skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is widely-believed in the investment banking industry that you can find a firm that will provide a fairness opinion for virtually any transaction. They are a little bit more costly than $50K, but not more than an order of magnitude for small transactions. Mergers and Inquisitions says, "As you might guess, banks never say a deal is 'unfair' – the Opinion is just a rubber stamp to justify the deal to investors."[1]

(For the record, I never saw any unethical fairness opinions while I was in investment banking)

The consulting industry has similar dynamics. They are mainly there to provide evidence in favor of a plan proposed by whomever is their primary contact. See, for example, the article by the BCG consultant at [2]: "What I could not get my head around was having to force-fit analysis to a conclusion. In one case, the question I was tasked with solving had a clear and unambiguous answer: By my estimate, the client’s plan of action had a net present discounted value of negative one billion dollars. Even after accounting for some degree of error in my reckoning, I could still be sure that theirs was a losing proposition. But the client did not want analysis that contradicted their own, and my manager told me plainly that it was not our place to question what the client wanted."

1: http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-fai...

2: http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html
Work during Passover is not prohibited, though.
I like to call this outcome a "non-answer answer". Very common in the corporate world.
Ask HN: A more open-minded and less judgmental community?
I like the level of detail with HN discussions, but I find that there are many people who act in judgmental & close minded ways.

This includes:

* ego driven discussions

* witch hunts on everyone who makes a public mistake

* downvoting opinions that are different from theirs, even when well expressed

Are there any technical/business/culture forums out there that have people with open minds & relatively free of judgement? If yes, are there cultural and/or technological safeguards to keep that vibe?

---

Edit: I'd like the opposite of homogeneity. Rather, novel perspectives should be more visible.

I'm thinking along the terms to respect for all opinions and highlighting all of the different perspectives on the topics. It would be great to see all of the perspectives & related concepts laid out somehow, to increase conceptual awareness.
I didn't take offense to your comment.

My primary point was that we can't assume things that the memo doesn't say. From your comment:

> "From what I see, it was an investigation into gender-based discrimination/harassment claims"

I think you are making some assumptions, and my guess is that whoever wrote the GitHub statement wanted you to come to that exact conclusion.

This is why they kept repeating the phrase "gender-based"--they want the reader to focus on the gender claims and then GitHub can try to render those claims invalid with their investigation results.

In fact, the precise scope of the investigation was not provided in the statement--we don't know what they investigated. There are many possibilities, including the one you suggested. Another is that they might have looked into a range of issues, found a few problems, and then decided to focus their public statements on the gender-based claims because they knew they could win those.

Mostly, I'm saying that this GitHub post doesn't tell us much (not saying it should, just saying it doesn't).
> (cough racism, classism cough) that is impossible (for a middle-class parent or high school student) to predict or navigate

Ron Untz has concluded there is heavy admissions discrimination against whites from rural areas and asians. Interestingly, Jews are quite over-represented.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...
Most corporate startup lawyers have founder's spouses sign release forms for to clearly indicate that they do not have some claim to ownership or equity.
I am sure other browsers will be supported in future. Why would a developer spend time testing other browsers if the project is not even known to succeed?
"The investigation found no evidence..."

That's the only thing you can say. Moving this to another, more objectively verifiable domain: let's suppose you want to buy a house, and you ask the seller whether asbestos was used in its construction. A seller would be stupid to go further than "to the best of my knowledge…". Problem is: if you buy the house and ten years later find asbestos behind some wall, and the seller said it wasn't there, he hangs, even if he couldn't know of the problem. Of course, you can refuse to buy unless you get a 100% definite answer, but that would raise the price because the seller would have to do better inspection (possible destructive) and/or find insurance and/or would want money for the risk he takes.

The same applies to this outside firm: if they categorically state that there are no problems, but it later turns out that there are, they are target for litigation both from employees of the company and from the company itself ("you told us we didn't have problems! but now our stock tanked")

The best you likely can get is a detailed description of what they did in their research. That limits the risk for that company. If they claim they read every e-mail message, and it later turns out that they could have spotted a problem from there, they are liable, but if it turns out they could have spotted a problem from the phone records, they are off the hook.

So yes, it would be nice to learn what exactly this outside firm did, so that we can gauge how hard they tried to find something, but I don't blame them for saying they found no evidence.
I like it, but the blatant copy of the Github design makes me wonder: could one run a public Gogs instance ?

Anyway, that's a really slick work. Once again Go shines and make that project super easy to install.
Netflix's problem is that they can't prevent #3 - case in point, my daughter discovered Ponyo on Netflix which was possible through NF's agreement with Starz. At some point Starz refused to give Netflix a license to their licensable content (i.e., to many Disney titles in this case) at any cost.

Of course, we now own the video as it's highly rewatchable for the kiddo, but I wouldn't doubt that Neflix would have happily paid ever increasing content costs to a point but their supplier cut them off because they felt Netflix was competing with them.
It's almost certainly "accidental" and a relic of some indexing or something that Sharepoint is doing to the documents. I'll bet it recognizes XML-ish content (as the article notes, images and plain text are ignored), tosses it in a validator or something similar that "corrects" the file, and saves that file internally. That's not too unusual in the CMS world. The bad part is that the internal version has found its way back out; hopefully in turning SharePoint into "cloud storage" they screwed up and sent the wrong thing. Otherwise, that's rather a mis-feature of SharePoint. If there's anyone here who actually knows it (I only generally do, being on the OSS side of the CMS world) I'd be interested to know.

So I'm ascribing this to incompetence and/or bad judgement rather than malice. But either way, still unacceptable.
You would benefit from a sense of proportion. Come back with this noise when there's a Google line running through my front yard that I'm not allowed to dig up. If you don't like the Android that Google built for you, then don't use it. Google haven't been purchasing laws and agencies since 1937. Ma Bell has.
Thanks, Jon. :)

You're right, the feedback given by the Product Hunt community is unique and not representative of the average consumer. Since they are the users of the product, their feedback is highly relevant; however, like all people, they too don't really know what they want sometimes so it still takes intuition and experience to interpret effectively.
Right you are, pull request complete!

https://github.com/gogits/gogs/pull/87
What's Happening in Mexico? A global call for freedom
PLEASE, take a minute to see this video and spread the word, the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and his government is trying to censor and control Internet access in Mexico.

http://youtu.be/8El2QlwbMZM

This would enable the government to create "silence zones" whenever there's a public event, manifestation or anything that they deem as a "national security threat" by blocking all access to communications, including the Internet, TV, Radio, Phones, etc.

ISPs would be obligated to maintain logs of its traffic and contents, and provide them to the government whenever it requires it.

This bill would give the Mexican government the power to control which sites and media can be accessed in Mexico.
...and, indeed, these XML namespaces (MS Office and data types) and the CustomDocumentProperties tag are already known to be added by SharePoint, and apparently for well-established reasons (though not ones I understand not being a SP user): http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/30626/why-is-s...
This stuff is still in beta and not generally useful, but we have Harbormaster (Build/CI), Drydock (software resource management) and Releeph (release management) in the pipeline.
Not the OP but here's an example.

And yet conventional ideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom.

http://www.paulgraham.com/foundersatwork.html

The idea being, in that ultra-early-stage, 2-3 founding members only, state, trying too hard to be "professional" is counterproductive. Obviously, at the scale that we're talking about with Github, the game changes.
It's cheap, but I wouldn't pay much more for it. There really is very little I find worth watching on Netflix. A couple of TV series, and few random other things. I hardly ever watch a movie.
I came here to make this comment. Interestingly enough, VX poison gas (think The Rock, but less face-melting) was disposed in this way before they tried incineration and chemical means.
I rented from these guys before and had a great experience.
Surely other women work there. Time will tell here, won't it? The story is dramatically more powerful if other women come forward. I don't know that it lessens things if others do not but it does create some interesting questions to those brave enough to ask them.
My screen brightness has broken it's so bright why are my eyes so watery, obviously it's the screen.
Anonymous allegations are worthless unless other Githubbers can confirm this.
My beef with economics is the lack of experiment and falsifiable hypotheses. Or perhaps it's a failure to integrate repeated failure of hypotheses into a larger theory. Once you've finished could you report back if there is any attempt to make predictions that can be checked?
This. Both Zed and JAH are difficult personalities, but a professional structure should be in place to handle matters which can distract people from work.

GitHub should have implemented a blocking mechanism to stop people inviting Zed to 'dick' projects, and if the rumour mongering story is true, HR should have stepped in and disciplined Horvath.
I'm taking baby steps in this direction with my startup but the biggest reason I can is because of people like Ryan that provide the inspiration to do so.
Keep an eye on this label https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/issues?labels=Level%3A...

Another way is to jump on irc freenode #elixir-lang and ask :).

Another way is to use it, report bugs, poor error messages or unclear documentation, and maybe fix it.

I did the later and the Elixir developers were super helpful and responsive.
The missus was pretty shocked that Spotify Premium costs more than Netflix. Once she brought that up, I actually thought about it and absolutely agree.

$7.99/mo had that perfect impulse-buy attraction to it, and got me into the game. But after using it and seeing the kind of content they've been building (even despite the content that they've lost, and will contractually have to lose later), $10/mo still seems pretty palatable to me too.
It is funny and strangely comforting that despite such a wide variety of topics, forum culture is still the same. There is always a large segment of the forum population that derive some level of pride in listing their collection of X in their signature. Here we see posters list their "casios in rotation," on the spyderco it is lists of knives and ubuntu forums it is "rig specs" and version names. The puzzling thing is that--thankfully--this does not seem to happen on mailing lists.
Well beyond the CEO is my lawyer and you get gather proof and build a case. She just exploded and left, making accusations nobody can prove. Again, that anonymous post just made it clear that she did not tell half of the story.

Just by going through her public gh profile.
I’m surprised that the quotes, and graphics (unsourced, but presumably provided by Netflix) insist on the international dimension of that decision — and yet, no-one in this discussion mentions that point. Netflix is roughly the same price in countries with different standards of living, and such an evolution is most likely going to mean adapting — and more cross-frontier purchases. I’m already doing it: I first booked Netflix in one country; moved and kept my orignal subscription, out of laziness to be honest, but it would have been expensive to switch.

About outright piracy: all the shows available on Netflix are available ‘elsewhere’, and many here (me included) have previously expressed their frustration of local limits for certain shows when one travels. Paying for Netflix is made out of convenience and respect for the economics of video creation: I don’t think a price-hike, combined with announces about investment in new content, will trigger that many pirates. At least, I hope I’m not wrong about that.
When we talk about variables we usually talk about 2 different things. Values and bindings. Values are the data in the variables ( a list, a tuple, an object), and bindings are names that are used to refer to data ( what the variables is called).

So X = [1,2,3]. in gives you variable binding X and variable value [1,2,3]. Variable value [1,2,3] is immutable in both Elixir and Erlang. You cannot do x[0]=5 in either one and expect the value [1,2,3] to be modified in place. Binding X is immutable in Erlang but not in Elixir. In Erlang you'd do X1=[5,2,3]. and in Elixir you could do x=[5,2,3].

You can argue what is better. I think both approaches are good, there is not one clearly superior in my opinion. Sometimes I take your side and prefer Erlang, because I like having explicit and immutable variable bindings that don't change behind my back. If I make X=[1,2,3], it is going to be [1,2,3] from now until forever.

As far as Actor and distribution stuff all that goodness is still in Elixir. They complement each other more than compete. Both take advantage of the awesome VM (BEAM) -- which I think is a marvel of engineering -- concurrent garbage collection, lightweight processes, scheduling balancing, async IO background threads, binary references, distribution and so on.
A very related topic is the Japanese writing system, which is based on Chinese writing system, and majority “Japanese” words are actually Chinese words. I agree with evreything this is an article on the complexity of Chinese says.

Almost everything is valid for Japanese of course, sans there are less Chinese characters in contemporary Japanese. However, to complete the picture, you just have to add myriad ways of reading a single Chinese character in Japanese.

Being a foreigner lived in Japan for years, let me sum it up: Chinese writing system, Chinese-style construction of Chinese characters (have fun explaining how not, moon and sun adds up to mean bowel to me as in 腸, or tree + mouth = to be in trouble 困) and words (I haven’t met a person that will think of a log when say them “round and fat” 丸太, I also don’t know how “bad heart” can mean nausea 悪心). As a whole, it’s not beautiful at all, and it is unnecessarily complex.

The complexity also goes for wrong Japanization of the English load-words (it both meaning and spelling: no it’s not shinapsu, it is synapse, and no gurasu and garasu are both the wrong spellings of the same word glass, used to mean different objects). Nihon-shiki romanization is also deeply flawed (I don’t know any language with Roman-based script that would spell shatyou as shachou in English), yet Japanese people are thought Nihon-shiki romanization instead of something that makes more sense such as Hepburn romanization. But these are best to be saved for another discussion.

On a related tangent.

I would very much appreciate if Japanese people could write my name using Romaji instead of some katakana non-sense that doesn’t even sound true. That non-sense became my name in Japan for years, and I was really sick of it. Tell me about being respectful to people then jackass.

And believe it or not, in one rare instance where my name is written in the actual script (my graduation certificate), they wrote it wrong.
I up-voted you, I think you make some very good points. There are some big errors I keep seeing in the "tax the rich arguments" over and over:

1) High income and high wealth are not the same thing. People keep mixing the two together (switching between "tax high incomes" and "tax the wealthy" like they're the same thing).

2) Many rich people don't have huge piles of money lying around, but instead own valuable companies or other assets. For example, Mark Zuckerberg owns a large part of Facebook, but that's not directly convertible into its equivalent in dollars. In fact, after the IPO, he had to pay an enormous amount of taxes on that, which was money he didn't have at the time [1].

1 - http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2013/12/20/mark-zucke...
what's even more amazing is that in the US, us as voters seem to insist on our higher level elected officials to have had 'experience' as a prerequisite for advancement to higher office. Are these really the people we want to elevate to have broader authority? And there is a bootstrapping? The country is really 'federalizing'; giving more authority to the federal government, so there is less of a 'filter' against local officials, because there's just simply less to do, and less incentive for voters to look carefully at who their, say state and local level representatives are.
GNU make restarts when a Makefile: dependency changes.
So it works perfectly fine. Try it ...
Rich Felker, the lead developer of musl libc, uses make to generate his ewontfix.com blog. See http://ewontfix.com/Makefile
The Best Video Store in the World Is Throwing a Hail Mary to Reinvent Itself
Consul actually uses serf for communicating between edge nodes. The central servers (think your zookeeper cluster) use their own implementation of Raft for internal communication.
One question that popped in my mind after reading the headline: can you possibly have a non-capitalist free democracy? You can't forbid people from "being capitalistic".
The UI seems a bit broken. I entered some airport codes, and chose dates, but it was not until the next screen that I was told "An error occurred" and neither airport is "supported". I had to click Back to proceed, and completely lost my original query. It should tell me as soon as I enter my airport codes if they are not supported.

Also, on https://levelskies.com/flights/ I clicked "Add my city", filled out the popup form, and it refused to submit the feedback form because the underlying search form fields were not completed. Seems like more thorough UI testing is needed.
It's just as odd as using OpenGL from Java, right? The main issue I've seen people have with Go and using it for gaming or heavy graphics use is that it is garbage collected. But compared to the Java Hotspot runtime, it's gc isn't nearly as robust.
Jeez, so when does The Wives of Silicon Valley start? The whole tech scene in SF has turned into such a little soap opera, cult of personality, wank fest.
This suggests future work on assistive devices that may be able to "speak for" a patient by ML and manual algorithmic adjustment... Huge quality-of-life improvement potential for people with limited/impaired vocal-ability.

Beyond that, there is far wider potential for translating brain scans directly and skipping vocal-aural pathway by communicating with others digitally.
I am neutral on AirBNB. Both sides have completely fair arguments and I find myself agreeing from all angles.

I don't think it's as black and white as people make it out to be. I think there are specific situations where AirBNB is great, and ones where it isn't.

I hope all turmoil surrounding this new "protocol" (I'm going to call it a protocol instead of AirBNB) will help establish a legal base around it, paving the way for such businesses in the future.

Maybe AirBNB is the "stepping stone" to running businesses out of your house? Maybe instead of just housing, it will be mechanics, it will be artisans of all sorts.
If you only serve 10 airports, could you please just give a dropdown list instead of making me guess at what airports are supported and then disappointing me 99% of the time?
Sounds like legalese boilerplate that the GH legal team recommended. Nothing more, nothing less.

Harassment allegations aside, the fact that the wife of the founder had the access/freedom she did was a bit of a WTF for me. I can understand that perhaps GH decided that was the termination-triggering offense, not the allegations.
Yeah, actually. It's called Hacker News. You may have heard of it.

Could it be better? Yes, certainly. But it's much better than Slashdot or (so I hear) Reddit. It's even better than The Economist, which until recently was my gold standard for a mature, non-judgmental board.
'Dressed' laser aimed at clouds may be key to inducing rain, lightning
Shocking that so many bytes would be added to HTML files. If you were backing up website views, this could add a lot of bytes per page request if you published them without realising. Totally unacceptable.
No, I don't think my comment is revelatory. Just adding my opinion to the boards like everybody else.
Thanks, ASquare. :)

I've been inspired by the startups I mention in the post and a few people in particular: Joel from Buffer, Sandi from Quibb, and Danielle from Mattermark.
If you read Theresa Preston-Werner's post (linked above), she claims that the "mistakes and errors of judgment" were completely unrelated to the harassment story, but were discovered during the harassment investigation.
Well put until you got to Spiegel. He made something a lot of people value, and I have been impressed with his public comments.

That said the comparison to college admissions is incredibly apt.
Decompiling Clojure Part II, The Compiler
Are you against your neighbours letting their friends stay in their apartment?
"The sad truth about culture is that a sustainable culture will feel much more like your parents home than your college dorm; and that will never change... because it's a good thing."

That is the single best line I've read about work culture in software companies in......ever.
I'm interested in this. An app that shares your work-mode laptop to the web more/less all the time would be interesting. Is there anything that can do this in 1-to-web way for free (or willing to exchange for feedback) and where the viewer doesn't need a special viewer plugin (html5/h264)? Vimeo, Ustream broadcasting?