skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with most people here that Monsanto is probably as evil as companies can get, but let's analyze the situation for a second, because there are some confused emotions at play here.

The original opening statement went "Fuck Monsanto, and by association, fuck Cloudant". This an emotional statement, a matter of moral outrage. What is the outrage directed toward? Well, to Monsanto and companies that deal with them? Nope. Because if that were the true outrage should be proportional to how much a company benefits Monsanto. In the big scheme of things Cloudant is not going to make that big a difference, moral outrage should instead be directed to the companies and institutions that Monsanto depends on. But those companies don't advertise their dealings with Monsanto, for reasons that should be obvious by now.

But wait a second... what is Cloudant guilty of? Poor PR judgement. Nothing more. Does that justify moral outrage? I don't think so. Moral outrage is a useful emotion, but it should always be followed up by some rational analysis. The cause of the outrage is the PR statement, not the fact that Cloudant and Monsanto are in business together.

pg hinted also hinted at this by saying that Cloudant is held to a different standard than all the other companies that deal with Monsanto. Nick O'Neill argues that pg therefore supports the PR statement and that this all reflects badly on YC and the moral fiber of the YC people. That's just taking it all way out of proportion.

I probably would have taken the moral high ground and refused to do business with Monsanto. But always taking the moral high ground is a huge handicap. If you want to have a shot at building a billion dollar company you can't afford to play with too large a handicap. The game is difficult enough as is. And if you succeed the world is going to much better off because of your business.

We read today that Jeff Bezos is a tyrant and micro-manager. So was Steve Jobs. Books have been written about the ruthlessness of Bill Gates. Larry Elison? Check. Even Richard Branson (who is a stand-up guy) committed $100k of tax fraud when he was young. Alan Sugar? Ruthless. Would we be better off without these guys? Hell no. Should we shun and shame them? Again, nope. It's better to take 10 steps forward and a half step back than to refuse to move at all.
This is amazingly naive to think that we human have practiced anything close to what you state. From advent of agriculture, the practice has been to mix and match various plant species to get the best produce at lowest cost. We have destroyed huge amount of bio-diversity in the process. For example, of hundreds of banana species that existed, there is now only few, and all bananas are essentially clone of each other.

We have far left behind the days when agriculture was "natural", what ever that word means. The only difference that GM food bring to table is that we can now actively modify genes without taking a guess of what to mix with what.

Hating Monsanto might be understandable, but it only shows how patent system is broken, rather than a group of innovator being evil.

Don't like Monsanto, stop using them. Let them die without profit as no one would buy their stuff. But I guess great motive of money is stopping the "small" farmers from doing that.
Updates - View comments on my latest updates - Yahoo Pulse
Is there any way in which this is not effectively a "MacBook Air with Windows preinstalled"? Any realistic difference from Air+BootCamp?

Features seem the same, style seems nearly identical just Asus branded...

I'm honestly not trolling, believe me I'm far from an Apple fanboi. I just don't see where the innovation is here, apart from an "us too" from Intel & ASUS.
If You Can’t Access BBM, You Should Try Kik
Definitely Blender, please! This looks great.
Diaspora asking for donations? What happened to the $200k and where is this new money going?

Then again...NY can be an expensive place to start a company
I was railing against the idea that business is one thing, and that as long as behavior is not illegal that it is ok. I feel like we are infected with a more virulent form of 1905. Ethics exist everywhere for all time, they don't belong in a free speech zone.

The idea that, business is business. Of course it is, that is a tautology. We both did the snarky comment dance.

I am going to outline an analogous skit, imagine you are at a cocktail party with a bunch of friends and this dude is there and he is funny and charming, but his barbs dig too deep he drinks too much wine and he tries to sow the seeds of discontent between you and your girl friend. You exclaim to your friends that his guy is total narcissistic ass and you want him out. Ahhh they tell you, tptacek, that guy isn't a person, he is a business. He doesn't have to follow the same social norms we do.
In ND, Halliburton is pretty well liked.
Apparently not:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-12/google-is-said-not-...

Google Inc. (GOOG) isn’t planning to acquire Akamai Technologies Inc. (AKAM), two people familiar with the matter said, countering a report in Business Insider that fueled speculation a takeover may be imminent.
Well, look at it this way:

* You're GIVING Monsanto the money.

* Cloudant is TAKING money from Monsanto.

So who's the Robin Hood here?
Given that Google is barely in the infrastructure market (they mostly just have a ton for their own uses), I don't see how Google + Akamai would be any less competitive than Akamai on its own.

I guess there could be some issues since this makes Google's competitors in other markets reliant on them, but from a "too much good infrastructure in one company" standpoint, I don't see how there would be anti-trust concerns.
I imagine Amazon's PR department is a couple of orders of magnitude more pissed off at him than Google's PR department.
My javascript parseint("08") suprise
So perhaps google wants to mine it for their ad network?
The title is misleading. This isn't what Facebook is claiming at all. This is terribly biased reporting.
CPU power consumption hasn't been increasing at all for years. The high-end desktop chips all top out at 125-130W TDP, with the slightly more reasonable chips topping out at 95W TDP, and the mainstream desktop chips have a TDP of 65W or lower. Compare this with the Pentium 4 desktop chips, which mostly ranged from 84W TDP to 115W TDP, and had hardly any power management features.

The extra cores don't increase power consumption, because the clock speed they run at is dependent on how many cores you are currently using, and cores you aren't using are almost entirely turned off.

Idle power consumption of a high-end gaming system these days is only about 80W, even though peak power consumption can be on the order of a kW if you use multiple graphics cards.

If you think current chips are monstrosities that put out lots of heat and fan noise, you're probably running with a lot of power management features disabled.
The tables have turned: this Reuters story is just rehashing Business Insider, which broke the story earlier:

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-move-2011-10

BI's version actually has more background and analysis, in addition to being the source.
> Imagine a kid from a poor neighborhood sitting in on a lecture from a top tier university. That's what we're talking about.

No, that's what you're imagining we're talking about.
I came to know recently that Google had plans to use services of Akamai. When agreement could not be reached on the pricing, Google came up with its own content delivery network. Now this acquisition. Puzzling.
My biggest take away from the apology:

"But as it was midnight and I am not what you might call an experienced Google+ user, by the time I figured out how to actually post something I had somehow switched accounts."

Uh, well Google: start there. I see about three things that could use some attention (Google+ adoption, usability and multi-account issues with Google and Google Apps)
I've been looking for something like that as I've been thinking about restarting an investment account. Want a founding partner? ;)
Redis creator calls for HN replacement
I've nothing against phone calls (except being asked for my number for no reason), but Bill Bailey had a bit in one of his earlier stand-ups (can't remember which one) where he said the phone call is the most impolite form of communication.

It's like shouting in someone's ears saying, "I WANT YOU TO STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND SPEAK TO ME RIGHT NOW!"
Any PR person probably could've saw this coming.

The reason this comment thread is a worrying sign for HN is that you didn't use to have to think like a PR person here.

Don't you see that you're insulting yourself by saying that you need to have news spun/censored for you in the way PR firms do? I noticed this in the comments about the recent Airbnb and Dropbox controversies too. People did not seem to grasp the irony of complaining that Airbnb and Dropbox were bad at PR.
I think those are a bit different. For all of the actions you mentioned, there is only one way to complete the task (eg deleting an app). With Siri, you can also accomplish any of its functionality using the traditional UI. Therefore the user has to remember to use Siri.

However, your point is well taken. Maybe I'm not giving the average user enough credit.
I'm not offended by the use of the word 'fuck.' I'm offended by the idea that throwing a tantrum is a reasonable or credible way to open a conversation. It's one thing to get passionate if the other party is being pointlessly confrontational or dismissive of genuine concerns. It might even be appropriate. It's quite another for someone to lead off with a shouty denunciation as if that person's opinion is the only one that matters and has no need of explanation.

Step back from the swearing and look at the context in which it cropped up. When an unfamiliar someone's entry to a conversation consists of blowing his/her top, it's usually because they're drunk or crazy. As William Burroughs used to say, 'I am not paid to listen to this drivel.'
Seems like a good fit seeing as "20% of the world's Internet traffic is delivered over the Akamai platform." (www.akamai.com/html/technology/visualizing_akamai.html).

Akamai & Google already have duplicate CDN/Endpoint infrastructure (albeit Akamai's is a CDN platform and Google just delivers for their properties). Akamai has something like 61k servers in most (if not all) major datacenters/ISPs and key peering agreements. Major overlap.. DNS/HTTP(s)/Streaming(youtube)/Data Mining, etc. This could possibly be a big revenue boost for Google in that they consolidate existing peering agreements, etc. and consolidate servers within the last couple miles. Google already does many of these things but it is Akamai's sole business and they do it very well! Probably a big win for Google to have the talent and relationships that Akamai already has. Akamai customers benefit from Googles infrastructure & people.

Edit: context + grammer
Unfortunately, you can't hide the loud, hot running monstrosity that you use for the heavy work under a staircase in the basement if you use it as a desktop.
didn't somebody do this with products from amazon's catalog once? I forgot what the name was though. Anybody else recall it?
That's really what this post should have been about. Where the money has gone, and what more will enable them to do. In my view (an outsiders) they haven't done anything of much significance with what they already got.
Akamai's market cap is $4.3B, which means Google would have to drop at least that (but really much more) to acquire them. Something tells me Google's investors are going to go bananas (not in a good way) if this goes through, especially on the heels of their Motorola Mobility acquisition.
As an ex-Amazonian, I have to second your opinion. It was by far the worst employment experience I had at a tech company. In my 10 year tenure, I fortunately didn't come across any company as bad as Amazon, when it comes to how it treats its employees. The management doesn't have any value for the lives of their developers, and use them as tissues. Use and throw seems to their policy. If you can take their abuse, and don't value your personal life, you can survive there long enough. You are expected to work like slaves, always on call. Office cubes were cramped, there is no free soda, drinks. Even coffee they stocked in the kitchen was cheap. They celebrate frugality at the cost of quality of working conditions they provide to their developers. No wonder, one of the SVP's life misson when he joined Amazon from Microsoft was to make Amazon a place where developers would love to stay. Average turn-over at Amazon is around 18-24 months. Most of the line managers were clueless and sometimes completely non-technical. I wondered why smart engineers would even consider working there, when they can work in awesome companies in the valley where they celebrate/cherish people they hire, and actually care about them. Most of the kids who are hired right out of school, wisen up, and leave in 2 years. I worked at Microsoft too. Microsoft with all it faults still takes amazing care of its employees. Great perks. Amazon just pays salary, and its medical insurance is a joke when compared to Microsoft. One other biggest gripe I have about Amazon is that it leverages so many open-source technologies but they don't give back (much) to tech community or industry as such. It is not in their DNA. Their attitude is similar when it comes to its people. My advice for anyone considering Amazon, should seriously talk to current and Ex-Amazonians, and get a real-picture of what you can get out of Amazon. Folks who don't have the faintest idea about working for Amazon seemed to have downvoted a similar opinion of mine in the past on HN. For clueless folks who think, I am some dis-gruntled employee, I can gladly quote/refer to Yegge's post now. Quitting Amazon was one of the wisest decisions I made.
I don't think the OP is suggesting phone support should be phased out; he's saying that email support should be there too and be on par. I can name a couple of companies I've had to interact with in the past few days that only offer phone support: Student Finance, EDF Energy.
I was being pretty imprecise there; the point is that Roundup is (again, imprecisely) potent and broad-spectrum. You couldn't just spray it over a normal crop; it would kill the crop along with the weeds.
this "voting with your dollars" thing is a bunch of bullshit.

Tell that to RIM or Netflix.
The multiple accounts issue is the main reason I don't use G+. It's no longer practical to tie an online identity to a correspondence account.
Parallax Propellor has 8 cores, a dev kit was $100, last I looked.
Bundler basically lets you set up and hop between different "sets" of gems.

Say I want to set up a bunch of gems for my new ruby app. I have a Gemfile, and so I use Bundler to install those gems for this app only. For example:

~$ cd myapp
~/myapp$ bundle install
# Installs a ton of gems.

Now we can use those gems:

~/myapp$ bundle exec rails console # Or...
~/myapp$ bundle exec rails server # Or...
~/myapp$ bundle exec rake db:migrate

This can get cumbersome, so I usually put this in my .bashrc:

alias be="bundle exec"
# Example usage: be rails console
# Example usage: be rails server

I hope this clears things up a little. (I see RVM being used to manage sets of gems, but Bundler does this out of the box.)
Smells of desperation.
Probably to get into the CDN business. Making the web faster is one of Google's strategic goals, and they try to achieve it by many different means.
Even though the Dart hate is the most recent example, I think the issue of negativity & trolling is much larger than one new language release. It seems that if anyone comes up with a new technology/idea that doesn't fit the exact zeitgeist of a particular community it is immediately & thoroughly slammed.

Having a 'thick-skin' is all well and great, but truth is a lot of people don't, and criticism hurts. Constructive criticism can be a very useful thing, but being adrift in a sea of 'constructive criticism' with not a dot of positivity in sight is just demoralising.

I know it can seem that if a bad idea is not immediately killed you will be stuck with it forever & sometimes this is the case, but not always. Sometimes things are just different, people have different ideas. If someone has a different idea that to you seems stupid, smile politely and walk (run?) away.

Bad ideas eventually become self-evident anyway, you will have just saved some time.
It is a fundamental difference. Some people will sit in a wooden house and decry the lumber industry for deforestation. Others will try to figure out how to make bricks cheaper.
You're right. That was the problem. I was visiting jobstractor.com, which does not work correctly.
see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2976139 for their financials report
My reaction, too. Wish it had "[video]" in the anchor text.
Try a Startup after College
> I think HN's initial population of smart, mostly apolitical nerds has been diluted by the arrival of a lot of new users who are not as smart, and are thus more excited by shallow controversies.

Or: I disagree with you, therefore you are dumb.

Outstanding.

I up-voted the parent comment. I have been here for years. I consider myself to be a free market supporting, fiscally conservative and independent thinker.

I have major issues with the methods Monsanto uses to conduct itself in the marketplace. In everything from the products they produce, their influence of the legal and regulatory systems, their seeming inability to factor in a basic responsibility to those that consume their products and even the way they distribute the surpluses in their pension funds (i.e. they steal them, when allowed).

I believe they act this way mainly due to a void of ethical behaviour at their highest levels, and because of this, I will look at them, and individuals that fail to recognize these actions as being a problem with a certain level of suspicion.

If you think I am not as smart as you because of this so be it.
I don't think you're giving the parent poster a very charitable reading.

Evil can be quite efficient for the entity being evil and inefficient for the world at large. It's the epitome of selfishness, ergo: evil.

Cheaper food is a benefit. That doesn't imply that this gain is worth the consequences.
The lesson here is don't quit two months into a new job before finding a replacement position. "The position isn't what I thought it would be" sounds much different if you are still there than if you've quit. Very few people will begrudge an incompatible match if you are seen as sticking it out responsibly.
> They [upvote] because they're dumb. It's the shape of this sort of idea that excites them, not its content.

The first part is a fundamental attribution error. The second part definitely plays a role, but don't think it's the primary cause. You can probably do the analysis on the votes, but I'd be surprised if the majority of the votes come from young accounts. I think it's much more likely that political topics are popular because the political climate changed so much in the US, especially for young people.
doesnt work for me..what do i do to make it work?? I cant see any option under messages for activating iMessage.
Isn't that voting based on perceived quality of product (which I don't believe is in dispute) rather than an ethical objection of some kind?
I wondered why smart engineers would even consider working there

Amazon seemed to pay pretty good starting salaries. I remember in 2008 losing an intern because we couldn't match the salary.
Floating Point Caveats
1. If we continue our use of herbicides/pesticides to the point of wide-spread colony collapse, spread of plant disease (perhaps canola, soy, or corn), significant reduction of nitrate fixation, increased human cancers we may also see hundreds of millions of people die or be without food.

Obviously, no one is suggesting we stop producing enough food for people to eat. But you need to look past the next 5, 10, 25 years. Those issues listed above are all real. And can all be linked to herbicides/pesticides and monocultures. We need to work on a new solution, a new system. The current situation is not a long-term answer.

2. This is more a theoretical morality issue. How much control/ownership should any one entity be allowed to have on life. What if they aren't just patenting seeds for RoundUp resistance? More so, say I live in a certain climate where I want a certain field tomato to grow. And under those circumstances I end up with a seed similar to a patented Monsanto seed. I lose in court. Other varieties of tomatoes don't grow will in my area. What do I do? I no longer have the freedom or right to grow successful tomatoes. This is not reality, but a possibility. One, that I do not believe in the slightest is worth risking. This could also lead to outrageous seed pricing.

Oh while I'm at it. Let's add climate change, land degradation (http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1214-unu.html). Basically, yes we need to feed billions, but we also need to do that 25-50 years from now. The practices used for high-yield crops are limiting our ability to produce food in the future.
Have you thought this through? Are you saying exploitation of some to the 'benefit' of others is okay?

That's the philosophy of utilitarianism in a nutshell. This is not a debate that can, or will, be resolved on HN. You might want to read up on 'Kaldor-Hicks efficiency' and 'Pareto optimality' which explores this concept in greater detail. 'Efficiency' here means net economic utility, as opposed to Company X just saving a few $.
Improving devices and technologies are taking certain things out of our hands and heads. More and more by the hour actually...

facebook is there to remind us on birthdays for example. now... it might sound stupid, but i don't care about those reminders and i am not that friend of yours who says happy birthday when seeing the alert. i usually log in at night, so if i forgot someones birthday, i let it slip.

i am pretty sure this sounds more than crazy, but i just ignore the part of technologies where they would change my personality...

i just hope the freed up space by advancing technologies will be put to better use, so instead of keeping your wife's birthday or your 34th anniversary in your mind, you'll invent a more efficient way to burn fuel, or thinking smaller, a better combination of spices for your bbq.
But what does that have to do with the question of whether Monsanto is right or wrong to be suing farmers? Because that's the question at the top of this thread.

I said, in effect, farmers are sympathetic, and Monsanto is not, but that doesn't necessarily make Monsanto wrong. You responded --- from what I can tell --- by saying Monsanto is unsympathetic. Why are you telling me that?
After reading the comments on the blog post and your inability to address even the most basic of my concerns without invoking my imagination and your chrome, both of which have absolutely nothing to do with what I've written, I think today's improvement was not.

Also, you don't deserve to carry the brunt of the UX discussion on your shoulders in a public forum, as you're obviously not the only party responsible, but your enthusiasm is palpable and I commend you for it.
This definitely does not come off well.

Especially given the general sentiment (around HN at least) that these guys were over-funded.

Chalk one up to the bootstrapping mantra of being cash strapped to force you to push/pivot/iterate/hussle ...
or die.
I just picked up an i5 2500k from Microcenter for $179. A great processor at a good price.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?prod...
Well, Google has always had internal accounts for most of the services that are tied to your Google Company account. I don't know if G+ works this way, but I would assume that the problem isn't something that G+ user would encounter until Google releases Google+ for Google Apps.