skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not having a sense of humor about something like political beliefs is a good sign that someone is accepting dogma on the subject. This could make them more likely to accept dogma for things important to work also.

I also wonder if people think it is hacker-like to have strong political beliefs. Maybe I am way of base, but I always thought of hackers as being more apolitical, or at least not enjoying (pointless) political arguments. It is one thing to be adamantly against software patents, or to focus on a few issues that you can do something about, but another to spend a lot of time on something as unproductive as politics.
> correction to tip #2: the plus trick (username+foo@example.org) works with many mail systems not just gmail (as stated). its origins predate gmail.

Obligatory note: this doesn't work with all signup forms, unfortunately.
I'd be very wary of declaring someone an extremist just because they said they were very very conservative. Individual understanding of what terms like liberal and conservative mean often is completely turned around. My politics are fairly liberal but at times I think of myself as a fairly conservative person because I think some conservatives are radicals. There is too much uncertainty about what these terms mean to base hiring decisions on them.

Plus, people with experience in other countries or cultures can have very different definitions. It seems that the spectrum of allowable political opinions in the US is much narrower than in Europe. Many American liberals would be considered quite conservative in some European countries.
Wow! Now you sound much more motivated! Good luck with that!
Anyway I was just saying that even if you decided not to start anything, its just fine!

There are many thing to master in this life. Business is just one, you name others(hint: family, prof skills, sports, etc). Think about it.
IPSec doesn't support authentication well. For example, if you have a shared secret like a web cookie, how would you use this to authenticate one endpoint of an IPSec connection? It's hard, because the granularity of IPSec session keys is not the same as the granularity of tcp connections. Tcpcrypt, by contrast, makes it easy to do this--just hash the session ID together with the other authentication data.
In some email systems like postfix, you can change what the + character is (like . or _ or even numbers) So you could have username_football@example.com
What I don't understand is why all the idiots who haven't learned statistics yet are still alive.

Wasn't Mr. Zed Shaw going to kill them all?
Darwin award contestant.
> I much much much prefer desktop linux

So do I, but that Linux didn't exist when Windows became dominant; it came much later.
I created an email address a long time ago that was something like readrfc822@ just for these sites.

Anyone who validates email addresses by doing anything other than sending you an email is doing it wrong.
Yep - you hit on the key difference: go freemium if your business needs network effects.

Marketplaces, social networks, ebay, etc - basically anything where the site becomes more valuable the more people use it.
I am 23 years old and still in school. I do not remember what the stats are but I do remember a lot of students graduate in 5 years are more.

When you spend the majority of your life in school the last thing you want to do is settle down right away. I am sure that people who did not go the college route are a lot more settled then I am because they had plenty of time to do what they want.
Indeed so many are arguing that it really does take longer to grow up in modern societies, but it makes me wonder. If the society move up de-facto age of adolescence, should the de-jure part follow? Maybe increase the age of majority to 24 or so.. voting age, age of consent as well?
I've been doing the iPhone sig on my primary email for 2 years now - oddly enough I think I heard Kevin say it some other time and I picked it up then.
Facebook toughened their ad policies and began policing ads and landing pages rather heavily. Users just hated scam ads.
The reason that Fox News and Republicans (and nobody else, you'll notice) says things like "the Democrat party" is that they did research and found that people have a more negative reaction to that than the democratic party. It started a few years ago, after almost 200 years of everyone saying "Democratic party".

I have a huge problem with this line of thinking, not because I'm offended by the phrasing (I'm not), but because it shows a 1984-ish approach to politics and governing.

As far as your claimed independence and moderation -- what does John Kerry's yacht have to do with anything? That sounded awfully partisan to me. I'm a partisan. I own it. You should do the same.
My 2 cents:

He did get a lot of exposure from the free plan, so at least at the beginning, a free plan is a great way to start a user base.

It is true that after that you will need to balance things out so that you don't get too many free users when compared to paying users.

But like the guy says, it's also about looking at your business and making a decision about whether this sort of free-plan offer is sustainable for your situation. For some companies it is and is part of the business plan, whereas for others it doesn't really help.
Thanks for the good counter-points, but I'd like to disagree. :-)

First, without using an nginx + fastcgi/Apache/whatever front-end it's not true that just running W3TC scales your site. I was doing that for my own blog and whenever I hit the top of HackerNews my site would go down anyway because Apache is still a beast and you need the proxy to move bytes.

Second, getting a sensible configuration of W3TC including e.g. memcached instead of the file cache is not trivial.

Third, it's not true that a "commodity VPS" server will match our speed. We found that hard drive speed and processors (e.g. Intel Xeon not AMD crap you get at some hosting providers, Amazon AWS included) together made a 2x difference in page-load speed in our tests of various VPS providers.

Fourth, none of that helps you with security. You still have to be on top of which plugins are secure, which patches are faulty, file permissions. Among the obvious security measures, we also have HARDWARE security devices (e.g. DoS and obvious hacking signatures) in front of our servers -- something you'd have to pay a lot for at MT (if you can do it at all).

Fifth, we have awesome WordPress-specific tech support from true experts, something that I'm sure you'll admit you don't get at MT or VPS providers like Rackspace and Amazon.

However I DO AGREE WITH YOU that anyone who is technical and wants to do the tests and research absolutely can produce a system reasonably close to ours. However wouldn't YOU agree that most WordPress users either aren't that technical or -- like me -- simply don't want to deal with it?

That's where we come in.
5 is the best one IMO. 3 seems to describe what GetSatisfaction is doing and 4 seems to describe Last.fm.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588553 I think.
So, basically, Blizzard is the 37signals of game companies?
I think the problem might be that google has completely ignored advertising. I do not think it has changed much in the past perhaps five years, much less than search. They looking to copy facebook, or twitter, or everything else and to tell me what I want to eat, but focus on their core products which is search and advertising.

So, there is a real opportunity for someone to come up with a much better algorithm than Google's in regard to targeting ads. But then, if you do not have much inventory, you can not really target, and a website owner would rather have an untargeted ad than nothing.

So I think the problem of targeted advertising is quite complex. For example, link adsense are targeted well, images not so well because perhaps they are more expensive to make and thus there isn't much of an inventory. Why would an advertiser, but the very few, design an image ad when a one hour to set up link ad might work just as well or better.

In any event, people like an image advert when they see it the first time, they might the second, maybe third, but soon they bored of it and start hating it. So changing the ads often is important too.

I suppose, to conclude, the issue is much more complex than simply saying that the problem is targeting the ads due to the many variables - which the ad network or publisher can or can not control - that go into targeting the ads well. That might perhaps be why there is not much progress in this area. The internet has basically just copied the model from the traditional world and tried to automate it.

It is an undervalued area though. Not many other things could make one a billionaire on par with google than solving the advertising problem.
Luck. People forget that luck is also important for success.

You might have awesome skills but bad luck and fail, while someone else might have mediocre skills but great luck and succeed.
Facebook Status Gets Auto-Suggest
I get this from `ruby -v` (having installed 1.9.2):

ruby 1.9.2p0 (2010-08-18 revision 29036) [x86_64-darwin10.4.0]

So, the revision number is very slightly different. Hard to say in this case whether that is worth uninstalling the one and installing the other. Probably not, but hard to say exactly.
Not really, though. Irresponsibility killed him, tragic as it may be.
"Are you suggesting that the article is wrong in stating that the Japanese believed that the Americans would treat them better if they surrendered to them rather than the Russians?"

The Japanese leadership believed they would be treated better by the Americans, probably correctly. On the other hand the Japanese people were preparing for mass suicide in case of US invasion, believing (probably incorrectly; but to be fair the Marines did manage to kill a quarter of all civilians in Okinawa) that the US soldiers would rape, torture and mutilate them. From what I understand they did not hold similar views about Soviet soldiers.
Thanks, I have his older book- I will see if he mentions that in there. I think either way it would be a safer bet to take D3- it seems everyone (including Holick I presume) is in agreement that D3 is a perfectly good form of vitamin D.
The emails asking you to update don't mention anything about privacy either. Throughout the whole sign up process I wasn't given a solid indication that my posts would be private.
Malarkey! Balderdash!!

The author claims that traditional ads work because they 'extend the content' of magazines, and digital ads don't work because they don't extend the content.

It's all in how you execute. There are myriad strategies for pairing online ads with content. Some work well, others don't. Some are cheap, others are expensive. No different from print.

However -- depending on your goal -- this may not even be necessary. I work with direct response advertisers who place ads with massive ROI: cost per acquisitions with 4-5x margin. It's a little more difficult to measure if you're not selling things online, but there's plenty of evidence it works.

Further, it's not an either/or proposition. A good campaign hits numerous channels. And print, as a channel, is on life support. Tons of important decision makers rarely, if ever, pick up a dead tree.
Ha! Good point. I guess I might have misrepresented my state of mind - It is a demotivating, and a bit of a hurdle, but hey, no one said it will be easy, right?

Thanks for the vote of confidence.
heh, #4 is from me.
The conclusion that "Free plans don't work" has been overly extended from data that doesn't suggest anything of the sort.

What the data does suggest is that his free plan is meeting a majority of his user's needs, and hence the "extras" that people get for upgrading are not selling.

What he needs to do is reduce the free plan so that more users' needs are addressed in one of the paid plans.
#4 already exists: http://www.theonion.com/articles/desperate-pandora-employees...
From the article…

> Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans, even if one is talking about virgin cans compared to recycled bottles.

Since when?!? Growing up, in a part of the country that was once known for glass making (but had stopped by the time I was a kid), we were taught in school that glass was cheaper to make resource and energy wise than aluminum, due to the lower technology overhead and ready access to the sand used to make it. Since then, based on my own reading, I understood that aluminum was really expensive to make due to the high electrical requirements for the process of cracking ores to get the pure aluminum out (a substance that is hard to find in nature in pure form, since it’s readily makes compounds and ores due to its reactivity.) It was this basis that politicians and activists gave to push the first recycling programs here in the States. (Which always, without exception AFAIK, started with aluminum.)

My understanding is that glass was phased out in favor of aluminum not due to container creation costs, but storage reasons, since cans take up less room and shelf space than glass and were easier for stock boys and shoppers to carry. (The only eco-reason I came across was increased fuel use to ship glass bottles for the old returnable bottle programs. But this reasoning didn’t make sense to me since I thought shipping a pre-existing container was much cheaper than destroying and making new ones.)

Did some technology in recent years dramatically reduce the energy cost of making aluminum? Or has the modern requirements of glass making added too much overhead to what was once a cheap process?
part 2 -> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/226

part 3 -> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/232
The author is a fraud. How the Times let him write without making it plain that he is a (failed) entrepreneur in an online education scheme, I don't know.

First, writers who go on about the how high tuition, but don't investigate how much people actually pay can never be trusted. The only figures to contemplate are average and median tuition actually payed. The stated tuitions are simply the maximum; it is true that Trustees have spiked the maximum in the last 20 yrs, figuring, why not make Saudi princes pay as much as possible. This is not inflation, but a policy change that affects a vanishing minority of students. Any writer who doesn't make this plain is either stupid or dishonest, and my advice is, stop reading as soon as he or she pulls this stunt.

(I realized how much fraud there is in journalism on these themes, when I looked into in-state tuition at my old school, College Park, and was startled to see it is the same, after indexing for inflation, as it was in the late 70's. Admittedly Maryland is a fairly well-heeled state, most state schools have been savaged by legislatures in the last 23 years.)

Presumably the Times pays him because they like what he says; clearly there is no fact checker. In one of his earlier [diatribes](http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/7/19/what-if-colle...) the claim was let pass that the average 'full professor' makes $12,198,578 / 30 = $406,619.26 per annum. He also suggests that it is typical to spend 5 years as an associate professor, then 30 as a full professor. The data on a large state university are before me: these are the numbers for the humanities faculty:

62 full profs at average $99,431 --nice work if you can get it.
69 assoc profs at avg $64,722
51 asst profs at avg $53,687

His claim about full professors would suggest that there should be something like six full professors for every associate prof; in fact, there is less than one. (That the number of untenured assistant professors approaches the same figure though this status lasts only ~7 years; this suggests well over half of them will soon be in real estate at age circa 40 -- shows how savage and efficient a market Universities constitute....)

For all I know, the Universities should all be drowned at sea, but we'll never know if we are given out and out liars like Prof. Taylor to read.
Check-in Fatigue and the Future of Mobile
Mobility is such a disruptive shift in computing, I am surprised that the best that is being offered to consumers are check in games and promos. Looking back at the wired internet I think that its widespread adoption was due mostly to its utility. Sure there are distracting fun and games, but people use it because it is inherently useful.

That is the driving principle behind our startup, Presence. http://www.presence.co

We enable physical locations with virtual services, and make them accessible to both businesses and consumers. If you have some time please visit our website to see what we are up to. I would sincerely appreciate the perspective of the HN community.

Thanks
I guess I just don't understand why you would roll your own.
What advantages do you hope to gain in the short run when you have no idea if you'll be around for the long run?

Don't let the excitement of the moment overwhelm you. Building your own email sending system (implementing policies to avoid being black listed etc) complete with analytics is a non-trivial endeavor.

9.9 times out of 10 the smart move is to go with a free mailchimp plan THEN try to roll your own when it gets too expensive.

be smart.
Your favorite idea has literally hundreds of possible customers!

#5 mystified me.
For once Twitter made the world a little less vacuous rather than more.
I would agree with that assertion.
Ruby 1.9.2 is released
Why not join somebody who found it already recently?
Steal someone's killer idea?
Start with good-enough idea?
IPhone Case w/ Bottle Opener.
A friend just launched his new product, the iBottle Opener. It will be hitting stores early October. Figured a few of you guys might need one of these.

www.ibottleopener.com
doh - a dupe of mailing list announcement that's already on here.
but another to spend a lot of time on something as unproductive as politics

I disagree strongly. Some hackers like politics, others don't. Neither choice is more hacker-like. I find politics interesting because I like seeing how institutional structure leads to outcomes; as a corollary, I find 95% of political reporting to be garbage, so my perspective on politics might be unusual. But that seems like a very hacker-like perspective: political outcomes are emergent properties of institutional structures that resulted from random compromise and contingent events. Tweak the structure here and look what changes....

In terms of unproductivity, I feel the same way about C++. I mean, the language is so obviously fundamentally broken that I weep when considering how much time has been wasted fixing problems that only arise because of C++'s brokenness. That doesn't mean that I think it is always the wrong choice, but I am astounded when I encounter people who C++ is a well designed language. It feels like talking to someone who claims the government is controlling their thoughts with an implant in their tooth.
Is the company name as important as the product or domain name? The company name mostly appears on legal documents, and you can add a DBA once you find a domain name. Unless investors are waiting for a flashy name, you could file for a random company name right away.

Domain names are becoming a serious problem. I spent a couple of months coming up with names before finding something remotely passable. Even now I am not happy with what I have, but the dismal return on effort prevents me from wasting anymore time on it, at least until I have a growing customer base.
I use symlinks to the directories I want inside the main Dropbox folder. This works well.
Maybe try setting up a standing desk?
Is it about saving "energy" or reducing carbon emissions?

If it's about reducing carbon emissions, simply follow France's lead and move 80% of the world's electricity generation to nuclear and get a 95-97% emission reduction over coal fired plants.
You have great points, except with regard to organic vs. inorganic food. Most web apps get more testing than the pesticides we ingest in our food supply.
Where does it say "tweet?" Not that it really matters, but it says "texting." Slightly different.
This is a great service. It is pretty close to a project I'm working on myself, although it seems your future plans and direction are quite different. All in all, this is a great case study for me to see if people are interested in this kind of thing.
I'm not attempting to represent her argument at all - I'm only relying on her data (which seems reasonably solid). I believe her presentation is representational of her views, but I believe her views are contradicted by her data. I also believe her presentation of the data is misleading (and I explained why).

The 60% number I got from a quick google search, not from her book. I didn't watch her online videos, so I don't know what she claims there. I believe the claim she gives in her book is that houses today have 1 extra bedroom/bathroom, but I don't recall her quoting square footage (the book is at home, so I can't check).

Also, as she clearly shows in her book, a family needs a second worker to have a higher standard of living (bigger house, two cars, better medicine) than their parents.

Regarding her numbers on childbirth, I truly don't understand why she would look at duration of hospital stays. Maybe if hospitals were cutting corners and performing worse it would be a bad thing. But if fewer complications requiring a long hospital stay occur, that would be a good thing. The data on maternal death rates suggests the latter is more likely: in 1970, 25.7/100,000 women died in childbirth (14.3 in 1978), compared to 13.3/100,000 in 2006 [1].

That sort of thing is why I generally ignore her opinions/viewpoints. I'm sure the data point she cites is correct, but she seems to interpret it in a really strange way.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7078850 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_death
there has been a clear progression throughout history of protection from theft

There is no provision in the constitution for the treatment of ideas as property, and the guys who wrote it explicitly disdained that idea. That isn't "appeal to authority" -- I'm merely pointing out that the document which is the foundation of our country forbids the laws we currently have. If you want intellectual property, amend the constitution.

the word "patent troll" is an ad hominem attack meant to discourage rather than encourage discussion

It's a description of a person/company that uses the patent/copyright system in ways that are against the very purpose of the laws that allow it: to encourage innovation and creativity. Patent and copyright trolls discourage it, and do nothing to improve artistic and innovative environments. "Troll" does not mean "ugly guy who lives under a bridge"; it's meant to indicate someone who trolls around looking for juicy litigation opportunities so he can cash in.

You never get coherent arguments like that from people who support the abolition of all IP

Never? I'd suggest you haven't read much, but how about this argument: it's illogical and unsustainable to pretend that ideas are physical objects. "Intellectual property" industries such as book publishing and music sales were actually about selling the physical media; the means to create such things were once scarce. Now that they're not, those business models must evolve or die.
That's been a pattern in the traditional print media industry (lack of data on ad effectiveness) but publishers throughout the 20th century were able to exploit this quite nicely by spinning whatever data was available (demographics, circulation) as well as intangibles such as the magazine/newspaper "brand" to justify extremely high prices.
What a vacuous link-bait headline