skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of this discussion seems to boil down to several key issues:

1. Should you ever refuse service to someone because you disapprove of their lawful activities?
2. If so, where do you draw the line?
3. If so, how do you deal with the fact that you can only enforce the policy when a customer's activities are specifically brought to your attention?

To answer #1, I'd make an analogy to the social responsibility rules some companies voluntarily impose on themselves. (Some companies say they will only buy from vendors who meet certain fair labor standards. Others say they will only buy from environmentally friendly vendors. Et cetera.)

Refusing service based on an ethical principle is very similar to these types of policies, except you're declining to sell something instead of buy. Companies that follow these rules are generally lauded for it. Likewise, companies that are perceived as not doing so are criticized. (Think of Apple's relationship with Foxconn.)

So I think it's pretty safe from a P.R. standpoint to refuse service based on ethical principles. You might have to ditch a handful of paying customers, but if your business model is about volume, it's probably not going to matter.

As for the ethical imlications of refusing service, I say that nobody is entitled to use your service any more than you're entitled to customers. So I don't see a problem there.

Question #2 is harder. Where do you draw the line? I'd say that's up to each company to decide, but here are some reasonable examples of things you might forbid:

- Patent trolls

- Hate groups

- Technically lawful but sleezy stuff, e.g. certain infoproducts

The exact list a company chooses would of course depend on the subjective ethical beliefs of its leadership. Which is fine--it's their company. In any case, it's very important to clearly state these rules in the TOS. You really don't want to be seen as capricious, and it's not fair to your customers, even the evil ones.

Question #3 is probably the hardest. As the OP pointed out, you can't just dig through your customers' data, looking for possible violations. So you'd have to wait until something was brought to your attention. And then, as the OP said, you'd have de facto tolerance for offenders who don't speak up. Which seems kind of unfair.

But here, I'd make an analogy to the TOS rules concerning criminal activity. There must be tons of people using legitimate web services for crime. Occassionally, some of these are discovered, and their accounts are terminated. The rest get away with it.

I doubt anyone would say you should ignore reports of criminal activity just because some other crime goes unreported. So I think the same applies to these ethical restrictions.
All machine tools, beyond the absolute cheapest ones, are like that; because they're built by machinists for other machinists. There's no such thing as a consumer-oriented lathe.
I've had a Site survive the HN frontpage and a slashdotting on super-cheap shared hosting. But that was a few KB of text and two very small Images.
As I am neither a hiring manager, nor can I point to my own website and say "that helped me get a job", I offer the words of Philip Greenspun:

A big salary can evaporate quickly. Between March 2001 and April 2004 roughly 400,000 American jobs in information technology were eliminated. Many of those who had coded Java in obscurity ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal professional reputation, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big salary but also harder to lose. If you don't invest some time in writing (prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a recession.

http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup

In my own opinion, a blog component only makes sense if you wish to write short (3-paragraph) posts. Use Wordpress if what Wordpress offers is what you want. On one hand, writing your own web framework can be a good learning experience and a good portfolio piece in itself; on the other hand, good programmers reuse existing code when possible. NOT writing your own web framework can be just as much of an indicator of your skills as writing one.
Ok, that one is a keeper. :-)

One I've heard which isn't specifically mentioned is the 'Experience Twist' as in "A lot of people need to X and they do it but it sucks because it causes Y. We can do X with less Y."
Only if Google were paying all the costs.

To the contrary, it makes for the biggest crowdsourcing project ever.
But hasn't there been fuel injected engines since the 1960s at least? There are planes like the Beechcraft Musketeer Super III that had a fuel injected Lycoming IO-360 engine for example. I don't know much about motors or aviation to know what the difference would be although.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Musketeer
That's actually what we thought at first, but there's a problem. Doesn't that encourage our legitimate customers to not use our customer service? If someone is running a political campaign, they can't risk asking us a question because we might not agree with their beliefs. How can we have that policy without leaving all of our real customers in a constant state of fear that we might ban them because of our own beliefs?
hmmm...not sure I agree that "you can't raise money for your startup and you aren't making enough to pay your employees, your business sucks".

When funding dries up, even good businesses have a very difficult time raising capital, and it's not uncommon for a "good" business to be unprofitable for a couple of years (or more) as it ramps up. (See Amazon, Twitter, etc.)
That's weird to hear. Lots of professors use their own textbooks in their undergrad and (especially) graduate classes (e.g., Yaser Abu-Mostafa uses his own textbook for http://www.work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html).

Also, there are certain canonical texts that are used almost universally across all universities during a certain time frame (say, the CLR algorithms book, or the Cover and Thomas information theory book).
Use a read later service like Instapaper. You wouldn't want to be reading HN all day because that would just be counter productive. At some point, you have to ignore what's going on and get back to work.
I got this too. It's reproduceable for me if I click on any of the nodes before the page is ready for it, and once this happens I can't use it at all. But if I wait a second or two before doing this it works fine. Using latest chrome.
I'd love someone to make a tank of a laser printer. Like just clone an HP LaserJet 6 (the pinnacle). Make the internals open source, the paper trays modular, and boom.

Most printers are sold on price. But I think a small niche player selling durable printers with low consumable costs could do well.
Why would it surprise you that a statically typed language like Java on the highly optimized JVM is faster than Javascript?

Any benchmark you care to look at should clearly shows JVM is much faster:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all...
Prismatic goes public
Haha, that's along the lines of what I was thinking. Meh. I sometimes wonder if Github could post something about feeding their company pet and make it to the top of HN. :)
Or, they had 8 people collaborating on the design and implementation of something important. Do you dare to claim that all 8 of these people did nothing else?
Interesting...the folders and files are now different colors for me. Different than when I first left this comment. Still not high enough contrast IMO, but a step in the right direction.
The site uses a font choice to change how the site works, which is pretty much conflicting with the entire concept of a style sheet.
This is a pain of compiling vim yourself; definitely makes it easier.
The App Store isn't evil because it filters. It's evil because it's a monopoly filter.

If there were lots of competing App Stores with their own beliefs, filters, prejudices, ideologies, etc - no problem. Of course this is exactly the case in the CRM industry.

So your conscience should be patting itself on the back, not beating itself up, when it tells a patent troll to go fsck a porcupine. This is exactly the purpose of a conscience: telling you to do what's right, regardless of the official structure of law in your era and country. Patent trolls aren't illegal, but they're evil, and it's wrong to collaborate voluntarily with evil. If the powers that be force you to collaborate, of course, that's something else...
Objective-C was not created by Apple.
You guys should not have demoed your app. Just add another line in your TOS which states that you don't let "Patent Trolls" use your app. How hard is that? You have to man up and say NO.

What's the point of "believing", when you don't act on it . This whole story paints a picture of a company without any conviction.
I'm surprised so many people are clamoring for this. While the system seems excellent overall, the lack of a rewards program on the card seems like a deal-breaker for day-to-day use. Why would I use this instead of a credit card that gives me 1-5% cash back?
Requests per second implies downloading the complete request for each request.
Did Sparkfun send a representative to the court house? I'd be surprised if the court forced Sparkfun to show up and incur transportation and other related costs.
Reddit IAmA with Pebble Watch founder
The more modern CAM packages will do this for you automatically (routing CNC so that it does not interfere with the part) but this version probably relies on the user to properly define the bends and angles so that no interference occurs.
I think this is a great summary, but it misses one key point. There's a big difference between refusing to buy a product from someone you find unethical and refusing to sell a product to someone you find unethical. The difference how this impacts all of the other potential buyers/sellers out there who are ethical.

Google and Facebook ban people's accounts all the time for doing things they find disagreeable, and they certainly aren't lauded for it. Instead, we all live in a constant state of fear that Google might ban our accounts because we didn't use our real name, or we're showing a middle finger in our profile picture, etc.
I also got the "Sorry, your IP address shows you are coming from a country that requires us to block access to this particular site."
My question is, then, why am I able to play Enemy Territory and go through forums of it?
NVIDIA  Announces Open-Source CUDA Compiler
Mildly off topic, but I buy BDU pants, (Former American military uniform) and they're pretty durable, as well as quite cheap. Several manufacturers make them to mil-spec, and they come in colors other than "camouflage".
But you're skipping a bubble: the 2008 collapse wasn't like that at all. Everyone ("everyone") knew we were in a housing bubble. Everyone expected housing prices to collapse. No one expected what happened.

As it turned out, all of the big investment banks were insanely leveraged in the housing market. And when it went sound just a little bit they went belly up first. No one outside the inner sanctums of those companies had any clue this was going to happen.

So the question here isn't "is there a bubble?", but "what unforseen side effects will it have?".
Could you clarify that? Are you saying that if the response is sent within the same second that the request came in that it contributes to the metric?

Or would a response that is sent 30 seconds after the request came in contribute to the metric too?
Status Update (Tech Crunch and Engadget not being sold)
The 1 % Chance Of Success
Interesting take. The credit card skimming scams are coming fast and furious, they are easy money according to some folks. I have heard estimates at $2B/yr in the US in lost cash.

That being said, a subpoena can be 'quashed' if you can prove that the agency is over reaching or 'fishing' but if you refuse it you put yourself in a position to be held in contempt by the court.
Finding people willing to do it for $50 of goods or casually is fairly difficult by itself.
Hahaha I hear you. "Me too"s are frowned upon here, but I could not resist. There are so many things that I want to learn that I wish sleep was just optional.

I know Hadoop is the poster child of all things good, but its API really makes me fall asleep. Not a big fan. Add to that the fact that Google's implementation is (or atleast used to be) 4~6 times faster for similar sized processing jobs and more fun to code in (the latter may be entirely subjective). The funny part is that Google's clusters then were made of weaker machines ! I dont know how it is now.

EDIT: It is indeed in C++ that alone cannot fully explain the discrepancy though. Java can be slower but shouldnt be that much slower. I am sure caching, memory footprint and as you said data access latencies and overall design plays a big role. If I remember correctly UIUC has an open source mapreduce framework written in C++ and they claim a similar speedup over hadoop.
I like that the PSA ends with "fix things properly", which is sensible, as opposed to "don't fix electronic appliances"
As a coder this is a fascinating read, but since this is the internet I am dying to hear from more educated readers on how close to reality it is.(that is why I hang around here)
any takers?
It includes a test with file streaming on Node.js, that bypass reading the file and write to socket via the Javascript loop completely.

Also file IO are heavily cached by the OS. You can bet that one file is read from memory most of the time. Disk IO is pretty much out of the equation.
1 is still hard because it implies vetting your customers based on intent. So basically you have a blank on your signup form asking why they want to use X, and then you reject them if they write the wrong thing? Seems fishy. Likewise, what if you suddenly find out a loyal customer of N years has been using your service nefariously?

I guess one approach is to have a Terms of Service, but in this case, what would it say? "You agree not to do anything we disapprove of." Seems like a tough road to go down.
The bang (!) sign would make more sense to me. It's already used in css to express priority (!important), so it's not much of a logical jump.
Careful. I count 5. Some people did more than one thing.
I was expecting a punchline such as, "The troll, on seeing the implementation of our feature set has notified our lawyers that we are infringing on his patent"
Some of the most mind-blowing facts on Quora
? I'm on Linux and github's new font works fine. Looks nice.
you know what's more annoying than patent trolls? arrogant posts about how much better someone is than patent trolls.
You just need to be transparent about your reasons. Just add a clause which prevents Patent Trolls from using your app. People are angry at the App store because they are blocking genuine apps. You can't compare your situation to the App Store or Google, they both have a huge user base, the advantage of being a small company is that nobody is going to notice that you asked a Patent Troll to stop using your app, and if they did it would only improve your image.
My comment: http://vertxproject.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/vert-x-vs-node-...
Lots of interesting points made here. If I could add only a few data points, I would say the following.

I have taught a very successful class on Investor pitching in SF for 6 months. I have had between 10 and 50 students per class, always sold out, even when I raised prices... (http://fundraisingviparisoma.eventbrite.com/)until end of March.
Then, in April, I had to cancel two classes because I had too few students, and I only have 10 next week in a venue when I never had less than 20. It just tells me that we are at the end of a cycle, when everybody who drunk the "Social Network Movie kool aid" thought they could create a Groupon for India, a language learning start up or an Opentable for Hair Salons. It's a good thing for everybody actually.

Now as for Facebook's valuations, the question is - will Facebook bring as much traffic to applications in the future than Google did to commerce websites. My belief is yes (look at Viddy, SocialCam, Zynga, Pinterest, Draw Something if you need examples). In that case, Facebook, like Google in 2004-2008, will grow into a 100B-$200 valuation (which does not mean that I think it is the best stock purchase to do, the big money on Facebook has been made already by earlier investors). Same for Pinterest. If Pinterest users convert like crazy, then they will be able to demand emerchants to "pay to play" and... they will.
I just got out of debt just to move to you guys and start from 0 debt... please invite me!
"So the question is, is there a way to tell the patent troll to go screw himself without jeopardizing our trustworthiness with our real customers?"

(further down in this thread you also said):

"Trust me, I don't feel good about helping a patent troll. I just don't see any sort of justifiable policy that would allow for us to act any differently."

Doesn't need to be "justifiable". "Justifiable" to?

You are, as was said by the sheriff played by Roy Schieder In Jaws "the Chief of Police". And you're not a large corporation (yet) where you have to issue a memo which says "don't sell to patent trolls " either.

You can do whatever you want to deflect or keep any business and nobody needs to know about it. You can simply be passive aggressive with any customer. You don't return phone calls. You don't setup demo dates. You don't get back to them without pricing or details or answers to questions they have. Almost everyone will leave and just think you are a typical non-responsive business and they will go elsewhere. Or you can quote them a high price to scare them away. There are dozens of "not in the book" ways you can get people to not give you business. Bad service is only one. It's not that hard. And you don't have to announce it to the world or justify it to anyone. It's done quietly.

This happens everyday in business for many reasons (that don't even have to do with anything objectionable). A salesman will spend his time with someone who is going to give him more business and be lackadaisical with someone that appears to be a trifler. Lawyers will build their business with any client then they will thin those clients by being less responsive and/or jacking up billing rates. The clients leave. They don't announce "you are not important anymore". It just happens.

Added: "jeopardizing our trustworthiness with our real customers"

The point is to do it where the other customers don't know you are doing this. I'm assuming there are many things in your business everyday that you don't reveal to current customers.
LuaJIT ported to MIPS (current archs: x86, x86-64, ARM, and PPC)
TorrentFreak has articles on the tech itself, but they don't go into a lot of detail. I suspect the exact workings are secret.

EDIT: Link = https://torrentfreak.com/movie-spy-cameras-attack-the-dying-...
git has plenty of properties that are supposed to be true. The developers write tests for them. The properties being tested could be proven instead.
Offers right in Maps is a great example of why I think those who claim Google would have been better off not doing Android cause iOS is currently making them more in mobile profits are being incredibly shortsighted.
Is it just me or does the new exit icon with the door not align well with the other icons?
It's more like expecting all cars to be narrow enough to fit in lanes or expecting all cars to have turn signals and brake lights. Type face has a huge impact on how readable text is, car color has almost zero impact on my ability to drive.
I was so psyched when I first played this because Castle Wolfenstein* was the first computer game I was addicted to. Something about sneaking up on Nazis and filling them up with lead. It never gets old!

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Wolfenstein
To be perfectly honest the icons confused me. I only found "new repo" because tere aren't many bbuttons so it's quick to go over each. I much prefer text.
It doesn't matter whether a request straddles a second or not in a throughput measuring benchmark when you saturate the system. A client would only count a request when its request call has returned. Runs it for N minutes, count up how many requests have completed, then divide the total with the time and you got req/sec.

Besides the benchmark has run for a minute. I doubt each request lasts 30 seconds.
Introducing Riak Community Release Notes
I had heard this before and just tried it...awesome!

It's also interesting that philosophy links to existence (ontology) and that links back to philosophy.
Is there anything like the MapDroyd app ([which keeps all the mapping info local to the phone) which also does turn-by-turn navigation?
I'm sitting in a chair as I write this. Nobody else has sat in this chair today. Am I on the cutting edge of research? Similarly, writing a game in Haskell does not make you on the cutting edge of research.
I still think BankSimple would've made for a better brand. Simple sounds too generic.

"Hey, have you tried this Simple app?"
"What's the name of this app? Where can I find this app?"
"It's Simple"
"Yeah I know, but what's the name of it?"
"Umm.. it's Simple"
"Simple what?"
"Just Simple"
"I searched the App Store. No app called Just Simple, dummy"
The way you wrote it made it sound like the industry isn't really concerned about camming due to it not being a threat. My point was that the industry is highly concerned about it and goes to great lengths to fight it.

I can certainly agree with your A & B.
Does The 1st Amendment Create A Defense For Google Against Antitrust Regulation?
D3 is awesome but I've always felt it is more suitable for complex visualizations. For simple stuff like line graph etc. Existing graphing libraries are pretty cool. Anyone using it for common visualizations like line chart or pie chart?
Cloud and SoLoMo are missing from the buzzword list. Anyway funny. Kinda reminds me: http://abstrusegoose.com/380
'Hire me' billboard leads to job for 22-year-old
They have glyphs for both Apple and Windows but not Linux.
You could list explicitly what all you find ethically objectionable. Transparency allows for honesty and a much more fluid system.

OR

Allowing for each employee to be able to make that call can find you some middle ground.

Lets take your political campaign example, if a democratic pro-choice advocacy group wanted to use your CRM, but your support guy/girl doing that gets the call is pro-life, she/he should be allowed to say, hey I'm sorry but someone else needs to take this for me, I can't do this. Now really that should be every company, but let it be known in your ToS that you reserve the right to not force an employee to do something they don't find agreeable with their ethics.

If it happens that ALL of your employees hate patent trolls to the extent that none of them will help then simply tell the customer that they won't be able to get help.

I can appreciate how hard of a question it is, censorship versus ethics. But, maybe it'll help to think of it this way, as a company you don't want to censor your customers, but at what point do you realize that in violating your own ethics you are allowing someone else to censor you.

It's a tough call either way, I don't begrudge you the choice you made as it seems you put a lot of thought into it.
Take that productivity!
I'm interested in this too, Paskulin, perhaps we can swap notes? wahyu at symbol picocrew.com
Yea I agree with you, I think we have enough html7 shits popping on twitter, do we really need that kind of stuff on hackernews? ... It does not bring any interesting discussion and does not show anything useful..

Unfortunately I cannot downvote!
Notch Launches to Make Healthy Living (and Data) Sexy
That's what AskMen is for.
Dropbox Ran Afoul of Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines: So What?
That's a pretty groovy framework, thanks for sharing. Nice work.