skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So it turns out, it's actually very hard to do this ;)

I'm launching a new site which relies on people's real names in the next week or so, so this is something I've done a bit of research on.

Here's the bad news- Credit Cards don't check people's names.
Really!
You can buy something and use the name "Elvis Presley" on an online store, and no one will ever know.
I've talked to Authorize.net, PaySimple, PayPal- No one checks name. The banks don't support it.

Here's the good news-
There are companies who can do it for you- RSA, Verisign, Equafax, and a half dozen others can do a background check on people for you, and as part of that they can verify their name.
Get ready to pay, though, and it's not cheap.
Quotes range from $500-2000/month, plus $1-$5 per lookup.
These engines are normally used by debt collectors to come after you, if you're behind on a payment.

They'll also need to verify your Company Bank Account, founding Documents, and have a personal guarantee, since it's sensitive information.

There are ways to do it without going through that, though- The easiest way is to send a letter to their house.
If you send "Certified Mail, Restricted Delivery", then it has to be signed for, and it has to be signed for by the person in question.
Not only does this make it difficult for them to fake it, if someone else signs it for them, it's a Federal Crime!

You could send out letters with a one-time code on each of them, and then have people use that to Verify the registration.

I'd love to talk more about your project, I may be able to help you out, since I just went through the work of building it, using the Credit Companies ;)
Email me. cdavis@darkenedsky.com
Fortunately for those of us coding in flash (i.e. ActionScript 3), a move to JavaScript would be pretty painless.
You'd think, but they actually don't check the name on a Credit Card.

The Mailing method is a good one, but to be 100% sure, you'd need to send it Certified Mail, Restricted Delivery. ~ $13/letter, but it IS the person you're looking for.
The cost is not all energy though, so at best that is an upper limit. Furthermore there are cheaper sources of energy than gasoline (eg coal), so it is not even an upper limit.
> there's no reason to suppose that 10 years from now that guy won't be able to haul a dead deer in an SUV-sized vehicle that does 50mpg.

Increasing the fuel efficiency of vehicles is not something that can be achieved by will alone; it also requires the cooperation of physics.

First, the SUV could quite likely already do 50mpg if driven by a hypermiler, and maybe fitted with truck tires and a streamlining tail. But it would take twice as long to get back from the deer hunt, and it would be a bumpier and much less comfortable ride.

At a given speed with a given frontal area in a given density of air, though, you're really limited by how low you can get the drag coefficient, and at any speed you're limited by how low you can get the mass and rolling resistance.

On this subject, I highly recommend Chapter A, "Cars II", of Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ps/2...
Yeah, I hear he summers at the Taj Mahal. :)
I get a sneaking sense that there are a lot of #2's on the not-so-distant horizon. Makes sense that social, mobile & location would converge in this manner.

I'll add my alpha to the list: http://poig.com - I love this space and am curious to hear what people think.
Java 5? Heh. Try all the apps still on 1.3 and 1.4.
...any time a Clojure programmer want's to change the state of a variable, they must do so using the same kind of transaction management as they would use for a database.

Not a good thing. The word 'must' is the glaring red flag.
I guess the article's author wants us to contrast the puerility of the director's apps with the fact that it's his job to decide which apps get rejected on the basis of content.

But maybe this is exactly the kind of person one would want in charge of the decision-making process? ...someone who knows that if the content bar is set too high, he would never have gotten into the app store -- and his current job.
I think this is one of the most well reasoned pieces of the domain name issues I've read in a long time. I don't quite agree with the conclusion as a real solution. It's too late in my opinion. We can't start over and have such dramatic pricing changes. In fact, I am appalled to see prices going up (VeriSign increasing prices 7% annually for no reason in a contract that wasn't competed for). Prices should be going down.

As far as negotiations and tracking down buyers... it varies. I've done domain investing for a living for many years. Most people big or small are quite easy to contact. Some big guys are a real pain to deal with (it's not worth their time to sell even for a few grand). Some small guys are more than happy to sell a name they no longer use. I cannot generalize from my experience which type is better/worse/harder/easier/etc. It's as unique as the domain you want.

Finally, most of these people aren't squatters. Squatters are violating someone's trademark, property owned by someone else. Using Beer.com and saying someone is squatting on such a name is complete and utter bullshit. It's a generic word, it's not being cybersquatter unless someone has a TM for beer on its non-generic purpose and that is what they are using the domain for. Thanks.
As an aside: I thought this quote from an Apple spokesperson was interesting, given Microsoft's plan to encourage employees to develop Windows Phone apps "in their spare time" [1]:

"Apple’s policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they’re developed and published prior to their start at Apple."

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/microsoft-wants-employees...
The only place I've seen reusable plastic bottles has been in Germany. Are they used elsewhere in Europe?

Also, it seems that most of the drink cans I've seen in Germany are steel rather than aluminum.
When I was at WWDC, there was an Apple engineer named Eliza Block. She and her partner gave a really good (best of WWDC) presentation on Designing Scroll View UIs. Her name seemed familiar so I googled it and it turns out she was the author of a very successful iPhone app. Apparently, she probably got recruited or asked to become an iPhone Applications Engineer at Apple. A testament to her software development ability (the googled articles said she was a graduate Philosophy student).
According to http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05004.htm cars also produce significant amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, which are both greenhouse gases. However good old CO2 represents 94-95 percent of the greenhouse potential from your average car.

So no, it is not all CO2, but the rest is a rounding error.
If they're finding enough qualified applicants, then that's great for them. If not, I just wanted to point out the problems with this scenario that make me as a technical person never ever respond to this.

1) Programmers hate working with empty-drum "idea guys" and that's what it sounds like you are. You don't have a single technical person on the team? It sounds like that since you're offering the CTO position and say "manage all the code and technology behind our product for 12 weeks". I'm not sure how you managed to get into an incubator with no technical person or whether your technical person bailed, but it's a big red flag. If you are a business-only team - what do you bring to the table that the next MBA doesn't?

2) Programmers hate working on crappy code
Since we don't know who wrote your code (outsourced to India, an old partner that left?) but we know that you -have- code ("manage all the code and technology behind our product for 12 weeks") then odds are we're going to be walking into a hunk of junk. And worst of all, the idea guys are probably going around telling everyone that it's 90% completed even though it's a crap pile.

Again, I don't mean to be a downer (too much). If they're getting plenty of good submissions, then clearly it's just me. But it sounds like they may be having trouble finding someone, and I think this is why. I often see business-founders who can't figure out why they can't attract a good technical person.
It's not totally true, either; there are other ways to do state in Clojure. But none of them simply let the programmer, you know, change the state of a variable.
Sub 15 minute recharge time would be more welcome.
I wouldn't say protective vs more holding you back. People don't want to sign contracts with minors because minors do not have to hold their side of the contract and it's been like that legally for a long time.
Ouch. Should definitely think more about "showing it" than "telling it".
similar to the fuzzy-logic chips of the 90's?
Re #4: For me, music discovery is still a painful and unsolved problem. Its hard to put my finger on precisely what the problem is, but I suspect that part of the problem is that there is so much music out there that new releases drown everything else out.

To put it bluntly, how am I supposed to find the next Suba or Orchestra Baobab?
Brazil: Venture Capital's New Hot Spot
Real wages purport to measure the amount of stuff one can buy, not the income as a fraction of some richer person's income. The claim I'm disputing was made about real income.
I think you are right, but still... would prefer to keep the model simple.

The purpose of using the price as an indicator is to roughly estimate the inputs required to manufacture a product. Under that assumption, profit margins are noise.

Of course, profits are eventually expended, but so are the cost paid to suppliers, the taxes and so on. You would have to think about velocity of money and the overall macroeconomic effect. This is way overkill.
My laundry washing machine has a dial on the front for the water temperature, which goes up to 90° (C, obviously). It heats the water electrically as it comes in. All but the cheapest washers sold here in Argentina have such a facility, because hot water is not normally provided to the laundry room. In the US, washers usually have an option to choose hot or cold water. Using cold water instead of hot will use less energy.

Also, "plenty of energy" is not a quantity of energy that can be usefully compared with other quantities of energy. See jws's comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614745 for more calculations.
How about the cost per domain increases the more you own. For example, the first one costs $7/yr, the second, $10.50, the third, $14, $17.50, etc. in a gradual linear curve, (or maybe $7, $10.50, $15.75, $23.63, etc. for an exponentially increasing curve) to discourage hoarding.
Why training for a marathon is improving my productivity
Yes. I just wanted to give the standard mathematician's tongue-in-cheek reply to proposals like base 12.

To be earnest, octal is quite a nice base. Or -2 (minus two!). Or 10, but with digits from -5 to +5, though that representation should be redundant, I guess.

To speak of redundant representations: Fibonacci numbering is also interesting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_coding). Or skew binary numbers.
Imaginary Interfaces
Product doesn't trump all. It's the exception, not the rule, that the best product wins the war.

Besides... what is the best product? Is it the most featureful? The simplest? The fastest? The cheapest? The most usable? The most beautiful? The most enviable? The most emotionally satisfying?

And even if you know what's best... if people aren't aware of it's existence, or if there are other barriers to them trying it, they might well never accept it.

I used to think like you. Then I made some great products.

I had much better success when I started thinking about the whole picture, and stopped zeroing in on the product.
This holds if you are risk neutral.
Agree with Ben on #2 - Twitter is far from a being a satisfactory solution for spontaneous group organization. As it has evolved to be increasing about sharing news, tweets are quick to slip below the fold unless you've limited your following to only your closest friends (and they aren't heavy users). The feed simply isn't conducive to organizing events that are tied to a specific time and only involve a subset of your social network.
A quick google search suggests that it's a bit more complicated than that. According to an employee rights attorney here (http://www.linkedin.com/answers/law-legal/employment-labor-l...):

"I will answer based on CA law. Labor Code 1101 and 1102 prohibit employers from forbidding, directing, controlling, terminating or threatening to terminate an employee based on politics. This was further expanded on in Ali v. LA Focus Publication (2003) 112 CA4th 1477. "
Actually no. Energy accounts for almost 100% of the cost of everything.

If you track down why does something cost money, and go all the way down, you will see that it's entirely the cost of energy, and pretty much nothing else.

Instead of rewriting it here, I'll link you to a comment which I wrote that explains it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=346912
It would be very difficult to check though: a bit too easy for people to find loopholes or cheat somehow.
You mean "lose 8kg being dried".

I should measure the water consumption of my washing machine.
Startups: Get All the Analytics You Can
Precisely. If you're talking about greenhouse impact, MPG is the only important measure.

If you're cared about pollution aside from that then yes, there are huge differences depending on make, model, maintenance, etc.
Office VOIP
Things like washers and driers only add a very small amount to the typical house price.
Are We Taking CSS Too Far?
Becoming a CIO – Current Thinking for IT Leaders
As a recipient of angel funding from several investors including Alexis, I can tell you he's one of the very best you could hope for.

Sure, he's not a hacker and he doesn't pretend to be. An angel doesn't need to be.

But his insights into cultivating and maintaining a highly engaged online community, developed over four years both before and after Reddit's acquisition, could be trumped by very few people in the world if any.

Alexis has already made small, early-stage investments in about 10-15 companies. He invests in companies where he is excited by the concept and the founders, and he goes far beyond the norm in offering advice, moral support, and of course mascot design.

I'd strongly recommend him to any startup that was lucky enough to rouse his interest.
Doesn't say "per day."
Have you thought about music? I consume a lot more author-specific music than I do author-specific books. (In other words, while I consume both books and music pretty voraciously, I don't buy books from the same author nearly as often as I buy music from the same band.)
Ask HN: Is a free plan worth it or not? Trying to figure out our pricing
Hey HN,

We (me and lleger) are Supportbreeze, and we're trying to figure out our plans for our launch next week. Our major contention is concerning free plans. We're debating whether or not we want to offer free plans at all. On one side, we see the value of offering a free plan: great entry vector, good promotional value, something that our competitors don't have, etc. However, on the other hand, we don't quite see the usefulness of a free plan on a business app, considering all plans come with a 30 day free trial and that it would affect the rest of our plans. We're concerned that it's a sinkhole that won't have any real benefit.

The main thing we think we'd lose by nixing the free plan is the influx of people that will simply start using our app instead of ignoring it if it were paid-only. Knowing that at some point they will need to start paying, is a trial enough enticement to sign up?

What are your thoughts? Should we abandon the free plan in light of our free trial period? Are free plans absolutely necessary, even for business apps? Thanks all!
I posted it late last night, only got one response... I figured posting it during working hours would garner more interest. I was right :)
Fortunately, there's an almost infinite number of domains, even within the .com tld. It just requires a little more creativity than it used to to think of a catchy one that hasn't been taken.

Now, if we were actually running out of domain names, the way we're slowly but surely running out of IPv4 addresses, then we'd have a serious problem.
Warning: Physics Envy May be Hazardous to Your Wealth
I don't think you should be so quick to dismiss this. While one variable alone is obviously not a good predictor, don't forget that these firms often have many other sources of data. If they can figure out what the average spend per customer is and combine that will some satellite traffic analysis, that should be enough to predict a trend.

Also, some analysts don't necessarily need an exact figure for a quarter. Knowing that Wal-Mart traffic is trending up or down might be enough enough information to make a profit. Information is valuable to Wall Street, even if that information seems insignificant at first glance.
Indeed, you are quite right. We frequently target specific artist pages and their related artists and also specific genre and have been for many years. It is a major selling point in a cut-throat industry.
No, the idea is you use stolen credit cards to buy your own game, then you get the money from the credit cards to yourself perhaps easier than other ways. I'm not sure.
I'm awesome at reading interesting threads and then adding my $0.02
What about polyphasic sleep? If the study only look at normal sleep, then obviously the ones who sleep less than 7 hours will be less likely to remember things than the ones who had a full night sleep. REM sleep is important, but REM sleep does not cover all 7 hours (more like about 2 hours). So if you get to REM sleep faster, you won't need to sleep as much.
All That Jazz
98% of the US soybean crop is used to feed livestock, according to Britannica http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/557184/soybean . Eating the soybeans directly, instead of converting most of them to animal manure, uses dramatically less pesticide and fertilizer.

I request that you withdraw your accusation of insincerity and substantiate your extraordinary claim that "it's probably a wash, for various reasons".

(Disclaimer: I am not a vegan.)
This doesn't prove anything at all. It simply proves that school makes you more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, which is hardly shocking. However, the idea that this implies that kids are getting misdiagnosed is a non sequiter. How do you know that this isn't a sign that kids aren't getting the medical attention they need until they get to school.
I suspect that part of what you are percieving as tone in these statements is an artifact of english not being the author's first language.
Profit for a government agency? The USPS has never been a profitable operation as far as I can recall, Haha.. What would really happen here is that expenses would be spared, and turnaround time for mail delivery would be reduced greatly by not having to physically ship letters, and possibly even payments.

The USPS would make profit through printing and stationary used during point-to-point email, where official documents could be scanned at one post office, and then printed at another on official paper. Local delivery could be done from each post office after email is routed to the correct center and then printed [locally].
"Those Who Do Not Move, Do Not Notice Their Chains."
I wonder what will happen with my Nook. Probably should have went with the Kindle... oh well.
I have also only seen reusable PET bottles in Germany, but haven’t looked very closely elsewhere in Europe.

You are right about the cans as I just learned. I always just assumed that every can is a aluminum can but Wikipedia tells me that tin cans are also common. I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. (Wikipedia illustrates its article about cans with two tin cans [1]. If you had asked me what material they were made of without showing me the caption I would have told you aluminum. Clearly visible FE in a circle be damned.)

Another interesting tidbit from that Wikipedia article: cans might be on the rise again in Germany. 700 million were sold in 2009 (a bit less than 9 per person), 1 billion is the projection for 2010 (a bit more than 12 per person). The US number for 2009 seems to be 96 billion [2], that’s about 320 per person.

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Getraenkedos...

[2] http://www.cancentral.com/members/pdf/CMI2009AnnualReport.pd... (PDF)
Apples being apples, all that matters to a consumer is the retail price. If Chilean apples cost more because of an energy tax, demand will increase for California apples, raising the prices, until the two equalize.
I agree with @mrbird - make the /tour page your landing page, and add a few bullets as well. Maybe even a comparison chart showing you vs Shopify?
When you can have children at 10 or 60 and your life expectancy is only 80 it's not really a major issue.
And now they drag him through the mud:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5615971/apples-freedom-from-porn...

the danger of using auto-follow services on twitter.
"How about the fact that the same guy institutes policies that ban huge swaths of apps (including anything not written in Objective-C)?"

I doubt the ObjC/C++/C requirement was his call. He may be in charge of enforcing it, but something like that would have come from higher up.
That is still possible. A lot of the consumption increase is required by both spouses being in the workforce. The second car is not a luxury, but a necessity. Money spend on house-cleaning, eating out, etc. has also perhaps gone up, but due to a time reallocation (away from the 1950s housewife to a 3rd party).
My old company did the opposite of this. As they expanded, they built worse and worse office environments. I started out in a nice 10x10 cube, and ended up in a 5x5 low-walled cube, on an 'expansion floor'.

After I quit, the primary building tenant moved to a new building, and the company I had had worked for became primary. This auspicious event was marked by the building cafeteria (fairly decent as these things go) shutting down, so not even hot food was available.

So yeah, not all companies get better digs as they expand.
But how do you connect it to the cup of no tea?
Great article overall, but it makes the same mistake as many other Clojure overviews: implying that STM is the only means of managing state. Clojure, in fact has four main ways to do state, one of which is a (thread-local) normal variable. Each is appropriate for a different sort of stateful operation; STM is the most complicated.
He's not defending saving money by living in an owned house, he's deflecting discussions on buying instead of "throwing away" rent money.
Nitrogen oxides are both toxic and greenhouse gases, but in the quantities that they're emitted from tailpipes, the toxicity is a much bigger problem than the greenhouse effect.
It is a good thing.

And it's as simple as e.g. (dosync (ref-set ref newval)). In fact, if you find yourself doing it a lot (don't, please!) then define yourself a little function (defn rset [r v] (dosync (ref-set r v))).

Must isn't that bad of a word, and it's a Lisp: what kind of boilerplate do you expect to write? I prefer it going on none.

It's definitely worth checking out, and if you need state, and you'll need it rarely if at all, you're better served using the built-in STM and the wonderful functions that allow you to manage it (like add-watch; what a lifesaver in a state-heavy app like a GUI) to handle the mess.
How common is 18/19? I know Massachusetts has some permit system.

In New Hampshire everyone that can get their drivers license does so on the day of their 16th birthday. It's like a rite of passage.

There are no learning licenses or permits or anything, but you are allowed to drive with a parent at 15 and a half.
unix.

but, that won't happen, so I'll stick with my bsd.

edit:
or linux, or hp-ux, whatever floats your boat.
Develop for Android yet? Maybe you should start...