skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you very much for trying Voxli!

We require an install program because gamers require push-to-talk outside the browser. This cannot be accomplished with any amount of Javascript or Flash coding. The only way to break out of the browser sandbox is to write a piece of native code and install it as a browser plugin. This is why we have separate mac and windows plugins, for instance.

I agree that the MSI is pretty annoying. I don't really like to install random binaries either. At the end of the install, the browser should take you into your room without any user interaction -- which is why we don't show a "install done" dialog. But as it is confusing and not how most other apps do it, we'll look into making it more clear. The only other alternative for Windows was to use the Mozilla plugin installer as we do on Mac -- but that requires a browser restart and it was very confusing to users in our user tests. Overall I agree our install process has a lot of room for improvement and continued user feedback such as yours will help us refine it going forward.

You must hold down the push to talk button to talk. While you are holding it down, it says "ON AIR" and shows the waveform of your microphone recording. Agreed, we should probably add some help text to say that it is a push-hold button like a walkie-talkie and not a toggle button you click once.

If you want background noise, just click the 'always on' checkbox and the mic will stay on, giving you all the background noise you want. We don't default to this state because we are tailored for large groups. The background noise from 20 people would be pretty distracting, so we default to radio silence. Sometimes we think of it more as a walkie-talkie system for groups than a conference call.

The "Add Rooms" feature is definitely a work-in-progress. To clarify, people who aren't in the same "room" can't hear each other. This way, large gaming guilds can all be in the same channel and know who's online and what's going on, but still be broken up into smaller teams for communicating on specific tasks. One way we are working on improving this feature is to allow string names for rooms: for example, "PVP Group 1" or "Room for Bored People" instead of just a number. Also, you can only be in one room per browser tab. If you want to be in multiple rooms, open another tab to the same page.

Thanks again for the feedback! Seems I should start a FAQ on the website, or maybe add some help tips to the interface.
In Fact, I'll cancel my rarely-used StackOverflow account.

Calm down.
Oh wow. Your blog looks great in FF3. I initially read it from Chrome and for some reason everything came through in bold. My apologies for having little faith!
Would be interesting to see a baseline against a RAIDx24 with conventional HDDs.
Complete how-to of building screencasts on OSX
There is no wonder that the rules of the game were dictated by big players, like facebook or google. They taught ordinary internet users (the mass) that good quality (usable and well-designed) services could be free.

So, if you trying to establish another service for masses it must be free, and meet the de-facto standards of quality. Tweeter is a good example.

It is possible to charge users for some very special and unique service, but only for a limited time, because free (no-cost) alternatives will emerge sooner or later.

It seems to me, that if someone wants to build such service he should think about some market-place or ecosystem (like in adult segment), not for public services for masses, because this market is already divided by rich and strong players.
All you need for validating emails
Seals aren't all that useful as shark detectors. They're usually not around and they look just like attacking sharks when they play their "swoop" game. (They find this quite funny.)

They also play "hide", which often consists of putting their head behind a rock and peeking around to make sure that you're coming by. Yup, they leave their huge body exposed.
I think it should be argued here that what you are trying to sell also really matters. 37Signals sells business software. I don't think you can get away selling social network software or search engines to consumers.

Also, social network-type software requires a critical mass of users in order for them to be effective. If all of your friends weren't already on Twitter and Facebook, perhaps you wouldn't be either.

It's not as straightforward as selling your software from day one to make money.
Agreed. Microsoft has released best of breed products. But Microsoft's product decisions are largely driven by "PMs", whereas open source is driven by technical merit and Apple is driven by industrial design. Microsoft occupies this weird middle ground, call it "pragmatism" (or even MBA-driven design :-).

This middle ground results in weak consumer products like Vista and Microsoft Mobile. They aren't bad products, but lack the polish an industrial design-driven process could have produced. They also lack the technical depth that open source is producing. As a result Microsoft is getting squeezed from both ends.

Joel's products are similar: a good middle ground. Neither awe-inspiring (technical) or fun to use (design).
Agreed. I wouldn't go so far as to call it meaningless without something to compare it to, but I'd imagine conventional disks would still be very fast in that setup.
Keen Insight into Pay vs. Ad Supported Mobile App Model
Pifts.exe description
> It is just not possible to build a project that requires rights-of-way stretching over vast distances and needing planning horizons extending decades into the future without the government being involved, if only to settle the inevitable disputes.

My point is that it doesn't stop with arranging for right-of-way and settling contract disputes - it starts there.

> I would be happy to invest my money in railroad bonds that were devoted to expanding the I-5 transportation corridor with a high-speed rail link.

And I'd be happy to let you if the bonds are backed by the project and not any entity with taxation powers.
[Book] Algorithmic Game Theory
Isn't this what RSS Readers are for? To select the news you are and aren't interested in reading?
What would happen if you make reddit/HN submission score = to # of people who comment on it?
Would this result in more and better discussion generally? What sorts of submissions would make the front page?
Considering that there still seems to be disagreement about the causes of the great depression, my guess would be that there are people who know, but nobody knows who they are.
Watch out--video games will kill ya.
Steve Jobs on Twitter
I just keep thinking to myself, "here I am working so hard at improving my programming abilities so that I can create more ambitious applications, and this guy is making a small fortune selling a freakin' Bingo card maker."
To succeed on web, be opportunistic and sell of quickly.
That gives some interesting possibilities for computers in a few years -- one relatively expensive drive for code, another cheap drive for data, for example.

Probably 80% of your hard drive is stuff where the access speed is irrelevant -- movies, for example, since your capability to read from the disk far outstrips your eyes' capability to watch the movie. Photos, Office docs, email, ditto ditto ditto.

Then there are programs -- or even a subset of programs, really -- that actually have appreciable startup times. Office, Eclipse, etc, I'm looking at you.

You could put those programs on the "fast" disk (along with most of the OS, presumably) then make it as big as you pleased with cheap spinning platters. With a little bit of software trickery, you could present the two disks as one physical drive to the operating system (or to the end user) and shift data between them using some sort of caching policy (LRU, whatever).

It sounds like a sexy idea for servers too -- can't afford to keep the entire working set in RAM? No problem -- back up the RAM with solid state and only write to spinning magnetic media when you need long-term non-volatile storage.
Quite frankly, I just don't see how one could live mainly on Ramen -- the little content wouldn't do it for me (and I'm merely 110 lbs.). What am I not seeing?
I love Dirty Jobs and Mike Rowe is an amazing host. The amount of charisma that man has is insane and the ability to say the right thing at the right time, every time, is something I wish one day to acquire.
You can’t beat Google only by developing a superior technology. You’ll still be left with the Herculean task of drilling your search engine deep into the minds of hundreds of millions of users around the world. Google the brand is far mightier than Google the technology. It’s the Google’s redoubtable omnipresence and visibility that makes it tick.
Amazon.com: Tha Funky EP XXL [Explicit]: MP3 Downloads: Gee Rock & Tha Cnd Coalition
Yeah - and perhaps for certain scenarios it might be faster? (Pure conjecture on my part).

So - if seek time wasn't a big factor, a fast conventional drive could be faster? And if you have a very high level of striping (ie. 24 drives), seek time might be significantly mitigated.
Nokia Had Fixed the North American 5800 3G Reception Issues
Microsoft and Apple are doing things the mom'n pop way then I guess.
Cloud Platforms - A Birds Eye View (analysis)
Thomas Freidman said it all in the Sunday NYT:

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese...

All the links begin to break...
As I've argued everywhere I see this sort of thing, this does not validate email addresses.

If I don't want you to have my email address, you'll get n.o.thanks@microsoft.com and that will fly through any shape validation, domain validation, character checks, any regex you can think of.

It still wont be my email address. If people aren't giving you valid email addresses, reassess your site and consider why instead of throwing technology at the alleged problem.
So how are Menlo Park, CA and Lexington, MA as locations? I know that Paul Graham places great weight on the location of your startup, and each of these Y Combinator competitors requires you to move to a different town. Should that be a significant factor in applying to Y Combinator instead of Summer@Highland and programs like it?
I suspect this would do much better on the front page if the link caption included the fact that the article is by Raganwald.
Follow the Money - What 3 VCs are investing in and Why
This is an academic view of the problems. The reality is different in each region, even in each block.

After Soviet Union was collapsing, we've got this so-called free market (free from a regulation of the goverment). First, we got unlimited supply of the low-quality alcohol, after some failed attempts of the soviet goverment to combat drunkness.

The result? Almost 1/5 of population were died in 10 years with direct or indirect involvement of alcohol consumption. The cases of the mental degradation and illness were never counted. But the next generations afrer looking at their animal-like fathers and mothers, at least trying to avoid the booze.

The heroine problem is almost the same, but more brutal and fast-going. After you saw several tens of the lethal cases you will try to stop, and even with some success.

I think (as a person who actually did it) that the most effective solution is the natural one - when you saw the results, you, sooner or later, will try to figure out the cause.

And what people or goverment can do is to show the results to the youths, to educate them, because they just trying to imitate an adults - in our case - tired and hopeless creatures, who become happy (actually just relaxed) for very short periods of time with booze and sigarettes.

And be sure, there never was a problem to get any stuff among a low-income and uneducated. And never will.
I agree this is a great opportunity worth looking at, but having a friend with you? Using investment dollars to fund your buddy's summer on your couch seems a little unwise to me.
Menlo Park is literally next door to Palo Alto. It's one of the nicer Silicon Valley suburbs.
I found it incongruous how Joel seemed to be in charge of the whole operation, with all these long-established gurus reporting to him - a guy fresh out of college, who (modesty?) didn't know anything.

This setup drove home his point for me, that The program manager and the developers have to be peers.

Joel wasn't their boss. He was just the spec guy ("program manager"). Still, he must have some serious smarts to land such a job - possibly great coding chops plus being able to communicate well. Rare.
You know who didn't bail out LTCM? Bear Stearns - the first to fall. They wouldn't play ball and it's widely assumed that the other banks saw a chance to make them pay.
Desktop performance with solid-state drives is less interesting to me than server performance -- specifically databases and other services where seek time is more important than throughput.

Has anyone done performance tests with MySQL on low-latency storage devices? As another commenter suggested for the desktop, strategies of using solid-state for latency bound activities and traditional disks for throughput intensive stuff might be an interesting hybrid to explore.
For me, hapless has a connotation of clumsiness. The hapless person goes through life fumbling every opportunity. The opposite is a person adept at taking advantage of every opportunity.

Relentlessly resourceful sounds like a person who makes opportunities or sees them where others don't.
Its more of a small fortune cookie than a small fortune. Maybe something along the lines of "90% of the important stuff happens outside of the IDE."

On the plus side, it proves what you want to do is achievable, right? Make program, improve lives of customers, get paid for it.
The point is not to check whether or not n.o.thanks@microsoft.com is your address, but that it follows valid syntax. Users make mistakes - I just watched a customer this morning type name@domaincom instead of name@domain.com when entering his address. I've even seen users enter their names instead of email addresses when prompted for an email address. This happens all too often and can make database management a hassle. Checking the syntax first can make life a little easier for the DB guys.
I've used a lot of color scheme picker web sites. You've just made them all irrelevant. My hat's off to you.
You're helping to save the world from CVS/SVN.
It's funny how they never say how much RAM this computer has.

Vista has a feature called 'superfetch' which pre-caches applications in memory so they're never actually loaded from disk. Also, it's hard to tell, but if this computer has sufficient RAM, you could conceivable load everything directly from memory.

Also, the fragmentation test was a little dubious. A computer that new would have very little file fragmentation, so of course defragging would be fast.

That said, it was an entertaining video!
This is a good idea and conceptually similar to showing how many times something has been flagged as off topic.

Although I still maintain that upvote and "off-topic" are not symmetric actions.. but choosing between public visibility of data vs "cabal of secret editors" is a no-brainer IMO.
1) You've written a critique about the whole HN voting system while being factually correct about only one subsystem - the design decision about submissions.

This is as silly (or arrogant, or plain stupid) as writing a critique of quantum physics just because you know how and when to use Schrödinger's equation.

2) It's not uncommon to downvote comments at all. Again, you are passing your perception as absolute truth. What you may see is few comments that have a negative score. Few downvotes and few negative-score comments are two completely different beasts, and you're inferring wrong things with the information you have available.

3) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inflammatory : tending to excite anger, disorder, or tumult.

My comment was a response to your post. It comes off as angry, but it is a reaction to the sort of thing that you write. The post has more than 100 comments, few of them actually accomplishing anything except discussing with you and pointing out why you are wrong.

So, the answer to your question is no; it's your articles that provoke reactions in others and excite disorder. It's your article that is inflammatory, not my comment.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

As a side note about what you write... I get it, Jeff. You're the textbook example of an extroverted person: you need to externalize things to process information. To you, doing supports thinking. For introverts like me (and most of HN, by the way) it's thinking that supports doing.

There is no "right way" here, no "better side" to belong to. The problem lies in taking these opposites to radical extremes, and this is what is happening to you. While hardcore introverts end up suffering from analysis paralysis and never get anything done, you end up doing things carelessly and using "social brute-force": you say whatever comes to mind and expect people to throw you "warning messages" and point you to a better solution.

Your blogging style is the equivalent of the guy that trolls in IRC channels (http://bash.org/?152037) to see if he gets responses from the gurus. This is seriously irritating: not everyone wants to be your "idea compiler", and you consume much of other people's time and energy that could be better used elsewhere.

You may even think that you are being successful with your approach: each post you write will probably make your readership increase more than decrease. But if you believe that, you'd be again relying on the idea that Quantity always trumps Quality, and again you'll be wrong by missing the point about the purpose of something like Hacker News.

Quantity trumps Quality on SO - you are more interested in having hordes of beginner and intermediate techies to drive traffic than lots of experts that don't need to seek technical help as often - but HN is about insightful news and comments, and for that you need the participation of above-average and like-minded people; it's all about quality, not quantity.
Taking Cuban's argument to its logical extreme, nothing can ever be guaranteed because a large asteroid could hit the earth and kill us all. I'm more likely to believe that Amazon.com will honor its service guarantees than I am some no-name ecommerce company, and Amazon's guarantee is close enough to certainty that I don't question it. The probability of a promise being kept is somewhere between zero and one. Our job as buyers is to estimate that probability accurately enough to make rational decisions.
Maybe. But the banks have a relentlessly resourceful profit motive. More likely, the regulators were more keen to hang them out to dry for not cooperating with LTCM.

Also, Bear Stearns always was a much smaller and weaker institution. Maybe they simply couldn't afford the risk then and now.
It would be awesome to finally reconcile Quantum Love-chanics and Feynman's Theory of Flirtativity.
A web startup has a much higher cost than a couple of laptops if they have any users.
Intro to Google Maps API for Flex: Part 2
A quick tutorial on how to plot PolyLines on a map, how to get the distance between them, and using Markers to had a little bit more usability to your application.
Ask HN: Anyone use brain drugs such as piracetam here?
If you have ever used these kind of drugs, what's your experience?
Favorite Eclipse Shortcuts
Over 10 shortcuts within Eclipse to make your day to day programming life easier. Also a short howto on how to remove the most annoying shortcut, Show in Breadcrumbs.
It's relevant to note that "don't be x" and "be y" are not equivalent even if x more or les = not y...

keith johnstone writes nicely about this as it relates to education in the introduction to the book impro.

hence be relentlessly resourceful is dramatically more useful than don't be x...
Cookie Forcing:  Overwrite SSL-only cookies from a non-SSL session
Samsung hooks up 24 SSDs at once [YouTube]
All of Microsoft Office loads in .5 seconds.
I think the kind of resourcefulness being discussed is less about "make v. buy" and more about "make/buy v. get for free."

By "get for free" I mean using personal connections, creativity, or whatever else you have at your disposal (maybe university affiliation) to avoid paying at all, either with real money out of your pocket or development and maintenance effort (in the case of software).
I'm just not sure thats the case. IPv6 has too much of a 'design by committee' feel to it, which usually means it falls over as a standard in Internet land.
> I know more than a few people who spend no money on "music" but several hundred a year on iPods

Does one have to buy a new iPod every year?
I had the exact same problem a while back. It was while working full time and creating a startup on the side. The stress of every thing resulted in the same symptoms. Every day I needed to resist the urge to go to the emergency room because I thought I was going to die of a heart attack. This lasted for about 7 months and I didn't tell anyone until eventually I couldn't take it and one night drove myself to the hospital. After a series of unpleasant tests, it was just to much stress.

So what did I do to fix it?

1.) Realized the deadlines and pressure I was putting on myself were self imposed and definitely didn't need to be that aggressive. One thing I have learned, all time lines and deadlines are made up (know one really knows, its just a best guess), unless there is a contract attached. Doesn't mean be lazy and slack off.

2.) Better time management, context switching in life is aa expensive as it is on a computer, Set aside time for each thing.

3.) Task lists, every day create a list of tasks you want to complete and cross items off when done. The sense of accomplishment creates a good feeling. Tomorrow create a new task list, don't add to the old one, this is a good way to clear the list of all the shit that doesn't matter or has changed. You are going to be behind schedule, the goals is to make progress and create milestones that can be reached.

3.) Balance your life, being heads down can only last for so long. Enjoy family, friends, people on the street, talk about what you are doing, get ideas and feedback. Get a way for a weekend, see #1 shit can wait a weekend.

4.) As soon as possible find someone that can start to use the software and give you feedback. It is amazing how one person giving feedback will help energize you. They will think the progress you are making is far better than you. This is because what you are doing will hopefully help them in some way.

5.) Started exercising, eating better and stopped drinking Coke. Caffeine increases heart rate and only added to the problem, but I was drinking Coke to cope with the sleeping issues. Exercise is always positive, don't need to run a marathon just get out and walk around, enjoy the sun.

6.) Massages, I made my wife start giving me massages and that worked really well. No wife, no worries, you can pay money for a professional.
Mike Rowe gets it right on so many levels. If Obama really wants to make a difference I think he needs to talk to this guy. He systematically relates to intellectuals and non-intellectuals and does it with ease.
More people would comment just for the sake of commenting. Comment quality would suffer.