skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "the theft of a portion of someones life "

I will not downvote you but I have a problem with the attitude that (seems to) stand behind this phrase. Remember the context. If you are an American, you grew up in one of the richest countries in the world, you probably had chances for education, access to technology, functioning roads and other public utilities, etc. etc. Of course, your life is your life but it's not like everything society might ask of you is "theft".

> "What does a person get out of national service?"

It's not everything about you, and perhaps you should ask yourself where would you be without the context of the rich country you grew up in (yes, I'm just guessing here, correct me if I'm wrong)? Is every tax "evil" too? Nobody likes paying taxes, me neither, but there is a difference between discussing where the balance of give and take is and just interpreting everything always in terms of "it's all mine". If you had to assign percentages of your success (if any), starting from zero, how much would you assign to your environment, your parents, your effort, your luck?
Sneaky swine ...
we're a/b testing a few homepages - you must have got the getting straight down to business one - some people really like it, others things its a little pushy
The EIA Annual Energy Review 2008 http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ estimates that 1340 trillion Btu was used in the US in commercial buildings for lighting during 2003 (p.65), out of a total of 99.30 quadrillion Btu total US consumption in 2008 (p.3), of 18.54 quadrillion Btu total commercial use (of which 1.34 quadrillion Btu is 7.2%, which is, as you say, less than 20%). US residential usage amounted to 21.64 quadrillion Btu in 2008 (p.3).

Suppose you're right and 11% of typical residential usage is lighting (what's your source for that, please? The AER doesn't seem to hazard a guess there), and that the US isn't too atypical (admittedly, a very dubious assumption). Then that would amount to 2.4 quadrillion BTU spent on residential lighting in the US.

The total, then, would be 1.3 + 2.4 = 3.7 quadrillion Btu per year used on residential and commercial lighting, or 3.7% of the total.

Industrial facility lighting adds another 0.2 quadrillion Btu (p.48), which would bring it up to 3.9%.

It would immediately follow that 3.7% of the average person's energy use is residential and commercial lighting, and 3.9% is residential, commercial, and industrial lighting, which is indeed a relatively small proportion. If every person in the US went entirely without artificial lighting but otherwise somehow continued their lives as before (except in cars, which are not included in the above statistics), total US marketed energy consumption would drop by 3.9%.

I am in favor of compact fluorescent lights, ordinary fluorescent lights, halogen lights, and new high-efficiency LEDs. But the savings are not enormous when considered overall as a society, particularly considering that most industrial commercial lighting is already using more efficient machinery than incandescent bulbs. They are, rather, relatively small.

3.9% of US marketed energy consumption is 130 gigawatts. 3.9% of world marketed energy consumption (about 500 quadrillion Btu/year, according to IEO2010 Highlights, p.1) would be about 700 gigawatts.

Laws are not admissible as evidence about energy usage. Laws provide evidence about political reality, not objective reality.

Do you not "share the view" that 3.9% is a relatively small proportion of 100%? I think that would merely mark you as a Humpty-Dumpty. (There's glory for you!) Or do you think that the US is deeply atypical, and that the average numbers are much higher than the US numbers?
Ask HN: Validating user's real identity
My startup needs to be able to validate a user's real identity. Similar to personal digital certificates, we may have multiple levels of trust.

I'm wondering what methods you may know of to validate a user's real identity. These may range anywhere from charging a credit card through a notary public's signature.

In particular, I'm looking for methods I could automate in code. :) Thanks.
The compression lemma
Go with whatever your distro provides as a default. RVM completely segregates your RVM Rubies from your system Ruby, so you're far better off with a "common" system Ruby install than you are trying to hack together a stripped down Ruby install. The package maintainers already know the platform specific idiosyncrasies you'll need to work around, so might as well leverage that. You may also encounter other software that expects a certain system Ruby environment on your system, so there's that too.
as a seller thats right - the tour page is a great landing page, but we also need to appeal to buyers so are caught in a place where the homepage needs to talk to 2 different markets at the same time
I'd love to get appliance by appliance data of where my house's energy is going. I've got a Killawatt, but that only helps for 120v appliances with plugs, and that doesn't include the in wall electric squirrel cage heaters (x6, on 240v) or the Hot Water heater, or the Oven/Stove, or the dryer. PSE, the local energy co, is supposed to have 5 minute lag time electric meters, but they've never been able to show me any data from them.

I have found out that my free, spare, energy guzzling fridge that's stored in the garage costs $5 a month to run in the summer. I was expecting way worse than that.

Google was supposed to have some sort of thingy that went on the electric meter, but searching for it is failing me now. If I had real time use data, even for the house as a whole, I could probably back out what's taking the monster share of the load. (especially if I went around killing things at the breaker).
If your mom went to college in 1970, GDP per capita was only $5000. So one year of college cost 60% of GDP per capita, now it costs about 80%. That's an increase, but not a ridiculously large one.

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_pc...

In any case, I don't much care about education by itself, since most people value education only insofar as it allows them to get wealth. If people have more wealth, why would I worry about their education? (That's not to say that education is becoming more scarce - far from it. We are more education today than ever before.)

The same applies to health insurance - I don't care about the cost of health insurance, I care about health. By most measures that I'm aware of, health is increasing. For example, life expectancy went up 8 years since 1970 and infant mortality went down more than 50%:

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_im...
This comment was interesting to me because I know several people like that guy - and their religious views would be better described as "extremely different culturally" than extremist with the common connotations of extremism. I'm having trouble translating the cultural norm, here, but I guess you could say that for them, the not touching women thing is simply a set of rules you don't break that serve as a safety barrier against real trouble like adultery. If no man ever touches a woman other than his wife, and is never in a private space alone with a woman other than his wife, then it's hard to get a relationship off the ground. I think cultural norms in the U.S. might take sufficiently little issue with adultery these days that even with explanation, the behavior is alien, but it's not the sort of extremism like "let's blow people up because we imagine God likes that."

Then again, she might very well have made the right choice. People don't easily ignore culture.
I'd suggest that their political views are largely irrelevant until someone makes them relevant, which you have done. Since this now apparently presents a bit of a dilemma for you, it would seem that it is self-inflicted.

Political views can be--though they aren't always-- indicators of intelligence. Don't stop reading here though. I don't mean to say that one end of the spectrum is smart and the other stupid, rather a political opinion is like any other self-representation in that how it is presented can be a good indicator of many traits important in evaluating a candidate-for-hire.

Sadly, I suspect that the Facebook political information is merely their political affiliation, a one word response to heading on a profile form. Which causes me to question whether or not someone could put any stock in it. Like most things on Facebook, it's designed as a conversation starter, nothing more. That leads me to conclude that perhaps Facebook is not, allowing exception for egregious examples of anti-social behavior posted to someone's wall, is not a good place to find professional information about an individual.
What are your CI boxes running? The Hudson team used to have a number of Hudson slaves running various OSs and distros just building Hudson on-demand.

That cluster drifted away, but there are a lot of Hudson servers out there that are mostly idle, and people seem generally happy to donate the CPU time. I've got an Ubuntu one here that could run Ruby slave builds.
"When we over-saturate ourselves in other people's work it short-changes our own creative development." - So true.
Google Research buzz: Suggesting Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph
A couple of points:

- It's a lot easier to heat your bath with solar energy than it is to run your phone charger. So if you have a solar hot water heater, a different comparison would be in order.

- The inefficiency of the water heater is probably relatively small (under 50%, maybe under 10%) and so can be neglected for the purpose of round-number figures like "one and a half baths".
We made a FAQ page for AirDropper based on all the feedback everyone provided earlier in the week. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1613574) You really helped us start to understand which benefits were important to emphasize. We'll definitely be keeping the feedback in mind as we work to improve AirDropper.

The FAQ is available here: http://www.airdropper.com/faq

Thanks everyone!
>They can save up their cash and are trying to move directly from living at home to buying their own place so they skip the renting waste of money (please don't get into that firestorm here, I've heard all the arguments, suffice to say they're saving money by not renting right now).

It's interesting that you feel the need to defend this, whereas in places outside the mainstream US culture, like Hawaii, it's the norm. Children are more likely to live at home through and after college until they've saved enough for a down payment on a home or apartment, and then move out.

Financially it's smart, it keeps families together longer, parents get to bond with their children as young adults, share life lessons the kids may not have appreciated at an earlier age, and other good things. But for some reason it's all taboo in mainstream American culture.
I guess parents can turbocharge their kids's future by holding them back a year, so they'll be the biggest, strongest, and most mature kids in the class.
All of these tips are generalizations of the same idea: with email, nobody grabs your attention without your consent. This is a new idea in society - you could always get someone's attention by finding them in person, and you could usually reach someone on the telephone. Call screeners and security guards are expensive, so only a few people had them. But now, I can just open up my GMail preferences and have my mail prioritized, flagged, tagged, deleted, and archived without lifting a finger. And malevolent emails are filtered out by someone else! At the end of the day, effectively dealing with email is like programming - when something sucks, automate it.
I loved Jacob Kaplan-Moss's "Django Deployment Workshop", which he presented at PyCon and OSCon. In it, he shows how to use cloud servers (he uses the rackspace cloud) to scale multiple web and database servers and do load balancing.

It is a very pragmatic talk, not specific to Django, but suitable for most wsgi setups. It is about 3 hours long.

http://blip.tv/file/3632436
Search Google Docs From Within Gmail
The Web as an API
What if the code is compiled remotely? If it's a web app, that makes sense because you could then view it in a browser. Of course no compilation necessary for rails and it's colleagues.
Clearance Sale: Barnes & Noble Didn't Evolve Enough
"impressive, isn't it!", what? You haven't shown me anything, why would I be impressed? I'm not sold on why I would want to open a shop on shoply. What do your shops even offer, e.g. can I customize? You should add a quick tour or bullet point list of important features on the front page.
It depends what you use it for. For relatively small apps that don't need much system level tuning I find it pretty awesome. Scaling wise it's fantastic - I have an app serving >100k hits/day (admittedly doing very little for each hit) with no problem.
I want the focus on developers that Ballmer has been yelling about for 20 years but has been completely incapable of implementing.
More and more people graduate school later and later.

Is that really not enough reason in and of itself? Very few people in school are really adults, unless they have returned from the work force.
Or living in general.

Oh, and wait, if everyone died that would have tremendous ecological impact too.
Dunno... of the top of my head: no need for much local storage, no need for much GPU power (I don't think that's the market they are aiming it at), and stuff like that.

But it's just a guess.
Fair enough, but I'd wager that carbon-based energy is cheap enough that it accounts for only a fraction of the price of many (probably most) products.

Also, producers have no incentive to utilize alternative sources of energy while carbon-based energy is so relatively inexpensive.
The function of the registrars is as a mechanism for homesteading, much like establishing initial private ownership of some newly discovered land. As such, the price charged by the registrars should be largely irrelevant and held as low as possible to not inadvertently set a price floor (this is after all a commodity with effectively zero marginal supply cost).

Once some individual comes up with and homesteads a domain, it can be used by them toward some ends, or traded/auctioned in the market whereby a price will emerge (see Coase theorem). To be clear, there is no "right" price, just whatever the market will bear, even if the market is constrained to a single domain name. Externally applied "fixes" would only serve to distort the market in unexpected and harmful ways. As Hayek noted, "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

If there is a problem here it is either that the transaction costs (including non-monetary costs) of such exchanges are high (which provides an entrepreneurial opportunity), or the value of the domain to its current owner just happens to be higher than what others want to pay and those others are upset. Not much can be done about the latter, short of coercion.
Not sure I'll have time to check out Clojure any time soon, but this post convinced me I want to read SICP. Despite hearing great things about it, my impression was always that it was much better for beginners, and wouldn't teach me that much. Sounds like I was wrong.
You might enjoy http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html

Or you might not.
After reading the article we've made the free option less visible (www.examprofessor.com), and perhaps we'll remove it completely one day soon.

Nice article!
BTW, in case you don't make it the last page - it looks like most of these apps were already in the Apple review process before he got hired.
I used to have two places to check for all of that semi-automated "I'd like to read this but it isn't urgent" material: my email inbox (mailing lists, newsletters, etc) and my RSS reader.

The fix -- a quick'n'dirty script that moves all those emails over to RSS: http://github.com/danshoutis/mail-to-rss

Caveat: if you're using Google Reader, you need to put the output RSS+HTML into a non-password-protected place, which means someone who can guess the URL can read your stuff. (For maximum convenience, I'm just dumping it into the public folder of my dropbox account.)

It certainly needs polishing, but not so much that I've felt the need to work on it recently. :)
Next they are going to tell us the amount of bandwidth that amazon uses directly reflects how much they make.. no kidding.
The claim is correct for relative income and incorrect for absolute income. In absolute terms, wages have been stagnating for a long time and combined with technological progress, yes, absolute real wealth may have advanced for almost everybody. The problem is, people define their incomes in relative terms, and with the total excess at the top management levels since the Soviet downfall combined with mass media, most Americans have been suckered into debt. So I would venture Americans' net-worth has indeed declined long-term, even absolutely.
How about the fact that the same guy institutes policies that ban huge swaths of apps (including anything not written in Objective-C)?
Create Bit.ly Short URLs Using Jquery and Ajax
we thought that was kinda cool - but i hear your point
I felt the same way. I was going along with the ride when I saw obvious connection between ads and content. While that doesn't make his thesis true, I was able to see how those magazine ads were clearly different from the typical online ads I see.

But he lost me with the Gap ad. How does he know it doesn't work? It contradicts his thesis, but using that as a reason for why the ad doesn't work is begging the question. Maybe people see that ad and are more likely to buy Gap jeans. We don't know without data.
Does a Panda's anus warrant a "Mature 17+" label? Or is that only for animated boobs?
I could definitely see a use for this. While digital distribution is rapidly making record stores obsolete, there still certainly is a need for the guys behind the counter who knows way, way more about music than you ever will (think Jack Black and John Cusack in High Fidelity).
We're largely debating about angels on the head of a pin, but what the heck...

If you scan my comments, you'll see that I never uttered the phrase "the Democrat party". My phrase was "a Democrat talking point", and I think this is quite consonant liguistically with a statement like "I am a Democrat". Nobody says "I'm a Democratic".

Specifically, had I said that "gun control is a Democratic talking point", that would indicate that the talking point of gun control is somehow characterized by democracy (but for the capital "D", which may help resolve it, I admit). That is nothing like what I meant.

"John Kerry's yacht" refers to a person who claims that we should all be paying our fair share to provide such democratic (note the lower-case D: I do mean that it's characteristic of democracy) funding for our government. Specifically, it refers to the recent discovery that he had moored his boat out-of-state in order to avoid sales tax, painting him as hypocritical.

Kerry was the first to come to mind because of its recency. One might also reference anti-immigration Republicans and their cleaning ladies, for example.

I'm a partisan. I own it. You should do the same.

I'm not partisan, at least not in the way that's typically used, in the polarization of American politics between left and right. I am a member of the Libertarian Party, so in a proper sense I am a partisan, but I'm not of the sort that mindlessly bashes the {GOP,DEM} while ignoring the faults of the {DEM,GOP}. For example, you'll see that just up-thread, I called the NRA "GOP stooges".

And there are precious few Libertarians in office for me to criticize.
Unless there's some kind of assertion here that Python-based fart apps would eat his lunch if only he would allow them, I'm not seeing the problem.
Women Who Take Red Meat Twice A Day Increase Risk Of Heart Disease
Credit Card would give you the user's name.... but John Smith isn't John Smith, he just happens to have the same name.

John Smith #2 could also add John Smith #1 address to his authorized credit card addresses, but that's a malicious edge case.

Old school way of opening a back account online was, you verified yourself online with something YOU KNEW (account number and last debit/credit on the account). Then we'd snail mail you a letter to your known address (something WE KNEW), have you sign it and send it back.

-- You could skip the mail it back by having them input a code you mail them. Also things get messy if you have a "jr" in the house. John Smith and John Smith Jr. may both use John Smith and live in the same house. How sensitive is the data and how regulated is your industry would determine the lengths you have to go to.
I can think of three tips that are more useful than any of the ones in the article:

1. Don't subscribe to mailing lists. Really, don't.

2. Answer yes or no questions with a yes or a no.

3. Don't reply if the email doesn't require (or warrant) a response.
Here's the story about the name: I wrote http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset earlier this year, decrying the lack of "tinkerability" of the iPad and similar closed devices. "There won't ever be a MacsBug for the iPad. There won't be a ResEdit, or a Copy ][+ sector editor, or an iPad Peeks & Pokes Chart."

One of the common refrains in the comments was that the iPad includes top-of-the-line support for a perfectly open, tinkerable platform: the web. Thus, the "HTML5 Peeks, Pokes and Pointers" chart was born.

Also, I just purchased a real live physical original Beagle Bros "Peeks, Pokes and Pointers" chart to hang up in my mancave^Woffice. Next to my Apple //es. Plural. So there's that.
An interview with why the lucky stiff : The Setup
This is what I do for my work email:

1. I create rules for every Exchange DL that I consider important. This is the first line of defense.

2. Any email that I receive that I am not in the to or cc line is sent to a "Check Later" email folder. Either someone bcc'd me, or someone (maybe me) adding me to a DL that I didn't create a rule for.

3. My Inbox should contain only mail that is directly to me.

4. Any mail in my Inbox that is not actionable (either I'm done with it or it's informational) is filed away.

Of course, these strategies only work for certain people (I'm just a cog in a machine), but it has done wonders for keeping my Inbox manageable. I rely heavily on Outlook Search to find mails that I remember seeing but have filed away (I have a single "I've read these mails and want to keep them" folder).
You don't seem to know what you're talking about, I mean that in the nicest way.

ICANN doesn't solve domain disputes at all. That is handled through UDRP providers (WIPO, NAF, etc).

ICANN doesn't manage any of the registries themselves, they give the contracts in some meaningless manner (different problem, shitty organization ICANN is).

You eat some of the biggest taco bell meals I have ever heard of. As others stated, you have a very rich mindset. Even 7$ is expensive for some people, I've met startups in third world countries that have trouble paying $20/month for hosting (that can be 20% of a monthly salary or more!)
A friend of mine who has created several successful non-profit organizations adds a "no buildings" clause to the bylaws of every new organization he creates.

He believes that once non-profit organizations accumulate some capital, the first thing they do is build a big new building, and that's the beginning of a downhill slide.
Mail Chimp is absolutely worth it IMHO. Spend your time on your content.