skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll tell you what so special about Romania.
1. We are learning foreign languages nowadays even from kindergarten (computers too). Even on the communism times we learned English and other foreign languages (myself I learned since I was 8 years old).
2. Strong theoretical learning in math and physics.
3. Proximity to Europe (this article doesn't address just the US market but also Europe)
4. Imagination and creativity of the people. We were used to not having things so we tried to be creative about them, make them somehow. I didn't have toys when I was a kid so I made my own toys (including functional model rockets and airplanes). We cam accomplish a lot with less resources and you don't have to micro-manage us (and I had bad experiences with micromanagement of some outsourced people from Asia - they couldn't do anything without me telling them in detail what to do).
5. Being part of EU and NATO is no small advantage. That means the country is secure and changes of regimes (like we see in South America sometimes) are not possible anymore (not to mention wars - how's Argentina doing with Britain?)
No optimization is intrinsically premature. Most of these are not things you need to worry about, but there will be cases where it makes a different.

That said, specifying image sizes is often a good idea in order to prevent the page from moving around while it loads. It looks a lot cleaner if your text all flows correctly and then the images pop into place.
indeed, The main reason tc(1) is underused is because it is under explained.
It took you less than 3 years bootstrapping?
(minecraftforum.net is registered June 2009).

Congratulations!
I'd like to respond to a few of your points.

I find myself not as bright as those who I have seen being very successful. I still try to do as much as I can, hoping that my efforts will be enough.

I didn't get into the IITs after my 12th and thought myself not smart and hardworking enough to do well at an IIT, leave alone at research. Many years and plenty of twists and turns later, I'm now a graduate student at a well-regarded and extremely selective US university. I have a small number of papers, some of which even get cited every now and then (!) and a couple of patents. The main thing I learned from all this is that in research it's not very important to be smart, because I see people smarter than me all the time, what's important is to actually like what you're doing sufficiently that you enjoy thinking really hard about it.

lack of research output may be because the brightest of UG students get into US universities where there are better research groups and opportunities. Or may be because other engineering colleges from where the PG students have completed their Undergraduate programs didn't offer as much as IITs (or US universities do).

There's a combination of factors here. Many good students do choose to go the US/Europe over India and I can sort of see why they do that. Life, in general, sucks a little less here, the professors are little better, opportunities are a little easier to get, and of course, a good job after graduation is significantly easier. I studied at IISc and got to know quite a few faculty there and at a couple of IITs. I feel that the Indian system is improving rapidly and there are many good professors who are doing excellent research at IISc and the IITs. Having said that, I think that some things are still harder to do in India, and some professors are still very mediocre and some still harbour rather regresive views on how research should be done. A generation or two from now I expect things will be a lot better.

It is unfair to compare IITs with other institutes, there are a lot of factors at play. Sure, we want high paying jobs - but if they are available who won't? Think about the socio-economic pressure on the students as well. For a middle income family most salaries that are offered to IIT graduates will bring about a significant change in lives of these students as well as their families. It might be a different case in US (and other countries) but a lot of us face these issues. I was lucky that I don't, but I know many students with parents who will feel happier if their child settles down with a high paying job and not pursue higher education for another 2 - 5 years.

This is an excellent point.

We're still at that phase in our development where it's more important to ensure economic security for oneself so that one is guaranteed a reasonable standard of living. Foregoing these "high-paying jobs" and doing research, in effect, means accepting a significantly lower standard of living and it's completely unreasonable to expect people to do that in a still-developing country like India.
It's not inertia, it's addiction.
I don't understand why Poland is not mentioned in this article. I know a lot of Polish engineers working on H1B in a valley, but I don't know how exactly this number compares to Romanian engineers. What's more, at Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Nvidia Polish interns were the largest group of interns on J1 visa last year (as far as I know J1 is required for all countries except USA and Canada).
Also, a lot of arguments stated in this article also hold for Poland.
Child online safety plans unveiled by Brussels
It turns out that pressure to keep patentable information private for potential profit slows the rate of progress in biotech.

See http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/... for an example of how much things improve when scientists are forced to share data. They wouldn't have done it if Mike Milken hadn't forced the issue. But he wanted to live enough to do so, and the result saves several thousand lives each year.
it's a very common opinion - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu0SHsALRnA (just to mention one)
Those are actually a special case. You're trading on someone else's trademark, that's what made those domains work. Usually domains like this are shutdown with an UDRP.

If I could register domains like AmazonDeals.com I could make a killing too, but they would get shutdown instantly.
This has to be one of the dumbest things I've read in a while. So because the phone has some differences to an Apple trademark (which may or may not hold up in court) it is safe to assume that Samsung's designers intentionally designed around the iPhone because the iPhone's design is just so badass?

Now certainly there had to be consideration of existing patents and trademarks. I can assure the author that Apple's designers and lawyers make the exact same considerations in their designs.

I like the iPhone design. It's okay. I like this phone's design better, and I'm going to be buying one when it goes on the market in June. I was about to buy another iPhone, but decided to hold off for this one because I like the design better. I'm not saying the iPhone is poorly designed. It's just not the optimal design for me. I like a larger screen and a slimmer profile. I prefer blue to black. You see, there are many, many worthy smartphone designs out there.
Buddha Purnima 2012 Buddha Wallpapers, Pictures, Images, Photos &amp; Pics
@Nick thanks for the heads up. It is isolated to users without a live FB session. We are fixing it ASAP.
Yes it's a gift, but this view is far too simplistic to be reality.
That's very true! Many of my friends are fantastic musicians who are on the dole in London. Being a musician isn't the best idea if your aim is to make money!
August is my favourite by a long shot, but there was also startup.com.
Because I'm Romanian and I'm writing about my experience. Saying that, I know some with great feedback from Poland, like WAYN guys and others.
Video - Taking Stock of Complexity Economics: Which Problems Does It Illuminate
This article makes no sense: just because the device has to be connected to the control channel does not mean that the control channel bandwidth is somehow free. The control channel is, as you say, the same channel used to keep track of devices, and it is a single channel that has to be shared among all of them (unlike voice calls and all non-GPRS data)... this is why in incredibly busy network regions (such as an after party at WWDC) it is difficult to even get text messages to go through: this is actually a limited resource that can easily be exhausted.
It's hard to judge the project because it's just a LaunchRock landing page.
Embedded fonts are almost definitely not causing max CPU load.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, you've got some good points.

Maybe because you said definitely JavaScript, and the GP said he had javascript disabled, but your point still stands.
> have access to Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s first CTO) when he had scaling problems with Instagram.

It was even more fantastic than that.

> “Who’s, like, the smartest person I know who I can call up?” Mr. Systrom remembered thinking. He scrolled through his phone and found his man: Adam D’Angelo, a former chief technology officer at Facebook. They had met at a party seven years earlier, over beers in red plastic cups, at the Sigma Nu fraternity at Stanford University. That night in October 2010, Mr. D’Angelo became Instagram’s lifeline.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/technology/instagram-found...
Hah, yeah

MICROSOFT.COM.WILL.BE.BEATEN.WITH.MY.SPANNER.NET
MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.GIVE.UP.BECAUSE.LINUXISGOD.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.OHMYGODITBURNS.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.IS.A.STEAMING.HEAP.OF.FUCKING-BULLSHIT.NET
That's why I wrote "for me".
Layouts and Responsive Design with Twitter Bootstrap
The waste was his opportunity cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
Definitely the portrayal may have been too aggressive, but that is the reality of the Indian Education system.

Students here are driven by a lot of social pressures to get into an IIT just with a mindset that this wil l help them get high paying job helping them to lead a cushy life.
FYI there is also CodeNow.org. It's an initiative similar to Hungry Academy but it's aim is teaching youth how to code thru workshops (D.C based as of now).
When I looked for sample code, it automatically transfered me to the tour, which then failed to load.

Anyway, the language seems to support all the constructs of the languages it claims to replace - which could easily mean it would be even more confusing than using those languages.

Also, I think Cold Fusion is an effort to do a similar thing and has about fifteen years of history. Railo seems to be an open source clone of CFML: http://www.getrailo.org/
You may replace Romania with any country from Eastern Europe.
This is an interesting issue

<p>blah</p> is easier to 'see' than <p"blah">

But in a big HTML you'll still be lost if you don't use indenting or a tool. At the end of the file you'll still have several close-tags one way or the other

One way would be to rewrite this in an easier way (but less canonical). In math there are several ways of doing that, for example:

Operator precedence and some defaults simplify, so you can write 3+2x(3+4) instead of (3+(2x(3+4)))

But it would probably make things worse for a text markup language.

Edit: changing asterisks for x
Well of course there are intricacies associated with my example, but the general point is what matters:

Websites that do exist that are making a lot of revenue and employing a lot of people would not exist if domain prices were changed to be only affordable by those with substantial income. I've seen other HNers talk about this before, I'm sure if you don't like my example I can find other examples that don't have anything to do with trademarks.

> You're trading on someone else's trademark, that's what made those domains work. It's likely both could be shutdown with a UDRP.

Also specific to this point, no, we have been permitted to use the Minecraft trademark since day 1. We can't be shut down (not that they would ever want to).
The medical school system and journals is too slow for a new drug. By the time new doctors have enough influence, the drug is out of patent, and you can't count on every doctor to follow up journal articles about every new drug.
Loeb Demands Yahoo Board Fire CEO by Monday Over False Resume
Wiki on Mr. Naggum for those curious about the man behind the rant: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum#_
Show HN: GiveBrand.to
The computer is being used in so many ways to extend our abilities, I can see no other possibility than to regard it as part of our extended phenotype.
— Steven Pemberton

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1386
Ultimate question for all startups?
We were profitable the day we decided to take revenue (2010), but we're not really a good example of bootstrapping or startups doing well or anything like that because we were supported by the success of Minecraft, we succeeded because Minecraft succeeded, not because we did anything.
Even were it adequately explained, it would still be underused, being a pretty crappy interface. I find it virtually the antithesis of iptables, whose syntax and meaning is fairly intuitive and easy both to remember, and derive from a few example rules.
Some of us know what a revision control system is. Most haven't got a clue, and aren't interested.

I'd bet a lot of them have seen the RCS-like abilities of Time Machine or Dropbox and been delighted or would react with delight if it those were demonstrated to them. A lot of them still wouldn't have a clue nor be interested, though.

If people have built content management systems for publishers like newspapers, someone must have thought of CMS for other publishers with roots in the dead-tree business.
There really is a lack of good tc documentation out there and honestly interfacing with tc sucks. HSFC Scheduling with Linux http://linux-ip.net/articles/hfsc.en/ is a good read.
2007's pre-M3 version of Android; the Google Sooner
They are the REGISTRAR of the domains - they are not hosting DNS for the domains. The fact that they manage the registration is completely irrelevant from a wiretapping point-of-view.

If true, the fact that they have a CA is what allows them to wiretap. But they don't need control of DNS to do that - just cooperation of an ISP.
While I generally dislike comments like this (and I wouldn't be surprised if it got downvoted on HN as lacking substance), this time, it fits. The "arguments" provided we're inane, providing no justification for the very-few actual suggestions contained therein.

What is particularly sad is that I completely agree with his comments on XML, and I try to teach others about the dangers of not using XML intelligently, but I would never refer to this author to back up my feelings.
There's a group 3, but it's likely just as small or smaller than group 1. Where your data is easily normalized (and easier to work with in that form), but the cost of a getting an rdbms to support your write load is an order of magnitude more expensive than a persistent 'nosql' datastore that you do batch dumps into an rdbms.

The catch is that very few people end up in group 3 and still have the cost of running/administering the rdbms over the 'nosql' one actually matter.
>if you are developing websites for clients don't get into this much detail cause no one will ever appreciate the work you made.

That's only true if you don't know how to sell yourself. Considering that you can make people think something is faster just by telling them that it is so, you should be able to get appreciated for actually making a difference.

But don't do this kind of thing in the course of your development. If you make something 10% faster without being asked, nobody is going to appreciate that. Fine-tuning and optimization is a separate service, and if you set realistic expectations and then deliver on them, your efforts will be appreciated.
They didn't surrender their domain name - they're just using them as registrar. Google still runs their own authoritative DNS servers.
Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
Opa reminds me of Curl, MIT's "Lisp with curly braces" programming language for web development. MIT spun out Curl as a company in 1998. Their business model was to charge customers per-byte served!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_%28programming_language%2...
There's always a bigger fool than you.... until there isn't.
Sorry, but it's the website for git. Things have websites. How difficult is that to reason, really? The top of the page explains what git is. Isn't it obvious that the site is git's website? It then lists things which one would expect to find on git's website, including the documentation and download sections.

Here are some other websites for things. The front pages also explain what they are and links to more information.

* Y Combinator: http://ycombinator.com/

* Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/

* Google Chrome: https://www.google.com/chrome

I will admit that some websites don't do a great job at this.

* Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/

Firefox doesn't say what it is. The other websites say that the things are.

But git-scm.com? How much more information do you need than "Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency." to realize that it's the website for git, the free and open source distributed version control system?

Your comment is not the only one in here like this, but I'm struggling to identify the reason why anybody would consider this website difficult to grok. Sure, it may not have the character of the old website with a monster eating trees, but I really feel that organization and clarity are not issues here.
> Torvalds is a little harsh sometimes, but it's nothing compared to the disgusting rudeness of this rant.

Remember that time he called the OpenBSD camp a bunch of "masturbating monkeys" on LKML? http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/706950
Common Lisp has a "condition system" that can do that (and with call/cc you can build it yourself in e.g. scheme).

GWBASIC of old had an "on error goto / on error gosub" that could branch to another part of the code on exception, and that part of code could always "resume" -- although there weren't any user defined exceptions, so it's not quite equivalent (and the scope of the "on error" handler was usually smaller than global)
It may be true that it could be done for cheaper if the hiring teams bought into a new system. But the course is really set by the hiring team.

There was a time when you only had to study legal books on your own and pass a bar exam to become an attorney. Law schools didn't exist until the turn of the century. Nowadays you can't seriously pursue a career in law without a law degree, and to get a top job, you have to have a degree from a top law school. This is not because the fundamentals being taught at each school are different. Rather law firms know which schools are hard to get into and simply go there to hire their talent because they figure those people are the best. Hopeful attorneys see those firms and want in, so naturally, they want to get into the top law schools. Those who don't, trickle down to the less prestigious schools where the firms that can't afford to compete with the top firms recruit, and so on. This is basically what drives the obsession with higher education in the U.S. whether it is business, law, medicine, or engineering.

Now whether a career in a prestigious firm is something you should actually want is a completely different conversation, but allowing that it is something a lot of the most eligible college graduates aspire to, the system will sustain itself.
I predict we will still be using SMS in 10 years. While we're at it, email too will be used in 10 years.

Both may have evolved by then, but they'll still be the same underlying service. Never underestimate the impact of resolve of companies invested in technology to support that technology ad infinitum ad absurdam.
Extension to search in a github repo
What's the Difference Between the Internet Now and In the 90s?
I don't think there really are that many examples where $10 domains (registered in the last couple years) were a key to success. I'd be sincerely interested to hear examples where that was the case.

Most people who are genuinely prepared to put effort into building a business would be willing and able to spend a bit of money. Maybe $500/yr is too high (I think so) but I seriously doubt $100/year would stop anyone who was at all serious.
My pleasure! Glad to hear you found it helpful. It played a large part in shaping my course (and later success) as well.
A false statement implies any statement.

That being said, the post itself is not really about record labels or the Internet. It's actually a pretty thought-provoking article.

I'm personally glad that the 1800's, the 70's or the 2000's are gone and will never return. We have something different today and it's important to understand that it will be gone by tomorrow. We never really understand the present, it's much easier to evaluate a bygone era in retrospect. We don't really know if Spotify, Facebook or RIAA has any impact on today's music (or culture in general) and we won't know until any of these won't matter anymore. So my suggestion for the author is to follow the advice of his last sentence; stop worrying and enjoy the music.
Hybrid dev/designer here. My experience:

Being a hybrid is difficult because of these kinds of situations. Even if you get to be very good at one or the other (or both), you're still perceived as inferior by virtue of your supposed "lack of focus."

Bullshit.

I had a hard time with this until I realized that I bring something rare to the table. The ability to traverse these two worlds is an immensely valuable trait. People like you are often the glue that binds great teams together, because you know both professions from the inside, and you're able to communicate with each in their own terms. You can add value constructively ("Here's a possibility that either side isn't aware of because they don't know what the other half can do") and prophylactically ("That's a bad approach to the problem, because the other team will get stuck hard if you do it that way"). You are uniquely able to hash out ideas to the show-somebody phase quickly, because you know how to supply all the requisite ingredients.

At the end of the day, hybrids like you (and me, and lots of others out there) have a harder time demonstrating value because it's assumed we are simply shallow generalists. I'm sorry to say that the onus will always be on you to prove them wrong, and you have to market these rare aspects of yourself. The effects of your presence in a company are often diffuse and hard to measure, which makes your task doubly hard. Welcome to the club.

There are many companies which are desperate for talent like yours. If you are like me, you'll feel unfulfilled working exclusively on one side or the other. Don't settle for a job that only draws upon half your talents—you are more than the sum of your parts. Keep growing both sides of you, and make "marketing myself" a learning goal for this year. :)
Data really has to be near unlimited, it's too difficult for folks to understand how much 1MB of usage is. I have a 6GB data plan and no matter what I do, I never hit 6GB. This is essentially unlimited to me.