skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read every word on your website:

Unlimited FREE Voice
Social Networking integration
No Subscription Fees
Blazing fast servers & superior sound performance
Download and Chat
No Fees, No Cost, No Worries!
Supports: Windows XP, Vista,7
Password secured servers and channels
Customizable backgrounds
Superior Audio Quality
Voice normalization
Easy to use, clean interface

And I still wonder: What is it about? Is it something like skype? Im not a skype user so even if it is - I would still not be sure what it is.
You know, when I'm talking to engineers, if they say "relational databases are always good" or "relational databases are always bad", I conclude that they're either inexperienced or stupid.

The same oughta be true when evaluating different methods of solving other problems as well. Busses can be run by private companies as long as the government provides the roads, because you don't need government involvement to drive on a road.

Building a road, or a train track, requires some amount of government involvement, especially in dense areas with small lot sizes. Unless we're gonna knock down half the skyskrapers for 30 story parking garages in our major cities, we need to find a way to make mass transit work.

There's 2 approaches towards that -- try to help the right people get into government, or throw your hands up, bury your head in the sand and declare that "databases are never the right solution".
Are Face-Detection Cameras Racist?
Of course it is, it's quite common for many companies to compete with offers, and the local authorities choose the best one. But that kind of competition is not aimed at the end user, passenger.
No offence, but the site is just ugly, you should redesign it ASAP. Seriously! The product looks pretty interesting though. Doesn't Skype more-less provide these services?
Ever since I've had a kid, I've felt that the nipple quote is bullshit. Infants have to learn how it works at first when starting breastfeeding. They don't just know how it works fresh out of the womb. The instinctive part of the process is that the baby happens to have a natural desire to suckle stuff - nipple-shaped or not.
"If you say yes to anything I just asked, I will kill you."

... no?
Always a legit question that I hope I can answer to the best of my ability.

We are highly interested at this moment in disrupting the market more than anything else. The current market for gaming voice clients is a tad stagnant and we'd like to do better in the long run.

We have a paid Pro version, which is $24.99/year and allows more users to join a server and the creation of more servers. We are adding additional features to the pro account to make it yet more compelling for a larger portion of our gamers. We're considering various virtual goods setups, as well as in-client advertising for the free clients.

While I realize this doesn't present an entire business model , we've got a few other tricks up our sleeves too and think that if we can perfect our software then we'll have a decent chance at making it work.
Interview with Blippy Co-founder
Those are all good points, but they don't say much regarding nicknames vs. real names, they say that the Facebook concept itself may not work very well in Japan, real names or no. :-)

The only thing that touches on real names is unwanted friend invites, since real names makes it easier for people to find you and possibly try to friend you. I don't know if that's gonna be a dealbreaker though, I think people can overcome that with the limited friend profiles?

Anyway, the article tries to predict the failure of Facebook in Japan on the grounds of it not being like all previous virtual communities, i.e. about groups of people already online making new circles of friendship. But Facebook was never such a virtual community, it was always about modelling your real-life social network, about hooking up online with people you were already friends with, not the other way around. And having real names is a crucial part of that.

Facebook may very well fail in Japan because of different privacy expectations, but changing it to make it more similar to existing community products is pretty bad advice.
Square for iPhone Demo by Kevin Rose
The amtrak yearly subsidy is in the neighborhood of 1.3B a year (http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/bg2072es.cfm) while congress generally passes highway bills which number in the 100s of billions every other year or so.

Incomplete story as it's totally ignoring state/local roads and city-level metros -- but that's one data point for you.
Not really more time. When someone wants to force me into a price quote I know that they are trying to monopolize my time with a sales call or the very least a lengthy e-mail chain. That's a lot of time.

Meanwhile companies like Fog creek (Fog Bugz), Zen Desk, Atlassian, and a host of others just sell me the damn software that I want without a huge sales hassle.

They also happen to be the companies that I actually use.
This may come in handy as I'm in a bit of a quandry. I have stormpulse.net and stormpulse.org registered through Yahoo!, and they want $43.95 per year (!) per domain. I'm afraid of letting them lapse, but I feel completely gouged. I've tried transferring to GoDaddy but hit a dead-end last time I attempted.

EDIT: I just did more research and apparently this has to do with the private registration for which we paid Y! an extra $9/yr. Apparently, GoDaddy was sending emails to contact@myprivateregistration.com (the email addy Y! uses for private reg), which is a black hole! http://www.sarahpin.com/2008/07/19/recent-researches-why-yah... Ugh.
Hustle (how to learn new stuff)
I think it's supposed to be a competitor for Ventrilo, more than Skype. Vent is very popular for online gaming- While the software is free, selling hosting packages for it makes a LOT of money every year.
Skype is rather similar in some ways and we often look at them as a role model. Skype is much more CPU/memory/bandwidth intensive and lacks some of the gaming-centric functionality that we're integrating. Also, Skype user conferences don't scale over 8-users, which is a barrier for many massive gamers.

I agree on the site. We've got a new 'look' that we have deployed on a landing page and we're hoping to roll out site-wide soon with some additional revisions (http://imvox.com/warcraft_ventrilo_hosting_voice_chat_altern...). Any parts particularly offensive on the current one (or future) that I can pass along to our designer?
For the last one: Lisps (in general) have a history/tradition/perception of being innovative and pushing the boundaries of language, for better or for worse. For modern examples, Scheme was arguably more guided by aesthetic principles than pragmatic ones, and Clojure is an exploration of immutable structures and concurrency. Many lisps were highly experimental pet projects, and associated with academic research rather than industrial applications. They were also commonly descibed as "elegant," where the "art" part of the quote comes from.

Common Lisp is notable among lisps for breaking this tradition. It was meant to be industrial-strength, which goes for robustness and completeness at the expense of elegance, and rather than innovation merely contains a lowest-common-denominator mix of (then-)standard lisp capabilities. In short, Common Lisp is the most Worse-Is-Better of any lisp dialect, putting practicality ahead of being really slick.

The quote ascribes this to CL being designed by committee, rather than being designed by eccentric (or straight-up batshit crazy) enthusiasts the way that lisps have been historically. While this certainly relates to its lowest-common-denominator look & feel, I would argue the language's design goals already set it down that path when it was the pet project of Steele & friends, even before it became a literal committee product. One could quip that Steele dragged C half-way to lisp and got Java, and then dragged lisp half-way to Java and got Common Lisp.
> Such statements also come out of biologists discussing evolution.

A lot of my friends are scientists, including in a couple biochemists and some other people that do more or less serious research into topics like that. In my experience, you're off on how they deal with stupid people and stupid arguments - instead of "get out of biology" and moving on with their lives, they tend to address and correct errors, debate if necessary, or at least point the person towards a relevant piece that explains things and take new criticisms and arguments and address them if necessary.

The scientists I know always been open to me saying stupid things (and occasionally not stupid things) and correcting me if I'm wrong, or exploring together if I might not be wrong. Good biologists don't say, "Get out of biology".

> Hopefully some day someone will take the energy to do the same with climate science.

Oh, hah, I honestly responded quickly and missed the climate science analogy originally. If you wanted to make an apologia for climate science, then I do understand why you'd want to draw a biology:evolution:creationism to climate science:global warming:deniers parallel.

I was responding to the "want to get on with their lives" part as being wrong based on my experience, as scientists are usually rather encouraging and tolerant of dissent. Climate science is not so much interested in people and data which disagree with them, which is a pretty big problem.
Agreed. If I was designing something like that, it would have a motorized roof. And a comfier chair. And a bigger desk. And be more like an open space which closed up for security at night than a closed space all the time. Or even, more like sitting outside with a laptop on a patio table and instead of walls closing around for security, you go back inside...

PS. Gardners want to work in tiny glass boxes because plants grow better in the warm humid greenhousy atmosphere. Maybe ideas do too?
I agree about clarity. The headphones image makes me initially think music service with social features, and I felt like I had to interpret all the bullet points just to figure out what it was.

The logo is a little distracting. Am I missing the connection of what the orange circle/triangle mark is supposed to suggest? Plus your eye tends to follow triangles (arrows), and this one is leading to left into nothing.

The screen shot is nice, and the colors and the design of the UI look like much better choices than the dated blues and greens.

FAQ is your best page- clear and focused. The features is too distracted by the right column. Does download need a testimonials column that looks so similar to the two download packages?

I know this has nothing to do with the product itself, but we all know marketing is just as (more?) critical.
Agreed. Honestly, your typography in general needs some major work. Hire some freelancer to work one hour and he can do some amazing things (assuming he knows what he is doing). The neon green colours are also painful.
It'd be interesting to see how far we could take a loosely coupled network for Wordpress installs towards this goal. How actually to make that work is something I've been pondering lately.

Also, I think the work that Dave Winer's been doing around realtime RSS is a huge step in this direction.
Yeah, I see your point.

I probably shouldn't have said, "He dislikes both sides" when I should have said, "He attacks/criticizes both sides." My intent was to show he's not some blind partisan hack.

I'm not sure if he's a leftist either. Some people accused him of being a libertarian in the past.
Buses work admirably, even in the USA. They're more economical, faster to deploy, and actually have a smaller carbon footprint. But bus systems tend to be underfunded, and there's a stigma for those who ride them -- essentially, many believe buses are for poor people. What a mistake!
The most ironic thing is if you copy paste the PRC Constitution law on any blog, forum even webmail in China, you'll fail to submit because the system will prompt you there's 'illegal keyword' in the content.

pic: http://i.imgur.com/XrGlR.jpg
more than likely!

I'll look in to it.
Without RTA, I don't think I agree with your comment. For two reasons.

First, markets move on information. Maybe one piece of big, important information, like a war, or more generally millions of bits of information. But it is a reasonable observation to note the correlation between big news stories and market moves.

Second, most times markets don't move on big news. In that case, the trend that I've seen for over a decade is for people to simply speculate on why the market moved one way or another for a particular day. It's not science, it's not news -- it's informed speculation, or entertainment.

I think serious investors let this type of entertainment roll off of them -- after all, people like to chat, and media forums like the WSJ (or HN) provide them a forum to do so.

Separating the noise from the signal is the entire purpose of becoming a good investor. Thinking it's all signal or all noise is a good way to never be one.
Something like this (not this) would be wonderful on top of a building in NYC. If you lived in a brownstone (owned a brownstone) and could put one of these on top, that'd be awesome.
Let's look at some statements in your post:
Does anyone seriously think that a determined information-seeker in China can't find out whatever information he/she wants?

Google's move to pull out of China, aside from harming average Chinese people.

So "determined information seekers" could the information the information that Google wasn't giving but by no longer providing government approved data, Google is harming average Chinese? I know you're teasing out two different groups in China but the argument seems remarkably stretched.

China has long been a huge buyer of US treasury bills, in order to keep its currency low relative to the dollar. This helps make China's export industry more competitive but harms the Chinese in general.

Given that this policy has allowed China to gain the second largest economy in the world over twenty-odd years, how has it harm average Chinese?

I would certainly say this policy is unsustainable and needs to be adjusted for that reason. But that's a somewhat different matter.
lol, no one gives a shit to constitution law in China. Countless official rules, regulations or 'TongZhi' violates constitution law directly.
It goes to show how stubborn IE6 is at dying. Corporate lock-in for the win! http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors
Good point. The best I can say is that life is complicated and inconsistent. If you are an attractive project, you will get good developers no matter where you and they are. People will make it work. But most people outsourcing are not sexy, high profile, open source projects. If you are a boring corporate project looking to pay bottom dollar by hiring elsewhere, you're going to get what you pay for.
But this is a problem that can be tackled, and those who take it seriouslt already do so. For example, in our pipelines we use an infrastructure that always adds every command executed on the file, with every exact parameter, to the metadata of the file, starting from one canonical archived file - and hence, one can indeed reproduce manually the result of the pipeline given sufficient time and dedication. [Edit: we also write the git shar1]

The same way that say, biology labs have processes they engage in in order to convince us that their samples are not contaminated, we can have processes that lead to the reproducibility of data.
Admittedly, we do some stuff that is questionable, like storing images and libraries

Not questionable at all. We do the same thing, all the way down to storing tarballs of software-packages a project depends on - it is the right way. The blame is on git here for not supporting it better. I.e. it should be much easier to selectively truncate history or even define an object-level attribute like "Only keep the last 3 versions of this".

Regardless we're getting along with git quite well, despite .git sizes in the gigabytes for some projects.

Our main complaints about git are access control and sub-projects at this point.

Subprojects ("submodules") in git are a royal pain in the ass. I consider them broken-by-design. A simple equivalent to svn-externals would work so much better...

This, combined with the complete lack of directory based access control, makes it rather cumbersome to work with "partially trusted" third parties in a commercial setting. We don't want to open our entire repository to some temporary contractor. Neither have we found the hassle of git submodules worthwhile for this purpose.

That's why we're still using SVN in this area, although I'd much prefer if we didn't have to.
Reminds me of an interesting Wired article from 2008: "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete" http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_t...
In a place where land is expensive you can still go ahead and build a 25 ft^2 addition for a hell of a lot less than $25k.
Given your site's (current) size, I doubt legal liability is an issue.
When the government seeks to regulate huge profit-makers at banks, it's completely rational for those banks' values to fall.

You're assuming markets are rational, and that the short term change in market structure was directly caused by a speech.

Again, the point I was trying to make was not that the sentiment due to the speech had shifted, but that the analysis by the WSJ was very politicized and intellectually dishonest.

The blogger points out that commodities fell harder. That and a nickel and a time machine will get you a cup of coffee.

And the real question then is, did the overall markets fall because of Obama's comments, or because of dollar strength and the widening of Greek CDS spreads? Since materials have a higher weighting in the market, would we not assume the latter?

There is a near-perfect inverse correlation between the value of the dollar and the market

That correlation started around 2H2008. Correlation running about -.5... nowhere near perfect; however, historically we have a positive correlation. Source: http://bit.ly/spycorr The liquidity infusions that the market has seen has very little to do with U.S. politics.

You can creepily see this happening on a tick-by-tick basis. I don't know why this is so perfect, but I suspect it almost has to be algos doing it. This is the kind of thing that the government (may) start regulating.

This happens due to capital inflows/outflows from different markets. If capital flows out of bonds, it most likely goes into stocks, which gives us this "creepy" movement... but there's nothing sinister behind it. Algorithmic trading has little to do with this, if at all.

One quick note: UUP is probably the worst tracker of dollar strength. It's an etf that is structurally damaged and has contract rollover issues due to it's exposure in front month dollar future contracts. I would suggest DXY or looking at a basket of currencies.
Fred Wilson and the Venture Capital (Non-)Cartel
Drop.io founder Sam Lessin on Why It's Cheaper to Be Public Than Private
Sorry for the obnoxious link, I had sound off when I posted it! Here is something less headache-inducing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeZep21f32o
I have no idea what imVOX is from visiting the landing page. Looking at the menu, I don't see any menu option which will explain this to me, so I try FAQ. Based on the first question answered there, I still don't know what imVOX as except that it's like Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. I don't know what those are either, so I'm probably not your target audience.

I think you could be a lot better at telling a story, at guiding people like me through your website in such a way that I leave thinking "wow, that is cool -- but I don't need it", instead of what happens now, where I have no clue what you're doing, will not be telling anyone about your service/product even though I may have friends who would find it useful.
Ultimately, I feel like this is more of a "hey, it's free!" decision than a "we are going to use, and give back to the community" decision. Open Source is not a donation to City Government. They should give back to the community if they are going to have an explicit policy like this.
On the contrary, I think math ed types want to keep the actual mathematicians out precisely because the mathematicians recognize how complex the field is. Every time I've been told "stay out, you don't know our field", it was because I pointed out complexity or plausible alternative explanations.

For example, a puzzle: why do SAT scores underpredict female performance in Calc 1, and overpredict grades in higher level courses? I suggested girls are more conscientious than boys, and that a study being proposed did not control for such factors. I even suggested a test of this hypothesis: compare grades in classes which are conscientiousness-weighted (25% homework, 10% attendance, tests questions are practice problems with numbers changed) to ability-weighted coursework (50% midterm, 50% final, test questions all new).

I'm not sure my idea was a good one. But rather than explain why either a) this had been tried, and didn't work, or b) why my test wouldn't work, I was simply told to leave the field to experts.

I've come up with plenty of dumb ideas in other areas, e.g., global existence of wave equations. The closest I've ever gotten to "stay out, you aren't an expert" was "Terry tried that and failed, ask him why before spending lots of time on it."

[edit: really confused why you are being downmodded.]
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[edit: added the bit about beta testing]
How TO Develop Your Business Continuity Plan
Once you build a generic structure it's easy to find it far more powerful than you first expected. IMO, this is the secret of all great programmers.
This is an excellent comparison. I can only upvote you once, but you deserve more.
do you have any thoughts on how/why the japanese rail system is as successful as it is? it doesn't seem like any of that quite fits into the description of their system except quality of service.
How can you tell that that's an official facebook page, and not a joe-random-fan-of-facebook page? It looks like any other individual or entity page.

I run in to this, for example, when I want to be a fan of a band or some other entity. Which of those is the entity's page and which are merely other fans?
I consider the taxes I pay to fund the US military to be a gas subsidy. Without it we wouldn't have access to such cheap and plentiful oil.
Maybe, but performing well in controlled press tour and demo environments is very different than performing well in a million different kinds of living room and lighting configurations. I'm not saying the tech is going to utterly fail, but these things typically do present a lot of problems for computer vision technology.