skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keeping it intellectual, these arguments get put in front of the US supreme court all the time. Under "uses and abuses" of power, type cases. Disregarding their fundamental import has important consequences (at least if you believe wikipedia). See, eg

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

There's also a long history in cognitive science on social trust and perceived consistency (anti-hypocrisy).

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

So that is why people normally vet these issues outsied of the context of SCOTUS, even on social issues. These are valid ideas irespective of people's views on any subject, IMHO.
For the record, I'm not asking for Condi to step down or be removed. It would be hypocritical of me to do so--I openly criticized people on HN for asking Eich to step down.

From a pure business perspective: I just think it's a bonehead move on Dropbox's part, as other people could have brought similar value with less reputational damage.

Views on gay marriage have NOTHING to do with running Mozilla. Views on data security+privacy have EVERYTHING to do with leading Dropbox.
Hindsight is always good, but this neglects that there was a strong point of view before the invasion of Iraq that it was a mistake. It simply wasn't a popular one in the US. But if you look internationally, there were a lot of people who stuck their necks out and said "don't do this, the evidence isn't very good." There were people in the US who did the same thing (notably Feingold).

The tragedy of US politics is that we don't seem to hold people who made the worst foreign policy call in several decades accountable. Unreconsidered support for the Iraq war should just categorically disqualify one for a position either within national politics or as a commentator on them. Yet it doesn't. These people are either cynical liars, easy-to-dupe rubes, cynical spinsters that can't be trusted to say what they think, or vacillating receptacles. Perhaps several categories apply to some. The point is, any of these characteristics should be disqualifying for national leadership.
You mean "get acquired" as an owner, or as an employee? I've been through two acquisitions as an employee and don't recall anything special in the way of non-compete agreements.
Here are some things I've "learned" from the comments in this thread:

1. Public discussion and encouraging people to vote with their wallet does not belong in a civil society.

2. Nonviolent grassroots campaigns are anti-democratic.

3. It's OK to do terrible things as long as you had good intentions.

Seriously, are you guys all completely insane? The quality of these comments is just amazingly bad. It goes beyond the standard "internet bad" comments full of trolling and bad reasoning, and over the edge into "actively ridiculous".

I'm sure there are good arguments to be made against this but they aren't being made here. Please think about what you're about to write makes any kind of sense before you comment.

Edit: if I were more conspiracy minded, I'd be wondering if the Brendan Eich affair was deliberately created as a weak example to create a wedge and discredit the whole idea of attacking companies based on the politics of their high-level people. It certainly strikes me as unlikely that there would be so many negative comments towards this if the Eich business hadn't first put so many people in that mood.
That's not really a fair example. It's a court so appearances (regrettably) actually matter, and the doctor will most likely never have to work alongside the lawyer ever again. (Not to mention a lawyer in court will be completely mentally prepared for insults.)

If the doctor behaved the same way to a nurse asking about a particular patient, that would be toxic behaviour. All they had to say was "The checks weren't necessary, his brain was severed." Going out of your way to ridicule someone for a misunderstanding is completely unnecessary.
"...are you really implying that he's been an awful president?"

Every president in the modern context has been and will be awful, even if to somewhat varying degrees. The problem is not the people in office, it's the office itself. It's important that the media emphasize personalities and the infinitesimal differences between them, so the average citizen can make-believe that some presidents are better than others.
For one day, Google will let anyone in the US buy Glass
-watch doesn't find new files yet, does it?
The system Condaleeza represents is still active and is heavily entrenched. This campaign may be a good start, but its going to take much more than that to change anything -- and that requires a strong moral consistency than extends well beyond participating in an occasional mob.

Amazon is actively supporting infrastructure to an agency that supports torture. Condaleeza isn't even in power any more. It's not that you shouldn't boycott Dropbox, it's that you are probably not really doing anything as a result of not doing it when it matters. The thing that created Condaleeza is still moving full steam ahead.
Except her opinions have far reaching consequences, such as killing people.

Am I not allowed to blacklist her because of that? I'm sure the people she's indirectly killed would blacklist her. No?
Historically the rationale for pro-business policies is that greater production creates more wealth for everyone in a society.

I don't think that's really true, in a realpolitik sense if you look into why different interest groups were advocating for "pro-business" policies at various points in various countries' histories. Historically the rationale for "pro-business" policies has most often been that they increase the profits of businessmen, which is why parties mainly representing the business sector have advocated for them. Sometimes they produce more wealth for everyone in society, sometimes they reduce it, other times they're roughly wealth-neutral but just reallocating it. But that isn't the point or the parties' raison d'être, though they may pretend it is in their politicking.
Especially since dropbox has ALL of your files in the clear. They dedupe then encrypt (or claim to encrypt).

Not only do they have all of your files in the clear, they know every other person using dropbox that has the same files regardless of where they got them. Deduping is also Total Document Tracking.
We know Gaddafi had a crush on her, but does she provide positive PR for international users? Certainly there is a more neutral person who could accomplish the same thing.
Who spends 10% as much as the NSA to do it?
While some of the vitriolic response to Ms. Rice's appointment to the Dropbox board stems from her political affiliations, we should take a step back to explore her resource-management and business decisions.

Personally, I know I have a lot of political mis-givings about appointing Ms. Rice, but that's not the main reason I would feel uncomfortable working under her direction in a technology company. I would probably be more concerned about her lack of fore-thought and poor decision-making. I would be concerned about my ability to trust her.

I know that I, and quite a few others in the tech community have a political bias, but even looking past that, there are many business-related reasons to feel that this is a wrong choice.
Is the data not loading for anyone else? It's been 10 minutes for me an all I get it "Loading data".

EDIT: Not working in Chrome, but it works in IE.
It's a combination of disparate factors. Most labs were set up under different initial conditions, and their future contracts and direction spun out of their initial intention. There are specific nuclear security/safety labs (Livermore/Sandia/Los Alamos), specific fundamental research labs (Fermi/Brookhaven), and more generalist labs (Oak Ridge/Argonne). This is not to say that each lab doesn't have significant overlap.

Livermore may be fundamentally a nuclear security/weapons lab, but they also morphed into a HPC and biotechnology lab, while I worked in more of their general energy research directorate, which covers everything from hydraulic fracturing and carbon sequestration, to novel enzymes for breaking down free methane. To give an exmaple, I never interacted with the people working at the National Ignition Facility, nor was I allowed in their building except on a tour (it was an awesome tour).

Oak Ridge has a general Environmental Sciences Division, which ranges from genetic engineering, to ecology, to soil sampling, to water power technologies research. That's just in the single building where I work, and these are just small subsets of current missions, while labs have specialties in certain areas, such as Livermore being great for lasers, or Argonne being known for transportation research. Oak Ridge has a big campus, and it's easy to never interact with other buildings. I believe both Oak Ridge and Livermore have 7k+ employees.

The labs are also managed completely differently. Livermore is technically run by a corporate board after it was restructured away from the University of California system, maybe 10 or so years ago. Lawrence Berkeley Lab I believe is still in the UC system. Oak Ridge is managed by a combination of Batelle and the University of Tennessee. I want to say Fermi and Brookhaven are managed by national physicist groups or something, although I'm not certain.

And finally, of course, the overall lab culture is influenced by their hiring practices and regionality. Before I became involved in this system I had no idea they were all so different, and the really amazing breadth of projects across all the labs. Hope this helped elucidate it a bit.
"The github profile was effectively useless." - exactly!
And one campaign was to deny a group the legal right to marry, while the other was to kill thousands of people. Neither is particularly wholesome, but I think there is a difference in scale.
As I cant access this page from Chrome (doesn't let me because "it's not secure") here is the archive.org link

https://web.archive.org/web/20140410171401/https://www.eff.o...

Could it be that because of heartbleed now i can't access eff.org?
What I'm seeing is minorities and people who care about human rights finally getting fed up with the status quo and at least trying to get people to talk about it. I'm sorry that makes people like you feel threatened.
Strongly agree. Now that Github is being used as a de facto CV, it's really important for our Github page to show our strongest projects first.

If some silly project I contributed to 4 years ago pops up first on my Github page, most potential clients and/or employers are not going to make the effort to scroll through pages of projects to find the projects most representative of my current abilities.

On the bright side, this exact phenomenon has led me to go back and clean up a few projects of mine that became unexpectedly popular. Now they have documentation and updates that I probably wouldn't have made otherwise (although their popularity alone also propelled me to make these changes).
I found the following part in the cons to NSS amusing, or maybe rather frightening:

> Certificate path building is C code designed to emulate Java code, through indirection of an average of 7 layers of macros, two platform abstraction layers, and then the remaining NSS abstraction layers (listed above)
Meet Big Bird, highest-energy neutrino ever detected
Well there's still GitHub pages...
Biggest prison population, enslaved, of any western nation.

Largest perpetrator of crimes against humanity in the last 80 years.

Among the worst health care in the developed world, Atrocious statistics in welfare conditions, in general (been to Skid Row, lately, homie?), categorically the worst exporter of waste, of the so-called developed nations, never mind it considers itself a super-power.

Apartheid in America? You're just not watching it on your channels .. but its there.

Slavery? White slavery? America is the home of it.
Couldn't agree with you more, grellas.

I've been considering moving out to SF from the Midwest, but this very thread has me reconsidering things.

I'm not interesting in being hung from a lamppost if I happen to accidentally blurt out a conservative opinion in a moment of forgetfulness.
Be Still My Breaking Heart
This is an instance of "but someone else also does horrible things". That may very well be true but isn't really an argument for why the "horrible thing" we're discussing at the moment isn't horrible.

There's a great article by a journalist explaining this phenomenon (my google-fu is weak today). He discusses how every time he reports on "X country has done atrocity Y" he gets replies of "but why aren't you covering country Z which is also horrible?".

If the standard for being able to protest anything is that you must do full due-diligence and protest all similar things then no one would ever be able to protest anything.
New Profiling Rules Are Said to Give F.B.I. Tactical Leeway
From the actual document:

> These and other features may require our systems to access, store and scan Your Stuff. You give us permission to do those things, and this permission extends to trusted third parties we work with.

This is nothing new...

Dropbox security is horrible (at least after they made everything public without asking) and I'm worried about the "trusted third parties" which could include the NSA, etc.
Just that regardless of your political inclinations, you need to be extremely ignorant of the complexity of the situation in the Middle East to be able to make such clear cut statements about what's justifiable and what's not.

Disclaimer: I live in Israel.
Let Payments Become Bitcoin’s First Beachhead
My professor once said,

Students come to college knowing how to add, subtract, and multiply. They can't divide, do fractions, or percentages, but at least they can add, subtract, and multiply.
tagged gists! I could actually start using them for reference, in lieu of (or possibly in addition to) my current personal wiki.
...you've got no idea...

That's why they should be taking PRs.
So if she's on the board of directors of the oil and gas companies, you won't buy gasoline anymore?
> No one is proposing laws about who can hold given positions. There is no free speech angle here.

This is a total straw man. The comment you are responding to does not mention "free speech" once.

The point is: you are part of a significant, vocal group that is enjoying using its clout to blackball public figures from the tech industry over certain political views that are only held by a minority in tech. Should any of your views ever put you distinctly in the minority, you will understand why the precedent you are setting is a dangerous one.
Within the progressive community, and other activist communities from all sides (in and out of the US), there is a line of thinking that individuals should actively seek to do business with companies that share their values, use neutral companies when avoidable, and endure discomfort before using products of companies actively doing evil.

I think that before we can discuss the "hypocrisy" of this versus Mozilla, or of the merit of such protests, we should first ask ourselves whether we agree with the above statement as part of our core values.

After that, we can discuss what actions line up within the three categories, and if the actions of the company are equivalent to the actions of the leadership.

To me, the Iraq issue is important, but it is not as important to me as my right to be a first class citizen of this society. My friends who work on the issue would have a different perspective.

Thus, to me, this is a warning indicator that Dropbox may not align with my values, and is worth investigating, but isn't worth making a quick decision. That said, I felt the same way about Mozilla.

Many of the comments that I've seen here are indirectly addressing this issue, but I think this is a value proposition that we each have to make within ourselves first.
I think the most salient point in this comment is whether the story belongs on HN (or, that its presence says something about HN readers/mods).

As to the rest, people can, should, and do judge leaders in business and politics by their worldviews. That is how democracy and free speech operate. If your customers want to express their opinion about a CEO's views and the potential insecurity of their product or the immorality of things going on behind the scenes, they have every right to boycott and publicly protest. This is especially considering that HN users are a good representative sample of Dropbox users and the technically literate, while the "rest" of America are unlikely to be affected either way. In fact, protest and boycott are the ONLY powers Dropbox customers have to address the problems they see, so denying them this power by shame or nostalgia for an American Flavor is decidedly unAmerican.

To give a less politically-charged example: I refuse to eat at Jimmy-John's Sandwiches because the owner/creator is a known poacher of endangered animals. You're telling me that I should ignore that because his political view is that preserving endangered animals is less important than hunting sport, and that's irrelevant to the business. Well to me a sandwich is less important than making a statement.

On the other hand, no company should be legally prevented from willfully hiring or appointing whomever they can get. But to say that everyone should avert their eyes as long as the decisions appear ethical from the outside is ludicrous.
A lot of these solutions sound very complex. Sorting, tags, categories, grid, trees...

How about just showing my repos that I starred at the top? Or if you want to get slightly more complex, a "Feature" button similar to "Star."
We are in the midst of the imperial order, not the end of it.
Got any evidence for this claim? That people are really opposed to her because ~"she's black and a woman" and not because she helped start a war that killed thousands, predicated on lies and misinformation?
Enterprise Mobility Patterns: Cross Platform Push Notifications
why did not MS write a pure C# typescript compiler?

the js one is so slow it's barely usable. It should be priority 1! write something in C# or even C++,that should'nt be that hard,or is it?
One of the many reasons this is a bad idea hasn't been mentioned yet, I think: If you are a well-meaning, eager-to-learn, but woefully ignorant coder, you probably don't know enough to know which questions are stupid. After the first time or two that someone humiliates you for asking stupid questions, you don't just stop asking stupid questions, you stop asking questions entirely.

I've been this guy. There was a good long while when I would just bob my head through stuff that I didn't understand at all because I was afraid of being humiliated in public, and then go back to my desk and spend hours trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. I was lucky enough, a few years back, to run into a very understanding mentor who put some effort into deprogramming me and making it clear that it was okay to ask stupid questions.

Making people feel small for being ignorant isn't just rude, it actively destroys productivity.
Yeah, but potential clients and employers tend to look closely at your Github profile, regardless of what you've put up on GH Pages.
Kissinger is widely and wildly despised. East Timor, Cambodia and extending the Vietnam war by years is his bullshit legacy. If someone can reincarnated before they die, then Kissinger => Condoleeza
So is murder, rape, starvation, racism, and lots of stuff I think is bad. I'm not sure I understand your point.
> "... Politics, religion, and social worldviews divide people and have no place as limiting tests in a business environment."

Technology is not just "business". We are building the very fabric of future civil societies. There is, in my opinion, no other area of human endeavor today that requires greater care and reflection than "technology".

The 'HN party line' that this is just "business" is socially irresponsible.
The way I would "drop Dropbox" if they or Rice give in to this shameful attack on diversity of thought. Otherwise, thanks in part to this effort, I will remain a loyal Dropbox customer for life.
Accidentatly deleted the YC application youtube video
I accidentally deleted the video today. Can I am upload it again and the send the link for consideration ?
https://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/

There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate.

There have also been reports that it was prompted by massive DDOS attacks. That too is inaccurate. There were indeed large-scale DDOS attacks, but they were successfully defended against.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.” It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy. Human rights organizations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments.

We’ve been running AWS for over four years and have hundreds of thousands of customers storing all kinds of data on AWS. Some of this data is controversial, and that’s perfectly fine. But, when companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere.

We look forward to continuing to serve our AWS customers and are excited about several new things we have coming your way in the next few months.

— Amazon Web Services
Here in Hamilton we're getting SoBi - their bikes actually contain cellphone and GPS components so they can phone home with their position. That's more maintenance and service costs.
While I agree with your general sentiment, the case of Ms Rice is more substantial. She has a track record of relevant actions (not views), such as legal support of warrantless wiretapping, that have a direct relation to DropBox's core business of storing users' information.

OTOH I wonder why people are so upset about perspectives of snooping on their data stored in DropBox and its likes. If the data can be snooped on, it will be, should the powers that be decide so.

I suppose that you consider any data you store in a public cloud also public, and not expect much privacy. The only way to store data in a private way on machines you don't control is to store it encrypted, and never trust the encryption key to anyone. This is how SpiderOak works, for instance: they are incapable of disclosing any clients' data even if they badly wanted to.
Excellent response Nik. I write from Laos, where one of the TPB guys apparently lives in exile, next door to where another was extradited, and next door to where lots of exploits apparently get sold (according to certain media reports and personal interactions). This whole thing is invisible to normal people. The bigger question is how can we educate the masses without reliance upon government. I think a global network of free wifi with knowledge libraries people can access on their cellphones would be a good start. Off the internet.