skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hipchat ain't bad; the place when I got to use it was a 3-week temporary gig for me (they needed additional programmer for emergency fixes). The places where I was actually employed all used Skype, and "bearable" is the best I can say about it.

I think the best solution would be a Hipchat/Slack-like IRC client.
Thanks for this excellent easy to follow summary.
The only piece I have difficulty to understand is this:

The new information here is "VNC." It was previously
known that at one instant in time Gox proved its
reserves by moving all it's BTC in a single
transaction. This could be done in a way consistent
with what the community thinks "cold storage" should
mean; the VNC bit militates against that understanding.

What would be an example of "cold storage" that allows moving all BTC in a single transaction?

And how does the fact that it is accessible via VNC change anything?
Since I live in Switzerland, I'll try to address these issues for you.

>There's one thing I'm interested in since this is on HN... How easy is it to start a venture over there?

On paper, it's easy. You go to a bank, deposit either 20K or 50K depending on your corporation type, and they give you a letter. You take the letter to a notary, and the bank gets a doc from him. They put your money in your new company's account. Whole process may cost you 2.5K in notary fees and a few hundred more in government fees.

Of course, there's some more things a company needs than mere existence. If you're looking for capital, it isn't SV. But they do have government programs to help startups and that sort of networking thing. There's contests. What I mostly see though is high-tech university type stuff rather than "guys hacking in a garage".

There's also a number of designated venture parks where you can find cheap office space and infrastructure. A friend of mine rents one in Luzern, and my wife went to see some in the one in Zurich. They're reasonably large buildings, but not entire towns like in SF.

>Also, my old roommate from college works at CERN now as a researcher. He tells me that he can't afford to go out and eat since it's so expensive. Is this true?

It is ridiculously expensive to eat out in this country, and your friend is probably not exaggerating. A pizza can easily cost 25 CHF. You can't do a meal at a middling restaurant for less than 100CHF. And the food is not great for the price. I've been to Michelin star places that cost less money than an ordinary meal at a Swiss restaurant.
A little while back I went back to some of the newsgroups that I was a regular on, back in the 2000s. It was... a bit disturbing. I recognised a lot of the names, but the people and attitudes behind them had changed a lot: insular, cliquey, a bit xenophobic, a bit crazy.

I've seen the same attitude before in tiny SIGs: go take a look the what's left of the classic 16-bit micro (or early 32-bit micro) userbases and you'll see a lot of it. But it was very sad to see happen to people I knew and used to interact with on a daily basis.
I felt the same way when I was in my early 20s, had recently graduated from college, was single and had few friends. My idea of a good Saturday was one in which I sat at a coffee shop by myself and continued working.

A decade later, my perspective has widened and my priorities have shifted. I still derive a lot of pleasure from work (even though I wouldn't describe it as "molding reality"), but I also realize that work is ultimately a means to an end, which is to spend time with my friends and loved ones and/or develop my hobbies.
Brick Laying Robot
> among anti-choice people

Unless you want to be called "anti-life" it's better to use traditional names for such groups: "pro-choice" and "pro-life".
It's nice living in Switzerland but the OP is like works in some ad agency and earning like 120k? How do I get a job in Swiss if I'm not from the Europe but a third world country? Yeah Swiss life is great if coming from the US or something. Swiss are asking for American works, they don't give a shit to skilled labour from third world country.
Any smart boss with decision making power should instantly give workers an additional 2 weeks off for a 10% pay cut. (Assuming the workers work more than 20 weeks a year and their duties can be taken up by someone else). It's pure profit at that point.

That aside... there is always a choice. Don't ever think otherwise. You don't have to stay there. You don't have to drive a nice car. Always a choice. It's just a matter of tradeoffs.
The Most Complex International Borders in the World [video]
Okay. Technical considerations aren't the only things that matter. Correct.

It's good to recognize that API design accommodates both technical and "political" considerations, but to argue that the concept is one or the other is silly to me.

Sure, an engineering team is a part of an organization. And that team may be the only to represent technical factors (affecting complexity management and cost of development & maintenance) on the political/financial/bureaucratic/business front. The influence held by the engineering team is probably determined by the culture within the organization.

APIs of all kinds directly or indirectly are or support a product. Of course technical factors aren't the only ones that influence product development and therefore API design.

If you zoom out far enough, everything can be viewed as a political/business issue. So why all the fuss about it?
>I was on a retro kick

Retro programming can be great fun. I dive into it - a little - every now and then. E.g. Turbo Pascal 3, Turbo C 2, Icon, Forth, BASIC even. I think I still have a copy of Delphi 1 on CD - it came as a promo with a UK computer magazine I bought at a roadside newsstand. And used it to write some small apps. Surprisingly the apps worked even on much later versions of Windows than were current when Delphi 1 was released, though of course the widgets looked old-style.

Also fun is exploring offbeat languages (that are not retro). Pike and ElastiC come to mind as ones I've checked out, and there are others.
Jesus that ad is horrendous. It's definitely tragic, and almost a comedy, if only I didn't know that there are some people who think that for real.
I am not American nor Swiss but have lived for multiple years in both countries and can echo your sentiment.

> The poster mentions the low rate of federal tax on the average wage. This is only part of the story.

In my experience, when considering EVERYTHING (e.g. remaining net monthly salary) the overall tax rate in the US (California) and Switzerland ended up being similar and around 30%. However, in the surrounding countries from the Eurozone, tax rates for similar income brackets tend to be significantly higher.

To be honest, I did like living in Switzerland, but my feeling is that a lot of the benefits they enjoy arise from arbitrage situations with neighboring countries. Taking your example from shopping at Marktkauf [1] (right across the German border in Basel), people living in Switzerland massively go there for multiple reasons:

1) prices are generally much cheaper, and on top of it
2) being from outside the EU you can get the 18% tax rate back, so essentially you can shop tax free and bring it over the border for no fees up to 300 chf/day.

Similarly, there's a tonne of P.O. box services in the same town allowing you to buy stuff from EU Amazon sites at lower prices and ship it to the P.O. box address in Germany, pick it up and take it over the border.

In general, probably Switzerland has opened up in the last few years, but it still feels like a very traditional (even old-fashioned) country deeply rooted in its own ways of doing things, in spite of a very large foreign population, e.g. around 23% of its population (from [2] and [3]) are foreign residents, who live there but have NO right to vote.

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Marktkauf/@47.5901807,7.59...

[2]: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL

[3]: http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/themen/01/07/bla...
Well, you can't. If you don't have 100k in deposits, you seriously can't. And IIRC from 2017 not even Europeans (even ze Germans) would not be able to go and work/stay in Switzerland without citizenship (which you can only get if you marry a Swiss wife and live there for a number of years IIRC).
And Saettle is like Manchester in the UK in having a traditional of worker coops
Even many of your examples of "technical" questions seem at least partly political to me (which just reinforces your point, I think). For example:

* Language bindings: The decision to create and maintain an API binding in a particular language is mostly a political decision based on what your API consumers want. It is a trade-off between convenience for the consumer and extra work for the API developers. You will probably develop bindings for popular languages. But what if a language is very popular but also one that developers are unfamiliar with, so it would be a high cost to learn the language and develop the binding? Both the developer and the consumers are invested in the resulting decision, which makes it political.

* Performance characteristics: This can be political as well, because in a sense it's a negotiation between the developer and the consumer. How much extra work should the developer do to save the consumer some time? How much of the computation should be done "behind" the API, and how much should be pushed onto the API consumers?

* Protocols: Each protocol has costs and benefits for the API developers and for the consumers. For example Apple chose to expose their push notification service over TCP, not HTTP. This has costs for the consumers because now they have to use a 3rd party library to handle a new TCP protocol (or implement it themselves). On the other hand, Android's push notification service uses HTTP POST, which is more developer-friendly. I would argue this is a political decision (and a deliberate one on Google's part).

* Latency: Typically reducing latency costs the API maintainers more dollars, but it makes the consumers' applications more performant. This is also, in my eyes, a case of a political negotiation. How fast can we make it so that consumers are satisfied, while spending the least money? Or from the consumer's perspective, how much latency is "acceptable"? This embodies a political trade-off as well.

You could probably make similar arguments for almost every other API characteristic. The simple fact is that almost everything that involves multiple people with selfish interests is at least somewhat political.
$120K is pretty average in Switzerland.

As for getting a job here, I know a handful of people from 'third-world' countries here although the term doesn't mean as much these days (India, China, and Brazil) and they all have MDs or PHDs.

The only other way is as a refugee, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Switzerland does give a small benefit to Americans and Canadians - we get our C permit after just five years. But that's all as far as the benefits go. The system is quiet rule based.
What would be an example of "cold storage" that allows moving all BTC in a single transaction?

Have all the private keys stored on a machine which is airgapped. Sign a transaction on that machine; copy the transaction to a networked machine (could be done via e.g. copying a QR code from the monitor with a smartphone or, in extremis, just typing very carefully); release onto the Bitcoin network.

And how does the fact that it is accessible via VNC change anything?

Management has previously said that Gox's cold storage was based on offline copies of the keys being fixed onto paper and held in 3+ locations, sprinkled with some RAID-esque pixie dust. (I promise -- this is the maximally charitable summary.) If they're all available for management via VNC at any given time, that casts some doubt about whether they are actually striped over a bunch of paper wallets. Although the Bitcoin community is primarily worried about a server compromise followed instantly by a wallet draining, putting them on a machine accessible from the internal network is approximately just as dangerous, since one assumes that an attacker who gets the web server owns the entire internal network with probability approaching 1.
Medical care is 3rd leading cause of death in U.S
I hope there are vacancies for someone who is learning Python and wants a job which deals with Python.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie should be required reading for anyone who interacts with human beings.
I'm a European living in Europe, could you please stop spreading propaganda. Europe is a POOR place, it's not this egalitarian paradise the media makes it out to be. People here are poor and desperate, they are exploited daily and treated like slave labour not much different from the Chinese. What work life-balance are you talking about, sure you have a life after 6 pm when you get home from work, and on weekends but how is this any different from the US. I've seen people lose it in the work place as in start throwing things, breaking office equipment, overturning desks and threatening to kill their managers some have even tried and had to be dragged out by security, all because they have been pushed to their limits.

Holidays, week-ends and working without being chronically on the verge of a burn-out is considered socialism aka communism in Europe, if you want that you are considered lazy like the Greeks and Eastern Europeans (note that is not my view of them) i.e. wanting free money without hard work.

I don't know how its like in the US but please do not paint a false image of Europe.
Which groups would you suggest that are still worth looking into?
Apolitical: my opinion, which is natural and normal

Political: your opinion, which is biased and mindkilled
Happy Swiss National Day Switzerland!

You've been a democracy since 1292(?). Good luck and hopefully you'll be independent and free for another 800 years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/3eux61/if_breaking_...
Seems more like a list of the software bugs with the most severe consequences.
https://www.soylent.com/
> Instead of taxing salaries at high percentages — a practice that puts most of the tax burden on the middle class, where most income comes from wages and not from capital gains — Switzerland immediately taxes dividends at a maximum of 35 percent and also has a wealth-based tax.

That's the secret. The Swiss are brave enough to tax the wealth. They are not afraid to do so. They also are extremely respectful of their electorate: They do referendums often and for any reason (building a bridge or allowing foreigners to work in their country). There is a sort of just distribution of social responsibility which unfortunately lacks elsewhere.

If you look for the city with highest living standard in the world though, it's not in Switzerland but right next to it, the beautiful Vienna :-)
That was a long time ago...Since 2009 actually the U.S. started going after them, it was all over the media.. not sure if you saw it..http://www.irs.gov/uac/Offshore-Tax-Avoidance-and-IRS-Compli... and http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/10/25/73-0f-100-...
Oh, those communists!!! :-P
On the subject of IRC: it wasn't fading all that strongly, IMO, at least for open-source and free software discussions. Then Slack came along. Startling to see a proprietary clone of IRC (albeit with some nice extra features, namely history) come along and start taking over. See, e.g., the Clojurians Slack community.
P.S. Most Europeans don't own a home because homes here cost at least half a million Euros out of reach for average Joe. Owning your own home is common sense in the US, even if it's a crappy home it's still your own place. Europeans live their entire life under the extortion of renting, they live on the property of landlords who will charge them for the oxygen they breath.

Also there is NO difference between West Europe and East Europe, the only difference is the rent prices otherwise the poor quality of life is the same. Stop spreading mis-information.
> UPDATE: Nest has listened and rolled back the software update. See Intermittent low battery or connectivity issues with thermostat software 4.0 . The software update on my Nest has been rolled back and the thermostat appears to work properly as before. Thank you.

Also (2013)
Smart contracts are one of the worst ideas ever conceived.

Nobody actually wants smart contracts, for excellent and obvious reasons. Nerds think they're a good idea because they'll sort out all the annoying grey areas in social human interaction.

Dr. Strangelove is literally about an unstoppable smart contract going wrong.

No business actually wants smart contracts - they always, always want the option of lawyering out of a bad deal. Or stopping it if the government gets pissed off and says it will penalise you to a crisp if you proceed with that smart-arse contract you just put on the blockchain.

No consumer wants smart contracts, for the same reason "no chargebacks" is a loser. You always want a human to be able to fix the problem.

The only use I can think of for smart contracts is for businesses to screw over customers who have no other option, c.f. mandatory arbitration clauses. Note how the standard example of a smart contract is a car that stops working if your payment fails. Or the Internet fails. Unstoppably. Immune to human intercession, circumstances, etc. (Such locked cars already exist, only bought by people who have no other choice.)
If there is a market for these, why don't they exist already?
Windows 10 “steals” your bandwidth
Does that imply Europe is more oligarch than America?

Those days, money is more or less a direct measure of power. Inequality of power and social immobility are marks of servitude. In this regard the US doesn't fare well (and has been getting worse): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
> 'pro-life' is also an epithet that many pro-choice people dislike (because it implies that pro-choice people somehow oppose life).

Many pro-life people dislike epithet "pro-choice" (because it implies that pro-life people somehow oppose choice).

Actually both implications are sort of correct. That whole debate is about what is more important: the right of fetus to live or freedom of choice of a pregnant woman.
I'd never really considered it before, but of course the author is correct. Control of an API is the control of a language, and as with 1984's Newspeak, control of language is a powerful tool.

Amazon's control of the dominant language to describe infrastructure (its own web services API), for example, gives it a competitive advantage beyond its head start and inertia.

Of course, an unused API is as apolitical as an unused language, and noting that an API is political due to its usage (and is more political the more used it is) may be a useful extension of the idea.
Oh it's real alright. I'm pretty sure that was a Super Bowl ad recently.
I agree, although I think that some of those are less critical issues. For me, the reason to be aware of the politics around APIs is that APIs - unlike libraries - imply an ongoing relationship.

With a library, it is presumed (leaving aside the question of licensing, which is definitely political) that the decision about whether to use a library is purely technical: does it do the things we want it to do, with the correct level of performance, reliability and ease of use? You could imagine writing a test suite to determine definitive answers to these questions and, once answered, there would be no need to examine them again.

An API gives you access to someone else's product, and that product will evolve. Some of those evolutions may cause your product to break. If you're a Windows application developer, you can count on a pretty strong guarantee from Microsoft that they won't break Windows APIs, which is why programs from the 90s still run on modern versions of Windows, even if this requires some complex engineering from Microsoft. There was no technical aspect of the Win32 API circa 1995 that guaranteed these things; the commitment to future support was entirely political in nature.

The same applies to network-accessible APIs today. If your program achieves some result by invoking a statically-linked library, you can be certain that it will continue to work in the future purely on the basis of your technical knowledge. If you're relying on a third-party API, you cannot, and that's the distinction that the OP is asking us to take more seriously.
I'm not surprised. The Germanic countries have the weirdest people in terms of social awkwardness. And I grew up in one.
I really like the idea behind Cycle.js, but I don't think it does a very good job explaining itself. The idea as I understand it is not very complicated, but the language is rather esoteric.

The main benefits of Cycle.js in my eyes are:

1. Emphasis on a single entry point for event handling instead of a million separate event handlers. This is similar to the idea of the "Dispatcher" in Flux -- it's a central handler that manages all user input. But the Flux dispatcher has a specific purpose, whereas the main Cycle handler is more generic (which is, in my opinion, preferable).

2. Use of reactive programming, which is an extremely powerful paradigm in asynchronous environments like the browser. It takes a while to wrap your head around reactive programming but once you do it's absolutely fantastic. The only concern I would have here is that Rx.js adds overhead that might be unnecessary in some cases. But then I guess you would just use a more lightweight framework., so it's not exactly a criticism of Cycle.
I wish I was old enough to use USENET when it was popular. The closest I got was using XDCC on IRC but even then, USENET sounds like such an interesting thing to use. I miss anonymity.
I still use usenet every day. There are, admittedly, only a few good groups left. But where there's a high barrier to entry there's a high reward. The discussion is of high quality. Higher than most mailing lists and reddit/HN, at least.

sci.math, comp.misc, sci.electronics.*, comp.lang.*
SCID - Source Code In Database; http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?SourceCodeInDatabase
Where is this coming from? I got a dividend in Switzerland, and it isn't taxed at 35%. What they do is they keep 35% until the next year, at which time you can have it. Dividend tax is a much lower amount.
Do some volunteer work, it looks good on your resume, it does some good in the world, and it improves your soft skills because it takes you out of your grove and sticks you in a new, non-threatening situation (hopefully). Plus, most volunteer events have mentors that will teach you how to deal with people. Do something simple, do not go overboard, and listen to how the professionals there deal with people.
> they offer an API that exposes functionality that they control but what is political about it?

Google's YouTube APIs played (and still does) a significant part in its turf wars against Microsoft. As did Google's MAPI support, and as did Microsoft's MAPI and SourceSafe APIs in the past (no longer in the MS world, so no idea about TFS).

It's political. It's not "country governance" politics. But it is politics, in the give-and-take-between-opposing-forces sense of e.g. "Your WinPhone users don't get YouTube or Google Calenader because you keep harassing my Android partners".

I agree with Sustrik that it's only considered an API (rather than an internal implementation detail) when multiple parties are negotiating.
Mr. Gas shows xmaxkatsu what Vita FW files look like
That index is almost comical. They prefer quoting the average wage over the median, the indicator of water quality is asking people whether they are satisfied with their drinking water, and the US wins the category "percentage of people with access to an indoor flushing toilet" due to having successfully eradicated the traditional way of living for native americans.
Income taxes.

As for sales tax, it's 7% here. Lower than most of Europe, and lower than some parts of the u.s., but not all parts of the u.s. But the low taxes more than make up for it. (about 1/2 compared to the u.s., but depends on your income level)