skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My view is that allowing gay marriage is itself a consequence (probably unintended but still welcome) of other radical changes to the institution of marriage in Western society in the last century or two. Such changes include the view of a marriage as a personal unit rather than an economic one united by love rather than mutual economic and social benefit, and the general increase of women's rights and convergence of gender roles (for example, women can own property, and are not treated as being property themselves). The whole "soulmate" thing is a relatively recent idea, but is the current ideal for marriage.

We have thousand of years of experience with a variety of institutions that share the name "marriage" but aren't very similar to each other. The current institution that bears that name has arguably only been around for about forty years, most recently being re-written by the sexual revolution and the increasing social acceptance of divorcing and re-marrying. Considering how flexible we as a society have become with respect to gender roles, this change is hardly "radical" by comparison.
Actually, the system is a constitutional democratic republic. There are many who believe that ballot propositions and referendums (like Prop 8) are in direct conflict with the structure and spirit of the system. Madison, notably, referred to direct democracy as the "tyranny of the majority." Hence, Congress.
A "good work ethic" is highly overrated. Maybe they just found their version of the "Four Hour WorkWeek". They work enough to get by, and spend the rest of their time doing what pleases them?
Do you have a source for the $2bn valuation. I've seen (+ personally remember) a $0.5bn figure but can't source $2bn.

Thanks
Well, maybe not any news site, but let's see what's going on on Reddit... hmm, new top story, I see: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/cxfcs/big_news_pro...
The main one I have heard is the slippery slope argument. If marriage is redefined as something other than a legal union between a man and a woman, where does definition of marriage come from?

In other words, if someone is for gay marriage, then on what grounds can they forbid polygamous or incestuous relationships or incestuous relationships?

Of course, this assumes that these other less popular alternative lifestyles should be forbidden as well.
Last Call: Pitch to find a Co-Founder at The Founder Conference
The Founder Conference is taking place in less than 2 weeks. There are spaces for 9 pitches from startups. These are not VC pitches or product launches. These pitches are for you to get help from the other 250 entrepreneurs in the room.

The beauty of Silicon Valley is that everyone tries to help eachother. Take advantage of it!

Just google "Founder Conference" for more details.
Slide illustrates "Stick to the point and say it in a single sentence. I know it sounds a little crazy, but indeed I’ve come to agree that a clear, compelling elevator pitch is essential to growing a business. (And I’ve paid dearly for the evidence.)" http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2006/01/practicing-art...
It's not just the devices that are US-centric, it's the whole iTunes experience. I find the selection of Movies & Books available through iTunes Germany to be sub-par insofar that I've bought all of my eBooks in Amazon Kindle format.
But this isn't reviewing a government action; it's reviewing a citizen initiative. It seems like the "community standards" argument must surely hold here if it does anywhere, even if the community is being irrational.
Here in DC, there was a movement to get a Prop 8 style ballot initiative to overturn our new gay marriage law. Luckily, the drafters of the DC charter had far better foresight than in California. You're simply not allowed to create a ballot initiative that would violate the Human Rights Act. Period. Doesn't matter how many signatures you get.

People have no business voting on how we should treat minority groups.
Nice. I was actually working on a similar project for a minimal realtime chat. Couch's new _changes api is pretty nifty for stuff like this. (http://books.couchdb.org/relax/reference/change-notification...)
As with an unfortunately large number of Google things, Wave was an absolutely stunning work of engineering art with a merely passable UI. The engineers obviously drove the development process, with the designers not being invited in until it was too late.

But this is where there exists, not to mince words, a monumentally huge opportunity. As Google begins to open-source more of Wave, there's room for a more UX-focused team to really bring out the tech's potential.

I'm not talking a new skin or even a new home layout; I'm talking a new software product that uses the real-time collaboration system in an ingenious new way. Google solved the engineering problem; now someone needs to solve the interaction design problem.
I said it before and I'll say it again: wave solved all of the wrong (easy) problems of communication and failed to tackle any of the hard problems. The result was a highly polished mashup of existing communication forms based on cutting edge technology that made for an excellent demo but a very poor (or at best niche) product. See also: the Segway.

P.S. Re: hard vs. easy problems: Wave tackled some hard challenges in the implementation space, which I think may have led the engineers into thinking they were building something innovative and worthwhile. However, the important bit is whether or not you've actually solved anything in the problem space.
I really hope nobody tries to use the internet to promote that argument.
At propagating the species, they are quite a bit superior. Anyway.

Chinese historians 200 years from now will scratch their heads over this sequence in the fall of the West.
Well I can see the idea of a gay couple raising a child sounding like a strange and dangerous idea to someone who hasn't been exposed to it, religious or not. For example: couldn't this lead to children being confused about their own sexual identity?

But one of the reasons for this ruling was that it was shown in the court-room that children do as well when raised by a same-sex couple as by a heterosexual one. It then follows that recognizing those couples would be even better for those families.
I don't think we should be allowing any argument that would also justify people posting cat pictures :) I agree that it's a nice piece of news; I just sometimes wish that HN had the same sort of #foo, #foo-offtopic division that specialized IRC channels usually do.

(And I realize—I was addressing the original poster in the context of your comment. :)
Trying custom games against the AI, I'm seeing occasional network blips.

I am betting a heartbeat or something to blizzard is happening at least.
There's something called the Bill of Rights. It's to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Just because the majority wants something doesn't mean it's legal.
Actually, had you actually read the ruling, you would have noticed that the primary foundation for the ruling was not the California state constitution, but the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses [US Constitution, Amendment XIV § 1].
Even though dropbox is probably simple enough to use without one, their "getting started" walkthrough is really the golden standard in my mind. Grooveshark is a little different, but whenever you access the site from a new IP, their little tooltips are informative yet unobtrusive. They're constantly improving their product too so they help with that too.

Just signed up for LeadNuke though, if anything comes to mind while I try it out I'll add it later.
Never underestimate the long-tail of Gay Erlang Programmers (GEPs) on HN. We're everywhere.
My point exactly.

Maybe they can adopt what the Chinese have started doing by paying a foreign person to appear to be the CEO for publicity purposes, even though the company would actually be owned and run by Japanese people. If the Japanese were made to believe that the company is a foreign one, would they be less opposed to its existence in their country?

Once "tradition" has changed in Japan not to frown on entrepreneurs, they can stop pretending to be foreign-owned.
I'm sorry if Chicago beat you up and took your lunch money.

I've never tried living there, but it's a great place to visit. Great food, great museums, great parks, Great Lake. Blues music. You can get there on a train from many places.

Also, 37 Signals seems to be doing OK there.
To skip TC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kole_PzjxKo

and a longer clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RFkv15Ngb0
I work for a startup that supplies enterprise systems to some very large companies that are still on IE6. In my view, when these companies refuse to upgrade it's a way of pushing (very real and substantial) costs onto us. We're now at the point where our starting position in sales negotiation is that we require IE7, if potential customers don't like it it's a negotiating point. If we really had to we'd support IE6, but we'll look to recover those costs in license/support fees.

Ultimately, this is good for the industry. Until companies like us start attaching a visible cost to IE6 support, these departments will not upgrade.
Save Google Wave
It's hard to say though... given that being gay is most likely in the genes, which obviously come from a heterosexual creation. So if the gay population will always have a 10% yield in the gene pool, I don't think natural selection will have any kind of effect.
They did not.

Well, they did originally have "who's online" functionality, but they had to yank it when someone found an exploit, and it took them forever to get it working again.

The "email me" option was much later - around the time they went from "Preview" to "Beta", I think. And as thorax said in his reply to me, Google flubbed the UI/usability of the preferences.

As far as "who has a Wave account", it's the same scheme as email. You get a Wave address; you're responsible for letting all your friends know what your address is (e.g., mine's in my HN profile). Probably could've been improved by hooking into Facebook/Twitter/etc. and spamming out your Wave address to all your friends...
Why Google buying Slide? Probably some VC, who invested in Slide, also sit on Google's board. That's why ;)
Democracy does not mean "majority always gets what it wants". Another part is "protecting the rights of minority".
In my example, the people were 'detained' for a few hours, during which they were not asked any questions at all. They just had to sit around at the police station twiddling their thumbs. In my mind, this just police intimidation. Some police officer didn't like them or what they were doing, so they decided to harass them. I don't think that, as a society, we should just accept this as a fact of life. By doing so, we give the police carte blanche to continue doing so, and to attempt to push the envelope even further.
What makes Hacker News cool is that the link is to the actual ruling, which is far more interesting than the articles about this I've seen so far. If you just glanced at the headline, I suggest you dig in...
Yes, it's an citizen initiative, but once passed it is a law that is enforced by the government. When a gay couple goes to get a marriage license, it's the government that is denying them one.
If you read carefully, the point he was trying to make was that you wouldn't necessarily want to discuss the issue on reddit or Digg.

I can't imagine why, though... http://cl.ly/1sDc
Good point about being hit by a bus. Key man risk is something I neglected to discuss in the article.
Please read the ruling. I don't think I have ever had to tell this many people to RTFA.
down vote all you want. If you want to know some of the reasons people oppose this look at this http://www.massresistance.org/

There is an agenda there...
I'm against gay marriage and my reasons are completely non-religious.

Currently, marriage consists of a default package of contractual rights given from one partner to another (e.g. default will, medical proxy) and I have no problem extending this to gays. In fact, this part of marriage can already be pieced together with a few legal documents.

Marriage also consists of laws which force single people to subsidize married couples, for instance the non-working spouse of a worker gets SS benefits that neither spouse paid for. Gay marriage supporters are in the unique position of thinking about this issue and recognizing the unfairness of it. But rather than advocating for fairness, they simply want to be allowed to join the favored class. I'll draw an analogy to the civil rights: think of an Asian American in 1960 saying "I'm not against Jim Crow, I just want Asians to be classified as White rather than Colored."

As a single person, I'm in the same boat as gay couples. Gay marriage supporters want to throw me overboard in order to join the favored group, forcing me to subsidize a slightly larger group of people. Why should I do anything but oppose that?

Marriage fairness (i.e., no subsidies), I'll get behind. Gay marriage, no.

[edit: I thought my last line was clear enough, but from the responses it apparently was not. I favor ending marriage, or at least ending the subsidies for it. I also favor ending the penalties for it, which apply in certain circumstances.]
Inside the final Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview
HN isn't wildly successfull. More importantly, it doesn't try to be, which is one reason it keeps its relatively "ugly" design.
RIM should sit tight and do nothing, IMO. Those 500,000 users are likely to be the most important movers and sheik'ers in the Saudi kingdom. When their Blackberry service goes dark, the government absolutely will be held accountable.
Thanks! I hadn't even thought of controlling tips or the wizard by tracking IPs. That's an interesting idea.
The practical purpose of marriage is to give protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing. This doesn't apply to gay "marriage", except in contrived cases. I'm actually yet to hear an argument in the favor of gay marriage that doesn't do one of the following:

1. Torture the definition of "equal". As if a law specifically designed to cover a specific relationship between a "man and a woman" is somehow invalid, whereas laws that cover specific relationships between a "lawyer and client" or "doctor and patient" or "parent and child" or "employer and employee" or "clergyman and worshipper" or 1000s and 1000s of others are never considered unconstitution.

2. Appeal to emotion. Ie, domestic partners can't automatically visit each other in the hospital when one is incapacitated, etc.
The entrepreneurs I talked to who were successful in a single founder role were either building low-tech consumer-facing web businesses, or had awesome tech skills and were able to bring on supplementary help at lower equity divisions to be treated like co-founders, but without the hefty equity split. After all, these extra team members were brought on after the companies typically got a bit of buzz and traction, so they had reduced risk.
Actually, Plenty of Fish is the best example of success due to being early. The site lacks any kind of special features that distinguished it from its competitors.

Success came from being an early entrant into the SEO game and recognizing ahead of others that AdWords could support a totally free site.
We were unable to use Wave because it never worked for hosted Google accounts. That sucks.
I suggest reading the decision which rebuts this point, or I can simply point to Brown v Board which enshrined the notion that separate institutions are "inherently unequal."

More importantly though I think you miss the extent to which the "rights" provided by the California Family Code fail to encompass the rights protected by the constitution. The right to adopt is orthogonal to the right be free from discrimination and a state sponsored determination of inferiority.

As for the culture war, I don't doubt that 100 years from now it will still be going on, under a different name, and with as much validity and import as it has today. This is not a mean or petty distinction being discussed here, but one of lasting societal influence and implication.

You have clear disdain for the debate, probably engendered by the disingenuous rhetoric on both sides, however I would urge you to put aside the cynicism for a moment and remember that this really does matter.
I don't think Steve Woz. has anywhere near a billion dollars.
1, They did release an expansion

2, They released another RTS, Warcraft III and an expansion, then an MMO.
You are right only if you believe that a marriage certificate is equal only to the sum of it's associated legal perks. It's obvious that neither opponents nor proponents believe this.

This actually supports the judges decision based on the opinion that...

"...the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples."
There are rational arguments, mostly coming from evolutionary psychology and similar domains. The arguments tend to fall apart under rational scrutiny when used to shape human behavior rather than simply explain it.

A couple recent articles by Robin Hanson about polygamy cover similar terrain in interesting ways. The arguments, particularly in the second article, more or less break it down to the problems of utilitarianism.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/polygamy-hypocrisy.htm...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/hypergamy-and-polygamy...
Kind of disappointing that trolling works so well.
Are you being facetious?

If so, read the comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1570694
I think more a more likely explanation is that they lacked the infrastructure to roll it out effectively. If that's the case then they should have just waited until they could deliver.

It's pure conjecture of course!
This ignores the federal benefits of marriage (taxation and immigration, for instance), as well as the fact that DOMA allows states to ignore gay marriages performed in other states.

As with civil rights legislation, federal laws arise out of the experimentation of states. California's move in favour of gay marriage (disgracefully late; 5 other states + DC already have it) is widely recognized as a stepping-stone to a federal ruling on the matter.

So: it's both untrue to say that gays in California have equal rights, and were it true it would be irrelevant anyway.
Google Wave was completely invsible after you signed up, I Completely agree with your post. Another important point is that there was no way to share your wave address like your email address. Which always felt a bit odd.
> "he's all of a sudden ok with them under Obama. And you'd be right."
No, you wouldn't.

For eight years he castigated Bush for not paying down the debt. Krugman's advice is: borrow your way out of the bad days, pay it back on the good ones.

There's plenty of policy there to disagree about. There's no reason or benefit to misrepresenting people's positions.
The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories
Finish reading :) I said exactly that.
I had the same reaction, except that I found a bar that moves to be even more distracting than the adds.

Hitting full screen (in the middle of the bottom bar) and turning off autohide (move the right toggle up) made it usable for me.
Regarding the social security benefits...in actuality married people in the U.S. pay what's euphemistically called the Marriage Tax, because the rules as codified actually require married people to pay more than if they filed separately.

Regarding the rest of your arguments, I suppose they work assuming an extremely weak social contract. Or at least, in my opinion it would require a very weak one. It's hard question to test in relation to marriage since marriage is a legally sanctioned relationship in all countries, but i am most certainly not well read on this topic.
One peril of cloud computing: an S3 outage is currently affecting Heroku, and Realized is unavailable at the moment.
We have a constitution to protect our basic rights from the tyranny of the majority. This is an example of the most important function of our courts.
Can money replace seeing your vision for realtime collaboration die twice? I'm sure they're not hurting, but if they were building the technology because they believed it could transform the way we interact with each other for the better... Well, that still has to sting.
Heisenberg?
I don't remember the engineer's name. Mentioned at WWDC. Not the Delicious guy.
What Linux can learn from the demise of Google Wave
He may be too close to Apple to realize Apple may be as likely (or more) as Google to be the "Microsoft of the future".
Definitely. I would invite friends, they'd be excited, but no one would check it and thus no one would use it, since there was no way to integrate it with anything non-wave.

I'm fairly confused about what 'success' is supposed to have meant here.
The election of President is not a direct election by U.S. citizens. See Electoral College:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_%28United_Sta...

Also, each presidential term is limited to 4 years.
Posterous is Down
Google kills Google Wave
It's funny: on one hand Slide seems such a feeble business proposition compared to the mighty PayPal, but on the other hand photo sharing has been the very thing that's fuelled so much consumer activity over the last decade (Facebook, MySpace, camera phones, memes...). What's the word on Slide's arch rival, RockYou or whatever it's called - valued higher than Slide?

There was another idea that came out of the Maxcubator at the same time as Slide, can't remember what it was (i read it in The Facebook Story) may have involved Peter Theil, it seemed like the best idea but Levchin passed it up for The Slide concept.
From what I understand, the couples who were married before prop 8 were never unmarried.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss_v._Horton
Ahh ... that link brings me to a strange place.Avoid.
What do you mean by "minority group"?

The polygamous, drug users, people who want to rent rather than own, or people who wish to stay single are all minority groups. Do you favor eliminating all laws which discriminate against such people?

I suspect you mean a certain types of minority group. If so, could you explain which minority groups deserve the protection you describe, which do not, and why?
Disagree entirely. Mainly cause I'm a very happy Wave user, and I think it absolutely has a place. It's just not the place Google envisioned at first (it's also not the same product they pitched at first).

This is, imo, a failure to Pivot. They have a working tool that, by their own admission, has many users. Why not capitalize on this fact, and start selling the product to the people it is useful for? I'm guessing it's just because Google likes huge, spectacular products over smaller, but still quite successful alternatives.
This is great news, except for the fact that there is still a huge percentage on IE6. Until people migrate off, it'll still be a pain in the ass to develop sites.

That's one nice thing about the other browsers. Most users are on very similar versions. IE, on the other hand, have users spread out across many old versions.

It will be time to celebrate when they can get most of their users on the newest IE. I can't wait for that day.
innovative technology feels like art sometimes, it should exist for the sake of it. "L'art pour l'art", Innovation for innovation!
If you can access Google cache so can the rest of us.
5 Kinds of Clients to Avoid
This does not make sense.

I am the developer of two Facebook apps, Friend Interview and Quiz Monster. I would argue those two apps are more valuable than Slide's and there is no way they are worth $182 million.

What is Google buying?
Do you mean Google Apps for your domain? It does work. Quite well in fact.