skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know that it wasn't the point of your post, but I think the 10x comparison is a bit off (I'm also in SA).

On paper SA is supposed to have a purchasing power parity of around -50 to -60% [1] (so, things are on average that much cheaper here than in the USA). Of course, SF is significantly more expensive than other places in the USA (although typically not more than a factor of say, 1.5 to 2x). If we add all this up, we've still only got to (at the outer edge) a factor of say 2 to 4x more expensive, not 10x. One website puts this number at around 2.6x for an SF to Johannesburg comparison [2].

The other issue is that SA has an extremely bifuricated economy (see our GINI index score), and local prices definitely also reflect this. I'm not sure to what degree the PPP measurements reflect this - I believe the PPP number is a national average, and the average prices in SA are aimed at people living close to or below the poverty line. These prices are typically not available (geographically) to your average software developer, who in SA easily falls into the (upper?) middle class category for the country. Their costs are drawn from that environment, too. Even if you choose to be frugal, the shops you find in the suburbs here are much more expensive than what the national average may be. On a similar note, appliances and high-tech goods typically tend to be along the lines of "find the item on the 'net, convert from USD to ZAR, add 10 to 20%", so we're definitely not seeing PPP-level savings there. There are also some other factors which are relatively unique to SA, such as the need for additional security (monthly payments to armed response companies, etc), growing trend (or need?) to send children to private schools, etc.

Apart from the above price factors making the PPP number unrealistic, most people here also seem to have high expectations of standards of living, e.g. expecting to buy property quite early on, driving shiny new cars, having houses which are usually > 200 m2, come with swimming pools, have large gardens which need gardeners to be hired, cleaners to be hired, etc (this is all a bit strange to me, coming from an eastern European background where we have a far lesser sense of entitlement).

So really, all I'm trying to say is, we're definitely not ~10x cheaper here, especially if you consider typical suburb shopping prices and some of our more unusual, frequently ignored costs. The high standards of living can be considered things we do to ourselves voluntarily (and as you say, sacrifices can be made there).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

[2] http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...
The guys at MeeWee are using Clojure full stack.
Clojure, ClojureScript and Datomic.
https://app.meewee.com
Oh, I see! So the "prevailing wage" column is the one that is the wage in the area. I understand now. I misunderstood it to mean "the wage which they actually were able to get after being employed".

Cool. Thanks for the explanation!
I would love to see Proxygen integrated as a HackLang extension. Especially the HTTP parser. As far as I know, the PHP world is sorely lacking a robust HTTP parser.
hey that's cool tricks to spare money! I hope we'll see your product at the top of HN one of these days :)
And then we go back to minimalism, Lua, ... always in this circle.
Take a 10-minute developer survey and win an iPhone 6
Computer Positivity
The correct answer is not to use HTML5, JS and CSS whatsoever and just use proper native tools.
Most viewed pages in the scope of WikiProject Computer Science
San Francisco is about 40% Asian -- they live everywhere!
You evoked a lot of feeling in four sentences. Thanks for sharing.
This seems really unlikely. Do they really calculate hashes for all words in a google document? What if your password is a sentence? Do they calculate hashes for all the fields in a spreadsheet too?
Emirates pledges to offer free Wi-Fi on all flights
Lack of toilets is not just an inconvenience, it's actually a huge health problem in densely populated developing countries.

For example in India it's (finally) being taken seriously at the highest level. The new prime minister promised 5.2m new lavatories would be built in the first 100 days of his tenure:

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matter...
I can't tell if this article is mostly genuine, or whether it's meant to push all the buttons to sell more tickets for potential space travelers.
Related TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_chen_a_warm_embrace_that_save...
A 3D environment with lighting, shadows built with CSS transforms
Darkcoin the new cryptocurrency now ruling drug selling dark web
Dealing drugs is a shady business run by shady people requiring shady and dark web. Secrecy is warranted and so people involved in the trade are naturally finding out new ways to avoid detection. This has led to online drug sellers at least, adopting crypto-currency as a means of payment. It is cashless, fast and the one currency being accepted currently is especially secretive. This world was ruled by Bitcoin upto now but a new more secretive crypto-currency is fast taking its place – Darkcoin....

http://www.techworm.net/2014/11/cryptocurrency-now-being-accepted-on-drug-selling-websites.html
foobar2000 is a more recent work from one of the original devs, and quite good if you're looking for minimalism and function over style.

And of course, if you're on Unixen, XMMS is pretty much a direct clone of the old Winamp (and used to even use the same skin by default).
I don't think that would loosen the iron grip of game companies - as you mentioned it would be "illegal to run" such servers then, just as much as it is now. And they would "still be run by many people" regardless.
Gosh we're so far from it in France
There's a lot of room between running out of money and earning loads. Say I was earning $15,000 per year from my startup. Costs were low and I could take most of that home but revenue wasn't growing. The business hasn't run out of money but it's not making enough to support me and I have to shut it down. Unless there is significant growth opportunity that I'm missing it's also unlikely to get bought.
Noizio – your subtle companion
Can I live in NYC for a month on a budget of $0?
Location: Beijing, China & California

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Business Development, RFID, C#, Unity, Games, mobile games, java, Game Localization, Game Publishing, Marketing, PR, Chinese

Résumé/CV: see email 中文英文都有，就是使用邮件联系我。

Email: jamesoclaire@gmail.com
I think it would help decrease your snarkiness meter reading if you also provided some specific, constructive, criticism.

What major mistakes are the author doing due to not knowing (as you seem to infer) 3D graphics well enough?

I, for one, was impressed (after grudging a bit about the talk about rectangles in the intro, which I think should be triangles to be more specific but I could be wrong, it's been a while).
seems really cool interface. Just trying to subscribe and I let you know.
For parties without DJ I still use Winamp 2 with SqrSoft Crossfading Plugin and "club" preset, which can easily be combined with Limiter to keep the volume somewhat steady (but losing some dynamic within tracks).
The Check URL "https://www.mytux.fr" is "Not Responding".

We requested the URL "https://www.mytux.fr"
on "Thu, 06 November 2014, 10:51:13 (UTC)",
it took 1368 ms and not responded at all.

But it's responding and online. What do you mean?
Fake DMCA claim used to obtain personal information of YouTube user
Malware Discovered in China Could Herald ‘New Era’ of iOS and Mac Threats
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/youtubes-date... is the original article, in German.
An easier way to write TwiML templates in Rails and Sinatra
Java devs have far better options than writing javascript: http://www.gwtproject.org/learnmore-sdk.html
Living in one room with your founders and working in that same room (essentially staying in one place with no privacy 24/7) sounds horrible. I understand that there are benefits to being in SF but surely they can't be worth enough to make you want to live that way. It sounds like the artist who thinks he won't be good unless he starves first. There are other ways and for most people it's unnecessary. How about living 2-3 hours away so that you can still travel in for investor meetings - probably the biggest benefit of being in SF? Or doing some freelance work on the side?
As a physicist I'm really glad that Nature talks about IPython. Most of my teachers are only familiar with Matlab or maybe Maple or Mathematica.
I think the main problem with them is not reproducibility. The main problem with these software that you can't really verify the correctness of the results. You will never know the exact algorithm being used for a given simulation or data evaluation. Especially Mathematica uses complicated adapting methods for numerically integrating, solving differential equations, nonlinear regression and so on, but you will never know the exact algorithm being used.
Facebook oughta hire some better scripters, the deps.sh is of terribly low quality. I didn't get more than a couple of lines until i stumble upon this (which tells me the author has no clue :):

'start_dir=`pwd`; trap "cd $start_dir" EXIT;'...

No need to say that the script can be dangerous, in case directory change fails for instance, there's no checks but sudo make uninstall is run anyway in another dir than the intended one.
Part of it is because modern day computers seems so... uninspired. And time after time we also see the mainstream reinvent what the Amiga had 25 years ago. Yet there are still missing bits for us in modern computing. And because the community has diversified. Some just loves the classic systems. Some care about the elegance of the hardware. Some loves the OS and user experience, and want to reproduce it on newer systems (e.g. AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4)

I'm currently trying to "reintroduce" AmigaOS into my life via AROS (AROS is an open source AmigaOS re-implementation). There are challenges - while there are lots of features in it I miss dearly, there are also so many things I have come to expect from Linux that is not there. So I'm taking the approach of running AROS in a docker container, let it mount my home directory, and bring it up on its own work space, so I can work on filling gaps in AROS to let me spend more and more time in it. I don't necessarily see myself using it 100% of the time, but thankfully a combination of a decent window manager, workspaces and docker makes it trivial to get an environment where I can mix and match AROS with Linux.
My ex-wife of 21 years passed recently and we've been going through the remains of a life. She was a programmer at Rockwell working on Shuttle Systems when I met her. We married and had three beautiful children. Over the years technology has woven itself into our lives and when she passed I was handed piles of floppy disks, CD-ROM's and even account info for the MMO she was playing.

I've often joked about Digital Archaeology[1] to my kids, told them they'd have to get a masters degree in it to review all the digital cruft I will leave behind. I thought this was all good and fun until she passed, and wading through all this stuff just tears at me. This trail of floppies, some I couldn't recover all of, some blank but I could see files that were deleted in hex dumps of the raw images. It was all very surreal like looking at old photographs of our life together but much more visceral for some reason. It’s like digital items don’t have dust on them, they look exactly like they did when you made them 30 years ago. You don’t boot an old floppy and see a fuzzy or yellowed and crinkled screen. It’s perfect in every detail, like the second it was last booted.

Logging into her MMO account and seeing the toons she was playing when the cancer started to take over her brain just killed me. I knew how much she loved these games both of us were gamers over the years and she loved to level to the end game and join guilds, run raids.. To be the center of attention in her online world. We deleted the toons, figured it was the closest thing to reality, she was gone now her digital form was gone, nobody would login and play those characters ever again and no need to make others wonder where she was. She had a large list on-line social network outside of Facebook, guilds in all sorts of games where she was a central figure. Her passing is known to us and those who where on Facebook, but out there somewhere is someone who she touched who’s wondering why she’s not logged into the game for a couple months.

How strange “Death” is in a digital age, sure our minds might stop working and our bodies no longer function but the perfect lines we drew in the digital sand continue on forever.. Or at least until a floppy finally gives up that final bit, or a hard disk somewhere crashes. As our digital world evolves into a place where bits really can live forever these thin digital lines left behind will remain forever etched in the digital world.

I often wonder what will happen to the petabyte that will be my digital impact when I go, will some AI some day in the future consume it in a matter of minutes and derive anything of value? Or will it just sit silently being copied from one storage medium to another forever without anyone thinking about why and what is in it?

Many years ago a customer of mine did a storage assessment and they realized it was cheaper to buy more disks then to ask all their employees to delete unused files.

I knew then the digital lines would go on forever, being copied from one storage system to another because it’s just cheaper to keep it...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Archaeology
> I wonder how much sensitive information is inadvertently pasted into a browser location bar or autofill text box that's silently captured by web apps like Google Docs?

Well, if you paste something in the location bar, presumably it'll already be on it's way to google (or whichever service handle autocompletion/suggestion)...
YES! I get this feeling exactly. Not just from vacations, but from any big social setting/liyestyle changes.

Honestly detachment is a good way to put it. I feel detached from my past especially. Like I don't have a set identity. That I'm not the same person as my past,largely delineated by large setting/lifestyle changes.

Honestly, it's sort of a depressing way to look at yourself. Makes it hard to feel like you're actually building on something, working towards things.

Probably the worst case of this was when I first moved to college. About 4 weeks in I actually cried (I can count the times I've cried since teen-hood on one hand so it's rather rare) and I had no idea why at the time. It literally came out of no where. The strange part, I wasn't home sick at all. I had no desire to go home. No, it was closer to an identity crisis. I didn't feel attached to my past self. It was a really empty, lonely feeling.

If anything that i'm saying resonates with you, feel free to reach out =)

For what its worth, I consider myself to have an okay to good mental health. Depends on a lot of circumstances of course.
the last video seems promising, except they skipped the landing part :)
Well the whole "race" idea in humans is basically flawed, there are no biological races in our species [0].

Also, by saying Asian-American what do we mean? is it people with Chinese ancestors, or is it Japanese, or Indian, what about Russian?

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%29
The best thing about their press release[0] is that within a couple of sentences they a) complain that they'd lose seven-digits in advertising a year per brand over the short listing on Google news and resulting decrease in traffic, b) demand that Google pays them for the Google news interaction.

[0] http://www.axelspringer.de/presse/Axel-Springer-schliesst-Da...
Great thread this :)

I am working on wrinq, an application that allows tenants to pay their rent online. I think it's cool because it makes it convenient for tenant to pay his rent and for the landlord by taking care of bookkeeping and reminders. I am set for a launch in December.

Also I am working on an openresty book[2] (definitely an openresty guide) which also should be complete by December. The official docs for openresty are very good but when I was starting out I struggled with a few things(like ngx.location.capture) so the goal of this book is to help someone who is new by quickly showing him some core concepts. I think that a lot of people who already use nginx can benefit a lot by using openresty.

[1]http://www.wrinq.com/

[2]http://www.staticshin.com/programming/definitely-an-open-res...
I’m working on a book to help startups get more and better user feedback (especially in the early days when you have a beta or launched recently).

You can sign up and get a discount when the book is out right here: http://www.saasfoundry.io/feedback-foundry/

Every one realizes the importance of user feedback to get their product in the right direction, but there’s lot of confusion on how you get useful insights and not just random noise.
As a tech nerd dad of three kids and having been in tech for 30 years this story touched me. Thanks for sharing, I feel your grief as if I were the father looking back.

I love my children but they've all sort of gone various directions none of them are quite the uber nerd I am. They call me once in a while "dad my sound isn't working" etc. I've always sort of been their tech crutch, providing them with answers, trying to teach them each time but in general they just say "Yea dad just fix it please". LOL

The greatest gift of being a father is knowing just how much mine had to love me because he didn't kill me while I was growing up. I'm sure it was no different for your father as clearly he wanted to share his wonderment with you and hoped like I do that for just a small flash of time that you understood a bit of what excited him in his life.
The boutique university
Isn't there a higher risk of data loss, if your "hard drive" is 100% memory mapped - all it would take is one buggy kernel driver writing to an invalid pointer or memset'ing the whole thing to 0?
Surge is a feature for the drivers.

If you are a driver, at a peak time, you can go to your app and get the regular income or get to Uber and get an increased income.

If you are a passenger, at a peak time, you can go to your app and see that all the drivers are taken and wait until one is available, or go to Uber and choose between paying a little more or waiting until the price falls down to the regular price.
For those not familiar:

http://www.bash.org/?244321
Also think self-tours. People could setup tours around places like Rome and vote them up. You load it up, then walk around the city getting tips on the hot spots and history. I believe there is a lot of potential for this sort of contextual audio cuing.
Thanks for the explanation. Do you think the idea of implementation/interface separation, that C and Java allow easily, is also better in Go?
Perhaps that's what they use to teach because those languages are reasonably easy to use from a math/physics point of view, even if they're somewhat limited from a CS point of view. I taught myself to program early on, but for others who went through honours in maths with me it wasn't so easy.

Don't be surprised if your lecturers use other languages on their own work. At my university, everybody in the math department uses Matlab and Mathematica. However I know that a lot of the guys who do smooth particle hydrodynamics use Python and Fortran, and my honours supervisor said he once programmed in PostScript (which isn't so much practical, but it's impressive and shows he knows how to program in languages other than Matlab).
I read something over breakfast that affects my emotions for the rest of the day.

I am also a recidivistic emulator. Sometimes a Super Nintendo. Others an Amiga 600, like the one I got for my 10th birthday.

I do it because I miss the games, maybe.

Or maybe I do it because I miss being 10.
Hackathon IO – Organize and Discover Hackathons
I've just began working in https://spate.io again.

There are no statistics to show yet as nobody is using it, but I'm hoping I can change that soon.

The API and the website are two separate Flask apps whilst the websocket server is implemented using node. For now the API and the websocket component communicate using redis' pubsub functionality for the MVP stage, but I have a vague suspicion this will have to be the first thing to change eventually. Will have to test.
Does sound like a very fragile workflow (there's no reasonable way to tell a full-history doc from a "publish grade" doc by glancing at the file on the filesystem.

Keeping everything in proper version control (possibly unzipped, to give usable diffs even for office document formats -- or in something like markdown) -- would at least rise the bar a bit -- there'd be different process for sending a single version of a file, and sending all versions of (all) [a] file(s).

I suppose if you're already running an internal mail server, you could just do filtering there, making sure no version/history-rich documents pass out that way...
Amazon Route 53 Announces Private DNS Within Amazon VPC
Why would you want to incubate an inflatable baby?
I remember at least one case where the game was played, and the person who got to choose took 9 bucks out of 10, and they all thought it was fair, simply because he was lucky to be the guy who got to choose.

edit: it's in the article HaloZero links in this thread.

When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”
IMO the biggest news about it is MS putting their clout behind it. A blind friend of mine told me a few years ago already he participated in some kind of experiment with mobile navigation. He then preferred his own ears and guide dog. But then, this was just before the smartphone revolution really took off, and we got ubiquitous Internet all over the place. I think right now is a better moment than back then.

While I'm here I still do want to complain about the website :P Why? Because it stressed me out. There's no reason a webpage should go out of their way to do that. It made me nervous how much of the text+pictures only started to fade in as I already scrolled halfway past it. Why does it even need to fade at all? It's already scrolled in and out of view. I guess this is an example of how, with normal pages, everybody has their own customary way of navigating the information, and as designers take more and more control of that experience, it's going to cause friction and differences. I can imagine how this could match someone's particular way of interacting with a page, but it's not mine. I stopped reading halfway through as it was stressing me out (I didn't need this before my first coffee was yet to kick in).

Regardless, as everyone is screaming, let's pay attention to this great project, helping blind people.
If you haven't [read it] already, I strongly recommend "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.

[edit: unintentionally demonstrating the need for more than one revision...]