skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
then write a much longer rant someday.

This sounds like you are giving up. I try to abstain from uncouth language on HN, but there is a saying: "Shit happens." I know little about this situation, but I do know of other unfair situations: illegal aliens cooking up Japanese food in the back of a restaurant down the street from me; a small company outside of Pittsburgh who hired a Chinese person just so the Chinese guy could get a green card (and then the guy quit as soon as he was on his way).

To quote an inspirational fictional character, no matter how tough you think you are it'll always bring you to your knees and keep you there. Permanently if you let it. You or nobody ain’t never gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep movin forward

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1tXhJniSEc
Potential Web 3.0 Hell
Come on, this doesn't belong on the HN front page... What's next? lolcats?
Barcamper exchange program
I have had a few math books use something similar, I believe a differential equations book and a linear algebra book with many 'We leave this to the reader to prove'. Which is fine if you know the subject but when you are learning it is by far one of the most annoying things I have come across.
Why I don't use CouchDB.
Yeah, maybe there is actually truth to this [dead] post from earlier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=608963
He doesn't say Hadoop is 40x less efficient than PostgreSQL, he says Hadoop is 40x less efficient than eBay's Greenplum data-warehouse, which Wikipedia tells me is apparently a proprietary produced "based on" PostgreSQL.
I've used some of these - and received part marks for them - when I got stuck on tests or exams.
Recent(ish) versions of Python have the "ctypes" ffi module in the standard library, which is useful if your C/C++ code is compiled into a shared library and doesn't use any particularly esoteric ABI features.
Netcallidus, a search engine marketing company in UK you can trust
Netcallidus, A search engine marketing company that I came across with all the credentials.
That may be a factor, but it is not the only factor. When applying for a spouse visa, someone from (say) Norway has little economic incentive to gain the visa. As a general rule of thumb, their visa will be subject to less checks and the marriage assumed to be genuine. They just don't have much motive to lie or try and fake their way through.

Someone moving from (say) Cambodia, however, will face an entirely different situation. They plainly have any number of motives to get the hell out of Cambodia and into a big rich country. These motives can and do lead to fake marriages, fake information, everything. The application will be given a far greater level of scrutiny and will take a lot longer.

Hell, don't take my word for it, Australian immigration spells it out. Here's the official "assessment level" (ie, assumed risk) of people applying for student visas here:

http://www.immi.gov.au/students/students/chooser/574-nonjs.h...

Plan on a miserable experience if you're not from a country in level 1. And you can be sure there's a much more detailed one for internal use, for spouses, etc.
There are many answers to them, which is kind of the point, no? :)

I didn't mean to imply that their system is broken, just that those questions are a good starting point to probe the A-C worldview, just as you'd ask a socialist about innovation versus personal reward.

My general objection is that absolute hostility to any coercive social structure is inefficient in the face of an external authoritarian or natural threat. It's not bad, not wrong, but possibly inefficient enough to be detrimental to the survival of the society as a unit.

To put it another way: Thoreau is compelling but he had the luxury of civil peace, plenty of land, good crops, and natural barriers to invasion. Where you stand depends largely on where you sit.
Smart move. Washington ought to remember that the War of the Laws was the watershed event in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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

The Federal Soviet government insisted upon laws that the satellites found unacceptable, and so they broke away. While the US has a stronger social norm of Federal control, the same scenario is possible here as the economy continues to decline.

"States' Rights" is no longer merely the battle cry of bigots. Its a necessary part of holding this nation together.
Can you please not post in monospace? You don't have any code in your article and it makes things difficult to read.
Do Web Entrepreneurs Still Need Venture Capitalists?
Lolproofs you think?

IcanhasQED, kthxbai
Thanks for the response. Maybe you're already aware of this, but ironically they would tell you that efficiency (including in the face of an external or natural threat) is one of the most important reasons for their views.
Glad to hear that your story is getting a little more press, Owen. You deserve it.
Misread that as 'Why are you on Twitter'.
I sent something to Paul Graham, who suggested I submit it to HN. To submit I had to sign up, so I did. I didn't know of HN's existence before that.
May be a basic question but did you go through the visa norms before applying? The official site clearly mentions at least $500K as minimal investment (and employ at least 10 people etc) for consideration under the investor visa!

(http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f...)
The Entrepreneur residence to Canada required net worth of CAD$300,000 which is quite a lot more than USD$65,000. Plus there are other requirements such as several years of experience running a business. Finally, if you look at the application processing times, in most countries it takes 1-2 years.

And it doesn't seem there is a way to start a business in Canada without a permanent residence.
I don't think A implied B either. B is implied through observing the behavior of simpler animals (which are easier to observe than human) and noting that it is generally self interested. Without any compelling reason to determine that man is somehow not an animal, it flows that humans also follow the same behavior.
A lot of that is due to the fact that a large percentage of Norwegians are homeowners, and when a 1 bedroom apartment in Oslo can easily cost more than $200,000, well, that will add up quickly.
Ask HN: How do you delete a post?
I did a search and found this post but I don't see any edit button around posts.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=402
Of course they world, just as a Frenchman talks up the benefits of national champions as a way to compete in the global market. :)

I would point out that historical societies that A-C theory studies, like medieval Iceland, the Celts, or the Wild West, tended to have few external threats and eventually lost out to other models of governance. Historical performance has to count for something.
All he had to do was point to the big-ass adsense unit.
I wouldn't like to bet my business on getting bought out by people who think I am stealing from them.
Run a split test and see if there's any cost to doing it.
I wonder if by the author's standards lisp/scheme were a functional language?
i'll give you a point for that?
www.metroflog.com/xdonny17x
Given that the people who are pathologically allergic to ads (if you think I am talking about you, dear reader, I am) disproportionately are early adopters and control the blogs et al which you'll want to get links from, I would say leave it off for the first while (to get the maximum love from the linkerati) and then integrate them later.

As for not jarring people when you introduce them later: 99.999% of your visitors will not arrive on launch day, or in any short window from the opening of your service. From the perspective of the guy who signs up on your SNS twelve weeks from now after reading about it on Bob's SNS Addict Blog, the site had ads from launch day. But if you actually put ads on it on Launch Day, you might not get that link from Bob in the first place.

P.S. On the other hand, if you charge money, charge money from day one. Even if you're not actually charging anyone because you mailed Bob a free invite code because you dig his blog especially that series on MySpace monetization and thought your new site would interest him. Free stuff = meh, the Internet is full of it. I am getting for free what other people are paying money for = proves my status as an expert on this field (validating my self-worth) and makes me like you enough to want to write a review in which I will (strike)brag(/strike) disclose that you thought I was an expert worthy of a freebie.

Edited to add: SNS means "social networking service". Apparently its a Japan thing. Sorry!
don't feed the troll?
You can view it as bookmarking an item with the upvote button instead.
Yes that's true unforetunately. But getting a work visa in Canada is not difficult. It's likely with his skills he can find a tech job here. If it's that important he has access to the US then being in Canada is the best next option. The extra money would only hurt in his loss of time dedicated to his startup work.
So your generation grew up exploring Internet and social networking, and that's what you are excited about most. But I think you take devices you use as granted - computers, mobile phones. Our generation (I'm 1969) was exploring these devices themselves, how they work and how to make them work our way. We learned computer languages from listings in magazines and by trial and error. We thought AI is around the corner, we were sure computers can change our lives, but never foresaw Internet.

Edit: oh, and we thought digital electronics is an essential part of software engineering. So different now.
Custom polo shirt printing
Adlogo is the right place to get custom polo shirt printing at best possible prices
Isn't there a 6 year visa backlog in Canada for skilled immigrants?
Designing a 'Single Server' MMORPG
Meta: [dead] users?
I occasionally see [dead] comments from users. Looking through their history, it looks like all their comments past a certain date are [dead], and that they're not aware of this fact - but I also don't see anything particularly offensive in their history. Is it possible they somehow mistakenly get auto-flagged and no one notices? It doesn't seem possible to upvote or reply to [dead] comments, so how can they climb out of this hole which they're (presumably) not even aware they're in?
- I would prefer if the logo is to the left than right - esp given that I am not on a wide screen

- A simple intro line would help. It took me 20-30 secs to realize what all those articles were (Can the source be at the top and not bottom) and then tie to the nav.

- The site loads too sloooow. A quick peek into the HTML shows 11 js files being loaded - I think concatenate+minify will help.

- It will be nice if I can customize(pick) my sources.
I agree. If you're taking over an old crappy Rails project of reasonable complexity, think about using Pat Maddox's excellent tips on working with legacy databases.
http://www.patmaddox.com/blog/railsconf_2009_legacy_rails

It's useful to get the app under a comprehensive test acceptance test suite. Then you can rewrite and feel comfortable everything is still working.
I read about this a while ago (slashdot?) and thought it was quite intriguing myself. I believe there were some complications with withdrawal symptoms so buyer beware.

As for your request, most competent electronics hobbyists / engineers could likely build a crude version, but I could see complications arising from the vast number of electrical sources potentially disrupting your "north" signal.

Which led me to ponder a refinement - by using gps, although encoding location is quite a complication, it would be an incredible extension of the idea. A possible implementation would have latitude and longitude pads that could either vibrate at a varying frequency or (for extra leet points) activating a series of binary pads to encode the lat/long.
A license fee in the tens of thousands is not much for a newspaper centric CMS. The big players in this field are often more expensive to license.
Interesting theory, but I suspect there is an simpler an equally plausible explanation.

> In this experiment, the task was to complete sentence fragments, either in an abstract or a concrete way. For example, some might complete this fragment: "An example of a bird is ______." Others completed this kind of fragment: "A bird is an example of ______." The first requires a concrete example—an indigo bunting, for example, or scarlet tanager—while the second asks for an abstract category—warm-blooded vertebrates, say

There's another difference between these two tasks: one is easier than the other. The experiment did not control for this. It did ask participants how difficult they thought the task were, and found no significant difference between the two groups. From that they infer that the results are not explainable by difference in difficulty - which seems flawed to me. Since when did perceived / stated difficulty become a barometer of actual difficulty? This is repeated across all three experiments. I suspect they are simply measuring differences in real difficulty, and its divergence from stated difficulty.

Link to paper: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/SozWiss/fg-psy/gollwitzer/PUB... (the lack of raw data in this paper is worrying, and makes validation very tough).
That's actually the other thing I'm curious about (What motivated people to register). But there was no way to fit it in the poll :)

I assume most people register when they have something to submit for the first time or read a comment they feel they need to respond to.
I'll add another note. I'm not condoning this but for the sake of all options being on the table...

If you know a few people who you trust then you can pool all of your money into one bank account in your name to reach the 500k-1M sum. Alternatively you can borrow the sum and hold it for a year or 2 and pay the ridiculous interest that would add up.

Clearly unethical and difficult but it's a very common technique with middle income would-be immigrants to get in on investor visas or as business immigrants.
do you really mean that each click is worth less simply because it is less likely for a click to happen?

He's not wrong. Welcome to Smart Pricing!

Imagine I have a graph of CTR on the x axis, spanning 0 to 1, and traffic quality (on any scale you want -- conversion rate if you need to think of a real number) on the y axis. On this graph I plot every site or page on AdSense.

You're going to see the same behavior at both asymptotes: when clicks are super high or super low, traffic quality (generally) sucks. If it is super high, then it is highly likely that the page is doing click arbitrage by having the ad be the only interesting content. In most circumstances, this sucks for the advertiser, because users will click the one blue thing just to proceed without ever having transactional intent with the advertiser. (This is not universally true, but work with me.)

On the other hand, absurdly low CTR usually means a very engaging page with lots of repeat visitors. Like, say, a forum. In this case, any clicks happening are likely to be mistakes -- oh, effity, I was trying to comment on pg's reply, now I've clicked off to greatVPSproviders.com, back button and they're out money.

So if you're not in the sweet spot that Google thinks is a "normal" CTR, either by being too high or being too low, expect to get Smart Priced. (Google if you don't get the term. Short version: CPC and CPM rapidly approach zero.)
It doesn't prevent them, but it's still quite hypocritical. I mean, come on, it's only tits!
I was hoping to have some examples of projects.

I'm interested in Arduino but have yet to find a good project to begin with.
Perhaps the barcamp ethos is different where you are, but at all the UK ones I've attended, marketing pitches are heavily frowned upon. BarCamp is about sharing knowledge, not pitching to people.
Most projects contain at least a handful of utility functions that your base library doesn't offer. These utility functions are largely independent of the problem domain, and often of a mathematical nature. Therefore, short, undescriptive variable names (such as 'x') are perfectly acceptable.
What what what?
I respectfully disagree. It's not about the money; it's about setting expectations.

If you plan on monetizing by ads, have them there from day one, so your users won't cause a small riot when you add them in later.
Most of the time when people here denounce an article as substance-free drivel, I think they're being too critical and maybe a little arrogant.

But this time, let me be the first to say outright: don't bother with this one. The triteness will make you sad.
(Quick question: is SNS actually English? I'm having one of those "Have I been in Japan too long?" moments -- had another one the other day when I couldn't tell someone how Americans pronounce SaaS because I have never heard one say it.)
At an 'institutional level', it's a bunch of horse shit. Sorry, but the whole mess brings out strong feelings: the process to get my wife (who is also the mother of our American daughter), into the US is quite a hassle. And we're talking about someone with a doctorate in biochemistry from a wealthy nation. Tons of similar stories of intelligent, hard working, qualified people being hassled to no end. Remember when Linus' visa was about to expire, and only a ruckus got them to speed the process up?
"Instead, think about putting on your sneakers and tying them, one at a time; entering the front door of the gym and walking to the first treadmill you see; stepping aboard and starting to move your legs, right leg first."

The analogy of going ahead and just doing it has been reiterated many times here - in comments/other articles.

proof of or the lack of - doesn't matter.

For some lazy few like me, these readings come in various flavours. Reading these nudges as a reminder to "just do it" and it works for a while atleast - before some distraction comes by.
Colored parentheses highlighting for Emacs
The key here is that $65,000 is not enough money for a U.S. investor visa. You shouldn't have been surprised at all. If the business idea is a good one, start outside the U.S., and then seek to establish a subsidiary in the U.S. With a proven track record, you'll get your visa, but by then, you won't want it because you won't want to pay U.S. taxes.
If he needs a job in order to legally reside in Canada then it means he cannot work on his startup full time.
When Innovation and the Legal System Collide
Sounds like they used two servers, and the other was probably a backup server, maybe even a db slave, designed to run the entire web app in case the other was down. This probably lead to it being compromised in the same way the main server was.

There are many good solutions mentioned to this problem, whether it be backing up to physical media once a month, or using tarsnap. I feel though that this could have been easily prevented by running a dedicated backup server, instead of one that was probably vulnerable in the same way as the main server was. In my experiences, vandals usually aren't the most brilliant bunch and usually won't go deeper into your others servers unless it's related to the original exploit, or possibly easier. Of course this could have been more than vandalism, maybe a personal vendetta or something.
Fortunately I've the definitive answer to the Procrastination problem, and I want to share it with you:

if you procrastinate you are working on things you don't care. And if you are in this condition the procrastination is the minor of your trouble, you are wasting your professional life. So... switch to something you really care, and for you to procrastinate will be to work on your things, because they are really interesting to you.
Null Is Not Empty
Yesterday we had an article on what services you'd pay $5 a month for. I'd almost bet most people would pay $5 a month, maybe more, for GPS.
The guy applied for an investor's visa. He's not an investor. If your wife applied for an investor's visa and not an I'm-married-to-an-American visa and didn't get it and said, "But I really love my husband." that wouldn't mean that she'd been unfairly denied.
Free Verizon Ringtones
If you are new to cell phones, ringtones are the sound that the phone makes when someone calls you.
Discussions about CouchDB focus on its very large and complicated featureset. It would be interesting to see examples of actual problems it's good for and why or how it worked for them. I've seen one example where it wasn't very good and the developer switched to an SQL database, but nothing beyond that. Their website doesn't have anything like this, sadly.
Moonshine enters FreeBSD Ports
The biggest advantage of CouchDB - compared with its competition - seems to be the ability to create views to query the schema less dataset. If I have to do this in mysql, then I will
have to create and maintain seperate columns with indices; making sure that updates to the data gets propagated to these columns etc. Do any of the CouchDB alternatives provide a cleaner solution?
And what other people and I are saying is that the whole system is quite fucked up and needs a major overhaul. Maybe this guy shouldn't have got in on this particular visa, but it's still lame; I'd much rather people like that have the option to go, and then get encouraged to go home if things aren't working out, or some similar compromise that encourages smart, hard working people to go to the US.
From what I understand, those societies are never held up as proper examples of anarcho-capitalism. (I know how that sounds.) And if the historical performance of a model of governance has to count for something, there are some more common models that don't look very promising!
Ads are so commonplace on the internet today, that when I see a site with no ads, I sometimes wonder what is up with it, is it new? Possibly unreliable or unstable? Am I the only person who has felt this way?

Now, annoying ads are a different story, especially those word-highlighting ads that float so you can't close them, and that usually have a cpu-sucking flash app running inside them. THOSE I notice and LEAVE IMMEDIATELY!
A bit early to write off the project, isn't it? The CouchDB devs have repeatedly stated that they're concentrating on getting it working right before making it fast. It's still in alpha, for crying out loud.

There are many positive aspects of Couch's MapReduce implementation. Sure, you can use Hadoop or what not for increased flexibility, but Couch gives you a baked-in storage system, universal HTTP interface, incremental views (big feature!), replication (another biggie) and a structure for it all to sit in, with a nice interface to boot. Sure, you could set that all up separately, but isn't there a lot of value having it all just there and working? And check out the MLs - chained reduce is a constant point of discussion; it's definitely on the roadmap.

The lack of strong authentication is also a puzzling point - how many people implement complex auth at the DB level in a web app?

He does have some good points - the overhead of setting up and pulling down a socket for each connection cannot be denied, but that seems solvable with persistent connections. Furthermore, Couch's stateless API and eTag integration offer powerful caching options.

One point that did strike home for me was about the lack of development direction - this does seem to be a problem. For example, the effort to make applications run directly from CouchDB seems speculative and pretty useless. If you're going to install erlang and CouchDb you may as well install an app server as well. But the BTree rewrite priortisation? There were good reasons for that: it was going to break backwards compatibility, so essential to do it ASAP.

All in all, decent points, but way premature. How about we at least get to beta first?

Then again, if this article rams home the huge importance of speed to the devs, maybe I shouldn't be arguing ...
Profit per employee for some large tech companies