skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The concept of a 'front lawn', or even of easy access to nature in general, has not always been as popular as it is today.

The divide between city and country living is ancient. I find most of your assertions based on Jackson hard to swallow. We were almost exclusively agrarian before industrialization. Your article gives the fraction of people living in cities as 1/3 in 1890 in the US. It's more than that today. It seems like lawns and easy access to nature have been around for a long time. If they are more in demand today, maybe it's because there is a natural need that's going unfilled.

(If anyone has a good chart of US city vs. non-city dwelling over time, please share.)

> As Jackson notes, a front lawn is rather useless except as a status symbol

A status symbol? Only if you are looking at it from the perspective of an apartment dweller. Suburban neighborhoods don't think of people in terms of their front yard. They don't think of front yards much at all, except when it comes time to cut them.

If your front yard is messy, that might reflect badly on you, but that sort of information will be conveyed in other ways. The front yard won't have much to do with it.

I suppose a more accurate way to phrase your argument would be "ornamentation". Even then, a front yard is not useless. People like to have space between them and their neighbors. It is a buffer between you and the road, and a place for your children to play. People like to have a space that's theirs.

I think it is much more likely that the size of yards is a function of what people find comfortable to have between them and their neighbors, with other factors like cost coming into play second.

Why, for instance, do New Yorkers buy their second homes in the surrounding rural areas? Why not another apartment?

When I lived in the city I felt cramped. Apartment living taxed my well-being. It's possible this is because of how I grew up. I think it's more likely it's a physical attribute of how I am. Suburbanites are probably the same way.

Open up Google Earth and pan over America. Are you suggesting all the front yards you see are equivalent to gold chains, and not some fundamental property of how people want to live?

> and they can cut the amount of available space in a neighborhood by 50% or more, making them a truly luxury expense.

Again, this could only come from a city perspective. Front yards are easy to get. Everyone who wants one has one. The objective function of a suburban area is not to maximize space efficiency.

By the end of your comment you steer the discussion back towards cities in particular---but Jackson is an argument on actual suburbanization, not "intra-city" suburbanization. So if you aren't talking about these concepts in general, why predicate your comment on Jackson's book/phenomenon?
Good to know. I saw the mention of Hiss in the readme, but there wasn't really enough detail to judge Hiss vs MountainGrowl.
This might be a long shot, but consider doing an online antivirus scan such as housecall.trendmicro.com and see what's up.

In my younger days of downloading things from the Internet, I've downloaded malware that hijacks your search results to be spamtacular -- for fun and profit on their end of course.
My first thought when I saw it.
I'm speculating here, but maybe it has to do with the disposable nature of shows in India. Indian shows usually don't get sold as DVDs by the season. The same episode will often be re-run later the same day and into the next week until a new episode comes up.

The sheer number of episodes being churned out means extremely high competition and the more the exposure to the show, the more the interest in it.

I'm guessing this is just their way of locking in user interest so that they do tune in to the new episode that gets broadcast.

Also, the Youtube India ad revenue could be significant given the sheer number of eyeballs.
Then I must be some sort of masochist (or love battle?) because I eat in spirals going up. Nice... analysis... btw :)
I haven't heard of those before, however 37signals comes to mind with that naming convention.
I'm reading your thesis as "stable APIs are bad because it's hard to get rid of cruft, and if we just test enough, stability won't matter". As a net-consumer of APIs, I'm not sure I can get behind that.

Of course, an API can be expected to change rapidly early in its life. Such APIs are usually not considered ready for serious production use and breaking changes aren't really a big deal. Later on, people tend to expect more stability out of APIs and tend to stop using (or if that's not possible, post strongly-worded rants to HN about) APIs that remove features unexpectedly.

There are extreme cases to be sure. Microsoft is famous for keeping new versions of Windows bug-for-bug compatible with the past. Apple, on the other hand regularly deprecates and removes features that see little use. In light of Steve Yegge's recent post about liberal and conservative attitudes in software, I would call Microsoft's position on this issue very conservative and Apple's centrist.

I think what the world you're envisioning would actually look like is massive fragmentation, with people maintaining many more forks of libraries that have since removed some important functionality.

That's not to say the problem you describe doesn't exist or that there aren't solutions. An appropriate deprecation policy is certainly one part. Another component could be wider use of dynamic binding to help keep certain code out of APIs and in clients. A third could be more effort to keep APIs simple in the sense that Rich Hickey uses the word.
dead right. whats works for someone won't necessary work for anyone else - you MUST A/B test. i increased my ROI week by week with a/b testing and in my mind now if you not doing it then it's a crapshoot.

But there are things that are (asymptotically) absolute truths in marketing and i loved the article. i bookmarked the site which i don't do very often
How does this differ to something like Airdroid (www.airdroid.com)? It's not really clear to me and I can't run it at the moment.

Airdroid is almost perfect and the screenshots on the Play Store don't show your app in a good light.
What's missing in this article is mention of actual scientific evidence. I can believe that traditional nutritional recommendations are on flimsy ground, but replacing them with new cargo-cult ideas isn't necessarily better. Do these newer recommendations have good science behind them? My lurker experiences in /r/fitness are quite mixed; they seem like nice people, but the specific diet plans are very heavy on anecdotal evidence, with people professing very high confidence in recommendations relative to how much evidence there is (if anything, it reminds me of alternative-medicine communities). They're also a bit too focused for my interests on bodybuilding/image/etc. rather than measurable health outcomes, e.g. reduction in heart-attack or diabetes risk rather than muscle definition.
This American Life isn't even on NPR. It's part of PRI.
I'm sorry but the content on Reddit is very shallow compared to popular fitness and nutrition forums that have been existing and going strong for many years. There is nothing in this poor article that shows Reddit to be superior in any way. It is very questionable that Reddit's weak voting system improves the quality in any way (and reputation and other voting systems are available on many forums anyway).
This is pretty cool, but I'm feeling the pain of my pathetic 2.4Ghz Core i5 when I move my mouse around.
It's not really online reading, but we have an iOS "trail map" at thoughtbot: https://github.com/thoughtbot/trail-map/blob/master/trails/i...
ha yeah, I definitely agree. It's amazing how the threshold for quality is with spammers/hackers/script kiddies...a little goes a long way with that kind of stuff
No need to get rude here. My replys are sticking to facts not insults. Yes, my experience is in sales and I'm proud of it.
Here's the data most interesting to our existing user base:
1) limitations (ie if the patient only has certain amount of visits per year)
2) deductible remaining
3) co-insurance responsibility
4) health spending balances
5) Coverage for specific tests/equipment/procedures: infertility, blood draws, wigs, durable medical equipment, dental crowns, etc.

Two of our largest api users built the system for: diagnostic lab order entry service and genetic testing service.
That said, I really wish you wouldn't take the thread wildly offtopic, I was just trying to answer the guy's question. And I honestly wonder if you read my second sentence.

You know what, that's a good point. I'm deleting the initial comment. It's not adding to the discussion at all.

No worries about the karma comment either. You're right that I should hold myself to a higher standard. Or start reading Reddit again.

I'll leave these around so nobody gets too confused.
Far from alternative medicine. The beliefs touted by /r/fitness, such as intermittent fasting, increased protein consumption (many times more than the FDA recommendation), progressive load resistance training, and NOT focusing on cardio for weight loss are highly researched. The leaders of the /r/fitness community are incredibly well-versed in science and there are extremely intelligent debates that take place on /r/ fitness. The problem is that these concepts rarely make it to the mainstream on their own.

There's lot of links to the research, but this wasn't the appropriate article to include them. :)
This is precisely what the plan is, check out matternet.us a sister project
ringermobile.com would be awesome!
This is the first time I have seen the reddit fitness stuff. I was big at the beginning of the year. Wasn't even thinking of a diet. Then I read a comment here on hn posted by Aramgutang, on the best books of 2011 thread, where they recommended reading the four hour body. The community behind the four hour body was a huge motivator for me to lose 40 lbs and really it does change the way you think about things. I think reddit offers a similar backing to your diet. You need support, sometimes it seems pointless, but when you are feeling good, you will never feel better. Everywhere you look is temptation to sabotage, a strong community behind you really helps. I always wanted to thank Aramgutang so thank you.

PS Get a kettlebell.
I am good with software development. I know java, C and python. I am not looking for way simple tutorials. I fall in the audience where people know how to program but need a good tutorial to show where things are and how they are connected.
Sure, the depth of the content is not as good as other forums, but a peripheral point I think the article was trying to make was that the accessibility of such resources is what makes it so revolutionary. I'm an avid reader of r/fitness and one of the things that makes it so appealing it me is how much of the advice relates to me, an average guy who spends much of his time on the internet.
Yes, we should write our editors in assembler.
Domain "squatters" buy domain names and keep them to sell.

As long as they aren't infringing on a trademark it is a legitimate and legal business.

While I don't really even like the word speculation that would more accurately describe what is going on. People might not like it or get frustrated that they can't buy the domain at the price they would like. That's simply entitlement. And they also assume that if the "squatter" didn't buy the domain it would be just sitting waiting for them to purchase for $10 for their startup. In a free market system that would simply not be the case.

Someone thought of an idea and purchased domains at the going rate (or more later on if not the original owner) and now the domain has value. If it was so apparent the domain had value to everyone then everyone would have done the same thing and they didn't. This is really no different than any type of gamble or investing someone does in business or in real estate.

You can come up with any scenario to try limit domains to "actual use" and it will fail on it's face. There is no way to have the growth of the Internet that we have and police how someone uses their domain. This is not gas or war time rationing. There are many options if the domain that you think is perfect for your company is taken by someone else. Find a different domain. Get over it.
The corollary "note-to-self" is to avoid doing anything that would land oneself in a mental institution!
The End of Indie Game Development on Android
Ah, got it. You're probably better off looking at http://www.raywenderlich.com for now. Or, just downloading the source for Cheddar and running the app through a debugger.
i pasted the entire json library into the field and it just hung. Any tips?
I just wanted to throw this out there:

you should first read the objective-c primer.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#referencelibrary/Ge...

You mentioned the apple docs feel complex to you but I'd honestly recommend truly taking your time and working through them as they really are the best.
But I really don't want to pass all of my personal traffic off to a random new startup's server

And rightly so. Just use EasySMS for the SMS thing (it runs entirely on your phone, no third party involved) and one of the six dozen Filesharing/Samba apps that run over Wifi without going through a remote party (personally I'm using the samba app with the red icon, don't recall the name right now).

Sorry @shynk, but your app is broken by design and the proper solutions have been available in the app-store for years.
Downvoted? Yes, it's bad news, but let's not shoot the messenger, shall we?
I can see drone delivery to be quite useful in far-flung communities (Alaska, Australian Outback, Africa, etc.), to deliver critical stuff (medicines, critical components, etc.). Assuming the drone doesn't use a ton of fuel, it could literally be a life-saver.

Very excited to learn about this project, and hoping it literally takes off.
It's not just the content alone that makes the difference. A few things:

- It's the community that makes you feel like a part of something. Compared to popular fitness boards, you don't go to reddit only when you're in the 'trying to lose weight actively' mode. You just go to reddit and then these posts show up in your stream keeping you actively engaged. YMMV of course.

- It serves as a gentle break-in to more detailed/technical information. Most of the advice there is usually watered down from some technical sources, which people/FAQs eventually link to in case someone needs more information.

The third and perhaps the most important point would be,

- people see 'regular joes' like you and me losing xxx pounds and know by their posting history that they're not a made up figment of the advertisers imagination. This works on two levels, not only does it give confidence to the average guy, it also ensures that he's not being fed some bullshit theory in lieu of money.

The major fact that people get amazing results without throwing money at the techniques seems to lower the barrier to 'hmm maybe I should try this.'

I'm a big time fan of keto and have had great results and I have but r/keto to thank for this.
Gray hat question out of curiosity and possible experience: did you also use proxies or perhaps even Tor?
I think the main appeal of communities like this is that there is a central place to cheer on people who are trying to get into improving their health. You see something similar going on at Pinterest, which, for all its scientifically debunked advice, tries to encourage and inspire people to work out.

It doesn't matter how good your workout and diet regimen looks on paper, if you have to multiply that result with an enthusiasm of zero.
How to build an online presence
i'm not sure we're in disagreement. names matter and warrant attention. the less direct your name (e.g., amazon), the more you need to invest in marketing and educating consumers about your company/product. the macro point, which i suspect you agree with, is that ultimately the product mattes more than the name, and that is where people should obsess. good names will not lift companies into prosperity, though terrible names can sink companies per your point and my edit.
Stuff at MakeGamesWithUs (http://makegameswith.us/tutorials/getting-started/2#_=_) isn't too bad since it will help you get up to speed, and you can always turn to them to do the marketing if you decide you're more interested in developing than selling.
He may have thought so because the phrase "income inequality" is usually used in the context of describing it negatively (in the US at least). I guarantee you that the phrase "income inequality" is used by Democrats in the Senate/House 10x as much as Republicans. No Republican is ever going to say their tax cuts for the wealthy "increase income inequality", they'll say it "helps the job creators create jobs".

Edits: Wow, I need to learn to make sure I reread sentences in full when I go back and reword something.
Port knocking makes no sense in this situation. I think it's something more like STUN (RFC3489).

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3489.txt
Former submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181369

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2950627

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4174453

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4207004
Half of internet users use Facebook.

If half of those internet users friends use facebook, this limits Sendrail to 1/4 of potential matches.

If half of those internet users' potential recipients of files are friends (colleagues, acquaintances, chat room contacts, etc may not be fb friends) that gets us to 1/8 of use cases as potentially solved with Sendrail, and Sendrail is only useful to Fb users 1/4 of the time.

Most people won't want to use a service that's useful only 1/4 of the time for a particular task, so this is far worse than a 50% reduction in potential users. This is how you get no users.
You're twisting my words. I'll let you refer to our terms, security and privacy for the rest of your questions.
Without getting into the fact that you're heavily paraphrasing the second amendment, surely you're not suggesting that "all men" should be able to possess, like the government, surface-to-air missiles, 1000-ton bombs, or nuclear weapons. And if we are at least in agreement on this point, then on what basis is the line drawn between weapons like these and hunting rifles?
I guess I'd fall into the "Unix as an IDE" camp, so I'm glad that by default Vim is "just" an editor. I think it's great fun to see how people have tricked out their Vim installations, but I confess I view those custom Vim setups kind of like I do tricked out hot rods, or Burning Man art installations. I hope people never stop producing arbitrarily complex Vim installations, because software can be art.
That is the most common question I see (it's been asked on reddit a lot, too). It is similar. One of the main differences is that Shynk works over mobile networks, not just over wifi. This lets Shynk provide other functionality, too. e.g. sharing files publicly and connection tunneling.

As I continue working on Shynk, you'll see their feature sets diverge a little more. I'd like to implement some more features that take advantage of the fact that Shynk uses the public internet.

As for the screenshots: they're not too beautiful, but the app itself is a pretty minimal part. After you log in, you should be able to forget about the app and just use the website's interface.
A Plot Scenario Generator
I'm a big fan of books.

I found this one very useful to get started:
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-iOS-Development-Exploring-SD...
Show HN: A new type of freelancer marketplace 
Hey HN, we just launched MyRudius.com -- a completely new type of marketplace to find freelance gigs. I'd sincerely appreciate any feedback! Feel free to be blunt and honest...

There's definitely work to be done. It currently uses fairly out-of-the-box Twitter Boostrap, for one thing.

Thanks for any feedback available!

http://www.myrudius.com
^ this. I've done a lot of research/experimentation/thinking about keto, and this is definitely one of the factors. Along with the increased satiety from higher dietary fat, higher TEF from increased protein, improved insulin sensitivity (less hunger crashes), etc, of course. :)
Clickable:

http://www.myrudius.com
Stanford has a free series of iOS lectures that you can get on iTunesU: http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/ipad-iphone-application-dev...

I highly recommend them.
Yep, that was the hard part. Our sales team was three people, including the CEO, and they also had to sell the product to providers. Somehow they managed.

We actually started with referrals. Providers were filling out paper forms and faxing them. Every payer had its own rules, its own identifiers for providers, its own forms. We put everything on a website and reduced a ten-minute process to thirty seconds. We got our first paying customers in 1999.

Trouble was, support was killing us. By 2001 it was starting to look like we wouldn't make it. Then we added eligibility, and it turned out to be insanely profitable. We started by getting payers to give us their entire customer lists, then added edi, plus some proprietary APIs some of them had. At that point, HIPAA hadn't fully kicked in and payers were still implementing X12.

In 2003 we started to break even, and I moved to our parent company to start another project. Meddata bought a couple other companies, then a couple years ago Transunion bought Meddata. I don't know for how much, but Meddata was making a lot of money by then with a team not much bigger, so it had to be a lot.
I'm sure a guy who worked on barackobama.com is going to be impartial on this issue.
But the thing is, all the points you make are equally applicable even for US/European TV as well, and yet we have to put up with astonishingly shabby ways to watch them. Even the BBC has all these restrictions around their iplayer. Hulu was a good start, but the networks have consistently been messing with it and now it is... meh. I've just given up trying to watch them.

What makes this strategy work for Indian TV, but not for others?
What do you a req or spec for that feature would look like?
An entrepreneur's business is not going to succeed or fail because of the current US corporate tax schedules. They alter the payoffs a bit, but that's about it.

They're not a big deal.

If you want to build things that create value, build them. You'll still get paid if you do it well.

I know. One of the biggest surprises I had while I was building my company was how little corporate tax I paid as we grew. It simply wasn't a big deal.

----

edit: But I'm unsurprised that you or one of your libertarian buddies had me hellbanned from HN for expressing this idea.
HyperCard turns twenty-five years old today
First High-Resolution Color Mosaic of Curiosity's Mastcam Images