skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Managed server ISP recommendations
I need to find a new ISP to host my personal web server. Anyone have one to recommend? I'm looking for a managed server (so I don't have to keep up with security patches myself) with root access. Thanks.
Tax oil -> Create demand for alternative energy -> Avoid political and economic problems associated with a diminishing supply of energy.

Simple.
First, I did not dismiss the environmental impact of drilling offshore. We did not discuss it at length. There were some sweeping statements made about my position and I pointed out I do not support those statements. Glad to have that discussion.

Second, I made no comment about helping the poor. My comment was about the use of personal opinion to control markets. I used the poor as an example of those who could be impacted by our policies.

I made no personal attack and posited no question that was supposed to inflame or outrage. I tried to the best of my ability to ask simple questions and make simple statements that I honestly support. As far as the poor comment, I used the statement as a way of advancing the conversation without it having to take another 50 posts. I obviously do not believe he would support that, and am interested in his reply as to where he thinks the limits of market control should be.

You're welcome to join in, by the way. I don't mind the critique of my style, but discussing the substance of the matter might be more interesting for all concerned.
What happened to Dropbox, and why some startups are in private beta forever?
This is a semi-rant that applies to other startups. I needed a quick solution for a online backup, and thought dropbox would be perfect for it. I go to their site, and it seems they are still in private beta?

I know they are working on it, and made a huge splash few months ago. But lots of time has passed, and they haven't released it in the wild. It seems that once you anounce something, maybe a couple of months of "private beta" should be enough, to get something more substantial, then have a more public beta, while you improve it. Why turn customers away? Early users usually are willing to put up with some functionality missing, as long as they know at some point the features will come.

It seems that this trend is among other startups, anounce something, make a splash, then nothing. Guys, don't turn your customers away. A two-three months period for a private beta, should be more than enough, then go to a public beta (gmail was in "beta" for years).
Well, it's an interesting problem. If the IOC is nice to the "end user", they bring in less revenue. A lot of the revenue that the IOC brings in goes to things like promoting sport. So, if they bring in less revenue, there is less money for charitable purposes.

I tend to agree with your stance and specifically I think all too often non-profits exist more for their own perpetual existence than for a charitable purpose - take 3rd level education in the United States - but one could definitely go the other way.
"What sacrifices?"

The potential environmental damage and future value of that oil that I mentioned. Oil is becoming increasingly scarce. The areas of the planet that currently have a lot of it aren't exactly our friends. Saving that oil for when we actually need it as opposed to dropping the price of a gallon of gas by a couple of cents sounds like a prudent course of action to me.

"I don't sit around taking my personal feelings and try to control world markets with them."

The markets for natural resources are heavily influenced by people's personal feelings, so you should probably join the club. More people have a claim of ownership to a barrel of oil than a given widget, so those people will use their position to maximize their self-interest. I think you're trying to trivialize my concerns by referring to them as "personal feelings", but I don't think there's anything trivial about wanting to avoid environmental damage and minimize the damage to the American economy that will occur if the transition away from oil is too difficult.

"There are all sorts of _possible_ dangers and warnings, but the markets indicate that there is a real, tangible need that's not going away."

I don't see how that has any effect on the situation. Yes, everybody wants cheaper oil, but that doesn't mean more offshore drilling makes us all better off in the end. It will increase our current dependency on oil, making the transition harder when the effects of the new oil wear off. It has the potential to damage the environment. If we need oil for something more important than lowering the price of gas by a few cents in the future, we will have less of it.

"The people impacted are third world countries -- mostly the poor. I would think that "screwing the poor to make the world a more pretty place for me" wouldn't be much of anything to be proud of."

Ok... so what happens to the poor when we're out of cheap oil? It's incredibly myopic to suggest that we should drill more oil now for the sake of the impoverished.

If this were a discussion about Pigovian taxation of oil instead of managing the supply of oil, then yes, we would immediately move into a wealth redistribution discussion. However, this has nothing to do with wealth redistribution. Poor people can afford fewer scarce goods. Oh no.
Yo. If you give me your email address, I can give you an invite.

As for your questions, the short answer is that we're holding back on going public until we're sure our infrastructure is able to scale, the data-loss-causing bugs are wiped out, and our feature set makes most people happy.
I find it interesting that French forces would be active in concert with US/UK forces, given the traditional differing approaches to diplomacy between the various countries. Having French fighters on a US carrier would be rather interesting from a spare-part/operational point of view, starting with "do the bloody things fit the catapult?".

To me, the only relevant item is "where are the landing ships". Everything else can be done remotely, preserving freedom of maneuver and surprise.
Oil is fungible, but maybe that's missing the point. It's semantic nit-picking that misses the spirit of what the author is trying to convey (perhaps with some exaggeration).

I buy "green" electricity. That is, all the electricity I pay for is sustainably generated and carbon neutral, from wind, solar, tide or hydro. However, the actually electricity that powers my lights is probably from a coal or nuclear power station. The point is that I pay to put electricity from "green" sources into the grid. The fact that the actual electricity that arrives at my house is not the same I paid to generate doesn't matter.

If Denmark puts more energy/coal/oil into the market than it uses then it is energy neutral or positive even if people are actually using oil from Saudi or wherever.
I found myself laughing at the absurdity

There's a famous story of Kafka reading his stuff to friends and laughing so hard that he couldn't continue. It seems he was more a comic writer than people think, and your reaction might not be so far off.

It's fascinating how creations come to be inseparable from the filters (e.g., Kafka as prophet of modernist despair) built up by others after the fact.
Hmm, that's odd. We got three slices in early May and it took them 4 days to get us up and running. I have nothing but fantastic things to say about EngineYard. Worth every penny.
I guess I need to be more clear.

When we get into "potential environmental damages", unless you're prepared to make a risk-reward argument with hard statistics we're treading on personal opinion ground. The Chinese seem to have a fairly high tolerance for air pollution, for instance. Other people don't. The Chinese are going to start drilling off our coast. We are not.

I also take issue with your statement we are running out of oil. Not to be pedantic, but it depends on what you mean by "oil". There's shale, sweet, sour, crude, light, etc. And that's not even getting into biofuels (which I know you don't imply, but "oil' could cover those) Look -- I don't know where the market is headed. I guess that makes me unique, because everybody else seems to think they know exactly what's going on. I've heard dozens of experts announce we were at 'peak oil' over the last month, which I personally think is BS. I've read at least one article by an expert that makes the case that oil prices will drop, not rise, over the next 50 years.

So I am by no means trying to trivialize your opinions. But I would point out that we certainly have a LOT of opinions about the topic. I've got mine. You've got yours. As a voter, we get to go slug it out at the polls, as it should be.

I get the fact that you feel you have a good grip on where the markets are, what the risks are, and what's the best way to manage our transition. To me, that seems presumptuous. No hard feelings. Not trying to label you or somehow put you down or anything. As we both know, you have lots of company. Just doesn't seem right to me.

"Ok... so what happens to the poor when we're out of cheap oil?" -- doesn't the market provide the most goods at the lowest prices, thereby helping the poor much more optimally than a government policy would? When you start fiddling with the markets, you're taking responsibility for the delivery of goods in that market -- like it or not.

Guess what? I'm happy being an idiot. I don't presume to know how to deliver the most energy the cheapest way to the world's consumers, and I don't think it's moral for me to hurt or help one group or another based on risks that are not scientifically verified. At least not to this huge degree. If we were talking about something easy like the death penalty, sure, the standard of proof would be much lower. But you're talking about potentially billons of people who will have a harder time reaching their potential for decades while we re-tool.

Don't count me in for that.
ummm...gmail is still in beta.
This makes me think of Clay Shirky's book "Here comes everybody".

I think the example of the whale oil industry's feeling of superiority until their rapid decline, is similar to Clay's example of the feelings of scribes during the advent of the printing press.

He talks about how the last people to be able to adapt were the people entrenched in the industry, who spent their energy justifying why change was bad rather than adapting and bringing their experience.

Often change is inevitable but a big enough change such as petroleum or electricity (or the internet) make it hard to predict how the future will pan out. People don't like change because it's unpredictable, so it's easier to deny it will or should happen.
With enough coffee...
Lots of possible quotes out of this one.

"You and your goal are part of the future. Without its specification you can never know the future. And the more you know yourself and your goal, the more you know the future."

"Only when you have found an entire array of vacant fields will you be able to find the one worthy of your potential."

Seems like his message is be very, very thorough...

With a bit of typesetting might make a good series of articles.
If you are interested in the topic, check out the book "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" (available at http://www.withouthotair.com/ ). Unfortunately it's pretty disillusioning.
The iPod was designed and manufactured in less than a year. It sold 125,000 units in the first month. That's his definition of a dud? Likewise, Google went from being a stanford research project to the best search engine in less than 3 years.

His premise is wrong and the article is an apologia for being slow. Every huge success on the web, and in the computing/internet sector in general has been the result of being better and faster than the competitors. 10 years is way too long. If you haven't succeeded in 2-4 years you are doing something wrong.

The trap: sprint all day and run out of energy before the marathon even starts.

Runners who win marathons can run all day at a pace most people would consider sprinting.
Your whole line of reasoning rests upon the faulty premise that there's a "free market" for oil in this country, and that encouraging alternate forms of energy is somehow "tampering" with the unfathomably complicated mechanisms behind that market. All of which is utter nonsense.

We subsidize the hell out of oil consumption in this country, and we've done it for as long as we've been consuming. Once we stop doing things like funding highway construction, suburban infrastructure and corporate oil exploration with our taxes (no, not just gas taxes!), maybe then we can start to talk about the "free market" with a straight face.
Someone should calculate the stats for mentions of different programming languages in HN submissions (titles) and comments. (But without getting noticed the wrong way by YC.)
I was surprised because I believe that a large portion of the excitement of sport is its event nature and viewing a live-event live enhances that experience, improving the Olympic brand. I guess the IOC was willing to compromise the brand for the bundle of cash from NBC.
Or more eloquently put: execution matters more than anything else, and the key to execution is passion
Interesting comparison.

Considering that the US hasn't managed to resolve its oil addiction yet, though, I think it's unlikely that this comparison is helpful - except in making people feel helpless.

Could you resolve this without government assistance? Perhaps. Maybe a company could sell a device that can be tuned to use whatever spectrum block is desired, and let people pick which bit of the unused spectrum they want to use. The government can't control what everyone does if everyone is doing it.
great question.

1) too complex for someone who should be studying medicine and maintaining whatever their club is, healthcare for the homeless or whatever their club is.

2) central admin still has to make the lists.

3) high likelyhood someone will create a list and then the whole group will forget about it, yet it is unclear in advance which lists will run year round (like the student-run clinic has proven too) and which are essentially recreated every year (like the student government and curriculum clubs do)
right, but not a private beta
Give it some time! :-)
Thanks, comments noted.
If you liked that, you should see his lectures very informative, controversial and funny
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3136634457413762837&...
Damn, that's disappointing. The headline made me think it was stuff he wrote, not stuff he collected.
I think his point about the iPod was it started out not turning the market around. See this sales graph from the Wikipeida iPod page (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/80/Ipod_sales_200...). It was almost 2 years after launch until the iPod sales really started to shift upwards significantly.

I think his point is that persistence is important. It's not about apologising for being slow, it's understanding that you need a certain social capital to become big in a market. That can take time.
News : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Community
subsidized consumption? or subsidized production. the article specifically points out that higher consumption taxes are offsetting income taxes.

the question is not taxing consumption but rather what exactly we do with those taxes. personally i think those funds should go towards funding and expanding renewables.
Look at the man on the Charlie Card. Seriously, go look.

See him leaning out of the window with that mocking grin, waiving his forged card in triumph and thinking, "Suckers!"
It's because web has given people an attention span of a few minutes so if they don't accomplish anything in that time they just give up and wander awa...
Thank you for pointing this out. It is almost exact copy. I am not associated with the blog, but I just found the link from my Friendfeed feed.
I'm saying that even if we could magically get at all that offshore oil tomorrow, it wouldn't make a difference.

It's only going to provide an extra 200,000 barrels a day. America currently uses over 20,000,000 barrels a day - and current world production is on the order of a 100,000,000 barrels a day.

Increasing production by 0.2% isn't going to change anything. Hell, remember about a year ago when when OPEC increased production quotas by 300K/day? Oil prices held steady for about a week, and then started increasing again. It did practically nothing at all.

I'm saying that the minuscule benefit off shore drilling will provide is more than outweighed by negative impact.
Django actually makes it easier...all you have to do is add django.contrib.csrf.middleware.CsrfMiddleware to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES, and it protects the whole webapp.

http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/csrf/
Not only in large quantities, plus it is addictive (sugar). Note that they started out with cocaine, back in the day. Sure, different times, but still...

I don't want to argue about the healthiness of coke, though. If you want to drink it, by all means, go ahead. It is your life, not mine.
It's a stupid idea in the first place to even try to enforce this. If your company can't even compete with its competitors, or you're losing your employees to them, you probably don't deserve to be in business (or will be out of business very soon). Keeps the co-founders on their toes and creates an incentive to not slack off and settle.
Andrew Brophy : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Community
When I say we're running out of oil, I mean we're running out of cheap, easily accessible oil. We'll have oil for quite some time; it will just get more expensive. Maybe I'm wrong and the peak of global oil supply is still a ways off. In that case, we'll have made a less painful transition than we would have otherwise. The longer we continue to use energy as we currently do, the more infrastructure will be built based on that consumption, and the more new infrastructure we will need to build in the future to accommodate lower energy use.

"When we get into "potential environmental damages", unless you're prepared to make a risk-reward argument with hard statistics we're treading on personal opinion ground."

It is personal opinion. I don't see the problem with that. I like my shorelines sans oil spills. I don't think the risk is worth a couple of cents a gallon off of gas. Any quantification of the risks and rewards of offshore drilling will be equally subjective as my assertion that it isn't worth it. If the rest of the country agrees (which looks unlikely at this point), then more offshore drilling won't happen.

"doesn't the market provide the most goods at the lowest prices, thereby helping the poor much more optimally than a government policy would?"

Yes. Cheap energy for the poor would be nice, but the decrease in price of energy caused by offshore drilling isn't worth the potential environmental damage in my opinion.

"But you're talking about potentially billons of people who will have a harder time reaching their potential for decades while we re-tool."

It sounds like you're talking about more than just offshore drilling here, as that would have a tiny effect on people reaching their potential. As far as broader governmental efforts that will raise the price of oil, I don't think we should go any further than pricing in the externalities of oil usage. Paying for the damage you cause isn't that radical of a notion.
The Idea Factory - CIC Cambridge
6 Teams that changed the world. From Edison's to Job's
I have trouble understanding this? The price for ice was set to 50cent, why should they give it away just because somebody asks? Maybe there is a reason for the price (more manual labor, higher electricity bill, whatever)? If 50 cents matter to Seth, why shouldn't they matter to the food company?

What about flavorings for coffee, or extra milk foam, etc? Maybe these things really don't cost anything, and the companies could give them away for free. On the other hand, if they do cost something, I would be annoyed to pay 50cent extra for a flatrate I don't need.

It just seems as if both models have their merits - maybe a flatrate shop and a "sectioning" shop could exist next to each other and please different kinds of customers.
Some people think it is a great PR strategy. That is because sometimes it is. The problem is when you fool yourself into thinking that "sometimes" is "always". Or, at least, "always for me".
Who Will Be First to Sue Alexa?
Here's a forum dedicated to answering that question: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=103
My line of reasoning says that the free market provides the best solution for energy production and delivery. Yes, the market is already subsidized. No, there's no such thing as a pure free market. No, trying to rationalize markets one way or another is a fool's game, but we still try (as any commodities trader will tell you)

No, I did not say encouraging other forms of energy was tampering. Yes, my argument against tampering was our recent history of not providing energy for our own country, including nuclear, oil, and refining capacity for the past three decades. I made the extension that the offshore drilling now in question has been on the table for a long time. We should drill. (And in ANWR) Not because it solves the world's problem but because getting out of the way is sometimes better than continuing to be part of the problem.

No I do not think that solar, wind, or any number of a dozen other areas are somehow tampering, at least not when compared to the other shenanigans we've been doing. And no, I don't think anything we do this year is going to stack up to shooting ourselves in the collective foot for that long. I'm all for them.

It's best to correct the premise once you actually understand it.
About the algorithmic techniques they employ.

And they do not even consider higher order functions.
I kind of agree. I'd rather be able to use a site knowing that it was in beta (as long as it worked mostly) and if there were any data loss, at least I know that it's in beta and wouldn't be too pissed if some data was lost. I like to use new services and I don't tend to put all of my eggs into one basket anyway, so using dropbox for vital backups is not the greatest idea in the world since it's still in beta, but as far as using it to sync some machines with non-vital data, I'd love to be able to use it. (I've already got a beta account and I love it, BTW). :)
I like Jones' "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" (http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/slpj-book-1987...) much more.

(Both books do not cover exactly the same topic - but Jones' book has deeper math.)
I have no time for a long, detailed article that does not reference a single source.
He who pays the $900m makes the rules.
In Germany we pay around $8.50/gallon for gas, now.
Are you talking about the drop.io service?
LangPop looks at reddit (and some other sites too), which has a bit broader user base than HN.
How do these payments work, anyway? Say this kid has to pay for all the songs. She goes into debt, defaults on the loan, and all is forgiven; except now my savings account has a lower interest rate. What's the point?
Welcome back to Reddit.