skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The bottom 10% in America is not very poor, or even "poor", by world standards. The homeless in America have better health care today than Dwight Eisenhower had when he was President, and, obviously, better health care than the rural poor of China.
Exploration of the Google PageRank Algorithm
I'm actually starting to lean this way myself. Many of our routine expenses (food, gas, restaurants) are now cash transactions. I think I'm smarter with money as a result.
Should I Just Buy This Domain?
I have a domain name currently that is similar to flickr.com, scribd.com, etc. in that with one letter excluded, it still sounds like the word.

After customer and market validation and with my co-founder and I coding, I realized it'd be important to trademark the name. That has gone through. Which is great since the name is a great fit, is a real word (less the letter), easy to say, and easy to remember.

The domain name with the correct spelling is available for purchase for $1.5k ("buy it now" so no negotiation). Honestly, similar or worse domain names are trying to be sold for more money and I would happily pay $500 - $1,000 without issue.

Should I just purchase it at this price? I doubt it goes lower and there isn't an option to negotiate. I guess the only thing holding me back is that it's a big sum (I have the money - since still working day job). I wonder if my incorrectly spelled domain is good enough?

But then I see that flickr has flicker.com. In terms of word of mouth, I'm sure there will be people who try spelling it correctly, in which case I would have potential to redirect them. It could help with SEO as well.

Any and all advice appreciated. Thanks!
This has been my experience...

> Your market value is higher elsewhere

While true, it's also slightly simplistic. It's more than just market value. There's an American mindset that has its plusses and minuses (like any mindset), but the ability to combine the plusses of the American mindset (entrepreneurship, risk taking, "fake it until you make it") with the plusses of foreign mindsets (in my case: high value on community, stubbornness, practicality) can be a potent mix.

> The quality-of-life/cost-of-living ratio is now much higher elsewhere

I'm reminded of when I lived in NYC, and friends would ask how I could afford it. My answer was that you value different things differently when price informs your choices. My first years in NYC I didn't have cable, didn't have a car, and even used dial-up from home. I didn't mind, though, because there was plenty to do without TV, easy public transit everywhere, and lots of cafes and libraries with network connections.

Similarly, I've found that where I am now a lot of things are cheaper (fruits, vegitables, dining out...medicine and health care) and some are much, much more expensive (cars, gasoline). Again, I let price inform my decision making, and overall I feel much happier and healthier now that I'm eating well, socializing more, and walking places.

> The Jobs Aren’t Coming Back

Put another way: the rest of the world is waking up! Is there really any reason that most programming jobs should be in Silicon Valley? Are people in Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, Kenya, etc. less capable of writing software? On top of this, many places are getting a "second chance" to grow their economies (esp. the service sector) without making the same mistakes as the US (allowing the skilled trade/manufacturing sector to languish).

> It’s time for everyone to grow up and become global citizens

The most shocking thing, for me, on leaving the US was realizing that there is almost no other country in the world where someone would dare consider themselves "educated" or "well cultured" yet have never been somewhere where the people did not speak their language.

Go where they don't speak English. Then you will understand how to communicate.

---

Also, for everyone here commenting about China and India, a small suggestion: look at Eastern Europe, Western Asia, Turkey, and the Middle East. The demographics are positively tantalizing for anyone looking for economies about to take off!
Rayiner addressed that point directly: first, it's a first-world myth that recent college graduates in the US would be living in anything resembling poverty by world standards (again with the running water, flushing toilets, electricity, inspected produce, guaranteed emergency room health care); second, if your whole argument is that there might be more money abroad for a new grad, well sure, but don't romanticize that opportunity, because it comes at a cost.
I think the low-cachet quotient society bestows on technology is the huge carcass no one wants to talk about.

It is the real answer why we cannot get enough women early on in the STEM pipeline.

It is the real answer why technology workers have not-very satisfying careers in the West.

Society treats them as lepers here. Whereas in the rest of the world they are highly esteemed members of the society.

We will still be talking about the low headcount of women in technology as long as its quite apparent that the likes of a sneaker maker like Isabel Marant or an editor like Anna Wintour are more esteemed in society than any living woman in any field that is remotely scientific or mathematical.
Thanks for the info! I'm essentially trying to convert http://outgrow.me/ (which is running on Wordpress with WePay buttons for payments) to a Rails site. I'm hoping I'm not biting off more than I can chew..
SEEKING FREELANCER (Remote)

We are looking for a person/team who can develop an e-commerce website from scratch for a line of Brazilian childrens' clothes. We have a local (Brazilian) brand and want to offer our customers a world class online shopping experience.

The site will need to have the standard set of e-commerce functionalities that US online shoppers are familiar with. We are thinking of something similar to www.gymboree.com, but on a smaller scale--initially only in the low hundreds of items for sale.

Some of the desired functionality includes:

--"completing the look" (suggesting matching pieces)
--"you might like..." (based on what the customer has seen or purchased)
--"other customers who bought this also bought"
--sort by age, collection, size, category (dresses, pants, etc.), etc.
--high quality product photos with zoom
--shopping cart, payment processing, etc.
--smooth, attractive and intuitive user interface.

The key is to replicate the world class e-commerce experience (especially for apparel) that is available to US shoppers and to make it available to our customers in Brazil.

If interested, please send me a short proposal, including estimated time to completion and ballpark price. Obviously this would just be to establish a general order of magnitude and would not be a binding commitment. Happy to discuss further.

gthomps@gmail.com
There's a sort of "faux wood" material you can print with as well.[1] And there is such a thing as 3D printing with metal also[2], although that can be much more expensive and probably isn't down into the reach of DIY'ers yet.

[1]: http://www.wired.com/design/2012/11/3d-printer-wood-filament...

[2]: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143552-3d-printing-with-m...
Where "enjoyable lifestyle" falls somewhere along the diarrhea spectrum from "chronic" to "intractable".

It's unfortunate that people here will think I'm being glib with this comment, since diarrhea kills more people in the developing world every year than cancer does in the US.
It was not my goal to compare apricots to steak, but rather the price of apricots here to the price in the US contrasted with the price of meat here to the price in the US. The US has optimized the production of meat such that the price is artificially low, but at what total cost?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-03-01/cash-spews-out-of-comm...

I studied ATM's at Uni, and they have been like that for over 26 years.

As someone else on the thread pointed out, they do authenticate you, and record the transaction in a aci(Durable!) database before they give you money. But the system clearly has a degraded mode when the exact balance is unavailable.

Also why do you need a balance to process a deposit?
The article was talking up the fact that Ninite allowed you to update your apps. The Ninite Updater, intended for home users, is a paid service for $10 and is separate from Ninite Pro, intended for corporate users. Without paying the $10 fee, Ninite doesn't provide automatic updates.
A for profit company can also be seen as doing good. My issue with the article is the complete one-sided-ness and the fact that they say that Ninite is an alternative to using the Flash updater but neglect to mention that Ninite costs $10 a year for updates while Flash's built-in automatic updater is free.
Because the rich people drive up the prices in your local markets. I live in NYC, where the price of a shoebox apartment in Manhattan is sky-high (ignoring rent-controlled places). Why? Because tons of rich people keep apartments here. Had I lived in the middle of nowhere, I could have acres upon acres of land, a spacious, decked-out office, and gigabit internet, for much less than a two-bedroom apartment in NYC. Since everyone has to pay rent, this really affects you, but even if you somehow bunked with others, the everyday expenses such as a cup of coffee are more expensive in NYC. In Moscow and other cities it's even worse.

So yes, living among people who make much more than you obviously depresses your standard of living / cost of living.
I visited China 10 years ago, and the extend of cash use surprised me even then. Nobody trusts banks.

Coming from a country where I visit an ATM maybe half a dozen times a year and a bank branch even less it was quite a shock. Fortunately I can still count change pretty quickly.

The other interesting thing about Chinese currency is how light the coins are. They feel like they're made of plastic.
> its starting to feel a little stale

The concept of "staleness" encourages change for the sake of change, and I don't get it. Please ask non-designers if they want the look of their favourite software to be re-imagined.

The feedback to this is predictably similar to the transition from Skype 2.8 to Skype 5 (OS X), and I know people who still cling to their Skype 2.8 binary.
Gcc was pretty wild-n-wooly back in the '90s, and seemed to add language extensions left and right, but that attitude changed quite a while ago, and it's very good about standards conformance these days (part of the reason for this, of course is it's no longer so necessary: many of these extensions have picked up by the standard in one form or another).

In my experience, gcc is also significantly better with standards conformance than VC++, either with default settings or with strict warning/conformance options turned on. [I was on a team doing shared g++/vc++ develeopment, and it fell to me to fix all the code checked in by devs using non-standard VC++ extensions... way, way, way too much time... >< ]
Outside of the examples Thiel mentions which is the subject of the parents thoughts'?
Why didn't I think of this? Seems so obvious after the fact.
Sorry, but Eric Brewer is wrong. He seems to be implying that there was some sort of intelligent design behind the software at banks that lead them to choose BASE. This couldn't be further from the truth.

Banks are one software kludge after another in attempt to not rewrite something new or offer the consumer anything of value... while paying out the butthole to whatever vendor has his arm shoved so far up your ass you can't ever migrate from their platform without colon replacement surgery.

So while it's a nice thought "Hey look Banks/ATMs are BASE" this was by complete accident through years of incompetence and corporate bureaucracy, not by any sort of engineering choice.
There wouldn't be much point in it if it wasn't easier than making an actual handwritten card. Handwritten cards consume an ordinarily large amount of time, but some people believe they are more authentic so there is a clear case for optimizing handwriting. As an added benefit, those who prefer handwriting will be able to receive these more often die to the reduced time and effort.
> rushed to judgement

I suppose based on the fact the kid mixed chemicals and sealed the chamber? I've done the same, multiple times. Never was I surprised at the result.

I suppose OP could be correct and my racist views led me to believe her intentions were the same as mine when it was me mixing chemicals and sealing the chamber, somehow I doubt it.
I have no interests concerning Ninite. I think they offer a handy service. But the article was completely one-sided and left out some key points so I offered a factual counterpoint. The site I run, PortableApps.com, is in no way competitive with Ninite as we offer portable software while Ninite is meant to streamline installation of local software.
Yeah I was thinking about doing it as soon as I heard about it, but I was lazy, and he beat us both to it.
The Avalon ASIC can perform 68,000 Mhash/s which is ~110x more powerful than a 7970 GPU (at ~600 Mhash/s) at around 3x the cost.

It's obviously better value for an individual to buy an ASIC than a bunch of GPUS, but I think you could still earn a few coins if you've got thousands of gamers with spare GPU cycles.
isn't the most unhelpful piece always just s-z alternating?
Without knowing what the domain is, I can't comment on its actual worth but considering everything that you have said you should buy it.

The reasons are because:

- You're already committed to the name - you have a trademark and you say the name is a great fit for your startup

- You are already willing to pay $1000 for it ($500 more isn't that much in real terms especially, if you think you can at least recover $1500 for the domain if the startup fails)

- If your startup becomes successful, you are going to want to acquire that domain name (and once you're successful the owner will want a more substantial price)
Well, that sounds terrible. Work for a startup because you like what they're doing, not just because they're a startup.
Ninite Updater is a $10 a year service aimed at home users, completely separate from their Ninite Pro offering. Ninite Free does not automatically update. The article was pushing Ninite as an alternative to Flash's built-in updater but omitting the fact that Ninite Updater is paid.
IBM makes the world's smallest movie
A thing would either be standardizing some keywords or showing some sort of tag cloud of popular ones.
CCleaner Free offers notifications only of when an update is available. At that point you must click a clink to download the new version from Piriform's website where you are presented with additional offers to upgrade to the paid version and/or ads.
I would go back to them and state that you have a recording with their promise of vesting. Make sure to read all the verbiage that you signed previously. Don't make it public at all. It is good you haven't yet. Make sure that the person who gave the comment about having your vesting cliff had the authority to make that comment. If there is law where you are that makes verbal agreements legitimate and the one who gave the agreement has authority to make that arrangement, then you have a pretty solid case.

I wouldn't threaten to go public and all that nonsense because it makes both parties look bad and even if you are in the right, future companies might see you as a trouble maker.

cross the "T"s and dot the "I"s, and if that pans out and they don't respond to your initial statement, lawyer up.

Good luck.
Interesting read, thanks for sharing!

I spent two summers in Tokyo in an investment bank, although I was too focused on having as much fun as possible to find what non-finance opportunities were available. Also, the prospect of working actual Japanese hours were not very exciting. How was the work-life balance at Ubit?

How is the market in Japan for (foreign) developers? If a recent grad were to follow your footsteps, how difficult would it be to find a decent and relevant job now, compared to 2006?
Being a big fish in a small pond has its perks. You can go for vacation to developing countries such as Thailand and live like a king. People would be willing to do whatever you want for money. Steak dinners would be $5. Obviously the internet lets you have much richer clients in Western countries subsidizing your lifestyle in developing countries.

But leaving all your family and friends behind to live there might not be for everyone. There was recently a nice article posted about relationships being more valuable to human beings than ambition: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/relationsh...

Not to mention, for a guy like me who is Jewish, and whose family would like to see him marry someone Jewish as well, moving to a country where there are very few Jews would just be decreasing my chances of starting a family. That's why it's good to travel for long periods when you're younger.
I think we need a BitTorrent Sync to share BitTorrent Sync secrets.
Oh I see, is it possible to move inside apple to diferent depts?
Re: interactive visualizations, we haven't gotten there yet, but it sounds like a really cool (and feasible) idea. On this front, libraries like 'lamina' look like a nice place to start.

https://github.com/ztellman/lamina

Graph backtraces look like ordinary stacktraces -- the compiled output is basically the same if you wrote the function by hand.

For logging, we wrap each node in an 'observer' with the path through the graph injected, which automatically records execution time and exceptions from each node, and lets you spit stuff out to the dashboard that will appear in the graph structure. There's an example of this in the graph_examples_test.clj, I believe.
I'd wager they are more concerned with preserving their paid revenue stream than losing a few free users. Any company offering a freemium product has to strike that balance.
> the running water, flushing toilets, electricity, inspected produce, guaranteed emergency room health care

You're still missing the point.

You emphasize guaranteed emergency care, but what about general non-emergency healthcare costs in America? If it's +1 for guaranteed healthcare in America, it's +1 for India when you can actually practically afford some life-saving x-ray or some surgery operation that costs literally 20X as much in America. Electricity is available in counties we're considering -- sure, it goes off intermittently but the results are not extraordinarily catastrophic. Practically speaking, the produce that the masses get is arguably better in a lot of 3rd world countries than it is in America -- less GMO, less carcinogens. I was born and raised in India -- my memory of fruits and vegetables/meat I ate there is SOOO much better than how it is here in America. We had flushing toilets, and we had drinkable water. And I am not even from a wealthy family, just normal middle class. My great-grandma lived to be 101, and my grandma right now in India is 103.
I obsess over price per ounce of my food while I am in the store. (Though it gets harder as I age and my brain weakens, and as prices and sizes get intentionally harder to compare)

Even still, I myself that groceries I eat are super cheap compare to food I throw away and restaurant meals. (And I avoid packaged meals and name brand cereal, which are near restaurant priced)

Every now and then I remember that the vast majority of people don't or can't think about food costs, and shudder. Paying $2 for a bottle of water with a scoop of sugar poured in. $5 for a box of Kellogs instead of $3 for generic. $4 for the frozen brocolli with fake cheese sprinkled top instead of $2 for plain. Etc
Short answer: because Graphs are data, it's easy to do tons of things with them that are difficult to do with code. In principle tooling may eventually bridge the gap, but for now it's hard to take a function and automatically monitor it's sub-functions, or run up to a particular intermediate result, or substitute one step for another in a test, etc. Our previous blog post gives some more detailed examples:

http://blog.getprismatic.com/blog/2012/10/1/prismatics-graph...
Perhaps they can now afford to put in an order system so that I don't have to remember, during the long wait, after ordering and before paying what coffee bean I chose. Or, you know, write it on the cup like everyone else. I'm looking at you PA Philz. </endrant>
This is exaggerated but more or less correct. Depends on the country. You can live in an expat bubble but the downside is that people leave all the time. And you will never be national local but after long enough you can be city local if that makes sense to you. Requires actually acclimating, learning the language and implicit norms etc. I'm not even remotely there yet but living in Shanghai beats living in Ireland.
It feels "off" because it's strange for Americans, who grow up in a culture that is made up of immigrants to understand that cultures with centuries of history aren't very accepting of people who are different.

Don't get me wrong, the international community is very accepting, even loving. But when you get to actual nationals, other than a few exceptions, you'll never be truly accepted.
Is Foursquare really only bringing in $2M a year? Is that revenue or profit? Either way that's not a lot for a company that I'd consider to be in the "Big 7" of social networks (FB, Twitter, G+, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Foursquare). I mean that's certainly a lot of money in absolute terms but FB is bringing in billions a quarter. Also I've been to Foursquare's office in NYC and it's very, very nice. I would have a hard time believing a company barely getting by would invest in a place like that.

Maybe that's a misquoted figure?
#4 is very true. Many americans I know live in a bubble (a very scientific survey, I know). They only get news from the "outside world" filtered by the talking heads on TV (no matter the political persuasion). When I first came to Mexico, everyone thought I'd be kidnapped and ransomed the second I set foot in the country. I've never felt in danger the 4 years I've been here. Sure, there are some places (mainly Juarez and seedy parts of the border towns) that aren't safe at all, but Mexico is so much larger than those places. It might not be for everyone, sure, but living abroad at least temporarily is an experience that is bound to teach you a lot if you take it seriously and stop being a tourist.

Edit: Sorry, replied to the wrong comment, but it still applies somewhat.
It's not cynical when it's basically correct.

You can usually tell what hearings are coming up just by looking at what ads are currently plastered in and around metro stations
Since they have a trademark for it and the current owners are using it in bad faith can't they use wipo to get the domain.

The cost may be greater than just buying it. i just have a dislike of those squatting on a domain.
Why do people still say Java is slow?
Good question, you've made me think. I wouldn't have said it in person (it would have been a question 'have you lived abroad?')

My brain took a statement which I thought was an error, and could have been based on lack of personal experience, then jumped to the conclusion that it was lack of personal experience.

Second, I made a logical error that I wouldn't have made face to face. Developing countries is a very broad term. So I think now there are countries where the quoted sentence is true, and some where is isn't.

In real life, I probably would have clarified which countries the OP had in mind (from subsequent discussions he clearly meant the poorer ones in the group 'developing countries')
Nice story, but moz.com really needs to "body { color: black }" with that background of theirs.