skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author's vague assertions that suburban development in America represents an enormous unfunded liability are supported in part by a considerable body of recent research suggesting that suburban lifestyles are far less efficient than their urban analogues.

To get you started, Geoffrey West, one of those physicists at the Santa Fe Institute who stick their noses into everything but physics, does a schtick introducing the idea of power-law scaling in urban agglomerations that you can find in various versions on YouTube [1].

An easy-reading overview of the same idea is Luis Bettencourt's paper with West, recently published in Nature, which points out that "doubling the population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure, whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes or number of petrol stations. This systematic 15% savings happens because, in general, creating and operating the same infrastructure at higher densities is more efficient, more economically viable, and often leads to higher-quality services and solutions that are impossible in smaller places." The already classic reference is their 2007 paper in PNAS [3].

But the power-law approach ignores the true city-suburb distinction by focusing solely on size. (Suburbs are not small cities.) Edward Glaeser, a top urban economist, and Matthew Kahn recently did a panel study of geographic greenhouse gas emissions that includes a direct comparison of cities to their suburbs [4]. They found that suburban household emissions are higher than those of city households, usually substantially, in 48 of the 50 largest American metros. (See Table 5 for the money-stats.) The methodology reveals a wide urban-suburban disparity in energy-efficiency that I imagine is mirrored in the efficiency of use of many other resources.

(Next up, someone needs to integrate these approaches by comparing urban and suburban power-law residuals [5].)

None of this bears directly on the author's point in the linked article, but it does suggests that suburban development is a poor investment if an urban option exists.

1. A recent (and short) version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m-jM_Z9LtA

2. http://www.cabdyn.ox.ac.uk/complexity_PDFs/Publications%2020... [PDF]

3. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf+html [embedded PDF]

4. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/fi... [PDF]

5. The residual approach is presented in another recent paper by Bettencourt, West, and crew: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
Construction workers, police officers, plumbers, retail salespeople and secretaries, among others, make significantly more with a degree than without one. Why? Education helps people do higher-skilled work, get jobs with better-paying companies or open their own businesses.

I would argue they earn more simply because of the signalling dynamics of possessing the degree, not that a college grad can do higher skilled work than a similarly situated non-grad. The question is is it fair/efficient to saddle young people with exorbitant debt and four extra years of classroom lecturing just to be able to competitively signal.
This glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
I worry about this a fair bit. This is why I am in the process of cloaking my gmail with a throwaway address (ping@namank.com)

And I just suggested gmail this:

-----
Gmail runs my life, as it does yours! Yes, I have an alternate email but whoever has my password can change it and then I'm LOST! You need to make this hackproof (yes yes, i know. but please, atleast TRY)

I suggest:
-Have a backdoor password. There MUST be a 24-48 hour window between changing the backdoor password and the main password.

-Must be a 24 to 48 hour window between a password change and alternate email change.
-----
I would really like to activate two-factor auth for my GMail account, but I just don't trust my phone that much. The battery life is terrible, and I'd be afraid of losing access to my account if the phone breaks. Or what happens if I lose my phone? Or if someone steals it?

Presumably there's a way to handle that case, but it still bothers me. On the plus side, I'm using a Google Apps account with a domain I control, so I could quickly switch to a backup mail provider, but it's of course a huge hassle, and I keep a lot of email in my GMail account.

How do you deal with these kinds of issues? I really do want to use two-factor auth, but this stuff scares me about as much as the possibility of getting hacked.
The cost isn't fair to the local suburb government, but that's because most of their economy runs through the city (hence the commute). Since the economy is shared, so should the cost.
Johannes Kopf's Publications - Microsoft Research
even in the American city with the most bicycle commuters (Minneapolis) the total percentage of commuters using bicycles is less than 3%

Agreed with your agreement with comments above. We live in (the suburbs of) Minneapolis, and we bike-commute. Most of the time I actually walk to shopping or to the nearest branch of the county library system, but I bike to do various errands. My wife is a regular bike commuter, who has put on 2,000 miles of bike commuting in all seasons since a year ago. But this area is terribly spread out, and for purposes such as bringing children to soccer games we have to drive. (Yeah, I know, driving to go get exercise sounds more than a little odd, but that is why it is called "travel" soccer. Just getting to different "home" fields for practices in different age groups in the sprawling territory of our local soccer club involves a lot of driving, even though our U14 player does his utmost to bike himself to practices and some home games.) Quite apart from the weather here, it's hard to imagine the percentage of bike commuters in greater Minneapolis going much over 5 percent, simply because of how sprawling the metropolitan area is.

For a description of bicycling culture in Minnesota in January (winter), see

http://www.bicycling.com/news/featured-stories/1-bike-city-m...
You're right Detroit might be better. I'm just more familiar with Cleveland, and was using it more as a figure of speech.

And too be fair, Cleveland is collapsing almost as fast as Detroit, save for Downtown, Tremont, and the Gordon Sq. area.

Edit: And possibly UC, but that's still debatable. It's certainly not falling as fast as the surrounding neighborhoods, that's for sure. But there are also 5+ police departments patrolling to try and keep the riff raff out.
Adela Creative Design - Thiết kế Tờ rơi
Adela Creative Desgin chuyên thiết kế tờ rơi mang lại sự khác biệt
It looks great!

Could it also work for regular WSGI webapps outside of GAE?
I used JSR-168 (JBoss Portal) back in 2006/2007 and was my worst programming experience ever.

Web development has only gotten better since 2006, so there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to do the same using any of the modern frameworks.
Ask HN: I want to learn how to code. Can anyone tell me how to start learning?
Greetings,

I am a recent college graduate (as of this past May) and I studied chemistry and physics. I have plans to go to graduate school within a year for theoretical and computational chemical physics - that's basically fancy talk for predicting physical interactions between molecules using high performance computing. I have some experience in the field from working as a research assistant as an undergrad and while I never had any problems with the physics, I struggled a little bit with the coding aspect because of lack of previous exposure.

I also read this post "To founders who can't code"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1761530

It really hit home. I have had two failed ventures thus far which likely would have taken off better if I had the coding abilities to make my own demo. Instead I took the seed funding I received and hired people to do it for me - long story short things didn't work out; I lost money and disappointed people.

The author of the aforementioned post recommends that noncoder founders should: "Take 6 months off and go learn how to code (day and night, weekends including)."
This is what I would like to do but I am unsure as to how to begin. Sure, there is a wealth of sources but I am unsure of which ones are quality sources and also what languages to learn first. I am not trying to be a coder or hacker overnight and my approach is methodical: I will devote 8-10 hours per week to learning. I generally pick up things fast; the key though, is having interesting problems to solve which increase in order of difficulty.

If anyone can give me a few pointers on how I can start learning (what resources are good, what language to begin with, a good program of studies) that would be much appreciated as it would help me develop my future ideas on my own and would probably also help with my research. I thought a cool initial project would be an applet which queries each line of a word document with book titles (I keep a running list of all the books I’ve read, one per line in a doc) and searches the net for a picture of a book cover and imports it into the app. Apologies for my ignorance but would this be a realistic project within 6 months?

Lastly, I did run a search on this but didn’t find any related threads; I apologize if this Q has come up before.

Thanks for your advice,
AKD
I disagree. These people are academics who want to help the poor. They go in and try to figure out what could help them and then write about it to help policy makers. It would be nice if policy makers could just figure out what works and do it, but that isn't working, so someone needs to run experiments. What would you prefer they did instead?
Matt, What about someone who travels for most part of the year , in my case working out of asia for larger part of the year, but US being my home base. I could put my US cell phone (which is deactivated for most part of the year - like this year my cell will be deactivated for the whole year except for 2 months). I don't carry a permanent cell phone in Asia.

How could the 2 step authentication help me - say I register with my US cell phone and I am out of the country for most part of the year?
Ask HN: What should my email address be?
I have the domain name [first name][last name].com and want to use it for my main personal email address. I thought of using [first name]@[first name][last name].com, but that seems a little repetitive.

Any creative ideas out there?
You're not the only one. I've been trying KDE4 from time to time, but I keep returning to KDE3.5, because it's faster, leaner, simpler, better configurable, and less cluttered.

In my opinion KDE4 was inspired by the compositing-window-manager hype in 2008, fueled by Windows Vista, OSX and compiz. Suddenly every self-respecting desktop environment had to have translucent windows (with blurring of underlying graphics), widgets, gadgets, 3D effects, and whatnot. This resulted in an enormous bloat, and this situation was further worsened by taking away user configurability.

Does KDE4 still have that silly 'cashew' in the top right screen corner, which cannot be removed?
They provide a list of backup codes which you're meant to print and put in your wallet.
Can you explain why you think they're "mentally and spirtually ill boys"?
I actually had the same concerns, but after going through it they give you two ways to solve that:

One is you can set a backup phone to use to get into the account, it can even be the same phone you have the authenticator on, so as long as you have the same number, you can access it. The backup phone option can also work with landlines through voice.

They also allow you to print out a set of numbers you can use in case you lose the authenticator to get back into the account.

[edit] Added voice backup note.
But even before the gold standard was officially abandoned, devaluation was a regular feature of gold- and silver-based currencies.

I once saw an exhibit in the Israel Museum showing a sequence of ancient coins, all stamped from the same die over a period of some decades, where the gold content gradually declined from about 99% to about 1%.
I'll take the opportunity to address some of the complaints I've seen in many comments through this page.

Q: It's too much of a hassle to generate and write a PIN with every login I do!

A: Not so. Google can 'remember' an authorized device for 30 days, so assuming you mostly use the same few devices all the time, the added hassle is very little compared to what you're construing it to be.

Q: But I use many browsers on many devices! (AKA: "But I'm a webdesigner!")

A: Google lets you create limited access, easily revokable, device-specific passwords. You may consider creating one of these for each device that you actually own, but then you're reducing your security so somewhere between 1 and 2-factors.

When making that choice, keep in mind that on a worst case scenario, access to your email = access to all of your other online accounts.

Q: I don't always have access to my mobile!

A: No worries! When you set up 2-factor auth, Google makes you print a little piece of paper with 25 one-time disposable passwords for just such cases.
Christian Louboutin Evening Elegant Pumps
i just use x11.app and run a bunch of xterms in a tiled window manager (ratpoison). as for colored windows for servers, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2089389
I think age is an important factor as well.

Think of it this way, most college aged kids today barely remember things in 1995. We just have an abstract idea of the early-mid 90's: no internet, limited scope of computers, primitive game consoles etc. Nowadays technology is a huge part of out lives so it amplifies the effect of "Holy shit we've come a long way."

I don't mean to assume your old or anything but even if my parents did have a laptop I certainly wouldn't have remembered it or even fathom the concept of GPS.

Its also interesting to see what the current generation will think of our advancements. My kid brother isn't at all impressed by an iPhone, while I still marvel at how far we've gotten in phone tech.

Just my perspective.
I know what a coldesac is but I don't know what a fluer de lis is. Could someone help to educate me? Perhaps an Ariel image?
You don't actually need to have cell service- there's an iPhone app (and presumably apps for other platforms) that lets you just generate new codes at will. You only need internet access to set it up initially, and you can do that with wifi.

won't help you if you have no phone at all but you can generate one-time-use passwords at will, so you could just stock up I guess.
While this specific project relies on a lot of GAE's batteries-included stuff like memcache and Appstats, please feel free to fork and support new environments.
Love the vonnegut-esque prose. So it goes.
me@[firstname][lastname].com?
It would be nice if Gmail and Facebook had two separate passwords: one for everyday login and another for administrative functions such as changing passwords, forwarding options, etc.
I marvel how the world changed during my mother's lifetime, 1910-1999. Her family was the first to get electricity in the town and her uncle was the first to get a car. It died after a couple of thousand miles. No one had told him to change the oil. Airplanes were in their infancy. If you wanted to go to Europe, you took a steamer, but of course no one she knew ever did anything like that. In her lifetime she saw transcontinental telephones, radio, antibiotics (she was a nurse), nuclear weapons, airliners, television, the interstate highway system, 4 states added to the union, a man on the moon, computers, and the internet, although she never did try that.

I started reading science fiction in the 1960s and the authors didnt come close to reality. Heinlein wrote a novel that featured an automatic drafting machine, but it was a robot, not autodesk. The societies were often quite dystopian, American dictatorships or theocracies. An the flying cars, automated households, and colonies on mars never came to pass.
Wedding Veil, Cheap Wedding Veils, Cheap Bridal Veils on Sale
This is not the headline on the article.

The headline on the article is Popular, but sluggish secure server? Popularity might not be the reason.

Not good to editorialize.
The Math of TechCrunch, Part 2: Does It Play Favorites?
As an end user, I could not care less about how robust the underlying architecture is or who inside the EA hierarchy is screwing things up. Bottomline is, weak passwords are being stored as unsalted md5 hashes, which is problematic.
Miles Per Milisecond, A Look At The WonderProxy Network
hello@[firstname][lastname].com
wait ... what?!

After the work-for-yourself jingoism?!?!
Just as a note, Google's "Google Authenticator" app for Android is open-source, supports the open standard for OTOP, and has a free OSS lib for PAM.
Android: Getting a Bitmap to Glow with a Specified Color
Charles Murray points out

http://www.openeducation.net/2008/08/20/charles-murray-%E2%8...

that what employers need is a signal of competence, but a four-year college degree is a very costly signal for a job-seeker to obtain. Many poor, hard-working people are locked out of the job market by the price of a college degree.

Isn't it possible that college degree holders are at an advantage in seeking employment by comparison to persons without college degrees simply because of the signaling effect of possessing a degree? The current job market seems to say that possessing a college degree is an advantage even if students are learning very little during their four years of college.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/18/106949/study-many-coll...
Ask HN: Yet Another "how to split equity in new startup"
Me and a co-founder are planning to launch a startup. We are having trouble splitting equity in a way that seems fair to both of us, so would welcome any suggestions. The gory details are:

Me:
Technical contributor from coder to manager a team of devs.
Will need to travel across the world (and ready to do so) to make this work.
Full time with no pay (leaving 6 figure job for this).

Him:
Main Visionary, came up with idea, documented scenarios, conducted some sort of user study.
Will supply seed funding - 10-15k/month.
Part time until company can sustain both of us.
Can be the CEO, good at generating connections with non-tech world.

I looked at the equity calculator[1] and it gave me 55-45% split in his favor without considering his investment. Per Chris Dixon[2], initial seed investment should be treated as a loan converted into equity at time of external funding at the same rate. We don't ever want to take external investment given that he's rich enough, so he's not interested in this model even if I agree to some upside while converting loan to equity.

Having all said and done, he's ok with something in the range of (55-60%) for him, (20-25%) for me and 20% for key employees. I just _feel_ this is too low for me given the kind of sacrifice I am putting in - several folks we are trying to hire to help from a tech perspective are hard to get, as always, and I have a track record of understanding other people's visions and running with them (not too good with coming up with ideas myself)

References:

[1] http://foundrs.com/calculator/index.php

[2] http://cdixon.org/2009/08/23/dividing-equity-between-founders/

Edited for formatting
There must be a corrolary to Godwin's law that says any financial system will eventually be compared to a giant Ponzi scheme. New metaphor, please!
I'm very much in agreement with objects-as-named-params. Default params just mitigate the problem, ambiguous function calling still rears its head as soon as you have multiple optional arguments of the same type.

As to the "option = option || {}", he was referring to the ultimate "option = {}" assignment if you passed a falsy value (0, "", false), which is different than if you didn't pass a value (undefined). Which is resolved by "option = option === undefined ? option : {}", which is even larger and kinda ugly.
The article conflates two different questions: a) whether universal higher education is sensible, and b) whether it makes financial sense for an individual to get a college education.

Do individuals benefit financially from a college degree, given certain assumptions about degree and institution? Yes. But a more interesting question is to what extent those degrees provide increased human capital, and to what extent it is a signal of existing quality.

For instance, if the value of certain college degrees is only as a method to differentiate between good and bad employees, universal higher education accomplishes nothing but to destroy that signal, without adding value. This provides an example scenario under which it is sensible for individuals to obtain higher education, but universal higher education is nevertheless inferior as a policy to limited higher education.

Thus the author errs in providing the individual benefit as a justification for universal higher education.
Marc andreesen attacks this method for good reason - the case methodology suggests you'll have a lot more data in the real world than you do and trains people to look for clues in the past about what you should do now; you simply can't always do that.
Me too. I can no longer imagine living in an area where I have to drive anywhere five-or-more days a week.