skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We ran a bot that, upon explicitly being asked to by a user, would convert a post to HTML5 video

Your bot's account is gone, so there is little evidence to cite. However, I remember how present and obnoxious it was. Promotions for MediaCrush definitely did not appear solely when a user mentioned MediaCrush. It was enough of a problem that an admin on reddit asked you to stop:

http://i.imgur.com/CDykpWp.png

> Yes, we upvoted the bot. We didn't realize it was a problem, and stopped once it was pointed out.

Many other domains have been blocked from reddit for the same behavior (e.g. http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-ban-the-atlantic-phsyorg... ), but you consistently portray reddit's admins as people who had it in for your site in particular, which is dishonest.

> We don't remove any posts where we get negative press.

Yes, you do. They cannot be found from your user page anymore, but I've personally watched you delete your comments in threads where you promote yourself and get bad press.

> I've shared some choice words about a few moderators who I've had a bad experience with. However, I've qualified myself every time, providing plenty of reasons for why I feel the way I do.

You've said things that are explicitly untrue about reddit's mods and admins. Mainly that they were big, bad, imgur-partial bullies. Here is the supposedly hostile, anti-user stance that moderators took towards MediaCrush:

http://i.imgur.com/iuMFUOO.png

http://i.imgur.com/GI8MFje.png

http://i.imgur.com/boKDi3I.png

These quotes come from a thread that you started, when you thought that you could push around reddit's mods:

http://www.reddit.com/r/KarmaCourt/comments/1k6ig4/the_creat...

You're the one at fault for your problems with reddit, and it is low of you to pretend reddit's mods and admins are the bad guys.

> The bot was a problem during the first few days of launch. It's hard to argue that it was spam when it only worked when summoned by a user. The vote gaming argument has merit - but we did stop once we realized that it was a bad idea.

The bot that you ran promoted your site obnoxiously in many subreddits, and there are plenty of accounts banned via /r/reportthespammers that do exactly the same thing. I don't feel that you can argue it was not spam.

> there are numerous bots that arguably generate much more spam for competing services

This is a tu-quoque, and doesn't justify you in any way.
That's the difference between the mean and the median. The median profit for a game is probably much closer to your number, but the mean is the average of all the games like yours (there are many) plus the rare game that makes $10 million or more.
No, you're right. For stories of this magnitude, one should be on the front page, and discussion should be consolidated there.
Someone has to say it (over and over): these are not good places to launch your startup. You must announce your startup where your potential customers are.
Economic retribution from the government the first amendment does not protect your rights with respect to things like keeping a job. If you call your boss an asshole to his face on a regular basis, you are going to be fired.

Which is why we have laws (separate from the amendments) which ensure people can't be fired for their race/gender/etc. These laws have nothing to do with the first amendment because they don't involve the government.
The issue is his continued belief that gay people should not enjoy the same civil rights as straight people.
I guess mean and median happen to be very different in this case.
The Kooshtie – I Watched You Go
But Eich isn't arguing or advocating anything. All he made was to donate to a popular proposition, I mean, it did found the majority of the electorate (then). In all other comments I read from him, he says his private politic views are a private matter and I agree with him there. I also think donations of this rather small size ($1000) should not needed to be publicly disclosed.
No, I just dont go around assuming things.
It's not as if Americans were abolitionists until the cotton gin was invented. The justification of slavery was already there. The institution of slavery grew due to the cotton industry, but those people already had the justification they needed. They knew the Bible didn't condemn slavery and they had God on their side. Abolition spread in spite of the economic demand for slavery.
Where did you get the latency data from?
That's incorrect. Prop 8 stripped all marriage rights. Most of those rights were restored by the time it got to the CA Supreme Court, but only because the CA Supremes said that Prop 8 was, legally, horseshit, but that to honor the will of the people they would let Prop 8 have the term "marriage". They're very clear about that in their decision.

The point of Prop 8 was to prevent gay marriage, and all the privileges that marriage includes. That is, to strip a civil right from gay people.
I use a Nexus 5 but recently I got a notification from MyPermissions [0] saying "Twitter for iPhone gained access to certain permissions." I checked it and it said it had rights to post on my behalf. I quickly removed all permissions as this was rather suspicious. I would recommend doing the same.

[0] http://mypermissions.com/
Is there a "McCarthyism" version of Godwin's law? Seems like that needs a name.

Anyway: I'm unclear why it's inappropriate to pass judgment on people based on their political speech.

Also, you're playing that trick with the word "intolerance" that people sometimes play... There's "racial and sexual intolerance," which should be weeded out. It has no place in our society. But there are all sorts of "intolerances" which are great! For example: We should be intolerant of things which drag people down and ruin lives. Disease. Scientific illiteracy. Lack of the freedom to marry whomever one wishes. Bigotry.
> substantial

It was trivial amount of money for an $83MM campaign. It may signal which side of the issue he was on. It does not inform us of what he is thinking or his motivations.
Actually, the drug is always the same. The variable is the person taking it.
It is absolutely reasonable for gay employees to be concerned. As CEO of a company guides company policy about a lot of things that have nothing to do with writing code such as health benefits.
"Keeping marriage as it's been" is a post-hoc rationalization, to attempt to disconnect the anti-gay-marriage crowd from a religious argument. Go read the Bible that's used to justify this crap and write up a compare/contrast.
Somewhat off-topic, but I found your talk "Build & Scaling a Test Driven Culture"[1] incredibly valuable as we built out the engineering team at our startup.

It was a major influence on developing the pragmatic approach we've taken to automated testing at ePantry, and is required watching for our engineers. Thanks for creating it!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvHf94hxzRc
To an extent, yes. However, restricting the rights of a noncitizen is a lot different than restricting the rights of a homosexual.
Really confused about the Xamarin/MSFT situation. I see Miguel everywhere on Build, and other MS teams casually mentioning cooperations with Xamarin.

Certainly Microsoft wouldn't mind just throwing some millions at them and buying them outright, so are we to deduce that any such offer was rejected?
> peruvian-aleutian lesbian

Or put "RonPaul2012" all over everything to appeal to your ilk? If you want to be a CEO, either avoid politics, or know that the people who agree with you have enough money.
Ironically I think it is ultimately a privacy issue. His (small) donation shouldn't have been publicly disclosed.
It's a combination of user flags and us burying/killing duplicates. We kill duplicates unless they have an active discussion, in which case we bury them (i.e. demote them in rank while leaving them open).

There are also penalties for flamewars. Originally I turned up the penalty because the discussion was so horrible. Users pointed out that a story of this magnitude needs to be on the front page, which was a good point, so I lightened the penalty.

By "horrible" I mean violating HN's values of intellectual substance and personal civility so badly as to be irremediable. There are some topics the community here has empirically proven itself to be incapable of discussing without that happening. I resisted this view for a long time—ask tptacek or davidw, my adversaries in this debate for years!—but my position either was wrong or at some point became so.

I don't know yet what the long term solution is, but the status quo is untenable, especially because these things aren't static—they get better or worse, and the trend has been worse.
Oh, the old compiler is just the currently shipping compiler (i.e., the one in a clean install of VS 2013). We've been using and maintaining it since the beginning. It's written in C++, so we refer to it as the "native compiler."

We only stopped bootstrapping using the native compiler about, oh, 6 months ago, since that was when we decided to take a dependency on new language features. The next VS will be the first VS where Roslyn is the default C# compiler.
Ask HN: the trajectory of domain suffixes is...
I was going to post this on stackoverflow, but thought I could find better answers here. There seems to be a controlled release of domain sufficies lately. I just noticed ``dot limo'' for example. What is the deal with slowly rolling out ever verb and noun both singular and plural? Where can I locate the schedule. When will every word in the english language be available, for that matter?
Apparently many Mozilla supporters seem to think it is okay to bully a qualified person out of his job only for his political views

He was not qualified for his job. Mozilla is a non-profit organization founded on ideals. It has a social and ethical mission as opposed to a directive to earn profits for shareholders. His social views made him unqualified to lead a company whose purpose was social good.

There are plenty of for profit businesses that do not fit that mold where he would be a better fit.

Additionally, he was not bullied. He gave publicly supported both in words and tangible resources initiatives to deny equality to others and people within his organization and without responded vocally and negatively. If that falls within the definition of bullying (I don't consider vocally calling out bigotry and intolerance as applicable here) then I'd argue he was a far bigger bully than those outraged by his actions and appointment.
Nice piece and love the "no log left behind" philosophy.

Recognizing every company's use cases are different, we've found Storm has worked quite well for us. We run an always always-on ingestion service with sustained peaks north of 1 million EPS.

We presented a talk at Strata two months ago on the Kafka --> Storm --> Druid architecture that we rely on: http://youtu.be/kJMYVpnW_AQ .
I don't have a classical finance background, but I have started and sold companies that have been valued on revenue and on EBITDA.

Here's my simplified take on it, YMMV:

For companies with high variable costs, you value on EBITDA. For companies with low variable costs, you value on revenue.

Consider a widget maker, each widget he sells for $1.00 costs him $0.65 in materials to make, his margins are 35% per sale. Therefore, it's much better to value his company based on EBITDA, or how effective he is after all of those variable costs that can't be whisked away.

Now, consider a SaaS app maker. She has a variable cost of about $0.03 for every dollar she sells in services, or 97% margin per sale. You'd value based on her revenue, as profits are not constrained by variable costs, but by fixed costs which can be reduced if needed.
Hey, Y Combinator: Stop Hating On #MiamiTech
The movement of smoke can trigger motion sensors. I believe they tried to account for this by also using a heat sensor, but if the smoke from the fire was within the threshold for "body heat" it could falsely assume a person is waving at it.
Then you don't have to use it. You can issue limit orders instead of market orders as described in the post that started this thread. Lots of people do want to purchase liquidity though which is why these folks exist.

(In reality, assuming you're a small retail investor, you don't even have to do what this blog post says. Your transactions are small enough they aren't going to hit the exchanges anyways.)
Or we are to dedude that Microsoft didn't want to make such an offer, because while they want to spread .NET into a cross-platform standard, they still prefer a third party like Xamarin to deal with iOS, Linux and the like support for .NET (perhaps for public perception reasons).
VisualR: what would you suggest people do instead of nonviolent protest like boycotting and public declamation? Tweet about it? Change our profile pictures? This is a serious cultural issue. We are not talking about Baskin Robbins eliminating a flavor. A major force on the Internet was going to be led by a man who clings to the belief that gay people should not have the same civil rights as straight people. That this belief is unacceptable to many should be made clear by them in the most direct and visible way possible.
Sure, he could easily have said, "My religion, of which I am a sincere believer, doesn't permit gay marriage. I mistakenly supported Prop 8 because I hadn't thought things through, and in the 6 years since I have come to realize that gay people deserve the same civil rights straight people do. I now see that religion is a private matter, and freedom of religion means that my church's views aren't a good basis for legislation."

And if he had said this in a blog post at any before becoming CEO, he could have skated through this easily.

On the other hand, if he still believes gay people to be inferior and not deserving of full civil rights, then yes, people could have reasonably questioned how he could be the boss of some of them.
A campaign donation is not political speech. It's public by law. A law that now shows clear conflicts if the internet mobs are going to be after people based on them.

The ways you are defending are the textbook definition of bigotry. I agree that they shouldn't have a place in society.
Funny how now the search is full of tweets referencing the "Twitter Spam Wave"
If this is interesting, you might also like to read the longer post by Wikimedia's Director of UX about the change. https://medium.com/p/1724cb2b7402
I'm all for attributing success to hard work, but it's hard to deny that a large part is also having the right kinds of smarts. Perhaps you lump that in with "luck," but if so, that makes luck into an incredible catch-all.

It can be a real struggle to wrestle with the guilt of catching so many fortunate breaks in life. Not having a mental illness. Not growing up in a ghetto. Access to a good education. Parents who loved me.

I'll have to try out your last statement in your post. I tend to ask myself "Why should it be me?" What a great idea to respond with the question "Why shouldn't it be me?"
I think the question you have to ask is, who is responsible for Eich's ouster?

To the extent it was primarily Mozilla employees, I don't think there's a problem. If they feel they can't work for this man, for any reason, they have the right to say so. If the Board finds that enough employees object to him, they can and should find someone else.

If it was primarily public opinion, I agree that that's unfortunate. I don't know for sure, but my guess is that public opinion, loud as it has been, played only a supporting role. If the employees collectively supported Eich, they could have said so, and I think criticism by the general public would have died down sooner or later.
>This is Microsoft we're talking about - they have a track record of profound fuckery.

Any examples? Besides "bundling IE with the OS and pressuring some OEM vendors back in the nineties"?
The core concepts of the language are probably set in stone, but some syntax changes, and fine-trimming of features may occur before 1.0. So I'd say give it a go.
With a scant few matriarchal societies aside, most of human history is absolutely dominated by men making other men and women subservient to them. That's the story of humanity.
http://sideprojectors.com
I'd rather pay for matlab out of pocket than have to use octave.
Cool shot of the ice jets from 2005: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap091124.html

Plus NASA's actual release about the sea: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/03...
32-bit KDB database now freely available for commercial use
If you aren't obtaining medical-grade ketamine or if you aren't synthesizing it yourself, the drug is highly variable. For example, you could be getting a different isomer or different ratio of isomers every time (pure R, pure S, racemic, etc).
thx, will reach out!
Yes, I see what you mean.

I make a distinction between the luck (or the lack of it) coming from societal structures, and the luck (or the lack of it) that comes from random events, chance meetings, the black box that is the AppStore, and so on. I was talking more about the latter, while it sounds like you're talking about the former. If you've been unlucky because of an accident of birth, rather than a random event, I wouldn't expect you to just shrug it off.

While I've been more lucky than not, when I have been unlucky (primarily with my health, this last year was a little dodgy in a life-threatening sort of way) then yes, I've been pretty blasé about it.
> Even the bible says, "You will know them by their fruits," meaning that it's reasonable to judge people by what they do.

That's reasonable enough.

On the other hand, it's selective at best to limit the applied focus to his donations.

He's spent a lot of time/effort working at and building up Mozilla, a Mozilla that has an equitable/inclusive code of treatment, a Mozilla where by several LGBT accounts his co-workers felt interaction with him was free of aggression, a Mozilla where where co-workers felt free to defend or reject his appointment. And he invited everyone to judge him by those standards had he kept on.
Maybe he thinks marriage should be between opposite sex for religious reasons but has no problem with civil unions that grants the same legal benefits. While not a progressive view, not the same as a Klansman.
I would love to but I'm building a different company focused on helping people optimize their home energy - I plan to do it (get rich) on that one.

You also mis-characterized what I said. Completely. But whatever, pretty typical Hacker News. It's actually really an interesting dichotomy: there are so many brilliant hackers on here that believe asking for a lot of money for a valuable product and service is evil and yet they're all participating on a forum built and hosted by an organization that specializes in smacking hackers with a fish until they realize the deep and fundamental mistake in that way of thinking.

My argument was that many different kinds of good can be had from the availability of resources and casting resource acquisition in a stigmatic light is cutting innovation off at the knees. All because some less enlightened people figured out how to acquire a lot of resources and use them in non-society friendly ways.

Do you really believe Elon Musk could have turned Tesla into such an awesome company by being Geek2Geek? Fuck no. Elon understands the value of charging for value and how much more value he can usher into the world - so do other amazing entrepreneurs.

I would rather see cperciva acquiring a lot of resources than many other people in the world. I would rather see a lot of people on Hacker News be wealthy people instead the alternatives out there - but they never will be until money and the having of it is no longer stigmatized by them.

For many businesses, $1,500.00 per month to feel secure is pennies. I would rather see Tarsnap, an actually secure service, pulling in that revenue than other "secure" offerings that actually aren't.
Pig? VS is considered one of the best IDEs out there. On par, if not better than IntelliJ.
I'm of a similar background. My brother and I are both software devs, making more than 3x as much out of college than her at 62.

We both collectively send enough money that she has retired and stopped working. It's not my decision to make for you of course but you should consider reducing the burden.
The median income for game in the app store was less than $1000 in 2011. I'm sure it has came down since.
You're correct that it's not a true statement, but that fact alone is of little comfort when trying to overcome the guilt.
If you had asked me a few weeks ago who was CEO of Mozilla I couldn't have answered the question and neither cared. I suspect a large part of hn would have felt the same.
Ideas are cheap, don't let that discourage you - implementation and execution is what makes something great.
Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism, combined with a regulated economic structure of cooperation between major corporations and the government.

This is rather different.
Nope, but thanks for the concern. I just have diverse interests, and think that the URbit project is quite strange and, as a result, sort of wonderful, IMO. For example, the algebra grammar for the Nock VM is fascinating for me. Moreover, I'm thinking of even using the C# port of Nock as a basis for bringing the rest of the project over to the Windows platform. My children take up a lot of time though.
It's this kind of view that is often the reason why the poor stay poor. I don't know anything about Ismail's mother, but I would bet that she didn't put much value on all his "computering." The rich tend to place more importance on mental work whereas the poor tend to value physical "busting your ass" work.
It could also be that their international expansion imposes different requirements, or doing it all under the supervision of Google's attorneys influenced the change.
Yes, the project does. Quote: "Mozilla offers the best benefits I have ever had and goes out of its way to offer benefits to its employees in same-sex marriages or domestic partnerships on par with those in heterosexual marriages."

The bare minimum compliance with current law is no way run a company. Great companies do more for their employees than the law requires.

I don't see anyone (other than idiot internet trolls) wanting his life ruined. All I see are some pretty compelling arguments for some difficulties he will face as a CEO and a lot of anguish that this had to happen at all.

If he'd just shown some empathy in that CNet interview, I wonder if things would have gone differently? It read like an engineer's response, not like a CEO. Alas.
Campaign donations are not a political opinion, they are political speech. You have freedom of speech in that the government cannot prohibit your speaking. You do not have a right to immunity from the consequences of your speaking.

As someone else put it once, taking a political position publicly takes a certain amount of civic courage. I am in complete disagreement with everything you say, which I consider alarmist, apologist, and simply wrong.
Correction: Webkit wasn't some software Apple made use of. Apple created Webkit as we know it. What they DID use was KHTML, a far more barebones web rendering engine used in KDE, that Apple adopted, and turned into Webkit. Webkit as Apple had it (before Google stepped in) was an order of magnitude more evolved than KHTML.
Here's my question: What was the board thinking to put him in place? It's not as if Eich won a contest just by inventing one of the most widely distributed programming languages, there were folks who decided he was the best to lead Mozilla forward. How did they go so wrong?
I don't think I have the guts to call myself the best and brightest lol. Does that mean I'm never going to find a job? Seems like every company insists on hiring the best and brightest, and everyone here thinks they're the best and brightest.