skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hum... It is not that they (we) are leaving, it is more like they (we) are not even going.

I'm a Spaniard, I have worked in five different countries in Europe and Latin America. I'm currently settled in the U.K. I have worked as a consultant, as a developer in a "one-product" company and now I´m working as an in-house developer in a non-tech company.

It simply does not make sense to relocate to USA for me. I have had a couple of offers to work in Boston or New York in the last few years and I turned them down. Weak dollar versus euro means that I won´t be able to pay my euro denominated mortgage while living in the U.S. I am free to work anywhere within the European Union, and I have always been very welcomed in Spanish speaking American countries while I would need some paperwork to work in the U.S.

The political climate doesn't help either. I have never been in the U.S. and I realize that T.V. is not necessarily correlated to real life, but every other day you get news about some guy who was traveling to the U.S. for some perfectly legitimate reason, with all their legal documents in good shape and gets detained at the border for 30 hours, their families are not notified and they are not allowed to drink, eat or sleep.

On the other hand, I personally know some people (about 15 persons) who travel frequently from Europe to the U.S.,for both professional and personal reasons. They have never had problems in the border. There is clearly a dissonance between my "real-life" experience and my "media-induced" experience. Nonetheless, if I had to travel there, I would be a bit scared... my mother would definitely be very scared.

I really hope that things change. My wife is eager to spend a few years living in the U.S. We won't be going for now... may be during Obama's second term (if it happens) it would be economically feasible (strong dollar) and professionally interesting for me. As anyone with a passion for our craft, I have read countless histories about Silicon Valley, and I think the odds would be better for my own (future) start-up in there rather than in Europe, where bureaucracy and lack of funding make things more difficult.
What are the odds that this blogger guy actually has a site that's already pushing 500 requests per second?
I guess to really get a good idea, you'd have to take a survey like this:

* Look at all the posts from site X in the past, say, 3 months.

* See how many have been posted to HN

* See how many of those got votes.

If the percentage is small, then adding the site automatically would generate noise. If, on the other hand, the site is paulgraham.com, they all get submitted and they all get tons of votes, so it would make sense to automate it.
If you're seeking tech employees, Beijing is probably the easiest place to find them. It's China's tech hub - the best universities are there. Google and MS, for example, locate their headquarters right next to Tsinghua University (China's MIT).

It's not expensive compared to Shanghai, but it is more expensive than some of the lesser known big cities like Chongqing or Wuhan.

The pollution is bad in Beijing. That's the only real downside, from my perspective. Shanghai is certainly cleaner. I'm not sure about the other big cities, but I'd bet they're something like BJ in terms of pollution.

I do have first-hand experience on the teaching money, but I also advertised to my students that I have a degree from a prestigious American university, so my sample data might be skewed.

Tourist visa for as long as possible (fewer hassles), but eventually I'll need to switch to a business visa.
This is probably an example of the old George Carlin joke about driving: everybody that drives slower than you is a idiot, and everyone that drives faster than you is a maniac.

I'm perplexed -- a top ten karma person posting that having high karma is a sign you spend too much time on the site. Do I upvote that? Sets off a recursion alert.

As for "does karma matter" -- if it didn't matter, we wouldn't have it, sandwich or no. Study after study has shown that if you give people arbitrary rewards, they'll work to gain them. Perhaps there is a lesson in there for startups, no?
If something's not making money or breaking even, then it's losing money. It's taking something good - raw materials, capital, the effort of employees - and producing something less good. It's a drain on society, a parasite.

We produce enough surplus that society can survive a great many parasites (the entire public sector, and all the loss-making businesses) but every little is a brake on potential, particularly the potential for compounding growth. It retards the future.
Last year they asked people to tell them what search engines to include:

http://blog.webmynd.com/2008/10/29/new-release-of-webmynd-pe...

Why not just ask?
3dCAD thoughts, continued
The Pirate Bay Trial Day 10: Calls for Jail Time
On a similar vein I've always wished for a "call back and delete" button on the voice mail.
At least back in 2006, Beijing was more polluted than most other Chinese cities (a notable exception be Lanzhou, which is ridiculous). This is in part due to the huge population, but also due to the geography (there are mountains nearby that trap a lot of pollutants, like LA -- and the Gobi desert is close enough to blow a lot of stuff in as well).

I lived pretty well there on about $700 / month (going out and with a 2 bedroom apartment).
Put the info in that side box into the top segment on the right (it looks a bit odd pushed where it is) and I think your made.

I usually dislike "bare metal" designs but that looks neat, efficient and does the job.

No option to add comments yet?
I kind of liked the idea of getting rid of the 'leaderboard' and only showing 'karma' for comments... where it is sort of useful for pointing out 'hey, this is a good comment!'.

Either that, or, yeah, introducing 'real world rewards' for it;-)
I agree 100%, I hope PG understands that if he let shills and drones take control of his creation he will make millions with pay-per-post but will lose his mantra and will become a clown like Mike Arroganton with no credibility.

PG is a well respected persona in the tech world, MA is not.
FTA: Safari dropped from 7.70% to 7.42%.

The (rather poorly explained) thrust of the article was that the beta release temporarily increased the proportion of requests using that browser to 10%.

This is probably from people trying it out; I tried it but went back to Firefox when I needed to do some work. I did the same thing with Chrome.
Food being served 6 times a day.

Breakfast, Second Breakfast, Brunch, Lunch, Dinner and Supper?

I suppose this confirms the theory that IT workers are all hobbits.
sorry you got downvoted for that perfectly innocuous comment you made, which also happens to be your very first. don't take it personally.

me and at least one other person voted you back up to 1, which usually happens after unfair downvotes.
I want the widgets embed in duckduckgo, rather than duckduckgo embeded in Google.
The post linked is from October 2008. It's now March 2009. Is there any more current information? I dismissed the article as soon as I saw it was outdated.
Perhaps instead of automatically submitting them (which would just increase the firehose nature of the "new" page) whoever submits them the first time simply makes the articles active. This will encourage people to find more rare articles.

For me, I like articles from joe the blogger, since I'm that guy. If I wanted Seth, 37Signals, or some such I'd just subscribe to their site (which I don't). I get the same signal-noise ratio from them as from the average blog post that has been upvoted several times. Perhaps better.
Twitter and Facebook share a lot in common, and are said to still be talking
"Error establishing a database connection"

Site is down
Doesn't Shockwave[1] (Flash's predecessor and an a spinoff of Macromedia Director) support native 3-D? Unlike Flash, Shockwave was built with more consideration for system performance, at the cost of download size.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Shockwave
Again? Really?

Nope it's nowhere near the standard for a mainstream OS. Yes it is technically very superior to other offerings. But all these techy types never seem to realise that that is not an important consideration for an average joe user. M$ might be the sum of all evil but they spend millions on user testing and development - and man do they get it right! And yet Linux refuses to utilise the mistakes and lessons M$ have gone through and start from scratch... hmmmm.

Some things that are wrong:

- Difficulty, the learning curve is still too steep

- UI, serious UI issues that people are not fixing (Ubuntu "the saviour" has a BROWN desktop.. where is THAT a good idea for mainstream use???)

- Uniformity, menus, methodolgy, syntax, naming is still not uniform enough

- Tech lingo, too much stuff is still in tech speak (take a reccent conversation I witnessed on a linux forum where the advice to a first time poster was "read the man page". Well if they knew how to find that I doubt it was helpful, most man pages are double-speak :)).

So, no, it's not ready yet. We stil have some nig hurdles to address :)

In terms of that specific link. I have one point to make:
"But desktop Linux does support basic Active Directory authentication for user access management."

Obviously the writer has never tried to use that functionality. Because it is not as simple as a one line sentence suggested. Certainly way outside your average windows user....
When I was studying in the US, I always bought the previous edition of all textbooks second hand. I quickly figured that they was little difference between editions and they seemed more like a ploy to get us to buy new books...

When studying in France, I didn't buy any textbooks and got all of them from the university (a good use of taxes from my point of view :-) )
reddited: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/81fjd/renaissan...
Umm, not to be picky, but can't a single server handle 500 requests a second if (as is likely) most of them are for static content?

I just hit my site's homepage with ab (Apache Benchmark) just for giggles. Its on a 256 MB Slicehost VPS ($20 a month), with a bog-standard install of Nginx serving static content.

Nginx has a maximum of two processes.

Result of smashing it with 25 concurrent requests through AB: served 80 requests a second. I'm guessing I could set that number of child processes higher and watch as it dutifully saturated my outbound link. 500 requests a second is only a factor of six and change, that is probably easily doable.

90% of the workload going into an app engine app is going to be the same stuff, right? Hitting small bits of static content, repeatedly.

Remind me why you need to rearchitecture your entire application if the limits to what The Cloooooooooooud can scale to are in any way comparable to what you can get from a single $20 VPS?
Versioned Objects in Artisan System
Twitter would be stupid to allow their company to be bought by yesterday's men at Facebook. FB is a fad amusement for extroverts, Twitter is a communications medium. One is vastly more of a long term proposition than the other.
It's a publicity stunt.

Of course, every time a company engages in a publicity stunt like this, the same debate we're all having takes place.

Pro: "Wow, what a great campaign!"

Con: "Pshaw, it's just a gimmick."

Pro: "Oh really? It got you talking about it, didn't it? So clearly it must be working."

Con: "Grrrrrr..."

The only reason why we're having this discussion here, on Hacker News, is they happened to choose flavor of the month Twitter as the focus of the stunt. Wow, so they have the ability to discern what the hottest meme on the web right now is.

They could have also given Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie a million dollars to shave the Skittles logo on the back of their children's heads. If they had done so, no one would here would give a shit, but I can guarantee you the message boards at Perez Hilton and celebritybabies.com would be lighting up with the exact same conversation we're having here.

You will convince me that this is something more than a gimmick if one month from now ANYBODY is still taking about this or visiting that page. Actually, if they're even still USING the Twitter stream as their home page a month now I will be halfway convinced.
Isn't that what he said?

"Azure here I come."

(...I believe qualifies as one of "a hundred other possible things.")
Why, look, it's another chance to flog my pet peeve!

Here's the problem: The citation in the news article looks like this:

A recent study published in the Journal of Social Behaviour and Personality...

Visit the page of that journal and you can see a link to their "journal online". But the page at the end of the link is hilariously awful:

Your university's subscription to this Journal has just become even better value!

Notice the complete lack of useful facilities for the general public -- and just about everybody else, for that matter. I can't even find a browseable homepage of the latest issue of this journal. There's a search box that I can type in, but I can't find a recent reference to the only scientist mentioned in the news article. When I do click on a random paper from the journal I can't read it unless I buy it, and I can't buy it or even see the price without registering.

They say expressing anger is good for your career. So let me advance my career by noting that the existing for-pay scientific publishing industry is a collection of hopelessly-obsolete parasitic middlemen that actively harms science education by keeping primary sources out of sight of the public, and that we should all lobby to have our government's tax-supported research grants come with a requirement to publish in open-access journals:

http://www.plos.org/
The Smartphone is Destined to Replace the PC
What strikes me as odd is that it's all centralized at skittles.com . This sort of marketing obsoletes the need for a TLD that you try and entice your customers to visit, instead it allows you to engage with your customer where they are. Yeah, this made for a good publicity stunt, but it's nothing that plenty of other companies aren't doing far more subtley. Do you really want the player to know they're being played? ;)
If you are hosting predominantly static content there, then it doesn't make a lot of sense for this level of traffic because your bandwidth bill is going to be sky high (put your static content elsewhere). Also there are uptime properties with the app and its datastore you are not going to get at slicehost without work and other instances.

And besides, this is not a limit on Google's architecture, this is an initial limit they put in place for you to bump up against... which is why I find the guy's argument inflammatory, there is no "hoax" here. EC2 has an initial speedbump too (20 nodes) and they'll bump it up if you ask, our max is at 200 right now.

(btw I'm using slicehost, EC2 etc. myself, and I don't see appengine as some silver bullet. I just don't think this article's argument holds any water)
Yup... if I knew then what I knew now (a moot point, admittedly), I'd audit classes or do the cheapest possible thing to be associated with the university without paying for it, and simultaneously work on startups/projects.
I think this is broken-- it's been a while since I saw clickable links in profiles.
They are almost sure to get nailed for it now I think - and a good thing too.

Neither side winning is a good outcome for the rest of us but I prefer to see the idiots dealt some of their own punishment for once ;D
I always find it amusing to read the comments for stuff like this. It's just so obvious that you will always get a people complaining about something.

I mean, you have a large number of complaints that Netflix is forcing people to use software made by "evil M$". You have people complaining that PPC isn't supported. You have people complaining that they wasted time supported Mac at all. You have people complaining that their decade old CPUs aren't supported, and others complaining they need to get beefier encoding to allow for better quality.
I agree it seems weird the guy has been blogging since 1994 (per his Blogger about page) with a whopping 2 posts, yet somehow ends up here on HN? Kinda fishy... also, isn't Azure the polar opposite of the technology spectrum from AppEngine? I would of expected "EC2 here I come" instead.
Linux has been ready for a long time, it's just that people are not ready. Just look at Vista. It's more user friendly than XP, still, people don't want to switch. They learned XP for 5 years and they now understand its small flaws. It was hard for them to get there. They will switch only after "everyone" will do and they'll keep their new OS for 10 years again.

It's not about Ubuntu being ready or not...
To use the demo (is a fully functional demo), you need Java installed in you PC. But, thanks for the idea, I guess that not everyone has Java on the PC.
Usually, the email clients in the mobiles are ugly and very limited.

Our application is a real push client, as soon you get an email in your inbox, you get it in your mobile, and the application notifies you. Also, you can see your attachments, even if you don't have a Word, PDF, Powerpoint viewer, you can see a Word, PDF or Powerpoint document. A nice feature that we have is the word auto-complete, you can auto-complete words while you are writing, so that writing with the mobile keyboard is easier.

And in the next releases we want to do a lot things: integrate the emails with SMS, so you can reply an email with an SMS. Integrate the application with the contacts in your mobile, and the contacts of your email. A better integration with IMAP, so you can have the IMAP folders in the application…
There are some interesting comments in http://www.rediff.com/money/2009/mar/02bcrisis-100000-pros-m...
Have you read through the book? Because that's discussed in the book. Rand explains the rationale behind that in the final leg of the novel.
Hadoop User Group UK
The parasitic public sector also put us on the moon and built the bomb.
The promise of the cloud was a goodbye to limits. Deploy to the cloud, and you'll never run out of anything. Ever.

Amazon (, promise of): We add resources faster than you can use them, kthxbye.

Google apps: Hit the once-in-a-lifetime really, really big one, and we'll be serving up 503's to your customers instead of writing invoices to you. Oh, and if it's sustained we might need you to spend critical time re-deploying to a different architecture.
That jibes with what we see at Kongregate. For the last 30 days Safari was 4%, though we have a lot more Firefox than you do. Out of 6.6M uniques:

IE 49% (78% IE7, 21% IE6, 1% IE8)

Firefox 41% (95% FF3)

Safari 4%

Chrome 3%

Opera 2%

Our audience has a lot of teens and college students, heavily male, with US about 48% and Europe making up most of the rest. 92% Windows, 6% Mac, 1% Linux.
Learning about Web search - distributed systems, DBs, linear algebra, IR, PageRank, etc.
Thanks To Skout, You Can Now Flirt Online Even When You Go Outside (Exclusive Video)
Because it's all they have going. Anybody who wants to find out about Skittles has to go to these pages, which means that the public controls Skittle's web site, to some degree.

That's a ballsy move.
Is cloud computing inherently evil?
SeatKarma Helps You Find The Best Seat In The House
MSpot Launches Browser-based Ringtone Creator (and We’ve Got 1,000 Ringtones to Give Away)
Usually I agree with the cynical stuff you say, but in this case the hype is warranted. No, it's not going to change things forever, but it's an incredible leap for a company that very few people would have seen this coming from, and the fact that a company is giving themselves up to the cloud is pretty damn impressive.
Do you just like attempting extended metaphors?

We all know what "kill" means. In this case, it means finding a problem that inconveniences every students on the planet, and removing it to make way for a new problem.

Problem solved: removing textbooks. Added value: removed textbook dependency. Answers in commas because they're so incredibly evident upon reading the title.
Hmm. You learn something new every day.

Turns out that you can actually measure the Earth's circumference pretty easily with some basic geometry. You can see the distance at which a ship starts to disappear on the horizon and are able to get a relation of distance to angle drop.

It's odd how they teach that the round Earth theory started with Copernicus.

Let me try another stab at figuring out why non Euclidean geometry took so long to arise: I'm under the impression that a large portion of Greek geometry was based on construction using a compass and protractor. Seeing that it is difficult to use those instruments on spherical or hyperbolic planes they never went beyond Euclidian geometry.
What do you do when you've caught an exception?
It would be interesting to know what proportion of people are "constructively" letting out their anger. If everybody did it, would it still be an effective tactic?
The standards of "professional behaviour" - especially in large organisations - tend to revolve around conflict avoidance, consensus and compromise. Is letting your anger out an abuse of that commons?
Make the paper a weekly or a monthly. Eliminate fluff, abandon breaking news and provide deep insight.

That's the same model used by magazines like the economist and the atlantic, and I think they're doing well.

This would not be the end of the tabloid, the are so cheap to produce they can go on forever. It would not be the end of local news, it would not even be the end of local daily or breaking news. It would just be the end of of printed daily local news.
That works often, but a lot of publishers have a fun little trick where they barely change the content but do change the problem sets.
Note that the default rate of the loans that Fannie and Freddie bought doesn't tell us that they did good biz. It also doesn't tell us that they didn't hire political hacks.

Fannie and Freddie are both sucking in govt bailouts and all of their assets are toxic. They pretty much created the subprime mortage market by "guaranteeing" to buy.

Fannie and Freddie stock made sense (when it made sense) only because govt gave tax preferences to certain types of buyers. That hid the lack of real profitability (while the hired political hacks were taking out tens of millions) and took down banks. (The govt gave special treatment to fannie and freddie stock that banks held, which pretty much guaranteed that they'd tank when Fannie and Freddie went under.)

Do you really want to argue that Fannie and Freddie weren't near the bottom in terms of bad biz practices?

Note that I'm not claiming that they're the worst. Competitors include Citicorp's Robert Reich, who Clinton said was the smartest Treasury Secretary evar. He's on the list because he's the one who popularized CDOs.

As far as Fannie and Freddie's propensity to hire political hacks, Google is your friend. No, I'm not saying that govt biz are alone at that, but ....
Small styling comment: the a:hover underline appears in between your border styling and the link itself, which looks a little odd.
Why not both? I mean seriously at school worst case scenario you spend 30 hours a week going to class/doing homework. Thats a worst case scenario where you have 22 credits + homework.

Plenty of time to do a startup on the side, especially in the early stage where you have slow growth.

And its not like you have to become a hermit, you have plenty of time to have a social life
That's why I love getting my hands on those leaked PDF copies of textbooks. Hope there aren't any publishers on here. ;)
A few people have asked us for the widgets independenlty from the browser extension. We didn't announce it in this release but we're close to being able to do this. I'll be in touch...
In short, newspapers need to stop pretending they still cover the news so that the next generation can figure out how to make this work.

I could not have said this better myself. In fact, if I could have said this, this is what I would have said!