skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is different is (A) this is not a normal employee but the CEO who represents the company, (B) it is not about his personal beliefs or lifestyle choices but his public political behavior, (C) not every issue or belief is equally innocuous.

But really, (D) this caused a lot of scandal for Mozilla that runs contrary to its mission, and some internal scandal too. If it were chartered as a conservative political organization they could have laughed it off. but it's not Mozilla's purpose to play Moral Majority or Larry Flynt.
Yes, I think that too, but in this case I will not use this as public domain but as internal support.
It most certainly is a political belief in the sense that it deals with a question of public policy that is currently being litigated in the public sphere.
carbon monoxide is less dense than air - according to wikipedia, density at room temperature is 1.15 kg/m³ for CO vs 1.275 kg/m³ for dry air.

The nest protect retails for US$129.00 and has a service lifetime of 7 years.

I recently checked all the smoke detectors at my parents house and found that they were all well past their 10-year replace-by date. (I replaced them, but not with Nest smoke detectors).
So now republicans asking questions about how science is furthering humanity in a hearing about funding science programs is a conspiracy to stop the progression of science?

Good to know we have come to a point where internet journalism is so shit a 200 page article filled with 3 quotes and some (totally skewed and not misrepresented) information from their speakers counts as an editorial for a 2-hour senate hearing.
"It's not a discouragement, so don't take it as such."

This after:

"you have no chance trying to compete with Imgur on their own home turf especially that late in the game."

"it's just too late at this point. Find another market."

Reads like you're trying to discourage them to me.
That is not logically equivalent. One group is trying to deny another group rights...the other group just wants to be treated equally under the law. Eich, unfortunately, is on the wrong side of history here and he suffered a consequence because of it.
Other than MATLAB being closed and very expensive. What is wrong with it?
Beware the Ides of March: Subsea Cable Cut Trend Continues
Careful with these guys. I once built an open source implementation of the q language, and these guys immediately threatened to sue me, my employer, and our clients. The language is not that interesting, it's easy to reproduce, and these guys will threaten you if you prove this.
It doesn't seem like you spent even an ounce of energy trying to understand who patio is and why the post might resonate with the HN audience. Downvoting warranted.
NPR's April Fool's Day Prank Was An Absolute Masterpiece
I believe any combo smoke+CO detector gets a pass to be up high. And isn't CO roughly the same weight as air anyway?

That being said, I wouldn't trust Nest for a safety device where the goal is to have a simple reliable device, which contradicts having a wifi-connected uC in control. I don't know that they have the most engineering-minded culture either, based on the horrid input lag of their thermostat.
> CO is a denser-than-air gas, so stays near the floor while the Protect is mounted on the ceiling to detect smoke

Research on this topic seems to indicate that CO dissipates pretty evenly:

"Contrary to a significant amount of public opinion, CO did not layer on the floor, float at the middle of the chamber, or rise to the top. In each case, the levels of CO equalized throughout the test chamber. It took longer to equalize when CO was infused at the top of the chamber than the bottom, but levels always became identical with time."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21536403
It's not simply an opinion though. Equal rights is fundamentally different than all those other issues you listed.
You tell me. He's out of a job because LOTS AND LOTS of people were seriously upset by his Prop 8 donation. You can decry this as the worst thing ever if you like, but it still happened and - and this is the important thing - was trivially predictable in advance, because they got a taste of it in 2012 when the donation first came to light (it reached international news coverage back then too).

So - given there's a pile of real-world data to reason from - what do you think made this different?
> Is there a reason the same techniques used in E-Mail aren't applicable to Twitter?

Twitter relies on very low latency - ie, once you tweet something, if it a whole minute to appear in your friends' timelines, it could already have lost much of its value.

Lots of spam reduction techniques introduce latency to levels that are unacceptable to Twitter's use case.

I'm not sure why it didn't catch these, but I can imagine why the same techniques aren't applicable in general.
Of course it is only a theory, but a very plausible one given the frequency of rock transfer between planets and the toughness of microbes that allow them to survive in space for long time periods (both empirical facts).

There is really no way of proving transpermia - even if we to travel to Enceladus and found microbial life there how would we ever prove how it got there.
What you consider in your comment echoes Bertrand Russell's famous essay In Praise of Idleness. Russell, however, goes farther and outright states that

>Leisure is essential to civilization [...]

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
Not being funny, but how many of us read the article, followed the link to Aha!, scrolled down to the bottom and went straight back to HN? Maybe the product just does not sell too well on an ad.
CO is about the same density as air, but it will rise with warm air. Placing CO detectors on the ceiling is allowed by the NFPA.

Nest protect costs $130 and yes you're expected to replace it after 7 years. It's actually a legal requirement to replace CO detectors after 7 years in many jurisdictions.
The more beautiful Wikipedia that almost was
Apparently many Mozilla supporters... bully

I would wager that plenty of those opposing Eich don't actually use Mozilla products. Chrome is the most popular browser, not Firefox, and their other products aren't monopolies either. Of the several screeds I read against Eich, not one of them said "We currently use a Mozilla product and now no longer will".
No forgiveness necessary. I think that's a valid strategy.
Apple has made Darwin open source. That, WebKit, and LLVM are pretty core technologies. A good portion of their technology is open. So, it's not just using free software and not giving back.
Immigration policy is also about equal rights...
I think an opinion on gay marriage is a political view.

Additionally, I think a negative opinion on gay marriage is particularly contentious, as opposed to a view on environmental or immigration matters, because it could affects the rights of employees, and additionally it creates a toxic work environment for supporters of gay marriage.

Companies shouldn't stray into the realm of political opinion because their employees do not have homogenous political views.
:%s/Gay/Interracial/g
Please don't paint all Christians with a broad brush. I, for one, support gay marriage, as do many others. Just say'n.

On the other hand, I also think it'd be completely valid to say that the government shouldn't be in the 'marriage' business at all (gay or straight) and it should only handle contracts -- aka civil unions. One could then parse "marriage" to be something reserved for whatever church/belief system/personal labeling one wishes to subscribe to. In the end, however, the government would treat all people equally, as it should.
Also, allow me just a quick addon to which people probably aren't responding in the comments below. I assure you banks and the like using R aren't passing round all their R/python/C code either.

R didn't bring open source to science. It brought free (as in price) software to stats, and that, along with its script-like ability to apply formulas quickly, its vast library, and its universal teaching in stats courses in universities, is the reason for its popularity. I'd even go so far as to say that python has had more of an influence outside of stats/bio/pharma.

But spend a bit of time in the SAS community to which it is commonly contrasted and you'll see massive amounts of code sharing, examples and how-tos. The interesting thing is to observe how these things play together. I argue that sharing of source has less value if the run-time on which it operates is not available to you.

Of course, SAS is so widespread in big business that you might point out that it quite clearly is available to a lot of people, and that it quite clearly is valuable to them, its just not available if you can't pay or aren't in a connected uni/job. I know my SAS and I can do several things in it that whip R and python's butt if the task is that which SAS is good for. It has its own separate and relevant issues in terms of design abd implementation. I can rail against all the tools i use :P

But the high-entry-cost of the software itself is the prime reason I'm trying to turn my back on it (because I don't plan on being employed by a big company or being locked into a software vendor forever, and subsequently it is not available for me to use for my own projects, which are often more valuable/complex than the ones i'm writing for employment...). I imagine there are a large number of other programmers/hackers feeling the same way, and you might even say that its evidenced by the parallel (as in along-side SAS, not multithreading) success of R. Perhaps there is a symbiotic relationship, subsequently, between free as in price vs open source code. Who knows. I need a "free as in beer"....
I think the original comment about unboxed numbers was not referring to vector vs. scalar but to boxing of primitive types (integers/floats) in object or other type wrappers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_type_(object-oriented_pr....

It's easy to imagine situations where languages that directly support vector types could have performance benefits, especially on HW that supports vector instruction sets. On the other hand, languages that don't directly manipulate numbers in the native format of the CPU(s) will peform poorly for large datasets.
Um. Animal Rights and Immigration are both "equal rights" issues.
For "how do you define "paid enough"?", yes, I did mean they weren't paid enough for the value they create, because of the price distortions I talked about that occur during the bargaining (price setting) process.

For "Yes, by automating their processes so that a single worker is much more productive and therefore can command higher wages. Not by paying people higher wages for doing the same work they were doing before." - automation absolutely is the only route to long term prosperity: it is what has create civilisation as we know it.

However, like I said there are strong incentives to stop people becoming more productive, because it is to our benefit, even in a market, once we have invested in a certain kind of productivity (indeed this goes both ways, with workers wanting to protect outdated forms of labour well beyond time). A lot of money gets sunk into developing places, and that money needs a healthy return. So although in principle, yes, there is something to be gained by helping people become more productive, that is on the assumption that the cost of doing so is negligible, which it often isn't.

Indeed, paying those costs, the ones that help people become more productive, are exactly what should be happening, and what will be avoided by whoever it was who previously invested in those people, until the investor(s) have got their return (which is essentially an indefinite period), or until the return on a new investment will be greater than its cost (and given that we're talking about moving cities, or often countries, those costs can be large indeed).

Just to (try and) be clear, I fully agree that what is required is helping people to be more productive. I don't agree that "free" competition is the optimal way to accomplish that. (I quote free because making competition free requires significant effort and enforcement, which is often lacking in the kind of environments that we are talking about)

As a small provocative thought: companies are legal entities, so how about requiring companies to be licensed, prohibiting them being owned, and thus requiring all returns to be either reinvested in the company or distributed to the people who work there. Investment would be entirely through bond issue, which is perfectly sensible, can be adjusted for any desired level of risk, and has good market efficiency. Lots of our structures today aren't defined by natural law, they are just arbitrary, and perhaps they have negative effects?

I'm afraid I'm off to bed, so I won't respond, but I'd be interested to read your reply if you write it. Good night/morning/afternoon/evening.
Why am I being downvoted? I can't use VS 2013 because it is unstable... I wonder if there are MS saboteurs among us.
Ummm... so what does gay marriage have to do with browsing the web? FAIL
http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...

But not much behind ASP.net.

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...

And quite a bit ahead of Sinatra

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...

Then again, so's Perl. The joys of implementation differences.

I find Nancy a lot easier to develop with than ASP.net. You do pay for the expressiveness however.

At work I'm deploying a Nancy based project to parse/process documents into structured data using a 3rd party vendor's SOAP service. There were some unpleasant compatibility issues with the SOAP service and our Perl server's SOAP client and zero logging so I took the service's source code (so glad the Vendor provided it) and replaced the WebService portion of it with a thin Nancy controller to route the calls and return JSON. Since most of the processing time is spent chewing on the files Nancy's overhead isn't an issue and Nancy made it dead simple to code.
Is it safe to start learning and using Rust for hobby projects or should I wait until 1.0?
He didn't say that at all. He said:

"If we are acquainted, have good-faith assumptions, and circumstances allow it, we can discuss 1:1 in person. Online communication doesn’t seem to work very well for potentially divisive issues. Getting to know each other works better in my experience."

I think it's clear that the vast majority of people that would like to discuss his views with him couldn't actually take him up on that offer, because they're not acquainted and couldn't meet in person.
It's my understanding that the original plan for how FaceTime worked was derailed thanks to Apple losing a patent lawsuit.
> No one should be afraid of losing their job for voicing their opinion in a public debate. No one.

Really? I guess there's no inherent problem with a homophobe or white supremacist coder, as long as he does his job and doesn't cause trouble at work. But a manager, who hires and fires, or a CEO, who is the public face of the company? It seems "rational and sustainable" to hold them to higher standards.
It means that there is now a precedent for anti-gay folks to argue against homosexuals being employed against the principles of the company, even when those principles are not the core product. "This hardware company espouses conservative Christian values - you can't work here because of your opinions". Separation of personal opinion and professional life goes beyond CxO staff.
The Next Mission
If he doesn't like gay marriage, he doesn't have to get gay married. But contributing a significant amount of money to take away that option from someone else is wrong. And to believe it's his right to take that option away is wrong.

I have a same-sex partner, Brendan is willing to work and make a real effort to take away our recognition. To unmarry our children's parents. To eliminate our shared benefits, and impair the other 1148 rights conferred by marriage.

I am not happy that my money and time might go towards his salary and to further empower his views, so it's a logical decision for me to boycott his company. Many others feel similarly.

To be fair, at any point he could have said "My views have evolved, and I no longer think it is my right to deny others marriage.". He chose not to.
Sure, but couldn't they run something that cleans up already posted tweets? That wouldn't introduce any latency while posting but would still (eventually) get rid of them automatically and hopefully pretty fast.
After seeing all this, I wonder what would it take to get the people behind 'the right to marriage' to get the same reaction to 'the right to privacy' - which is an arguably more expansive provision that protects literally 100% of the population?
"Linux is a virus" thinks McAfee
it reflects an attitude that company executives have towards their employees. Companies should respect the reality that their employees do not have homogenous political views.
Except he didn't stand his ground at all. He never once explained his beliefs.

He did stand his ground in terms of what his position meant at Mozilla, explaining it on his own blog and doing interviews.
Putting money behind Prop 8 helped strip a civil right from gay people. It's technically true that proves nothing about Eich's beliefs. Heck, maybe it was Eich's personal Opposite Day. But does it matter? Even the bible says, "You will know them by their fruits," meaning that it's reasonable to judge people by what they do.

The pseudo-gotcha about tolerance is ridiculous, an accusation of hypocrisy based on a straw man. Gay marriage isn't about some mushy notion of tolerance. It's about civil rights, about equality before the law. As you point out, we don't yet know his views. This is about his actions.

And the concern about him as CEO also isn't about tolerance. It's about safety. Given that Eich has worked against the civil rights of gay people without explanation or apology, it's reasonable for gay employees and business partners to be concerned. When he was CTO, it wasn't as big a deal, because that was a technical role. But as boss of everybody, it's a different thing.

Personally, I don't think he should have left over his donation. I think he should have explained and apologized for his gay-hostile action before or as part of the CEO transition. Failing to recognize the problem in advance and then failing to deal with it quickly and forthrightly did make me strongly question his fitness to be CEO. Mozilla's CEO needs to lead and inspire people, and to adroitly handle the media, both traditional and social, adroitly. At that, so far, he's very much failed.
Expensive breaking is precisely what they're trying to avoid!

(Sorry, normally I wouldn't nitpick spelling when the meaning is clear, it was just a funny error!)
Or increase your salary and use the surplus to donate. But really most of that profit should probably be directed to improving the business, or R&D that goes back into the business (which can be opensource!).
SmartAsset (YC S12) Hiring Software Developers
I don't see how reciting a companies commercial objectives can aid your argument. FAIL
It's easy to frame immigration as a human rights issue.

Only somewhat more challenging to frame climate change the same way.

Political views are already covered under human rights via freedom of speech, thought, and conscience.

Some people view animal rights as equivalent to human rights.

These are not fundamentally different things. At most it's a matter of framing.
Thanks for the links, definitely helpful
Show HN: RSS feed of a user's HN comments
Sylvain at Algolia was kind enough to accept a small pull request for HN search, which means you can now add things like http://hn.algolia.com/userfeed/pg to your RSS reader, to get the most recent comments from that user.

Each feed item currently includes just the text of the comment, but it should be easy to add some extra info, like the article title and parent URL. I'll take a look at the weekend unless someone beats me to it :)
This assumes that marriage is a civil right (it's not directly mentioned within the bill of rights)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
I was disappointed in how little detail this went into on the different pointer types and how/when to use each one. IIRC, it doesn't even mention lifetimes, which are the feature that's currently stopping me from writing any rust code (because I don't know how to fix lifetime problems).
What's done is done. But now that Mozilla rid itself one of its best assets, what's do prevent a rival like Microsoft or Google to hire Eich and have him work on their products?
Maybe somewhat rude question, but how close to being "ready" Rust is? I mean, should I start using it already if not only for the sake of language itself? How stable is it now? How much it will probably change 'till 1.0? How soon it can be expected to be "production ready"?
Building a web browser requires that you employee people, some of whom may be gay. Alienating that entire group of people, and the majority of others who support them, can certainly put a damper on their motivation to keep that browser pushing along at full speed.

Definitely not FAIL, this is a big win for Mozilla and civil rights.
This is absurd. I've been following the news for over a week. I still don't understand the outrage. Heck, I doubt Mozilla even did, because Eich posted a reassuring statement and people still aren't happy.

Besides, he never said he hated same-sex couples. Supporting Prop 8 was a bad decision, but the vitriol directed at Eich is a non-sequitur. There's varying opinions on varying sides of the debate, so why is Eich singled out for having one?

People can hate Eich. I frankly don't care what anyone thinks of him. But it's so boneheaded that someone would need to step down from a CEO position just because he supported a bill. It's scary. And remember, Eich isn't just "some guy"; he was CTO of Mozilla for years and invented JavaScript.

The whole situation is kind of pathetic.
WW1 was an Austro-hungarian civil war at its heart. It spiraled out of control because we didn't have the system we have today.
Mozilla is a political organisation not just a pure commercial entity. It has supporters and a community not just customers and the CEO needs to retain the support and trust of that community. A CEO with controversial political views would be a risky choice for this post whatever the subject).
Probably referring to this:

http://blog.jooq.org/2013/08/24/mit-prof-michael-stonebraker...
Shipping firm first to use drones to navigate Arctic ice
Now I am confused. My understanding is that when I apply a function on a vector etc. in R, I call some compiled C code in the background that translates this into a straightforward for loop. The hardware would not work on vectors but on scalars in this case and vectors are just a more condensed and more math-y interface for users. You're saying that R actually never works on scalars in the background? Maybe I'm missing something here.