skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading the OP carefully, it is clear there are a lot of implications that can be derived from choosing to limit service outside of what the law requires.

As a thought experiment: Suppose Oracle and Google show up and want the service. Oracle is known to be an aggressive company with respect to business and so the company denies Oracle... but accepts Google since Google is friendlier.
Does Oracle have grounds for suing ? I don't know. IANAL. But if I was in their position, I would be concerned until I consulted a lawyer.

What about other entities: political parties you disagree with? activist groups you disagree with? businesses who have unsavoury practices?

Put anther way, what can you legally say 'no' to, and what will get you sued for denying them?

If you can provide a straightfoward notice "no patent trolls" (enforceable in court), does that insulate you?

Again, I don't know. But it would give me pause to ponder if (when?) I am in the position of providing services.

--- more thoughts---

If you take the onus of determining who is moral onto your shoulders, you take responsibility for the inevitable screwup. And with that, you ensure that you will be arbitrary when you notice that one entity is an exception to your existing rules. You have to modify the rules, and that angers people (notice Blizzard's forums anytime changes come

Where the line? Where the exceptions? How to handle it? out!) This is a scaling problem.

Can you get away with not overthinking it and simply kicking the odiousness to the curb and hope that the scaling problem won't manifest?
My total medical bill for having a child: $0.
My bill for visits to my doctor (checkup, prescription renewal, etc.): $0.
My hospital bill for stitches after too much beer: $0.

The out-of-pocket cost of health care is not something we Canadians frequently consider. The national cost of health care is something we debate endlessly.
Hate to be pedantic, but that's the Bourne shell, not bash.
The harder thing is getting the boxshadow to work on that.
This had made HN and had the chance to win a lot of sympathy.

You backed down. That's fine, and - being no business owner or part of a startup myself, I'm clueless - maybe required. Maybe you just can't afford to alienate customers, especially as a small shop.

That said: You asked for an opinion. The idealist in me (see previous paragraph's disclaimer) would boot all of your imaginary customers. I DO believe, naively, that most people are good - or maximum chaotic neutral. In the grand scheme of things there aren't so many assholes to ignore and kick out.

But the list you presented, including the patent troll? Yeah, all of them should go. Politely, with recommendations maybe/help with the migration. No problem. But no, you cannot stay. We're sorry, but our company codex doesn't allow that.

Now THAT would've impressed me.
This would be unnecessary if more people understood monads.
We received an email from the user outlining their entire business. They weren't the most extreme example of a patent troll (where you can't even tell what company it is) but they didn't seem to have any real products, and their use of the CRM would be entirely for managing the victims of their lawsuits.

This is kind of the point of the post though. We hated the idea of letting this person use our software, but is it really our place to make those decisions? Things are rarely black and white.

Having said that, I'm really glad this guy didn't stick around.
Agreed 100%. Grad school is a time to explore all kinds of CS fields (or various topics within a field you're interested in). Right now I wish I had 28-hour days to mess around with GPU computing, compiler design, language theory, and random machine learning projects.

EDIT: its also worth pointing out that Hadoop is not the 'be all, end all' framework for large-scale data analysis. Many problems do not fit the map-reduce paradigm, and are better suited for other frameworks (looking into GraphLab once I get free time, for example).
We may or may not be in a bubble (though I think we are) but I am sick of people using Instagram as their proof of this.

Instagram was a purely defensive purchase by Facebook. They were not buying them for their revenue, or their ability to make money in the future. They were buying them because they thought there was some chance (5% maybe?) that they could become a big competitor with them. They spent 1% of their value with 70% of that being stock to take out the possibility of a quality company taking on their entire business.

We can debate the merits of buying competition to kill them, but this is not new, and it is clearly far different than valuing them per user or per revenue. Facebook wasn't buying their users. They were killing their competition.
won't someone think of the ninjas?
> using the law of the land to justify going against your personal conscience

I don't see it that way at all. Their personal consciences recoiled at providing support for a patent troll and they recoiled at imposing censorship based on the content of a client's messages. They had to reconcile these two opposing attacks of conscience.
I was able to find a cached version here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Inside The New York Times’ Skunkworks
I like the idea, but the site is fairly buggy:

* After signing in via Github, it asked me to create a username. I did so, but clicking either buttons on the dialog that displayed did nothing (incidentally, I probably shouldn't be able to resize that dialog).
* I clicked the "Sign in" link in the upper right and the dialog popped up again, again not working. I closed it, clicked the "Sign in with Github" button, and was taken to my profile page.
* In clicking around my "wall", I got it into a state where clicking the "All Activities" button does nothing. I have to click the logo in the upper left to get back to my "wall".

Like I said, though: neat idea.
System programming is more than just the kernel.

I imagine that the kernel can easily compiled with the Objective-C or Objective-C++ compiler, if Apple so wishes.
To be clear, we tell customers all the time that they shouldn't use our software. Each customer is worth $10/month, so it's not worth having people on the system that don't belong. This wasn't about the money at all, it was about the precedent it would set. How do we convince our other users that they can trust us if we're arbitrarily booting users because we disagree with them.
I've been writing CSS for a couple of years now and it took me like 10 minutes to understand why this is even working.

I already feel sorry for anyone that will be debugging this mess.
Maybe, but I didn't see anyone in the real estate business (employees, not investors) in any vertical or business saying there was a bubble until mid 2007. By that point, valuations had started coming down and financing was being much, much more selective. I stand by my point that it is strange for an industry to call out bubble repeatedly when there isn’t any real evidence of a bubble besides a few anecdotal acquisitions at what people believe to be high prices because they use a non-revenue metric.

Again, I don’t know if there is a bubble or not, but it seems odd for a group to call a bubble so early unless there is already drying liquidity. I really have no idea. It just doesn’t seem as self-evident to me.
> Could you imagine if, like in Portal, when you first launched Photoshop you only had a paintbrush and an eraser? If the app waited for you to master those tools before presenting others? That's madness.

Not if everything was locked from the beginning with no recourse--but then, that's bad game design, too. Nobody wants to come over to play a friend's fighting game (or Photoshop) and find that their favorite characters/tools aren't available. Instead, well-designed games have a "story" or "campaign" mode, where things are slowly unlocked, and then an "open play" mode where everything is available.
I'm on Chrome 20 on OS X and I got this error:

Cannot read property '0' of undefined d3.v2.js:5166
If it was me...

My ToS would have an ethics clause in it, that if it becomes known to us you are doing something I may find unscrupulous then me and my staff have a right to refuse to help you on a personal basis. I'd hate to make any of my people have to help someone they find unethical.

It is a hard question to answer though, but I think harder to answer after you are established, and therefore should be asked by every new startup that wasn't planning on having an ethics portion to their ToS.
I don't think you have to worry about being compared to the App Store or Google when you cancel accounts of patent trolls.

When you run a business, you have to regard yourself as a building block for other people to rely on to build their productivity, their own business, or their own ideas. If customers have to be fearful of pissing off the owner of a service they're using, that has a chilling effect on progress.

However, when a customer's actions or business model directly threatens those ideals you're trying to uphold -- helping people to improve their own productivity or offer better products or services themselves -- then I think you have ethical grounds to ban them as long as you have a human process to handle mistakes.

The main complaint about Google and Apple is that interacting with them is Kafkaesque. An occasional false positive is acceptable if the company has a process to resolve them fairly... a process that doesn't require the customer to get blogtweetHN traction before the company opens a dialogue.
Try drawing circles with your mouse, rather than shaking it — some people find that easier to do on trackpads. Does that help?

RE: showing up when you show the desktop — this is a good feature request, and I will see if I can make it happen. It may not be possible.
Yes, but reference counting (ARC) is also automatic memory management.
I see your point about local branching, but I do prefer git's approach for simplification on large branch sets. Some of the git repos I work with have upwards of 200 branches, having those in folders to be manually managed would be a little overwhelming.
Agreed. The 1st Amendment is not a guarantee that any jerk can say anything he wants. It is only a restriction on government interfering.

The framers of the Constitution didn't want people putting up pornographic billboards on every carriage path. They just didn't trust the government to be the ones making the call.

Instead, they entrusted the ethics of society to ... society at large. If somebody says something that we feel is offensive, it's not censorship to speak out, or even to refuse that person the use of your resources to facilitate his speech.

So I think that this was an incorrect decision. The OP has abdicated his right and responsibility to act as a moral member of our society, instead electing to follow a libertine philosophy of "if I can do it, there's no reason I shouldn't".
That's a great idea — I just did. Thank you.
I feel like a second class citizen. I can't play the game, nor watch the video (without proxies and stuff), because - oh my god - there's swastikas in them.

Anyway, mirror of the game: http://www.phoboslab.org/crap/wolf3d/

Uploading the video now... [edit]: http://www.phoboslab.org/crap/wolf3d/commentary.flv
Facebook's timeline is bad enough that if I see it, I just close the page. I have enough trouble reading it and figuring out what's going on that I just don't do it.
The real 'why' can be a dangerous question to answer, though. :)

"Daddy, why do the owls want to make the Sun go away forever?"

"Well, Billy, it's because the film is an expression of the cultural tension generated by the threat of nuclear warfare which faced American society in the 1980s when it was made. When they're singing about how the good guys are 'running out of batteries' it's giving you a context to interpret your experiences in a possible future in which you might have to hide out in a fallout shelter in the dark for days at a time."

"Huh?"
They would start trusting you on your principals, if they didn't agree and you lost a customer, then it's a customer that didn't line up with what you as a person line up with, and therefore you shouldn't be worried about them.

Edit: Didn't really wrap up my final thought.
that's exactly what I intended to do ;-)
thanks!
That would have been the easy way out. feel good. But read the post again carefully, and you'll understand why vetting each customer is not a viable solution. Comparisons to the App Store are warranted.
Do you think that Reddit is immoral for allowing many despicable people to hold conversations about despicable topics? This community is normally all about a free and open internet, where companies like Google, Facebook, etc. aren't trying to control what their users can do with their technology.

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.

We will definitely re-evaluate the decision though. This is a tough one, and we're not in love with our current solution.
With tech gear, I think it comes down to finding cheap parts.

I once salvaged two Xerox Star dedicated wordprocessors creating one working unit. They were ancient when I fixed it. Had never seen one before or since. But this person was still doing contract wordprocessing with it (which is so boss).

Counter example...

I dropped a coffee mug onto my Powerbook G4, breaking the motherboard (thru the 'O' key). I kept that brick for a long time, waiting for logic boards to come down in price. At no point was the repair cost lower than the replace (with the latest greatest) cost. In order for this to have worked, I'd have to horde broken and dead Powerbooks.

FWIW, re Apple products, I've repaired my iPod (HDD), iPhone (battery), and laptops (screens, touchpad, DVD). In general Apple products aren't designed to be repaired. Not like a corporate issue Dell or HP. I haven't cracked open my unibody model yet, so don't know if that's improved. But the tear downs of iPad show that it'd be trivial to repair.
Absolutely. Also, while the article may be right that a lot of research-group clusters being run out of a closet are only getting 10% utilization, this is not true for shared institutional clusters. Those systems are often hitting utilization of 70, 80, or 90%, and are a lot more cost-effective than a cloud provider.

This is why a lot of institutions request that money spent on new compute hardware be contributed to the shared system (in exchange for a large allocation), rather than building tons of tiny clusters.
You’re probably below average. Death of the bell curve.
Sorry about "the original". It wasn't actually supposed to have that query string on the end. That was for Google Analytics tracking elsewhere and I forgot to remove it when I posted it here.

I'm not sure why it produced an redirect loop because it worked many times for a lot of people. It may have had something to do with my server getting overloaded. I'm on a Hostgator reseller account, so I have limited resources and when HG saw the massive CPU usage from all of you people checking this out, they shut down my site for a bit.
The alternative is having sites select fonts that hurt my eyes. I want a consistent experience across the web.
I don't like em either, but they're giving me free icons I can use for my website, so I'm all good!
Simple is like an online banking account where as Mint requires you to have an existing bank or credit card account. Mint just helps you to visual and consolidate all your accounts into one easy to access area.
Pah, it's missing "utilize" and "leverage". But at least it doesn't use the word "use".
NO POLITICS HERE, PLEASE.
I was noticing that too.
Google's self-driving car gets green light in Nevada
Who Wants To Buy Honduras?
Electric cars and battery swap stations
It's not a server-less app if it's using a server though. Does not make sense.
this is a critical reason why git makes sense to me, cause all non trivial code changes conflict, and then need to be resolved with understanding of the underlying code.

the only way to reorder these in git is with rebase, but that is flagged as a dangerous tool, and with good reason.

if darcs can find a way to do this it would really be worth switching to, but if not then it would fall short in it's claim of safely being able to reorder patches. doing so behind the scene automatically would really worry me about code integrity.
That's like wanting all cars on the road to be red :)
I guess I'll join in on the bandwagon as everyone else and ask, are you going to support languages other than HTML5?

Now, I noticed the site is very Pinteresty. I guess this is the start of a Pinterest design meme. I expect will see more Pinterest-looking sites in the future.

Do you think Pinterest will do anything to stop Pinterest-looking sites? Is there anything they can do? Or does having people copy the essence of their design in the end help their brand?
Can you turn away an account based on their “religious” beliefs,
however ridiculous, hateful, or exploitative you may find them?
Shut down? Answer: No.

For brevity, lets focus on this one example. I would not refuse service based on religious beliefs. But thats missing the point.

I would refuse service based on the actions of the organization.

From that standpoint I think you ultimately made the wrong decision based on providing service to the patent troll. You should reconsider.

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?

First, thats not the question you're answering. You don't tell anyone to go screw himself.

The question should be: "Is there a polite way to decline service?"

Yes. Its easy and you can explaining it nicely in a few short paragraphs that don't tell anyone to go screw them-self. (Much shorter than a blog post I suspect).

Your blog post, by the way, basically told me your company has no moral compass.
Calligra Suite, the Promising Not-An-Office Suite
+1 for Scala

Might be nice to also see a FAQ about the differences between vert.x and Play 2
Another facet to consumption culture is the cost of ownership. After a tipping point, your stuff owns you.

Having stuff and clutter makes me feel anxious.

I've been unloading everything that's not essential. eg, I only used my microwave to heat water for tea. And it was pain in the ass to clean within and around. So it went to the curb, snatched up within minutes.
I love Nigel Farage. Like many other libertarians, he's been able to predict these sort of economic disasters years ahead of anyone else.

Just a couple of videos with him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96j0A7IXQKo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhXqCTd8JQ0
Completely agreed. The icons are not only excessively detailed for their small size, but also sit rather awkwardly in relation to the rounded-rectangle container. The top right corner of every Github page now looks like the notification area of an old Linux desktop with an amateur-designed theme.

Every minor redesign Github has released over the last couple of years increasingly reek of "designed by programmers". But Github deserves better than that. Please get real designers.
I agree also. Just too little contrast and color... I like the icons on buttons etc, but not for the file browser or the activity feed icons.
> This is a power granted to citizens

Technically, no. Jury nullification is an unavoidable consequence of the fact that juries are not required to explain their reasoning. But it can only happen when a jury ignores a judge's instructions (which will say to base the decision on the existing law).

> it should say Greed is good. [...] Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with making money, but don't try and rationalize your ethics away.

Maybe you read a different article than I did? In the article you read, the employees at LessAnnoying got together by the water cooler and talked about how they'd LOVE to eject EvilTroll, but couldn't make payroll at the end of the month without his business. In the one I read, they didn't give a hoot about EvilTroll's money, but wanted to avoid engaging in content-based censorship.
You're right, but I imagine most grad students will inevitably go through a "doing it wrong" phase. Mine lasted close to a year.
This is consistent with a benchmark I did a while back comparing Netty vs. Node.js. Not surprising since Netty powers Vert.x. Netty is pretty amazing. 500K concurrent connections and not batting an eye.
I've given it some thought and GitHub should be able to make this more accessible by doing something like this:

<span class="mini-icon notifications"><span>Notifications</span></span>

Using media queries, serve CSS like this only to screen-like media (i.e. not screen readers):

.mini-icon.create:before {
content: "\f030";
}
.mini-icon span {
display: none;
}

Hopefully they'll adopt something like this, though it wouldn't help people like me who just want a consistent font across the Web.
From giving Spire and Freebase a quick glance, none of these services seem to be designed to work in offline mode. What I'd love to see is a different kind of architecture: a server-less app with its local database (websql or indexedDB) which syncs with a server-side database instead of making RPC style calls. ie disconnected mode of operation with syncing when online.

This is how Meteor works from what I understand, and we've had to build this ourselves on top of Backbone for Post.fm. Perhaps we're a special case, but something tells me that the infrastructure of the future is not RPC calls but data-sync. (I guess MS Exchange is one of the first large examples of this).
Envy! I'd love to have my mom's old Singer. I've shopped around a bit, the new stuff is complicated and breakable.
My point is that I had to read way too much to figure out that they meant they provide the server, for what is actually a "serverfull" application.

Just reading the headline, it makes me think that they've somehow built a P2P "serverless" framework for hosting a mobile app. Which does sound intriguing to me, but it's not what they're offering.