skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The website apparently has over 500 million lines of Java code though. Nobody can cover all of that by themselves in 2 days. Undoing bad design decisions at this scale takes a LOT of work, a lot more than you are estimating. Even if there were 100 others like you, I doubt you guys could even put a dent in the problem.
I suspect the actual correlation is not with wealth (i.e. giving money so somebody with low SAT scores would not actually improve their scores - unless he would have enough money to bribe whoever is overseeing the test of course ;) but with some things that correlate with wealth.
He wasn't a crackpot. We were just more gullible :P
> Also, the median home price where we live is $500-600K (depending on the city/neighborhood). 30% of that is quite a down-payment.

You're talking about being entrusted with half a million dollars of someone else's money. That's a huge bet to make on you; it goes both ways. If you can't afford the down payment, then you can't afford to live in that neighborhood.

30% isn't an unusual downpayment, especially if you don't have perfect credit. With a smaller downpayment, the bank is in a position where you could default on the mortgage, they repossess the house, and because it's depreciated in value at all, get less money when they sell it than they paid the person who sold the house to "you" (to the bank, really) after foreclosure and closing costs.
GPA and SAT correlate well to IQ. With those two pieces of information you could estimate IQ pretty accurately.
Population (in millions):

USA	316.8
Canada: 35.1
Southern North America: 176.6
Northern part of South America: ?
Southern part of South America: ?
...South America: 387.4
UK: 62.2
Scandinavia: 25.7
Western Europe (excl. UK): 278.7
Eastern Europe: 176.7
Southern Europe / Mediterranean Europe: 153.5
Russia: 142.2
Northern Africa: ?
Southern Africa: ?
...Africa: 1032.5
Middle East: 370.9
India: 1210.2
China: 1353.8
South East Asia: 610.0
Australia and New Zealand: 35.6
Japan: 126.6
South Korea: 50.2
Other: ?
I was good at the algorithms and data structures part of my university course, but as a developer with ten years experience, I find it is very rare to actually use these now.

Far more important is how / when to index an database table, how to design the tables in the first place.

If I need an efficient algorithm, in most cases someone has written (and tested) it and put it in a library.
If people enjoy seeing it it seems decidedly churlish not to preserve it for future generations. As does someone who can only enjoy it because other people won't be able to.

As for missing the point, I'll raise you death of the author. A piece of art must stand on its own merits, not the intentions of its creator.
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Is it safe to say that merely getting accepted to YC, will give a startup access to all types of talent? Would you be quicker to take a tech position with equity from a selected YC company over a 9-5 position with a tech giant?

Side note: Good luck with all your applications, I hope all goes well for you.
The client tries to be as diverse as possible when it comes to connecting to other nodes, but the state where you're only connected to attackers should not be avoid. That's what I was trying to explain in the post.

> "the other 45 in the network know your real amount" implies some sort of voting mechanism, which is not how bitcoin works.

Sorry I wasn't implying a voting mechanism. Simply that your account information is controlled by whomever has the majority of the computing power in the network.
Sorry, but some of the things you wrote are about perception, not reality.

What does "prone to security issues" mean? And compared to what? When we compare iOS and Android, iOS had 304 vulnerabilities in 2007-2013 (294 in 2009-2013), while Android had 29 in 2009-2013[1]. That's order of magnitude difference, yet Android is blamed to be prone to security holes.

Also what does "clunky unless you run it on the latest hardware"? All systems are slow, when you run new system on old hardware. You cannot bend physics there. Ever used iOS4 on iPhone 3G? iOS7 on iPhone4? Or why there is no WP8 update for WP7 phones? These are exactly the same reasons.

Even the APIs in Play Services, as described in the article, are exactly marked as "google, not android". You project has to explicitly include Google APIs, it is not enough to target Android. Every Android developer knows that.

[1] http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15556/ and http://www.cvedetails.com/product/19997/
Speaking as a Finn, it's a cultural aspect common to all Nordic countries that there's much less of the sort of superficial friendliness to strangers or acquaintances than what is normative in the US. But when you do make friends with one of us Northerners, it's often a "till death do us part" sort of affair.

Oh, and for better or worse, alcohol is the social lubricant and a primary way of making friends in the Northern Europe even moreso than in most other places.
This video is no longer available : a critique on copyright claims on youtube
Well of course - it's difficult to get more western Europe than Portugal ;)
I think the strongest argument the article makes is the claim about the new Location APIs. Location algorithms are not dependent on Google services and have always been part of the core APIs, but now Google is moving new location algorithms into their closed source app. It's an obvious power grab, they want AOSP to be less and less useful on its own.
No love for the Washington DC area? :(

I've lived here since I was 10, and worked mostly in Maryland. Used to work in Silver Spring MD, then Hanover MD.
I'm from Russia and happy to stay here.
It have a poor contrast for text.
I'm curious to know if there are any internal google project of porting all the Google play API on iOS (either on Objective-C , or using a cross-platform language such as mono develop, which would make more sense).
Right, but the point I was trying to make is that if you're only connected to attackers, they could broadcast only parts of the chain. Perhaps only the part they're interested in to bring out their attack.

Bitcoin solves this by making the p2p connections as diverse as possible.
A couple of things:

You have to be absolutely certain that they will supply living and work permit for both you and your family. Immigration laws are very strict in Scandinavia, so you'd obviously want to be certain there won't be any nasty surprises with getting your wife and children here.

Living costs in Moscow and Stockholm is not that far from each other.

A full-time position as a front-end developer usually won't pay through the roof. However a good front-ender never needs to look far for a new job.

Career-wise where you'd really be able to take a leap is after a year or two as a frontend dev at this Stockholm company. By then you have working permit sorted out, a Swedish referral and maybe a little knowledge of the language.

When you have these things you can break into front-end contracting for customers in Sweden or other countries in Scandinavia (Oslo, Norway is particularly booming at the moment).

Front-end contracting is typically full-time contracts on-location for between 6 and 12 months. It typically pays 100+ USD an hour, meaning a monthly income of 16K USD or so given a standard 40 hour workweek. If you have the skills (and it sounds like you do), the contracts are pretty easy to get by using agencies who are always looking for new development talent.

It's very hard to jump directly into contracting in Sweden from Russia, particularly due to the whole work-visa problem. But once you are inside, it's a very viable opportunity.

If your wife enjoys learning languages, there is free Swedish language education (she can even apply for a "learning bonus" of around 1000 USD pr 6 weeks or so). Once you are in, there's also (almost) free health care and such.

Stockholm is a lovely city, and it's only a 2,5 hour flight from Moscow, priced typically at around 400-500 USD round-trip.
I'm curious, which Countries did you consider for Western Europe, and Which for Southern/Mediterranean Europe?
JavaOne 2013 Roundup: Java 8 is Revolutionary, Java is back
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Having read through it, I rather suspect that that's not a matter of writers blocking readers or the other way round, but instead a case of writers blocking writers - he's writing a lot of data to the table, and it's highly likely that InnoDB has escalated the lock to a table lock - which effectively prevents concurrent writes.
Taxes are alot higher than in Russia. You'll probably end up paying 50-60% in total taxes (income + sales + various other hidden taxes on consumer goods etc.). So thats something to consider.
From PEP 443: "In addition, it is currently a common anti-pattern for Python code to inspect the types of received arguments, in order to decide what to do with the objects."
NSA 'taped millions of French calls'; France summons the US ambassador in Paris.
Are ads coming to WhatsApp and other messaging apps? tl;dr - no.
Who is Banksy? Is he Satoshi Nakamoto?
Interview with Pelle Hjortblad CEO at Moonlight Management AB
I don't think the Pirate Bay people ever lived in the USA, nor do they want to come close.
If you are currently making $7-$10k on average, why would you relocate to an foreign country and make less on a monthly base? Also seems like you are married with 2 children. Relocating your family will be more expensive than your first thought because most probably you will have to cover their visa expenses. You all need to get familiar with "aliens".

If I were you I would offer remote service to that company but would not relocate there. If they accept it's a win win. Other wise you can continue freelance.
Sweden has implemented the Blue Card scheme, so work permits should now be simpler for highly skilled migrants:

http://www.workpermit.com/news/2013-08-23/sweden-joins-eu-bl...
I rest my case as for Central Europe. The main line of division is along Roman vs. Byzantine legacy, and this point of view is not hard to defend

Of course pushing forward the category of Central Europe may stem from a variety of motivations, like some people just fearing the stigma of being "Eastern" as you say.

But this does not by itself invalidate the legitimate justifications for using the concept of Central Europe and it's certainly not enough of a reason to drop it altogether
I'm not sure where your numbers come from, but they're overestimating Australia + NZ by around a quarter.

From Wikipedia, NZ ~4.7 million, AU ~23.2 million, total ~28 million.
I used Oceania, because the poll was implied to also mean "Australasia", which is a geographically vague term, but is commonly known to be very inclusive.
Result of one of my front page articles on HN: https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/41591...
I tried to follow Wikipedia as closely as possible, but stupidly didn't keep my workings.

My starting point was the full list for Europe. From there I split off UK, then split off Scandanavia, then split off Southern Europe, then worked out a plausible split for the remaining western and eastern. For example, Czech fell into my eastern pile, but could have easily gone the other way...

I didn't even bother trying to bisect Africa or South America, as I couldn't find any evidence for such canonical bisections.

Political geography is tedious.
Reading your comments, I can really sense your frustration because I feel the same way. I live 15 minutes from California's state capital and this whole fiasco makes me want to just drive up there and do something.
My apologies - you're right. In the general case readers don't block writes, but InnoDB does use share locks on some foreign key interactions and when using the SERIALIZABLE isolation level.
Wow, I've heard that HN is often pro google, but this thread makes it blatantly clear.
friendliness scale

more friendly -> less friendly

Denmark -> Norway -> Sweden -> Finland
I've been browsing with showdead on for a while now and more and more I see quite reasonable-looking posts that have become [dead].

My hypothesis is a little more charitable: people just get caught by some semi-automatic filter and get accidentally hellbanned. Which is still a problem.

Then I post and hardly ever get responses or upvotes, which makes me wonder if:

a) I'm hellbanned myself

b) I'm a victim of my timezone

c) My writing is not as useful as I think
Well - I'm not sure I'm as pessimistic as that...

But look - if your default position on a topic is X, and it happens to be the case that there is no rational way to explain why you are wrong about X, then you can hardly be blamed for continuing to carry on believing X.

So if you're right that there is nothing that can be said on this issue - then the powers that be will just steam-roll academia. How can they even play political? They won't be able to convince anyone to support them!

My point is that while my intuition is that academics ARE valuable and should be given large amounts of freedom - still we don't have a choice but to believe that we can find some justification for this. We certainly won't figure it out by being defeatist about it.

My position is the only rationale one on this topic - but lordy convincing a single academic of its reason is beyond me. The irony of this is painful.
The author clearly showcases how this is not true in his (and probably others') case. Anonymous functions, function pointers, etc. are not language-specific features, but rather something you learn when learning to program.

I think the point of the article is that being smart at puzzles is not enough. It may not matter whether you have 3 or 10 years of programming experience, but if you have 20 years of puzzle solving experience with only 6 months of (real-life) programmering experience you have a lot of non-trivial learning left to do.

Being in a startup setting where everyone (usually) is expected to be a bit of jack-of-all-trades, I would argue that having programming experience trumphs being smart, at least for the first period. You may be the master of finding smart algorithms to design your application, but if you can't build the first CRUD website it does you little good.
Poetry requires quite a bit of technical skill. You can immediately tell the difference between a good poet and someone trying to imitate them. Not so with Pollock - a painting by someone trying to imitate Pollock looks very much like an actual Pollock.
It sounds like you heard "causation" when parent said correlation. Correlation is observed in past samples; what you describe is a mechanism for trying to disprove causation, but it won't remove any correlation from the past samples, and it probably won't remove the correlation with historical wealth of the family etc.
I wouldn't dare to claim Victor for my cause, and I'm only reflecting on what he said in his learnable programming essay.

> It seems that for him, discussing improving programming tools was a diversion from his long term aims of uncovering a new way of thinking with computers. His disassociation from live coding seems to be a direct criticism of Khan Academy's approach but maybe he has a more general criticism of live coding...

I don't think this is indicated in his essay. i.e.

> Programming is a way of thinking, not a rote skill. Learning about "for" loops is not learning to program, any more than learning about pencils is learning to draw. ... Thus, the goals of a programming system should be: (1) to support and encourage powerful ways of thinking; (2) to enable programmers to see and understand the execution of their programs

He very much is concerned with programming not as a new way of thinking, but as an existing way of thinking. The examples in his essays then go on to elaborate on programming with better tools to understand execution; it is not a re-invention in any sense. We could try to interpret this passage:

> We change programming. We turn it into something that's understandable by people.

I think this means: we make programming into something that's understandable by people. Comprehensible. Is it change, or is it augmentation? His words imply the former, but his actions (features) imply the latter. Finally we get to:

> Likewise, a well-designed system is not simply a bag of features. A good system is designed to encourage particular ways of thinking, with all features carefully and cohesively designed around that purpose. This essay will present many features! The trick is to see through them -- to see the underlying design principles that they represent, and understand how these principles enable the programmer to think.

Yep, it is about design. He is just scratching the surface of a field I refer to as PXD (programmer experience design) :). The essay then goes onto to present design principles useful in helping make programming more understandable, and examples of those principles at work through various demoed features. Some of those features include some form of liveness; but many don't.
If the benefits can't be measured, why are we wasting money on them? I can also give you oodles of unmeasureable and unquantifiable benefits. Just send me a big check and then don't try to box me in with oversight or accountability.

(There are of course some measurable benefits from the current system. For example: http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=W04 )
Population of Australia 22.68 million
Population of New Zealand 4.433 million

Where did the extra 8.5 million come from?
Aren't intelligence and wealth correlated with each other, and both are correlated with SAT and IQ tests? I thought the explanation for the mysterious "g-factor" in intelligence that IQ is supposed to measure isn't that it exists in and of itself, but that a number of measurable outcomes (income, wealth, test scores, GPA, job prestige, etc.) are all positively correlated, and then that correlation is called g.
Hey!

I recently moved to Stockholm from London to join a startup as a software engineer. Here's my experience so far:

Stockholm is a lovely city. Small enough to not be too hectic, but big enough to offer a broad variety of things to do. On average, I would say it's expensive – more than London at least – but I think I'm still living like a tourist instead of a local. You're going to have to hunt for the good and cheap places. On the other hand, rent is cheaper. The salaries are lower compared to London and what you've been earning as a freelancer in Moscow but I believe 1000EUR/month spending money for a single person should be enough for a good standard of living.

The startup scene is really picking up. There's a number of excellent startups and an attitude towards substance over hype. There are also quite a lot of events happening in the tech and startup scene and most of them are on meetup.com.

I'm 26, single, no kids, so my situation is different than yours. When it came to make a decision, salary was not my top priority. The company and people were pretty cool so I just went with it. I was getting a bit bored in London anyway, so I wanted a new experience.

Whether it will be a move forward or not it's completely up to you, but I think Stockholm has the potential and infrastructure to help you progress individually and career-wise.
Hacker News voters# per million:

pop/mil votes density
--------------------------------------
Canada 35.1 284 8.09
Australia/NZ 35.6* 283 7.95
Scandinavia 25.7 151 5.88
USA 316.8 1817 5.74
UK 62.2 190 3.05
Western Europe 278.7 363 1.30
Eastern Europe 176.7 155 0.88
Southern Europe 153.5 65 0.42
Japan 126.6 34 0.27
South America 387.4 71^ 0.18
Russia 142.2 26 0.18
South East Asia 610.0 110 0.18
India 1210.2 196 0.16
Southern North Am 176.6 25 0.14
South Korea 50.2 7 0.14
Middle East 370.9 40 0.11
China 1353.8 61 0.05
Africa 1032.5 26^ 0.03

# As at time of posting

* Australia/NZ population is treated as Oceania, as the original survey implied Australasia.

^ Combined votes for northern and southern regions.
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He _was_ true to his own, doubtful, self.
Google is creating a walled garden just like any other company does. The article points to how they are making their shift towards an operating system that is similar to ios (in terms of lock in). Android may be an open-source platform but, on the majority of devices that compete at the top level, it becomes far from open source.

It's understandable why Google would lock people out of seeing the back end of their closed apps. But you have to look at what the long-term implications of them slowly removing support for ASOP apps are. As Google continually pushes out fantastic products that tie in so well to the mobile experience, why would anyone/developer want to have/develop [for] anything else. As this power grows, Google can strong-arm phone manufactures to develop hardware/features/etc to work with what they are developing. They have to sign contractual agreements to get the top version of Android and are then locked in to keep up the good terms. Google is outsourcing the hardware manufacturing to other companies and ensuring that if a user wants a good phone, they will be using their services.

Many people here are claiming any company can leave Google's garden like Amazon did. While some companies may be able to do that, I'm struggling to think of a one with the technological background, money to invest, and callousness for risk who are willing to try. Amazon has a huge assortment of media that it can toss at its users who use their hardware. Other companies don't have a differentiating factor or the software development to be able to make a truly competitive product to drive people away from Google supported Android. Just look at how much Microsoft, a software giant, is struggling to gain any shred of market share.

No executive in any reasonable company is going to propose to invest billions in order to squeeze into the highly competitive mobile OS market. It’s a huge risk that only a startup could swallow, and yet few startups could even raise the money required to topple the Google supported android market.

What the future is starting to look like is the one Google was initially afraid of, that users were” faced a Draconian future, a future where…one company, one device, one carrier would be [the] only choice.” As Google gains more power, the open source part that Android users love is going to slowly disappear. This may or may not happen, there are many variables that could prevent it, but it is a future that would bring Google the highest return and that is the goal of all market traded companies.
I think you vastly underestimate the value of "other knowledge" for any kind of complex undertaking. Unless you get a domain expert who happens to be a rock star programmer and a ninja architect and top-notch devops, you'll have to compromise somewhere. Take an iOS game: Depending on the game it can be vastly more value to have knowledge of game programming and game AI than having knowledge about iOS frameworks. If there's a team on the project I'd even go as far and say that I would pick the domain expert over the framework expert as team lead, given that all other capabilities were on par.
Is it really that obvious? What power are they grabbing? By this reasoning, Google may not augment any 'traditional' AOSP service with improved functionality. That's obviously ridiculous, so what solution would you envisage?
Of course there are crimes, but statistically it might be lower than in other places. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
really true
There might be benefits other than the wage that make up for it.

I am not sure about Russian healthcare and so forth but free healthcare, education, childcare (cheap at least) and such might make up for it.
Is Software Testing Really a Low Profile Job?