skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Easy

1.
> Is the trade surplus mainly affected by private enterprise?

Hell yes.

> If that's the case, what control does the German
> government have over it if the businessmen running the
> companies would rather save than spend?

Good question. They could put export tariffs and forbid the immigration of "highly skilled labor". (If you make at least 30k Euro you get a work permit immediately. If not, just ask for asylum and you get better benefits than most pensioners.) It could abolish export financing and government guarantees for export financing.

2.
> I'm personally conservative with money, and never like to > get into debt, so from a this naive point of view, I
> would be very happy to know my country has a large buffer > to weather out any oncoming storms.

It is impossible to save money without someone else going into debt. Germany is not creating a buffer, it is exporting both, capital and goods. She does dumping with salaries for engineers and exports like crazy. She has too, since there is not enough money people can spent in Germany since the salaries are so low. At the same time, "Germany" is not getting any financial buffer. She gets Lehman debt obligations and Greek government debt. Germans take pride in being the leading exporter of goods. They better would take pride in "giving away products for free". But in fact, there is someone profiting: Private, highly export oriented enterprises. And there are three kinds of people footing the bill:

1. Employees that are highly underpaid.
2. Tax payers that will have to foot the bill for the bail outs.
3. Citizens that see there infrastructure, universities and public services crumble.

In short: Germany is exporting itself to death.

3.
> What books would you recommend for a complete newcomer to learn about macro economics?

Hm. Hart to say. There are so may. Mises, no matter what you think about him, is good for an introduction. But later you will realize that he failed in most things. Keynes may be right. In the end, we are all fucked.

"There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)"
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat...

Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt...

Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-...

Galactic-Scale Energy
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
That's excellent! I find the cost of a "15 minute" standup is more like 1.5 hours. First, it's hard to get any work done in the 30 minutes leading up to the meeting because I'm trying to come up with what to talk about. The meeting never lasts 15 minutes, it's always 30 minutes, and it always involved being immediately ordered by the manager to talk about some BS nonsense that came up in the meeting. Then it taks an hour to get back in the zone to be productive after the meeting.
Even without MS push, it may not have been a different story. BeOS was to generic, without any niche. Without MS Office etc it would have been difficult to capture any market. Linux was successful as a free UNIX clone, so instead of paying 1000s of dollars to sun, IBM you could have a free UNIX with a good webserver with PHP Java and all. BeOs never had such a ready market nor a niche.
Very powerful thoughts. I retweeted your last sentences (if you don't mind.)

https://mobile.twitter.com/pestaa/status/585740222450819072
Would you have the same attitude about kiddie porn?

What you say is true, but being able to buy guns from Tor will save you a lot of hassle over trying to manufacture your own.

I think I am pretty open minded, but I was fairly shocked at what claimed to be available when I logged onto Tor to see what it was all about.
I was in the same boat as you, just a little older ( 27) and created a web application www.ledenboek.be (it's also in English). It was a niche, but i don't think "sportclubs" have enough money. So i just abandoned it ( i have one customer - created an emailing application to email the 50 partners (emails) that he gave me).

It was a learning experience and i'm really considering about sharing my experience with others when i'm more successfull then now ( i have my own small company now, but not enough to talk about it)... I do plan to talk about it though... ( when i earn more ).

If anyone would be interested (this seems like a nice place to put it), there is a newly subscription list on http://goo.gl/forms/Ck1kK7YuhJ - I called it "Moving away from reaching too high - when to pick a stable income".

I cancelled plans (for now) on creating a web application without knowing it has a future (= income) and i'm planning to get a more stable income (already happening and i'm only 1 year further -- i have a full time job also - so i have no pressure).

I really hope you enjoy what you do though... 99% of the mass never create a successfull web application.
FreeCharge and Snapdeal = Exciting Times Ahead
Indoor Farming Offers Tech Investment Opportunities for the Future
Two points:

1) The examples you see are biased in the extreme. The most sucessful are held up to an extreme degree, so that the average of what you see is six or seven sigma ability. This is not even close to being the actual average.

By having a couple years of savings, you are probably actually 3 or 4 sigmas ahead.

2) We all wish we started earlier. The truth is that I am not who I was 5 years ago. That person was an idiot and if I had started a business then I wouldn't have been successful. The person who was me 5 years before that was a complete lunatic and I am surprised I ever had any friends then. That person fortunately hadn't moved out from home yet, or I wouldn't have gotten anything to eat.

So you see I couldn't have started earlier, because I didn't exist. Sure the person with my DNA who walked around existed and I have that persons memories, that persons scars (in some cases literally), etc but he isn't me.

Therefore wishing I had started earlier is as productive as wishing I had been born a millionare.
I'd agree with this, but from an unusual perspective - I write some really, really bad PHP. So I thought I'd offer some perspective on where this actually comes from (from a sample set of 1).

PHP's documentation is almost too good. It's fantastic. My primary frustration dabbling with other languages is that no-one else has not only the language itself, but a huge subset of the core library documented to the standard that I've come to rely on from PHP.

But here also lays a huge problem. I'm not a programmer. I have next to no idea what MVC is, let alone what would qualify it as sensible. When it comes to architecture, I could give you a much more convincing description of flying buttresses than anything you'd hope to find in a codebase.

But what I can do, is break what I want to do down into small enough component tasks that I can find very workable examples within the PHP documentation, and then duct-tape these all together until I've accomplished my goal.

Now, the good news is that I know this is a terrible approach with terrible results, so I wouldn't dream of inflicting my results upon anyone else. But I thought I could offer a little insight onto how PHP enables such atrocities.

It's similar to the popular backlash against Bootstrap. Where Bootstrap enables me to kludge together a frontend with near no idea what I'm doing, PHP's documentation does the same for the backend. But I still find it difficult to blame the products themselves - I'm more than aware that this is my failing.
He's not the only late starter, check out the ages of some great composers, some of them are quite late!

http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/infographic-great-co...
Germans are a cautious people and fear that the economy could collapse at any time. As a result they are trying to:

- Make sure they have some savings to fall back on

- Moving their Euros into bricks and mortar

They are careful with their private income and suspicious of debt.

When I look at my fellow Brits in the UK living on their credit cards and month-to-month on their Wonga loans, I'm starting to realise that the Germans might be onto something.

One thing is quite obvious. The German mentality for cautiousness is not going to change any time soon.
Financial incentives do not make sense: having a car in Paris is already crazy expensive.

During the 20 years I lived there, I cycled everywhere, and I had an almost weekly accident, always at the same three intersections -- cars running into stationary bikes, half the time openly on purpose (there is a bolo for a taxi driver for attempted manslaughter under my name: his plaque was unlegible on the camera, but him accelerating twice into my bike was clear).

The local police knows those intersections, there are camera monitoring those. Those are on large axis, and have the largest concentration of tourists (about 50 people waiting at the light at any time of the day).

If you want to make Paris a biking city, no need to spend millions; all the protected lanes become useless ever 50 m when an intersection shows up and dozens of car just want to run you over no matter what.

Just ask Police to enforce laws on attempting to kill people and make clear that a car can be used as a weapon. You do not even need to budget their presence: they are already there, watching and helpless.
Here's also a Docco 'implementation' for Java code: https://bitbucket.org/doklovic_atlassian/atlassian-docco
>> The golden rule is to segregate. Give cars, bicycles, and feet their own space. DO NOT mix.

This seems too emphatic, given the counter-example of Japanese cities, which have few dedicated bicycle lanes, yet remarkably high rates of cycle usage.
Great comment - I can relate to a lot of what you've said - despite being in the bottom of this HN comment thread .

As you, I haven't a background in CS, but with one difference (as I understand), I don't regret it. It allowed me to experience another life. Somehow I understand why so many people strive to be an actor, in the end is not just money and fame that motivates them - being able to play a doctor today, a policeman tomorrow and a politician the day after tomorrow is a huge privilege in life.

About your practical advices, I would just add one more. For the unfocus and indecisive people - as me - GTD may change their life. Read about it, you'll not regret it. If you ever want to implementate it you can try: https://github.com/we-build-dreams/hamster-gtd
I wouldn't want to work somewhere that expected me to be on the job between those times unless of course I was contracted to work weekends. I'm not religious in the slightest.
Did Bugs scare you? Why?
I see Clojure described as a Lisp.

What advantage would I gain learning Commons Lisp over Clojure? Clojure seems to be fairly well respected, has tooling and libraries available. I have no real idea about the situation for Common Lisp
"Whenever I encounter a technical article, I immediately and compulsively investigate the author's age"

What technical article? About the latest js fad? About the latest "Software Craftsmanship" pointless discussion?

You went to CS, you know the fundamentals, the rest is syntactic sugar, small differences and tradeoffs.

Yeah, a lot of unfinished projects. Or maybe not, some of them I used for a certain purpose, or even some I use pretty much always.

Don't try to catch up with everybody which is what you're doing.

Meanwhile someone is doing the next billion dollar project in PHP and MySQL (or maybe node.js and MongoDb) without using a Docker container...
- [domain] - [what it supposed to be]:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- descr.me - overview of ones opinions about anything one chose,

- uuk.nu - shortener for polish fantasy fans (GNU Terry Pratchett),

- prat.tl - yet another chat based on women chatting system,

- datza.click - tool for creating occurances counters,

- wai.uno - tool for creating "Y U NO..." memes (y.uno was unavailable... o(╥﹏╥)o) on the fly.

Maybe one day... I'll finally make use of them.

EDIT: BTW - I own domain "uko.ms" which I use for my personal link shortener and e-mail sm.oku@uko.ms. This is my favourite domain I own ୧། ☉ ౪ ☉ །୨
One Einstein ring to rule them all
> Including a function like count() or sizeof() within a loops execution condition is a bad idea. This expression will be executed with every iteration.

I've been told by numerous people that this is no longer the case, the value is cached.
The Springtime of Internet Archive 2.0
Sadly i fear that many companies will do just the same given the chance, open source or not.
I've still got my BeBox and boot it every year just to confirm it still works. It still works! I have no clue what I'll do with it - its not worth selling. Anyone got any clues?
Most of the big avenues in Paris already have separated bike lanes on either the sidewalk or the bus lane but the road (for regular cars) still takes 80% of the space. The goal here is to leave more space to pedestrians (like on the river front) and reduce the "car space" in the city.

The cost of public biking in Paris (3$/month) is very very very small when you consider the cost of having a car (at least 200$/month) or taking the subway (around 70$ / month).

One problem though, Paris has some hills and people tend to avoid these areas. Using your legs is great yes, healthy etc... but hey, we'd like electric bikes :)
These are very wise words.
> If these were 2 people, then who is the 'problem':
* US with heavy debts?

If I may quote Greenspan: "That all of these claims on government are readily accepted reflects the fact that a government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency. A fiat money system, like the ones we have today, can produce such claims without limit.

* Germany with savings?
>Germany is in a position to fix its infrastructure,

Nope German infrastructure is in ruins. She does not have any savings. She has Lehman debt obligations, Greek government debt and billions of unpaid retirement obligations. She gives its products away for free.

> Germany isn't the US, and for this reason, it is rich.

The average American is richer than the average German.

Neither too much export, not too much import is good. BOTH is a sign of weakness. The best country is one that exports a tremendous amount but has an close to zero account deficit.
CAR is a great reference book and something that I will use when I am writing embedded C even today.

But it is still a reference book not a get started with C guide.
> I still support DST as a quality of life thing, though.

I was amused at this comment, since i always dread the week or so after transitioning. Invariably my biological clock is screwed up and i'm something of a zombie in the morning at work and the later evening at parties.
Since Agile became a buzzword (and before that "Extreme Programming!!1!") about 14 years ago, I've never seen it work right. I've never seen either of these have a net addition to the performance of the team. 2 developers pair programming don't get new features done twice as fast. (though it's great for fixing a bug or transferring knowledge for a particular piece of code.)

Daily standups have never been beneficial. I see people here talking about managers not talking during standup. I've never seen that once in the past 10 years that "SCRUM" has been the buzzword. NOT ONCE. I've never seen standups that were only 15 miutes. After being forced to stand for 20-40 minutes each day listening to an air headed project manager drone on during the Standups at Amazon, I vowed I'd had enough. I got tired of having my time wasted and made a rule that if I can't sit down during a meeting, I'm not attending. If you think I'm rambling in the meeting, then you can make me stand up, but I'm never the problem (always the "product manager" or "biz guy" is the problem. Talking seems to be what they think is the purpose of their job.)

It's gotten to the point where I associate the word "scrum" in job postings as a red flag.

Teams should work asynchronously, all the time. Git lets us code async. Slack and Hipchat let us chat async. Whenever we need to coordinate, we just talk. (which is why you need offices so your talking doesn't bother other people.) Otherwise, everything should be async.

A standup is a big old pointless nose-counting exercise. It feels like it comes from the 1950s.

And if you're having a daily standup at 10am, then that means I can't start work at noon, can I? So, where is this "flex hours" that everyone thought was such a good perk 10 years ago?
Wanted to ask which one, but both seem appropriate :):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_interface
What's speed of Thought?
Agreed, but provocative title ftw in this world!!

A better title may have been - 'Are daily stand-ups an anti-pattern?'. Like with most applications of the term to social interaction it is based on too many variables unique to the individuals involved. He says as much at the end of the blog.
Both physics and the unreasonable success of math at explaining the world make much more sense if you just assume we are living in a math equation.
New Study: Entrepreneurs Prefer Getting Acquired to Going Public
The dream of every entrepreneur is to be as big as Google, isn’t it? Apparently not. More and more startups these days are choosing to be acquired. The edconomictimes.indiatimes.com has interviewed prominent venture capital professionals for their take on this phenomenon.

"Founders do give up at some stage," says Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder, Indian Angel Network. "Globally, very few founders take a company from start to initial public offering (IPO)”

For most founders, the realization that they can't scale comes very early," he adds. Fantastic entrepreneurial success passes into folklore; but not so the nine out of 10 startups that don't go public. Studies show that less than 1% of startups go on to public listing. There were 738 venture capital (VC)-backed exits and 637 VC-backed M&As in the US in 2014. Less than 50 made it to the IPO stage. Most startup founders prefer to merge with or sell their companies to larger corporations.

"An entrepreneurial journey is very personal," says Niren Shah, managing director, Norwest Venture Partners. "There's a thing in Silicon Valley,making your first $1 million. Many just give up at that stage rather than go on to become very large companies," he adds.

Valerie Wagoner, founder of ZipDial, which was recently acquired by Twitter, echoes this statement : "Given Twitter's ambition in India and emerging markets, our team and platform can achieve more, faster and at a bigger scale by being part of Twitter."

Vikas Saxena, co-founder of Nimbuzz, which was recently bought over by New Call, agrees: "New Call telecom shared a bigger vision with us. New Call is putting up the largest public WiFi in India. Now we can grow further and faster."
One use is converting columns of numbers into math strings for bc.

Example (contrived):

$ seq 10 20 | paste -s -d +
10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20

$ seq 10 20 | paste -s -d + | bc
165

Or converting columns of strings into regex 'or' clauses for searching (contrived example again):

$ cut -f 3 -d , something.csv | paste -s -d "|"
a|b|c|d|e|f

$ egrep "$(cut -f 3 -d , something.csv | paste -s -d "|")" another_file
... result lines appear here ...
INTEREST IS EVERYTHING.
I think PHPs big strength is the other point mentioned in the post: It enabled lots of people who are not really programmers to do some programming. Some of them developed into serious developers, some of them didn't. Being able to produce something slightly meaningful even without any skill is a big accomplishment, but it also means loads of erros, over estimated skill levels, security holes, unreadable code etc. The reason this doesn't happen to Haskel is that you become a computer scientist first and then learn that language. The reason is not a single bad book, where probably most programming languages have a few of.
Is it really that much better? I've found e.g. the Python documentation for the core library is very good. It seems to me that it should be possible to slap together some Django approximately as easily as PHP, and you'd end up with something a little bit better.

Is it just that something like Django requires a bit of up-front install, whereas PHP you can write <?php in a file on your shared webhost and be rolling? Am I wrong about the documentation being up to the same standards? Or is there something else going on?
https://www.mentimeter.com :)
And Unity won't last forever.
Antic Babylon neither, but lasted centuries :p
Measuring Customer Value in a Software Product
This has been my biggest peeve with the standup idea. Quite often I'm in at 8 or 8:30, so if I actually get started working, rather than dinking around doing email before a 9:15 standup meeting, I'll just be getting into the flow of what I'm doing when it's time to come up and switch gears to do the meeting.
Jeff Bezos' rocket company to start suborbital test flights this year
Inkjet-Printed Liquid Metal Circuits Enable Soft Robotics and New Wearables
That hasn't been my experience. I've never been in a standup meeting lasting more than 20m, and almost always < 10m.

I've been a PM, TA and developer - I would be fairly ruthless with timing.

Agile might make it easier for incompetent people to screw things up, I suppose. And therefore it might be best to avoid in teams where the problem is deeper than the team organization.
You are probably constantly reading and hearing of those examples and you feel compelled to do impressive things. Worse yet, you assume that software projects, startups etc. are all big accomplishments. Just like becoming famous perhaps. Or amassing a lot of stuff. That's a recipe for disappointment and failure. Take a step back, breathe, analyse what it is you really want. And if you want to define your self worth with such things.

Imho, society, in my case: software development culture, (to some extent) is sick. Many of us probably believe we need all to be Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon Musks. Insanity. I suggest you take a step back and find out what you really want. Perhaps a time off for centering yourself might be a good suggestion.

Someone said: A lack of ambition is a wonderful thing. That's probably true. Please relax. ;)
Would you mind shedding some light on your automation tool?
Ah yes, the age old "reply-all" email storm.

The bit about the recipient processing bug is novel tough, ouch.
Google may be about to take on Amazon in home-services space
That comment made me smile. We are so caught up in short term happiness, and excitement, that it's easy to forget what all this is about. Thank you for that last sentence :)
Same feeling here. I tend to feel underachieved a lot of time. Then I put my focus on doing some project/learning new stuffs, really enjoy it, feel empowered. Then the cycle repeats after a while.
It also keeps the team together as a team. The team I work on is in three geographically separated locations. Without the standup we would tend to become three separate teams.

I feel that the article is attacking a strawman, or perhaps it is a no true Scotsman where the objections are all or mostly about standups that aren't working rather than about the idea of a short "Let's just make sure we are all on the same page" session.
Gigaom is unable to pay its creditors