skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There isn't. If I spend any resources opposing something then I spent money however small doing so. If I drove my car to go vote against gay marriage then I spent resources directly and gave up alternative uses of my time to do so. I don't like that the political process is even involved in this but if it must be then debating issues has to be OK and retaliation against folks who disagreed with you in the past seems unhealthy if you want a free exchange of ideas.
> If, on the other hand, you try to predict something like the moment that a radioactive atom will radioact, then you’ll find yourself at the corner of Shit Creek and No

I love it!
Why is the donation relevant? Only because it revealed Eich's opinion on the issue. People have been focusing their attention on the fact that Eich believes that gay marriage should be illegal; if you do not think that should be called 'thoughtcrime' what exactly do you think it should be called?
If OKCupid are so against Brendan for his stance on gay marriage, they need to stop using javascript, for Brendan Eich invented javascript.
A virus hypothesis
Now there is a complete virtual currency, and there are online market to spend currency for human labor.
How about making a virus that mine currency on infected machines and then spend them on these markets to ask people optimize it?
Such as mining BITCOIN and spend them on MECHANICAL TURK or something similar.
How does submitting your site to these services affect SEO?
The difference, obviously, is that Prop 8 denies rights to some people and does not affect anyone else, aside from offending them.

I don't understand your point about my comment about religions that permit same sex marriage. I think it's pretty obvious I was trying to say that morals can differ and in a pluralistic society, we err on the side of permitting individual freedom. Same-sex couples should not have to live by certain interpretations of the Talmud. Charismatic/Evangelist Christians should not be compelled to use birth control. Sikhs/Muslims/LDS members should be permitted to wear religiously significant clothing. Is that controversial?

Finally, I have actually defended Eich's promotion at some length in non-HN forums. I believe that Mozilla stands for privacy protection and the highest quality open/free software. In that regard, his viewpoints/goals and mine are very close. As strongly and fundamentally as I disagree with him on other subjects, I felt his leadership would be beneficial to Mozilla. I regret he was forced out, I think it was a bad decision.

Now, that being said, don't worry about turning down a job offer from me. I can disagree civilly, but you've called me a bigot and an asshole, and I am done with you.
What if the person with the opinion also sincerely believed that his position was not bigoted and was not denying anyone happiness?

Well, if a person sincerely believed that black people should not be granted equal rights would you pick him as CEO? I'm pretty sure you won't; gay rights are the same thing.

I really admire the technical work Eich does, and benefit tremendously from it. However, his views on gay rights are disappointing.
There's a story about Eich already on the front page. All the new story does is create new opportunities for ungroomed nasty threads.
I thought about this for a bit. Best solution i came up with would involve sensing the room a person is in and deactivating it locally, but even then there's the "edge case" of a fire happening "behind your back" (e.g. in a closed stove) and you don't notice. Basically, even though the possibility of a fire going unnoticed will become increasingly small, the cost if it does happen is so high that IMHO it doesn't balance the amortized cost of having to deal with an annoying fire alarm. (unless that serves to "train" you to ignore/disable it... This may actually be an interesting behavioral question)
In the particular context of this post, it isn't. The local hidden variable theory is conclusively wrong. Not sure if there are recent results about nonlocal hidden variables, but last time I checked we couldn't say anything about that.

There's a great (and pedagogical enough) discussion of this at the back of Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
I love the idea of true randomness because it seems, to my uninformed mind, to allow us the possibility of free will. Without true randomness, while we may enjoy the illusion of free will, our decisions are ultimately left to deterministic hidden variables. That makes me sad. But given true randomness, we may in fact have some mechanism whereby we are truly autonomous. How that might work is way beyond me and probably leads very quickly to pseudoscience and quackery, but it's certainly fun to think about.
Recently, he declined to comment on the issue or address whether his beliefs or motives had changed – which, to many people, meant that he stood behind his actions and genuinely believed that same-sex couples should be oppressed.
Yep, you're right, I lazied out on looking it up before typing. Inexplicably, someone downvoted you, to boot.
When I first red the snooze idea I thought the UL guidelines would say that it is not kosher but from a quick scan it looks like a "presnooze" button might be acceptable.

UL 217 Smoke Alarms: https://ia600608.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.law.ul.217.1993/...

Carl Malamud is fighting the good fight. Without resource.org that doc would set you back $400-900.

CAVEAT: That is the 1993 edition. It looks like there is a 2005 update.
Girl Writes Letter to Matt Smith
I've been on the receiving end of this due to who my father is. When I was a kid, he was in charge of PR at a Bay Area oil refinery.

- Activists attacking him during city council meetings and pushing for his termination

- An orthodontist refused to take my brother and I on as patients because he disagreed with my father's job

- Various, err, packages left on our doorstep

- Unprofessionalism amongst some teachers, except when they needed a donation from the refinery. More than one snide comment.

Ironically, one of my best friends was the daughter of a lead activist in town. That led to some awkward moments getting dropped off to hang out.
Acqui-hires have little to do with business fundamentals, and are outside of the scope of this calculation. They're simply measured as "Enough to attract the talent away from their existing venture." Typically in these deals, the core business is shut down and the variable/fixed costs aren't given any relevance.

I'm not sure about there being a hard and fast rule of cost-of-sale in SaaS - I would expect that's largely based on the target customer, enterprise targets are usually going to have a higher customer acquisition cost than consumer targets. Or, by cost of sale, do you mean variable cost? If variable costs approached those of manufacturing in software companies, you'd have to take a hard look at the management and consider replacing them quickly. =)
Almost everyone has bigoted opinions on one subject or another.

Suppose that a devout Muslim is hired by the Mozilla Foundation.

He says nothing of his beliefs in his interview. He wears jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers, and he looks like any other modern guy who happens to be from the Middle East or South Asia.

Should he be fired once it's discovered he's religious? Should he have been asked a bunch of probing questions--do you beat your wife? Do you believe homosexuals should be stoned to death? Do you consider Jews spawn of the devil? Should women who are raped be killed by their families? Are there times when suicide bombing is justified? These are all Koranic teachings held to be literally true by extremists, and put into practice by thousands of people every year.

You could ask similar questions of a fundamentalist Christian. You could ask a black man whether he refers to whites as "crackers" behind their back.

The fact is, no one's perfect, everyone has some baggage, and we all have to get along.

I think this whole Eich affair is a sad and nasty example of intolerance run amok. It doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong about his support for Prop 8. There is no right or wrong. There's only agree or disagree.

Diversity and tolerance are two way streets. You can't pretend to be tolerant, then fire people or demonize those who don't strictly adhere to your political beliefs. That's a genie that can't be put back in the bottle, once you release it.
3d printed skull transplanted to patient.
This article completely misses the point. You can never disprove hidden variable theories in a stochastic system, because hidden variable theories make the exact same predictions as 'true random' theories - the difference is only philosophical. What you can disprove are local hidden variable theories, which were somewhat popular (and favored by Einstein, for example) prior to Bell's thought experiment being empirically supported. See what Einstein wanted was for all of quantum mechanic's weird results to be explainable by local interactions that took place when two particles interact - so that when they become entangled and subsequently drift apart, you don't have to have any "spooky action at a distance" to explain the results of experiments you do on them separately. However, what Bell's experiment shows is that the dice don't get rolled until one of the particles is measured - and that the way in which a measurement is performed on one particle affects its correlation with the other. So in fact you do need instantaneous nonlocal interaction to explain the real world. The result, unfortunately, has nothing to do with 'hidden variables' vs. 'true randomness'. What it does say though, is that you can't just explain away the weirdness of quantum mechanics as the result of some yet-to-be-found local hidden variables.
So, basically...if he thinks he's special he is a narcissist, and if he thinks he is not special, he is a narcissist?
Never met any Americans/westerners/etc who wear shoes in the house. They all walk barefoot.
There was a blog post here recently that I can't find. It spoke about how someone starting from the bottom of the labor pool and getting promotions to middle management. The blog made the analogy that he'd climbed a mountain from the base to a certain height.

In another example, there's another person born with access to wealth, connections, and high-quality education. This one can reach the peak much more easily because he started higher on the mountain, but in both examples, the same amount of 'distance' was covered.

The second example could easily find a job as middle management and just coast through life. That's not really impressive given his starting conditions. He hasn't really moved much on the mountain if he decides to do this (maybe even going backwards).

In a meritocracy, the praise for this absolute progress is lost because the goal posts on the mountain are more-or-less sticky, slowly pushed higher as technology and social advances moves us towards bigger accomplishments. Also, the slope of the mountain is steeper when it's closer to the earth, which is often shaped by the powerful.

No one will likely give you a higher salary despite that you struggled through awful jobs, tight budgets, and many other inconveniences of not having wealth. They don't care how you acquired the 'skills' you have, as long as you have them.

This is fairly obvious stuff, but a meritocracy that ignores this other dimension of merit really irks me. America in particular (only because I live here) is a society that really doesn't reward this other dimension of effort but continues to use the feel-good narrative of hard work and long hours for whatever purposes.

Of course I'd have a completely different view on American meritocracy if we were in a real post-scarcity world.
Clearly Eich did not have an actual right to hold his opinion, because he lost his job because of it!
Setting up automated testing for a Windows application is an excruciating manual process of installing the OS in a VM and periodically manually installing updates, multiplied by 15+ OS flavors. It's a big waste of time that Microsoft could solve by simply releasing images periodically. I hope this release is the first step in that direction.
I tried, liked and missed Japanese toilets. I certainly wasn't going to be installing a $1000 Toto in my house, but I waited too long to take a chance on a cheap bidet. For <$50 you can get a bidet on Amazon which, though little more than a valve and a spout, works pretty well.
No-one is saying he did anything illegal, and this certainly isn't 'thoughtcrime' - he actively donated money to a bigoted cause, an action incompatible with the values of the organisation that he was the public face of. That is the core issue here.
"Political wealthy, skilled, healthy dude who still has a great life"?
So has it been identified what you hit to cause a highjack of your account?
What specifically did he do recently?

He was interviewed. To be honest I don't know why he agreed to it as I don't see how he could have thought that steadfastly dodging the issue would improve the situation.

http://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firestorm-...

I was on the fence as to whether he should be the public head of Mozilla before reading this (I disagree with him on the issue in question, but I suspect many hold beliefs that I don't agree with), but in that interview he just comes across as an arse. If the transcript is faithful to what was said, I'd say the interviewer gave him plenty of chances for reconciliation, and Eich refused to take them.
Personally, the donation is key. It's a concrete effort put towards oppressing people.
Don't know where you live but removing shoes is uncommon practice in my experience.
Yes. This is what I hate most about political stories on HN. They mostly just create opportunities for people to misunderstand each other, yell at each other, and then get angry at each other. For no good reason.

In the worst of these threads, people don't even disagree; they just don't agree with each other the right way, or don't agree as fiercely as they'd like. No matter; they'll still yell and spit at each other.
Who you know, and a wealthy father will take you far in life. This is Always conveniently left out of the speeches.
I guess out of some kind of denial. i've only heard one wealthy person publicly admit his wealth and opportunities in life was because of their father. Yea, there's a reason the wealthy stay rich--generation after generation. The man who spoke the truth was George Soros. Growing up in Marin I have seen the process first hand. If you are a poor
kid trying to make it in America, keep your wealthy friends
close, if you can stomach it--I couldn't. I guess today it's called networking. Ugh!
Wow, big changes at MS.
Again you continue to equate political issues with civil rights issues, my views on gun laws are not the same as my view on whether one group of people should be treated the same as another.
I think that it's a shame that Eich had to resign. And I say this as someone who is very happy to see the winds changing in the US (and elsewhere), and who thinks that it's a good thing that gay marriage is becoming the norm and accepted law.

Mozilla is a non-profit. It's normal and expected for a non-profit to have officers and directors who agree with the stance of the non-profit. I would expect the head of a vegetarian organization to be a vegetarian. I would expect the member of a religious organization to be an observant member of that religion. And I would expect that the head of a labor union patronize union shops more than non-union ones.

So if Eich had taken a public stand against open-source software, or against Web standards, then it would be totally and utterly reasonable for him to resign, or to be forced out.

But Eich didn't take a stand against things that are at the core of Mozilla's mission. Rather, he had a personal opinion -- one which I don't share -- that used to be mainstream, and is increasingly seen as out of the mainstream, at least in large portions of the US and many other liberal democracies.

I think that it's unfair, and even a bit dangerous, for him to be forced out because of a personal political opinion.

If the next head of Mozilla gets up and says that he thinks it's OK for women to have abortions, would it be reasonable for them to be forced out? After all, there are many millions of people who feel that abortion is murder. (I don't concur with this opinion, but I know that it exists.)

If the next head of Mozilla donates money to anti-Obamacare ads, saying that things should go back to the way they were a few years ago, you could make a pretty good argument in favor of saying that this opinion will effectively condemn many people to death, or perhaps crippling poverty.

I don't think that we want this to happen. We don't want CEOs to be ousted because they have political opinions which reflect a minority.

I've often engaged in political discussions and debates with clients, some of whom hold opinions that I find completely and utterly wrong-headed, and perhaps even dangerous. But I'm not going to stop working with them because they hold different opinions. Rather, I'm going to be professional and work with them -- and perhaps even continue to debate them, so that they'll see my side of the argument.

Eich believes that gay marriage is wrong. I believe that he's wrong about that, and history is increasingly against his opinion. But his opinion doesn't have to do with Mozilla's mission.

By capitulating to public opinion over Eich's personal politics, Mozilla has opened Pandora's box. I worry that people who want to become the heads of major companies and organizations will keep their opinions and donations to themselves, for fear of eventually being condemned for those opinions. And that can only be bad for democracy and openness.
If you don't want to use CloudFlare as your DNS provider, you can use https://www.rootredirect.com/ to point your root domain to your ELB or other CNAME-based load balancer.

Disclosure: I own rootredirect.com.
I would love to hear Alan Kay's take on Project Xanadu.
It's rational to demand an apology or explanation for a vote held six years ago that actually passed? Are you going to collect apologies from the other seven million voters as well?

Sorry, and I hate to be the one to say it, but his view isn't that far from mainstream. In fact, it would seem less than a decade ago, it was quite popular.

Just because your opinion is currently popular, doesn't mean the people who disagreed with you six years ago owe you an apology or they can't have a job.
Can you hear me now? No, I don't have that app
Hmmm. I think that if someone is potentially headed into the midst of some public controversy, and they decline to comment, that's pretty understandable.

The fact that so much energy has been devoted to this -- that 6 years ago some CEO made a donation to a political group people don't like -- indicates something broken in the prioritization of effort in US political life. Seems like they didn't go after Mr. Eich so much because of the severity of what he did, but rather that they were able to get to him. (Seriously -- Brendan Eich > the Koch Brothers?)
Many people (including myself) think PyPy is a better stack. We will see.
Fair agument, I did not think that through. Mozilla is, of course, required to comply with any and all anti-discriminiation laws which apply.

However, would I be correct in saying that his rights are not being infringed by having people (both internal and external to Mozilla) call for his resignation because of his beliefs, and his contributions to causes which are actively damaging to some of those in the community? Especially in the case of Mozilla, who rely heavily on volunteers, the opinions of those connected but not necessarily employed by Mozilla should be important.
So you'd work for someone who takes the proceeds of your work and spends it on attempting to attack your rights and freedoms, or the rights of your friends?

Once you vote or donate money, it's not a thought, and it's not speech. You're taking direct action to negatively impact the rights of another person.

This is completely relevant to the company a CEO represents, regardless of what the company does. All of the output from that company contributes to his ability to restrict rights.
It's even worse than that, this isn't like Bill Maher getting fired from ABC for something he said on the air during a time of hysteria. This was something Eich did in private six years ago which he may or may not regret, depending on how you interpret his blog post. The precedent this sets is truly awful.
The support page for the Nest Wave feature is interesting

http://support.nest.com/article/What-is-Nest-Wave-and-how-do...

>One of the most common things you see when a smoke alarm goes off is people waving their hands, towels or magazines to air out the room. With Nest Wave, that instinctive motion will actually silence the alarm.

A person's natural response to the first sign of danger might silence the alarm, inadvertently, and lead them to believe that they are safe. That is troubling.

However, they have thought about this problem:

>Depending on the situation, you may need to wave more at Nest Protect in order to silence it: Non-emergency situations require less waving, such as cancelling a manual test or listening to a Nightly Promise message. For your safety, you’ll have to wave more at Nest Protect during a Heads-Up or an Emergency Alarm. This helps ensure that you are deliberately trying to silence an alert.

Obviously, the liability load on this product is far more than most other gadgets. I guess that even though they anticipated this sort of issue, a paranoid level of caution is required from Nest

(Makes me think of the attention that Tesla received over one or two battery fires, or that bitcoin receives over company failures. New products are held to much higher standards than 'traditional' products)
> What specifically did he do recently?

Refused to apologize, even fake apologize, meaning he hasn't changed his views. He also came across as weirdly combative, trying to justify his homophobia by pointing out that homophobia is still the norm in Malaysia or something along those lines. He wasn't smooth about it at all.

> Somehow I don't think it's a good idea for democratic processes to label the side that is wrong as "horrible people."

There are degrees of "horrible people", and in my opinion Brendan Eich does fall on that spectrum, though admittedly he's not even close to the worst of the worst, but he makes the cut. That's my two cents though, take it or leave it. I personally feel pretty strongly about gay rights, so there's that.

> What if the person with the opinion also sincerely believed that his position was not bigoted and was not denying anyone happiness?

I think this is a flawed argument. Bigots almost never seem to believe themselves to be bigots. They think they're saving gay peoples' souls (without ever asking if they want their souls saved) or various things like that. Or they, maybe not overtly, don't really see gay people (or whatever group we're talking about) as real people with feelings.

That's what is so insidious about bigotry, it's not a Lord of the Rings thing where the villain (who conveniently wears black and lives in a scary castle) stands up and says "Muhahaha I'm going to make everyone miserable!". Instead, the villain says "I'm going to help all of you out by forcing you to be just like me, trust me, things will be better this way!".
Per Article 2 of the UDHR, "political opinions" are a protected class (to use the American terminology).

However, "the right to not be judged or criticized by fellow citizens" is not a right that is outlined by the UDHR. Not as I am reading it anyway. Specifically which article and section details the right that you think Eich is being deprived of?
Let's play a game called Name that Fallacy!
By using serif fonts for headings and sans-serif fonts for bodies they have broken the page alignment: the serifs push the headings over by enough pixels to be really noticeable; this kind of design requires really careful attention to optical margin layout (which is, of course, really problematic in CSS).