skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The subject of the OP is the climate for startups, and it is almost certain that the climate for startups is better in the U.S. than it is in Germany or Austria.

Off-topic, but I recently considered relocating to Germany, and here is a brief synopsis of the main considerations.

I saw figures on the web once saying that in the U.S. government (Federal, state and local) takes about 40% of the income of individuals and in Germany government takes about 50%. Take the figures with a grain of salt because I do not recall where I saw them or who compiled them.

Homeschooling is illegal in Germany, and the law against homeschooling is enforced, making it very difficult to raise children there without sending your children to government schools or to private schools heavily regulated by the government. For example, it is illegal for private schools to pay their teachers less than the pay of teachers in government schools. The result of the heavy regulation of private schools is that almost everyone sends their children to government schools.

It is easier for men to get laid in Germany than in the U.S. I cannot tell you why, but several sources have said so, including a French manufacturer of sex dolls (high-end ones costing thousands each) who said that his company's dolls sell much better in Japan and the U.S. than they do in Europe. His exact words were, "Sex is easier in Europe, but taxes are harder." So if you are a heterosexual man having trouble getting laid in the U.S., moving to France or Germany might solve the problem.
You've neglected to name: a field, a sample group, and a definition of "research skills".

Among the general population, skill at taking physics tests probably correlates pretty well with skill at doing physics research -- both are dominated by people who know something about physics.

Once you're among the people in the physics Ph.D. program at an Ivy League university, the correlation is pretty weak.

Of course, to the extent that you measure "research skill" by things like "number of papers produced" or "amount of grant money attracted", anything that helps you get a more prestigious adviser at a prestigious university is correlated with "skill". Ergo, it doesn't hurt to be good at taking tests. But after you've passed your graduate qualifying exam, you can afford to stop worrying about tests, pretty much forever. Real life -- even university life -- is about other things.
The numbers add up if you consider all the other governments, not just the US, and compare that to the $39B for pretty much every pharma company.

As to the shortage of doctors: Doctors in Canada are limited to the amount of patients they can see, not so much by what they can charge. (Although the rates for services are set, the same way they are often set by HMO's in the US.)

The whole reason this is done is to prevent doctor "factories" - doctors that spend 10 minutes with patients and provide poor diagnosis' in order to see as many people as possible.

The shortage is exactly due to the fact that they don't hire more. The number of semi-qualified medical professionals driving cabs in this country is outlandish. The doctoral societies have been not bent in their admission guidelines, and hospitals simply don't have enough space for all the people needed a Canadian residency requirement.

There are tons of people willing to practice in Canada.
Cycling’s One-in-a-Million Story
No, they obviously do not. (Being bright is always helpful, of course, but they are pretty different skill sets, I think.) This is supported by the fact that marks/GRE scores aren't particularly important for admission to most top research PhD programs, in CS at least.
Suits go out and owe money all over town and the government pees on our rug?
I agree. The best will quit a boring job, though, right?

(says someone who sticks around)
Too long in the tub.
This guy knows which way the wind is blowing. I laughed at this:

"Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies - they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works."
Yes. Actually we [cassandra] are seeing a fair number of people switching to Cassandra from hbase because of speed and reliability (no single points of failure).
Actually, the problem is that they thought they WERE a search company, in the way that Google is.

My point is, instead, the ongoing bizarre otherworldly logic of their management.
"This is supported by the fact that marks/GRE scores aren't particularly important for admission to most top research PhD programs, in CS at least."

Is this really true? (honest question). I can imagine GRE scores not being important, but I always thought that good grades were a kind of baseline for admission. As a thought experiment, do people with terrible grades,(but good research backgrounds, say) get into a good PhD program in CS?
I mailed a can of soda that was only available in the town where my college was to a friend across the country. It arrived intact, only slightly dented.
I found a very effective way to limit my spending at Powell's Technical. The rule is simple; you have to leave the store after picking out the books you want. The ones you still want to buy after having lunch or walking around the block are the ones you can buy.

I actually follow this rule approximately two visits of every three.
If this came from anyone but MS, I would say it's a good example of how to lie with charts. The upgrade rules are pretty simple, but drawing it as a chart makes it look complex. You can't upgrade to a different bitness, because that might break apps or drivers that depend on the old bitness. You can't "upgrade" to an OS with fewer features (e.g. Ultimate to Home). I don't know why they don't allow upgrades from XP or Vista Starter; that sounds like plain laziness given that IIRC it is possible to upgrade XP -> Vista -> 7.

In general Apple tries to configure things at runtime, while Windows does more install-time configuration which inevitably breaks when things change.
> Austria for example, and Germany. They have social services that are built in and aren't nearly as bloated as the US government.

And, they're about as diverse as Minnesota.
Many research organizations structure the positions of senior recruits this way. For instance, senior researchers at MSR are given this leeway.

However, the outcomes are not what one would hope. Although demos are held quarterly or semi-annually to give then idea of progress, it does not take long for an organization to develop which is more focused on its own survival than that of accomplishing its promoted goal.
Not a crypto person. I'm pretty sure this is going to be ripped apart by tptacker, NateLawson or cperciva. But I'll speak up anyway :-)

I see a lot of sites use HTTP basic auth to do usernames/passwords (especially startups). Or worse, they send it over the clear (for e.g., some very popular APIs out there which I shall not name). Their reasons vary but typically it is one of cost and convenience. It is of course a terrible practice.

Compared to HTTP basic auth, this seems less evil. In this case, with no implementation issues, I assume you need an active attacker. With HTTP basic, you can just grep logs and decrypt credentials.

This seems the lesser of two evils.

Please be gentle :-)
To me, search specifically is something you don't want to give an impression you aren't good at. There are more types of "search" than just keyword search. There's ambient findability, which Flickr does and Bing is trying to do as well. Showing related items could gain from knowing about search. Is the Bing team going to dig deep into Flickr or is Flickr going to need to continue to be good at search? (And in the case of Flickr, there's plenty of room for improvement.)

I'm trying to think of a good analogy. Anyone want to chime in?
From main.php: $keyLength = 256;

I'm assuming most people who would choose to use this library will just copy his example code and use 256 bit keys, which are very easy to factor.
> I was under the impression that lack of regulation is what caused many of these mega banks to collapse.

You may be under that impression, but it's wrong. (It's being pushed by folks who like regulation.)

They were all regulated to the hilt. AIG especially.
Update 2: See also the PSF blog: http://pyfound.blogspot.com/2009/08/in-search-of-success-sto...
Thanks for the vote of confidence! :-)
When a company does something stupid, its competitors stand ready to benefit. I love this tweet: http://twitter.com/CJAhearn/status/2822810506
Without knowing anything about the mechanics of IPO's I'm sure there's a great opportunity for a startup with a heavy finance background. The amounts charged are absolutely absurd.
I'm still the only person working on tarsnap, unless you count some (free) help I'm getting from my brother to build a more useful website.
Interesting article, as a non-programmer I don't have a firm grasp of whether his weekend hacking test is legit or not, but I can say that our startup is already using wave, and when Google lets regular plebes like me on, I'm going in head first. The sheer amount of cruft in email conversions and the maddening quilt of chat clients will have me waving it up as soon as I'm able.

That said, he does have a point that incrementalism has been the way technology has been developed and adopted in the last 50 years. The QWERTY keyboard is the most painfully obvious example of this and I can see why he would be arguing that Wave is equivalent to deploying Dvorak keyboards en masse and hoping people opt for the more efficient option. Sure, Dvorak is better, but only for people who start on it, and there's no momentum.

I would love to see wave take over the way we communicate, if only to vindicate me and my rants to my family and friends about it.
I don't think it needs to be that complicated. Just add a new comment field that contains the session key in plaintext. Neither the server nor client ever knows the difference.
(1) There is some nice geometry going on here. The tree appears to be embedded in hyperbolic space (is that what "hypertree" means?), visualized using the Poincare disk model. Edges of the tree are drawn as geodesics. Node-to-node moves are accomplished via translations of hyperbolic space.

One result of this is that you can demonstrate to yourself that a rotation in hyperbolic space can be realized as the composition of translations -- which is not true in Euclidean space. Pick three nodes, repeatedly click on them in order (1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, etc.), and watch how the space slowly rotates.

(2) There is a bit of a problem with the UI details, at least in my browser (Firefox). The clickable area for each node appears to be roughly a square whose top is the horizontal diameter of the red disc representing the node. Thus, clicking in the upper half of a red disc accomplishes nothing. And trying to click in the center of a disc gets you what you want about half of the time.
Actually, just mail it with either no postage or one cent postage. It has a high probability of getting through, even if it's international mail. I did some experiments a few years ago, and of the 4-5 I sent every one of them got through.

Crayons wouldn't help anyway, except for maybe fooling people. The postal service machine's actually only look at the envelopes for flourescence which is applied to the stamps. In reality, the stamp's design could be totally blank. However, if the package or letter is an odd size, humans must handle it because it would otherwise jam the machinery - the reason there are now charges for oddly shaped mail. So, if you're scamming the USPS, make it an envelope that will have to be processed by people. Maybe a 1/2 too wide or something like that.

I'm not 100% about this, but I think the machinery spits out the envelope for a human to look at if there doesn't appear to be a flourescent stamp; else stamps from 50+ years ago would be invalid.

One more interesting item: the USPS uses some pretty cool OCR to read the addresses on mail. As I recall it has a 98% accuracy, although I wouldn't be able to find the source.
In college, Unilever mailed a bar of soap (in the normal bar-of-soap box) to every student on campus. The whole post office reeked of scented soap. Dozens wound up in fountains around campus. I can't smell that soap without being grossed out.
Well, for both grades and GRE scores, the assumption is that you're going to do at least decently: if you had truly terrible grades, then that would raise a lot of questions about your work ethic / interest in the subject / etc (those questions might be addressed if you had strong letters of recommendation from well-known professors who explained why you did badly, for example).

But certainly the top schools don't simply take the students with the best GRE scores or marks: there are many rejected applicants with perfect GPAs and great GRE scores, but no research experience.
Well excuse those of us that don't have English as a first language. How good is your Mandarin? Just because somebody doesn't speak your language as well as you do it doesn't mean they don't have something interesting to say.

</even more grumpy>
Really? I did most of my grade school/high school in the 90's and I can't tell you much about the 70's based just on what I learned in school, let alone the 80's. So 'a few years from now' is a bit of an overstatement.
I agree that this is hard and necessary. Whoa. When we were developing the first version of the product, we were always torn between releasing it and letting people see our steaming pile of half-finished code and tearing it apart and waiting until it was "perfect" and "wowing" everyone that came to our site. The reality was exactly what Kent is talking about. We released a terrible looking and difficult-to-use alpha version that people actually used, and it took months to disavow ourselves of features that we thought were awesome that users simply didn't want.

I also agree strongly with bmelton, geez, it's so tough to fight the desire to release something "perfect" when it's way more valuable to answer the burning questions and leave perfect for the birds.
Yes, basic auth with no encryption is bad. In some cases, this is no better though.

For example, if the key and JS are provided by the server, then it is the same as basic auth (all data needed to obtain the plaintext password is in the HTTP session). If the key is generated locally on the client, you have the problem of including a good enough PRNG, seeded from enough entropy that the attacker can't guess it.

And those are all purely passive attacks (no MITM interjection). Active attacks could include modifying the JS to insert another field in the FORM POST response that is the plaintext key.
My question is: do you really "do business" in new york? because i found the definition of what is not doing business in ny state, and I would be only operating a bank account...
http://law.justia.com/newyork/codes/limited-liability-compan...
Evidence why this kind of talk is needed, ironically on the same day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748430
As someone that just went through the grad school app process, I can say that most schools have GRE minimum scores, except for the top schools (everyone that MIT admits is in the top 10%, so it's not really a good indicator for them). So really you need good GRE scores to not be disqualified, but they don't actually get you in anywhere.
Sleep paralysis has probably been responsible for quite a lot of superstition through history. I experienced it myself regularly while I lived in a particular apartment, but neither before then nor after, so I wonder if there are some environmental factors involved too. I didn't find out that it was a well-known phenomenon until years later.
What is the cost (time and money) of going through the process of getting the application for authority?
The bit change makes sense, but why not upgrade to an OS with fewer features? Maybe I bought Vista Ultimate, and it wasn't worth it, so I want to just stick with the normal home version this time around. I have to do a full clean install for that? I think MS could easily add support to upgrade to a "lower" version of the OS if you bought the premium last time.
How times have changed. A Reuters executive told me, many years ago (quoting from my less than stellar memory): "Let me tell you, son, this internet thing will only be really important in the pornography business."
If you feel like you must create a new "window" then just do create a new normal browser window where everything works as the user knows. Don't think that an animation makes your site better.
Do you often play with yourself while waiting in line at the store or having an awkward situation?
No, but people are able to upgrade their content management systems. The internet wasn't around in 1900, but you can read news articles from that period just fine on NYTimes.com.
I hope you realize that it doesn't really cost few cents. The taxes paid by us keeps USPS running. FYI: USPS lost 2.8 billion dollars in 2008.
Tell HN: HeavyMetal for PHP released
We've open sourced most of the framework we used to build massify.com to the world. We're still working on the release, but there's a usable version available on GitHub.

Three years of development on this framework. Designed for scale, designed by people who hate PHP but have to work with it everyday. It's been in active production for 2+ years now and smooth sailing the entire way.

This isn't an official release, just a notice to any HN hackers who might be interested in a PHP framework designed by a bunch of python, .NET and Java hackers.

You can get it here:

http://getheavy.info

Or the NSFW link:

http://heavyfuckingmetal.com/

Would love feedback.

Cheers!

Your friends at Massify.
That's interesting -- we've seen a lot of the opposite, especially from the .20 release. I guess it all depends on what you need to do with it :)
Oh, how horrible -- self promotion :)
Two reasons;

1) You begin to get a combination explosion of all the scenarios Microsoft would have to test "upgrades" with.

2) Some people may appreciate this, but others would complain about program or feature X/Y/Z suddenly going missing from their machine after an "upgrade".
I've heard that someone once addressed a letter to:

HILL

JOHN

MASS

And it got there. See if you can figure out the intended recipient - it took me a good half hour. Spoilers at http://www.randomhouse.com/features/billbryson/bb_title/disp...
Re-read my post; Actors are incredibly useful, and I like the idea behind Scala's type system -- bind things together with contracts, explicitly declare types only when you have to, and let the compiler handle the rest.

Let me repeat: I like Scala. I just wish that the Scala creators had avoided creating a syntax that is almost, but not entirely, quite unlike Java.

Look at Lift -- fast, scalable, and may as well be written in Greek. What is '_ ::'? What about '(something _)' and '(__ thing __)'? Why does Lift require that the programmer require goat-sacrifices to Maven to get things working?

It's very newcomer-unfriendly, and Scala people tend to be incredibly defensive of the language's odd syntax... and really hostile towards dynamic languages. Both static and dynamic-typed languages have their place in the programming world, so accept that and move on.
Health care is not just like any other product or service.

It's impossible to predict when you'll need it, and how much of it you'll need. When you really need it, you'll pay any price for it, even if that means spending every penny you have and then going heavily into debt.

I can't think of a single other product or service that behaves quite like that.
I think it's generally considered okay to submit your own blog here.
It's funny... I feel like I've been going through a mid-life crisis since before I graduated college. My wife and I also identified most of our strife as having root cause in our (lack of) personal happiness. Not sure where I'm going with this...
It's a stupid argument in the first place. If there was a social healthcare system in the US, then do rich people somehow have less money? Do people really believe that there won't be better 'cutting edge' techniques that are expensive, but you can only pay for 'out of pocket' or with a private insurance company?

It's not like private insurance doesn't exist in Canada (for example). You're just guaranteed a certain base-level of medical care by the government. You still have to pay for things like prescriptions unless you have private insurance. Things -- like dental work -- are not covered either unless you have private insurance plan that covers it.

{edit} You have to pay for non-life threatening prescriptions, like anti-depressants or antibiotics. Just thought that I should clarify that IIRC, things like insulin which a person needs to stay alive are covered by the government {/edit}
I'm also confused by your dislike of operators and syntax sugar. These are some of the things that made Ruby so popular, and the sort of ham-stringing that make Python and Java so long-winded and painful...
If you're worried about n00bs shooting themselves in the foot, that's really a matter of training -- you wouldn't give all soldiers single-shot rifles just to make sure the new recruits couldn't lose control of an automatic. Later on, those "technical excellences" may be exactly the right spanner for the bolt.
There's New Zealand if you want more diversity.
"Who in the United States doesn't have access to healthcare?"

I took the liberty of looking up some numbers, because clearly you haven't. The answer to your question is over 46.6 million Americans(1) (you have 300 million total), the ones without health insurance.

Add another 25 million Americans(2) who are underinsured and the number is scarier. Underinsured is defined as people who have insurance but end up spending >10% of their income on health care expenses.

The same source (2) indicates that 42% of working adults (19 to 64 years-old) are uninsured or underinsured.

So in short, who in the US doesn't have access to health care? Apparently 42% of them.

"Quite honestly, I don't see why this is such a massive issue with everyone right now..."

You don't see an issue with someone breaking a leg and going bankrupt because of it? You don't see an issue with a population going broke just to keep themselves hobbling along?

Here's some more fun. 50% of bankruptcies in the US today are due to health care costs (5). In fact, 68% of those who declare bankruptcy due to unaffordable health care costs have health insurance (4).

You don't see a problem here?

"Medical innovation (in it's current state, meaning building things on a molecular level) is prohibitively expensive."

Yet Europe and Canada (and other first-world nations with public health care) are doing fine at their own medical research. It's s till expensive, but it's being funded by the government, and the people still get great health care (some of it is better than the US...).

Your thesis is one that is trotted out a lot by proponents of the private system, but it simply holds no water. We have many cases of massive medical R&D being done in countries where every single person receives free health care.

"Also, how does the US Gov't plan on getting the cost of healthcare down?"

Easy. By going public. You asked if there is a magic wand, and I'm here to tell you it doesn't get more magic-wand-y than this. Right now 25% of every health care dollar spent is going towards administrative expenses (2), compared to 1% to 5% for public health systems around the world (2).

By cutting out the private insurance companies you instantly gain a 26-32% efficiency on your health care dollars. Imagine the number of people you can cover with that massive amount of money (some $400 billion per year as of 2003).

(1) http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=628

(2) http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2008/06/1...

(3) http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/8800.php

(4) http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

(5) http://www.pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study/Bankruptcy-2009.pdf