skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"""The availability of world-class cultural assets is crucial to liveability."""

I take issue with the word crucial. Like others I do not think the list is going to sync with everyone's needs. Did anyone else manage to find the weighting for each of these factors/variables? It would be nice if we could add our own weighting and see which city comes out on top. I am looking at Vancouver these days and sad to see it not included.
From what I have seen, if you write PhoneGap apps, you simply don't care about UX or performances.
It does not mean that it is useless, there are cases where UX & perfs do not matter, like corporate apps that will only be used by employees.
Aphex Twin on on a decade of unreleased music and drum-playing robots
“Production Prolog” by Michael Hendricks – Strange Loop 2014
Whether we see the face of this in Ruby some day or not, I'm just really glad people are putting effort and work into making Ruby faster. Whatever you can do and say about the language, the fact remains that sometimes, the productivity and expressivity you gain by using it is quite simply overshadowed by the weight and sluggishness of the code it helps you produce.
Liberating the lurking Smalltalk in Unix
NugetMustHaves tells you what projects depend on a nuget package
Democratizing Hardware
Analyzing Rap Lyrics Using Python
London is the place to be in Europe. I only wish there were proper large tech companies head-quartered here and capable of competing with financial sector in salaries.
The Internet of (Expensive) Things
Cause and Effect: the unexpected origins of terrible things (6 min video)
OpenGL might well be the "only truly cross-platform option", but it seems to me that, for games or mobile app development, getting stuff drawn on screen is only part of the problem. The rest is about doing so with the minimum use of cycles - either for better frame rates or better battery life. I can easily imagine that this is a classic 80/20 problem, with the 20% that takes 80% of the time being adequate ("butter smooth") performance.

So, given that the capabilities of the graphics hardware can vary a lot, how closely can a single, unified API like glnext approach optimal use of the hardware? And without the kinds of platform-specific code paths which are necessary under current OpenGL?
Nashorn: Implementing a JavaScript Runtime on JVM in 2014
You're ideas seem like massive invasions of privacy. I get we're trending towards a loss of it (it may be inevitable). But yeah I can get my own sandwhich while you get you're auto delivered to you seconds before you wanted it.
Sprawl struck me as a curious factor too. I can see it both ways - less sprawl means you don't have to go so far out of the city to get into the countryside; more sprawl means there are potentially affordable suburban areas whence you can easily commute into the city.

London, for instance, is pretty sprawling, but many of the commuter towns or villages are actually very pleasant, desirable places to live (they can also be extremely expensive - though not so bad, of course, as central London, which is prohibitively expensive for anyone who isn't an oil sheikh).
Clojure: A core.async Debugging Toolkit
StrangeLoop: Typed Clojure in Practice
1) Who cares about ads on Facebook? They are not giant ads, or popunders or whatever. Sometimes they are relevant. The FB page 'ads' (that say they are sponsored) can be very relevant sometimes. People care more about things like privacy, and how easy it is to share things ('statuses' / photos / videos) with certain people.

2) The design (no offense to whoever made it) is a bit weird. Monospaced font?

3) The part where you click on the arrow (on the right of the page). It isn't clear what that is about. It is 'invite only' but they want you to submit a photo? (https://www.dropbox.com/s/wx88cyg0lh3u5j8/Screenshot%202014-...)

4) and the profiles do look (again no offense) like a crappy tumblr blog (with a touch of instagram, which IMO isn't really a social network (no messaging, it is just a fancy photo gallery site. No one would call flickr a social networking site). Maybe thats the kind of audience they are going after... but it looks a bit amateurish. Whereas facebook, linkedin, even twitter all look a lot more fine tuned.

5) But profiles seem to be able to have direct outgoing links (no nofollow, which will encourage spam a little bit), so if it wasn't invite only it would get filled up with spam quickly.
Type Systems: The Good, Bad and Ugly
Our Shared Joy of Programming
I am not so sure about Bayes. Bayesianism is certainly a good tool for making rational decisions, but human intelligence usually does not look like rational decision making to me.

Sometimes I wonder if our conscious mind is just a puppet and rationalization mechanism for our unconscious decision making process. This makes conscious decision making a farce.
Hopefully the elections next year will bring back the more sensible highly skilled migrant immigration policies from the past that will allow highly skilled foreigners to participate in and contribute to this boom.

Current policy introduced by the coalition government, as I understand it [1], is that a highly skilled migrant in the UK from outside the EU would simply not be allowed to build a revenue generating side project, either by themselves or in a partnership. The best they can legally do is find somebody to take their IP and hire them into a new business - an unlikely prospect, and a risky one - and even then they'd be limited to 20 hours of work per week unless the new business goes through a complicated legal process to become a visa sponsor. And after 5/6 years the foreigner may be declined leave to remain and forced to return to their home country, regardless of what they may have built up in the mean time.

[1] This is what my research shows. I'd love to learn that I'm wrong, being somebody who has to make a decision about whether to take this 5/6 year gamble while starting a family.
Inside the Wolfram Language
I'm not op, but will tell two stories that may interest you.

My cousin, mid 30's has FU money. Took him around 8-9 years of hard work (not in technology). He's the guy that buys a 5k rolex (or whatever big brand of watches) for fun. Last 'toy' he got was a 250k euro car for himself to drive maybe 1 month a year (he travels a lot). He is still an amazing person, tries to help people. He will have no problem spending a day with you trying to help fix a problem you may have. He will lend you 5k, no questions asked.

My parents try to badmouth him every time they can, and try to bring his accomplishments down at every party/gathering. From insulting his business partner to just saying he is an exploiter of people/resources/whatnot.
I noticed his friends, behind his back do the same, even though he throws parties for them, welcomes them in their house, lets them use his pool even when he isn't there. The car I just mention before, he lets anyone drive it if they ask. But still, the envy is there.

On a smaller scale, my wife's family and friends. My wife decided to quit her job to raise our kid. I still work, but due a good amount of effort, I'm making a good amount of money. There is no need for my wife to work so we both prefer that she stays with our kid. We also live a decent life (near the beach, pool, etc) but not FU money like my cousin. The amount of flak she gets for our choices is just amazing. From her mother telling her she is kinda useless, to her friends making snide comments about getting a 'rich husband', etc. We never show off, we invite everyone to spend some time with us for free in the summer (saving them 1000's in holiday rentals and food), but still, I can feel the jealousy in them... Hard to explain completely.

I never thought this, but last few years what I noticed is in general, people are an envious bunch. A few are really happy for your successes, but most will resent you, because you are doing better than them, or 'showing' to them that some of the decisions they made in the past were the wrong ones, and they can't really come to terms with it, so it is just easier to excuse/criticise you.
No, the trick is just that he is interlacing himself, didn't you notice??
(otherwise he would flicker, obviously)
The Only Good Option in a Burnout Spiral
Yeah I think that using just UNESCO sites as a metric is a bit flawed. I mean on a scale from 1 to 5 (from good to bad) Rome gets 1, Paris 3 and New York City 4.

I live in Rome and I love it, but I wouldn't say that even if we have a bunch of UNESCO sites, the cultural assets of the city are that much better than Paris or NYC.
Cconcurrent update of the same object is actually an extremely common real-life use case. You need to handle the arising conflicts anyway, so you might as well get the benefits of eventual consistency. If you don't have concurrent updates, then you don't have a distributed system. But that doesn't model the real world anymore. The state of the object is already distributed to multiple computers (e.g. mobile clients), and the database system needs to handle that.

You can, of course, handle the concurrency on the application level, but the question is, why bother? The database can help with managing that.
Completely agree. These prices are disgusting. Even if this consultant was there for an entire surgery, how can one person justify charging $1m/week?

The US desperately needs to walk back the amount their doctors are paid.
For an API with 20 years of cruft? Rewriting is the only option.
How to crash Apple's servers
> That's why if you want to reach a goal, you should tell as many of your friends and family about it as possible so you risk "losing face" if you fail.

If only that were the case, that would be grand. The opposite tends to be true more of the time. http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Se...
There is the Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) visa, though it's not at all straight-forward - you need £200k investment, or £50k under conditions that I'm not sure it's possible to actually meet.

https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-entrepreneur/overview
Those are great numbers........

Too bad they can't be even close to used to predict the revenue of my SAS apps (so far....). Then we have the train of weekly "Sorry users, we are shutting down" posts here on HN (unlikely to happen if they are pulling in ~200K per employee no?).

There is a lot of variation.
I view this method with more than a little skepticism.
what happened to the auto pdf warning?
hmm... they rated Damascus but not Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem?! why is that?
If you're awake at 4 AM because of anxiety about growth rate and lack of capital, make some hot cocoa and then thank God you don't have real problems.

I'm not saying this to be snide. Those problems feel real and scary enough. But as the other replies to this comment demonstrate, there is a vast spectrum of human misery that we live on the far end of.

Anything you can do to remain mindful of that will have the side effect of letting you sleep like a baby, even the night before the big investor meeting.
Personally I'm for making immigration easier but how necessary is it for businesses considering that they can hire from anywhere in EU with very few hurdles? Are there really many people outside the EU that are so skilled that an alternative can't be found within the EU?
Integrated audio is going to be a dealbreaker for me. If I can't use my own high-quality headphones I will not use an Oculus.
London's coming along although we're a bit lacking in big hits compared to the US with Google, MSFT, Facebook et al worth ~$406bn, 391bn and $202bn respectively. The London areas biggest hit (if you include Cambridge as it's an hour away) is ARM worth about $22bn. Things are definitely on the up here but with some catching up to do.
The way I've heard it is: "Total rewrites are always a bad idea. Sometimes they are necessary."
There are offices of a few large tech companies around but it makes sense for them only to have a sales presence in London because it's so incredibly expensive.

And for workers the UK is not great. Salaries are very low (when compared to other english-speaking nations) and so are expectations in many companies.
They are designed to be removable.

You might not want to, though. They are there because 3d audio is important to the experience, and the reason they ship with integrated headphones is that it's both hard and important to get the 3d audio to "sync up" with the display, especially during rapid head movements.
70 seconds for a multiplication?
Verizon FiOS iPhone update slowdown?
In trying to download the iOS 8 update for iPhone, estimates range between 24 and 48 hours on my laptop.

I have a few servers in the Amazon cloud, so I connected to one of them and downloaded the update from there. It took about 10 seconds to download from Apple's servers to my server!

Then, transferring the update file from the amazon server to my machine took about 7 minutes at a download rate of 5.7MB/s.

Is this indicative of a purposeful slowdown from Verizon? Seems like a Net Neutrality issue.
It's interesting that SMS piggybacks off the handshake part of connecting a phone call - making it actually less data intensive than utilising missed calls, I assume - yet phone companies make a killing on SMS packages and costs.
Sorry but I disagree with nearly all of that.

>> "many CS graduates I meet really want to work in tech rather than finance"

I would hope so considering what they studied CS. And I'm are many finance grads want to work in finance rather than tech.

>> "They want you to work 60+ hours give or take"

This also applies to a lot of startups. Even in places that don't enforce extra long hours you often feel pressured to arrive early and stay late.

>> "There is dress code - really ? 2014 and we still enforce people to wear suits ? we grew up idolizing steve jobs so no thanks."

Didn't Steve Jobs have his own uniform (turtle neck, jeans, trainers)? Even places that don't require a suit usually have some sort of dress code (jeans, shirt). In a small startup you will have to meet investors or potential customers and in these situations it's required to look at least respectable. It sucks but appearances matter.

>> "Tech is way more fun and the chances of making it big is what drives many young people."

Personally I think tech is more fun but I know lots of people who have fun working in the financial sector.

>> "A tech career to many people is a lot like an struggling actor's career however the difference is there is less luck and more hardworking."

I disagree completely. There is LOTS of luck in the startup game. Sure you have to work hard but there are tonnes of people who work their asses off and don't succeed even though they have a good product. If you read about the work ethic of the worlds biggest actors I think you'd be surprised. Most of them got there by working their asses off too. And they also got lucky.
Well there is an element of cultural signaling going on. Washing up liquid like 'Fairy' in the UK usually feature an attractive mother in a middle class white household dealing with the state of their children's (usually boys) clothes after they've come home from soccer practise or school or what have you. The ad isn't saying Beyonce endorses the product, but it is saying that yes! you too can be like this supermom and effortlessly and jovially clean your kid's clothes for school tomorrow, so you look like a neglectful parent thanks to Fairy. Trust Fairy. Live Fairy. Fairy is love. Fairy is life.
It's not your/my/our job to wonder what resources might be needed to keep it running. If you build a service like this, you should have a user-friendly exit plan.

At the very least they could be open and honest about what is going on instead of pulling a "thanks for being part of this incredible journey, we've had our fun so now we will let you stand in the rain".
Those are billable seconds
I view it differently. Sprawl means you're never where things happen. Everything is somewhere else, and you get there in a car. With dense cities, everything is at your doorstep, and that makes it much more likely that you'll actually participate in great and exciting things and events.
There are ways for non EU folks to come here settle here. I'm not up on the details as they keep changing but basically if you come here to do a degree/masters they tend to let you stay on and work after and if you stick 10 years you can apply for UK citizenship. There's some sort of earnings requirement like you have to be making over £30k or something like that and be paying tax. I'm not sure it matters if the earnings come from employment or your own business.

(some bumph here http://www.workpermit.com/news/2013-11-15/uk-immigration-min...). The norm seems to be to do a masters and then stay on with a job, then you could do a startup if you can get funding / customers to pay a suitable salary I think. I've got a couple of friends, one Indian, one Chinese here that way.
I have to agree. I have seen the Shoreditch triangle come a long way and having taken my skill set around Europe, there really is no place like home but we aren't exactly silicone valley.

I look forward to some home grown giants over the next few decades.
We're still waiting for WebGL 2.0 to be finished, nevermind widely implemented, and that's based on a GLES version released two years ago rather than one that doesn't exist yet. Don't hold your breath.
well, hiring from silicon valley for one thing
The Bitcoin blockchain is another nice example of this principle.
I think they ought to divide cultural assets into what I would loosely call "Heritage" and "Modern culture".

On the Heritage scale, Rome is an undisputed [global?] leader.
On Modern Culture scale, Paris is perhaps ahead (I've not been to NYC but imagint it's the leader here).

These scales' appeal varies for different people.

UPD: UNESCO sites headcount is a deeply flawed metric anyway. I've heard that South Korea has more UNESCO sites than India, which proves it is 1% history, 99% lobbying.
Well OpenGL exists in the first place as cleaned up version of IrisGL (it originally was going to be IrisGL 5)
I don't want a free market in my health care.

I am not competent enough to judge if the pills I purchase actually contain penicillin and only the inert ingredients listed on the label. We know from the less regulated dietary supplement industry that many manufacturers lie about the contents. I have no reason to believe that the pharmacological drug industry is fundamentally more honest.

There used to be a free market for health care. The FDA started as a political response to the adulteration and misbranding of food and drugs in that market. The early 1900 saw the rise of popular patent medicines containing radium, with so-called "radioactive quackery."

A true free market would have no restrictions on Doramad Radioactive Toothpaste, on the sale of snake oil made of petroleum, or of Bonnore's Electro Magnetic Bathing Fluid as a cure for cholera. The free market of that era produced Elixir sulfanilamide, which killed more than 100 people. The owner of the company justified it because they were "supplying a legitimate professional demand." A free market needs no more justification than that. Anything else is politics, yes?

I don't want to return to that sort of free market. What is your most convincing evidence or argument that your proposed free market will lead to an overall improvement in health consequences? Especially knowing the history of bad actors in the health care era.

You commented that "people also need food and groceries to survive, but we haven't had to nationalize a grocery chain heretofore." You omitted that we have nationalized oversight of the food production system supplying the grocery chains. Again, the FDA started because the free market system of the late 1800s couldn't handle the food safety concerns. People did die because of the adulterated food they ate.

They still do, as you know from various E. coli outbreaks, or the 2008 Chinese milk scandal with an estimated 300,000 victims.

Your argument regarding grocery chains therefore at best means that governments shouldn't own hospitals, not that the state and federal governments should get rid of the 'committees or small groups' which develop the regulations for the hospitals.

All of the examples you gave appear to assume that only the current actors - licensed doctors, regulated medicines, hospitals with government inspections - will be part of the free market system. However, an apolitical free market system must allow anyone to claim to be a doctor, anyone to claim to produce a medicine, and any barbershop, plumber, or auto shop to provide hospital services.

How does an apolitical free market prevent these known historical problems, including deaths, from becoming more common again? Why didn't the free market of the late 1800s come up with a free market solution?
Also how about non-pi Debian linux?

I'll experiment with the .tgz file for that.
It also ignores the established practices system admins have had for literally decades now of writing hard or complex scripts from bash into more advanced languages like Perl and Python.
How is your conception of what is involved in 'do[ing] a language for programming music' different to super-colider or ChucK or puredata? Not being aggressive just interested in how you see the problem.
But my point is that the hiring pool is already huge (the entire EU). Are there lots of people in SV who want to move to London and who have skills that nobody in the EU does?
> Focus on the data, not on the logic. The logic will emerge when you understand the data. -- Bryan Pendleton

Sounds similar to:

> Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships. -- Linus Torvalds
According to e.g. the CEO of Citibank [1] and the mayor of London [2], immigration reform would really benefit the UK. The OECD suggests that there's no reason not to [3].

However, it's more complicated than that. The current policy is actively deterring young, skilled people from developing their skills and connections in the UK, which is a great concern for the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee [4] - who clearly understands that immigration is a long-term process, and governments can't treat people like sheep if they hope to attract talent.

If you were 30, about to start a family, would you immigrate knowing that you're not allowed to make money from tinkering on a side project for the next 5/6 years? And that after that time you wouldn't even be sure if you and your family could remain in the UK? It's a tough decision. And yet the best of the best are exactly in that position -- the people who tinker on the side are exactly the people who become the best, not the ones doing a 9-5 day job.

The irritating thing is that the policies were great prior to 2010, until Cameron decided to make a policy of reducing immigration to levels that are simply impossible ("tens of thousands"). His only way to control immigration is non-EU immigration, which is a very small percentage of actual UK immigration. It turns out that just a few days ago the government has finally started to acknowledge the sham [5], after years of criticism. Unfortunately in the meantime, people have to make very difficult life changing decisions in the face of this political drama.

[1] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-06-27/minister-uk-will-n...

[2] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-06-17/london-mayor-londo...

[3] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-05-23/migration-is-econo...

[4] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-04-14/lords-denounce-uks...

[5] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-09-17/deputy-pm-uk-has-s...
In a relatively densely populated country like the Netherlands it is a joke...
I've been working in tech in London for just over a year, and even in that short time I feel the spirit has evolved. People are thinking bigger and smarter.

There is also a rudely healthy crypto currency scene in London, which I suspect will explode once they find a way through the banking/regulation maze.