skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is not much to play around with on your webite, and my laptop is 4 years old so I don't have an onboard webcam -

BUT -

I think the concept is extremely useful for the non-tech savvy general public. You are essentially making it ridiculously easy for someone to create a "video" post (so long as they have an onboard webcam that is)

I can see this concept being EXTREMELY useful for consumer oriented online services. For example wordpress and other CMS where you need a very non-tech way to create media on the internet. Think if it like tinymce (html editor)
for video.

I would love to see your product marketed this way as I would have a real use for this.
The 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media
Source, please.

Just from my own anecdotal evidence, my ability to learn from a teacher was based far more on their knowledge and passion than their genitalia.
Open-source is largely a trust network. I don't mind if someone is an arrogant SOB, intolerant of n00b questions, or has an ugly website... IF I can trust their word about the code they produce, AND if they are still able to maintain an active community. There are implications about the long-term ecosystem regarding the particular project in question if the leadership falters too frequently or too severely, and the support network (community, business, labor, mindshare, et cetera) around a project is a vital aspect in making IT decisions. If you can't trust upstream providers to be clear and honest with respect to code, the future doesn't look so bright. While the proof is in the pudding, I have neither the time nor the inclination to thoroughly vet every change or release (this gets back to Open Source being a trust network.)

The blog post comment that you refer to seems to reflect a poor thought process. However, mine has a little more reasoning behind it.
I'd say we need more smart people.

Then I have a simple suggestion based on the same wide-ranging generalisations you base your reasoning on:

Make marriage illegal for all the heterosexual couples who believe that same-sex marriage should be illegal.
I agree that it's very easy to "misspeak" in C++ or C. It's even easier to mislead or obfuscate what's going on (i.e. write correct code that others can't easily understand). So this sort of documentation is great and I applaud you for adopting it.

That said, the fact that such extensive documentation is necessary (or at the very least nice) suggests to me that you'd be better off using a cleaner, more powerful <http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html>; language that:
(1) documents itself to some degree through more elegant syntax
(2) takes care of low-level tasks that clutter and confuse otherwise clean code (resource allocation, memory management, etc.) and
(3) requires less code to do the same thing, which means fewer lines to document.

There are a bunch of great languages out there that are far more powerful (in terms of abstraction) than C++ or C. Haskell, Lisp, ML, F#, to name just a few. You might consider checking some of these out if you haven't already.
Erm. So you believe the only difference between women and men is their genitalia? What planet are you from? You've never seen any evidence of their thought processes being different, their completely different logic, social skills, spacial awareness etc?

I'm sorry but if you believe that you're blind, or really haven't lived.

Your statement sums up what is wrong with the political correctness/equality mob. Men and women are not equal. They will never be. Thank goodness. Celebrate the differences. Embrace them. Don't just blindly pretend they don't exist.
Yes actually our plans going forward might take that direction. When we cross the consumer product line, and jump to possibly business and more professional needs, recording videos directly from web camera does not suffice.

We really think there is a great need for a simple platform to communicate via videos - video emails is just an extension of it.
Video Game Consoles Up 26%; iPhone Killing Portable Gaming Devices
Right, it is much easier to change the california constitution than most other states.. which has led to its current 110+ pages and 500+ amendments.

As for what it takes, you can see that right here:
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_h.htm

I fundamentally agree with you that 50%+1vote is flawed and puts minorities at a disadvantage.
Can't comment on the photo, but I think "out of context" is a little harsh. Here's why: http://tinyurl.com/5bvwzz
-Galen (the MHT reporter)
Both of you make very good points. I'm merely saying the example I responded to seems to support the opposite.
Thanks, Disney ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Exten... )
Tell HN: I'm freee
I finally took the leap and quit my day job today (well, gave notice to be precise). Just wanted to thank the community here:

1. For teaching me about web-app design & development, and inspiring me with your stories.

2. More specifically, for cheering on Dabbleboard. I had launched the beta on HN, and -for many months- your words were my greatest source of encouragement, since it took a while to build a user(fan)base.

I hope to someday be able to return the favors... And good luck to you too :)!
Memo to Jerry Yang: Time to Re-Brand Yahoo Search
Yeah I just wanted to make sure everyone had the whole story. I certainly understand why it happens (I wasn't mad or anything) and how articles get trimmed down often outside the writer's control.

I just didn't want people to think we'd never ever take money. For angel funding you often don't need a model and sometimes don't need a deck. Rest of the article was great (even if the picture was a bit embarassing :-D). The other clarification points were for the Hacker News headline (I didn't want people to think revenue or profits were growing 50% per month), the picture (ha) and to expand on points made within the article.

Nothing tops this picture, however: http://is.gd/7yx4
(This one was at Tom's expense instead of mine)
I hope you had a firm grasp on the next vine before you let go! Good luck:-)
I don't get the deal with gay marriage. Marriage is only meaningful because of the function it fulfills: provide a hospitable environment for reproduction. Take this away, a la gay marriage, then no one cares about it.

For evidence, just look at how many people get married when they think it's just about sticking around with another person. Pretty much zilch, i.e. the number of people co-habitating vs marrying in England.

So, if gay people want an official marriage because marriage is special, they are undermining themselves by helping to destroy the institution they value. It's like: because I think the Olympics are special I think they should allow me to compete for the US. If they did this, no one would like the Olympics and they would cease to be special.

I don't get it.
does anyone actually use chrome? I used it for a few days, then went back to firefox since its a more complete experience.
Flickr was nice before Yahoo bought it. So was Upcoming.
They're still nice, but I don't attribute them to Yahoo.
Can they be programmable bacon-flavoured daisies?
PLT redirection through shared object injection into running process
I appreciate your use of logic and reasoning, but as a point of fact, you are wrong about quotation mark usage.

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

Quotation marks are overloaded in english =)
How I Use My Dell
Be very careful about open sourcing a game, especially if it is multi-player.

Because people cheat. A lot.
Congratulations. Wishing you the best.
I've been following the updates here on Hacker News from a distance and finally dropped by to test out the product.

Holy cow. It's awesome. As soon as some cash frees up in the budget I will splurge for the desktop version.

Most surprising, delightful feature: The guides that appear when dragging stuff around to line it up.

Cleverest feature: The intuitive way that the link bars work. I didn't need to be told that the commas break up the links, just showed in the example. Slick.

Well done, good sir.
When I worked for a larger company, I had the rare pleasure of working with someone who was at once brilliant and patient (something he actively cultivated.) When trying to get to the bottom of things, I usually was granted a purview into the historical technical and political history. While this was illuminating for a while, eventually it boiled down to: lack of approval to pay off technical debt -- the compromise was made knowingly and was the best decision at the time. Of course, this was something I thought to be true, but only really learned it after coming to the same conclusion time and time again.
>Marriage is only meaningful because of the function it fulfills: provide a hospitable environment for reproduction.

That's where you are wrong. It's an issue of rights, not of function. Why would it make the slightest bit of difference if anyone cares about anything? It's just a word that you want to take away from people: separate but equal.

Lots of straight marriages don't exist for the purposes of reproduction. And no one reputable disputes that gay households raise children just as well (if not better, on average, because of higher incomes and older partners) than straight households. Why would you want the children of gay parents to be raised in unwed homes?

At this point, it's completely and entirely an arbitrary decision, made because people like you feel like there is something special about this word marriage that gay people don't deserve. The best solution is to completely eliminate marriage at the federal level: civil unions for all. But that obviously isn't practical. That leaves us with an obvious violation of the Equal Protection Clause in wake of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia.

You know you are going to lose this issue in the long run. You can't win. Conservatives never win, because change always wins in the long run. We're about 12 years of voter demographic shift or 2 US supreme court seats from winning this issue that doesn't even deserve to be an issue. Give it up; why make people that love each other wait?
"Why" applies perfectly well to that.
Great, now Obama gets to wade through the morass of YouTube comments. Welcome to Hell, Mr. President.
Heysan (YC 07)  - 100 million monthly page views and 600,000 users
The Communist Are Just Wild About Obama
You were asked for evidence for an assertion you made that boys behave worse in classes with female teachers, and that girls behave worse in classes with male teachers. Put up or shut up, axod.
It's a good question, you shouldn't have gotten downmodded.

If I'm sharing a single hosted instance of an app with 10 other customers, any bug in the Rails code can potentially give me access to other people's data.

If I own my own instance on a VM, even if I can't get access to the VM, I'm at least assured that I'm not sharing controller or model code with other customers.

Now that creating new public VMs with Rails instances on them is a pushbutton affair, you'd think people would start offering this as a feature. It's a great way to get a "*GOLD" price tier in your app.
You know what I love the most about Django?

It's as easy to use as Rails, plus has no such toxic people hanging around it.
Thank you <:D

[I actually hate grammar-nazis and love gramar-nazi-nazis. The tone of my response and the grammar part was mocking the logic-nazi FAIL ;)]
(^.^) Congrats!! GL&HF.
To be honest, it's not as firm as on the previous vine, but falling (together with the rush of worrying about it) can be lotsa fun too :).
yup.. thats us
If you think either DHH or Zed have a lot of credibility when it comes to subjective issues like "who's respecting who", you haven't carefully studied the record. I direct you to Zed's crazy-talk sum-up of Drew Yao's Ruby security findings:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=223622
Congrats, do you have any plans yet on what extra things to accomplish with that free time?
You are missing my point.

Zed just wrote a whole blog post about how DHH's "mythbusting" post was wrong.

As evidence, he cited a factual error in DHH's post that was not relevant to DHH's argument.

Logic seems to show how Zed was wrong. Innuendo and personality drama is all that implied DHH was wrong.
Please, no, those guys have fucked up enough start-ups already, leave Twitter alone!
Aaron, you weren't going to use Rails anyways; you develop on a competing web stack. Stepping into the middle of a DHH vs. Zed Shaw rant is not good evangelism.
You're using the word "lying" where "mistaken" would do just as well. To import the Wikipedia rule: (A)ssume (G)ood (F)aith.
Computers don't get slower. A computer that did the job 10 years ago can still do the job today. I'd happily be using the same Sun Ultra 1 I had on my desk in 1997 today if I could, and it could do everything I need to do perfectly well. Maybe the silver lining of this recession will be to teach people that they really can step off the treadmill and the sky won't fall in.
If you don't want to do a tour that's perfectly fine, it's your site :)

I would then suggest you put an overlay of text on the image on your homepage, otherwise it looks like a misbehaving flash player or something.

Good luck!
Twitter offers a potentially superior signal to noise ratio than blog content

Does anyone agree with this? I don't think brevity implies a greater density of information; often it means there's none at all.

There's no context to real-time information, no opportunity for its audience to either discuss or ignore it, and therefore no way to judge its relevance. The author seems to feel that the sheer newness of a Twitter feed guarantees its importance, but I think the chances of 140 characters written five minutes ago being more relevant than the topmost Google result is close to nil.
Am I the only one who is a bit spooked by the way she's holding that binder?

It's not a tanning reflector! You can let go of it!
First, I don't care about some word. I care about the institution, which is both supported by the government and our culture.

Second, what does it matter whether I think marriage is special or anything, or who wins or loses on the issue? I expect you are right, and gay marriage will become accepted at the federal level, precisely because so many rich and influential people are behind it. Is that a good reason to throw away my argument? No. So why bring it up?

My argument is that insofar as the gay marriage movement thinks marriage is special, they should reconsider what they are doing. Otherwise, why push for this particular right? What makes it a right anyways?

As for the function of marriage, gay relationships are naturally non reproductive. You have to use artificial means to do this, which is restricted to the more affluent class. So, unless gay marriages are going to automatically qualify for artificial reproduction, they are inherently not going to have the same capabilities of heterosexual couples. Besides, is artificial reproduction anywhere near as successful? Plus, affluence doesn't create good kids. Look at all the rich kids committing suicide and living horrible lives. Do you have any kind of evidence to support your claim that children from gay households are equally or better mentally, emotionally, and physically formed? If you can provide counter evidence/arguments to these two points, then I'll accept the position that gay marriage should be allowed at the federal level.

If not, then it is immoral to force such an unproven and unsupported position on all of America. Keep it at the state level so people can still make choices about what kind of environment they live in in America. Otherwise, I just see this as deeply un American, something of a totalitarianism of the upper middle class. Precisely why we broke off from England in the first place.

Finally, yes, it may look like conservativism always loses. But, that's only at the social, cultural level. In the end, these different institutions are only so good as they are at perpetuating themselves. So, if conservativism is always losing, have you wondered why it hasn't gone away by now? It's because it is so much more sustainable than liberalism, so it is always around to "lose" to liberalism; whereas as soon as liberalism wins, it kills itself. Look at Rome. Look at Europe. Look at the USSR. China may be a counter point, but they've been tearing themselves up to get where they are, so I think it is too soon to tell.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14546994/?GT1=8404

http://www.menteach.org/news/its_not_who_but_how_boys_are_ta...

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/boys-taught-men-do-better-stu...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/sep/30/primaryschoo...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5294854.stm

"A study of 25,000 pupils by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee found children did 4% better in tests when their teachers were of the same sex"

"In general, girls learned more with female teachers and boys with male teachers"

"A large fraction of boys' dramatic underperformance in reading is linked to the fact that their reading teachers are overwhelmingly female," Dee concludes.

There are a large number of similar studies with similar results.
Absolutely.

The "build a great product and they will come" myth is bullshit 99% of the time (unless you have a built in marketing engine-- SEO or viral). Balsamiq won the same reason that 37s did (and JoelonSoftware for that matter)... They had a great story, told it well, and the story happened to resonate/be interesting to their exact target market (web geeks / entrepreneurs).

Bravo!

But try to build great software for supply chain management, or managing a beauty parlor and let me know how "everything else will follow" there. There's a reason that SalesForce.com (which, arguably, has/had a great product) has spent 60-70% of their topline on sales and marketing.
That's the problem: You shouldn't care about how well a SPARC desktop runs Firefox. You should use such a box to develop software that run on a 32 or 64-thread machine.

We must be prepared to deliver performance on many-core machines because that's what the desktops and servers will be in the near future.

And that's why Sun should investigate cheap desktops that could be used to run and develop - they have a uniquely viable platform for that and they have it today. Any software built for those boxes will run better on their servers.

As a personal favorite, they should work their asses off to make sure "fashionable" languages like Python and Ruby do threading decently on those chips. If I have to select a web server and I have a US$ 20K server with a 4-thread x86 and a US$ 20K 32 thread SPARC, I will probably go Sun's way.
I was a Rails user for 3 years and I looked at Django seriously before settling on Merb for my current project. I wouldn't say that it's as easy to use or as powerful as Rails, but either way it seems like we should be moving beyond silly arguments like this by now and have started building the next generation of frameworks that take the good pieces from all of the current generation and build upon them.
Video of you crying like the "leave Britney alone" 'guy' please...
Innumeracy and the U. S. Supreme Court
Motorola EM28 Unlocked
Motorola EM28 Unlocked is a superb quality flip phone that would add spark to your life. This phone would readily convert itself into a portable DJ.
No, you don't sound like a broken record at all. Hacker News needs people like you marking things.

This story got marked as dead the moment I flagged it.
Think you might be able to do better than one "controversial" study published by the conservative Hoover Institution by a visiting Swarthmore associate professor, an unpublished survey taken by a private consultancy in the UK, and an opinion poll in the UK?
Looking forward to more.
In certain circles, that becomes an endless feedback loop.
Has anyone kept track of the others who've posted about quitting their job to do a startup in the past?
Of all the complaints you could make, this is probably the silliest.

Obama's delivering weekly video messages online, to theoretically talk with America and update its people. How are you expecting him to deliver video in a context that makes his work very accessible? YouTube is the most popular site, and it uses Flash. Unless you want him to release videos as .oggs, and get feedback as email, Flash is the most effective system.
Well, you seem to want to believe women and men are exactly the same, so you go on believing that.

My experience, including my kids experience of various teachers, is that they are not.

Of course it's a "controversial" study - it highlights differences between the sexes. Which isn't "cool" in this politically correct age.
Yep, both on the product-development side as well as the other (dark) side.
Ask YC: DB Scaling question
My site is divided into sections based on the school where users are located. For each school I have an entry in an mySQL database which stores some information about that school. Users access their particular schools website through URL GET varaibles:

www.mysite.com?school=someuniversity

My question is this: In terms of scalability is it better to query the db for the specific school info each time a page is loaded or should I query only the first time a user visits a particular school and cache the info in session variables? Or is there a third alternative that is preferred? Any advice would be greatly appreciated or just a point in the right direction to finding this info myself. Thanks!
What I especially dislike is that these are the people who are responsible for our colleges and university continuing to focus more and more on the pragmatic and teach to the test approach, than focussing on true understanding. It's not just that they are bad for themselves, but they bring things down for us.
Related post: Balsamiq hits $100K in revenue

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364254
The best way you can explain things to me is to anonymously downmod my post. That way I'm not distracted by arguments and evidence, and instead can get in line with the groupthink.

Thank you, anonymous downmodders.
I think this is the non-scribd version:
http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/pllc.pdf
He probably meant millifarads.
Pretty big spike on alexa,

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/heysan.com

Congrats :)
Anon84, you might find more welcome here:

www.newmogul.com
http://www.danga.com/memcached/

It's like magic, but real.
Unfortunately Alexa doesn't track mobile traffic so they're 95% irrelevant. Sorry.

Google Trends is better but still crap.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=heysan
Spaceball Football | It's Not Fantasy, It's Funtasy Football
"Every single mobile web service should be looking at these guys to see how they are doing things. The site is also beautifully designed with a really clean UI.

The proof that Heysan is onto something interesting is in the stats which are absolutely jaw dropping - and remind me of the kind of figures facebook used to pump out after they started which made everyone sit up and take notice. The average user spends over 5 hours a month on heysan, they are doing 100 million page views a month and have 600,000 users. What is also amazing is that the largest markets for Heysan are not Indonesia or India like a lot of other mobile IM aggregators, but the UK and the US."

Awesome. Congrats.
Can't... all my tears were spent on previous start-ups.
"Everybody" is not using Linux for their mid-level servers; Solaris, especially OpenSolaris, is still a very viable option, and offers a number of features (most notably ZFS and Zones) that Linux isn't really close to, yet. Not to mention, Solaris has, in my experience, a much better I/O scheduler.

Linux is a fine operating system, but it isn't the end-all-be-all.
"To have everyone in your world using your software, but not offering you any jobs greater than a system administrator position is tough."

this kind of refutes the idea that you can make a good living by writing an open source package and selling support for it.