skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if it would "create" a great deal of jobs for construction engineers, it would take away resources from _useful_ production.

In the U.S., we have no shortage of "useful" production, and no shortage of not-very-useful production (see also: Cougartown).

Reducing pollution is useful production. I appreciate the idea that we'll assign a cost to traditional externalities whose cost is usually foisted on society at large, at which point the market will be forced to find new ways to decrease those costs.

The increased demand for carbon licenses does not come out of thin air. Someone does pay for it - while reducing other expenses!

It will also force incumbent, stagnant industries to invest in research and development, and disperse wealth more broadly, both of which pay significant future dividends beyond simply a reduction carbon output.
Right, well first we have to decide that the products and services created by cap-and-trade are a good use of our country's talent and resources. That's an entirely separate debate, but once we've already decided that then the broken window analogy no longer applies.
Uh, clearly you have never read /b/. (Reddit is /b/ for people that don't want as much child porn mixed in with their political campaigns.)
No, I translated back to USD for the benefit of the HN audience. :)
How-To: Influence Influencers - Bloggers, Tweeters & Others
Like a 20 year embargo or so, that's an excellent idea!

I'm something of a data packrat anyway, so I probably would just move them out of sight, but a mechanism to restore the pages in time would be good.

Thank you!
Nuclear War Survival Skills
No, you'd keep the long-tail search results in tact, but then tend to surface the good content people are actually sharing amongst themselves.

Google already does this, by surfacing youtube videos in many search queries.
It could be a very good day to be a GPS manufacturer if you create an Android 2.0-powered GPS device with internet connectivity. Piggybacking on Android and Google's new app would cut development costs significantly and bring instant credibility to a lesser-known GPS maker.
A batter does change his behavior. There are multiple ways to hit. Sometimes, you attempt to hit a ball to a gap in the defense, where it is difficult for a player to make a play, and to get it there quickly. Sometimes, you try to hit it down the line, because it's harder for the defense to get it to a base. There's a sacrifice fly, where you are just trying to get the ball to the person with the weakest arm, as far away as possible even knowing you don't have the power to make it over the fence in that direction.

You can even attempt to hit a ball out of play just to bring the pitcher's pitch count up and extend the batting series long enough for him to make a mistake, or at least have to come out a little earlier than he would normally.

Some of this depends on the pitch you see. Professional players are making these decisions based on how they see the pitch unravel.

Then, there's attempting for a home run. You put everything you have into the swing and let it fly.

(These are all based on how early or late you start your swing, and how high or low you swing.)
Silicon Valley is more than 100 years old. I blogged about this in http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/05/steve-blank-on-secre... but here is one quick data point:

California Landmark NO. 836 PIONEER ELECTRONICS RESEARCH LABORATORY - This is the original site of the laboratory and factory of Federal Telegraph Company, founded in 1909 by Cyril F. Elwell. Here, Dr. Lee de Forest, inventor of the three-element radio vacuum tube, devised the first vacuum tube amplifier and oscillator in 1911-13. Worldwide developments based on this research led to modern radio communication, television, and the electronics age.
Location: In sidewalk, SE corner of Channing Ave and Emerson St, Palo Alto

Radio technologies preceded and prepared the way for electronics and semiconductors, and it was fueled with risk capital.
It would ideal if the government bundled fiber and power lines together and restructured both grids at once. Two birds with one stone. However, this is probably unlikely.
That's definitely an option, see below.
talented entrepreneurs, monied investors, academic expertise, and, above all, critical relationships with those who know startups well and are integrally involved in launching and promoting them

Silicon Valley had none of that before Shockley and the Fairchildren (AKA tha Traitorous 8) rolled into town back in '57. Was that truly a one-off? The world's a big place.
Separating staff and user accounts in Django's admin
Sell Reocities to AOL for $6 billion!
> compensated incredibly well for very incredibly poor performance

Sort of. They tend to be compensated well, right up until they're fired. The analogy someone else made to sports coaches is an apt one; if a team loses a few games, the coach doesn't get his pay docked, but if a team loses for a few seasons, chances are he'll just be out of a job.

Plus, in many cases it can be hard to determine whether a CEO's actions led directly to a poor quarter, or if it was just a bad quarter and they handled things appropriately. And if pay was tied directly to financial metrics, there would be an incentive to play the numbers game.

It's important also to remember that the people determining a CEO's salary -- or at least giving it the thumbs-up -- are typically the biggest owners of a company; the CEO's pay comes out of their pockets in greater proportion than it does anyone else's. If they think that their CEO is doing a ten-million-dollar a year job, who is anyone else to argue? If they thought they could get someone to do the same job at half the salary, doubtless they'd do it; I doubt they enjoy spending that much, but they think it's necessary.
What in the photos gives you that impression? People say that sort of thing often, but it seems more like a mantra than something backed by actual evidence.
It says a lot about society in general when you consider Reddit users to be "well-educated".
I'm enjoying this conversation/debate :) Feel free to email me, if the reply delays get too long.

1. All interventions in the market are social engineering, it may not be intentional, but subsidizing/taxing certain behaviors encourages/discourages them.

2. I'm all for getting fiber to every door step. I'm just disagreeing with the approach. There is no reason that individuals couldn't form a co-op, or some other nonprofit, or even for profit company together to provide their internet.

3. I'm going to disagree with the national defense thing on two points.
A. The government's sole purpose is defend your rights, national defense is defending your rights from foreign enemies.
B. The government has a monopoly on force (except for certain self-defensive purposes).

The community has a vested interest in infrastructure, but if you actually look at what goes on with it is ridiculous. The mass pike was supposed to have tolls removed years ago, but through all sorts tricks they manage to keep the tolls. The big dig, also in boston, cost Billions of dollars for a tiny tunnel.

So my final points:
1. Without competition and voluntary interaction we don't actually know what the value of something is -- high speed is important to some, while for others 56k is enough for them.
2. For almost anything people propose the government should do, a private nonprofit could be created to carry out the same task.
3. Organizations and nonprofits are more driven by results than politicsl they don't want to merely show that they're taking action.
4. Nonprofits/Foundations deal with many critical issues that most people don't realize/know about. For example, the Ford Foundation with regards to Russian studies & American foreign policy/defense.
5. It is very hard to compete against the government since they don't have to make a profit, can alter rules to their advantage, and lastly they don't pay taxes :)

I think I addressed your points above.
High vacancy in a central location means cheap rents that facilitate face to face interaction. Perhaps there is room for a half dozen different kinds of co-working / hacker dojo spaces that can now afford to come into existence.
Was one of those supposed to sound more plausible than the other? They both sound like pipe dreams. Steve Blank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley" shows that it'll take more than a few bills passed to create a viable competitor to SV, esp. since this new region would have to compete with the actual SV.

How about option C) SV continues to thrive as a worldwide center of innovation no matter how jacked the rest of CA and the US gets? The only way I see this not happening is if the US completely clamps down on immigration (right now it's a giant pain but still navigable for a large number of immigrants).

The only international tech centers that I've ever heard anyone mention seriously were Tel Aviv (but unlikely b/c of security issues), and Singapore. Not sure how immigrant-friendly the high tech Asian economies (China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S. Korea) would be (Japan certainly isn't).

Much more likely would be a barely-across-the-border city like Vancouver or (don't laugh) Tijuana. With the ridiculous life science cluster in San Diego, Mexico could have a place where any international scientist could get into easily and collaborate with the existing cluster. It's a beautiful opportunity for regulatory arbirtage of a positive kind. What other opportunity does Mexico have to become a center for super high end research?
Granted the "best" one for a particular task need not be defined exclusively by considerations about the language itself.

The (apparent) lack of this exact reasoning when choosing databases for projects is what surprises me.

There seem to be two bands:
1. One who equates database to relational database and disregards everything else.
2. One who decries the relational database and proposes <insert alternate model> as a the end-all of database models.
There are also many Java programs that do not use files or sockets; they use "the database", "the classloader", "the configuration class", etc.. With the details abstracted away, this JVM can replace those classes with custom implementations that have the same interface but are implemented without any OS support.

Note: I haven't watched the video or read the source code yet.
Decision Time: Does the Nation Need TV or Mobile Broadband?
By the same argument, you could basically claim that reducing the carbon emissions to _zero_ would improve the economy. The value that you attach to green policies are not quantifiable in a non-arbitrary way. (In the same way that religious artifacts like Pyramids does not represent a measurable economic value.)
Can you tell me if there are any in the SiliconValley neighborhood with the address of 7771? I don't know if I ever deleted it, but I don't remember the exact subneighborhood.
Eliezer Yudkowsky lays out the Bayesian reductionist argument in his Zombies sequence: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Zombies_(sequence)

It's a good accessible read, mentions a few of the interesting questions zombies can shed light on, and has a fair number of reader comments and responses.
Thanks, looks good, seems to be gratis (zero cost). Had to search for the market page:

http://www.androidforums.com/market/tools--utilities-9/local...

(What's up with the bright idea of "need to view Android Market on a handset" to see a list, in the main page http://www.android.com/market/ ? Perhaps also install iTunes, eh ;-)

P.S. Sorry, the first link is NOT the market page, and it's dated 2008. Can't easily find current price ...
The 60 most valuable Internet startups, as ranked by Silicon Alley Insider
How could I have known OJ was involved with covering up the moon landing hoax without geocites? I forgot how much fun random readings of goecites could be.

OJ was in Capricorn One, which many of the moon hoax nuts think is a documentary about how NASA did it.

So it makes sense to think that they'd think he'd be involved in the coverup.
FYI: If you ever wondered if being on the homepage of the New York Times increases your server load, it does.

-Chris, Airbnb engineer
> Actually there is no rational reason for you, personally, to vote.

[snip]

> And yes, I do vote.

You believe there is no rational reason for you to vote, yet you vote anyway? So you believe that acting irrationally is a good thing to do?

I can see how we might differ in opinion about what is the rational action in a given situation, but I have a hard time understanding how we can agree on the correct action to take, but disagree as to its rationality.
5 Fresh & Innovative Collaboration Platforms For The Creative Community
Ask HN: Do press releases get traffic?
Does anyone have any good or bad experiences with press releases? Did you hire someone to write one or just write your own? Did you email to bloggers or papers? Did you pay for submission to PRWeb, etc.? Please share your experiences.
12 Free and Amazing Wordpress Themes that Don't Suck
The author is not as incompetent as they claim to be. The content is accessible if the bizzare stylesheet is ignored.
I've never had much success with this. Can anyone who has comment on how they approach the blogs? Maybe even a copy of a successful email sent to the bloggers?
JQueryExchange
Get your answers, make your questions on jQueryExchange, a stackExchnge portal dedicated to jQuery sponsored by Matteo Bicocchi (mb.jquery.components)
# Disallow viewing of .svn and .git and .hg directory contents
<Directory ~ \.(svn|git|hg)>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Directory>
What I like most about this idea is that system administration via init scripts, et al, can just go away -- presumably one will have APIs for interacting with the available hardware, necessary 'OS' services, etc.

It'd make automated deployment of systems even more manageable -- turtles all the way down.
As I said, there are means to overcome these maintenance problems; outsourcing the work being just one of them.

There seems to be a fair amount of cognitive dissonance going on here, and it seems to stem from the fact you feel overwhelmed and I am suggesting that more can be done. This dissonance is probably part of why your response is as aggressive as it is.

Get off HN and do the customer support. Skip that trip to the bar and get that next bug fixed. I know and am surprised from my own personal experiences at how much time we spend on small unproductive things. Personally, I think they are essential to being happy, but there can be stints where neglecting happiness and relaxation has a greater payoff; where doing the work and getting the customer support done will give you enough cash flow to hire someone to do it for you.

There is this little voice in everyone's head, saying that the extra work is too hard, that it'll be better not to stick it through. It's like there is a constant battle with yourself on what level of self-dominion you can achieve; meaning, your ability to actually get yourself to do what you want to do. It's running that 5th mile when you've run 4 and want to call it a day. It's coming home from work and putting in 2-3 hours into your side project when you just want to lay down and watch TV. How hard is it really to dig in and get it done?

I say what I do not to be critical of you--I don't know who you are, and I have no conflict with you personally--but because I know how sticky that emotion is. Feeling like that extra work isn't worth my time; I've been there. What it takes is doing small tasks, one at a time, to build momentum. Taking the trash out leads to cleaning your desk, which leads to writing up a short brief about things, and eventually, you're flying through and getting task after task done (not just work-related things) and you are 100% confident in your ability to say, "okay, so today I'm going to do X, Y, and Z," and at the end of the day you will have done those things.
So there is a level of dilution doesn't make sense, but I don't know that a good VC would proffer them. Does a VC no good to close a round and have the whole team walk away. I think this article is talking about situations where dilution is painful, but within the realm of reason.

Assuming even a small/moderately sized team, i.e. other people than just the founders are also employed, a good VC will grant new options to employees. The founders get hurt the most. If the VC's want to keep the founders around, then they need to ensure they're properly incentivized as well.

In some cases, you can get the deal done to take care of your people. Then unwind yourself and move on.
Has Google been having massive server downtime issues that I'm not aware of?
At a guess, Liability.

For Yahoo to state that they'd be keeping an archive of geocities up, there would be legal issues about what kind of guarantees they're giving, legal state of the sign-up 'contract' that people entered into when they started their geocities page, legal requirements for proving someone is who they say they are when they suddenly say 'hey, delete my page I created in 1997, btw, I moved 8 times and changed my name 3 times', how that all fits in with EU data protection laws, etc etc.

Geeks doing it makes it a 'fun project', with no expectation of those legal issues (not that some of them don't exist still). If it vanishes overnight, it's a loss of something that wasn't guaranteed,

For an individual to do something is a different endevour from a large corporation doing something, and in this case, the financial burden of keeping a read-only archive of geocities might have been too much for yahoo.

Or perhaps they never even contemplated it :)
it's not in the set that has been restored so far, but I haven't even scratched the surface yet. I've made a note and if it comes up I'll drop you an email.
Is it simillar concept as JNode ( http://www.jnode.org )?
Story Title: Linkbait

CRE sucks, but it sucks less in that area.
When the product manager says he navigated to the museum and is standing in front of it, he's actually on a green screen. You can see the difference in the lighting on him vs. the background. Kinda amusing.
The problem with philosophical zombies ("p-zombies") is that, since they're indistinguishable from normal humans, some of them must go around talking about qualia and consciousness and so on; it's mysterious what's causing them to do this, since they don't actually have any qualia or consciousness.

This is the strongest argument that mind is matter: mental things like qualia clearly do cause physical events (e.g. discussions about qualia), which seems to suggest that qualia etc are themselves physical, since we expect physical events to have physical causes.

(And yet I can't stop wondering how being a collection of atoms feels like anything.)
You never know! This may be a good opportunity to launch a startup. Some users may be interested in maintaining their sites so maybe tools can offered to help them in that regard. The work done so far is commendable and there is more work yet to be done. It would be a shame if all the work goes unrewarded!
Unquestionably A), because whatever the likelihood of that, it is more likely than politicians creating a Silicon Valley.
Congrats on the coverage!

I met most of the AirBnB folks at Startup School (awesome party, by the way) and they were all really awesome and helpful.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time that someone made something profitable out of someone else's "trash". Good on ya!
Psystar Emerges From Bankruptcy With New Product, Same Insane Resolve
I'd say just use the same function name. people will learn what is what as long as it sticks to some sort of consistent convention.
Ask HN: what's the best python-supported web hosting out there?
I'm looking for a very good python-supported web hosting service. Do you guys have any suggestion?
>1. On my Windows and Mac machines I refuse to install the Silverlight plug-in

Wow .. you refuse to install it because .. why ? It's MS ? it's a small plugin man get over it.

I constantly see this : ohhhh it's silverlight, nevermind what the application does - let's throw stones at it cause it's silverlight.
Object-Oriented C (OOC): Creating Foundation Classes
D-Day For Facebook App Developers
Droid uses the default Android 2.0 UI. It's a "Google Experience" phone, which means that it's just running standard Android. AFAIK, Verizon didn't touch anything.

If you don't like this, then you're probably not going to like any of the other Android 2.0 devices either.
Glad I did a text search before commenting so I could vote you up for Pimsleur: I found the Pimsleur language learning approach great for the car when the commute is mostly on a freeway rather than a road with traffic lights.
That makes sense, in a weird, twisted, PR sort of way.
In the past, I have emailed blogs that have just written a story about a topic relevant to my company.

For example, when GigaOm wrote a store called "Where's the money in casual gaming?", I emailed them saying "Hey, we've got a great way to monetize casual games." Their staff picked up the email and forwarded it to one of the writers.

Since then, we have relied on a PR firm to get press. It costs money, but it can be very helpful. We are fortunate enough to have found a local, well-connected, and relatively affordable firm.
And Hollywood was nothing more than orange groves outside of Los Angeles before Lumiere invented the motion picture camera. Was that a one-off? So far that does seem to be the case. Lots of places will compete for the title of being the second-best version of "the center of the universe" for industry X, Y, or Z but there are very few examples of the center actually moving once it has established itself.
I think the Chinese dominating the web is going to happen, but it won't disrupt non-chinese speaking content consumption and associated services. Japan is wired and almost all 8-50 yr olds use technology actively and infuse a large amount of content (mixi.jp anyone?) into the web - dominating Japanese content streams, search and web services. However, to the non-Japanese speaking/reading world they only see the occasional odd image, news, etc. Silos are a nice analogy.
Funny, that's precisely what we're doing at DocumentCloud -- Base.js for OOP / jQuery.js for DOM and Ajax / Underscore.js for functional...

Part of the idea is to make it easy to add functional utility methods to an existing project without making any other assumptions. You can use it with whatever OO scheme you've got cooked up, any Ajax library, and any DOM-manipulation framework.
I think you're making a case against government intervention in the market, and my argument is that government has a role in defining the market. It's a different concept.

As for government protecting rights -- right on. But this gets to whether you view connectivity as an arbitrary service or product or something else. I think the problem we have is that the old metaphors are not descriptive enough. Access to the computer, the internet, and the electric grid are extensions of my person, not external entities. Of course the amount that I have of these things are dependent on my actions, but access to them should not be.

That's not an argument in favor of the government regulating or providing anything, btw. the market can and should provide value based on need -- once I have free and open access.

Computers and connectivity are extensions of our brains, and should not be controlled, even passively, by government. By ensuring connectivity and processing ability, the government is actually getting out of the way of citizens performing their daily lives, not intruding in on them.

We see the same "bad metaphor" problem with Digital Rights Management. If you view the computer as some sort of super record player that folks plays songs on, then perhaps the government has a say in what happens there? (because it is somewhat of a performance) But if you view computers as an extension to people's brains, as they surely are becoming, then controlling what goes on seems silly at best and evil at worst.