skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is something like a 90% chance of getting a cap-and-trade system passed within the next two months. McCain-Warner is going up for vote in a couple of months, and if it passes then Bush is going to be under a lot of pressure to sign it since A) McCain is the Republican nominee and B) both Obama and Cinton have their own versions of a cap-and-trade system. This bill isn't perfect, but it's a pretty good start toward fixing the problem. If it doesn't get passed in two months then almost certainly it will in another year, or failing that, Obama's bill will.

It's gotten to the point where even many of the major industrial companies in the US support a cap-and-trade system. Risk costs serious money for entrepreneurs. When taking out a loan on these billion-dollar power plants their weighted average cost of capital goes up a lot since they know there are going to be new rules in place but they don't know what the rules will be. It's actually better for these companies to get the rules in place ASAP because their cost of capital goes down so they get a much better return on their investments. That's partially why Duke and Alcoa and Caterpillar and Dupont and all these companies are lobbying for cap-and-trade.

I think we are going to see more progress on this issue than anyone can possibly imagine within the next couple of years. Once a cap-and-trade system is put in place, expect solar photovoltaic to achieve price parity with coal within 24 months.
One site I used to manage used to have an unexplained high ranking for "animal porn"... talk about the gravy-train.

But seriously, thanks for the article. SEO is definitely one of those areas that hackers tend to downplay in significance, probably because it's not rocket science to learn or implement. Not to mention it introduces a bunch of generic looking language on your page. Ie: just having Adpinion in the title bar may be worth the gain in aesthetic alone... just a thought...
When you label Atwood's response a DH2, you're saying his response was a weak form of disagreement with the central point of your Boss essay.

I agree, but I think you're missing a bigger point than your essay's thesis.

In your definition of DH2, you say:

"So if the worst thing you can say about something is to criticize its tone, you're not saying much."

Atwood and other "distasteful" responses aren't saying much about the essay's central point. True. But the central point of your essay is of less interest than another point, say a well-known entrepreneur's view of the world and of MegaCorp programmers in particular.

"It matters much more whether the author is wrong or right than what his tone is."

I think it depends on what the author is arguing and who the author is. If the author is a presidential candidate and he's arguing some trivial point but showing utter contempt to women in the debate, then the real story is his treatment of women and not the trivial point. The candidate doesn't get the luxury of dismissing outrage to his contempt by saying the critics simply don't get his trivial point.

You keep trying to redefine all criticism as refutations of the central point, even though many of those criticisms didn't object and even agreed with your main assertion.
So we are in trouble... I like a lot Macs, and it is what I suggest to computer agnostic guys, but unless you plan to install a unix-like operating system there it is very hard to think that an hacker can use this kind if user interface.

Hackers are much smarter than the people apple have in mind when designing the user interface, so the mac user interface is an obstacle between the computer and the hacker.
MIT Inaccuracies in 21
If anyone can find it, I suggest checking out the Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel talk "50 in 50" where they say 50 words each about 50 different languages. I can't seem to find the slides online, but I know that it was presented at the OOPSLA and and HOPL III acm conferences...
Hey, I just downloaded your app. Nice job. I especially like how you guys seeded my tasks so that it's natural for me to start using the app instead of getting a dauntingly blank task list.

Have you guys considered a watered down free version with a lower price tag to buy the full? Like $10?
Pine in flash:
http://www.xobni.com/?page_variant=pine_default
How will I solve it? Persuade the government to force every citizen to live in grass huts and ride horses to work. Or electric scooters.
why? this is what I used: when an user searches for a given keyword in the search box (a very unlikely search but not impossible from time to time) the ester egg is activated (setting a cookie).

p.s. is it a problem of mine or hackernews is monkey asses slow?
Hackers Flood Epilepsy Web Forum With Flashing Lights
Good question... I have nothing to contribute but look forward to reading the posts.
Banking industry to lose 200,000 jobs
Sprint's touch-screen takes on iPhone
I know you're probably joking, but in the limited experience I've had with Linux, I've never had a more negative experience with an operating system than I did with Linux. I'd run Windows XP way before I'd consider running Linux. At least XP works. OSX has tons of advantages over Linux, including a window interface that runs smoothly, OSX has way more software available and there is no discussion whatsoever to be had in this area, and OSX has a lot better tech support available to users. I could go on and on. Linux is a hobby OS at best.
The irony is that this link-bait is a prime example of SEO.

Still want to buy what they're selling?
Anyone who wants to play with some modern linguistic support for concurrency and not having bugs should check out Fortress, it has some pretty slick ideas for both
Where are the neuroscientists?
I believe the single biggest problem is that planes fligh so high they are burning Ozone which has 2 parts oxygen rather then flying lower. Since the engines run better burning ozone rather then just plain oxygen that we breath they save money flying higher and will keep doing so.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg14219232.100-saving-...
Twitter: "It's Like A Store For Car Parts, Right?"
Emacs: GIT
Just wondering - is anyone else seeing this as an entrepreneur opportunity?

This seems to me to be more of a sense of dissatisfaction with the current (aesthetic, quality, speed, you-name-it) of the PC/laptop. The current mindset of the Windows laptop industry (cutting quality of parts and shoving tons of unneeded software on you to cut costs and improve short term sales) is killing the industry from the inside out, and Macs, although much more costly than an average PC laptop, values the satisfaction of the customer more than the price point.
I am working on our property management application / rental property listing service startup, http://www.propertystampede.com.

I focus on capturing users and marketing, writing for the blog at http://www.stampedeblog.com.
One reason it's interesting is that Guy Steele designed it and has been working on it for years.

Edit: For anyone who finds this insufficient, Guy Steele's "claim to fame" is that he "co-wrote the specification of the Java programming language". So there.

http://research.sun.com/minds/2005-0302/
how are you trying to run Ubuntu? Parallels, boot camp, VMware? I was hoping to be able to run Linux at least as running it through VMware on Windows.
MySQL: Indexing Joins
Could someone summarize what this is? My employer blocks this site (and makes you feel criminal for clicking the link in the first place).
Funding Risk
The weakness of the above argument: Why would site-owners install an untrusted Clickpass widget spread around the net but not from Clickpass itself?

I can see how some users might fail to recognize a Clickpass or OpenID url and give their login credentials to a fraudulent site, but no worse than password management, OpenID requires folks be on guard against phishing.
Real-Time HTTP Referrers
News.yc "user" nickb is actually a sockpuppet for Paul Graham?
Setting up a cash bonus plan for my team to clean up our code base. $5 for quarantined methods or blocks that just need to be deleted, $10 for deprecated blocks that need to be extracted from active code, and $25 for useful rewrites of badly designed methods. 3 days cut the fat code cash cookoff!
Arc killed Common LISP
YC is the Future of Startups
Using SimpleDB and Rails in No Time with ActiveResource
Ditto on Vimeo.com and Tumblr.com
Joyent Accelerator Pricing--Is the service worth the high prices?
Right now we're running 1 dedicated server for our startup. We pay $250/month for a 4GB machine. We're a hosted application in the enterprise software space (reporting & business intelligence).

We've been in beta with a customer but we're about to go live in production, and I'm wanting to add a couple more servers for uptime reliability. I started looking around and Joyent gets good marks.

It seems though pretty expensive for what is, at the end of the day, a VPS. We're looking at $250/month for a 2GB/1CPU slice, whereas now I can get more computing machinery from a managed dedicated provider. I'll probably be needing 2 web servers and a DB, so total cost might push $750/month which seems high to me.

In short--are the benefits of Joyent enough to pay those high prices? Anybody here using the Accelerator service?
i'm pretty sure eating a lot, not driving, is what makes people fat.
This reminds me of those "man on the street" things where they ask about American history. Only this isn't scary.
With a solution that passes a cost-benefit analysis. None of the most popular proposals do. Seriously.
This could really catch on. It's hip.
If you mean "global warming", don't worry, it will be discredited soon enough, (for those who don't already know it is a pile of crap, and I mean that in the most rigorous mathematical sense).

I don't fear "climate change" as in most temperate zones climate changes every 6 months, just as it has for thousands of years.
Right now we're running 1 dedicated server for our startup. We pay $250/month for a 4GB machine. We're a hosted application in the enterprise software space (reporting & business intelligence).

We've been in beta with a customer but we're about to go live in production, and I'm wanting to add a couple more servers for uptime reliability. I started looking around and Joyent gets good marks.

It seems though pretty expensive for what is, at the end of the day, a VPS. We're looking at $250/month for a 2GB/1CPU slice, whereas now I can get more computing machinery from a managed dedicated provider. I'll probably be needing 2 web servers and a DB, so total cost might push $750/month which seems high to me.

In short--are the benefits of Joyent enough to pay those high prices? Anybody here using the Accelerator service?
URL as UI
C.f. the whole thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151461

All I can say is wow. Especially after his most recent essay on intellectual honesty. What bullshit. TechStars is looking better and better all the time.
Microsoft Yahoo Deal REAL - Leaked Documents Prove it
"Hobby OS"? Is this some sort of April fool's troll?
Denis Fuenzalida, the second on the list :-)
Pretty much the one thing that bothers me about working with Lisp in Emacs/Slime is the lack of what I would call a normal debugger with breakpoints, code highlighting, single-stepping and so on. Does anybody know if there's a deep reason for not having this? (I've often wondered, for example, if macros make it harder.) Or is it just that it hasn't been much of a priority?
He already had a claim to fame by the time he worked on Java - as someone who did a ton of the Common Lisp standardization work.
oh, snap. pawn3d. I still like him thou, and I liked nickb too.
Major urban areas, such as London, can be three degrees centigrade warmer than the surrounding region partly due to dark synthetic surfaces which absorb extra energy. Dark tarmac roads cover a significant proportion of urban areas and therefore contribute significantly to this effect.
Yes the CP guys are here, but the Disney Code of silence is firmly intact...and insurmountable.
Bah. He co-wrote the Java specification. Co-wrote!
April Fools?
and invented Scheme.
He was probably posting from a computer at YC HQ that nickb used before him. You people are like children.
Ask YC:  Anyone else unable to login after the most recent outage?
I don't seem to be able to login under my original nick . . . had to create this one to post this.
Same here. I was worried I forgot my password.
I entered my existing username and password in the registration fields and it logged me in.
There's a bug. Hang on; we're fixing it.
I just began working on a very similar idea :)
anyway, how do you score the posts, using bayesian filtering?
Guys, it's a joke: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg
Damn that was clever of you!
Um, how does that thread show that it's a joke? What am I missing?

In other news: login does appear to be very broken.
I'm working on a startup. www.hybir.com (not much there yet)

A really different approach to online backups. My nightly full backups take only a couple of minutes over broadband...

Right now I'm porting C# code to win32 C/C++. .Net has some really nasty bugs. So half my code is already in win32 C/C++.

I will give away some free subscriptions here when I am ready.
Not so clever. It may have created you a new account, overwriting the old one. Please don't do this!
I was worried about that too but, in my case at least, my karma seems to be intact . . . so far.
News.yc "user" nickb is actually a sockpuppet for Paul Graham??

I doubt it.
Digital Launchbox and TechStars Join Forces to Directly Take On Y Combinator [video announcement]
You've been Rickrolled. April Fools!
I can think of other explanations including April Fools Day, data corruption and a problematic upgrade which affected accounts and logins. Alteratively, given the essay What You Can't Say ( http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html ) and the recent drop in essay quality, it is possible that some essays are ghost written.
EBay's early backer to leave board of directors
M-x artist-mode
Self-Discipline: Persistence
Vint Cerf (the other inventor of the Internet) spoke @ Sharkfest
Today Vint gave a speech to about 300 open source tool enthusiasts (Wireshark/Ethereal developers and users) and discuss the importance of net neutrality and standards to the continual growth of Internet. This is particularly interesting in light of the recent Comcast fiasco in shutting down P2P traffics. Vint also talked about the history of Internet and answered a few questions with insightful commentary. The total speech is about one hour long and the quality is passable, but it is worth the time.
Damn. Forgot that. Yes, sorry, it's an April Fools' joke. Thanks, Alex, for helping out. The recent outage (now fixed, let's hope) is unconnected, btw.
A Plan for Scams: A proposal to put 419 scammers out of business for good
Angel Investors put $26 Billion in 57,000 companies
Nanotech Leads to Self Cleaning Clothes
New Lisp and Functional Programming Comic Novella
In honor of April 1st, I've put together a little comic tale with many twists and turns- I hope you'll enjoy it!

http://www.lisperati.com/landoflisp/
Chillout. Keep in mind that every website that depends on community activity, starts as a ghost town, with fictional accounts, (which are owned by the creators of the website) that start posting/commenting, to get it jump started, and make new commers feel like there is a reason to stay.

Every single web 2.0 website does this, so I don't think that is dishonest.
Maybe Pg. liked the anonimity of his alter ego, nickb, and kept posting on his name, and got carried on (and forgot to switch names). And if you see nickb, stats, he is probably the oldest user in here.

user:	nickb
created:	406 days ago
karma:	10982
about:	My email: nickb.yc {at} gmail.

This is the only site where I comment/post. I am not 'nickb' on any other site.
Tron in Cardboard Stop-Motion Animation
COBOL ON COGS :-)
I found the post ridiculously condescending. Insinuating we are idiots and then stating 'For fuck's sake people - get a clue.' and then attacking specific small startups unprovoked does not seem like a very proper way to spread the word for your company or SEO in general. Unfortunately, I'm sure the post has garnered the desired attention by 'dropping the F bomb for the first time'.

I would hope search optimization is really important to SEOmoz given it's their entire concentration as a company. But, I work in a startup as well. Our concentration is not in the field of search optimization. When we have a spare moment or the resources to tackle SEO, I am sure we will. In the meantime, I would refrain from calling me and those in similar positions idiots.
Today Vint gave a speech to about 300 open source tool enthusiasts (Wireshark/Ethereal developers and users) and discuss the importance of net neutrality and standards to the continual growth of Internet. This is particularly interesting in light of the recent Comcast fiasco in shutting down P2P traffics. Vint also talked about the history of Internet and answered a few questions with insightful commentary. The total speech is about one hour long and the quality is passable, but it is worth the time.
Developer user-hostility and arrogance: a case study in what not to do
What a pity. I had been assuming for a while that nickb was a code for 'nickname b' (where pg was 'nickname a').
The nickb comment in question shows up under pg's posts.
what climate problem?
When you really need vi, you really need it. I'm talking about connecting to servers halfway around the world with the only access being via a serial connection. Straight-up serial console, none of this fancy newfangled terminal emulator nonsense. No amount of emacs and sshfs will help you then.
> every website that depends on community activity, starts as a ghost town, with fictional accounts

Apparently, this is very common practice on dating websites.
Yes you can run Linux and Windows under OSX via VMware Fusion. I have a Macbook Pro 2.4Ghz with 2gb Ram and its great for all my needs.
This isn't hacking. This is just vandalism and malicious abuse of an easy mark.
I always thought that "SEO" was some basic good practices wrapped in a bunch of snake oil. At the last place I worked at a full time job, we had an "SEO expert" come in, and the boss and I concluded that 1) he was basically full of it, and that 2) the boss had a good handle on what needed doing to make various things visible. Just one anecdote, but there seem to be a lot of dubious people touting their "SEO" credentials.
Yes, dating websites have that, but there is clear maliciousness in that, as they try to make you think somebody is interested on you, so you can fork money. News.yc is not trying to bilk money out of you, or try to play with your emotions. PG using nickb's name (if it is so), might be similiar to countless of writers that user pseudonims on their work. I doesn't make them worse people for doing so.

Anyways, all web 2.0 have gohsts, or test accounts, youtube, friendster (used to have them marked as test), facebook, you name it. and of course, we have Tom of myspace, the most profilic account ever (who lied about his age too). So, what?
The value of news.yc is the great submissions and comments comming from everybody, and not just pg, nickb, or whoever else.
Photo Essay: Unlikely Places Where 'Wired' Pioneers Had Their Eureka! Moments
It's even easier to shoot yourself in the foot with compiled languages like C or C++ (strcpy, etc are especially dangerous)
Thanks - been a lot of work! On the lower price: have thought a little but not convinced. One problem is "price-as-signal", another is that below a certain amount it just costs you too much in payment fees, marketing and support. Also, you are essentially selling the difference between the two apps for the price difference. That takes some serious thinking to get right so you don't shoot yourself in the foot...
I've waited as long as I can stand it before inserting a spoiler:

"In the early 1990s, I was writing a lot of essays and columns for magazines and journals, so much so that I was using a pseudonym for some of that work: Nickieben Bourbaki. The original idea for the name was that my staff at Lucid would help with the writing, and the single pseudonym would represent the collective, much as the French mathematicians in the 1930s used "Nicolas Bourbaki" as their collective name while rewriting the foundations of mathematics in their image. However, no one but I wrote anything under that name."

http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
Well, when two sites offer the same features but one offers OpenID and one doesn't, I'll be a little more wooed by the one /with/ OpenID. But then again, maybe I'm not your target audience. ;)

My use of Ma.gnolia over Del.icio.us illustrates this.

I guess the main idea is that it can't hurt to implement OpenID, it can only help your service. You can still ask your users for all of the data you ask for during a normal registrarion, but /you don't have to/.
How do you discredit global warming mathematically?
What I mean when I say that the "users make the best content anyway" is that most people just ignore game-company produced "content" or just figure out how to blow through it to get the items. What takes the place of such "content" is the real content -- players vying against players to achieve their own varied and often conflicting goals. What players have done to me and with me has excited, terrified, exhilarated, and entertained me 50X more than any game content ever has.

There are certain elements of "content" for which there will be "structured content creation." Players will be able to design new items. They will be able to play as whole factions if they want. (Using a distinct RTS style of play, controlling an entire economy of autonomous drones.) But there will be no drudgery of missions, no mining, no leveling up, no camping. Only either the action of combat, or the management of wealth generating economies.
Fly ice in from asteroids and dump them in the ocean. And they say you don't learn anything from television.
Spam filter -> Elisa -> postmodern generator -> spammer distracted by unlimited number of fools errands.

Genius.
Pseudonyms can be used to good effect. Ben Franklin used them extensively. They're especially good for testing out or spreading ideas you'd like to have considered apart from their source.

When I started a small social site, the first thing I did was create 40 nicknames and start talking to myself. Boot-strapping a social site is tough. Most users leave if they see an empty site.
Making a UI to Input “Availability”
What makes it a joke, exactly? nickb shows up under pg's posts. OK. So he has a sock puppet. That's an April Fool's joke?
Message queuing in php... ak.
The only problem I have with this is at the end he suggests that hard work is something you have to "surrender to" and suffer through.

If you are working hard on something you care about it doesn't seem at all like that. It may not seem like it when you are sitting slack-jawed in front of the TV, but if you turn the damn thing off and go work on something, you'll be 10 times happier.