rabble

Interesting, i know a lot of americans go to Berlin but German laws make being a freelancer quite tricky. Interesting to see it's easier in the Netherlands.

It's missing the H1B1 visa which is very easy to get but isn't dual intent. It's only available for citizens of Singapore and Chile. It requires little paperwork and takes about a week to get. If you're so lucky as having a Singaporean or Chilean passport i recommend you look in to it.

We didn't have a choice last time.

Not like the US, Uruguayans never say they're celebrating easter, they call it tourism week. People say 'christmas' but the government calls it 'family day'!!!

Compared to the rest of latin america or the US, Uruguayans are much more like Europeans in terms of being very secular. That said, Uruguay is culturally catholic.

The link you provided shows that %40 of the population claims no religion at all, the highest numbers of any country in the americas. Then on top of that, looking at church attendance, most 'Catholics' in Uruguay haven't attended mass in years, and then only for christmas and easter.

Let's see, Uruguay. I'm from California but i've spent a few years living in Uruguay and started and ran a tech business in Uruguay. The country is a special unique place, but it's far from perfect.

Let's start with the good things:

Good Tech Policies

  * Laptops for every public school child (over 1 million distributed) 
  * Free basic (64k 1 gb per month) internet on every phone line
  * Good 3G/4G coverage over the country
  * Fiber to the home finally provides good broadband
  * No taxes for tech companies profits (there are pay roll taxes)
  * Free education through university, no exams to get in.
  * Goal of %95 renewable electricity production by 2015
  * Lots of small startups / exits (about a dozen a year under $10 million USD)
  * Strong freedom of information laws
  * Good open source / open formats laws for all government data.

Other Positive things

  * Very little corruption (i never came across any, but people complain)
  * Legal Gay Marriage, Abortion, Marijuana, etc... Socially progressive
  * Walkable cities, sidewalk cafes, beaches
  * GMO's are banned, food is natural and unprocessed.
  * Good electoral system, proportional representation
  * Politicians care about building consensus and getting stuff done.
  * Fantastic & cheap health care system
  * Not consumerist, people care more about friends & family than things.
  * No traffic / pollution problems related to cars. 
  * Uruguayans trust their institutions (banks, government, union, church)
  * Atheist! Uruguayans are not religious and the state is officially atheist.

But Uruguay's not perfect. There's a lot wrong. The bureaucracy is complicated with more crazy rules than you can imagine. There's lots of paperwork. There's a lack of local credit and asset markets to get investment. You can get a new company easily, but opening a bank account is a real PITA. Credit card processing and things like that re very hard. Inflation has become a major problem in Uruguay and when combined with real productivity gains and a strong currency it means that real prices have risen a LOT. Pay roll taxes are high but salaries are low. That means many Uruguayans are broke. Car's are very expensive, gas is expensive, keeping traffic down, but it's a pain. The quality of things you buy in Uruguay are very very low. Things constantly break, the market is tiny and customs duties are high.

Uruguay's biggest problem, ironically enough given their being very socially liberal and open about good public policy, is that Uruguayans are very conservative. There's no desire to try something new or different. This makes Uruguay feel like it's living in the past. Stable families, sunday diners, stay at home housewives, summer vacations in the family beach house or camping in the same place every year, banks are open from 1 to 4pm, multigenerational house holds, etc... Uruguay feels like an alternate history version of the 1950's.

Uruguay's a great place to retire. It's not a place with people who want to change the world, or change their own country to keep up with the Joneses. It's got it's own path driven by good public policy and a desire not to rock the boat. It's definitely much better off than any of the other countries in the region. Few poor people, no rich people, decent quality of life for everybody.

PS, ignore then trolls. The right wing in Uruguay lost power because they mismanaged the country and are upset that things are getting better.

I think today foursquare does serve a lot of the dopplr niche. When i'm traveling and i check in to a new city, i find other folks who are in town. It's not so good for planning, but it works for discovering who's in town.

How much do they cost? They're sold out now so they don't list the price. Does anybody know how much they run? Seems like a really good idea to me, there are lots of known USB hacks for phones and somebody smart could probably find away to get the trojan back up on to the person's primary computer.

That's pretty funny, Xobni's CEO is Jeff Bonforte who used to be a yahoo running IM and eventually part of the business where delicious was. Now he's been brought back in.

Am i the only one who thinks making $30k as a graphic designer freelancing in California for 6 months is incredibly low? In fact less than making at $42k annually as a salaried employee once you count in health care and self employment taxes?

Since when did a blog post about being a barely surviving freelancer qualify for the HN front page?

Sorry for being a bit of a jerk on this, but i don't get it. Maybe he got clients by being good at gaming HN?

I started reading this and i kept thing, why the hell would GitHub be buying a food startup! I know they're doing well but this is really beyond developer tools.

Yep, it's to expensive. We were invited to participate and decided it simply didn't provide the value. Especially starting focusing on tech conferences, which are Lanyrd's core, each company which could pay for pro could also just code up their own page to do the same thing. It's a shame as I like lanyrd and want it to stick around.

There are countries where this is being done. Uruguay is tiny and highly urbanized, but it's got a goal of achieving this very thing. Every phone line in the country, there are only about 900,000, comes with free no cost broadband. You get 1GB of traffic free, an extra GB of traffic if you visit educational sites associated with One Laptop Per Child. Speaking of which, every child in the country gets a laptop, so they can get online.

So they've achieved two goals of universal access already. They gave everybody a computer and everybody a slow but free internet connection.

Now that they achieved that, they are rolling out fiber to the country. So far it's just in some neighborhoods of the capital, but if you can get it's a pretty good deal 120M fiber connection for $83 USD per month. Beyond fixed line internet, there's 3G/4G coverage over every city/town/village with good bandwidth (i got 5m up / down last time i tried it).

How did they do this? The government treats getting good internet access as a human right. There's ANTEL, a state telco monopoly which sees it's mission as getting everybody online. There's a viable threat that if ANTEL didn't do it's job, the market could be opened to competition. Bridging the digital divide is a national priority and so Uruguay has chosen to invest heavily in making sure everybody's included and online. As a result, Uruguay has the highest internet penetration rates in Latin America.

Other parts of the state, like the energy company is well on it's way to eliminating the need of fossil fuels for electricity production, primarily through hydro and wind power.

Utilities are precisely places where the state can, has, and should continue to provide a common level of service everybody can expect. Getting universal internet access, cheap and fast, is something any country can achieve if they decide it's important. If a tiny country in south american you've never heard of with $15k gdp per capita and 3.8 cows per person can do it, the wealthiest country in the world should be able to pull it off.

I faced a choice like this as I went through M&A of my most recent company. We were doing well, growing like a weed, but also because it was a consulting services company it was very cyclical and dependent on a few large clients. There was a real risk that we could lose both key clients and staff at the same time and eat up our capital reserve. Growth was also dependent on us reinvesting the profits of the business while maintaining working capital. Each time i took money out of the company, it was taking out of it's capital reserves.

The earnout comes in a stages as is norm when you're expected to stay involved. So it hasn't changed my life much except for paying off all of my debts.

While i think the rich vs king thing might have some truth, I ran my company this time to be king. To enjoy doing good work with smart people and build interesting products. Have an awesome office, run a good conference, and the like. It was a lifestyle business and i wasn't looking to sell it. But i'm happy to have gotten the offer, happy with the arrangement, and happy with my new role as CTO of the acquiring company. It's not perfect, but neither was everything perfect running a company all on my own.

The really ironic part is that i've been involved in many startups, which were very intentionally about making money and value. Odeo became Twitter, and really was worth a lot of value, but left after 2 years & sold my options, long before it was clear Twitter would become, well, twitter. With my most recent company, it was about creating a place i wanted to work myself, with a team i liked, doing great work. Sometimes you make money where you intended to change the world, and change the world where you intended to make money.

Looks like there are a few more pages, but most of it seems to overlap with what Aaron already posted.

I've got a xiaomi M1 which i picked up in China, it's only sold in mainland china and i've never had any problem telling AT&T that it's a dumb phone. No messages or anything. Maybe it's just an obscure enough phone. Miui is a pretty well maintained distribution of android.

That's true, but Kara usually does a pretty good job of actual journalism and verifying sources.

He wants to be an exchange student in high school, but instead of doing it through a program like AFS or Rotary, he's arranging things himself and put up a website to find a family. With programs you don't get so much say as to where you go, often not even the country, much less the state. Since he's a techie, i'd imagine he wants to end up in Silicon Valley or near by. Seems like a smart tactic to me. That said, he probably needs a follow up page or something for folks who are serious about hosting, which includes what it's like and need to host him as a high school exchange student.

So sad to see matrix.itasoftware.com's amazing search engine get most of it's features ripped out and replaced with a pretty UI that does so little.

For folks who like hipmonk? Do you really travel? Their search engine also fails to find most good fares. Pretty but useless.

Most people who are serious use expertflyer.com and matrix.itasoftware.com to find fares. Yes you have to learn a bit about how air fares are constructed, but this is hacker news not consumer news isn't it?

Pretty fair, for every $ that Apple steals from Samsung in patent BS, Samsung raises their rates to charge Apple for chips.

Back in the day, 2007 and 2008 there was live running federation between Twitter and Jaiku. I remember i was sitting in the room when Ralph and Blaine got it working, at 4am at a foo camp.

Unfortunately Jaiku was bought by google and they spent a long time with it offline only to come out as Google Buzz which didn't take off.

Many of the early twitter engineers like Blaine Cook and Alex Payne pushed hard for twitter to be more open and federated, but lost that argument and left or were pushed out. It's a business not a technology decision which makes twitter centralized.

This is the same guy who designed DHH's Pagani HH a couple of years ago. http://filer.progstr.com/1/post/2012/05/dhhs-pagani-zonda-hh...

He listed himself as an investor in PayPal on his angel list profile. https://angel.co/greg-kouri

As somebody who has a complicated relationship with a well known startup's founding, it's tricky to explain sometimes. Important and early roles are held by many, the title founder is tricky and often contested. What's worse the media usually has incentive to make everybody in to a 'founder'.

Simon and Nat started Lanyrd (W11) on their honeymoon even! They were planning on traveling around the world, but got delayed and built the first version in a couple weeks from a rented apartment in morocco. I bet there are other YC companies founded by couples as well.

With Twitter what we did when we launched originally was simply get a PCMCIA GSM card and used some windows software to post it to the website via a protected REST api. Now i guess you could use a usb gsm modem. Worked great for prototypes. Now i guess there are services, but really the usb gsm modem method works well even today.

You can't charge for SMS that way and technically you're supposed to use a short code for automated sms sending. Short codes are very expensive, so don't do that til much later.

55 employees before their A round? Either they raised a lot of money in a 'seed' round before this or they put a bunch of their own money in. Otherwise i don't see how they funded the growth to this stage on revenue.

So any sense of how much these new micro apartments in SF are going to cost?

Good time to consider Google's Compute Engine as an alternative? What will we call it, GCE?

Ironically enough, yammer started out as a twitter clone for the enterprise, and evolved in to something more like a private facebook.

I tried what might be called polyphasic sleeping twice. When both of my kids were born. It sucked. Babies do it, and their parents are forced to join them for the first few months of life. It's a damned good thing we teach kids the normal way of sleeping, when it's night.

So the video in question got pulled offline, so now none of us who missed it can tell if it was sexist or not. Kind of ironic.