skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is little more than an advertisement for a couple of companies that have set-up base in Berlin. Much like everyone else, I'd tired of these technology 'gossip columns' that add very little to the dialogue.

At the very least tell me /why/ you think Berlin vs. London vs. Santiago is the next Silicon Valley. Instead, all I get is a list, series, catalog of companies that are based in the area (alongside a few quotes from people who have massive amounts to gain from feeding a bubble) - what am I suppose to conclude from that?

Parading an odd few companies is hardly worth your time. Maybe these companies haven't gotten to the size where they are able to move to SF yet. I want some deep, interesting research; research and insight tells me why 'X' is the next Silicon Valley.

This type of deep insight and research is sorely missing from this particular article. Here's a prime case in point: "One factor helping Berlin become more like Silicon Valley is that the attitude to risk is changing."

In this quote, the writer alludes to European's aversion to risk. Sure, I agree that's a problem, but I'd prefer some analysis rather than depending an a quote from a pop technologist. In particular, there's a lot to discuss about the treatment of bankruptcy in the US vs Europe; the European system penalizes bankruptcy a lot harder than the US, squishing risk-taking.

This is an interesting argument, but in this article, it doesn't get a look in.

Here's the point I'm trying to make: It's bad/unwise to write quick articles about technology that drive pageviews (like this one), but /it is/ a shame to see them keep bubbling to the top of Hacker News.
Ugghhh... Forbes. Clicking through four pages and then having to scroll to find my place in TFA makes me uncomfortable about having to upvote the content.
They are comparable.

Bulgaria/Romania: You can easily get 1500-2500 Euro gross with a few years of XP. Taxes and cost of living are lower too.

Ukraine: An acquaintance of mine, who's sold a few startups, didn't have success there, because experienced people wouldn't work for less than 4k Euro. Developers get paid a lot in the big cities.

Russia: Crazy high wages in Moscow/St.Petersburg, though cost of living is insane too.

Don't know much about other countries, but the situation is definitely comparable.
Chris Stucchio has a couple of good blog posts explaining why this common reaction would not have the impact most people think it would.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html
Making Document Freedom Freer
Judging by the proportional rise in number of suspended accounts, I'd say they've gotten a lot better at catching spam.
Gerd Ludwig’s Long Look at the Chernobyl Disaster
I think Israel might be the example of how unplannable a startup hub is.

It's far from the markets and on the wrong side of trade barriers most startups serve (EU, NAFTA, etc). Other markets (including some pretty large countries) are completely inaccessible. Flying in and out is expensive and inconvenient. It's not a place people can arbitrarily migrate to so workforce is largely limited to locals. They speak a language and use a currency no one else does. It's not a financial hub, not even in the VC/startup niche. etc.

Then there is also the fact that the country is in a constant^ threat of existential war which means your employees are doing active reserve. Long term anxiety is real.

Of course there are the major positives that do make it work. I think that's an interesting point. Maybe the pluses get multiplied in a way that minuses don't in the case of startup hubs. That would imply that optimizing around the edges (eg living cost, CGT, typical "ease of business" measures) are not as important as complaints might suggest.

^By constant I mean that if you look at a 10-20 year horizon from any point in history, there is a substantial risk that conflict will affect your life as a citizen. Many Israelis hold foreign passport in case things go south.
There are lots of free udemy courses that teaches web development. Here's the link:

https://www.udemy.com/courses/Technology/?view=grid&price=fr...

You need some digging to find the courses that interest you, but it's well worth it.
You can use gvp (https://github.com/pote/gvp) to isolate your workspaces (GOPATHs, really) for each of your projects, you can then include your dependencies in your project's repo or have a Godeps file specifying versioning which you can use with gpm (https://github.com/pote/gpm).

Hope you find it useful! :)
Sure. That said in most regulatory environments putting orders into a market that you have no intention of trading is illegal. Enforcement and it's impact of profitability on this sort of predatory trading is an issue.
Just had drinks over the weekend with a friend that works IT for a major exchange in the midwest. He was telling me how they set up the network interconnect cables from their trading systems to the co-located brokers. They are measured to be identical to the millimeter to satisfy all the high-speed brokers that want to sit next to the exchange and avoid any argument about who can get in quicker.
Pierre L'Hoest creates its own accelerator Liège – Belgium
Depressed again
Startup for several years, but little to show for it. Co founders left, and I have been alone for nearly a year. The product is in beta, and I have not made any publicty. My infrastructure is being used by some customers. Revenue is falling again. No time and energy left to grow it currently.

I have recently started working in a Coworking space. At least I am building up a routine, and not procrastinating that much. But who knows, I have been here for only three days now. Atmosphere is nice though, and this will probably help. Costs have increased in 200$/month. Scratch that: no more coffee shops, so saving on coffee and sitting comfortably now.

I am feeling very depressed. The only thing that motivates me is doing sport, and playing computer games.

I am sleeping a lot, in an unhealthy way: I go to bed relatively early, read my tablet, watch a video, generally lose time, unable to sleep. I watch too many movies, without interest, just killing time. I have not read a book in ages. In the morning I do not feel like standing up, but I still manage most of the time to be on my feet before eight.

I am not going out very often, but if I do, old patterns emerge, and I drink too much. I am not that young anymore, so that burns a lot of energy. I have never had alcohol problems, but this is dangerous in my situation. I should be careful.

Getting married next year, but not in the mood. My girlfriend is probably very unhappy, but does not say anything.

Not very keen on hanging around with people currently, but I still have some friends.

I am living a multiple failure: startup failure together with midlife crisis, and no children, which is something I miss.

Money is fortunately not a problem, but I am becoming unemployable, and burned-out. Going back to the employee / consultant frigthens me. I love the freedom I have. I want so much for my startup to succeed ... It is my only priority. I do not want to give up.

Any feedback is very much welcome.
Google viewed Facebook poaching as a "Defcon 2" event, new emails reveal
This is very useful and thoughtful feedback - thank you.

Having just deployed this app up last week, I am experimenting with different ways to describe it. I was unsure of the "introvert" tact to begin with, and am now certain it is not the best choice.

Rather than misunderstanding introversion (as you claim I do simply from reading an experimental tag line for a web app), it is more likely that I failed at capturing the essence of the product in the tag line. There is plenty of successful marketing copy that uses words differently than a thoughtful definition would dictate.

I think the wise choice is to remove both notions of blogging and introversion from the description, and focus more on the process of writing. My goal is to create a place to write on the web that feels offstage from the large social networks that I believe extroverts thrive on.
Show HN: An orientation-aware VR viewer for the mobile web
Yup - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax
You can make it very small to cut out almost all of these problems and it wouldn't be noticeable to any non-HF traders. It's not gotten very far in the US and is only partially supported in the EU (though I think there's something amiss with the EU proposal).
I remember when this first broke getting heavily downvoted for suggesting that RSA wasn't paid $10 million to create a backdoor for their customer's as everyone was implying at the time. Rather, they (naively) were paid to joint develop a technology that would be a marketing dream "Hey this included help from the brightest minds at the NSA so why wouldn't you use it for your own organization?!"

So I found this quote to be very interesting: "We could have been more sceptical of NSA's intentions," RSA Chief Technologist Sam Curry told Reuters. "We trusted them because they are charged with security for the U.S. government and U.S. critical infrastructure."
That's a much more compelling-looking changelog! Good to see the anti-bufferbloat work proceeding apace.
I don't think it is quality slip as much as scope increase. Now there are more topics on the homepage that will not interest everyone.
A lot of my resistance is due to the fact that I've been burned in the past by the fine print and ended up having to pay 80% instead of the agreed upon 20%. If I truly trusted that the insurance company would be there for me when I need them, I would have a different approach. As it stands I paid monthly insurance premiums + deductible + most of the bill. No thanks. I'll take my chances on my own.

Edit: For clarity, the insurance company decided to pay 80% of what they claimed the procedure was worth, not what it actually cost. Apparently there was something in the fine print about that.
Quote "Very cool - hope this becomes a template for other companies as to how to properly handle open sourcing the various important parts of the stack in the future."

I DON'T it was A) Not a driver (They should have made the driver and released it B) Use the actual chipset not one removed chipset and have people hack on it for money.
City vs. Suburb: Walking One Mile in Streets or Culs-de-sac
It's not just increased liquidity, it's also a decrease in the bid/ask spread, which is the actual cost of purchasing. HFT drives those much lower, decreasing the cost for most participants.
ScaleArc: Benchmarking with sysbench
I remember playing Quake 3 on a Pentium 2 233 MHz in 1999 and a Voodoo 3D graphic card (30+ fps).

This was the first game that had no software renderer.

All other games (til ~2001) including Unreal Tournament just run fine on a Pentium 133 MHz with a software renderer (exceptions were also Outcast and Ultima 9).
Healthcare isn't a product by any stretch of the imagination. We are human, we get sick, we get injured. Even the best of us. It is also morally wrong to not treat those who can't pay.

Disclaimer: I am not in support of the ACA, I don't think that it does a good or sane job of solving a problem.
you've got the option. IIRC, q3 itself generally runs bytecode blobs rolled by ID and compiled with their speical tool to that does quakeC -> qvm. q3 based games generally have compiled dll or .so files that may or may not make external OS or library calls.

source: i cloned orange smoothie pro for jk3
destroy:
put an end to the existence of (something) by damaging or attacking it: the room had been destroyed by fire.

--- Oxford Dictionary
What exactly is the supposed link between the President changing laws and a web site outage?
Berlin has a problem that everyone will feel it after a while living there: Its scene roots are still very anti capitalistic. This still influences the culture there, even CCC and other "digital culture groups". Still many people don't want to earn big money because they don't want to lose there scene credit. It's creepy, but still many of my Berlin colleagues think that way, especially in the CCC and pirate party orgs.

Hamburg and Munich are much more focussed on deliverying value, real products, make money. They aren't cool, they're expensive and tight. You have to deliver there or you will run out of money very soon (pressure => focus).

Imho Berlin needs to evolve without becoming the next Munich or Hamburg: Leave enough room to have a decent living/start up, to do experiments without having to burn millions for nothing (fancy rooms) — but also be able to rise money and go big, if there opportunities are there.
Ah good.

However there are still some regions not so fortunate, like Bielorussia
My co-founder taught herself web development using online courses and resources. This “Learning Path” outlines the resources she found most helpful, and lays them out in a sequence that a beginner should be able to follow.

We realize this is a curriculum, not the best curriculum. We'd love your feedback on whether this is useful, and what we might change or add.

Also if you’re so inclined, we’d love feedback on our product SlideRule itself (a Yelp-like catalog of online courses), which you can access it by clicking on “COURSES” in the header.

EDIT (based on some of the comments):

We're very encouraged to see the response to this.

1. On which other subjects would you like to see such Learning Paths?

2. If you're interested in helping us build more learning paths (on any subject), we'd love to hear from you (in comments here or at founders@mysliderule.com)
The Executive Branch has a lot of leeway in how they, well, execute things.
Interestingly, I think most such "small lies" would have affected nobody but me (and would only have affected me by adding to my stress).
e.g.
Saying something's complete when in fact it's 95% complete, and will be complete by the end of the week, regardless of whether or not I claim right now that it's complete. There's nobody urgently waiting on this thing. The only difference then being whether I complete it in a relatively relaxed manner, or under the additional stress of hoping nobody asks to see it before the end of the week.

Other instances were based on how I felt about certain aspects of the project.
e.g.
Q: Do you think the remaining deliverables of the project will follow the plan?
(True) A: Actually no. And here's why.

Previously I would probably just have said yes, and dealt with any upcoming issues as and when. The truthful approach led to a brief discussion about what will be different and why. Everyone now understands the issues. They're not major. Nobody died. Everyone (including me) left happy.
Skype are a commercial company that has hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue. Doubtless they have their own relay servers which they pay to run and connect everyone up. However it would be great if hackers and startups didn't have to deal with all of that.

Ideally it would not be necessary to try anything else and peers would just be able to directly connect. In practice TURN is a standardised way of doing relay, and what else are you going to do? Invent your own? How will you test it across the 1000s of different network configurations and know with any confidence that it actually works across the open Internet? Skype might have the resources to pull that off, but the next peer-to-peer startup might not.
The position I've maintained since before its enaction is that at best, the ACA is a temporary measure. This is just my theory, and it's very possibly wrong outright.

There are a variety of problems with medical coverage in the United States, in large part, because most of our medical coverage is handled by insurance. Insurance, at its core, is not good at complete coverage, and if we expect it to be, it's always going to be more and more expensive, especially as the payer is abstracted away from the true cost.

Medical insurance arose as a response to the wage freezes enacted by the government during the war. Wages were frozen to 'stabilize' the economy and money could be dedicated to fighting the war. The unintended consequence here was that businesses, leveraging 'benefits' to compete for top talent, petitioned the IRS to allow for medical coverage to be pre-taxable income. The result is that we have a system where largely, other people are footing the bill for medical costs. This was, IMO, the genesis of our failing health care system.

This got worse and worse and worse until the ACA. Now, the ACA appears to be fixing the problem with more of the same. More people abstracted further away from the actual cost of health care.

(Again, IMO) this is not a long-term fix, and I'll be very surprised if we don't see rates escalating dramatically in the next few years.

Before insurance became pervasive, insurance was for catastrophic purposes. E.g., cancer. For general health care needs, the flu, a cold, a pulled muscle, a broken wrist, etc., people should be paying for their medical expenses out of pocket, while paying into their insurance to buffer against bankruptcy from something like cancer, leukemia, etc.

If that were the case, we'd see the free market work. People wouldn't get three X-rays and two MRIs to determine whether or not a wrist had a very minor fracture or a very major sprain -- they'd just slap a cast on it and wait a few weeks until it was better. That cast costs a small fraction of the cost of an X-ray, or an MRI... but because the insured don't generally pay those costs out of pocket, they get all the X-rays that are needed, because they're free -- and then they're surprised at the cost of health care.

I have objections to the ACA on grounds of politics, and I have concerns with the ACA on grounds of pragmatism. I certainly don't begrudge those who have needed insurance but didn't have it until now, but if we really want to lower the cost of routine health care coverage, I find the current approach to be the least likely way to address it, and foresee rising health care costs in the future.

Again, just an opinion (though I think it's informed), and I could be proven completely wrong in a few years.
HFT firms don't see the buy order before its get to the market. They see that a bunch of quantity was bought so they raise their prices on the other markets. Because the purchaser had bad order routing, he moved the market and the hft firms were able to raise prices for what they believe the new market price to be.

Say you decide you want to buy up a bunch of property that's all on one street, and the market price for each property is listed at $100,000. Once word gets out that you made the first purchase for $100k, the prices on those other properties are going to go up, because if there's a buy at $100k, they might as well start negotiating at $110k, but they have no idea if there's a buyer who wants just one property, or all of them.

Now, only the buyer know how much he wants to buy. If he was smart, he'd go to each seller and execute at the exact same time so when word gets out of a purchase and prices go up, he's already purchased everything he wanted, the uptick in market prices actually benefits him.

It's the same thing with trading. If the guy is buying a couple thousand shares scattered across a dozen exchanges, he absolutely needs to make sure they get posted to the exchange at the same time, or he needs to break them up in small orders over a period of time so he doesn't affect the market with his purchases.
Yes and providing identical service levels to all co-located participants is a major profit center for exchanges now. Before that change in the market there was a whole class of consultant that would claim they could find specific racks in colo data centers that would give you latency edge.

But this latency is not about seeing other peoples orders before they enter the market, it is about reacting to market data quickly as it is disseminated to everyone.
> If somewhere like Spain sorted out their bureaucracy and local corruption and made it feasible to set up business [...]

That's a big ask.
The Perks of WFH
no, its not regulatory arbitrage. its latency arbitrage.
You've got twelve hours. Today's 4/6/8 core CPU's with an SSD can build a Linux kernel in what, 5 minutes tops?

I built one on an old Xeon in something like 4 minutes and it took 3x as long to upload/download the files to the system I wanted to use it on than it did to build it.
Amsterdam seems ideal on paper. It's fun, young, eductaed, extremely international and easy to immigrate to. Cheaper than London. Warmer than Copenhagen. English is as good as a second language can be.

I'm not even sure you can make a cultural argument that makes sense about Amsterdam. There are so many foreigners there that the culture is <40% Dutch. A city where most residents decided to live there because of a fun urban environment is risk taking by some definition of the term. The only cultural argument I can think of is that it's quite euro-leftist, not very capitalistic.
I understand your micro regional distinction there but it strikes me that most of those enamored with SF cite the weather and/or wonderful lifestyle is a key driver for most people being there. As to Spain, my startup Spreedly is sort of an infrastructure service for payments challenges with global support. I'd say Spain is the most active country we see for startups in Europe (if it's second it's second to the UK). I'm always impressed and also drearily wonder if it's a function of Spain's incredibly high youth unemployment rates. (making a startup more appealing given the dearth of other good options)
This is pretty hilarious, would drive me nuts.

I once did a similarly annoying chrome extension just for fun: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/annoying-typo-gene...

Randomly generates typo in inputs and text boxes.

Side note: Mihai, since I know you will be reading this, watch out if your arrays in LRTF are upside down ;)
We did look at Udemy, and in fact include one of their courses in the Learning Path. Are there any others you think we should include?
My favorite example of this is the Waffle House (24-hour dive). In Indiana, "Waffle House" was already taken, so the national chain had to use "Waffle & Steak" instead. Of course, since we used to call the Waffle House "WaHo," this leads to the MUCH better name "WaSte"!

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_house#Waffle_.26_Steak
I've also heard the saying "in a panic, all correlations move to 1". Basically, when the market goes down like in 2008, everything goes down.
> It can be done in plain JS, but you end up rewriting a lot of methods to fill in the gaps already filled by jQuery. My conclusion was, it's still easier and more productive to use jQuery.

Of course. That's the entire point of jQuery :/

If your goal is to put up an application - jQuery is basically industry standard. If your goal is to develop a better intuition about how the DOM works - then stick to JavaScript.
Serval Project (http://servalproject.org) does this and much more already. It's very mature and should be supported before an upstart idea, IMO
>If I truly trusted that the insurance company would be there for me

I don't believe they will be there for me either, and I've been burned before too. That's one of the reasons why I don't support the ACA. However, making others take on your risk is any sane solution. You are just shifting the burden to others.

> As it stands I paid monthly insurance premiums + deductible + most of the bill

You can appeal and appeal and appeal, then go to your state insurance board. This is a government required right. There wasn't any reason to just accept what the insurance company told you. You can even get an external review. Over 90 percent of insurance decisions are reversed on appeal.

Just several phone calls sometimes resolves the issue. I've been on the phone so many times I've practically gotten them on speeddial.