skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Legal rights on the other hand are abstract meaning they can be equal if the law says they are.

But the law does not say they're equal, as has already been pointed out to you. And yes, pointing to civil unions — which embody a subset of the legal rights granted to legally married couples — as a justification for not granting full marriage rights to homosexual couples is a perfect demonstration of the fallacy of "separate but equal" institutions.

If civil unions really were a perfectly fine substitute for legally recognized marriage, do you think the civil rights movement would have been so up in arms about Proposition 8?
"was guaranteed (literally, contractually)"

What benefit does Microsoft get to offset this huge potential liability?
And rather than posting any useful details in the twitter feed they simply spam it with @replies saying the same thing. Oh, and post.ly links which are also affected by the apparent DDOS.

It would be vastly more beneficial to post a link to the instructions than simply repeatedly posting:

"if you have a custom domain, pls send an email to help@posterous.com for instructions; otherwise u should be up in 1 hour"

Can't say I'm impressed with how they are handling the PR aspect of it.
>- Every parent can send their kids to whatever school they wish.

This is an impossible system to work if you don't have unlimited funds for education. Parents want to send their kids to "the good school" getting the better grades, with better facilities or whatever. Not all parents in an area can do this, there isn't enough room. As the good school gets fuller, it takes more of the cream and the other schools suffer. But this school is leaching the money away from other schools too as the richer parents that help to contribute time and resources and money move to the "good school". Ultimately the other schools aren't getting the pupils they need to run properly and suffer incredibly. The one school gets better the others worse.

>- Each school is directed entirely by the parents, with no interference from government bureaucracy.

There are many areas of running a school that can be made more efficient by using local government departments. Paying employees, insurance, grounds-keeping, building maintenance, healthcare provisions, utility purchasing, school meal provision, etc., can all be run more efficiently with a local grouping of schools rather than individual schools fighting it out for themselves. Do you know who is good at administrating such groups? Local government.

Indeed things like creating syllabuses and setting exams can too be streamlined by cooperation across schools.

>- Each school gets $X per enrolled student.

I'm assuming here that you're not allowing x to vary from school to school. What about areas with high levels of non-native language speakers that need translators and extra helpers. Or that by some quirk have large numbers of disabled students that require special care and equipment. Or those in rural areas that pay a lot more for bus travel than inner-city schools. Do these schools have to restrict the care and opportunity they give to pupils because of costs that are out of their control?
Interesting, but dictionary.com and m-w.com claim that it's a contraction of "al(though) be it".

* http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/albeit
* http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/albeit
Wikileaks Must Be Stopped
If you didn't add Node.js no one would have upvoted it. Node.js is so hot right now.
If the owner is reading this: Add a link to your product on the header of the blog. I wanted to know more about your company/product, but I was stuck in your tumblr blog.
I bet she was referring to the shutter speed. People then didn't have context to know the film was slow, just like we don't call all of our digital cameras "low-resolution" although they will be in 50 years.
Android's widgets widget is quite good. Simple and to the point. Think Microsoft Office's paper clip, only that you can get rid of and which has 5 or 6 tips in it.
Here we go: http://twitpic.com/2bnkba

And I can't believe anyone here would be snotty enough to downvote because I used the term "advanced." From what I remember, I am using GMail as it originally was because people complained about this at the time. I can Select All for delete spam in YahooMail. Adding this to GMail would be trivial. And this HTML mode is what people have to fall back to when the "standard" GMail is not working.

EDIT: I had to change the snaplink.
i hope he goes and works with wepay on the payments space
FuXi: A Python-based logical reasoning system for the semantic web
I guess you're trying to characterize laws that happen to apply to a particular subset of population that you'll label a "minority" and characterize them as "discrimination" hence equal them with laws that are really discriminating.

The point you're missing is that those other laws are against behaviors that we find bad for society. We don't have laws that discriminate against drug users as a group (e.g. disallowing drug users to enter restaurants), we just have laws that penalize drug use and distribution. Our laws don't discriminate smokers but penalize smoking.

Denying marriage to gays discriminates against gays. It doesn't penalize a behavior.

This is not a subtle distinction.
iBooks is easily the best PDF reader I've used on any platform. I find myself syncing PDFs to it to read instead of scrolling through them in my browser, even when I'm at the computer anyway.

We use it for a lot of browsing. I have a laptop and a Mac Mini connected to the TV, so when my girlfriend is over (often) she uses it to browse, browse YouTube clips, catch up on news, Twitter, etc. it's quite handy.

I got a copy of Air Video and the associated free server for Mac, and we use that to watch TV or movies in bed (we watched Lisa's Wedding the other night to celebrate Lisa's wedding).

For games, I finally got her into PvZ by loading it up on the iPad, and then putting the thing down for a few minutes. There's also Dig It HD, stick golf, and a few other casual time-wasters. Also planning on getting Scrabble and the Scrabble word tile iPhone app for myself and my girlfriend (and other friends), to try that out. Interesting use of technology.

I started reading comics as well, though I only browsed through a few free or cheap issues available on Comixology. I also found myself getting frustrated with books, so I loaded up digital copies of Scott Pilgrim on it, and found myself reading much faster than I normally would.

Likewise, I read more on the iPad (and now, my iPhone 4) than I have in recent years, mostly because of the convenience of having books anywhere. I mostly use the Kindle app, just because the iBooks store was devoid of non-free content when the iPad launched in Canada, and Amazon has a better selection (plus I can shop from my laptop).

Losing it wouldn't be devastating, but it's incredibly convenient. I take it with me most of the time when I leave the house (I have the 3G version) and it's nice to be able to just load something up.
Sir Stirling Moss's tricked out pad including automated bath running
Hey Yelp geeks, this would be quite a bit more impressive if you could select from a range of kegs in a properly sized kegerator using the touch-screen, possibly including custom blends mixed from different kegs. It could keep track of your favorite beer, so you could just swipe your RFID and pour exactly what you want. Hurry and get to work on version 2.0, and be sure to keep us posted.

I could see this being popular at bars; self-serve beer stations with an electronic tab, used with a swipe of an RFID wrist band they give you at the door. Flag your friends' accounts and buy them a round of drinks with the tap of a button. Add an augmented reality iPhone app to buy a girl across the bar a drink (credit her RFID account), and things are looking pretty futuristic all of a sudden.
Poor/middle class libertarians generally hate the ideas of paying taxes, or any for that matter.

On the other hand, the tax burden and the supposed services and goods provided might have a larger effect on the poor but rich-compatible ideologues.
Understandable, but still a shame.

We've got a wave going with about 14 people planning our trips to Ruby Kaigi in a few weeks. It's working really well and has definitely provided value that would be tricky to find elsewhere.

Could Wave have worked better if it targeted a vertical? Or is that not how Google does things?
Japan isn't some third-world backwater, there are opportunities abound for people who are willing to work and fight for it

Regardless, in any first world country there are plenty of people who are willing to sit on their butts and not try to do better for themselves unless they're pushed through life with social programs and social "contracts" as were mentioned. I don't like it either, but, sadly, I'm not convinced we can get everyone to be eager, enthusiastic, ethical go-getters either.
Becoming wealthier often involves making other people wealthy absolutely by providing better goods and services.

It might be more cost-efficient to make everything cheaper to make it easier to help Africans in poverty.
So I have a question - doesn't this effectively take billions of dollars that was (via investment) essentially going to capital expenditures to increase productivity overall and make it go instead to consumer expenditures? Doesn't that make the country worse off overall, despite helping a few people in the short run?
> The practical purpose of marriage is to give protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing.

[citation needed]

Accepting that for the sake of argument — suppose I'm sterile, then. Or I just don't plan on having any kids. Do I still have a right to all the benefits that heterosexual couples obtain from legally recognized marriage? If so, then on what basis are those rights granted to me, but not to my gay neighbors next door? (I'm seriously curious whether you'll say no, sterile couples don't deserve those rights, or whether you'll just engage in more special pleading toward the prescribed end of denying marriage rights to gay couples.)

But back in reality, those of my friends who've gotten married already had many reasons for doing so, and "giving protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing" certainly wasn't at the top of their lists.

And dismissing discussion of crucial benefits such as the right to visit your husband or wife in the hospital as "appeals to emotion" is nothing short of absurd.
> "The people" are paying for it.

My claim is that they don't see that they're paying for it and they should. This isn't ADA-specific.
Fixed @:)
The high point is the versatility. It makes a great eBook reader, but it also makes a great comic reader, a great web browser, a great YouTube watcher, a decent twitter client, a remote control for my home theatre, a game console, a Skype phone, an interactive map, a Scrabble board, an image editor, a newspaper, an RSS reader, the National Film Board of Canada's digital archives, an IM client, a way to stream video to anywhere in my home, an iPhone locator (MobileMe), a dictionary…

The point is, it's incredibly versatile, and it does a lot of things very well. On top of all that, it's light (but feels sturdy), it's small (but not too small), it can go a few days of casual usage without a charge (so I can plug it in whenever is convenient), and it's easy to use.

I paid $850 Canadian or so for the 32 GB 3G version, and other than the first day, when I was trying to get a hang on what to use it for and where it fits into my life, I've never wondered about the purchase. Using it to read news articles and RSS feeds, then switching it over to recipes so my girlfriend and I can make truffles before we curl up in bed and watch a movie on it, it's really a wonderful device. I could do all of that on my laptop, but it would be more cumbersome, take up more space on the counter, run out of battery faster, weigh more, etc.
Microsoft made $250M profit yesterday.
Yeah, right. Even if the "25% each" estimate is right: the part that "naturally dissolved or evaporated" does not just disappear, but gets diluted to the point where further effects are not readily attributable to it. The part that was dispersed is still as toxic as before, it has just become practically impossible to recover it. The real news is that only one third of the spill can be recovered at all; the rest (plus the incredible amount of wanton Corexit poisoning) will be a constant burden on the environment of the gulf of Mexico for the years to come.

That article is most likely just spin.
I can't believe you're being voted down. The idea that marriage is solely for the purpose of childbearing is patently absurd. Marriage is a lifelong partnership with a myriad of benefits and responsibilities, some of which are recognized and codified by the state. The state also recognizes that marriage provides enormous good to society, not only child care, but also care of the aging, the unemployed and the infirm. It is also a partnership that is deeper, longer lasting and more important to society than that between any lawyer/barber/personal trainer and client.
First of all, religious arguments against or for anything should be irrelevant in civil arguments, it's a question of human rights. For example, the recent discussions on wearing burqas does center on whether their use is religiously dictated or not but rather the trade-offs of the rights between wearers and society at large.

This trade-off point is my main counter argument. Specifically, this means that gay marriage can have drawbacks for the society, e.g. (i) as others point out, the same logic (consenting adults, personal rights, etc.) can be used to argue for polygamy and other forms of relationships that are outside current society's norms; (ii) it may have adverse affects on the couples children.
Epic talent?
So this is how one defines Opportunity Cost...
Unfortunately by the time we can count on this being available on a majority of client computers, the web will have moved on to newer and better things.

As long as Microsoft insists on allowing users to use anything but the latest version, we will have to play to the slowest mover - which will make everybody suffer.
Google is buying distribution across many social networks in lots of countries, and a team 100+ smart engineers and product designers.
It's about discrimination, there's no slope.

It's discrimination because non-gays can marry and gays cannot.

This does not apply to polygamous or incestuous relationships. Those are not recognized by law, but they are denied to everyone equally.

Also, "union between a man and a woman" does cover incest so clearly that's not the definition used by courts when deciding who can marry. Your premise is flawed and even if it wasn't, you're just trying to confound completely separate issues.

Again, it's about discrimination.
I've been surprised recently how many worldly people have been cheering Wikileaks and think what they're doing is OK. This isn't a judgment on anyone - just surprise. I'm as big an infojunkie as anyone ;-)

Is there significant support amongst the intelligentsia for nixing laws like the Espionage Act and Official Secrets Act that the government and military rely on?
It wasn't so much that they lacked infrastructure as that the early versions didn't scale so well.

I got a very early invitation, and it was pretty slow, and got worse as they added more users. They fixed that of course, but it did slow down the roll-out.
It's seemed to me like the people most upset by the antenna problem are the ones who don't use Apple products. This is not a controversy driven by outraged iPhone 4 buyers.
True, gay people can enter into heterosexual marriages. As for the subsidy, I doubt that will change unless the affected group decides it has become too onerous and starts putting pressure on their representatives to remove it. Which means that more people getting married could shed more light on how unfair the system is for single people. It shouldn't have to be this way but unfortunately that seems to be how it goes.
Where is the radical change? Allowing a tiny sliver of the population to enjoy the same privileges and responsibilities as the rest of us?

Let's be clear here: compulsory gay marriage would be radical. Allowing gay people to marry is not.
I removed the external font file and some other css that may skew the results. Next, I'll re-test and the charts automatically update.
Isn't that toad from Microsoft who was previously heading up the Android effort the guy slotted to take over Google Me? As cute as Slide is I really don't see very much about it that screams "social"; its not much more social that Google Docs and if Google has any intention of playing in the next big game it has to do much, much better than this.
As a Kenyan who falls under the OP's definition of "a bunch of Africans" I do not want American philanthropy to "feed or cloth" Africa.

Most African economies are agricultural and it is therefore alarming that the EU uses 40% of it's budget(about 48B Euros annually) on agricultural subsidies. The US uses about $20B every year on the same.Ending these subsidies would enable Africa to export more, buy more products from the US and Europe as well as form the basis for industrialization.

We need more trade and less aid. Is that asking for too much?

More info;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy

http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978963,00.ht...
The Etherpad guys originally tried to build a platform (AppJet). Then etherpad took off, and they pivoted to building the company around that.

Not saying they wouldn't be a bit disappointed, just that their original version changed at least once and they seem to have dealt with that ok.
How To Create Flash Slideshow Easily
Would love to be able to:

1. set my own url

2. set a password

3. create categories

Great job.
I like the fail fast strategy too.

But Buzz is great! What don't you like about it?
rockyou is doing quite well- def bigger then Slide. They just signed a 5 yr deal with facebook for using fb credits in all social games http://tcrn.ch/adWPTK
I thought that was the most ridiculous quote as well. One company makes an open-source operating system, the other exerts iron-fisted control over what developers and users can do with it's OS.
Dev Giving Away $12K in MSDN Subs to Unemployed/Non-Profits
I prefer to have lot of lands and lot of space to conduct scientific experiment, build rockets and train network and generally engage in hacking physical stuff.

Still, I might make use of small space design principle for my imaginary hacker mansion, if only to make use of it more efficiently and make my house feel larger than it really is.
I am struck by four things.

1) Wikileaks is really pissing people off. I don't mean the nicey, lets-go-protest-down-at-the-student-union kind of protest. I mean people who are not normally angry with anybody else in the world talking about throwing him in jail and/or killing him. Devil or Angel, that's a whole heap of pissing off he's accomplished.

2) Assange has more power than many 3-star generals, yet he's just some guy running a web service. That's awesome if you're Assange, but for the rest of us, we have to live with the world that results with whatever he decides to leak or not.

3) Anarchy is not the same as openness. Openness says I demand full insight into what my government is doing. If not me personally, then somebody I elected or appointed. Anarchy says any type of secret is bad and open air always beats secrets. Governments can't function without secrets -- even your local small town has to have secret meetings to discuss personnel issues and such. Wikileaks is, to my mind, opposed to this cornerstone of government. That's anarchy.

4) If Assange wants to play this game, he should think long and hard about where it's going to lead him. Right now he's having a field day because records are centralized and available electronically. But for every move there is a counter-move. I know if I were running a covert op anywhere in the world there's no freaking way I'd put anything on a computer anywhere. If he would rather have millions of little secrets offline and out of sight, that's what we're going to get. Which makes the entire intelligence community even harder to manage for those folks managing it. Is that better than what we have now? It's the exact opposite of what he says he wants.

There's a certain amount of cocky self-promoting asshole about Assange. As much as I want the maximum amount of liberty, freedom, and openness, this isn't the way to make it happen.
Probably true. I wonder sometimes what kind of subtle cracks it may expose in the cult of Apple, but they do seem to have weathered the storm well. Just a minor drizzle, I guess.
I missed a 'not'.
I'd be all for it - in the subsidy case anyway. And I'm married.
Python 2.6.6rc1 Released
Hm, is that actually true? Internet Explorer 7 seems to be fading fast. Internet Explorer 6 is in my eyes the only really big problem and there is not much Microsoft can do about it. (They should bring IE9 to XP but I don’t think that’s going to help all that much.)

Transitions seem to be fast now, Microsoft can push out updates relatively quickly.
- “I love Google, but I’m afraid it has a chance of becoming the Microsoft of the future. You remember how Microsoft used all of their ownership of the operating system to take over the browser … “

Pot, meet kettle.
You can tell the suits have taken over at google, at least in acquisitions. This makes no sense at all.
Low Tolerance for Boredom
You're using very simplistic and very wrong definition of what equality and discrimination is.

For example, denying gay marriage discriminates against gays by denying a specific, identifiable group (gays) the right to marry that is given to everyone else.

You're trying to claim that the same logic applies to e.g. laws against smoking which, in your naive interpretation, "discriminate" against smokers. The crucial and not so subtle difference is that law against smoking bans a behavior. It would be discrimination if we had laws that prohibits smokers to marry.

So yes, the courts made the right decision I do want the courts to apply constitution in the future to abolish laws that violate mine and yours constitutional rights, equality being among them.

Using your reasoning serial killers are a minority and laws against killing are discrimination.
3) Anarchy is not the same as openness. Openness says I demand full insight into what my government is doing. If not me personally, then somebody I elected or appointed. Anarchy says any type of secret is bad and open air always beats secrets. Governments can't function without secrets -- even your local small town has to have secret meetings to discuss personnel issues and such. Wikileaks is, to my mind, opposed to this cornerstone. That's anarchy.

Some crypto-anarchists and agorists would like to have a few words with you.
> But it's also true that Bush took inherited a surplus and doubled the national debt in a "boom" economy

The deficit under the last Repub congress was $100B/year and the trend was downwards. That changed when the Dems took congress for Bush's last two years. The current deficit is $100B/month.

Note that Congress didn't pass a budget in 2008 - they held back until after Obama became president.
Facebook Buys Friendster Patents for $40M
I know the protocol is a bit complicated, but didn't they say a while back they're going to open source a reference implementation of the server? Is this it?: http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/

I do not know if that's a complete Wave server, or if it's missing a piece. But if it is a complete Wave server, there's nothing to "save". It's already been saved. You just need to run it yourself, and possibly support from Google for exporting your data once. If it isn't, maybe some people will fill in the blanks. If nobody steps forward to fill in the blanks then the demand probably wasn't there in the first place.