skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have, and I still believe he's being extremist. No one is in this space unscathed. For no other product have I seen the same level of vitriol and hate being spit at Cryptocat, despite it being absolutely not the only entrant.
I'll follow you, although I actually deposited money like half a year ago but have yet to start testing it :P
I really wish when people talked about "death threats", there was some clarification on what that actually means.

Is it a detailed email summarized as "I know where you live, you better watch your step, because I'm going to kill you"?

Or a tweet of "Fuck off and die"
Read about multi-signature transactions. That's something you can't do with fiat, and libertarians (or any other conscious person) will gladly use that.
>Value relative to effort.

I'm not sure what you think Chinese people did before they moved to the cities. Farm labor is backbreaking work, and they did it from sunup to sundown. Working in a factory for ten or twelve hours a day is a step up.
Apparently "tolerant to opposing political opinions" is not such a value either.

I presume most Mozilla users, myself included, are in favor of gay marriage, yet there is no clause that you "have to support gay marriage" to use Mozilla software. It's also obvious that if Eich ever let his political beliefs affect his decisions on software he would be fired immediately.
Not to mention that in 2009, when RMS wrote that, the TomTom lawsuit recently happened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc.
It doesn't work for Mozilla.
I'm not quoting anybody. My comment is a spin on the parent's comment on Mozilla.

The joke is that a foundation that claims to have "freedom of speech" as one of its core values is having its CEO step down because 5 years ago he expressed an opinion that hurts lots of peoples feelings.

Hence, "your rights end where my feelings begin"
He didn't get a pass. A lot of people made a huge issue out of it from the day he announced to the day he changed his views. He also didn't stand in the way of the advancing equality movement while he mulled it over. Brendan Eich did, to the tune of $1000.
Because he's recanted, and is too powerful to assail anyway. 'Who, Whom?'
I can understand why he gets a pass: He probably was only publicly against it in 2008 in order to win an election, and when it was politically convenient he had a "change of heart" and has repented.

What I can't understand is why anyone who espouses the view that opposition to gay marriage is akin to the most heinous racial bigotry could possibly have voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I'm a pretty reliable GOP voter, but I wouldn't think twice about voting for a Democrat for president if the Republican candidate expressed support for segregation! I'd vote for a third party if they both did.

My point is that it's basically free to express outrage at Eich. Six years ago (when Eich actually made his donation), a lot of folks here and at Mozilla who are so worked up about this issue now were not so unforgiving about it when it came to getting "their guy" in the White House.
Because people can be cruel idiots. Your question makes it sound like properly targeted death threats would be rational. They are not.
I've gotta agree with just about everything Patrick said there, despite being inclined more towards Colin's way of doing things.

For the last several years I've been running a business whose primary purpose, really, is charity: providing high quality technical services to people and businesses who couldn't otherwise afford them.

It sounds like a noble cause, but it sucks balls.

You're not serving your customers' needs if you end up in the hospital for any of a hundred different reasons that can happen to anyone at any time, and there's nobody that can manage the service for you while you're out. (Look: you obviously think that having a backup plan for data is important; why do you not think that having a business backup plan is also important?)

You're not serving your customers' needs if you can't afford to ensure the integrity of your own infrastructure. No business lasts forever; what happens if Amazon, two years from now, starts making policy decisions that cripple your business? Steve Jobs died just over two years ago and most people agree by now that Apple has become a different company. Bezos is not immortal, and there's a board of directors that would very much like to be making a lot more money from Amazon.

You're not serving your customers' needs by maintaining an unnecessarily high barrier to doing business with you. I do web and mail hosting for a number of customers. Having backups is really important to me. But I'm also busy and underpaid and my hair's always on fire and my bank account never has quite enough money in it, so tarsnap for me has never looked better than my current backup system (BackupPC on a machine I have physical access to in a secure location). Excel modeling to attempt to estimate my monthly costs for a service is obnoxious.

You're not serving your customers' needs by being unable to fix problems that they are actively complaining about because you're the only engineer in your business capable of addressing them.

Colin's current way of doing business is actively interfering with his goals -- assuming those goals are anything more than, "provide a cool backup service as a hobby".

You don't have to become a disciple of SV startup culture. There's a fantastically large middle-ground that allows for changing the business just a little bit without sacrificing its soul.

The amazing thing here is that both Colin and Patrick are amazing engineers: Colin as a software engineer, but Patrick as a business engineer. A business is an abstraction that can -- and should -- be engineered. That means understanding the scope and requirements of the problem being solved and then coming up with a system that meets them. Colin, for godssake, take Patrick's advice just as seriously as somebody should take your advice on cryptography.
Great NY Noodle Town
You can turn any political belief into "someone's rights". There are people who believe abortion is a woman's right, and others that believe legal abortion is an unprecedented holocaust. I believe we should be able to work together and respect each other while we work that out.

This is enforcing an ideological litmus test on the industry, policing people's internal beliefs. It is terrifying.
> this line of reasoning is very troubling to me ..

This entire affair is troubling. This individual's livelihood was affected because of his socio-political views and activities. Your 2nd paragraph correctly underlines the more important issue.
Perhaps we're referring to different organizations here, but I've reviewed Mozilla's mission statement and efforts and it doesn't appear their task has any connection to preventing "Google Earth", as you describe it.
I wish I could just study new things constantly.

I do it as a hobby. Every once and a while I find a completely new rabbit hole to dive into and I find it exhilarating. I wish I could spend all of my time learning and making new things, ranging from computer systems/programs to rebuilding old motorcycles/cars or learning how to draw.

I did find my physics degree a little tiring by the 4th year, but that was mostly because I had discovered computer science.
This is the culture we've created for ourselves. The only people who can be in a position of power or publicity must be sanitized to the extreme. Hold a view that isn't mainstream and you will be eviscerated by a mob that has hijacked the media. I guarantee that no one has a completely "right" set of views that won't anger some faction of the population enough to create a mob response. Of course, we still need politicians, CEOs, and presidents. And thus the only way these people can rise to the top is to lie through their teeth. This is the environment we've created, and thus this is what we get.

Incentives matter, and instances like this simply re-enforce the fact that one must lie about their true opinions otherwise you will be tarred and feathered.
To expand on my comment, I am woefully uneducated on the entirety of the situation. I was speaking as someone who knows Brendan and his work and wanted to see his appointment resolve positively, not fail.
Context partly. Think about it: Mozilla vs Population of the US, certainly there are massive differences of opinion between these groups. Mozilla is clearly a group that holds the rights of LGBT people in high regard. The population of the US as a whole -- less so.

And politics partly. I don't think anyone without their heads in the sand actually believed that Obama was against gay marriage. He was clearly playing the game and paying due lip service in order to get the votes he needed, like any politician. Eich refused to play that game.
Unfortunately there /seem/ to be a lot of people holding back from using it until the language is stable.

If so, that virtually guarantees some regret after it becomes stable and new users flood in with new use cases that need breaking changes to address in an optimal manner.

Edit: Perhaps I was too subtle. If you think rust is something that may meet your needs in the future, you should do future-you a favor and start using it now when there is still time to remove warts in a backwards incompatible way.
Society has the right to protect itself from intolerant bigots like Brendan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Michael Walzer asks "Should we tolerate the intolerant?". He notes that most minority religious groups who are the beneficiaries of tolerance are themselves intolerant, at least in some respects. In a tolerant regime, such people may learn to tolerate, or at least to behave "as if they possessed this virtue". Philosopher Karl Popper asserted, in The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol. 1, that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance. Philosopher John Rawls concludes in A Theory of Justice that a just society must tolerate the intolerant, for otherwise, the society would then itself be intolerant, and thus unjust. However, Rawls also insists, like Popper, that society has a reasonable right of self-preservation that supersedes the principle of tolerance: "While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger."
I wonder what would happen if someone built what was described in the post and used tarsnap as the backend...

Is that even possible? ;)
> In my eyes, this shows that there are certainly different viewpoints on the matter and makes it as political as anything else.

We had the right to marry in California. Proposition 8 took away that right. We gained the same freedom everyone else has and then the proposition Brendan Eich supported took that right away. Of course politics are involved, but you have to understand how hurtful that turn of events was to many in the gay community.
Gists are quick and dirty. When I use a Gist, I don't need a full repo. A full repo could do the job, but it'd be like hauling groceries in the back of a dump truck.

Why do we "need" them? We don't, but they're nice to have. I have all sorts of things in my life that aren't needs, but I'm still glad I have them.
But how much does "Tarsnap" as a brand buy you in the enterprise space, really? Enterprise buyers won't get what it means -- to them "tar" is sticky black goop, not an archiving format. That by itself is no big deal -- if you spend enough, you can get people to remember anything -- but there's no evidence that Tarsnap has that kind of "brand awareness" among that crowd, is there?

I normally would agree, don't throw away a perfectly good brand if you can avoid it. But if the customer has never heard of your brand, and wouldn't understand it if they did hear of it, that's one of the few cases where coming up with a new one could make sense.
You say that like it's obvious. But, empirically speaking, we seem to have evidence that your personal values do impact your qualifications to run a values-driven, public-facing company.
"The Mozilla Manifesto should not be taken to be the total sum of what Mozilla, as an organization, believes."

That's the deal. They all think differently on subjects unrelated to the Manifesto. True, there may be cases where the ratio is 99% against 1%. But it's still there.
This is meant in all seriousness (and posted here instead of private mail because it is something that others could probably benefit from reading):

The preface is the gist of my post ("I disagree with your reasoning, and find it absurd."), and the appendix summarizes the conclusion ("The conclusion you've come to does not follow logically once you take into account other factors").

I agree (having written some bad posts in my time) that writing "You're a fucking idiot, how the hell did you come up with this?" is not good discourse.

At the same time, avoiding any flavor or diction in our writing here would make it tedious to read and worse still boring to write.

There's got to be some middle-ground; I assure you that it wasn't written to be hostile (consider the corrective reply and my acknowledgement elsewhere in this subthread).

EDIT: Also, where do you come down on the "meta discussion kills" theory of communities?
The thing is, there effectively has been a lot of consolidation of the EU telecoms market, even with its fragmentation due to roaming tariffs. The only thing is that the likes of Vodafone, Telefónica, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, TeliaSonera, Tele2, Hutchison Whampoa, Telenor, Airtel, Swisscom, &c., have had to establish subsidiaries in the various member states up until this point, and what we're likely to see is that the parent companies will start consolidating their national subsidiaries.

I doubt we'll end up with anything near as bad as the situation in the US, where they're left with effectively four operators of note operating two incompatible sets of standards, given the EU's greater overall diversity: language barriers, if nothing else, place limits on population migration, so smaller telcos with a firm footing in a particular market might be protected from larger multinationals eating their lunch completely.
So how easy would it be to use Rust to compile libraries to be called from non-Rust systems?

I've seen reference to using #[start] and #[no_std] but it wasn't clear with the latter just how much of "std" I'd be giving up? Hopefully that would mean just giving up task spawning and inter-task communication (ok), or would it be everything under the std namespace (not so ok)?

Making this easy would be an easy win to get Rust into active use incrementally. Rust would for example be able to do heavy lifting in computations with Python/Cython providing a web front end dispatcher.
Power t
I've already made a couple new friends. Thanks!
To me the news is that she is creeped out by it. Oooh scary bot! I have a bunch in my living room, they make me smile.
Cool! Good Job. I really like it. Many times the documentation for programming projects look like grab. This project is a big help. Many Thanks1
Wish I had more upvotes for this. It's surprising how intolerant people become once their opinion becomes the socially acceptable one.
No, it means freedom from state censorship and state punishment (imprisonment for instance). The public can punish you all they want.
>...admitting you were wrong...

Therein lies the problem. He clearly does not think he is wrong. If he made an apology it would only be for show.

Lying to appease the masses in this scenario would be no different than is he had the inverse opinion (not discriminating against gays and then telling everyone you do).
> But the effects are actually much greater, because the CA decision was not made in a vacuum: it affected public sentiment all over the country, and the world.

Who holds up America as an example/ideal of socially progressive policies? People who are waiting for Americans to lead the way with socially liberal laws might be waiting for a good while.
I don't know that there's a list of famous people including sexual orientation and whether they've received death threats or not. However:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6239098.stm - 17% of UK gay students report receiving death threats

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2008/victims.html - 17% of hate crimes in the US (2008) are related to sexual orientation (mainly against male homosexuals).

I think it would be fair to extrapolate that famous gay people also receive plenty of death threats.
I'm saddened by this development... not terribly surprised, but saddened to the point that I got a sick feeling in my stomach when I read the headline.

In all seriousness, should this be seen as a kind of warning/signal? That is, if you take the moral teachings of your church seriously enough to act on them in the context of democratic processes and/or public discourse, then you need not aspire to, apply for or expect to hold on to a publicly visible secular job, such as CEO of a corporation.
Why should he apologise if he believes he's in the right? That's just pushing hypocrisy.
So he is to be viewed as objectively incorrect because his is an opinion that "is becoming more and more unacceptable to hold in our culture"?

That's crazy, man. I can't imagine it would take too much effort to come up with some popular opinions that reasonable people could disagree with.
Because the project employs gay people, some of whom would be in a position to receive marriage benefits from said project.
Ask HN: What's your personal standard for filenames?
Here's mine, rule : reason

no whitespace : don't need to escape whitespace when using a shell

all lowercase :	easier to type, easier to read a directory listing, exceptions for filenames which should begin with an uppercase according to another formal specification, such as Java class names

alphanumeric : [A-Za-z0-9] printable, typeable

begin with a letter : easier to read a directory listing

word separator is '-' : looks nicer than '_', exceptions for when the filename is a symbol in a programming language such as '_' for Python modules
NASA Breaks Most Contact With Russia
Good. I hope his career is over and he falls into obscurity.

He's just like someone championing segregation a few decades ago. History will not look at him kindly.

The world has no place for those that discriminate.
> even though it doesn't hurt you in any way if they do.

He is no longer CEO of Mozilla, a job he quite clearly wanted to do. Sticking to his beliefs _HAS_ cost him.

It's not spite. It's based on his moral framework. 15 years ago I shared that framework, so I understand why he feels that way. He is, in my opinion, wrong, and I hope that he eventually realizes that (like I did).

But he stuck to his beliefs at a time when lesser men would have buckled.

We could do with my people like that in the financial industry..
The first person to lose his job to homophobo-phobia.
This is how East Germany worked. You weren't usually harmed for holding non-communist beliefs, but you were blacklisted so that you would never work again.
Linus to block commits from a systemd dev over constant reluctance to fix bugs
Related http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01488.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-April/018375.html http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01537.html
One thing that is clear is that any corporate executive who holds an anti-LGBT viewpoint will be destroyed. Eich was made an example of.

The ability for internet mobs to create chilling effects could lead to a movement for less transparency for smaller political donations. Where I'm sitting, that wouldn't be a bad thing.
That's a fair point. But to play devil's advocate, I can empathize with someone just wanting to get out of the spotlight when they are in the middle of a worldwide mob accusing them of being a bigot. In all likelihood, at that point, anything you say will just be manipulated to re-enforce the view that you are an intolerant, evil person.
Well, that's a matter of opinion (which I completely agree with!) but we can't say it's objective.
Congrats, this is possibly the best comment in the entire thread. Issues like this are rarely black and white, and this is grayer than most.

As a former Mozillian, I'm frustrated that a great person to lead Mozilla held such destructive views about other human beings. Brendan is, in my limited interactions with him, a wonderful person who has done great things. It's very difficult to know how to combine that with the idea that he is opposed to equality for a large group of people.
Ruby on Rails? ;)
The complaint originates from Google preventing advertisers from separating desktop & tablet bids. It is not that Google made ads available for mobile platforms but that they force you to purchase them. Kind of like if you want HBO.
Unfortunately Rust is not actually using semver, which I always found confusing because they seem to be in support of it, and they even include a semver library in the core distribution. If they were following semver, this release would be version 0.10.0 (notice the patch version).

The point of semver is to stick to a standard, instead of every project deviating from common practice in subtly incompatible ways.
If it was correct for Brendan Eich to resign, would it be incorrect for any company to now offer Brendan Eich a job?
Before you run to flag this as a dupe, note that it has lots more behind the scenes info than the comparatively dry first-party announcement.
I don't think 'integrity' in the face of an opinion that is becoming more and more unacceptable to hold in our culture is a good thing.

"Unacceptable"? Really? I don't get this mindset. The core premise of a free and open society is that you can hold any opinion you want, no matter how unpopular or "unacceptable".

Personally, I absolutely value this kind of integrity. An individual should stand firm to their principles and stand by them, regardless of what "society" or "out culture" think.

Of course, there may be consequences (economic, or whatever) as a result of having that opinion, at least if you're vocal about it. But to suggest that one should change one's views to simply fit the majority, is one of the most disturbing things I could imagine.
Doesn't matter now; he resigned.
So you're saying it was wrong for the Supreme Court to strike down bans on mixed race marriages because at the time an overwhelming majority of Americans were against it?

Why do you think human rights should be put up for a vote? Are you against mixed race marriage because it was so unpopular at the time the "activist court" struck it down?
Thus excluding everyone with a shred of self interest or any experience with drinking the corporate mystery beverage.

Clever, but you won't end up with "the best."

Somehow, I don't think that "the best" would forego thousands of available opportunities to work for a company that won't even consider hiring someone who might be able to compare their offer to someone else's.
"Dr. Tsou devised a way to capture comet particles and bring them back to Earth for NASA’s Stardust mission and has been suggesting a similar method for a spacecraft that would fly through Enceladus’ plumes and then return to Earth for scientists to examine.

The challenges are to make sure that the interesting particles would not break apart, to take precautions that any alien life would not infect Earth, and to fit it into the $500 million budget of one of NASA’s lower-cost planetary missions."

Why bring it back to earth? Wouldn't it be safer & less expensive to return it to ISS instead, (or is that what's implied) ?

Didn't know the carbon & nitrogen part of the story, read the article thinking only 1 thing: "when are you going to mention Europa".
That was sort of the joke, but T-Mobile has real unlimited with no throttling or caps.
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

I'd bet the Dropbox team is aware of unladen swallow and the issues it faced.

Applied too broadly, that quote would mean "never try anything where others have failed."