skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, time to crunch the numbers again...

149M sq km total land

15M sq km farmland

7000M people

So by dividing current farmland by population and rounding the result up a bit, each person gets a plot 47x47m for 603 sq ft for living and the rest for farmland. Assuming half the land is rank (unusable) wilderness, that roughs out to an optimistic carrying capacity of 33000M people.

But that’s not taking into account high-efficiency farming or compact housing.

So methinks the alarm has been prematurely sounded. We’re still a ways from 33 billion occupants, and between technology and nature methinks that issue will be...adjusted.
Why haskell is a more appropriate question.
But now you have to trust "Joe" to make sure his real identity can't be easily linked from his bitcoin addresses, or else they'll find out about the USD transfer.
Ask HN: Alternative to cj.com for affiliation program / referral for web product
We run a small web service and we would like to promote our service thru affiliation program (we have partners which will put us on their site right now). CT.com is the biggest but expensive. Are there any alternatives? Something Web 2.0 simple?
One of the greatest benefits of using my Mustache style ERB approach — there's absolutely no blockers. You can use any crazy ruby you so desire, but at the same time, you can also build clean, documented mustache-style views. I'm hesitant to say it's the best of both worlds, but thus far it actually has been.
Would you consider putting comment scores on a user's Comments page or perhaps on the permalink page to an individual comment? That way the truly curious can look?
IPhone 4S sales top 4 million in 3 days Read
Cassandra is way underrated. It is a great advance in DBRMS, just not relational. I've put it to great use and it's an amazing database system. Searching is badly needed, regular expression searching by column values would make it kick Oracle`s ass anytime.
Well yes but you are assuming you can find a buyer who is willing to do a straight bank transfer rather than using an exchange. And most people much prefer to use the exchanges. Especially if they are buying drugs with the bitcoins; if they did a bank transfer to a person selling drugs, they could have just used that payment method in the first place.
I'd just like to add Fuck Datastax to that otherwise great comment.
https://github.com/tjake/Solandra
As individuals, we don't act the same way around our peers, our friends or our family. While we certainly present ourselves differently in different contexts, I wouldn't call these different "identities", rather the same identity applying the rules of the given context to their behavior.

Where it becomes tricky is when one is strips away the context isolation. For example, at your friend's bachelor party, some behavior might perfectly normative within context and participants, but the next day when people outside of that context can watch a video of your behavior - you might feel a little shame/embarrassment/regret/etc.

The internet, for better or worse, allows a complete breakdown of context isolation. While the rules of posting on 4chan or HN greatly differ, a person adhering to rules of a given context, will still be judged across both contexts by outside viewers.

The solution here is to create context isolation - which is very easy to do with anonymity.
They won't pivot. Digg sucks.
In the ideal world, the spec would be open and anyone could implement it in their service (be it a browser or other). For most operating systems we're talking about something that looks like a device connected over a serial port. The Android service is pretty straight forward and I've played a bit with ideas on an old G1 which had a serial port hidden in the USB port, not sure about iOS. Computers like laptops etc its very straight forward (for both wireless and wired solutions).

"Also, you wouldn't be able to log into a public terminal."

Actually depending on capability (no pun intended) I could easily see 'read' access being usable without the key but recognize the issue there. The real 'issue' if you will is universal appeal/buy-in which is to say if anyone can use it then you will get some early adopters who will provide support as a differentiating factor and that can drive adoption into more slowly changing markets. Because it has to be everywhere to be effective it won't be a big money maker (this is where a lot of VCs stop listening :-) basically the barrier to implementing it has to be 0 and the value to the implementor has to be non-zero. Given how thinly marginallize 'security' fixes are, this margin won't leave anything for the manufacturer in terms of on going revenue so the key itself has to define the value for the company. (I've actually thought a lot about this :-)

So to your point, for early adopters the experience would be to get a 'key' and to install a plug-in and then enabled sites and services would be secured. Pretty easy sell to an enterprise if their only cost is the 'fob cost' and there isn't some giant consulting revenue stream attached to it. For big companies it has to be completely implementable (once the key infrastructure is set up) in a way that is custom (and probably private) that enterprise. That gives their IT folks confidence and it makes the risk low.

For more general engagements like PayPal or Facebook its a bit different. On things that are appifyable (if that makes sense) there is a potential for differentiation (look at how the World of Warcraft Authenticator stuff was worth it for them to implement).

The key for me is that the existing way of doing things is under attack and it will eventually succumb, when it does there is a tremendous opportunity there.
Beautiful Photographs of Open Spaces
We have a roundup here of fields, roads, canyons, oceans, and even night scapes. Enjoy!
Web developer color tool
> laziness is not intuitive

That's just, like, your opinion, man. In the context of a declarative programming language, laziness is so intuitive it hardly needs a name.
Top Catastrophic Health Insurance Companies
Beware of selection bias. I saw these submissions when they were posted, but voted in neither, because I didn't mind the status quo of no points, and I'm wary of meta-discussion. If I had felt differently, I'd definitely have voted.
The thing is, that AOL screenname I chose 15 years ago isn't how I want to be seen now. I've changed a lot since then, and it feels right to me that my handle should as well. Over the last 8 years or so I've been moving away from that handle and to something a little more... professional. I'd really like the things associated with that handle to stay in the past, and not be easily accessed by anyone who has my current handle.
If someone gets hold of your password from one source, the goal is that they won't be able to use it in other places, hence the "ma" from Amazon in his example.

If I have maAskNotWhatYouCanDoForYourCountry then someone seeing it could possible guess the relevance of the ma, and try ew or hn, etc. on this site.

Woth maAnwycd4yc on the other hand, without being told, are you going to guess that maybe it's a generic password with a small site-specific portion?
Some websites cut your password off at twelve or even six characters. What this means is that your long password when you enter it into the password form is only 'AskNot'. That's not so hard to brute force.

To avoid confusion some websites let you type in x characters, but only take the first y characters.
I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on.

I'd love to know what he would think of http://www.iawriter.com/
It’s All About the Safety Margin
Dare to be Different: 3 Leadership Lessons I Learned From Moneyball
“You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.” Warren Buffett
A Conversation With Google Ventures Bill Maris
Ask HN: Any GOOD iPad HN Reader?
I'd ideally like Alien Blue the HN edition, but I gather we'll seen an Android version before we see an HN one. I have tried loading in Flipbook, but that gets the articles without the comments. Is the problem that the HN API isn't as rich as the one for Reddit, or... ?
Strange how Adobe can deliver a mobile Reader in 2.7 Mb, but the PC version is a 126 Mb monstrosity. http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?platform=...
Separate them in time. If the protocol is well documented and there are free source code implementations available then that removes the barriers to implementing it in new systems, and plug-ins or some other form would be needed for older systems but the plug-in itself could be implemented by a third party rather than have to come from the key manufacturer because of the open spec.
I have always to have three areas of identity online. I've had my professional persona, which I try to associate with my work and professional interests. I have a different identity that I present to my friends, which is a lot goofier, complains about work and plays a lot of video games. Then I have my third layer of handles which I use to identify with others in games or specific mediums such as discussion boards. I don't want potential employers looking at my Reddit post history, or my gaming clan looking up details about my personal life, or Reddit trolls looking up pictures of my wife.

I like that Google+ made some efforts to let you keep those lives separate through Circles, which prompted Facebook to make their lists more prominent, but I still prefer to have multiple identities.

I acknowledge that with a little work you could probably connect all my identities together, but I'd rather not make it obvious to the casual observer. Let's keep honest people honest.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28263608@N00/3108550313

Wow. They lifted another bloggers screen shot.
XKCD has an infographic on password security:

http://xkcd.com/936/
His reason is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbPASJiAfu4#t=323
The only hard limits for human-style organisms on an earth-type planet are thermodynamic. Using 1970s technology, the earth could support hundreds of billions. e.g.:

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2006/09/overp...

When you look at the simple figures that show that to be true, it somewhat puts the ridiculous debates over billions into context. i.e. they're not really debates over capacity and resources, they're debates over organization and (lack of) understanding the nature of progress and achievement.
SpeaktoIt seems to have more personality based off responses it gives. It is not as serious as Siri. Though Siri does have its Easter eggs too though less so then speak to it. Both are equally useful and enjoyable and have their strengths and weaknesses. Siri is built into iPhone and it's speech is superior to speak to it.
The article asserts that MS completely got it wrong but it doesn't even attempt to persuade the reader with arguments as to why. To me it isn't obvious that adding a ribbon with the most frequently used features to the top of the explorer is a bad approach.

I think the ribbon was a mostly a success in MS Office, Notepad, MS Paint, Wordpad and so on. So why not also use a ribbon in the explorer?
Here is a similar type of page but for a Sony Tablet S product http://discover.store.sony.com/tablet/#specs/diagram
I bought a license for TotalFinder with Bitcoin.
I will play the devils advocate here...

I've browsed 4chan every now and then during the last year I will totally disagree with you.

If anything, the post quality is deceiving, not immediately apparent. I couldn't understand at first, but then it became obvious.
99% of the posts are striped from any real content, they are irrelevant single words, offenses, f*ked up puctures, funny pictures, etc. But then, in 1% of the comments lies the real value of 4chan.

I've seen very insightful comments in there. Many topics that would be taboos on pretty much any other place on the internet are discussed there openly and with innovative views.
I'm not sure about the purpose of the huge amount of useless fluff, but if you want to get the real content you need acknowledge that crazy people will post tons of stupid things while serious discussions take place.

If you have a totally new way of looking at a subject, if you expose it to a place where your identity is valued, you will for sure get it damaged. So everybody refrains from posting potentially controversial opinions. Going the opposite direction and totally remove identity ties, will attract trolls, but you get the real stuff, what people really think, no bullshit, no political correctness.
Sketching helped me avoid getting stuck
There's a difference between making something more (vs less) accessible based on usage patterns, and making things impossible to do at all.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, and as long as they don't touch cmd.exe or powershell.exe, the Windows org can do whatever they want to Explorer...
A change in the initial conditions might make a change in the result, but it isn't guaranteed to. At least not any noticeable change in the next few days, weeks, even months. So if you find that, for most of the possible current conditions, the end result is mostly the same, you can have a good probability of being right.
He's ruined your hard-earned reputation as a slick, suave James Bond-type operator.
Of course it matters. If you "exchanged value" with someone in return for bitcoins three months ago, then approximately 90% of the value of your transaction has disappeared (whether lost by you, or someone else you passed the coins onto). Unlike hyperinflation of currencies backed by governments and banks offering interest, the only way for you to have retained value received in bitcoins was to dispose of the bitcoins in favour of something else. So after getting burnt by a lot more than Paypal exchange fees, you probably end up converting to a government/bank backed medium of exchange anyway. That's not dysfunctional?
Google doesn't use patents and that's a great boon to their benefit. Google makes money from self-made technology and uses no other patents, that's what matters. Microsoft is evil.
They built it in 8 hours. What do you expect?
Sorry, but if we're talking about the quantity of poorly documented, broken, shat-straight-onto-github libraries out there, then ruby wins by a mile.

This isn't a challenge, but I'm curious what standout libraries that ruby or python have for which Haskell is lacking in a good alternative.
Used that. Not Cassandra, but a very nice application of it.
>Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do.

You are operating under the assumption that the usual way of dealing with technology is that you have some goal, and then you search for the right tool to achieve that goal. I disagree with that assumption. Most of the times you don't know that you want a specific functionality until the technology comes that implements it. Then you realize that you wanted it 'all along.' You are shaped by your environment more than you shape it.

Your time is indeed better spent doing things other than upgrading, the reason being that the software business just hasn't been able to keep up with the advances in hardware. Even though we have so much computational power available to us, we still haven't learned how to handle complexity and make more interesting, flexible interfaces. There can be innovation in document publishing software, even though we haven't seen any for such a long time. And when that innovation comes, I'm sure you will start wanting features from your word processor that you couldn't even imagine were possible.
Right, so energy can be substituted for arable land.

But I wonder if the real limit to human population is mineral-based, rather than energy-based. Every person needs a certain portion of different minerals: calcium, iron, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, selenium, etc. Maybe we would run out of one of those minerals before we would run out of energy?

This could be a topic for science fiction. We run out of zinc, and then have to send an unmanned spaceship over to some other galaxy to mine some zinc... but there would have to be some other complication, because unmanned spaceflight is boring.
I use stormondemand.com. Over a year ago I unixbenched it, EC2 and Linode, and it clearly won. Only problem is that they don't innovate...it's where AWS was when it started..no queue, email, s3, ebs, ... At least they have dedicated boxes, so you can build a hybrid solution.

Linode is pretty great too though. I only have 1 box there, but I've had up to 6. Never had a problem.

I never know how to say this without sounding like spam, but http://webhostingtalk.com is a really popular and good community for anything related to hosting. I suggest you check it out.
Hacker News Tokyo Japan Meetup #8 – Friday 21st of October
For those interested in learning Haskell, I can recommend the lesser known "Haskell Road to Logic, Maths, and Programming":

http://www.amazon.com/Haskell-Logic-Maths-Programming-Comput...

It's great to go over old and new math concepts and do so while exploring Haskell.
Pot growers manage to substitute energy for arable land.
But you are showing that with points shown you have two tiers of users:

-Those who read every post & up/down-vote each one on its merit.

-Those who scan the page quickly & read the comments with the highest votes.

The problems is, how do you tell which kind of user is voting when comes to ranking a comment?
I would argue that a vote from someone who just scans the top rated comments is less useful than a vote from someone who has read the whole thread. The chance of gems being left languishing in a corner decreases with many eyes hunting for good content.

By being the second type of user you are essentially out-sourcing your opinion of a comment to the crowd and assuming everyone else is not doing the same thing.
Let's face it. A TRS-80 Model 100 in many ways is probably still the ideal portable writing machine. Only displays a couple lines at a time so you can't get too distracted with formatting and such. Rugged, full keyboard, 20+ hours of battery life, and reasonably easy to read even in full daylight. While I have migrated to an iPad 2 for many things, I sometimes wonder if that really represented an improvement...
I can absolutely understand what you're saying. I don't have so much of a problem with having the same name I chose in 1996, at the age of 16, though. (That's what I meant by "I'm not sure what that says about me.")

And actually, my problem is different. I worry not about my past overlapping with my present, but my "real life" crashing into my digital one. While it certainly doesn't take much to piece together who I am, I do get oddly disconcerted by people who I grew up with who are only now getting online. I've mostly avoided it by not visiting Facebook anymore.

I like to compare the Internet to a swimming pool, only, it operates exactly the opposite as you'd expect. Normally adults would be wary of children getting into the deep end, as it's less safe. But on the Internet, not only are the younger ones far better swimmers who live in the deep end... The adults stay in the kiddie pool/inlet. One scary run-in with the deep end, and they never want to "swim" again.

I'm very curious about the effects this is having on society. I can't wait to see what parents and children are culturally like in twenty years. (Of course, who knows what'll be around then.)
I am still implementing form validations as server-side validations and not sure I will ever change that.

Super easy to deal with on a simple ajax request and it's in place for all requests. If a POST/PUT is done with an ajax request simply return the error message. Otherwise, set the HTTP status code and render the form with the error as the response.
Seems to be down temporarily:
Fedora Core Test Page
This page is used to test the proper operation of the Apache HTTP server after it has been installed. If you can read this page, it means that the web server installed at this site is working properly, but has not yet been configured.
How many of those were upgrades vs new customers? They may "only" have 4% of the cell phone market in general but they have a much larger percentage of the smart phone market. By saturated I meant that anyone who wants one has one. You can get them free with contract, so they have already completed the race to the bottom. iPhone's future mostly consists of replacement rate, and the gradual death of dumb phones.
Both Facebook and Google are doing it right. They just work for the wrong interests?
الاسهم القطرية
That's what I am trying to say.
Common security practices will put you out of danger. I'm confused why we should have recipes to 'secure PHP'. Why don't the regular security measures simply apply?

My guess is that many don't know what they are so they apply follow 'secure PHP' guides and feel safe, though they are not.
Give Web Ahead on 5by5 a listen. Sometimes might be too basic for some, but interesting tidbits all over I think.
The usefulness of a business payday loan
I wish they'd fix all the annoying little things they broke in Windows 7 before moving onto anything new.

In Windows XP, copying files over a network worked. In Windows 7, some "improvements" seem to result in abysmal file copying performance on a very noticeable proportion of machines/networks. The Web is full of such stories, and the best anyone has come to fixing them is basically random tweaking of low-level network parameters that no user should ever have to go anywhere near on the off chance that turning off something supposedly beneficial will fix whatever incompatibility or feedback loop is crippling performance on any given system.

On Windows XP, you could navigate folders in the tree in explorer by clicking once to expand and open a folder. In Windows 7, I have yet to find any way to avoid double-clicking or aiming for those dinking little triangles to expand each folder, which is not terribly efficient on a modern large, high-resolution display. Also, why do they hide the triangles unless you're hovering in the correct area with the mouse? Might a user not want to know which folders they can see in the tree also contain nested subfolders? Again, Windows XP did this fine, and the Windows 7 behaviour is objectively inferior in this respect.
> I know this sounds absurd to a lot of people, but it makes sense on some levels. Take the names out of the mix and it's a bit easier to detach your emotions

> * PhoneCorp invents a new interface that is unique, useful, and makes phones very easy to use

> * BizPhones thinks this technology is good and would also like to incorporate it in to their product

> * BizPhones negotiates a licensing agreement so they can use the technology, making it possible for more consumers to enjoy the benefits, and fairly compensating PhoneCorp

That description is clearly in favor of one side of the argument here.

Here is an alternative description:

> * PhoneCorp files a patent for a fairly general and obvious concept.

> * BizPhones makes a phone, without reading PhoneCorp's patent. The phone sells like hotcakes.

> * PhoneCorp threatens to sue BizPhones for 'infringing' its patent, if BizPhones doesn't pay a 'license fee'.
Monads are not unreadable. When you finally get do-notation and realize that you can use the same idioms for (a) list comprehensions, (b) imperative-style programming, and (c) error-handling and option-chaining, there's a "Wow" moment. However, we can give up on selling monads to the masses. The name alone...

The concept of the monad is beautiful and awesome, but it's too different to succeed with the masses.
You're thinking of facebook.