky that my parents allowed me to live at home for a year while I spent my entire time teaching myself programming. A friend told me to learn Scheme, so I went through all of SICP using my sister's Mac (I did not own a computer at the time). Then I started to learn C and Unix, hacked a bit with that, learned C++, and applied for jobs after doing some open source work so that I could have something to show. I got hired as a software engineer a year after I started my self-study.
Me, but they have your data anyway cause of your ip. It's more so that they won't suddenly start posting my spotify playlists or whatever.
ShowHN: Social Media Page Rank Calculator
I've built up a solid fund over the past 4 months for this kind of self-study. The plan is to quit my job around May 1st, and use the resulting free time to spend 20 hours more a week on edification and 20 hours more on personal projects.

I'm explicitly committing for six months, with the option to continue it six more without even giving a thought to job-hunting.

The downside is that, at the end of it, I'll be down a bit more than 12 months of savings than I would be otherwise. So compared to the "stick with my job" plan, in my particular case I'd have 75% what I otherwise would. That's assuming I don't change my consumption habits from current.

In terms of intellectual growth, I've stagnated at my current position. So the skills built by taking this route are pure benefit. There's no trade off. The alternative of getting a job where I'm both challenging myself and getting paid (likely more than I am now) is more appealing, but getting a much more solid grasp of the fundamentals seems to trump that (I've never taken any CS classes).

I figure that the investment should pay itself off financially within 5 years, as a pessimistic estimate.

As far as the actual feeling... that's an open question for me, too. The big issues I see are making sure that I follow through with my intentions. No wasting any time on HN/Reddit. I shouldn't be doing that now, even.
VC's aren't buying into an idea. They're buying into talent and a vision. If Pinwheel succeeds, that does not mean that SkyChalk would have succeeded.
This is a reason to worry.
Best kitchen faucet for you home kitchen is Moen kitchen faucet
If you are looking for Kitchen faucet.We highly recommended the moen kitchen faucet for you. The Moen kitchen Faucet is the Best kitchen faucet for you home kitchen.
wow... is this the first time Apple is copying Microsoft on the UI front... that's not very Apple.

Maybe, Apple is scared of what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8 and the whole Metro UI thing.

Otherwise, why would they announce the plans for the new OS X just before the Windows 8 beta release.
Statement on New York Knicks Jeremy Lin Headline | ESPN MediaZone
Is that really an old saying? I thought that was a Steve Jobs' description of the iPad?
Misleading title. Or I'm too optimistic and read/watched too much scifi.
Regarding insurance in the USA, I saw a paper by Milton Friedman in the 1970s who was evaluating the impact of government involvement in the healthcare industry. Prior to 1901, healthcare in the USA was completely private (charities are considered private as well, since they aren't controlled by government.) Between 1901 and the 1970s the US government at all levels started to take over health care, by funding hospitals, and by regulating everything.

He found that, as of the mid 1970s, this intervention had driven up costs 26fold, and had reduced availability, by an amount I can't remember.

Since then I'm sure the impact is even worse. But if you just use that number-- a $100,000 operation that might bankrupt you would have cost $3,846.15 if government hadn't gotten involved. So the impact of government is going from a cost you could afford to put on a credit card to bankruptcy.
IE's box model made more sense, but everyone else coded to the standard.

And yet, even IE9 has major CSS bugs.

For example, say you want rounded corners. Cool, it does border-radius!

For example, say you want gradients. Cool, it does ... well, sorta. ms-linear-gradient works fine on its own. border radius works on its own. But combine them together, and you're in for a world of hurt:

The box shadow, and border radius, show up fine. But the radius doesn't clip off the corners from the gradient - so you get a perfectly weird looking element.

I give them a B for effort, an F for actual usage.
It's worth telling the folks roughly why Rayleigh scattering is independent of the type of gas. ^_^ I'm only a physics grad student; but let me try.

Okay, so basically, atoms are really small. They're so small that they're smaller than light -- light has a size over which it likes to interact and interfere called its wavelength, and thousands of atoms can fit side-by-side across the visible wavelengths. (Smaller light also has a little bit more kick to it per photon, which is why we physicists tend to think that cell phones cannot cause cancer.)

The smaller light is closer to the size of the atoms that it's scattering over and that's principally why it scatters more strongly. It's what we call elastic scattering; the light doesn't lose any energy and therefore keeps the same color, rather than becoming redder. So the light bounces off of the air without kicking it.

One curious fact that you might think about, which bugs me a little bit, is that the color of the sky is not isotropic. It really depends what direction you're looking. Imagine that you're facing the setting sun, and you look up, and the sky's still actually pretty blue, but over "next to the Sun" the sky is pretty orange. But now teleport yourself to the distant fields that this sky is right above, and you will be jumping closer to the Sun -- so the Sun will actually be higher, there will be less red in your sky, you look up and the sky also seems quite blue to you. Step back and look at the globe rotating from space, half black, half in light -- as sunset comes, you're rotating away from the Sun, into the black. The only isotropic way to get a red sky around the Sun is to have the horizon be a sort of red band of sky, but that would have to "wash over" the sky as we crossed over it. I mean, I'm sure that if you looked from space the objects would seem redder, because the Sun gets all coppery as it sets, but the color of a given box of air in our atmosphere is actually as far as I can tell different in different directions, and nobody ever seems to want to calculate this.

Point being, it's not like a blue wall, where the wall is glowing blue in all directions. The same sky glows in different colors in different directions.

As for your specific question, if you're right that methane is colorless (i.e. that it has no absorption frequencies in the visible spectrum) then that's certainly strange, yes. Are you sure it's not colorless in the sense that air is colorless -- that you need to look through some kilometers of air before you see some tiny-in-probability scattering event?

Some searching on DuckDuckGo reveals that there are a couple of different effects; one is that methane might form smoggy cloudy effects as on Titan and Venus which are not colorless; but that without those effects methane does indeed weakly absorb red. They claim that this might cause the sky to become blue-green under our sort of illumination:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=534194
and the developers of simtower laughing quietly
Not earning for 6 months, a year or more isn't a big deal. Just plan for it financially ahead of time and leave a nice buffer so you are comfortable.

If your going to come out with a new skill set or even just a better outlook on life it's worth it IMO.
I didn't mean to rebut you so directly, but was using your mention of these things that were widely reported in the US media as an opportunity to compare.
What The China-Hollywood Deal Actually Means | Bombtune
Catarina wasn't born into "startup royalty" -- she was an unknown entrepreneur when she started Flickr.

Most companies from YC, 500 Startups, etc are created by first-time founders, and they've had remarkable success.

It does help to have an "unfair advantage" in your startup. But for most of us it isn't celebrity; it's deep knowledge of a market segment, or a special relationship with a customer or channel, or specialized tech skills, or something else.

Between that, and mentorship from people who have more experience, connections, and/or celebrity than you, you can do almost anything.
Yep, all of the above.

Even the little things cost a lot: nurses cost a lot in US/CA compare to Indonesia (where they are probably on the low-medium end of the salary range).

There are a few issues with health practitioners in Indonesia, here are some of them:

1) Preferred C-section over natural birth

C-section brings more money

2) Preferred anti-biotic over natural healing

The answer to almost everything is anti-biotic. If they can't "fix" you in 2 days, neighbour will spread rumours that a particular GP isn't that good ("he/she can't heal me, but I went to Dr. Foo and he gave me a medicine and I'm back to work the next day")
Sales Bootcamp: The "Sales Toolkit" for startups
ESPN mobile website using the headline a "Chink in the Armor”" to refer to Lin
Chinese Mobile Execution Buses &amp; Body Organ Black Market
Can someone concisely explain to me the benefits of a very javascript heavy way to build your mobile app like Sencha-touch over the more HTML5/CSS based way of jQuery Mobile and Bootstrap?

Also I'm confused why this article failed to mention two of these frameworks
I think it worth every penny lost. But, I would suggest to do enough groundwork on what you would like to achieve in that period.

No financial earning periods can be quite challenging but if you have a job, like I had, that does not allow any time to explore yourself, I think it is worth taking time off if you are really serious and confident about doing something different. Also, bear in mind that your efforts could (will) take substantially longer to bear fruit. So, it is really important to set your expectations appropriately before taking the step forward.

As far as I can see, all successful stories are basically breaks that involved a lot of hard-work, luck and which finally materialized!

Just my 2p.