skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the actual figure? That one billion figure corresponds to all the carbon dioxide released in a year. Think of it. To counteract our carbon emissions, you have to cut down and bury 10,000,000 km^2 of forest per year! Even if we do 1% of that, that corresponds with the average deforestation over the past century. That's an industry larger than the forestry industry, because we need to grow all of those trees, and then bury them.

Regarding global warming, it may not be catastrophic, but it's... absurd to call it a hoax. Average temperatures are rising. Do you have another explanation for the receding ice caps, then? Do you have a different prediction for the greenland glacier? If the north pole is free of ice in the summer, ice must be melting in Greenland, too. If it's melting in the summer faster than accretion in the winter, the Greenland ice is melting. If the Greenland ice is melting then unless Antarctica is growing, the sea level will rise. According the geological record, the ice caps grow and retreat in a nonlinear way; suddenly, in other words. According to the wikipedia:

"If small glaciers and polar ice caps on the margins of Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula melt, the projected rise in sea level will be around 0.5 m. Melting of the Greenland ice sheet would produce 7.2 m of sea-level rise, and melting of the Antarctic ice sheet would produce 61.1 m of sea level rise. The collapse of the grounded interior reservoir of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise sea level by 5-6 m."

Additionally, it is estimated that a sea level rise of just 20cm could create 740,000 homeless people in Nigeria. and already there is evidence that diseases from warmer climates, such as malaria, are growing in extent. http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/11/report-climate.html

A 2004 World Health Organization study estimates that climatic changes that have been occurring since the mid-1970s caused more than 150K deaths by 2000 through increasing incidences of diseases such as diarrhea, malaria and malnutrition, primarily in developing countries. The study projects a potential doubling of climate-related deaths by 2030.

Are you claiming that these aren't happening, or that they aren't problems?
Execute f 7 times, add all numbers, call that x. Then you do mod(x,7)+1, and you get a random number between 1 and 7. If the original function was unbiased, this one is going to be unbiased too.
Indeed. Supposing you are 30, what are the odds that the company will outlast you? Very, very poor, IMHO.
Isn't this level of interviewing kind of excessive and time-expensive? If I were Google, I would do the following:

1) Have the first interviewer be the best/most-appropriate interviewer for the position (manager, lead dev, whatever). Have them write down in a sealed envelope a "hire" or "no hire" statement after the interview.

2) At the end of the assorted interviews, measure how often the first interviewer is correct in his hire/no hire assessment.

My theory is that interviewing is a great opportunity for "thin-slicing" (a la Blink) and that you'd get 98% of the value with 10% of the time invested.

Related anecdote (from gladwell dot com):

One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain.

Not surprisingly, it was really hard to convince the physicians at Cook County to go along with the plan, because, like all of us, they were committed to the idea that more information is always better. But I describe lots of cases in "Blink" where that simply isn't true. There's a wonderful phrase in psychology--"the power of thin slicing"--which says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience. I have an entire chapter in "Blink" on how unbelievably powerful our thin-slicing skills are. I have to say that I still find some of the examples in that chapter hard to believe.
Rubinomics Recalculated
That is interesting; I asked about increasing it on my personal slice and Slicehost refused. I decided to move to Linode as a result.

The company I work for also has several slices at Slicehost and, from what I understand, Slicehost wouldn't increase the limit on that account either.(I am not the point of contact so I can't say definitively in this case)
"I got the green light from Google to publish this article"
Sounds like you need to decide what you need from your buddy. Do you see him as a way to get some high quality development done in a cash-poor situation, or do you see him as someone who would contribute in every possible way to the success of your startup?

If it's the first, then you're using equity as a way of paying him. You're essentially saying: "Your work would normally be worth $20,000 to me. However, I don't have the money. So I'd like to pay you in shares that have a chance at being worth a great deal more than $20,000 down the line."

In the second case, you're saying "I need a partner, especially one with a technical background. I see you as having the ability to make this venture a success, in ways I can't even anticipate right now. This is a very early stage startup, with all kinds of risk. This thing will consume your life for at least a few years, so you'd be coming in as a cofounder".

It can be pretty difficult to get well employed, well paid programmers to take either deal you're offering, but I'd say the second is probably the best bet in terms of getting him to agree to come on board. Mainly because working equity usually means you end up working for nothing.

However, I would also caution you against making someone a cofounder simply because you need his tech skills and can't afford to pay him. He's a buddy, that's great. But you need to have faith in this guy's abilities as a cofounder.
Can someone just summarize what compounds are thought to be responsible?
Comparing the performance of Factor and V8
The often iffy data behind those ubiquitous words, 'research shows'
The biggest problem with this is what happens if one of those people dies - or simply gets a new email and doesn't tell you - before you die?

Your data is forever locked because of one person. It's even worse than you not telling the service that you changed your email. At least you should have known that the service existed.

Burdening your friends and relatives doesn't strike me as the best way t handle this issue.
Ask YC: Are we relying too much on the cloud/social networks preserving our personal data?
If so, what's the solution?
It's an homage to the wave of artistic and poetic manifestos in the early 20th century that sought to sweep away old and rotten forms. Specifically, it's a detailed copy of http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto..., with painting references replaced by programming ones.

These manifestos weren't intended to be understandable, exactly. They were poetic and designed to communicate a revolutionary artistic energy. The original Futurist manifesto was by the poet Marinetti (who I think is primarily remembered for that) and had a big influence on Russian poetry. The Futurists liked speed and rebellion. They probably would have gone for rock and roll.

I agree with you that it's not clear what point about programming these authors were trying to make. Perhaps they were mostly just "covering" the original piece.
Most of irc.perl.org - notably #moose is quite good for discussing meta-model type stuff even if not directly in a perl context.

Plus a few bits and pieces on freenode.
India Calling: The "brain drain" becomes "brain circulation."
As a CMU alum, I hate to bad-mouth a professor there, but this guy doesn't seem to understand the psychology of start-ups.

This method may lead to an equity split that seems to reflect the inputs of the founders, but could potentially, and will probably, demotivate the founders who get the smaller pieces.

Does it really seem like a good idea to tell the people you are going to be working with non-stop for the next 3-5 years (hopefully) that you are twice as valuable as they are? It seems like that's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When I started a start-up this year (www.trailbehind.com), I had the idea, wrote the business plan, raised the money, coded most of the original site, and then split the business right down the middle with my co-founder. Because I want her fully and completely interested in making the site work, and not thinking that this is just some job or somebody else's project.
Hey, I think I did alright in that post. #3 came true (for the most part, though none of the big boys are relying parties). #2 was sort of half right. Sort of. And, #5 was a little bit right -- iPhone 3G has been one of the best-selling phones of the year and mobile apps are finally a big story (big enough to get mainstream television coverage, at least).
A tale of two tech cities: Silicon Valley vs LA
The Financial market is not a complex calculation. It is a derivative of human emotion and psychology. In the end humans will try to manipulate the computers. The best investors such as buffet and soros are not math whizes. They take qualitative and quantitive approach to their investment.

Sounds like a major fail to me.
> The 'Casual Game Industry' is much to young

The only thing young about that is the name. What we call "casual games" were the mainstream 25 years ago, until the hardcore gamers (myself included) left the mainstream behind for RPGs, FPSs, RTSs and other acronym worthy gaming genres and types as the technology gradually enabled them. A new game like "Pac Man" or "Asteriods" would be considered "casual" nowadays.
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/doczone/2008/disappearingmal...

Bisphenol A (found mostly in hard colored plastics) is becoming particularly non grata (update: in Canada) these days.

Edit: according to the article it's also "the de facto lining used in food cans". Wow.
Confusing, I clicked through on my RSS reader, and somehow landed on the original version of that post being submitted to HN -- and accidentally left a comment on that page. Anyway, now that I'm in the right place...

I think I did alright in that post. #3 came true (for the most part, though none of the big boys are relying parties). #2 was sort of half right. Sort of. And, #5 was a little bit right -- iPhone 3G has been one of the best-selling phones of the year and mobile apps are finally a big story (big enough to get mainstream television coverage, at least).

Now, quick... someone buy Tumblr.
Reading these git "success" stories, I find myself asking the same question again and again: how many man-months of effort were spent writing "scripts, hooks and documentation" to transition to a version control system that is only incrementally better than the one that was there before?
Phthalates and bpa.
I really enjoyed the hot-dog dialing on the iPhone and the helium-inflated bubble tower.
TextFlow, First Parallel Word Processor, Now Available In Public Beta
Because that would help poor people.

PS: That may or may not be a joke I can't tell.
The French cafe is dying
Yeah, you (OP) are probably stupid to try to do it on your own if you have a capable cofounder readily available. I'm on my own, and if I knew someone who was interested and whose skills and character I could trust, I'd jump at the chance to bring him/her on.
A new startup: The Clouds Cloud
(this is a cheap pun on the Williams Communications "carriers carrier" business model 8 years ago).

I don't personally rely on any particular social network to preserve my personal data. I know how to get in touch with all the people I really want to do business with. If LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. all went away tomorrow it would be no terrible loss to me.
Its about time, Federal Reserve was brought under some regulation. They are just printing too many dollars and lending.
And yet oddly enough SV is where most of the most profitable startups have been. Focusing too much on revenue at the expense of strategic vision is not sound business sense, but premature optimization: you ride a greedy algorithm to the top of whatever local maximum is nearest, and you're done.
Pac Man and Asteroids haven't changed, but the context they are played in has. The context is young.

25 years ago they were played at arcades or bars in coin-operated machines. Today, those games are played in a web browser or on a handheld device.
The solution - if one person does not reply by clicking a button 'he is not dead', this persons opinion ceases to matter.
Unfortunately, that's probably relatively complicated. The internal Mercurial convert utility doesn't speak Perforce, and while tailor (http://progetti.arstecnica.it/tailor) does, I've had mixed results with it. You can always give it a show. The worst case is simply that it doesn't work.
The System Implodes: The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008
"Bisphenol A (found mostly in hard colored plastics) is becoming particularly non grata these days."

Not in the United States.
Perhaps I'm missing something. How does the state of cafe's in France even remotely relate to Hacker News?
Additionally, one of the issues with increased CO2 content in the oceans is acidification. The oceans can't absorb more CO2, even in biomass, without this occurring.
10k to each person wouldn't unfreeze the credit markets, though.

Credit is "frozen" now b/c banks won't lend, in some cases not even to each other, over fears that the borrowing institution is not going to be able to pay back the loan.

So the $7.4 trillion posted by the government is more about restoring confidence than anything else.

There are some good papers on the subject by Stephen Figlewski at http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~sfiglews/FinCrisis.htm particularly the one titled "Viewing the Financial Crisis from 20,000 Feet Up".
I use Tektonic.

http://www.tektonic.net/vps.php

I haven't done any performance comparison. (since I don't use other hosting services.)

But as far as raw resources per dollar, Tektonic has both Slicehost and Linode beaten.
I'd say from experience that significantly less effort is spent transitioning to git than is spent worrying about and complaining about git before actually trying out the switch.

It took me a few hours to learn enough in git to replicate my experience in svn; sure, it takes longer than that to learn some of the other features, but the only time that is actually lost is the time spent relearning what one already knows.
In the end humans will try to manipulate the computers. Also known as: Garbage in Garbage out.
Proof Of Correlation Between MySpace Usage And Illiteracy
Grammatical Framework Tutorial
Thanks everyone for your feedback. Please keep it coming.

For those who are curious here is a bit more context:
The company was founded to commercialize technology developed by our founder, an electrical engineer with 15 years of hardware development experience. His first big project at the age of 15 was a pirate radio station he built from scratch in his bedroom. He has been innovating ever since and has developed multiple novel electronics and radiometric products over the course of his career.

The other two co-founders have equally impressive backgrounds. One co-founder has over a decade of senior operations and intellectual property expertise. The second co-founder has over ten years experience in sales, marketing, and product development with both Fortune 1000 and several startup ventures. We do not have extensive lighting industry experience but instead have taken a hacker's approach to both the engineering and market challenges.

I am looking forward to sharing more about our 'secret sauce' but am limited until our provisionals are filed.

We are currently filing our first patents covering improvements in brightness, color rendering, control, thermal management, and cost - significant problems that have so far prevented widespread deployment of LEDs for mainstream lighting.

Although our technology can be broadly applied we are focusing on launching a standalone consumer floor or desk lamp and have partnered with leading design partners to develop a simple, affordable, and attractive enclosure. We are not developing an LED light bulb but instead are focusing our resources on launching a lamp with breakthrough price performance to be sold over the internet to eco-friendly, design-savvy, gadget-geeks.

It will be as bright as a 100 watt incandescent light bulb but will consume a fraction of the energy, last up to 50x as long and will allow users to control the color temperature of light in addition to brightness. We expect it to sell for under $200US and we will be in Beta by Q1 2009.
They had better do this right, or this recession is going to become a serious, serious depression.
the system they exist in requires continual printing. if we don't prop it up, we will likely see a deflationary spiral.
Palm cutting jobs, slashing a hole in our heart
According to a program I heard years ago on public radio, if you sit outdoors at a French café in Madrid, Spain long enough, eventually everyone you've ever met will walk by.
It seems to me as if the ideal cofounder is one whom:

a) You very nearly can't, or wouldn't do without.

b) Is working as hard as they can to get this thing going.

c) Is totally committed.

d) Can do rare things that you cannot yourself do.

and

e) Feels the same way about you.

In such a circumstance and nearly equitable split is almost certainly the best option.

If you don't feel the same way, there might be some kind of way to split the equity, but it seems much, much harder to get a good outcome. Then again, you probably shouldn't be founding with such a team? I did; and ultimately the other founders bailed or fizzled out, and I had to let them go.

PS: Hi! How is trailbehind going?
The next couple years are likely not going to be the last couple years, especially for small businesses.
A fancy overlay add-on to browsershots.org
The guidelines say: "What to Submit: [...] "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

If you wanted to stretch the article to hacker/startup-related topics:

- The eroding economy means that more people are spending time at home, to the extent that communal watering holes are closing. Hence, there is a need for newer, cheaper ways for communities to interact.

- If the trend crosses the ocean, we may see closing coffeeshops, which serve as a gathering place for many hackers and entrepreneurial types.

(And it would seem PG is uniquely situated to define what does and doesn't relate to Hacker News... :) )
Apple is slapped with a patent lawsuit over the iPhone's browser
25 Most Influential People on Web
Or rackspace could just one day decide the VPS market isn't for them and declare slicehost a mistake, and then shut it down. Not entirely impossible...
The 'bad' off topic articles are the ones that set off the endless, dreary, predictable debates about politics or economics. Stuff like this is easy to ignore if it doesn't happen to interest you, and isn't likely going to attract argumentative bozos, with little interest in hacking or involvement in startups, to the site.
Part of the interview is an intelligence/memory/experience test. They don't want to use rigid requirements ("must absolutely have five years experience") and it would probably be illegal to administer an IQ test (and the sort of intelligence IQ measures isn't always the same as the sort of intelligence needed for the job).

In addition their culture seems to be that once you're on the job (as a salaried employee vs. a contractor) they'll do all in their powers to ensure you aren't laid off, get fired or quit out of boredom: you can freely move from team to team, you generally work flexible hours and with little micro management. The tough hiring (with far too many false negatives but no false positive) requirement is why they're able to mantain such a culture.
My false positive rate for 'cofounder material,' to date, is nearly 80%. Keep that in mind when you consider splitting 50/50.

You almost certainly should vest. But a better way is to run a little trial period of three months or so, maybe with a little bit of vesting, and then negotiate. He should be happy to demonstrate his worth. If he can't you'll have to make the hard decision, but at least it will be based on something.

Keep in mind that friendship does not, in my experience, really survive a broken business relationship, unless you both go down with the ship. Even if the split is respectful and equitable.
wha? That pretty much defeats the purpose of having that person on the list in the first place.

What if nobody responds?
Or they could lower prices hoping to attract more people. Or they could deploy the Slicehost guys to work on their own offerings, which don't interest me. Or ... lots of things.
Funny, my comment originally said something about Canada and I cut it out for brevity. I'll add it back. (Actually, it's not funny at all. The industry's argument appears to be: "But if we don't poison people, how will we make all those shiny plastic bottles?" With the fallback position: "How about if we just don't poison babies? Will that do?")
What the hell do you think I'm doing all this work for?

If someday I find myself retired but without any French cafés to visit, it'll be like the end of a Twilight Zone episode.

This is an emergency! I need to go to France and bail out the croissant economy!
Sounds like the probem is stuff made out of plastic. Is that a reasonable summary?
1 person has responded - the person who clicked the button. If nobody else agrees, then I would say the data stays locked. Otherwise the one person could simply wait for a moment where everyone traveled and had no email access.
It really depends on the criticism. Some people do not critique things so much as dismiss them. It is a waste of time to engage with such people is such a mode.
The good, the bad, and the ugly of the current economic environment for startups
Git handles symlinks, so if your devs were all on UNIX-like systems, you could just store symlinks to your un-diff-able blobs under your Git repository.

Sorry to offer a non-solution, but maybe someone else out there does have a UNIX dev platform, and could get some benefit from storing big binary files in network share with versioned symlinks.
They are lending, but they are not willing to take as much risk so they are charging more interest which is slowing down the economy.
Yes, you're right of course, distribution is another problem. I really don't see how something like this would work - if someone made me head of a light bulb startup and gave me $500 million, I'd still be quite lost as to how to go about doing things. I'd probably burn through a lot of money on consultants and all that.

I think some types of business are better suited to big companies, and some are better suited to smaller companies.
According to the article, the Fed wants to make trillions of dollars in loans but they won't disclose who gets what or what terms / collateral is being offered. Why haven't we thrown these jokers in federal prison yet?
I knew a few people who had a "if you read this, I am dead" cronjob setup on their machine: if they wouldn't log in by a certain time, an email would be sent saying that they're dead. Of courses there were cases where people would simply forget about these cronjobs and send email needlessly worrying the people they cared about (and possibly getting themselves 5150'd).
Odd, I'm running WebKit nightlies, and I was marked as Safari 3.1
Try prefixing the channel name with a hash (#).
OK, so then you've pretty much satisfied my worry that there was some insanely obvious hackerish news in this post and verified that it is merely interesting on some obscure level.

Thanks.