skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People change too. You can't hold it against someone all their life because they donated $1000 to prop 8. For the rest of his life, people will look at Eich differently simply due to the small donation amount many decades ago.
You also need free speech to discuss what equality means, but apparently that is no longer possible; our culture-makers have now decided there is a univocal conception of equality that must be imposed on everyone.

This is a gross misreading of the situation. It's actually pretty simple:

- Eitch is appointed to important, visible community leadership position
- His personal views are incompatible with those of the organisation and actively harmful to many members of that community
- He does not engage with or deal with this controversy, such as by apologising for his actions
- People in the community who are directly or indirectly affected by his actions object to the appointment
- He resigns.

I'm really, really struggling to figure out what exactly you guys who are banging on about "cultural imposition" and other hand wavy nonsense actually think should happen in a situation like this. Is the suggestion that nobody should ever complain about anything? Should we complain, but avoid calling for resignation? Should we turn a blind eye to people who are trying to strip civil rights from us, our family, or our friends?
Eich's late March '14 comment, for reference: https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
Or you could, you know, fix the OS like they are trying to do in TFA.
Given that all of those are already open sourced, do you know how bad it would look to close source them now? Especially Webkit/KHTML - that would be a PR disaster. I don't keep track of what Apple does - have they open sourced anything within the last few years? If not, I think they fit right in with the other companies.
>But if the customer has never heard of your brand,

If they've never heard of the brand, you are right. A good name that your customer hasn't heard is better than a bad name your customer hasn't heard.

But, my belief is that there are a lot of semi-technical "enterprise" or at least "SMB" types on places like hacker news, who likely have heard of tarsnap. And even if not, as I said, management listens to their technical help, often more closely than it seems.

Hell, I've had a few 'enterprise' type companies coming to me, by recommendation of their technical folks. The deal usually falls through because I am not equipped to deal with that sort of thing, but the opportunity was there, because a non-management technical person knew my name. Colin is way closer to being able to support those sorts of customers than I am, and I think he has a much larger technical userbase than I do, too.

>and wouldn't understand it if they did hear of it

I'm a firm believer that how recognized your name is matters a whole lot more than how "good" or "meaningful" your name is. A bad name that your customer has heard before is worth a lot more than a good name that your customer has not heard of.

What does conviva mean? what does akamai mean? Avocent? Cisco? To your average English-speaking monoglot, these are just random strings of letters. Much like 'tarsnap' is a random string of letters to people who aren't crusty sysadmins. The names of companies gain meaning through use.
So do you have to use python to work with this? That's probably a stupid question because clearly facebook's using all kinds of tech on the backend. I'm trying to see how you'd integrate this into a rails or node project...
Selecting companies that are valued at over $1B yet haven't IPO'd yet is a really narrow set and a moving target. Why not include companies that were venture-backed and have IPO'd? And/or companies that were acquired for over $1B?

For me the most interesting part of the underlying data is the number of Chinese companies.
If you think it's "not up for discussion," I think there is a serious problem with your view. And yes, I think my previous sentence is up for discussion.
I think the whole thing is sickening. Why? Because there are CEO's and companies that you and I use and love that are not boycotted. That are not hounded. That support the murder of people around the world. That support the exploitation of people. That pollute the environment. That invade the privacy of people's lives. That make the world a worse place. That we and our governments support.

These are the targets that should be addressed.
Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone
None of the people piously denouncing Brendan Eich as a "homophobe" or trouncer of gay rights would have the courage to face him across a desk and say, "We can't hire you because you supported Prop 8."

Instead they will lie and say, "Your skills are not the right fit. Best of luck with your search."

Very few people have the courage of their convictions. Eich could have caved and said something like "I've changed my thinking about Prop 8 and I deeply regret supporting it."

Instead, he stayed true to his convictions and did the best thing for Mozilla which is clearly an organization he cares deeply about.
That's what shell armour is for ;-)

http://drj11.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/piping-into-shell-may-...
I do not believe that lying to advance your goals is a praise-worthy trait. Advocating for conscious deception in service to an end is quite the slippery slope.
Having followed a fair number of MS bloggers/podcasts currently in and around their web tools (ASP.NET, MVC, etc) teams... I honestly believe they understand the value of open source.

Visual Studio and their MVC framework continue to impress me (I mostly work in Ruby today, but have to maintain some .NET stuff) and MS takes inspiration from successful open-source tools and frameworks where needed. Many of their recent advancements over the last 3-4 years have clearly been the work of engineers who enjoy and value the best of the open source world.

I'm not trying to tell you that Microsoft is suddenly our warm, fuzzy friend. As even Scott Hanselman would gladly admit, they're ultimately trying to sell you software licenses or Azure services.

But it seems to me that they're using open source the right way in order to achieve that goal, as opposed to the bad old "embrace and extend / embrace and extinguish" days at Microsoft.

Whether or not Microsoft has earned another shot with us or not is definitely up for debate, and with all the cool shit happening in the open source world it's probably even a moot point to an extent.

But they're definitely doing more than cargo-culting in Redmond these days.
People have not been spending their time arguing about the pragmatic negative effects of choosing Eich due to the perception of young people that he is a bigot (regardless of facts.) They have spent their time talking about how terrible Eich actually is, how terrible Mozilla actually is, etc, etc.
Yeah, I'm not sure what this is saying.

Python has been the lingua franca of choice for most sciencey things for a while now.
The Perils of Workplace Purges
Mono isn't bad for mobile development actually.
We don't, but no correlation would have been made without the Prop 8 donation. That was my point.
I think that if you got to the point where you're using a significant amount of mobile data and you alone are impacting other customers' experience significantly, they'd ask you to knock it off.
This whole slideshow was too pro US for my taste, academia everywhere seemed too big there in comparison because all other countries where chopped up in such small pieces. The only fair comparison was the # of top ranked school in the world, where actual continents where being compared.
What front running? Are you talking about arbitrage between exchanges or something else?
> People reject the labour theory of value, probably correctly in fundamental terms, but the marginal and subjective theories of value both seem to promote (and justify) this kind of structural inequality.

Economics is (at least most of it) a science. It doe not promote or justify anything; it tries to describe the real world, and tell you what consequences any input would have.

The Labor Theory of Value is just not real.
To piggyback, there's an additional difference between being a public-facing CEO of, say, McDonald's, Exxon or Apple, and being the public-facing CEO of a non-profit which exists due to the donations of primarily liberal and libertarian internet people. The prior case might cost them a little revenue due to boycotts but if the person's effective, you can make a case for 'private views' and 'shareholder value'. When your whole company is an activist platform, it's a bit harder to say that political positions of the CEO don't matter.
It'd never work. We think in kilometers not miles ;)
I think what he's getting at is that you shouldn't suffer work consequences for opinions that you hold outside of work.

Alternatively, maybe we can decide on a set of American values and we can investigate and blackball people who hold unamerican views.
This is exactly how opinion worked in East Germany. You didn't have to be a communist, but if you weren't you would never work again.

We have the exact same protection for political expression as East Germany. That's freedom? "The Lives of Others" was a warning, not an instruction manual.
As a first time startup employee, what should I know?
If I'm going to be accepting a job offer from a startup soon, what do I need to know? I've worked my whole career in large corporations, and I'm confident of my technical skills. I'm asking more about things like how equity works, what is typical in a job offer from a startup in terms of non-monetary payment, and what should be negotiated for. Thanks for any help
I think it's easy to also say he lied. Probably before, and his support of gay marriage is his true heart... which is nice, so he's got that going for him. But, he probably lied.
In a free market, the market is perfectly free to reject your products because you are a woman. It is perfectly free to reject the business of handicapped people because making the establishment handicap friendly would hurt the company's bottom line. The free market seem pretty indifferent to whatever is going on around it. In this case it did 'the right thing', but that was because of the people using the free market, not the free market per se.

Bringing up the free market seems a bit stretched, though, since most people's relationship to Mozilla is their free browser. How much does Mozilla get from their users versus donations from companies like Google? Of course, goodwill is important for any big company, which was definitely at stake here.
Does this only apply to UI changes? Or can i fix, say, a logic bug as well?

Also, what kind of performance concerns might I see?
Yes folks, Tarsnap — “backups for the truly paranoid” — will in fact rm -rf your backups if you fail to respond to two emails.

I don't think that quite says it all, because the other important factor is that you can't properly predict when the underlying conditions that would trigger those e-mails will arise. Patrick seems to have latched onto the use of picodollars as his pet hate there, but of course the real cause is the unpredictable efficiency of compression and deduplication. This problem remains even if you move to tiered dollar pricing for "up to X GB" plans.

I have multiple businesses that are definitely good candidates for using Tarsnap, but sadly that combination of unpredictability and insufficient warning/recovery mechanisms is a deal-breaker for us. No matter how great Tarsnap might be technically, from our point of view it's not offering a reliable backup with its current model, which is a shame for all concerned really. I do hope Colin will consider the various comments on this and look into fixing it.
The other side of the argument is: people should not be sacked because of their political opinions, even if I don't agree with them.

I find this a rational and sustainable position. No one should be afraid of losing their job for voicing their opinion in a public debate. No one.
Would you change your mind on an issue like this as a result of peer pressure?
I've not seen any evidence of that, and I don't see what your point is. I mean, it did actively strip civil rights from LGBT people, and that's pretty bad…
It's not very difficult at all to call Rust libraries from other languages by using #[no_std] and exposing a C API. You're correct in that this does currently dispose of the entire standard library, which is rather unfortunate. We're still exploring options for partitioning the stdlib into levels such that you can lose just the stuff that needs a runtime (heap allocation, concurrency) without losing all the other goodies (overloaded operators, iterators, etc.)
Left-leaning folks are going to be gun-shy about third parties for a while. The memories of 2000 with Gore/Nader in Florida aren't fading all that fast.
> Well, when your partner dies and the State doesn't recognize your marriage, you don't get survivor benefits.

The lack of survivor benefits is ridiculous. But it is (or could and should be) completely orthogonal to how government defines the term "marriage."
He did not apologize for his behaviour, he expressed his "sorrow at having caused pain." Quite different.
Suppose conservative activists push out a CEO because he contributes to Planned Parenthood or otherwise supports legal abortion. Would the Eich critics be OK with that? Many conservatives believe that stopping abortion is as much about human rights as liberals think gay marriage is. Both sides can play the game of getting people fired for views unrelated to their jobs. It would be better if neither side did.
Half of the people in this thread are deeply confused about the relationship between civil rights and popular opinion. The latter is a perception of the former, not the cause or definition.
I believe that is the thinking behind vidd.me
Well, at least you didn't mention Hitler.

Mozilla made a business decision that the guy was a liability for a public non-profit. That's capitalism, not totalitarianism.
That's the way democracy works, though. If about 320,000 more conservative voters had turned out to vote in several swing states in 2012, we'd have a different President in the White House.

That doesn't mean Romney should have won, though. It's the people who turn out to vote who get to decide. If you don't care enough to vote, tough beans!
If we can show that sexual orientation isn't a matter of choice, then we can say oppression of people based on it is objectively wrong.
In some sense science was the originator of open source in the way of "here are my findings and data, debunk or improve on them if you can".

I have to think a large part of the open source ethos comes from the academic setting at MIT and other institutions.
PostgreSQL pain points
I thought they were trying to become the Netflix for fine art.

Or was that a tie company, and was it GameFly for... ties?

This is all getting very confusing.
No, rights are manifestly NOT subject to a vote. That is why they are called rights.
John Frusciante launches new album into space via satellite
Yes, it does. Many millions of Americans supported slavery/Jim Crow as well.

People were voting against the rights of gays even though the right for same-sex couples to marry had no effect on them personally.
One site has been continually spamming me with ads after I visited their site once.

Now I click on their ads whenever I see them, just to cost them $1 (or whatever they're paying per click).
Holding an unpopular opinion that is all about increasing fairness and equality (racial equality, feminism, gay rights, etc.) is completely different than holding one that is about decreasing fairness and equality.

We cannot compare Eich's position of denying a freedom to some people to those of the people who stood for racial equality and feminism.
Plenty of other freedoms work exactly like that.

The freedom to assemble doesn't mean that private owners can't keep you from assembling on their property. The freedom of press doesn't mean that the editors can't censor your work. The freedom to bear arms doesn't mean that private businesses can't bar you from the premises.
> Most likely the tutorial didn't get updated. It doesn't get a lot of love.

Ah, that's a shame. I actually just mentioned the tutorial as an awesome resource in another comment.

Maybe my understanding of the Rust language isn't as good as I thought it was, as most of it comes from reading the tutorial and the related guides linked at the end.

I'm a big fan of high quality documentation, and I assumed since the current tutorial was so well written, it was being handled actively already. This is actually one area I would love to step up and help Rust with. I've previously gone so far as to read some of the compiler implementation, but my experience with programming languages is still stuck in the interpreters stage, so it didn't get very far.
Mozilla explicitly states that one of it's goals is to foster an inclusive and diverse software community. In their position, where they do so much work related to community engagement, do you not see how the views of their CEO conflicting with their stated mission is a problem?
You realise that Dropbox isn't a backup system, right?
That's one of the limitations I have to deal with when I write on Medium.com

I'm considering adding my email address at the bottom of my articles so people can contact me if needed. Thanks for the heads up.
I would have agreed years ago, but consider me jaded. All it says to me is "Yep, you're reading Hacker News."
This is a very tricky issue. Tr8n somewhat solves it by allowing developers to specify translation key constraints for critical sections right in the code. The constraints make the translation key unique, give an indication to translators what they need to do and enforces the translators submissions. For example:

<%= tr("App", :max_length => 6) %>

If translators try to submit something longer than 6 chars, they will get a warning to adjust to the constraints.

In Russian "App" is "Приложение". So they would have to provide something shorter or an abbreviation.
Got the info by email from a trusted source (I have been a Mozilla contributor)
Awesome job guys!!
Well, now, since we've got this all straightened out, let's just do it right the next time.

Reply below with your suggestions on what political views will be litmus tests for CEO positions in the future. We can compile a list, and then dig into the next candidate's background to make sure that all of her or his views are within the realm of acceptability.

A lot of people just want to apply this to the CEO position, but frankly a hostile work environment can be created by coworkers, too. So, I propose that we dig into the backgrounds of all the people that work at Mozilla and make sure that the organization is thoroughly purged of people who could possibly offend someone with her or his views.
That trade is not going to happen, man. That's another way of saying that everybody is already perfectly happy without trading at all.

If trade volume is zero, the auction reports the price as whatever the most desperate seller would accept. Anyone who wants to actually buy in the next interval should probably offer more than the value reported in the previous interval.

But since the trade orders are secret, you don't actually know how big the spread is. You only know how much traded at the last price. Again, you are very intently focused on something that has very little relevance to the proposed system.

You have no way of knowing what the spread is. That is intentionally hidden via a cartel arrangement to exclude arbitrageurs. No one trades unless everyone is happy with the trade. If no trades occur, everyone was already happy enough with what they have. That is not a problem that needs fixing.
That article is way more interesting, to boot.
RedMonk's James Governor on In-Memory Data Grid: Less Disruptive NoSQL
> even if they had absolutely no effect on his qualification or his actions on the job.

It did affect his ability to fill his role as CEO of Mozilla. A CEO is not just another employee. A CEO is the face of the organization.
My father-in-law is a high-level official in the "Alliance Defending Freedom", which is essentially the conservative counterpart to the ACLU, providing legal advice to conservative causes.

For years, he's been telling me about the "gay liberal agenda", which, to him, was not just about promoting gay rights, but also about silencing any freedom of speech advocating opposing viewpoints. I always pooh-poohed him and gently asserted that he was on the wrong side of history.

Now, I think he's right. That someone can be ousted from their job because of privately held opinions and personal donations is extremely scary to me -- and I'm in favor of gay rights and gay marriage. You can't correct injustice and intolerance with more injustice and intolerance.
Personally I think your characterization is hyperbole. There are a lot of rational reasons to oppose gay marriage (if you allow one their irrational premises). Opposing the state recognizing gay marriage is far from "treating people as lesser humans".
A great list of questions here:
http://mashable.com/2014/03/20/want-to-work-for-a-startup-10...

Also see this if you get an offer: http://venturehacks.com/articles/job-offer
There is no separation. Secular vs. sacred is an artificial divide, because every action has consequences in reality. Mr. Eich here did not simply take seriously some moral warnings, he acted on them in the form of donations to political organizations which worked to enact laws which affect real people's real lives.

When your job involves leadership of a large publicly visible organization, you are going to want to be on the right side of history slightly in advance of the people under you.

Everybody and everything is connected, and it's not just a matter of your sect vs another. Being at the head of a large organization means having a massive pyramid of people under you, supporting you. That pyramid is composed of an increasingly diverse group of people. It used to be almost entirely white men (imagine IBM or any other major corporation 50 years ago). Now, look at an organization like Mozilla, supported by legions of Internet-connected hackers with a staggeringly diverse range of views on social matters, with one in common: openness and inclusiveness.

You cannot expect a stable platform to lead from if an increasing number of the people who support you find your views that repulsive.

You almost sound like you think that someone owes this guy a CEO job? He could easily find a leadership position with a group composed of people who could support him based on his views.
Show HN: New on CoinTouch: find cryptocurrency traders in your Google+ circles
For those of you who would like to use this on smaller images, play around with "DoG:15,100,0". This string refers to implementing a difference of gaussian filter with inner radius of 15 and outer radius of 100 pixels. This is obviously tied to image size. The first number should always be smaller than the second, and my guess is that it should be on the order of the average width of the text. Just a estimation, I don't have the time to test it right now.
Github is the perfect example. Very "pro-geek". But can you imagine if they had appealed to only people who are comfortable with the command-line and with no GUI's? Github is in many ways just a nice GUI and good documentation on top of git, making it more accessible for the average programmer.

And does anyone honestly think the world would be better if git was less widespread?
In a sad way, all the activists have really done given a good example for why political donations records should be kept away from the public.
I can't believe i have to say it, but donating to a cause, no matter how misguided, is meant to effect the public opinion in a certain way through certain channels. Asking for his job, his head or his property because of his opinions is bullying [mob rule is a better term], not civil discourse!