skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is probably the most fair approach since why should the owners of fossil fuel assets pay most of the cost when the benefits flows to everyone. It would also remove the cause behind all the FUD being spread by the fossil fuel industry.

The way to do this on the cheap is to buy the rights to shut down the assets at some point in the future. Buying an option to shut down all fossil fuel production 30 years in the future is relatively cheap. Take for example Exxon. It has $252 billion is physical assets [1] and its cost of capital is 9.11% [2] The present value of these assets if we were to scrap the lot in 30 years time is only $18.4 billion (252 / 1.0911^30). We could pay them something above this level today and it would be financially rational for them to sell us the option.

1. https://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=XOM+Balance+Sheet&annual

2. http://www.gurufocus.com/term/wacc/XOM/Weighted%2BAverage%2B...
Odd how he missed off "twat"
A modern version of barrage balloons.
He was referring to time with his spouse, so he was reclaiming time in that regard. Some time is more valuable than other time.
> "In one case, a young woman killed herself in her apartment and the landlord showed up during her funeral to demand ¥6 million (~$75,500) so that he could hire a priest to “cleanse” the property."

Any Japanese people here to comment on this specific point that there are "exorcists" who dedicate their time and effort for this economic activity and that's well established phenomenon there?
>> It doesn't seem likely that it will be 100% fatal, but with runaway climate problems, you're potentially looking at mass flooding, natural disasters, crop failures and starvation, and potentially the collapse of many societies in the ensuing unrest. It seems likely that it will result in large changes in the makeup of vegetation and wildlife, potentially to the point of mass extinction, if the food chains in the oceans and on land break down. Our social systems are not set up to deal with this kind of event, at all.

> How much of that doomsday scenario are actual scientific predictions? Sources?

I believe there are a large number of studies looking at individual impacts. E.g. "flooding" / "crop yields in sub saharan Africa" / etc. For studies that look at the grim end of the spectrum (i.e. +4 degrees C global warming or higher), there was a conference in 2007 that considered the consequences of a +4 degrees C world - not a bad place to start reading: http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/events/4degrees/

Similarly, there are studies regarding mass extinction. Current estimates of species extinction rates are way above what the estimates of "normal" rates are-- this won't all be due to climate change - as a species we are changing a lot more than just the climate (e.g. destroying ecosystems to make way for agriculture, etc). Do a google scholar search for words like "current mass extinction event" and you'll no doubt find many things to read.

I am not sure if we are capable of making "actual scientific predictions" regarding the cumulative impact of all these different threads - e.g. "collapse of many societies" / "ensuing unrest". Personally I reckon such things would be fairly plausible and unsurprising consequences of +4 degrees global warming.

Pragmatically, we just have to make the best decisions we can now with what information we have available. Certainty is a luxury and is not necessary to make decisions or take action, particularly when we're time constrained, and it takes a while for the consequences of our actions to manifest.

Here's an analogy from one of the decks of slides from the 4degrees conference.

> We are walking in Florida.
> You find you have just been bitten on the hand by a snake.
> We did not see the snake.
> If it was the deadly carbonblack snake, the bite will kill you in a painful way, unless you cut off your hand within 15 secs.
> I have a hatchet.
> You have 5 seconds left.
> Did you cut off your hand?
>
> How would a society learn to make such decisions?
>
> Luckily with climate change we have more than 15 seconds. Without knowing exactly how much more...

http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/events/4degrees/ppt/8-1smith.pdf
You'd still get puppyslug-style things, but they would be combinations of everything the network knows about. You might get car-eyes in one place and tree-rockets in another.

It tries to converge onto something it recognizes.
There are plenty of apps to mitigate screen caused sleep disturbance. I am using f.lux on osx at the moment and it works quite well.
Me too with open arms.

A superstitious person's plight is another person's delight.
You don't have to go to Japan to take advantage of this. California requires a death on the property of any kind in the last three years to be disclosed to potential buyers. This article says that suicides must be disclosed in Japan, which is true but misleading. Any unnatural death, including murders and death by neglect as well as suicide must be disclosed. http://japanpropertycentral.com/real-estate-faq/what-is-a-ji...
The learning required and the exams to test it are likely highly structured, whereas Uber driving would be fairly random. It could help, but perhaps might also hinder.
Sounds like the mafia. Except jail instead of being maimed/killed.
We need more studies like this. For instance, I'd like one that reveals that steak and beer actually have negative calories.
Congrats on having the problems you want to have. :)
Superstition (proto-religion) is the enemy of reason.
Update 5 min later: Maybe not. I logged in and while playing First Steps is listed in "Stuff You Can Do", clicking a level from Level Controls is instead throwing errors in the console.

I'm assuming this is not part of the game.

--

It looks like email invites went out about the same time as the HN post, but it seems to be good now.
On the other hand, an apartment where someone killed someone else, or suffered a psychotic break and had to be institutionalized permanently, or died of mysterious causes? Higher-than-average likelihood of mold, lead, mercury, carbon monoxide, etc.
I used to work hard to be a morning person, but the result was miserable. Laying in bed wide awake at 11pm, hitting snooze on all my alarms, over-caffeinating the next day. It never worked. Eventually, I decided to just embrace it. I don't feel guilty anymore, I don't lose precious work hours late at night, and I don't spend all day being groggy.

(That being said, the one trick that worked for me was finding a gym with non-refundable classes in the morning, which forces me to get up.)
I do consulting. 99% of consulting is persuading prospective clients that they need your consulting. Not that there's something wrong with it, but I am not that good at it...
I know what will help, writing a script to mash F5 faster and notify me when it works.
Mayer will have two.
That is Stephensons style though. I think what Seveneves needed was a proper ending. It felt like he got bored and just threw together an end in like a tenth of the space it would have needed. Balance between the stories was off by a lot. Outside that, enjoyable.
I can't wait for Papyros [0] to be out! I cannot believe how Mint can be #1 distro [1]!

[0] http://papyros.io/

[1] http://distrowatch.com/
From the welcome email: "You can play with any tech stack which speaks HTTP, or try doing everything by hand (or curl) if you like playing life on hard mode."

Love this.
Just like international development money in Europe has been moved to pay for handling refugees from war locally and military action in Syria, it is a risk that this pledge just becomes recycled money from this previous pot of money. (International development funds were about $130BN in 2014.) And countries like the Netherlands and Finland have been cutting back their spending recently, quite dramatically, if they just spend what they used to spend they could claim they have done their part already, without actually adding anything.

(They will add $100 billion, not million.)
How to create a fully automated uninstaller for a Windows USB driver using NSIS
(This is intended as just another idea to think about)

The long-term passion and commitment come after some level of success, not before.

Steve Jobs didn't dream of dedicating his life to Personal Computing. It was his early successes that fed into his self-image and a feeling that it was what he was meant to do.

Maybe you need to find the right project.

Turn your weakness into a strength by publicly launching a new project every week. A new mobile app, web site, screencast, open source project, whatever. They don't have to be good, just a bit useful. Make things that you want and try to give them away and/or sell them to other people.

There are a lot of ways to make a living as a skilled programmer. Most people have trouble finding the right kind of project, and that's mostly because they don't iterate quickly enough.
I BLAME RAILS.
Ask HN: Why did OS X win out over Linux for so many developers?
Can confirm. Have a circadian rhythm disorder where I pretty much can't wake up earlier intentionally; very common in teens, but occasionally it sticks as an adult. In my case I actually cycle around, living >24 hour days left completely unchecked, which is probably worse than it sounds (but extroidinarily unlikely; guess I'm just lucky). The prescription is to get bright blue-spectrum light-box and have it within the field of view for 15-40 minutes in the morning. Or stare at the sun. I also cut out blue light at night (f.lux and custom arduino-controlled lighting.) People were built for the light; some more than others, but it still holds true.

I go camping on occasion to reset it as well.

Edit: For those without disorders it works similarly. Doing my routine would have you comfortably waking up a bit earlier each day, but just getting some sunlight in the morning and toning down the blue at night would work.
There's no reason you'd have to advertise that someone died in your apartment.
I guess if you are a green enthusiast you'd go for solar and batteries and if a skeptic you'd go for gas/coal. So there's a narrow group who like nuclear.

Another thing that surprises me is how few people actually cost up different options on reducing CO2. I've given some money to reforestation projects and the CO2 saved per dollar is about 1000 times as effective as getting solar panels but no one seems interested in running the numbers.
And given how old civilization is, I bet someone probably died within 1000 feet of where you live right now.

Unless you live at the top of a tall skyscraper. Civilization is old, but people living in mid-air isn't!
When I lived in Japan, the person who hired me was responsible for me on my renting apartment.

It is standard practice in Japan, and works pretty well. There is the implicit belief that you have to respect others first."You" is not you as individual, but includes "your social group", your family, your boss, your company.

In the US they can sue you for all kinds of stupid reasons and ask you millions(if you have them).

In the US it is about the individual first, you and only you.

It is the US the one who is different. Most of the world operates under a mixture of social responsibility for your actions and personal responsibility.
The VW scam was actually better for climate.

Their engines released less CO2 and more NOx as a trade off. NOx is bad for humans and has slight cooling effect. CO2 is not dangerous and has heating effect.

"Less polluting" can mean several completely different things. People often don't get this.
Professional drivers who rely on GPS and do not know the city roads can be absolutely terrible drivers. They often watch the GPS rather than the road, crawl dangerously slowly looking for their destination, cut across traffic because they're in the wrong lane, and put their hazard lights on as carte blanche to do all this. Just awful to share road space with.
I'd probably do an extra review of environmental factors to be safe (as I would with any below-market apartment), but it's unlikely that even the majority of deaths are driven by persistent factors.
I wonder if Amazon (and other e-book reader vendors) can do something about this. Add a feature to trim the book only to the pages or sections that people have highlighted, shared, spent time on the most.
The Graying Thieves Who Nearly Got Away with a Record Heist in London
Honestly, with the skills you list, you can definitely find something that is rewarding, both intellectually and financially. You view your attraction to novel technologies as a downside, but it's kept you remarkably up to date and you probably have a much wider (though may be a little more shallow) knowledge base. Have you considered pursuing things like project management, marketing, developer support, QA, etc? Or maybe freelance? There are jobs where you can still apply your knowledge, but on smaller project.
Don't leave us hanging; what was the story your friend told you?
Was this supposed to reason to ALLOW Syrian migrants? It's not.
Would be funny if this could be used against CCTV cameras
Obama Talks
Is there any deadline or is this a long-running project? I'd love to play with this but I don't have any time at the moment.
Well done on getting it out there. Also well done on ensuring you get no time off during the holiday season :D

Will be jamming it in the morning. Hope you guys get some sleep at least.
These are definitely good problems to have!
An Unthinkably Modern Miracle
Yes - but no one provided any argument for that.

Instead, andreyf relied on it as a fact. I pointed out we can't assume that.

As such: its reasonable to fear AGI coming before we have that stuff sorted out.

Hence, as such: there is a real risk here, which the safety folks are trying to mitigate; hence they aren't worried about a threat scenario easily dismissable by andreyf's argument.

>It is entirely logical to argue that a high level intelligence could not be constructed without a broad and deep understanding of it's motivations and behaviors.

Ie. If you, or anyone had convincingly argued this, then it would be reasonable to dismiss (or at least greatly reduce) the concerns of the safety folk. But no one has, so its not reasonable to.
I wanted to give you a status update of what new users currently experience. Or at least what I'm experiencing.

After creating an account, I was redirected to the front page with no notification about whether it succeeded or failed. No emails have arrived. When I try to create it again, I get "username already taken" and "email already taken", so something worked. But when I try to log in, I'm redirected to the front page with no notifications. In other words, login is failing.

To clarify, this isn't a complaint. Congratulations on launching, and apologies if you're already aware of these issues.

Edit: This is similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10724699 but I'm unable to log in after clearing cookies. I get "Couldn't sign in. Check username/password" for a correct password.
According to the theory of general relativity, gravity isn't so much a force as it is matter literally changing the definition of a straight line. It would be weird for anything to not be affected by gravity.
Exact opposite here - more or less severe brain fog until the sun sets. Then I can start getting things done.
Ask HN: What platform do you use for current events and news?
I enjoy staying update to date, not only on general current events (us politics, world news, ect), but also more specialized topics like Linux, and programming. In the past I have tried things like RSS feeds or even just plain old CNN, both have their obvious flaws. How do you picks up your news HN?
Yes the present value of these assets 20 to 30 years in the future at fossil fuel industry capital cost is not that high. Given how cheap long term interest rates are right now, just issue a bunch of long dated zero coupon bonds and buy options to scrap all the fossil fuel assets in 30 years time from the current owners.
Interesting. There's perhaps still the open question of exactly who should pay the owners of fossil fuel assets.

A few academics over here (in Australia) recently proposed that the most polluting energy generators be forced to exit the market, and that they would be paid compensation by their competitors, as their competitors stood to profit from the reduction in competition.

That was a pretty interesting argument. In the long run, I believe the public still ends up paying for everything (due to increased energy prices), but perhaps it would be a more politically acceptable way to wind down some of the more polluting companies.

Personally I think this kind of approach is far more complicated, and far less efficient than an appropriately priced carbon tax, but we don't have one of those.
That history idea is fantastic! I was using global history when I was on zsh, which was convenient when looking for something I did recently, and annoying for all the other cases.

I need to set up something like that too, thanks for the idea!
I could guess that the bar for entry to develop via OSX is a bit lower than on Linux.

While Linux Distros like Ubuntu make it really easy to set up a developer system (with localhost web, languages and database) it is even easier on OSX via MAMP: install MAMP, configure with a GUI, ready to roll.. Linux you might be tweaking some config files to get the optimal setup.

On Linux you are partially a dev-op not only working on your code but also learning and tweaking your OS, services, etc. for one reason or another.

Another factor is there are some shinier tools on Macs, (i.e. the Adobe lineup, and a easily installed Sublime Editor) And many that went to learning institutions will be comfortable more with Dreamweaver/Photoshop/Illustrator than Eclipse/GIMP/Inkscape.

I took the Linux route, even though I already owned a Mac, I felt on Linux I was closer to the metal where Mac OSX had too many safety rails (both for the user and many publisher's safety)
For me night time is lazy time. The world is asleep and it doesn't demand anything of me. So I take it easy and dont get much work done. I wake up late and have to play catch up with the world again.

The few times I wake up early I have a head start on the world for once. Feels good.
OSX is a lot more refined and the GUI programs available for developers are more rich. If you're switching from Windows, you're likely to find more of the programs you're familiar with or alternatives. Also Mac hardware is often found in Universities which gets students familiar with the environment.
Finding Quality, Cost Effective Remote Workers with High Speed Internet
Worked for me. Try incognito?
I'm gonna claim that nothing would change if we would get rid of capitalism, but politics remained the cesspool it is today. Politicians like power, money is just a form of power. Greed will find a way.

On the other hand, with responsible, smart politicians and capitalism, anything is possible.

What I'm saying is that the system is broken, but everybody is concentrating on the one part that actually does work.
We intend this CTF to be the flagship product of our company for the next several years. If you can't play it today, no worries.
You didn't use to be able to suppress the 'z' switch. You had to specify 'z' or 'j' depending on whether you wanted gzip or bzip2 decompression. It's a somewhat recent (sometime in the last 15 years, I think) change to "tar" to make it just detect the compression algorithm.
I am surprised and delighted to see your comment, and I am glad that my post was helpful to you. I'm totally open to whatever further explanations you may wish to offer.
By having access to a robot.

Actually most manual labor is done by machines controlled to a greater or less extent by a human brain. AI just removes the human brain out of the production loop.
HAProxy in 60 Seconds
I wonder if this applies to all walnut-like families, such as pecans.
It looks like it's a long running project. From their announcement post[1]:

"This first release is Chapter 1. We intend to release a new chapter approximately every 6 to 8 weeks."

[1]https://discuss.starfighters.io/t/welcome-to-stockfighter/14...
Ya that's a pretty hard judgement to make when Google's own devices aren't even supported for more than one major version. Even the G1 didn't make it to 2.0.
Glade you liked it!
Thanks for the suggestion! I will be looking into it.
From their launch announcemnet:

"We decided to found a company to do nothing other than create and operate the best programming challenges in the world."

"You can play whenever you want, at any pace which works for you. Some players will race to complete these. Some will play leisurely. Either is perfectly fine."

https://discuss.starfighters.io/t/welcome-to-stockfighter/14...

So come on over when you have time and enjoy yourself!
Yeah, I agree that this should be manual, subject to significant checks, and rare, and without that we've effectively extended the SHA-1 collision cutoff date. (Another worthwhile check might be to require that it be an exact renewal - same key and names - of an existing cert, signed before the proposal.)
I just want them to be friendlier to indie devs. It's better, but not ideal. Nintendo has interesting control schemes and game design could benefit from being able to experiment with them in the form of game jams or smaller niche titles.
Photos of the event:
http://www.iisd.ca/climate/cop21/enb/12dec.html
Try clearing your cookies. They flipped on the secure flag, and it borked a few things.
Cool! Sounds like there's some teething problems right now, so I'll put this on the check it out later list.
Awhile back, I tried to find the actual studies that determined that sugar has 4 kcal/g and fat has 9. I failed. I couldn't even find a clear definition of what a kcal means. (Is it mechanical work you can do after eating it? ATP produced?)

Given recent results, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that fat, in general, has less than 9 kcal/g or that sugar has more than 4.
This is a dodgy article.

I've lived in Japan for almost a decade and heard about these "cheap suicide apartments" exclusively from foreigners or Japanese people who "learned" about it from foreigners; whenever I looked around for Japanese sites for this kind of thing, the "discounted rent" would be the same or around $5 to $40 cheaper per month, well within the normal variation for apartments in the same building (due to facilities, size, shape, location, time since renovation, etc.).

Additionally, the "cited" articles talk about the extortionate practices of individual landlords who seem to be taking advantage of the families' grief to send them through the wringer for more money, rather than "cheap suicide apartments."

The real story here is the minority of shady landlords who indulge in those practices -- no doubt they would also be the ones who keep your deposit and additionally try to charge thousands of dollars for "cleaning" fees after you move out. This kind of scum exists in every country.
Did you read the part about how he wanted to sync his schedule with his wifes schedule, so they could spend more time together?
The 'braided stream' analogy for human evolution
I thought your stack was mostly go?
The people who should pay are the people who are going to benefit - future generations including the people who are not even born yet. Luckily we have a magic mechanism for doing this - the long term zero coupon bond [1]. We just issue zero coupon bonds and use the money to buy up fossil fuel assets and build replacements. The cost gets shifted onto the people in the future who will benefit from not living in a world 5˚C hotter.

I actually gave a talk about this years ago - I will try and find my slides and put them up somewhere

Edit. I posted the slides to my blog [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-coupon_bond

2. http://www.tillett.info/2015/12/13/preventing-global-climate...
Churchill may have been a old school imperial asshole. But when the people didn't vote for him, he stepped down.