People have asked us for a way to try it out with other people, so here's a set of pads for news.yc readers to play with:

http://etherpad.com/ep/newsyc

For the curious, I added this URL to our running web server in 5 minutes with 12 lines of JavaScript:

  function render_newsyc_get() {
    function countUsers(p) {
       return getCollab().getDocument(p).getNumConnectedUsers();
     }
     var body = BODY({style: 'padding: 20px; font-family: monospace;'});
     body.push(H3("Welcome news.ycombinator readers! ",
   	       "Join us in an EtherPad of your choosing:"));
     pads.forEach(function(p) {
       body.push(A({href: p}, p), '   ('+countUsers(p)+' users)', BR());
     });
     response.write(HTML(body));
  }

Just a taste of the AppJet Web Platform. (A separate 1-time script generated the array "pads").