skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Lack of real VCs

Venture Capital, shock horror, is not the only way to raise capital. And we have extraordinarily low interest rates.

2. Lack of non-predatory Angels

What are you basing this on!

3. Lack of a startup culture

Absolute garbage. We have hundreds of startups. Hell, all of them are looking to get purchased and ruined by some huge U.S. tech giant (hi, EMC!). In Sydney alone you can go into North Sydney, Crows Nest, St Leonards or North Ryde to find them.

As the author said, they are not founded by people working or partying themselves to death (well, some are), but that doesn't mean they aren't startups.

4. Risk aversion

Startups here take risks all the time. But your view of being "risk averse" opus probably coloured by the fact that you think a business can only be a success if it's made it in 3-5 years. Australians tend to want their businesses to survive long-term, so they adjust their position on risk accordingly.

5. Geographical distance

Big deal. Plenty of Aussie startups have overseas offices. Software development startups utilise the Internet extensively.

6. Cultural cringe

Possible.

7. Time zone differences

This is only a problem for people employed outside our Timezone. You realise that a good majority of emerging South East Asian markets are close to our TZ? And if you know what you are doing you can make time zone differences work for you?

8. Over valued currency

Yeah, we're one of the few countries in the world to escape the GFC largely unscathed. Our high dollar can be an issue... Except when you realise that the U.S. Dollar and the UK dollar are far higher than our currency.

9. Real estate speculation

I hear yourain. This is a real problem in Australua, but it has little bearing on startups.

Let's look at our positives:

1. Highly educated workforce

2. Stable government

3. More relaxed culture as we have less disparity between the rich and poor than somewhere like the U.S. - often mistaken for laziness, when in fact we work just as hard and often harder than other cultures. And we have universal health care, a decent industrial relations system, reasonable welfare systems for those who are disadvantaged, a properly regulated banking sector, strong consumer laws, and lots of other things that make for living here actually pretty awesome. Heck, we're stable because we got so many things right over the past few decades.

4. Technology obsessed populace with cash to spare

5. Highly connected populace no longer concerned about technology (risk averse my arse)

We do things differently here. That makes us different, not impossible to do business with.
I would imagine the downvotes are because of the 'super secret walled garden, full of itself' comment, which is negative in tone. You could have said instead something like,

'As someone that knows people who've worked at Apple, I doubt many of them would know the answer to this or be allowed to post here if they did.'

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You will need to use Babel or another processor for the newer syntax and features, which will compile you ES5ish JavaScript that browsers will mostly understand.

Compiling JavaScript is one solution to the problem that you have no control over the client interpreter and the 'version' of your code that it supports. It isn't an ideal solution, but it means we can move the language forward without worrying about breaking everything.
One of the problems IMHO is, that employers get more and more demanding.

There is this joke, that fits very good: "If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers" [1]

In former days, the readiness to take people and train them on the job was much higher. In Germany this is a really ugly trend. The licence for truck drivers is very, very costly but the earnings of the drivers are very low. In former days the transportation companies educated their own drivers. Today, they don't. They just expect, that the drivers somehow have to have the education and come from somewhere. What is the result: The state is in more and more cases educating unemployed people that they can become truck drivers. They pay tax money, that the transporting companies don't have to pay for it ...

I don't think, that a "free market" has to mean that more and more costs have to been taken over by the state, but that is, what is happening.

Today, when you apply for a job, they search for exactly those skills needed. They are not ready to train you on the job or take people that have to do a lot of learning on the job. And also in Germany: They are not ready to take people above a specific age.

[1] http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...
The real question is not "can you?" but "should you?"

For most people with a mental illness, even one that interferes with their work, the answer is probably no.

You've invested in that person and you lose that if you fire them. You also have the costs of the new hire. You have no guarantee that the new hire isn't going to have a mental illness. (The ageist culture of hiring in SF tech firms selects strongly for people who are at about the right age to have their first episode of psychosis - 14 to 35.)

Firing that one person for their mental illness related performance is very visible. The effect is to make other people with mental illness hide it from you. As a manager which do you prefer - Ann who has a predictable 2 hours for therapy per week over a 14 week period, arranged in advance; or Bob who just takes ad-hoc days off sick?

And, really, the role of a manager is to help workers perform better. This includes people whose performance has dropped as a result of a mental illness. Since work-related strss is very common any manager that doesn't understand mental health is just an unprepared - probably bad - manager.
I have a positive opinion of Australian tech because I was one of many back in the day who learned a lot from Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions'_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th_...). This put the University of New South Wales on the map, and of course Australia as well.

Since then, I've noticed you've got a research institute that does a lot of wireless stuff, it or another has done some major L4 microkernels, and I happily pay Fastmail for my email service.
You win, Microsoft: How I accidentally went back to Microsoft Word
> Apple is incurring real costs. The labels, not so much.

It's really weird that you specify "developing the software" as a real cost, but not "developing the music".
It's a sales move of apple to get people to use their product, and immediately make it paying to get new subscribers.

It's crazy how the industry leaders are so prevalent compared to the people they employ.
Some other bootstrappers from Melbourne:

* PayDirt - http://paydirtapp.com/

* Cycling Analytics - https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/

Other products developed in Melbourne (I am unsure of the levels of VC):

* Aconex construction workflow - http://www.aconex.com/

* Redbubble - http://www.redbubble.com/

* Realestate.com.au - http://www.realestate.com.au/

I don't always understand the hype about investment. If someone is giving you their money, you are giving up sovereignty. If you can build something that earns enough to continue growth, then you can afford to make some mistakes.

Edit: Formatting
I think T-Swift just needs to "Shake it off, Shake it off..."
4+Common+Mistakes+Beginner+Bloggers+Make+|+AnsMachine
Doesn't that logic mean she should pull her music from all radio stations?
Yes the key to success in Australia is bootstrap and export. Now the dollar has come down from its ludicrous level to just somewhat over valued this is more viable. I do still miss the days when I got A$2 for ever US$ though, but it is better than in 2012 when I was getting A$0.90 for every US$.
>The company prefers to sell itself on being an employee friendly place to work.

For senior good developers, an employee friendly culture is an hygienic factor, not a competitive factor. By not posting compensation you cheated yourself out of your order winner.
> Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing.

It is safe to assume that max. 10% of the subscribers will be in this 3 month trial. You will make money from the other 90%.

Also, just a little industry insight: Taylor makes $1.5m+ at each concert, plus travel, hotel, technical rider. I have a very hard time understanding all this cry baby talk.
Show HN: rationalfiction.io – host, share, discuss rationalist stories
When Eliezer Yudkowsky has written HPMOR(http://hpmor.com), this work has spawned a genre - fictional works focused on science, technology, and rationality.

I have made a website for people to discuss and share these stories. I want it to be the perfect place for hosting such fiction, and I want it to be a great community for the kind of people who hang out on HN(and also enjoy fiction).

Now I'm looking for some feedback - what do you think about the website? How can I make it better?
Would they have to pay taxes all of the overseas earnings if they use just some of it? I figured they only paid tax on what they actually bring back here.
Flux Without Flux: Using Flux Architecture in Plain React (ReactJS / JavaScript)
> I do agree that Apple has the ability to pay artists during the 3-month trial, but should they have to?

Unless the artist (or representative) have given them permission to use their content for free, they should absolutely have to. It's the same IP laws that Apple like to use in their own defence: you can't just use someone else's stuff without their permission and without remuneration. What do you think Apple would do to me if I started selling an OS that used Apple's graphics set?

Just because some artists put their music on free media doesn't mean that a corporation can use that music as a loss-leader to sell their service.
> This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success.

Did you read the whole article?
You have any data to support that?

And if that's true, then Apple should be taking the hit up front, not the artists.

Your last point is just irrelevant and unnecessary.
If the problem would be just employees "shopping around" that would not explain, why wages are not rising. If they would shop around, wages would also rise, even when they are only marginal interested in wages ... (show me 3 employees that are not interested in wages)
I don't think so.
It would certainly help in some specific cases and some ideas are certainly worth testing out.
However :
-A/B testing can only answer some very specific questions. Good UX is not just measured by engagement.
-some of these decisions are just bad practices that are widely recognized : for example we were asked to add modal popups pretty much everywhere.
-we are severely shorthanded and implementing these changes and the A/B tests can be a very significant time investment. Especially when they are abandoned before going live for the reasons given by everyone but the person in charge.
"Taylor seems quite out of touch with the shape of the industry here."

She is VERY in touch with its shape... And she is trying to change it. She also famously ditched Spotify and has been consistent in using her fame and leverage.

What she is doing is very important...Spotify is bankrupting artists while bleeding cash with no real business model to make the money back. She was outlasting them while the vc money ran out and it was working.... Now that Apple is in the game, the danger of them using their cash to bankrupt artists with a bad business almost indefinitely is very scary to artists. She is trying to be diplomatic while making a point.
That is fine for throwaway scripts. But such "perl duct tape" is not 100% accurate and will break for no reason. There is no place for such solutions in reliable and maintainable software.
Thanks, I have added it to my reading list.
"...Place drone "nests" every 500 meters in urban areas. Cell towers might be convenient locations. When ShotSpotter[1] detects gunfire, dispatch the closest drone to the scene. It can arrive within 20 seconds, record footage, and relay it to police..."

Is there some reason you wouldn't use stationary cameras to do this ??? I mean... it seems like a lot of extra expense and technical hurdles for not much more payoff. Actually... I'm pretty sure there isn't ANY payoff as far as benefits beyond those conferred by the use of stationary cameras goes.

And the technical hurdles are pretty large. You're in an urban area... so how do you get good lines of sight ??? You have to fly around quite a bit... and you'd almost certainly need human controllers, increasing the expense. Drones could crash during incident response, and in an urban area, ie-densely populated, that definitely would entail some collateral damage. Potentially even severe human casualties. Hackers can potentially boost your drones and then they "own" them. I mean... the list goes on and on.

I think that the "better" use you gave is actually one of the WORST ideas you could have for drone use. I mean... we have cameras right now ??? Why would we not just set up a monitoring system... if we wanted a monitoring system ???
So you obviously didn't read TFA then. Like the second or third sentence in clearly states that she is not doing this for herself but for all of the smaller artists who don't have the power to make a stand like this.
If you made it to that line you already read her explanation of that and her saying that she makes enough from live performances.

That money pays a lot of other peoples salaries too. It takes a large staff to put on a tour for a performer of her size.
Its not exactly aesthetic. Little diffs and big diffs are not isomorphic. They could conflict with eachother. The only true diff is either diffing a squashed commit or diffing over the whole range. And if you are diffing over a range all the time you might as well be squashing and rebasing so you get the benefits of linear history.

This is my primary complaint regarding rebasing and no-ff. It leaves all these useless and confusing commits around. A lot of times the content of the commit was undone by a commit in the family. Its usually not useful to anyone and can only be reasoned about by the original author. When you merge all that crap lands in `master`

Interestingly I think I am actually learning something during this thread. The hardcore `no-ff` actually misunderstands rebase. They find the billion crap commits to be disruptive as well and want the merge commit so they can get rid of that mess. But I just say the mess is unnecessary. Just squash and you get the best of all worlds. You'll never miss those 12 commits
To everybody hating on regexes: remember that the alternative to even a simple regex is typically a poorly-implemented ad-hoc state machine dozens of lines long full of nested loops and conditionals. Without gotos if you're lucky.

_That_ is a bug breeding ground.

Now, if what you are after are regular expressions with a different syntax.... well, maybe you're onto something here.
But I would still call it a regex, personally.
In your comparison, the dealer has to pay the cost of this free sample, not the drug producer.
Offering several weeks/months for free is nothing new in the music streaming industry but usually the service is the one that has to swallow that cost.
The one album can be seen as her token of protest without going as far as shunning the service as a whole. So, this is probably a carefully calibrated objection, and we're not privy to the details of why she did it this way and not some other way.
A badly written badly argued hatchet job. (And largely plaigerized too!) Maybe you should have doubts about the safety of aspertame, but this article deserves zero weight in the assessment.
You raise a great number of points here that I can really relate to especially the reliance on the product selling itself. I am pretty sure that this is a mistake, but it is hard to try and compete against all the noise when you are running a lean startup.
Ah, now I know where you are coming from. Yeah, we have amazing potential around biotechnology, but the current government cut funding to the CSIRO by $111 million and scrapped the Science Ministry when they won government, then recreated it last year and put as its head Ian MacFarlane who said of Scientists who weren't happy about a lack of a dedicated Science Minister:

"But I hear it constantly from some of the precious petals, can I say, some of the precious petals in the science fraternity, and if you can’t guess, I won’t accept it.”

So I'm not surprised you don't think startup culture is great in Australia!
I believe that Netflix pays content providers for the views on their 1 free month.
Sounds like we worked the same place, had abou the same issues as your guys only with a limited QA team and we were starting to build up a second product brand for ourselves with new blood that basically had the same people in charge as the old. Hiring talent was a nightmare and learning selfimprovement were set very low on the list. Me being just the admin but having written code in more languages at various degrees of difficulty, topic and necessity ended up making me more mad than the people directly affected by it.

Holing myself up for a month and working towards a new job paid off and I'm now in a better place as a developer and person.

"It gets better"
Snarky comments (like 'full of itself') tend to gain downmods just for that. It's a lot softer than it used to be, though - it used to be that using the lightest touch of humour would also bring the downmod brigade. HN is becoming a much more generic "tech and this-article-I-saw-on-nytimes" site.
Well that's not entirely true, since her music is available on YouTube.
Because they're powerful and can make excellent allies if they so choose.
1. Please check out the Paperkarma app by reputation.com. It makes getting off of obnoxious junk mail lists simple. Just take a picture and submit. I used to get a shitload of junk mail catalogs, now i get maybe 1 or 2 per month. I HATE junk mail and Paperkarma has easily reduced it by about 80%.

2. Majority of people are too lazy and stupid to care, that's why they went to the single bin. I used to live in a large condo complex in the US where I was essentially the recycling police. No matter what I tried to educate the building, I still found tons of non-recyclables in the blue bin.
I don't know why someone downvoted you - a clear and honest answer deserves an upvote in my opinion.

But, while I understand what you're saying, and for all I know maybe being humble works well for you as internal company culture, humble really isn't a good marketing strategy - there's a good reason why marketing if anything traditionally errors on the side of boastfulness! I don't advocate exaggeration, but if you really are offering good pay and good working conditions, you should specify this in your job listing. Remember, in many cases a candidate will start off knowing nothing about your company except what he sees in the listing.
I think it's hard to find funding because all wealthy people in Australia made their wealth in mining. If you want to open a coal mine in the middle of the Outback, you will find investors easily - Just show them the report on soil composition; they'll get it instantly. If you want to start a tech company; good luck.
In other words, lifestyle businesses, i.e. businesses that plan to direct nearly all profits and investment capital to the founders / employees / other expenses while the investors end up getting nothing (unless they do something extractive to the company e.g. via seizing control and extracting value for themselves via that) -- versus "non-lifestyle" where the company optimizes for a big exit through which investors can be compensated.

Remember, tech startups nearly never pay dividends. Making a ton of profit but no exit = good for founders and employees, big problem for investors.
Apple Music's big problem is that the service itself offers nothing new - most of the people that are going to paid for paid music will use Spotify already, and getting them to switch will be hard.

I suspect that Apple knows that the take up for the three month free trial will be huge, but that conversion to paid will be a much harder row to hoe.

This is all about Apple not wanting to foot the bill if and when people switch back to what they were doing already (Spotify, YouTube) without paying Apple a dime.
I get the typical arguments that things being available free might not affect sales - but in this case I think they'll see a direct impact.

I think they'll get a pretty large amount of trial users simply by advertising it in iTunes - oh you're about to buy this album? Why don't you listen to it and the majority of our catalog free for three months instead?

Other than Android they have a lot of music use cases supported, free of charge - why would you buy?

I honestly don't know how much this will affect sales but Apple are certainly in a position to push users away from those sales and toward the free service.
There's also some countries that have relatively "low tax rate" but very high social security costs which are not always counted as tax rates by studies.
Apple even named a programming language after her and she still refuses to cooperate
Awesome. Can I move to Zurich now? :)
My cousin's daughter trained at the Royal Academy of something in England. When she returned, she immediately went to LA to find work. After a few years, she quit. Her reason? "I thought it was all supposed to be about the art. It isn't."

I've been in and around the business for 45 years. Far too often people get into acting cause they want to be rich and famous so they jump in cause someone said they were good looking and did great in the high school play. They then try to land an agent while never studying the craft.

Acting is art. Artists study the work and try to get better at it.

My son is an actor and runs his own theatre company. Often I visit him and find an open book about a play by someone I never heard of, yet to him, it's a matter of course that the playwright should be studied. I never see this among others in his circle of friends and acquaintances.
Syllable OS Action -x86/32MB RAM/50 MB HDD/USB/Video/Audio Card/multimedia/GNUut
I got vilified as a troll on reddit for suggesting such a thing. A reply to me earnestly said something to the effect of: I don't know anything about twitter, but I'm sure <washed up star> follows <big movie franchise>.
> They don't run the trial. Nobody wins.

Their competitors win. The artists make out the same or better. Apple isn't the only player on the market, even though they act that way.
I worked in the live music industry and have a pretty good idea of these numbers. But you can just google up some leaked booking agreements (The Smoking Gun has some pdfs).

Yes, obviously a lot of people must be paid from that fee (crew, management, band...), but it is still shitload of cash.
> unacceptable risk of them falling on someone's head

Same could be said about airplanes 100 years ago, but now I have planes flying over my head about 20 times a day. Even in the post-9/11 world.

The safety of drones will only increase, and with such a great financial incentive as the whole delivery industry, it will do so rapidly.
Lots of great advice already.

There will always be people smarter and better than you. All you can do is do your best.

It's hard to be a programmer in a world where 99% of every article about programming is some sort of epic tale of mindblowing success. What those stories don't tell you is the road it took to get there. Most success stories are results of the team banging their heads against the wall for months or years until they found what works.

The life of a programmer is a neverending series of fixing your own, or if you're unlucky other people's, mistakes. There is no such thing as a perfect computer program. Occasionally you get to see the results of your work have positive impact on something or someone. Savor those moments, they don't come often for most of us.