skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So Progressives only preach them when it works in their favor.

Yes, it certainly seemed like "open-mindedness" and "tolerance" were some of the watchwords from progressives a decade back when supporting gay marriage was political poison. It's a pity the same standards aren't upheld when the tables have turned.
No; I'm either demoting them or killing them for reasons I plan to describe in a post.

There is already a major thread on this topic, and it has already spent time on the front page. Anyone who wishes to participate in that thread is welcome to do so.

Edit: I lightened the penalty so that it would be back on the front page.
is there a service that can submit your startup to all these sites?
Worried enough about posting this that you'd create a new account so that people don't see this connected to whatever your long-term identity is?
> He handed Eich the forum to come out with his views on a silver plate lined with silk.

Can you envision any scenario where he would be able to express his views that wouldn't have angered the mob even more, without modifying his views to be those of the mob?

> It's not about freedom of speech, but actually holding you accountable for what you say, which is a great thing.

For this, pg's "What You Can't Say" essay cuts both ways:

"The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true."

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
+ http://starthq.com/apps/submit if it's B2B SaaS
Dude, it's biology....sigh.

(And probably anthropology thrown in there as well).

I don't get it, for people who claim to be super-rational, and only believing in "evidence", some of you atheists are a strangely illogical bunch.

And then when you say "Err...but wait, did you actually think this through - what about X?", they start throwing around labels like BIGOT, BIGOT!!!! NYAH NYAH!!!

Ok, I'll try and put in in HN tl'dr terms =).

Man + Woman = Procreation

That is a fact of life (literally, the fact of life) - human's engage in sexual reproduction.

For most of recorded human civilisation, we've had marriages - to try and foster the family unit, and engage in aforesaid procreation.

Now, in modern times, we've had an upsurge in homosexual relationships - some people decide to have sexual partnerships with same-gendered people.

Now, this can't by definition by procreative - which for most of recorded history was the point of marriage and families.

So some parts of society want them to come up with a new term to describe this relationship, which is sexual in nature, but not about families or procreation.

However, the other group say that because their relationships are sexual in nature, and they still like the concept of kids, they should still use the same label.
He donated some money to support his believes. By doing so, he did not do anything bad to anyone. If you want to have a civil discussion on any topic, boths sides should be able to express their views, otherwise this is unfair.
> Incidentally, has anyone noticed that Apple's push towards simple geometric UI design in iOS7 has simultaneously reduced application sizes (less need for giant bitmaps), improved performance and battery life, and paved the way for more flexible screen resolutions.

I have never seen numbers that indicate better battery life or performance on iOS 7, in fact the opposite has been measured on the iPhone 4:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/03/ios-7-1-on-the-iphone-4...

Plus UIKit is still monkey-patched around fixed-height UITableViews everywhere. I have increased the font size in iOS 7.1 and see truncated text all around the OS (with no tooltips to save me), probably because implementing line breaks in lists is pretty painful.

I don't really disagree, maybe Apple wants to release a larger-sized iPhone with an all-new resolution. But I don't think that iOS 7 has made resolution-independent app development any easier. (Xcode 5 has made AutoLayout a lot more bearable, though.)
TGit least is closer to what is actually happening and is much less flawed.

I still take issue with your idea that the HFT is injecting itself into some preordained transaction. Information that there is a lot of demand for something should raise the price for that thing.

Large institutional buyers already have huge information/infrastructure advantages. Why should they also be given assn exemption from market dynamics that no one else received?
Sure, this is the 'contractor' approach where you bill for services provided at a higher rate than a pure salary, and pay for your vacations/sicknesses/whatever out of that.

As for that "Scheinselbstständigkeit", I believe most other countries have some similar legislation. It's not an issue with freelancers as you have rotating clients, even if it's only one at a time; but yes, if you're creating it just for a single employment then that can be treated as tax avoidance - having the employer run a shell-subsidiary-branch would be preferred in that case.
Is the CLR runtime open-source too? Because open sourcing the C# compiler isn't such a big deal without it.
I don't disagree with your reasoning at all--I have made those same arguments myself at various times. Where we disagree is on the meaning of data mining. When I think of mining, I think of deducing facts that are not directly present in the data. For example, imagine the government deducing your attraction to gay unicorns by some tangentially related facts about you {likes unicorns, watches teletubbies, is a brony} -> {attraction to gay unicorns}. My argument is that such a thing is impossible. There is nothing of interest that a government could learn about you through indirect means (mining relationships out of disparate data), that they can't learn through direct observation. That is, instead of having to deduce your attraction to gay unicorns, they would simply observe it in the virtual world (leak regarding monitoring of WoW). Under this understanding of data mining, worrying about the government mining is misdirection--they will simply watch your avatar get sodomized in real time.
I would hardly call 52% for vs 47% against, a "broad moral view".
I don't think it is, I think it is about this specific issue. This issue isn't considered "political issue" anymore (by many), it is a moral issue. A hate issue. Akin to racism, sexism, etc. He was unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of rapidly shifting public perception and got burned by it.
Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich Resigns After Protests from Gay Marriage Supporters
But there now seems to be a police on moral thought. If someone dares to speak against an opinion that the left holds dearly, they're now subjected to having their careers and lives ruined. Don't you think this stifles alternative thought?
C# support in IntelliJ would be a dream come true!

(yes, I know about ReSharper - but that's just lipstick on a pig)
I really think it was inevitable once people started complaining about his political background. The whole appointment had become about the gay rights issue rather than about where he would lead Mozilla in the future.

No one really thought he was suddenly going to turn Mozilla into an anti-gay rights organisation, but standing down is still the decent thing to do. It lets Mozilla focus back on their mission and carry on without controversy.

In a way it's a little sad though. I was kinda hoping that he'd say he'd had a change of heart since prop8 and renounce his views. Maybe that's just the optimist in me though...
You and many like you keep saying he lost his job over 'unpopular views others didn't agree with'. The sort of thing, as Brendan Eich says, you can leave at the door when you come to work. But it isn't as if Brendan Eich lost his job because he went out for beers with a few co-workers and, in an unguarded moment' said something like 'you know what, that that whole marriage between people of the same gender just doesn't square with my religious faith'.

I wonder if people like you are familiar with what California Proposition 8 was. California courts had already ruled that same-sex marriages were valid under the California constitution and such marriages were already taking place. Prop 8, funded in part by out-of-state conservative religious groups, sought to modify the constitution to define marriage as solely between a man and a woman. That is what Brendan Eich was for and that's what he supported with his money - the legal imposition of a specific belief on a historically discriminated-against minority. It's certainly his right to do so but it's hardly compatible with holding the top leadership and representative position at Mozilla. If you were the leader of a Catholic charity but expressed strong pro-choice views, you'd probably have trouble holding onto your position as well.

As a meta point, speaking of discriminated minorities, you should probably avoid calling people who, however vocally, express views different than yours on the internet a 'lynch mob'.
Says you.

I would rather work with and disagree with someone who has the integrity to stand by what they believe.

I work in a group with folks of Indian decent from different religious backgrounds (Islamic, Hindu, Catholic), an Orthodox Jew, a bunch of Irish catholic types (including myself), and a person from Nigeria. We are literally from many corners of the earth, with different backgrounds, traditions, etc. If we delved into politics, we'd probably find a lot of contested ground.

Part of democracy and free society is that we need to get past those differences. If you believe that gay marriage is against your moral code, you have a right to vote your conscience. Likewise, if you campaign for LGBT rights, you have that same right, and I would make the same argument 20 years ago for people similarly mistreated for taking that stand.

I'm Catholic, and contribute regularly to a church congregation. I'm also a public officer in a secular government, whose policies are often not consistent with the church. Should I be booted out of my job (or contemplate "spending more time with my family") because I provide financial support to a religious organization whose doctrine re: things like birth control or LGBT issues are out of step with many in our society?

Where do you draw the line? Once you decide that it's not OK to think different, you end up on a steep slope.
It is very possible and I'm remarkably tempted to do it myself in my free-time.

I also believe that was the intent of Patrick posting this publicly - to stimulate Colin into realizing what people really fucking want and that someone may actually go build a better tarsnap using tarsnap if he doesn't.

I'm sick of Tarsnap's complete disregard for its users; charge more money, listen to your users, improve the product!

WITH ALL OF YOUR SURPLUS MONEY, INSTEAD OF BUYING A $2MILLION DOLLAR MANSION, DONATE IT TO THE FREEBSD FOUNDATION.

Holy shit! What could HE DO FOR FREEBSD with the personal surplus in income from properly implementing Tarsnap as a business!?!?! IT'S FUCKING MIND BOGGLING.

</rant>
This is really exciting! Columnar storage is something that the big boys like Microsoft and Oracle charge an arm and a leg for. You can currently get column-based SQL open-source databases, but this new FDW allows you to mix workloads on the same machine.
> No company is entitled to a person's money, and if they make their public face about politics they accept the consequences

I think Eich was chosen for his technical contributions (e.g. the creation of Javascript), not because he donated $1000 to a political campaign a few years back. There was no indication whatsoever that he was about to use his his new influence or Mozilla's money to advance political causes. In Chick-Fil-A's case it was at least possible to imagine that eating there would increase the owner's wealth, which would then go towards politics. But any fears about Mozilla promoting an anti-gay agenda under Eich seem unfounded at best.
An Interview with Scott Murray, Code Artist
BTW, author here. If anyone wants a few dogecoins to see how the site works, email me. I'm dbasch at Google's popular email service.
I tried to do some searching for some specific projects that I've heard of but I'm coming up blank.

Really any decent quantitative study that isn't just an absolute basic regression is going to have degree of data processing done to it. Not exciting, but it is there and on a large level.

The other more interesting projects are doing stuff like scraping news sources, constitutions, etc, using natural language processing to pick out relevant parts and then matching those to some kind of database in order to code the necessary data.

Here is an example of this:
https://github.com/openeventdata/phoenix_pipeline

Then you've got something like Nate Silver's analysis and predictions of recent elections which is dealing with popular political issues + data.
Finding isolated in-group proponents of beliefs typically despised by that group is never hard (in fact, I'd argue that such proponents occur regularly but with low probability), so I don't find this argument compelling.

Also, the fact remains that the argument imo, no matter who is making it, is an exercise in word play and sophistry.
> such a small minority that they're unable to materialize a voice.

Surely the whole point about fighting for civil rights is to help all minorities, not just those who are able to muster a voice...

Anyway, I think it would have been more accurate for the gay marriage campaign to not brand themselves as a fight for marriage equality since it clearly excludes certain factions. Small point but I think the details matter.
If it happened, awesome comeback.
sorry for your loss, that's a lot to take in at that age.
yeah he's not historically very involved in activism but he's not in the closet either. http://valleywag.gawker.com/tim-cook-speaks-about-his-own-di...
Whatever his opinion is, that is irrelevant to my post.

Pretty sure he didn't ask for an angry mob. I'm betting his life will be much harder now. His mistake, according to my post, was to express his opinion in public.

The moral of this story is that, for the well-being of oneself, all opinions should be kept private. That is the way things are.

A risky alternative to keeping them to oneself is to express them "anonymously".
I never noticed before that the Sad Mac's frown is asymmetrical. That certainly lends to its unpleasantness.
The announcement http://www.news.va/en/news/agreement-to-digitise-82000-manus...
The thing with R that I think is important to note is that you don't have interactivity to support code (eg in ruby and python the huge advantage of the repl is to interact with the code you are writing while you're writing it) but rather your code is a way to the make interactive experience better. R is an amazingly advanced calculator.

The reason I use R over python most of the time is because, despite some amazing improvements in this area by the python community, there's no better tool for fluidly interacting with data that offers the same power.

That said, R is not for writing software systems. People used to refer to many interpreted languages as "scripting languages", and while this is clearly not the case for Python and Ruby, this is exactly what R is. There's a good reason in RStudio it says "New File > R Script". The limit of using R is when you have a bunch of scripts that interact with each other to create a bunch of visualizations/reports. If your system gets more complicated then that, write it in something else.

Of the many language/environment combos I've used, I don't think I've found one better for rapid prototyping than R, and following from that R has no place near anything that would be called "production". I also happen to think, if used properly, this is a good thing since it means your "prototype" never accidentally creeps into suddenly being your production system.
I think that Europe does not have class action suits. I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, USA has special laws around collecting and storing data of kids under 13 years old.

That is primary reason why facebook like companies tos excludes them. It is safe to assume that ad companies do not follow requirements written in these laws.
This really annoys me.

Civil rights aren't political issues!

If you had a brother, or a best friend, or a coworker who was LGBT, whether or not they're treated the same as you are (assuming you are heterosexual) by our society should not be considered a political issue. It's fundamentally an issue of morals, and I think it's exceedingly appropriate to vet the morals of a CEO candidate.
according to their manifesto, their stated purpose is to keep The Internet a free and open platform. It turns out that this does go hand in hand with innovation, and so they are an institution for innovation, but their stated purpose is pretty clearly grounded in user freedom.
> the relative return to people at the bottom of the labour chain is low...they are getting paid proportionally less for the work that they do.

If this is true, then based on the cost breakdown (which is all the evidence we have in this case), it's also true for the people who do order fulfillment and shipping/handling. Are all of those people also "at the bottom of the labour chain"?

> poor people have less bargaining power, because they have less to bargain with (e.g. poorer health, less education, less to fall back on)

It's true that poor people have worse health, education, etc., but that's not why they have less bargaining power. They have less bargaining power because they cannot perform higher-value work. Improving their health, education, etc. helps because it makes them capable of doing higher-value work, not because it magically increases the value of the same work they were doing before. A T-shirt doesn't become more valuable because the person making it is healthier or has a better education; but if better health and education enables the person to operate a T-shirt making machine that makes 10 shirts per hour, instead of making 1 shirt per hour by hand, then that person is doing higher-value work and should be paid accordingly (and will be, in a competitive free market).

So if people want to have more bargaining power, they need to bring more value to the bargaining table. Helping people to do that is certainly worth doing. But it's no use pretending that just improving people's health, education, etc. is enough. It isn't.
Under pressure.
I have dabbled with neo4j a little bit for my side project
I'm killing this as a dupe.
Slippery slope argument? Really?
That suggests some authority is granting your Rights.

What authority would that be?
I know for a fact my comment was about the wider corporate response. I wrote it. :-)
And this is part of why I found this whole fiasco so sad. As far as I'm concerned Mozilla is one of the very few technology companies I trust, and they have an enormously important role in safeguarding many of our rights in practice.

I think that this whole affair has deeply harmed them and we need them strong.
Just remember free speech and an open mind are encouraged. Unless you disagree with the LGBT agenda.
Yep! I'm not sure it was clear, but I was agreeing with you.
I would feel the same way if he contributed a million dollars to something far more extreme, and I am not sure if it would carry any more or less weight if that extremity were suddenly as personal or close to home as is the matter of gay marriage. Some people do like to hide behind the concept that, if you're not gay then why are you having X, Y, Z opinion in this conversation; I wanted to throw it out there that, as a gay man that loves his boyfriend but also loves people's opinions and the right to have them, this seems like a damn shame.

Mozilla wasn't going to become some bastion for social counter-productivity just because one man, even in the CEO position, held a certain number of opinions; I trust him more than that, I trust Mozilla more than that, and I trust our ability to find out and handle that if it were indeed to happen.
I love the overblown rhetoric here...sigh.

This was never about security or liberty (although it's a bit like the Monty Python sketch - "We're being oppressed, we're being oppressed! We really are!".)

I'm not saying there isn't discrimination against homosexuals in other areas, but this wasn't it.

This was basically a semantic debate about marriages versus civil unions.

A majority of Californians (Eich included) took the viewpoint that marriage was a traditional institution, and if people had a new style of relationship, they should have a new term for it, even if it had the same privileges (not rights - government's can't grant rights).

However, another group said no, we want to use the same word for it (I assume for ideological reasons, as opposed to purely utilitarian ones).

So no, please don't hoist the whole "WE'RE BEING OPPRESSED" flag - it doesn't help your case
Obviously you're free to disagree with arguments like Rauch's, but calling his writing "word play and sophistry" just shows that you haven't actually examined it.
This is sort of like: "I am a business consultant, here is how other businesses do things. Do this"

There is no problem in the way the service is priced.
Its about the same way cloud services charge.
How much are you going to spend on a big AWS installation,
including bandwidth, storage and compute? You dont know?
Well knowing that to a penny is hard.

Well boo hoo. I was going to go on vacation and I dont wanna
read email when I am on a 21 day sabbatical. What happens if there is not enough money on the credit card you are charging your other cloud services too? You get email, and if you go over they stop running your stuff.. Go over even more and eventually they will just delete your stuff. That is not just your backup that is your entire platform.

I dont see the problem here. The use case is, I sign up for tarsnap, I put some money in the account and then I dont want to ever think about it again.

Do you do think with other cloud platforms? Dont you want to keep an eye on what it costs? Wouldnt that be prudent?

The same with tarsnap. You star using it, keep an eye on what it costs. Then after a while you should be able to create a projection of how much its going to cost. That to me seems like a good thing to do if you run a "serious" business.
Fair enough. To be honest, I was in the majority with Brendan Eich at that time (although not in California), based on sincere beliefs. And I am now in the majority with you and others in being all for marriage equality and viewing it as a civil rights issue. But because of where I am now and where I have been, I feel empathy with those struggling to sort out their feelings or that are still on the other side. Most people who I know who were or are still against gay marriage aren't "homophobic" or hold have any problem with gays, they just don't view marriage as a civil right, like the civil rights of 60's, since marriage has always been a man and woman thing since the institution was invented. And while I may disagree with them, it doesn't matter to me in the larger context, and I still willing to love these people and I don't think they're bigots worthy of my contempt unless they prove to be so beyond this single issue. I respect that this is where I differ from many of you, who, this single issue is enough for you to hate someone or wish for nothing but evil upon them. And I'm not talking about the figures at the forefront of the anti-gay-rights movement, but the every day people I know who may be more conservative than I and besides an occasional vote or even a donation that differs from mine, that is only a small part of who they are.