skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Above the united states in that rank (and by a LOT) is most of Europe. France, Belgium, Austria, most of Eastern Europe (and the Netherlands if you were to add "self" chosen euthanasia to suicide figures, bringing it up to over 20. Self between brackets since it's often not a choice, as medical treatments are stopped for elderly people in Holland, making euthanasia the only treatment that can offer hope to alleviate pain)

There's also Japan, just in the top10, which was claimed to have a lower suicide rate than the US because of lack of guns, in fact has a suicide rate just short of twice that of the US.

Incidentally, all muslim nations are reporting suicide rates that I just can't believe are accurate, or they're just not present at all. I know multiple stories about suicide from people in Kuwait, and I've never been (just work with consultants that have been there). Presumably they only report suicides amongst Kuwaiti, not the 80% immigrant population, and even then it seems on the low side.

There's reasons for suicide, but merely having an easy means to do it (guns) doesn't factor in at all. Looking at that list, clearly the cold is the main factor, with a close second bad economic conditions, and then we move on to lack of freedom. I wonder if you were to check suicide rates in parts of the US if this pattern would hold. Most in the poor northern states ?

Yep: http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html#death-rates (not sure if it's a good reference)

Alaska comes out on top, with only New Mexico as a southern state in the top-5.

So here's the theory from those statistics.
1) cold (maybe lack of sunlight ?) is a big cause of suicide
2) barring that, bad economic conditions
3) after that, bad government will do it
The "legal" section of the site is confusing.

"1. You may only access the service using unmodified Tarsnap client code which I have distributed" -- really? no API and no custom clients?
Oh, I thought that was going to be about code written by education people. Actually, it's a larger problem - I'm constantly shocked that anybody who writes documents for a living (code or otherwise) is relying on the filesystem. My wife's a teacher where her department pools their lesson plans and tests and whatnot and I'm constantly harassing her about the importance of setting up some kind of VC to keep track of all that crap.
They're not stupid. VCs make more money than entrepreneurs do in the long run.
This is debunked, in my personal experience. If I want to do internet data piping, data conversion or a database backend, its faster and simpler to do it in node.

I also use node as replacement for scripting in bash, PHP and perl. I also use javascript for frontend work, so this means I need to keep only one programming language syntax in my muscle memory.

I've actually used node for quite a few commercial data back-ends : both nosql ( mongo, redis ) and relational ( postgres, mysql ). Ive written similar things in PHP, so I can compare them fairly : basically there is just more ugly syntax with PHP.

I use a node proxy to handle multiple small sites on one host, and have a small node program for hosting static content [which does gzipping, sets cacheing for images to help page load performance]. It might be slightly better to use nginx.. but for a small to medium traffic site, this is fine - I don't want to know the nginx or apache incantations to do this, its just faster to write code in node.

The main npm modules are pretty stable and cover nearly everything. The language is _better_ [ smaller simpler more readable code, less syntax, less ugly syntax, functional idioms, procedural idioms, readable map/reduce, readable 'functions as variables', better names, less UPPERCASE ugliness, less work ]

Yes, node is newer, yes there is a mindset change needed to handle the async-callback-centric approach. But basically node is a better PERL than PERL, a better bash than bash, and a better backend web language than PHP.

You'll write smaller nicer code.. its probably just as fast or faster these days at runtime [ although that is not my main reason for choosing it : my reason for choosing node is less PAIN.. and more enjoyment ]
Upvoted you because it's a very good analogy. The Washington Consensus and neoliberal trade theory have wrecked developing economies by at least 10-20 years. It's no surprise that the developing economies doing well right now accepted little to no aid. Reading up on structural adjustment policies give a good insight into what the consequences are of seemingly benevolent loans. It's basically like a mafiosi loan shark giving you a desperately needed loan, then threatening to break your legs because you don't have the means to pay it back, forcing you to do whatever they ask of you.
those are all examples of standards that Google has supported and developed, two of them originating at Google (well, sort of for WebM/VP8...the standardization, at least, originated at Google). I'm not sure what you're on the right track here...just because you come up with a new format does not mean that you're undermining old ones.

That's exactly what the EFF has suggested, in fact: if they don't want to use XMPP, publish the new format for others to be able to use.
On large pages I've had massive issues with Promoted Posts - flooded with spammy comments that suggested all additional impressions were fake.

Facebook advised Promoted Posts were more effective on smaller pages (eg. <1,000 fans).
VCs yes; a better question is LPs or GPs. The answer matters greatly.
Yes, but what would the suggested rate be? I studied finance and worked as an accountant before programming, although at a top school, a different subject.
Using the Go language you can pretty easily get around the concurrent write issue, using channels. Data for concurrent users is written to the same channel. A routine that reads from the channel does all the writing to the SQLite database.
It is odd, but I recently noticed that my 2 most tech savy friends (use linux, take CS classes, read PG, etc) both have dumb phones. For one of them, it's a bit of an cost thing, but my friends explanation was: Since I am on my first/real device almost all the time, I don't need a second device as much.
Engineers are better equipped to collect and store massive amounts of data than to analyze it to draw meaningful conclusions from it or to drive decisions. It takes business acumen to ask the right questions to the data.

The way "big data" is stored today also poses problems with respect to queryability. NoSQL systems are great at storing huge amounts of data efficiently but don't help us slice and dice the data easily. Having to write map reduce jobs for every "query" is painful and time consuming. Tools like Hive, Pig and Cascading help in writing MR jobs succinctly but are still very slow when someone wants to quickly filter and explore the data.
SPDY isn't a trademarked technology, the name is trademarked (it should be), the protocol is not.

The way SPDY works is just like OAuth/OAuth2, HTTP, XMPP work: someone invent/improve a protocol, working on draft and get it open standard. I don't see any problem with that.
thanks for this reply, it's super informative! I've done a fair amount of ocaml programming but not as much as I would like with Core. Or_error looks really nice.

I think I underestimate the benefits that come with reducing the surprise in code. I get a similar amount of distaste lots of matching on option types and throwing to comparing to null and throwing. or_error definitely would help with that distaste I think.

you still have to give a lot of consideration to exactly what the error means, I think. in a lot of programs I write, the presence of an error cascades a lot and doing things like unwinding transactions and ensuring that the fault leaves a component in a consistent state is much more difficult than identifying all of the locations in a component where a failure could arise. maybe I'm doing something much higher level incorrectly but I've read a lot of other peoples code and it either has 10x the code to deal with, for example, many potential null-return scenarios or "works most of the time" and presents extremely critical consistency problems if a "stars align" error occurs ...
I think part 2 of the Article is what people worry could easily be abused, especially when you include wording like "for the protection of health or morals". "Morals" in particular being something that is subject to very wide interpretation.

Viewing from the lens of an another American political issue: separation of church and state, an aspect of freedom of religion. There are people in the US who strongly believe that we should have state sanctioned prayer in schools and feel this doesn't conflict with religious freedom. What they fail to take into account is that at some point their children could be in the school holding prayers for Not_Their_Religion. The point being that separation of church and state is the only policy that protects everyone's religious freedom. Analogously, you can argue that allowing all speech is the only way to protect everyone's freedom of speech.

I really am not an expert on this. This is more of a dorm-room, after-hours student discussion level of understanding on my part and likely more a cultural reflection than a strong reflection of legal foundations, etc.
Who is paying that much and for what?

There's a cottage industry of firms specializing in conversion rate optimization for X. (My consulting practice was in no small bit doing this for B2B software firms. "Conversion optimization for e-commerce", "conversion optimization for insurance industry", etc etc are also common specialties.)

If you were hypothetically a client desiring top-tier talent, and you asked what $400 an hour would buy you, I'd say "One journeyman at a boutique firm... if you can find anybody with availability at that price." I was priced rather north of that for some of my consulting career. There were likely folks priced at a substantial premium to me.

There are substantial programming/design skills implicated in this, obviously. (At some firms there is specialization of labor but at boutique firms typically all consultants do everything required to ship.)

Edit to add: You asked who is buying this sort of thing. In my case, largely B2B software companies with revenues in the $10 to $X0 million range. In broader terms, almost every company which either does direct transactions or collects leads with value over $1 million per year should probably be buying this sort of consulting, and many of them do. What's your guesstimate on how many insurance companies there are which sell direct-to-consumer products in the US, for example? All of them are potential customers are this.
Sure, any time!
s/What out/Check out/ # How the hell did I miss that typo? :(
Nitpick: line 57 has a typo in 'undefined'. I will have a deeper look at the code tomorrow. A 30% increase is definitely interesting.
I think by 'cromulent' he means acceptable
One could speculate that if you increase the spend, and traffic - the percentage of bots would actually be much lower.
Was genuinely curious. The term kind of took over in the last couple decades, but I've come to realize that it's a very vague term, with not a lot of actual agreement as to what it means. To be quite honest, I've never been quite clear what the term means.

For example, you mention the AK-47. I consider it to be a fully automatic, with selective fire, machine gun. You hold down the trigger, and the gun rapid fires until you remove your finger from the trigger, or you run out of ammunition.

Interestingly, and as far as I can tell, the author of the article did not make that. He assembled a semi-automatic-only version, based on the type that is available to gun enthusiasts. IE, not a full-auto machine gun.

But anyoo, just to be clear, you would term the following rifles to be assault rifles, correct?

http://i.imgur.com/PXUg1St.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/a916R.jpg
Just because Google has a lot of capacity doesn't mean they're wasteful with it. At scale, minor inefficiencies add up to a lot. That is the incentive for protobufs, etc. For a more concrete example of seemingly trivial bandwidth savings, check out the HTML source to their 404 page (it validates!): http://www.google.com/asdf.html
That's a good point, but it's not completely true as stated. It is illegal to manufacture a firearm for sale or transfer without an FFL (a Federal license). However if I'm reading this[0] right it is probably not illegal to manufacture a firearm for personal use, and later sell or transfer it to another individual.

It would need to be a legal sale under CA law, meaning I guess it would need to be serialized and registered by an FFL. Mind you this is all subject to the capricious opinion of the ATF, which has pretty broad discretion over who gets to go to jail-- but even if transfer were utterly illegal, that's something hobbyists have been dealing with for decades.

All he would need to do is remove the receiver -- the folded sheet metal, the only part he "made" -- destroy that, destroying the firearm, and give away the rest as so much unregulated junk. As soon as he cut that receiver in half, he was holding a legal, untraceable nothing in the eyes of the law. Then he says he cut the parts into pieces. He really, really did not have to do that.

And what I reduce this to is-- you're right in that transferring this firearm could be a huge hassle that might lead the average person not to bother with it. So this is a journalist researching a story, and he turned down an opportunity to find out first-hand just how burdensome these regulations are on hobbyists. That's an entire missing half of this article. Why? Because it was hard? I'm not trying to question his motives, but it really seems like he didn't even try to understand.

[0] http://www.ar15.com/mobile/topic.html?b=4&f=51&t=115...
This is probably the most common hiccup in getting started with node.

I think this is the reason node.js is either loved or hated : if you get over this activation energy hump, you love it, if not you hate node.. to a first order approximation.

Basically, to get over this hump, you need a small piece of code which can handle a sequence of tasks in order : I wrote serialq npm to a minimal implementation of this, and there are much better ones for production use.

So, once you have a sequential task Queue, you can use it to program in a more procedural way to get started with your early apps.. then you will use it only for a few edge cases like startup initialization, and you will be comfortable with callback-heaven :]

Callback-heaven is not a new idea.. you may not have heard of CICS COBOL system.. its an ancient mainframe terminal client-server app framework system with some of the same ideas.

As a side note, be aware you don't need to have many levels of indentation in your code.. its a bad symptom in node javascript or in any other language. Just as novice programmers can make deeply indented code in Pascal or C.. you can do it in your node.js program. Just realize its bad style and think of nicer ways to structure it. Async does not imply deep indenting.
Blogging and the Paralysis of Choice
"they feel that if they don't add a bucket of legalspeak, they weren't earning their money"
Then you are hiring the wrong lawyers.
I am happy to put you in touch with lawyers that don't feel the urge to randomly wordsmith stuff so that the feel like they are earning their keep.
> Finally, performance.

Wouldn't Strongtalk and the research around it be the counter example to this claim?
Those numbers are what I'd expect to find in Houston, not in San Francisco.

It'd be hard to get me to move to SF in a senior role for anything less than $120k.
Hangouts is not an extension of XMPP, it is a replacement.

Google's extensions to XMPP took place via the XEP process, and were published so other vendors could implement them.
I have the six figure income and don't really spend much of it on anything. Like what could I possibly spend that much money on? Go out and get the most expensive thing on the menu every night of the week? Fill closets with designer clothes I'll never actually wear? I have no idea.

So I just throw a huge cash pile into savings paycheck after paycheck, year after year. I feel like I could develop some alternate career that I could enjoy more, like working on cruise ships or music video shoots or something. Makes me wish I had crappy food service or retail jobs when I was younger so I had some alternate experience to draw from.
It means you're fucked. Your name is dirt after that. You'll never get credit again.
That link isn't saying what you think it's saying; "fewer" is the correct word here.
Ask HN: Valley Graphics?
I recently read an article (I think it was on wired or techcrunch) which had some really amazing graphical artwork of SV geography, showing the locations of companies etc. I can't seem to dig it up though, does anyone have the link to it? The graphics were kind of like a modern version of this: http://www.grow-california.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/siliconvalley.jpg
IOC container benchmark
Purpose of Human Evolution as a Value-Algorithm Processing the Universe
It’s not too hard to see that as we improve our technology, getting down to the smallest scales, and removing everything that seems redundant, that we might wind up with something that looks just like a physical process that already happens in nature. So does this mean that in the ultimate future, with all that great automation and technology, all we’ll achieve is just to produce something that’s indistinguishable from zillions of things that already exist in nature? -Wolfram

All technologies and discoveries in nature we make are ultimately re-purposed for human evolutionary values. We augment our intelligence, communication, transportation, survival, and other abilities to gain a competitive edge over other species and other forces of the universe (ie, asteroid deflection). What is the ultimate logical extension of this, you might ask. Lets imagine we become these immortal brains floating thru the universe; we have augmented all our potentials to their fullest. What then? We will still extract energy from the universe in order to calculate and alter the matter of the universe along some value system. We will value augmenting some matter while decreasing other parts of the universe. All forms of life value their survival and expansion. It's likely that we'll value augmenting matter that promotes our growth and the growth of life generally. In some sense we'll be like a computer virus that follows a system of logic to rearrange your data as it expands its way through all our files.

We cannot escape ourselves. Yet, in becoming aware of ourselves as a value algorithm that runs as a process through the universe, we might ask ourselves "is this desirable to continue" -- why do we go on, marching robotically towards the singularity and countless other future things, constantly refining and improving the value-impact we have on the universe. Why is it desirable to continue this activity?
I believe the assumption is that a future civilization will be less advanced. Should society collapse, you can expect knowledge to be lost and advancement to cease. Sure, we hope that our civilization will continue to advance, but we plan for the worst and leave the message in simple language in the hope that the last remnants of mankind will survive by avoiding a serious threat left by their ancestors.
Two Lessons For App Makers From "Dots For iPhone"
Criminal trial lawyers? No.

A really good corporate lawyer? Yep. 20-30k per day for the best of the best; plus various thousands of dollars for their assistants.

(Now you know why Gigaco Inc vs Humunco Inc cases can blow out to millions or even tens of millions of dollars).
Great article Ryan, I am (as I'm sure most founders reading this are) actively working on my startup's story - so I found it very useful. One thing that interests me is how the story changes over time. This seems to have been the case with Instagram. Like you said, Burbn was a very different product and over time they realized people were using it mostly for photos so they restarted with what is now Instagram. Was the well-crafted story you described there from the beginning, or was it developed as they worked with users and iterated through early products? Stories definitely give a company direction, allow designers and engineers to focus more on the few important features that really matter, and make it easier to speak to users, but it seems that getting to that story can be a journey in and of itself.
Don't try to think large complicated thoughts in your head, think them written down on paper. Typing doesn't work as well (as far as I can see), I would guess that a large enough tablet with a stylus would work better.

This will increase your capacity for involved/interesting ideas, make recovering from interruptions faster, and slow you down slightly (but not enough to completely offset the benefits).
I tested Twitter ads for the first time recently.

I liked the demographic information they gave me - where the engagements came from geographically, as well as information on gender and interests. We can use that information with regards to Twitter, as well as independent of Twitter.

I know our campaign (probably) hit real people because we got a reply and five re-tweets. Our campaigns totalled to $225.
That's exactly the point, though- why should Google have to defend themselves so much more? Apple have the most tightly locked in messaging protocol, but no-one says a word about them opening it- even after they promised to.
Thanks Jared, I'm going to read your book :)
> but it causes silent bugs, where you thought something was happening but it wasn't.

In Objective-C, it could be a silent bug or just intended behavior to send messages to a nil object. It is explained here: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/cocoa/...
>I left a $100k/yr job to do school, so that loss of income on top of paying for things like daycare and a mortgage made it a much more expensive proposition than when I was in my early 20s

Why did you decide to go back to school if your income was already that high? did you change careers? or was this just a social status/personal enrichment project?
Hi, I'd like to thank everyone for their great replies. More good info then I could have hoped for here.

Thanks,
od2m
The only way to fix that specific problem is to change the protocol. Which is what Google did.

Creating new and better protocols is OK. Making them closed and non interoperable - is not. XMPP is not ideal, but it's open for participation in its development and for its usage. Whatever Google decided to create is not open, and that's their main failure.
Try to get work with overlapping subject matter, then you'll be able to charge more.

Eg. work on web projects with a finance component. Work for companies in the finance industry. And so on. Pitch your expertise in the problem domain to bump your rate way up and keep walking it up on each new engagement.
Yes. Exactly this. Please get a degree. You will have a great experience doing it and get a piece of paper that will make you employable at much higher salaries. Worst case you won't enjoy your time in college. Do it any way. Life is not about having everything your way every minute of your life. It is a marathon. Prepare yourself for the long haul.

If you are worried about the debt there are plenty of great universities which are not all that expensive. Many schools also have the option of GA/TA where your tuition will be completely or partially waived off.
You should read up on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's concepts of fragility and antifragility. Taleb feels that over the long run the biggest of the big will have fragility, and thus tend to fail.

Another thing to keep in mind is that what you're reading about in fact represents only a small amount of what is going on in business. There are plenty of small companies that aren't being sold to big companies, and quite a few big companies can be doing badly at any time. In tech just take a look at HP.
Sky News (UK) has its Android apps hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army