skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is shockingly little data for this supposed tax-motivated exodus from NYC. Note this oped conflates NY state and NY city in several places.

The vast majority of New York State is not New York City. People are leaving Upstate and Western New York because Kodak closed up shop and the steel mill jobs are long since gone. This has nothing to do with either NYC or taxes.
This article is quite poor.

Firstly, "Instead, the state politicians are pocketing the federal cash to maintain spending, and raising taxes anyway." is quite a stretch. Using his own numbers: "[New York's] $132 billion budget is now $17.7 billion in deficit."

The best number I can find for the NY's share of the stimulus is about $3 Billion[1]. Arithmetic left to the reader.

Secondly, I can't substantiate the population loss figure he cites, the Census[2] cites a 2.7% increase in population from 2000 - 2008. I can only guess that having 1.9 million people leave but having 2.4 million arrive constitutes an "exodus" by the Wall Street Journal.

[1]http://www.nysut.org/cps/rde/xchg/nysut/hs.xsl/bulletins_126...
[2]http://www.census.gov/popest/states/NST-pop-chg.html
What exactly is the difference between being locked into Microsoft or being locked into Mac or Linux or FreeBSD or Java or Python or AppEngine or EC2 or technology in general?

If you start building your project on a particular stack and then need to move, there will always be a transition cost.
I would go to wikipedia for all of those.
New York State grew by nearly a half-million people from 2000-2008.
Should You Attend University for Web Development?
Indeed. I went and looked up the rates and it seems the maximum anyone would pay is hovering around 30%.

OK, that's pretty low.
Sure she's a good tech blogger, but what does she look like?
I actually prefer using http://www.hypem.com

Been using that site for months, all the other ones (even grooveshark) lack certain alternative songs which you can find on hypem.

The list with popular songs on hypem is also better, but that might just be my personal taste.
I love Apple :)
he says that if he is prepared to chase one sheep round the field for 45 minutes or so

Your friend must not be a programmer. If he were a programmer, methinks he would just get a sheepdog, and save the 45 minutes.
I did my dissertation work in this field, and I wish I could properly communicate to everyone how not important this stuff is to science. There's no doubt that this is an interesting engineering problem, and that it has a gee-whiz aspect that has fascinated technology writers for decades. But most of these guys aren't learning anything from the work that they're doing. It isn't science.

There are plenty of researchers learning new things with computers -- computers are used to assemble DNA sequence reads, find genes, analyze mutation hotspots, on and on. But protein design -- even when successful -- doesn't teach us anything new. It's a random search through the dark with a tiny flashlight, and success primarily means waving the flashlight around faster. There are very few take-home lessons from a successful design, other than "that seemed to work". That's why these researchers are so focused on hardware, and sampling more structures in less time -- it's all about the million monkeys.

This may sound harsh, but I sincerely believe that the electricity that you save by turning off your PC when idle would be far more valuable to the world than any marginal technological gain you're giving these researchers. Please don't fall for the hype that you're curing cancer or HIV with this stuff.
That's a false choice. I'm proud that the US crew resisted and that the US Navy is involved. The Somalis will be less likely to target US flag ships in the future.

It should be a crime to pay a ransom-- the "negotiators" in these cases are getting a cut of blood money, and the ransom money is going to bankroll criminal gangs.
Luckily, the first or second result of a Google search for each of those links to Wikipedia. I find it's faster to do a Google search and click on the Wikipedia link than it is to go to Wikipedia and hit Search.
The difference is, obviously, that open source software is completely free, and the others aren't.

I'm not trying to start yet another OSS vs. MS war here, but all other things being equal, with one option you have to pay money for server/DB licenses (and then constantly worry about compliance), and with the other you don't.

I understand why companies use Windows - they need common desktop apps, they need Office. But the question was about web development. There is little advantage to using MS tools, in fact most of my web dev associates would say they are worse. Worse, and expensive, especially the databases.

Why sign up for that kind of trouble? Stick to OSS.
Obama Should Support Climate Hacking Research
Smashing PDF eBooks Search Engine
Not true - cobol code is often very unstructured. It's very difficult to limit variable scope in cobol, and functions that would normally be a few lines long have so much cobol boilerplate around them that each "function" is usually put into its own source file.

Try dealing with "just" 14k lines of cobol that you haven't written; try to make minor changes to it (and wait a minute for your $3000 piece of shit Micro Focus compiler to run) without breaking things. Try getting fed up and spending a year of your life rewriting the code in Pascal. You won't like it, but when you're done, you'll say "thank god i'm free of cobol!"

Come to think of it, Micro Focus is usually behind these lame annual PR campaigns to try to drum up talk about cobol. Their business isn't growing. Some reasons:

* Installing their product is a big pain. (At least on Solaris/SPARC and Linux.) Bugs in the installer script mean that you have to spend an hour or more on the phone just to install their junk. Support is included with the $3000 fee, but only for a year. So if and when you have to reinstall, prepare to pay a few hundred for the incident.

* Their product uses flexlm, and it sucks just like most consumer DRM, only worse, because it's buggy. I imagine that MF sees it as another form of copy-protection.

* The compiler doesn't play nicely with make, so when you rebuild your project, object files that are up-to-date are recompiled anyway.

* Interoperability with other languages and database systems is so cumbersome that you'll just end up writing output into some cumbersome flat text file, and have the rest of your system poll it to display progress from to your cobol program.

* The free/OSS cobol compilers won't compile non-trivial systems.

If you still think that the only problem is that it's "unfashionable", there are two possibilities: either you don't really know much about cobol (haven't used it in a real production environment), or you don't know much about anything but cobol.
It's my search engine, calculator, converter, stock-quote-checker, e-mail client, word processor, spreadsheet, chat client lately, local business directory, atlas, and employer. Hrmm. That makes it far more dominant than Microsoft ever was...
50 years of bad grammar advice
Why don't they catch them when they leave the boat (easy to track with some drones) ?

How do they leave ?

I couldn't find any answers to that in the article.
SMS GupShup - Register
his claim is starry eyed idealism that the internet would usher in an age where supply directly met demand. there will always be arbiters of both.
If cobol is so great, why do Amazon and google run exactly 0 lines of it?

There is a cost (vastly increased development time, inflexibility) to sticking with cobol, and it may be so great someday that it'll drive the companies that use it out of business. Just give newer companies 15 years after the current economic crisis is over and free competition and you'll see the difference.
For a project I'm on right now we're using VMs w/ Debian on developer workstations. Deploying the app is a tarball & a shell script on top of a base Debian install. Any time we need a new public server we spin up a new EC2 instance (Alestic Debian) & run the script.

Ticket tracking is a Google Spreadsheet w/ some formulas to calculate ticket sort orders, estimated completion dates, etc.

Works well for us on the budget we've got.
Can you offer any evidence that university accreditation is a net lose? It may prevent "startup" schools, but it also prevents scams. You haven't made any effort to weigh the costs and benefits.

And even if school accreditation were a net lose, that doesn't mean accreditation in general is always a mistake-- that it's impossible to do right. Whenever you try to build any kind of filter, people will try to game it, but that doesn't make filters pointless.
Of course, he would also maintain the dog for two hours a day...
Check out http://code.google.com/p/rubycas-server/

sudo gem install rubycas-server
Delaware has a significant state income tax. Maybe you're fleeing the state for non-payment?

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/itax/edit/state/profiles/state_t...
Does anyone else consider this spam? Submitted by ossreleasefeed to ossreleasefeed.com, and is a question that could be very easily be asked as a self-referential submission here. There's no additional substance on the submitted site either-- seems to me like the author is simply trying to drive traffic to his/her site.
I recommend just looking at the way others have used Ruby via various projects on github -- and then review the chapters in the pickaxe book to understand exactly how the syntax works.

I think the new O'Reilly book co-written by Matz is probably a great choice too, though I haven't read it yet.
Microsoft DreamSpark:  Free Dev licenses for students
I also heard that the French, British, Americans, Chinese, and well... pretty much all the nuclear club were using that area off Somalia as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. When the tsunami hit, the locals discovered this was happening when all the waste washed ashore. That, allegedly, helped spark the piracy. None of the western media outlets report this but the likes of Al Jazeera have been reporting it long before the piracy situation even started making mainstream headlines in the west. There has even been a UN special envoy tasked with investigating the situation.

EDIT: I knew an Al Jazeera link would go over here reallll well LOL, so here's an AFP link from Google about the UN investigation: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVV_gQDsp1m8v7nPcumVc5Mc...
I'm talking about transition costs. Vendor lock-in is only an issue if you need to move.

Microsoft has a BizSpark program that lets you have access to their entire suite of development and desktop applications for $100 at the end of 3 years. That's cheap! Almost free.

But still, I'm talking about Vendor Lock-In and transition costs. For example, say it takes you 2 years to build your product, you start on Microsoft and then need to transition to Linux. How much would that cost?

What if it turns out you just can't find enough developers on OSS to move your product forward or they cost too much and you want to move Microsoft, because all the metrics say the TCO on the microsoft side is actually lower. How much would it cost to escape the OSS lock-in?

"Free" OSS is not actually free. The product is free, but services still cost money. The OSS community neglects the services cost from the TCO, but they are very real.
Third World Tech
I learned Ruby by jumping into rails and building a small app. I learned how through various blogs, tutorials and railscasts. Then I later picked up Matz book and gained a deeper understanding of Ruby.

I've more recently begun to dig through the rails source to get a better understanding of what happening in the background and how certain things are achieved with pure Ruby.
Keeping track of where your prey has gone suddenly becomes a matter of putting pieces of evidence together to tell a story that is quite a bit more complicated than simply seeing them directly and running them down. If we are going to have physical adaptations, we should also expect cognitive ones.
Are you kidding? Facebook Connect might be OK for blog comments but for a professional site it is totally unacceptable. Since he's considering implementing SSO I would consider it a pretty serious project.

You do realise many people don't have Facebook accounts, right? And not just because they haven't heard of it?

Not one of my top 5 technically knowledgeable friends have a Facebook account.
Swedish tax rates on someone earning 100k USD would be hovering around 60%, and then there is between 12% and 25% sales tax on most things you buy. I'm surprised that I don't feel more ripped off than I do.
First, it's not a very large industry.

And the technical problem is very difficult to solve - you have many different versions (from each decade) of the language to be compatible with.

But most importantly, think about the result of success - translating cobol successfully to a modern language means that your customers don't need your product once they're done. This is why MF does lame PR once a year - they want to keep businesses from modernizing away from their product.
ATG (www.atg.com). It's very expensive eCommerce software, J2EE based, with their own IOC container, data access layer, etc... At the moment the demand for good ATG devs and architects far exceeds the supply.
yes, there is still a middle man, it is "a device that found exactly the page"

The issue isn't google, it's newspapers. THey are big and bulky and kill trees and there are millions of them accessible by the web now making all of them less valuable. It has nothing to do with Google and nothing to do with a middle man. Besides, lazy people can't waste time at their desk reading the newspaper, but they can stare at news.google all day.
It may already be too late, PHP on the JVM:

http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/

Note, I know nothing about the project, just first result from Google. I knew something existed because I'd read about IBM's Project Zero, but I think their implementation of PHP on the JVM (called P8, iirc) is closed source.
Samsung SGH i710 Unlocked
Samsung SGH i710 i718 is subsequently cohort handset has come out tremendous look, and the look of the handset gives you the good it’s your palm computer by all accessible features. phone 55 MB internal memory with this cell phone.
Don't take this the wrong way, but either:

A) You aren't very good (or at least aren't as skilled/productive as other folks with 7 years of experience)

or

B) You really need to learn how to negotiate better

For a senior Java dev with 7 years of experience in Chicago, you should get much more than that for corp-to-corp.
Cool, but I was so waiting for him to start driving in circles like in "Tomorrow Never Dies"...
Why should people(bright) all around the world come and help america? Why are proposing an idea to lure these bright people? Has america lost its confidence? In this digital age, whole world is like home. Why again think of country ? why not "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam"?
"Vendor lock-in is only an issue if you need to move."

And the reason you'd need to move is because Windows is costing you too much, at which point you realise you're locked in! So, yet another reason to avoid Windows like the plague.

I won't bother to respond to the rest of your laughable shilling.
"I have an RFID tag surgically implanted in my left arm so I can unlock and start the car simply by putting my arm near the window." Interesting.
I agree with point #2, but this is public television they're arguing about, right?
"darting the antelope first and attaching a radio direction beacon"

well, If you don't want to model how much the hunter recovers during periods of relative rest ( slower-than-running-time-spent-in-tracking this would be additional resting time for the prey as well I suppose) you could do it that way.

Does anyone in HN know of what kind of mathematics would be needed to set up a simulation like this?equations for rates of exhaustion/ speed loss over time etc?
You know your opponent has lost the battle when they resort to logical fallacy.
I've writing a pretentious wanker matrix, but this simplifies it a lot. It's now a simple question - do you pay attention to stuff like this?
The same was true 100-150 years ago in the US. The US Army Infantry routinely marched 35-40 miles per day, seven days per week for weeks on end. The cavalry simply could not maintain that pace; it killed the horses.
" why not "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam"? "

For those who don't know Sanskrit

"Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam" == (roughly) "(Every one in) The world is my family"

I wish people wouldn't drop into non english languages without providing a translation. If someone were to sprinkle his messages with Swahili (for example) I would be lost.
Smuglispweeny: COBOL has Macros?
Apparently COBOL does have Macros: http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/2008/03/kenny-and-firing-s...
In Silicon Valley, Recruiting Clashes With Immigration Limits
I think it's a question of value for money. You pay more, but you get more, too. The question is, do you get proportinately more than you pay? I think yes, but reasonable opinions can obviously differ.

I felt pretty frickin' ripped off last time I bought a beer in Stockholm, though. Just sayin'. : )
The article is mostly informed speculation, but its sweep is so large, the conclusion almost becomes trivial. If we accept that the entire culture is literally sick, there are deeper implications than just programming productivity.
I really enjoy the Merb source code for that. There's more rigor in Merb than Rails, though it's less helpful if you're mostly doing Rails stuff.
A quick search shows no mention of Illusions of Entrepreurship. Excellent book, btw.

That book claims that existing companies create more jobs than new companies. Starts at page 153:
Here's the google books link: http://bit.ly/m4vXV
He's waiting for a compile :-)
Not quite public television, but public airwaves. Well to be honest I don't quite know where the CBC fits in that spectrum. Regardless, broadcasters are just licensing the public airwaves, they don't own them.

There is not slippery slope here, though. Fears about freedom of web advertising are unfounded. The airwaves are a scarce resource: there's only so many available frequencies. That's why the government regulates their use. Websites are not limited in any way, neither are cable television channels, so those media do not need to be regulated.
Can science and technology parks replace Arab oil with Arab IP?
"HN'ers hate microsoft."

I think you're onto something there, although we could expand it into an even more general rule: "Anyone who has ever done any standards-compliant web development at all, ever, hates Microsoft".

Fair?
As a news publisher there are problems with your suggested scenario.

Let's look at the currrent situation online news publishers face. Let's say I run a business news site like Business Insider and the AP has a hot story about Steve Jobs.

I have a choice:

1. Put up a 2-3 sentence post explaining why this is a great story and sending people over there. Jeff Jarvis calls this link journalism.

2. Copy and paste that AP story as an article on my site, with 2-3 original sentences above it and 5-6 below it.

3. Rewrite the story so it looks like original material even though its just a pure rewrite.

4. Find and report out an original angle on the news that the AP overlooked.

Outcomes:

If you choose option 1, your story will be deemed too short for Google News and Google search and you will lose lots of traffic. Link journalism is not a realistic option for a real business.

Option 2 and 3 are quick and easy and guarantee that your article will be "in the mix" of the 5000 articles competing for top placement for related searches in Google News.

Option 4 will get you in the mix but will put you behind the rest of the pack time-wise so you'll likely lose out on eyeballs unless you have a legitimate scoop that can itself start off a news cycle of its own.

So that's the current situation.

Now, let's take a look at the scenario you suggest:

"The Smart Papers will stop printing a daily paper and start finding niches where they can provide the best content."

Let's say you're the a Chicago news publisher cough and decide to start a site that will cover the city's South Side businesses, breaking news and politicians.

1. Yes, you're creating value and bringing new content to the web that wasn't there before.

2. Unfortunately, no one's searching for stories about what you're covering yet, which means YOU HAVE NO DISTRIBUTION. Which means you get no traffic and thus have a hard time selling advertising.

So I'm fully on board with news publishers going against the grain and covering stuff beyond whatever the day's scrum is chasing after, but unfortunately the online news audience for whatever the scrum is covering is much, much, much larger than whatever niche audience you're going to be able to get.

There are solutions of course. But right now, it's A LOT easier to get a bunch of friends together and just start rewriting AP stories about celebrities and tech companies 10-12 times a day and letting Google handle distribution than it is to go out and build a new audience in a niche.
KITCHEN CABINETS: Tips For Kitchen Cabinets: Revamping the Kitchen Cabinets
KITCHEN BACKSPLASH IDEAS:Tips For Kitchen Backsplash Ideas: Make Your Own Kitchen
where are these molten remnants on the mit campus?
The Pickaxe Book
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ruby/programming-ruby
Impressive, especially the linked YouTube video. Reminds me a bit of the old Alan Kay video lecture with the faces and scary inverted mouths. (I can't help but think of Vanilla Sky when I look at that mask, either.)
DiggBar is a Howl of Desperation
You rank applicants to the visa program by Erdos numbers? Is this the same Erdos number as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number? Or do you rank investors?

In either case, you're ranking people based on WHO they know, not what they know. Worst kind of ranking possible (it keeps competent outsiders out).
the person who spilled the hot coffee bought from mcdonalds was responsible for it, but somehow mcdonalds got stuck with paying for the lawsuit and the alleged damages.

to a certain degree, the lawyers will push that it's the sites responsibility to check who is on the site.

i'm not saying it will happen, but it's just something to think about.
In the UK, there's 1 limited company for every 10 people.
Hopi has no nouns at all

That one sentence makes me doubt the entire essay. No language can get along without nouns. The Wikipedia page on the Hopi language has examples of nouns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_language

Can you imagine any normal person being able to live their life without representing physical objects? That isn't just a functional language; that would be like a programming language without variables or data structures.

There's a trope in North American culture of supposing that Native Americans were or are somehow holier than other kinds of people, or even had access to some special states of consciousness. Their cultures are nearly destroyed so it's hard to check that. But I think it's silly and probably kind of patronizing.

There is some work which does suggest that a Neolithic tribe can have very different concepts of time and number, but this is still a point of controversy. I don't believe we're going to find the key to enlightenment here, just a different way of thinking, which is way more important than a fantasy for nirvana via linguistics, IMO.

Although, I will forgive this author because it's not central to his argument, and he has a point about how Native American lifestyle was the antithesis of modernity.
Very cool hack. I wonder if he can adjust the timing and fuel mixtures on the fly or if he is just doing the data acquisition to the db?
Another quick clarification - I am not saying the list has "small investors" in the sense they have less personal fortunes or these are small/less influential people..and also they don't have ability is wrong phrase..actually, my point is these and all other folks should also think of they crossing the boundaries themselves and help America tap the enormous resources in a truly global society