skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have a large sample size, but my small set of second-hand reports suggests that trying to live-and-work in Berlin can be problematic if you don't speak at least passable German. Not for the startup scene itself, where everyone speaks English, but for practicalities like interacting with the civil service, health-care system, housing, and banks, where German is expected. (This is a difference from Copenhagen, where everything can be done in English if you prefer. And Danes often prefer it, too, because they don't understand foreigners who try to speak Danish.)
"Now, I understand that Ingo Molnar and Linus Torvalds have a lot more experience in open source development than I do, but we can learn about this from scientific studies and statistics, rather than depending on unreliable personal experience."

So we should rely on your personal experiences instead of scientific studies?
Ask HN: How do you determine which database(s) to use for a project?
This is probably a stupid sounding question, but it really confuses me. How do I decide whether to use MongoDB or Redis, Redis or MySQL, PostgreSQL or MongoDB etc. for a specific project? Is it just a matter of taste or are each one optimized for certain use cases? I've heard of Redis being good for a cache, but then I hear some people just using it as their database. Which should I use it as?
That seems odd to me. BC has one of the highest income tax rates in Canada and Florida has no state income tax.

Using the online paycheck calculators I get:

$50K/yr in BC would net you $36,758 after taxes.

$50K/yr in Florida would net you $38,296 after taxes.
I'm using motorised desk (similar to GeekDesk) for over three years now. On 8-hours working days I'm doing 3-6 standing sessions, each one 25 minutes long ("Pomodoro"). If I stand more than that feel fatigue which is distracting.

For a while I had only a fixed standing desk and I took breaks by just taking the laptop on my lap. Motorised desk is much better and promotes changing your stature more frequently.
Recent Improvements to Mono on ARM
Then that could well make you one of ultra-nationalistic Estonians who would rather see their country and language die rather than have it be 'tainted'.

I'm half Australian and half Estonian - and have citizenship of both countries. I've worked as a developer in both countries, and currently reside (and work) in Estonia. I see this attitude all the time in Estonia; despite the obvious need for immigration, many people would rather see the population keep on decreasing. Currently it's simply too difficult for professionals to get an Estonian visa, and wages are not attractive enough, in general, to attract those with an EU passport. This is part of the problem that will, in time, kill Estonia and likely the other Baltic countries.
A case study in "just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it."
A project I worked on at a large corporate client got into serious problems after it got audited, and they found we were using several non-Microsoft libraries. They wanted us to remove those and use "supported" libraries such as Unity and EntLib.
Gee, no comments allowed on that page. Scared of getting lamb-basted.

If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
First I ask the same of you, and the answer to my question, where are the charities cleaning the streets or changing street lights?

And good luck out side of the western world getting by with a hard working business owner to run any kind of high flying business. Good luck with the bribes you'll be paying the old USSR or India for example. Why do you think people are so keen to join our countries (presuming you are from Europe or the USA)?
Also, California and other large states can't get much impact from federal pork because they have to spread it too thin across a large population.

Wyoming and Alaska can get a few billion dollars in waste and abuse money from senior senators and spread it across half a million people. That makes for a lot of fun for anyone who's in on the windfall of bridges to nowhere, local culture grants, "national security" slush funds, and the like.
Or developers appreciate the effort it takes to program something, and want to break away from the 99c per app approach and want to make a more fair payment?
Rep Justin Amash: Strip NSA Of Power To Collect Phone Data On Innocent Americans
Huge mischaracterization to call The Oil Drum a "peak oil website"

It was one of the most thought, informative, evidence-based, and civil sites about fossil fuels.

The reason the site closed also had nothing to do with "peak oil"

"A discussion we have had several times in the last year, due to scarcity of new content caused by a dwindling number of contributors. Despite our best efforts to fill this gap we have not been able to significantly improve the flow of high quality articles."

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10059
Outdoor cameras traditionally have been housed in a weatherproof, heated enclosure. Not sure if this is still the case. Maybe you need to be looking for camera enclosures and cameras as separate items.
My point is that the laws of physics can be have symmetries that do not exist in practice. For instance in the Standard Model there is nothing to say that protons need to be heavier than electrons. But thanks to the Higgs field, they are different everywhere that we see.

In the case of general relativity, even when there is no preferred reference frame in the theory, there is an obvious one that is still special. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle for more on that.
What's with this pseudo-shamanistic idea that viewing a picture of an act makes you a participant in it? Has everybody lost their mind?
A criminal offence. Stop making up thought crimes, you authoritarian zealots!

This is Europe. When it comes to "right to free speech" versus other rights, we don't have the dial set as far towards "free speech" as the USA.
Points 1 & 2 are facts, and are not in dispute, but point 3 is a question, not a statement.

"Don't ignore population growth/decline when examining economic reform."

Ok, but what of it? Is anyone ignoring that? If the author believes that the population decline in the Baltics is due to the economic policy therein, then they should find ways to establish that causal relationship, not just point at a graph and say "see here".
Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.
I don't know. By swearing, it tells me that he spends more time caring about their feelings. If he could just say "No" instead of "Fuck no! I'm not accept that shit!" he'd save a lot of time and energy dealing with people's feelings.
$100 discount NoPanels meet vcs & angels directly fabulous opportunity
Woman With Multiple Sclerosis Ran 366 Marathons in A Year
The Most Powerful Word Known to Mankind
Would hurt the proverbial small inventor more than it would hurt others. Almost like a regressive tax.
Wrong guess I'm afraid. We (Canonical) haven't announced any hardware or network partners for a general market launch.

Ubuntu Edge isn't aimed at the mass market. It's a special limited edition hardware platform which accelerates lots of interesting hardware technology combined with the Ubuntu phone. So it's designed for developers or technology enthusiasts who really value cutting edge innovation.
I don't, so if you're inclined to give a summary I'd appreciate it.
That's not a real argument. You're essentially saying "respect because I said so."

The irony is your argument is just as flimsy and opinionated as everyone else's.

This article is devoid of content AND is written by a respected member of the community but neither of those things make it worth reading.

The great moral of the story here is, if you let the internet bother you, the internet will definitely bother you.
If you want to keep it up, you should contact a lawyer.

It _may_ indeed be illegal under the DMCA to distribute. Or it may be legal, as there are some exceptions for reverse engineering etc.

Nobody here knows. Heck, even a lawyer might not know, but a laywer will know your level of legal risk and possible expense.
how can we really say "no" to the next, gravely offended person who comes along? Where will it end?

Y'know this is Europe, not USA. We already have decent laws (going back decades) about lots of things that would not pass the free speech thing in the USA (e.g. privacy law, hate speech law). Claiming slippery slope isn't really a persuasive argument.
Leap Motion Has Launched
I am actually in the process of reversing the process and building the marketing first, and not building the product until there is enough marketing validation. My thought is, if maybe 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 ideas is going to sell, better to figure out what will sell before building out every idea and then hoping for the best each time.
That's a good insight. He might even be addicted in some way to the drama he creates.
They probably want to avoid the "fictitious investor" problem -- without the "Canadian" requirement, Canada would get lots of people jumping the immigration queue by having their friends and family "invest" in their "startup".

(There's already a way for rich people to buy their way into Canada, but it takes around a million dollars instead of a hundred thousand.)
I've given it two minutes of thought a couple of times. You have fans--every country does.
You're mixing up the objective of putting Ubuntu onto a mass-market phone with a special platform aimed at developers and technology enthusiasts. We (Canonical) have extensive experience working with major technology companies in the PC market. But, Ubuntu Edge isn't aimed at that area - it's about getting great technology into the hands of power-users and developers as early as possible.
I love the convergence thing. I've been predicting and hoping that things would get to a point where I could just have one device that I use for home, work, and everything. Canonical is making it happen and I will do anything I can to support it and be a part of it!
Linus supporters' arguments are always I'd rather have it like this than the opposite side of the coin. The idea that there is a decent alternative that is not the 180° of Linus confounds you.
Qt just released 5.1, which has prelimiary ios and Android support. By the end of the year, you will be able to write a Qt application, and use a QML ui. You can even use one single UI across all devices, where the UI dynamically adds or substracts elements depending on screen size. IE, responsive design for applications.

It is pretty close to write once, run anywhere. The only downside is if your app is the first qt app installed on an ios / android device, it forces a download of the shared libraries which are quite large. You also have to build the applications against individual platforms, since you are using C++, and the finished binary is a native application that uses the qt libraries to launch the qml engine and v8 for the javascript parts.

One experiment I am anxious to see come to fruition in the qt space is the KDE project to get qml apps running in the browser : https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/www/qmlweb. Since QML is inherently javascript, a web app could only use javascript / qml to create a restrcited sandbox (or nacl / other browser equivalent for the c++ parts) and the entirety of qtquick is designed around high latency elements, so it can support network transport.
As a bit of a counterpoint, I'm originally from rural Mississippi and was raised by very religious parents who would absolutely say that God should be #1. But this didn't translate into devaluing education. Instead they viewed it as their religious duty to give their children the very best education they could so that we could make a positive difference in the world.

"You would be amazed at the things people would give up if they thought "God" told them to."

I wouldn't be surprised at all. My parents made tremendous sacrifices to provide their children with a better life because they believed God wanted them to.

On the flip side, I have often seen people making poor decisions and attributing the decision to what they believed God wanted them to do. However, I don't think it is at all obvious that this is caused by their belief in God. It seems more likely to me that in the absence of belief in God, they would make similarly poor decisions but give different justifications.
" But focusing on that isn't, IMO, terribly useful"

I agree when we're talking about making decisions in our own lives, but we should think about it at the level of society and government. We want policies that increase opportunity,and we need to know when we are failing. Social mobility is decreasing in America, and we should do something about it.
repost from deleted:
Wicked cool concept, I can definitely see this being useful on several fronts. Just out of curiosity, how are you determining the "links to your competitors but not yours"?
The example query is """ (www.nike.com OR nike.com) NOT (www.adidas.com OR adidas.com OR redirect:nike OR domain:nike) """
I assume this is assuming that "you" are Adidas and "your competitor" is Nike?
Hell, look what influence cyberpunk had on early internet work and culture.

I'm curious what sorts of things the current twenty-somethings consumed while working on twitterscapes.
The risk / reward for early adopters seems insufficient to me. For a 20% discount (249/199) you're accepting the risk that the device is delivered and works as advertised. I wish them luck, the device does fills a need, but as a consumer the pricing doesn't work for me.
Nice suggestion. I'll bring it up with the team.

Off the cuff though, I'd say the ideal backer is someone excited about open platforms that push the boundary of what we think of computing today.

Arjan and team[1] proved that a 5-second boot on a laptop is a qualitatively different device. When your laptop boots in 5 seconds, you use it differently than one that boots in 10s or 30s. It becomes more device-ish and less computer-ish.

Analogously, I'd say that a single device that has a touch interface for mobility and a keyboard/mouse for desktop productivity is a new category of computing, and user software will need to adapt to the new possibilities opened up by the innovation we're doing in the foundational plumbing layers.

Looking at computing around us today, my observation is that we're asymptotically trying to achieve this vision by nibbling away at the branches, but not attacking the root.

exhibit a) iPad + bluetooth keyboard. lighter and more portable than a laptop but no one uses it as a phone so you still need 2 devices.

exhibit b) Samsung Galaxy Note, the phablet category. I've seen lots of people with these in Korea, but not so much in the States. Actually, walking around the Mission in SF, I've seen more Google Glass than people using Notes. Not sure what to make of that anecdata, but I think phablets are just too large. I use Strava on my phone when I run; I sure wouldn't want to strap on a Note.

exhibit c) Dropbox, one view of your files everywhere. This sidesteps the device problem, but the paradigm is still 'sync'. I'd prefer to just 'have' (and use the cloud for 'backup' or 'extend'). Plus, editing office docs or writing code on today's mobile devices is still going to be painful.

exhibit d) dumb/feature phones; OLPC. The bottom several billion people in the world don't have access to traditional computers[2], but they do have feature phones today. It's not unimaginable to think that they could just skip laptops and go straight to smartphones. It would be nice if these smartphones were enabled to provide a "productivity personality". Teaching a new generation of programmers will be a lot easier if they had keyboards and mice.

Maybe there will never be a one-size-fits-everyone-all-of-the-time device, but to me, the industry trends are pretty clear and one-size-fits-a-hell-of-a-lot is pretty darn good.

If those ideas excite you, then you are the ideal backer for Ubuntu Edge.

/ac, speaking only for myself and not Canonical

1: http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

2: pre-emptively agree that the 'bottom billion' don't have easy access to enough calories or clean water either, but I don't subscribe to solving those problems in serial
"because in the history of science, whenever we begin to see how maybe something could kinda, sorta, maybe exist, it's usually just a matter of time (perhaps centuries) until we crack it."

Like mermaids, magic, the halting problem, ESP, and religion?
In my experience standing in front of a desk does not interfere with getting into the zone.
Counterexample: geosynchronous communication satellites [1].

As a physicist, I find sci-fi inspiring.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit
Differences between startup life in New York and San Francisco
Since the USPTO is financed by patent application fees it has a perverse incentive to continue promiscuously granting as many patents as possible.

I would hope that filers for patents that are rejected would still get charged a fee. If they aren't, they should be. After all, it still takes up a patent clerk's time.
See also: The Little Lisper a.k.a The Little Schemer
Ubuntu is a very reasonable average joe OS. It is actually really crappy for gaming - when I was using Ubuntu at the Unity switch around 10.04, there were tons of absurd full screen and tearing bugs in games. Even now that most of that is fixed, Unity/compiz is still vastly outperformed by everything else when running full screen opengl apps. On Gnome / KDE I never encountered those.
A lawyer can give you legal advice. That is a lawyer's job.

You do not need to wait until you are sued or prosecuted to get advice from a lawyer.

They say "we consider Snaphax to be an unlawful circumvention device under 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)."

They are implying he would be subject to lawsuit and/or criminal prosecution if he keeps distributing the software.

How likely is that to happen? How risky is it for the guy? How expensive might the defense be, and how much pain might this be for a weekend project?

I'm not really sure. But you know what class of people are expert at answering questions like that? Lawyers.

But, sure, if the poster want to keep it up anyway cause you think it's bullshit and are willing to see what they do next, certainly that's another option. It's potentially a brave and commendable one.

But I wouldn't do it because a bunch of people on HN who don't know what they're talking about told me that since they didn't use some special magic words in the letter, there's "nothing a lawyer can do", what?
> BromBone uses a real web browser to download your web pages. We run all that fancy javascript, make all your AJAX calls, and save the result.

Makes me wonder why Google itself doesnt do it like that.
Maybe Google should buy BromBone...
Put this in my server room - give it a few Ethernet ports to let me know if my switches have link, throw in the option to log video locally, and make it so I can bolt it down so that the thief doesn't run off with it.
I'm betting that the filtering will be at the DNS level. So all you'll have to do is use an alternate DNS server.
How about 60 years ago? 80? 100? At some point, if I explained to someone that I would be able to pick up a small black plate filled with electrical signals (ha!) flying around it many million times per second and use it to learn the answer to any question, talk to (AND SEE) any person in the world, in real time, how far back would you have to go to hear "that's impossible," because I guarantee you, at some point, someone thought that it was, even if not 40 years ago.

Hell, I remember explaining to my dad when I was a kid that someday there would be a way to watch whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, simply because that's what people wanted to exist. In my mind, it was an inevitability, and he felt it would never happen. This was only a scant 20 or so years ago.
How about a Bug Block from http://buglabs.net/ and a pile of Zigbee sensors from http://www.zigbeesensors.co.uk/
In reading anecdotes like this it seems that in the south, "Christianity" has been hijacked to have something to do with keeping up the status quo or patriotism or something, which is radically different from my experience (and not at all reflective of the bible). God doesn't live in Alabama, so I'm not sure why you'd have to follow him there....
This looks awesome - won't lie. But the paranoid skeptic in me has me concerned about the device being hacked. Imagine this siren being triggered in the middle of the night.

Also imagine people spying on you, in your home - if I am at home, how do I know if the camera is on? I assume that there isn't a big red light on the front, because if an intruder is there then that will give away the fact that they are being recorded. But if someone else, nefariously, accesses the device and starts recording me I would love to know that immediately.

Also, a potentially 'always-on' video & audio recorded in wake of Prism is actually more scary than people breaking in.

I love the idea though, and I feel like those issues can be addressed by the company.
I recall, but can't find, a story on HN about someone who, before building any product at all, put up a website with an explanation of value, and a "purchase" page. People put in their credit card number trying to buy the product, validating there really was some market for them.
Correct. Adidas would be able to see sites talking about their competitor Nike that are not linking to Adidas and also do not contain Nike as part of the domain. This makes sure you screen out all the Nike sub-sites like runwithnike.com which obviously don't link to Adidas.
I feel the media coverage of the Royal birth has been excessive. Is it really worthy of being the top headline story?

The BBC is one of the worst offenders - they have an entire page devoted to "live" coverage!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23413944

It's pretty ridiculous. The BBC's coverage of anything related to the Royal Family is always far too fawning and sycophantic.
Largely the message of Start Small Stay Small, http://www.amazon.com/dp/0615373968.

I've played around with it a bit, though haven't followed through heavily on any of my PoCs so far, but the market first idea seems to be quite useful for a lot of areas. Enjoyed the book quite a bit, was not a fan of their startup academy at all.
The William Cook paper 'On Understanding Data Abstraction' gives a basic formulation of pure objects. Crucially, an 'object' needn't be what the language itself calls an object, e.g. I could write up a 'set object' in Haskell, which does not have objects:

data Set elem = Set { contains :: elem -> Bool }

insert :: (Eq elem) => elem -> Set elem -> Set elem
insert key set = Set { contains = c }
where c key' = if key == key' then True else contains set key

union :: (Eq elem) => Set elem -> Set elem -> Set elem
union set1 set2 = Set { contains = c }
where c key = contains set1 key || contains set2 key

emptySet :: Set elem
emptySet = Set { contains = (\ _ -> False) }

-- mySet corresponds to {1,2,3}
mySet :: Set Int
mySet = insert 3 (insert 2 (insert 1 emptySet))

-- myVal is True
myVal :: Bool
myVal = contains mySet 2

Depending on your definition of object-oriented programming, this could be considered an object or something else. William Cook argues that it's an object because access depends only on a public interface, i.e. I could add another implementation

fromList :: (Eq elem) => [elem] -> Set elem
fromList list = Set { contains = c}
where c key = key `elem` list

which uses a different representation underneath the surface, but the previous implementations of union and insert will work with it because it exposes the same interface... which is not the case with ML/OCaml modules, which must select a single implementation. This is a simplified version of the example Cook himself uses, so I urge you to read the paper if you want to understand more. (On the other hand, people in the Smalltalk/Ruby/&c camp will say, "No, of course that's not object-oriented—you're not sending messages!" So... it's a complicated debate.)

[1]: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf also linked by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084465
Best Productivity Books