skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
great little service (I hope, at least!). You should maybe add a "some words I've been kicking about include" box. For example, I might really want to call my email app something with 'post' or 'fountain' in the name but just can't make the leap to available domainname. *just an example, I'm not building an email app called postfountain. Really I'm not. Would be a good name though.
I think there are a couple of factors at work here. The first and most obvious is that young adults are more often engaged in higher education, which effectively delays the point at which they enter the "real world". The second is that it's harder your young adults to earn a wage which can support a family. In my parents and grandparents generation it was possible to leave school aged 15 or 16 and after a few years of apprenticeship be earning a full wage sufficient to start a family without a massive amount of financial struggle. The post WW2 baby boomer generation seem to have had things especially easy in this regard. I think it's only when people begin taking on significant responsibilities - like having children - that they really mature.
That's cute - my 1981 Toyota Tercel still gets 35+ mpg.

I must disagree.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not poking fun at you per se, but the idea that our technology will 'always' trend toward more efficient engines is one that we've pretty much failed at until very recently, which is still arguable.
6 Tricks for Doing Business on The Far Side
DNS was used to resolve hostnames for almost every other type of internet traffic, including email and telnet, even in the early '90s. As the size of data increased over the years, the size of DNS queries didn't change much, so its proportion of overall bandwidth usage quickly disappears from view in the graph.

Most of the video traffic is likely transferred over HTTP and accessed via web interfaces such as YouTube, so it's a bit disingenuous to distinguish video from web traffic - if you're going to make that distinction, why not put images in their own category as well?
..waits patiently for Heroku to support it ;)
We have infinite energy, but not infinite accessible energy. It takes millions of years for those rays of sunshine to get neatly packaged into oil and coal, which are honestly still our best ways of extracting energy.
Apparently, I Rickrolled the managers standup today by tweeting this. Thank you.
You may need to do this:

rvm update --head && rvm reload && rvm install 1.9.2
By the way, they should re-rig the definition of the Kelvin, to make Boltzmann 1. (The Planck units already do this.)

We would probably need either very tiny or very large multiplies of this new Kelvin for anything practical, though. (Depending on your choice for the other units. The The Planck unit of temperature is way too big for practical uses for example.)
The only thing new about 3D is that it finally looks good (meaning almost as good as a GAF Viewmaster). But to enjoy it, you still depend upon cumbersome eyewear. I think it will be big in entertainment (films & gaming) and to a lesser degree live chat/video telephony (for those who are interested in such things), but I doubt that it will dominate in the world of passive computing.
Thanks for that - you posted quicker than I could find the instructions on the documentation :D
I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life.

Other people's decisions become your business the instant they affect you.
Finally! Once it percolates down to Safari and Chrome, I hope to see a real adoption of MathML in the academic community (which tends to use IE less, while having a stronger demand for MathML).
Sorry, but you will probably never have true security, or become truly wealthy, working for someone else.

If some deep part of you wants to try starting a company, it's not healthy to suppress that, and if you do, my guess is you'll eventually regret it.
The author never defines “work”, so perhaps his definition isn't related to making money, but it seems to be that ads work pretty well by that definition. For click-through ads, it's easy to measure how much money is made (on both sides), and people simply wouldn't use them if they don't work.

It's harder for the advertiser to measure the effectiveness of display ads, but that's true in both the online and offline case. Yahoo has done a controlled study showing that display ads effect both online and offline sales (with the usual disclaimers that it was in one particular case, at one point in time, and that the results may not generalize, etc.).

Traditional advertising firms don't have research arms that publish on the effectiveness of their techniques, and they don't even seem to try to do controlled studies, A/B testing, etc., to figure out which ads are more effective. It's harder to do in the offline case, but that's no excuse; it can be done: Capital One is known for doing that with their mailings. It's even harder, but still possible, to do something similar if you're a retailer taking out an ad in newspapers and magazines.
A complaint I hear quite a lot is that people in the west are so decadent, they throw away a perfectly good mobile phone every two years and buy a new one. But, I mean, mobile phones are tiny. They don't use up that much material. Sometimes it seems the activities targeted by environmentalists has more to do with how much people like them rather than how much energy they consume. Killjoyism.
is the aluminum going somewhere? we're mooshing it around into different shapes, and drawing pictures on it, but it's still aluminum which has had inconvenient impurities removed. if you're telling me we've got infinite energy, then what's the problem with mining through landfills to extract the useful stuff?

if we've got infinite energy, then the problem will be when we want to have more aluminum in use at one time than we've got, total.
>there is a reason that a task killer is the first thing every Android phone needs.

Hard to take seriously after read this.
With 1.9.2, the I18n internationalization module does not update available locales after loading more languages in the backend module. In my app we do this as a plug-in and since it can be done in run-time there may need to be some extra steps taken. I doubt this matters for 99% of the people here but just thought I'd give you a heads up if any of you move to 1.9.2 and use I18n dynamically.
"Worse, participants who reported taking the most steps toward energy conservation had the least accurate perceptions of which ones saved the most energy."

That's a killer quote right there. I think bad newspaper science is to blame, there's too many articles printed on "do X to save energy NOW", without putting them in perspective, and only reinforcing some sort of feel-good effect in the readers.

The only thing that will work is cold hard measurements, and lots and lots of education.
As usual, unmentioned is an individual's biggest single energy impact: dietary choices. Just a single semester's worth of thermodynamics study (the 2nd Law in particular) would make that clear. Some background includes:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-...

http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm

No one who claims to be worried about energy consumption and climate change should be taken seriously, unless they cut down on their meat consumption first. Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth" was a case in point, but Gore finally started changing his tune on his diet, to his partial credit:

http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/11/04/al-gore-agrees-that-going...
My boss walked by and said "That's cool!"
Agreed. I have a high amount of interest in buying an Android tablet (2nd gen of course, let someone else beta test your bugs out), and next to zero interest in a ChromeOS tablet. Android is a known quantity.
I designed and cut vinyl signs for a summer and we had a lazy dog that loved listening to the Yankees in the afternoon. The dog could have been an adept WalMart greeter. If they're not barking or threatening, they're quite charming.
Can someone explain this to me?

"For example, participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer’s settings (the reverse is true)"

Makes no sense to me. "Changing" doesn't mean anything. I'm sure the article is on to something, but that quote here is just too unclear.
Ask HN:  Beyond illustrated fiction:  novels with video clips?
Why don't we see novels with video clips?
I think it's clear which Clojure feature was/is critical to its popularity: the JVM and interop with Java. This isn't a language feature, of course, but it is a marketing master stroke: it removes the principal objection to Lisp, gives people a cognitive-dissonance-free way to try it, positions the language nicely (no small deal) and soothes the savage enterprise. This dynamic is nearly entirely one of perception -- one could argue that technically it's a non-solution to a non-problem -- but perception is a life-and-death factor. It doesn't matter more than reality in the long run (if Clojure weren't a good language, people wouldn't keep using it) but it actually does in the short run.
Please please please do this :) I have enough books on my queue that I don't need any more ;), but when something from one of my favorite authors pops up I like to grab it.
I was thinking the first gelatin finger he made was just a smooth finger-shaped mold and inferred that it worked by simply pressing the pattern left by the oil residue of the last person to place their finger on the pad. I thought that was pretty cool, but then wondered why they considered the second more arduous process of printing and etching a fingerprint with the same success rate more interesting. I was thinking, well that can be solved simply with software. Like don't let the same person enter a door twice in a certain time-window.

Then I realized the first method meant you actually had to mold a finger that already has access, fingerprint and all. Oh, ok now the second more arduous method is more impressive.
It is not working consistently for me. Maybe one of every ten page views will I see the UI.
Ask HN: What are the best conferences you've attended? 
Any advice/anecdotes about getting the most out of the experience?
encodings, dl, sockets and time improvements - too good to be true! ^_^
http://www.metacritic.com/search/game/world+of+warcraft/resu...

Define mediocre.
The New Yorker cover mentioned in TFA: http://content.archives.newyorker.com/djvu/Conde%20Nast/New%...
I keep hearing about practices like this and I wonder how prevalent they are outside of HR.

I've interviewed my share of people. In fact, we just finished hiring for all our open positions and I interviewed most of the candidates. But not once did it even occur to me to check out someone on Facebook or LinkedIn or even google them. What people are doing on their own time simply isn't relevant to the job and I think they're smart enough that if they have something useful and relevant online (like OSS contributions/projects), they would mention it since it can only benefit them.

Am I out to lunch here? Are you guys really googling people you're going to hire as a matter of course? If so, what useful information are you getting from it?
Crunchbase says:
"Husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts"

Anyway I don't want to cast aspersions too much on Cuil, because they may turn out to be successful eventually. My point was that software is a hugely risky business, with massive upfront costs.

You can build stuff cheaply of course, but when you do that, you have the problem of dealing with competition - namely if you can build it cheaply, others can too.
Presumably, yes. Although there are formulae to convert water use to an amount of energy consumption (which takes into account processing, pumps, etc), they are probably referring to the energy to heat water. 1 watt for 1 year is (1W * 24h * (365d/year)) * (1Wh/1000kWh) = 8.76 kWh, or ( * 3412 BTU/kWh) about 30k BTU. The average bath is about 50 gallons, or ( * 8.35 lb/gallon) 417.5 lb. 30k BTU is enough energy to raise that much water by about 70°F (30k BTU / 417.5 lb). By that measurement, the Guardian takes baths 46.6°F hotter than their tap water. If that is too cool for you, you can take a smaller bath.

It's worth noting that the conversions here assume you can transfer the kWh with perfect efficiency to heating water, while in actuality, all heating systems will be somewhat inefficient. It will actually take more energy to heat the water, regardless of the energy source used by the water heater.

Edit: whoops, I originally misread and used 1.5 years and 1.5 baths. Calculations changed.
Welcome to the coming lost decade of the US. We are repeating the cycle of Japan. Growing unemployment. Aging baby boomer population. Recent college graduates can't get jobs, so they live with their parents.

We are coming very close to recreating the Japanese culture, with all of their societal problems (40 year old unemployed men living with their parents and reading manga porn all day instead of working).
Block 'Flash cookies' to thwart zombies
IPhone factory tries to stop suicides by improving moral
Chome OS on a Tablet Will Be the Best Web Experience
The tablet is the best hardware form factor for browsing the web, and Chrome OS should be the best OS for browsing the web, so it makes sense that a Chrome OS Tablet will be the best browsing experience.
The "easy" solution is for society to imposes higher taxes on energy, particularly those forms of energy which we wish to discourage our reliance on.

This would particularly useful in the realm of consumer purchasing decisions.

Which apples required less energy, the ones shipped in from Chile, or the ones trucked over from California? There's no way as a consumer I can know that, but if taxes on certain energy forms (e.g. carbon-based) are high enough, then price becomes 1) a signal of how much energy was consumed in production and delivery, 2) a factor which discourages consumers from purchasing products which require more energy, 3) an incentive for firms to minimize their energy usage to keep costs down.

Will such taxes ever be effectively implemented? Almost certainly not. For such taxes to work they would need to be high enough that consumers and firms "felt the pinch." This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America.
Boost Your Sales Through Print Labels
Print labels certainly make a big impact on your business sales because sales are the main concern for businessmen and industrialists every time. Nowadays competition has been enormously increased among the businesses.
It's surprising (though not unwelcome) to see that the only distro at the highest level of support ('Supported') is Debian 5.0 (i.e. Lenny). Some irony here: Lenny currently has Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.0 (as a distinct package - 1.8.7 is the default Ruby); Squeeze (Debian 6.0) has 1.8.7-p299 as a Ruby default and 1.9.1 for the 1.9 branch. Since Squeeze just froze, it is unlikely to release with 1.9.2 - though they may make an exception. Point being: the only distro that enjoys the fullest level of support has no stable version with 1.9.2.

OSX, Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris and Symbian make the next level ('Best Effort'), and all other Linux distros only come in at the third level ('Perhaps').

I respect the developers' frankness, and it's not something I have to worry much about, but the names of the support levels don't scream "use me on a multi-billion dollar project" for corporate folks.
I think it depends a lot on the role and company size. If it's someone who's joining as a first employee and you're going to be spending 10+ hours a day in the same small office, I think it's very prudent to learn as much as possible about them and determine if you'll be able to work well with them.

If it's a larger company (read: not an earlier stage startup) then I don't think it's as necessary, but I'd still probably do it to vet them a bit.
The part where he lost his brother was heart breaking.
Sorry it took me so long to respond; I just noticed your reply to my comment.

I like the idea of pulling data from Delicious to determine matches. It gives you a good source of social data, and it solves the "chicken and egg" problem that a site like yours would have if it weren't pulling data from somewhere like Delicious.

In the future (once you get your userbase up), you might consider pulling data from other sources, too (Hacker News, Reddit, Digg). I'm not sure how that process would work, exactly, but it's food for thought.

As far as promotion, here's a good article that I just saw this week on Hacker News:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610540

As a general rule of thumb, find people that are already writing articles (blogs or otherwise) on subject matter similar to your site. Use Google News and Technorati.com to find these articles (maybe terms like "social news" would be a good place to start for your purposes).

Then, start talking to those authors (in the comments section of their posts, via email/twitter). Once you have a rapport with them, offer to do a guest post on their site, sending a pre-written article that won't take them much time to edit. If your article provides value to their reader base, then it's good for you and them.

If it were my site, I'd personally focus on promotion first, and then a streamlined UI later. One quick idea on getting a good design is 99designs.com. It's a great concept on crowdsourcing design. I promise I'm not affiliated with 99Designs in any way--I've just had good luck with using them in the past (I've had a couple of logos designed through their site, and was pleased with the value of the design combined with a low cost).
At this point as a Rubyist the only thing you really need is rubygems (of any version) on your computer. gem install rvm and then rvm install RUBY_VERSION.
AWS Start-Up Challenge Goes Global for 2010
>I've been in both workplaces and graduate programs where one's political views were simply assumed.

Ditto with religion. I'm not devout, but I don't believe it's anyone's right to sit around and mock religious people on pure "durr hurr god isn't real" grounds.
The article is also several years old.

But there's a huge difference between writing a compiler for a real programming language and doing a few regex or xpath queries on some data and then doing something with it. It doesn't have to be an expensive engineering project, either. The difference is in the scope, and it's an important difference. Building a compiler is a comprehensive task-- it requires a solid understanding of the regex language of your tokenizer, it requires a solid understanding of syntax grammars and recursion, it requires you be able to traverse a large, complex syntax tree to generate code. You will almost certainly explore methods of helpful error reporting that rarely come up in typical programming (example: error productions). No, it's not beyond the reach of any decent programmer. But it's going to be a lot of work. The essential complexity of compiling is significant.

The difference between implementing a classic compiler for a programming language and throwing together a calculator parser is like the difference between writing a 30-minute symphony for a full orchestra and a beginner piano solo. Sure, the fundamentals are basically the same, but the experience is totally different.

And that, I believe, is the point of the essay. If you write a symphony, writing each line for each instrument as if it were your own, keeping track of all the dynamic contrasts and interplay between the parts while developing a coherent structure to the piece as a whole as it develops over a half an hour, writing a simple 3-minute verse/verse/refrain pop tune for guitar and vocals will feel like nothing. If you build a compiler, you'll be able set up a simple regex parser for a configuration file with blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back.
The impact of any one individual's environmental choices on my life is basically zero. People in aggregate matter, but individuals have minuscule effects. At least, for the people that I interact with. Things might be different if I spent a lot of time chatting with Senators. But I don't.

Besides, this claim proves too much. Everything that everyone does can in some possible way affect me. Want to live alone in the woods cut off from human society? You're depriving us of your wisdom so the next generation will grow up more ignorant.
First, they copied Apple iPhone and created Android. Now they are going iPad and creating this tablet. Very innovative Google. very.
I prefer and use linux too, but the typical HN user doesn't represent the consumer market.
The eco-friendliness of a car does not come down to its MPG only. You also need to look at how much greenhouse (and other) gases come out from the combustion. New cars tend to do better.

But on the other hand, building a new car requires lots of energy, so maybe in the end we're better off driving old ones... ? It's all so complex, I don't know what to think, personally!
I can't parse that. What question will other people read?

I summarised the article - if you want to know more, go read it - the justifications are there. I don't understand why people should ask me the questions.
Google and Facebook Compete for Gamification: You Win.
The minimum "safe" height for skydiving is 2000ft with most jumps between 2000-5000ft depending on the type of jump and experience of the skydiver.

In emergency situations it's possible to deploy at 200-300ft. and survive.

Basejumpers deploy way below 2000ft. with 200 or 300ft. not being uncommon but they have gear and techniques designed to open the chute very quickly.

Skydivers can fall at a rate of ~160 ft/sec. So in a worst case scenario you've got 2 seconds before impact.
Indeed, the most eco-strident person I know a) lives in a huge house full of consumer crap b) flies all the time on business to c) Dubai, where she is part of the indoor-skislope-in-the-desert economy.

She was vegan for a bit which I suppose might count for a little, then her therapist told her it was OK to eat meat so she started again...
Does Michigan have worse weather than Bergen? The wettest city in Norway, situated 6° south of the Arctic circle? I'm willing to bet not.

Bergen has seen a boom in percentage of trips made by bike since they instituted a program to make the city more friendly to that mode of transportation.

Cities being designed around the automobile are by far the biggest thing standing in the way of the uptake of everyday cycling, not the weather.
Sure. Passive up-selling is fine. I hate aggressive up-selling.

You have a very good point. I don't think there will be an easy way to figure out how much value each user will see in a product. Maybe try to up-sell through a mailing list? People interested in new offers could sign up.
Wow! That's a pretty bias view!

If you remember there were a lot of rumours of the iPad coming out. In part it was because of a lot of people, including many Wall Street guys, felt Apple HAD to compete with the netbook-mania by releasing their own netbook.

Apple sticked to its gun then. It could have used such a line just as well: "No, netbook are crap compared to our awesome tablet that we're working right now: stay tuned". Did they? Nope.

You even had Microsoft and others (remember the Techcrunch's tablet) being announced long before they were ready, and even then Apple didn't change its stance.

I'm not saying that Apple is just a genius or something: it's probably as much arrogance as it is a passion to be different (and not just copy some other ideas). But to say that Apple didn't have to say anything, it's partial recollection.