skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is completely wrong. World population is about 7.2 billion people and growth is slowing. The UN projects it will peak at about 9.1 billion in about 2050, then decline slightly. And the US population isn't fast growing, its projected to reach 438 million by 2050. Most of the US growth will be immigration, which is completely under our control.

As for being swamped, lately, in spite of the recent economic downturn, global population growth rates have been lessening by more than demographers expected. All of this can be read with a cursory Google search. My numbers are from the UN, US Census Dept., and Pew Research.
It's specifically Beef that is the massive drain. Chicken/Pork/other meats are magnitudes of orders more water-conscious per calorie. (Pork uses 75% less, and is yet the most wasteful of water outside of cows/bovine)[1].

Beef is astoundingly wasteful of water. You could take an hour-long shower and it would use about the same amount of water needed for a pound of beef. [2] and [3].

[1] http://gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big-wat...

[2] http://www.wsscwater.com/home/jsp/content/water-usagechart.f...

[3] http://blog.epa.gov/healthywaters/2012/03/virtual-water-real...
It is a common complaint among people who moved from Finland to Germany, how dodgy the German houses are. If the rest of the world is even worse, maybe I should never leave home.
Is there any kind of logic to granting stupid patents? It seems like if their approval was really harmful to the industry, it would manifest itself in reduced tax revenues. No government wants that. So is the government increasing its revenues by granting these arbitrary technology fiefdoms?
I'm sure I cut-and-pasted the title.

I was worrying so much over the URL (a resubmit since prev submission didn't get anywhere) I must have slipped.

:(
Chris Lea joins NodeSource and replaces ppa:chris-lea/Node.js
had this problem for years, along with google checkout's callback process. google was worse. they seemed to get to a point where if/when they'd ping, if the request took longer than a few seconds to reply, it would stop, then never retry.
Wish list:

- Make the list of items available online without signup

- At the minimum, don't require a phone#, ask for email instead if you don't want list to be public for some reason

No way giving away my phone# even if you promise no spams.
Yeah, but that's over the lifetime of the cow, plus while there is a fair bit of beef and other livestock farming in CA it's a fairly small proportion of California's overall agricultural output. I haven't been able to find exact breakdowns of water usage per sector per year, but throwing random big numbers around isn't really informative either - eg the figures in the top post and the first reply differ by an order of magnitude (I think the EPA # of ~1800 gal/lb is the correct one).
Yea; we always, always return a 200. I have no idea about redirects but you can test that using the (very, very painful) sandbox. FYI, another lesson we learned the hard way: if you are testing your IPNs in the sandbox and you include a port number in the URL, the IPNs will silently fail. You also can't use IP addresses for IPN testing (again, they will silently fail) so I setup an A record in our DNS pointing to my local machine for testing.
Can I suggest you include a sample recipe like so: http://www.blueapron.com/pages/sample-recipes
I'd just like to point out that the satellite mission in question gets this measurement by comparatively weighing parts of the Earth through gravity gradients. It's hard to do well, and GRACE and GOCE have done a great job.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Recovery_and_Climate_Ex...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Field_and_Steady-State_...
I know people who've bought these kits. They say it's loud, but that it seems to work as they can see the HEPA filter get dirty over time.

My $1000+ air purifiers are quiet enough to keep on in the bedroom at night, even on full speed. Plus they don't just filter particles. Plus they are easy to wheel around when necessary. Yes, the manufacturer (IQAir) is probably making a killing on the machines and the (three) replacement filter modules, but it's worth it for the effectiveness and convenience.
Ask HN: Framework with the most built in functionality?
Hi everyone. I'm about to start a new web development project and I want to move fast. I'm looking for recommendations on a web development framework that has the most functionality built in, so I won't have to reinvent the wheel. Specifically, it would be great if there's a framework that makes it very easy to have user accounts that let a user manage their account details (email, username, password) and that provides password recovery. Also do any frameworks have payment/subscription management modules available? Or if there are add-ons to a framework that provide this kind of thing I'd like to know. I'm open to any programming language/platform though I prefer Java and Python. Thanks!
From the article:

> A pilot flying through eddies too small to bump his plane around will not notice them—the effect of all the tiny eddies is averaged out into a general sense that the ride is smooth. On the other hand, neither will he notice an enormous eddy that enfolds the entire plane, any more than a fish would notice the water in which it swims.

I'm pretty sure that an airplane pilot would notice a wind blowing him off course. And I see that idea "fish can't notice water because they're in it" around all the time, but it's never made any sense to me. We move through and breathe the air just like fish do the water. Far from lacking the concept of air entirely, "air" was one of the classical elements. People notice when they get caught in strong winds. They even notice soft winds. What are we supposed to understand from this bizarre metaphorical assertion?
So what? The mail server name has practically nothing to do with the email address. The address is still @hotmail.com.

He makes a valid point: why did @outlook.com addresses suddenly become used for scamming?
Interesting. Do you have a source on that? My 30 seconds of googling turned up 3,682 L per pound of beef (or 145 gallons for 1/3 lb). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8478283
Interesting. What did freehand have that illustrator does not?
Gross negligence resulting in the deaths of others is usually a crime, punished by incarceration. Yes, those people aren't coming back, but it's not like nothing happens if this sort of thing happens.
> underfloor heating pipes [...] we can use this system to passively cool the house

While floor heating is cozy and wonderful, I am somewhat skeptic on the comfort of floor cooling.
"Yet the buyers don't pay anything for the service."

Well, it is a bidding process. So if buyers believe there is enough added value in this service, they will overbid the 'CL price'. So if a couch would sell for $300 on craigslist, presumably it could sell for that plus whatever the value of having the item delivered, let's say $400.

I think the bigger issue with this service, is that the cost of delivery of a large piece of furniture is relatively constant regardless of the value. So if I want to sell a $1000+ dollar couch, I have no incentive to use this service, it would make much more sense to sell it on craigslist and offer to cover the costs of a professional moving service instead ($500 vs $100-200). It seems to me that this service is most valuable for lower priced items. So if I can sell my crappy $100 couch hassle free, but only get $50 back, I would be pretty happy with that. However I doubt that would be profitable for the company.
No they aren't. Global population is levelling off faster than people anticiapted and is likely to plateau at 9b in 2050 - a lot of people, to be sure, but far from the Malthusian scenario you seem to be suggesting.
Non-visible lasers pose a much bigger hazard than visible. Intense visible light triggers an involuntary defence called the blink reflex whereby we blink before the retina absorbs enough energy to get damaged. Lasers outside the visible range don't trigger the blink reflex and can destroy the retina before you know what happened.

Lidar operates at relatively low power and relies on very sensitive detection in a very narrow wavelength range to identify reflections.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-03-09/news/070310002...

Although high-def video most often is used for blue screen shoots, director Zack Snyder and Fong shot on film. "We wanted the film grain to show," Fong said.
We actually don't even necessarily have to shift agriculture itself. Right now, the agriculture is water-intensive: the only reason it's so water-intensive is because water in the West is cheap. We know how to grow produce using less water-intensive methods (see Eurofresh Farms in Willcox, AZ), it just isn't very economically viable, because water is not the expensive part of agriculture (for the producer).
I'm not trying to assume. I'm trying to research. I read that page, and several others. From what I understand, the local fallout (ie, within a few mile radius) is much higher in subsurface bursts, but the longer-range fallout is substantially less.

Thus, I am unconvinced by the argument that the longer-range fallout would "wipe out" something the size of Arkansas.
FYI, Google Domains includes customer support. I have been using it for a little while and it's really nice.
pin number

arg
The Four Habits of Highly Silicon-Valley Startups.

1. Put something that doesn't belong there in the cloud.

2. Make undue generalizations about its applicability to third party businesses of which you have limited understanding.

3. Fake growth by dubious means, such as ramping up 'customers' (even if none of them actually use your service on an ongoing basis), hiring extensively, and waylaying all business processes to cater toward visible progress at investment rounds.

4. Spend almost as much on marketing as development.
Really neat! There's not enough posts going into this depth of configuring Docker contains for a HA setup.
It includes email forwarding, which you can attach to gmail.com account.
What do spouses of H1B visa holders do?
I understand that spouses of H1B visas can't work. For the existing tech workers in US, what creative/productive activities do your wives do? It seems very unattractive you are the wife of a H1B visa holder.

I am not sure whether I want to sabotage my wife's career for my career.
This is exactly backwards. Traditional Li-Ion batteries have a liquid electrolyte, and Li-Poly have a solid polymer electrolyte. Both batteries consist of anode/electrolyte/cathode rolled up. In the case of a "pouch" cell, they are rolled up flat, and a cylinderical cell has them rolled up in a cylinder. There is actually no limitation for the shape - you can totally make a Li-ion battery with liquid electrolyte in a prism - many cell phone batteries do this.

Li-ion, due to the liquid, needs a hard metal case, whereas li-poly can often get away with a foil pouch. The surface area per volume of a cylinder is less, as well as easier to make structurally sturdy, which means less weight is spent in the casing. Tesla cares more about weight than volume, so this is an acceptable tradeoff.
CIA director apologizes for search of Senate committee’s computers
http://dashboard.pluspool.org/
I think an easy answer would be a "stocking fee" if the item doesn't sell.

That will encourage people to pick a price others might jump at. Some fine-tuning would of course be required.
> This is a great idea.

Not really: you don't condemn an entire system by pointing out individual bad examples of it.

This is like picking a bad article linked on Hacker News and saying "Hacker News is broken and needs to be abolished".

You're not going to convince anyone with this kind of cherry picking.

Besides, the title made it sound as if the EFF was filing stupid patents.
> " you can't have a contract with an intended two-way exchange of obligations. "

> This is false, of course.

Except, not.

> You can have unilateral contracts accepted by performance of something that a contract requests,

You can have contracts accepted by performance as described, but they aren't unilateral. Acceptance by performance is a mechanism for demonstrating acceptance (hence the name) of a contract offer with mutual obligation while simultaneously fulfilling some or all of the obligations on one side.

> contracts implied in fact,

Which are contracts where the acceptance of mutual obligation (and perhaps the actual content of the mutual obligation) is inferred from non-verbal communication, not an exception to the requirement for an intended two-way exchange of obligations.

> contracts implied in law, and all sorts of interesting quasi-contracts,

quasi-contracts are another name for implied-in-law contracts, which are not actual contracts, but equitable arrangements; given the nature of the equitable basis for these -- particularly the direction they run -- it would be odd to see implied warranties, or even some equitable analog, mattering to them except to reduce liability that might be due to the provider. But equity can be be weird, so I wouldn't rule it out entirely that there might be some relevance there.

> But that's also "first week of contracts".

Indeed.
We are examining the patent in detail and finding ways that we can workaround the claims. The claims are wrapped in industry jargon and detail, so we feel we can add or remove steps to get around it.

But, the core point is the patent did nothing to further the state of the art, nor does it provide information that someone in the field would use to implement the patent. As I understand those are the two reasons for the patent system, so by that standard the patent is worthless.

I wonder if patents in other industries are actually useful, eg would a chemist ever refer to older patents to further their own lab work?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your objection, but you can actually run your own stellard, which is a first-class member of the network: https://github.com/stellar/stellard. The Foundation runs a public stellard for convenience, but you're under no obligation to use it. The client and wallet powering launch.stellar.org are similarly open-source, and can be hooked up to your local stellard.
Here's how I would rewrite your post:

"I noticed a typo -- <phrase containing the word 'affect'> should be <phrase containing the word 'effect'> instead. And since I'm not being a smartass, I don't have to go through all the trouble of citing <link to Muphry's law>. Yay!"
Decisions can be motivated by lots of things other than maximizing tax revenue. For example, political beliefs/agendas of various relevant parties, lobbying, bureaucratic lock-in, and so on.
I traced the citations back to a pretty thorough report, see [1].

[1] http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Mekonnen-Hoekstra-2012...
> So, here is a concrete case of patents discouraging innovation

It seems to be just the opposite, though: the patent system is telling you "You are copying something that exists, instead you should innovate and create something new".

So why don't you innovate instead of copying something that already exists?
+1 to NYC. I tend to avoid selling stuff on CL because I don't want to directly deal with the potentially creepy person that actually wants my stuff. I guess what I want is a minimal middleman that brings an extra degree of safety and convenience to the exchange.
Yes, but not from the birth rate. The US receives well over 1M immigrants per year[1]

[1] http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/2005/09/2005-immigration-tr...
It looks great. UI is really nice to look at.

Looking around, this has a long way to go before it is able to compete feature wise with current commercial managers.

Also, it's going to take a long time, security-wise, to get up to par with the current commercials as well. It sounds like I'm being harsh but there are a lot of possible issues to consider. An HSTS header would be a nice start......
In 100 or 200 years from now, I think we can be certain that teaching won't even resemble what we do today. Not to mention just how little we've applied scientific research to modern education. We have a long way to go before we see how usable and powerful our tools for information become.
Or maybe, don't infringe the patent and innovate by creating your own approach to the problem?
Lithium iron phosphate has much lower energy density (energy per weight). This is the most important factor in the choice of battery, along with the cost per energy.

LFP's advantage is in power density, which is not an issue with the size of pack that Tesla is using.
Two recent works [0] have attempted to model the occurrences and magnitudes of terrorist events and war casualties. Both seem to fit power law distributions.

The Johnson et al. work was mentioned at the end of the article.

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/the_power_law...
totally agree w/ #2. Each list in the column would correspond to the Dev / QA who has taken the particular task off the queue
No. Exactly by providing examples which are explained clearly, one can argue that the system is broken if it passes such examples through. Saying that it's broken with theoretical explanation is not enough. Practical examples demonstrate what is broken.
> what makes the second one look better to you?

The main thing is the noise on her skin - it makes it look very artificial. Like it's not an actual person. On her cheek it almost looks like she has beard stubble.

The background of the first one also looks like a pointillist painting instead of the real world. (Although I might not notice it in motion.)

I'm not a fan of the skin color either since real people don't look like that. To me it looks cold and artificial, like I'm looking at a painted robot instead of a person.

I do wonder how much of this is film vs digital, as opposed to post processing. Film might not be able to stop grain, but I don't think it needs to look like that for the color. It suspect it was over sharpened and over contrasted in post.
np, I find the Four Corners stuff to be of super high quality.
Doesn't the recent Supreme Court ruling destroy this patent, then?
"The government" is not a coherent entity. The government is made up of many self-interested groups who largely don't care and possibly don't even know about one another. The relevant agency here, the Patent and Trademark Office, is not funded by tax dollars — it's funded by fees from people or businesses seeking patents and trademarks.
Redneck Neckbeard Nunchuck Fail Smashed Face Broken Glasses Adult Tantrum
What the patent system should say in theory is very different from how the patent system is used by patent abusers. Which directly indicates that the patent system itself requires a reform, since otherwise it would have prevented such abuse to begin with.

If something is obvious, it should have been unpatentable. If the patent system says that it is patentable - the patent system is broken.
All you're doing with the cherry picking is showing that the system isn't perfect, not that it's broken.
but without all the ads.
SpaceX 3D-Prints Engine Chamber for Crewed Spaceflight
I think we can do that, might include it in out next build.

Another thing I was considering - automatically categorizing tweets by topic and filtering them based on each person pre-sets. For example, I follow a bunch of VCs - and I want to see their comments about Bitcoin while ignoring comments about Secret.

Also - thinking about an ability to mute/ignore a given topic (e.g. Politics), keyword, or author (without unfollowing them). WDYT?
IPNs are annoyingly difficult to use.

Some accounts simply will not send them until an IPN URL is set, even for transactions that include the notify_url in the request. You cannot even see the IPN history until you enter an IPN URL, even if it was used through the notify_url param.

IPNs that include UTF8 characters will not validate by default in most PayPal accounts. PayPal defaults to Win1252, translates the UTF8 content to Win1252, tells you it's Win1252 and then seems to validate the IPN against the original UTF8 data. I have never been able to validate a Win1252 IPN that had UTF8 content. I've tried iconv, stripping bits, and plain substitutions (ü -> u). Nothing seems to work. This seems to be getting better though.

For about 2 months last year they forgot to include a field that had to be added in order to verify the IPN. And you had to iterate through a few different values to see which one was correct. So we got a rash of support tickets asking why our customers were suddenly getting notifications of issues verifying PayPal purchases and were having to manually approve orders. I submitted a ticket after a day of dealing with the issue and got a response about 2 weeks after they fixed the issue. There was no indication of the problem on their status site.

The IPN verification service randomly returns INVALID for valid data or simply doesn't work. Sometimes IPNs are delayed.

Dealing with the PayPal APIs are far, far harder than their sales sites would have you believe.
These $1k filters are designed for 2.5 ppm particles, not dust (10 ppm) and allergens. China's air problems are quite different from the west's. Your $150 filter would be completely unsuited.
I hadn't heard of Servo until just now, googled it and it looks really neat.

Could you elaborate on what things you think Servo does better than current rendering engines?
I'm very happy to see new alternatives to Illustrator and Photoshop emerge because they are both terrible tools for interface design.

Maybe I'm missing something but basic snapping doesn't seem to be working very well in this beta. With snapping enabled I still can't seem to easily draw rectangles that snap tightly to grid lines. I get locations that are all over the map instead. Sketch used to have this problem as well but they finally fixed it in version 3 and it was extremely frustrating to use for UI design before this was fixed.

So unless I'm missing something this is going to sit on the shelf until they get snapping really nailed down. Looks nice otherwise.
You are changing the subject, patent trolls are a totally different matter.

Here, we have an example of a company that is knowingly copying something that exists instead of coming up with their own solution to the problem, so I'm claiming that in this particular example, software patents are encouraging innovation. The company in question is simply choosing the easy way out of copying instead of innovating.
So is mockers and fools two separate categories?
For a story to appear on HN's front page, you need perhaps a few dozen upvotes. For a patent to be approved, years are spent examining it.

If a bad story hits HN, it's gone within the day. If a bad patent is issued, it can be used to extort millions of dollars out of people who are doing useful work.

The situations aren't glibly comparable. Every bad patent can cost millions of dollars. This isn't a system where we as a society should permit a high false positive rate.

In this situation, a high enough false positive rate, as evidenced by bad patents like these, can make it such that the cost of the system outweighs its value, such that a rational society would abolish it if there were no workable means of correction.

That aside, I note that the patent bar tries to spin the patent lawsuit revenue as being the value of patents, rather than the cost, so I suppose entrenched interests will continue with that line.
"Not perfect" means broken, since such cherry picking can easily pile up to hundreds and thousands like EFF said in the post. There is no doubt about the amount of bad patents. Demonstrating what is bad is however very useful.
I wonder what the cost of getting a frivolous patent like this is? Anyone?
Living most of my life in a state where all judges are elected, it's been clear to me since childhood that it's stupid.

Judges are not supposed to reflect the public will. They are supposed to reflect the law.
They're talking about the frontend being blocked, not the backend.