skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> whether Pao actually had anything (or everything) to do with it?

Reddit only has around 70 employees, I would find it extremely unlikely a CEO at a company of that size wouldn't have been aware or involved in the decision (if only to rubber stamp it).
That article is good in that it calls out the obviously bad stuff pretty well (and some of that stuff is pretty fucking vile tbh) but it doesn't really address that a biggish minority of the users are just not that nice, take out all the porn, the trolls and the 'dank memes' and the few good subreddits and you are left with a group roughly split between 'nice enough people' and 'get the fuck away from me'.

Of course a cynic would say that reddit is just a reflection of the society we live in and that might be right but it's also a reflection of the society we live in where there are few consequences to been a complete dick (I think if you could punch someone through a computer screen reddit might be a better place).

I've been on reddit >7 years and I'd love to say that it was 'better in the old days' but honestly I don't think it was I just think I've reached a point in my life where I don't feel the need to surround myself with that crap.
You don't know what a psychopath is until you meet one. I decided to leave a project because the project lead turned out to be a real psychopath. It's difficult to describe a psychopath's behavior. They are not 'evil', sadistic or cruel. They are clearly self-centered, narcissist and self-important but in unusual appearances. Appearances which can be very abusive to dependent persons in their sphere of influence.
Hope you go away forever chairman Pao.
Given her previous record with going after past employers I think Sam was just covering his back from a potential lawsuit.
> gaining access to my information isn't intrinsically hacking

Perhaps not, but saying "I was hacked" is a commonly used colloquialism that means, "My supposedly secure personal information was compromised."

But I guess it's a moot point now.
Reading between the lines and viewing her resignation in the context of what she's had to go through in the past few months, she was harassed out of the job by the user base.
Confused: you can't 'have had' malaria, its a lifetime affliction isn't it?
No, the analogy was intended to compare a condition (poverty) with another (paralysis), not a tool (money) with another (wheelchair).
? I thought Yishan left because he wasn't a fan of moving to SF.

e: half correct, they were in SF, moving to a new SF office but he wanted instead for the new office to be in Daly City:

"Then, when it came time to relocate from one San Francisco office to another, Wong put his foot down, Reddit sources say, and said he wanted to move the company to Daly City.

“I felt that locating an office in San Francisco proper is an incredibly difficult thing given the strains the city is facing and the high rents it imposes on employees who wish to live close to the office,” Wong said"

http://www.siliconbeat.com/2014/11/14/yishan-wong-leaves-red...
Journeyman: Elabs
Poor decision making skills? I don't think you understand what it is to be poor. People are more rational than you think - when people experience long term problems and generally a very inconsistent world (food/money/resources come by sporadically), they make decisions that help them in the short term, because to their experience there is unlikely to be a long term.

If someone below the poverty line wins $10,0000 in the lottery they'll buy a few luxuries, spend a lot of money on short term things for a little while and then go right back to being poor. If you tell them they'll get $10,000 for the next 4 years no matter what they do, I'll bet their attitudes change. What people need to make rational decisions is to be able to develop confidence that tomorrow will not be another disaster - of course, that is a much more difficult thing.

As long as we continue this meme that people that are poor have poor character poverty will be allowed to continue and fester.
Sam and the board are happy and pleased with her performance because she played the part of the suit pushing an over-corporate monetization-focused agenda and then eventually was offered up as a "sacrifice to the reddit ideals", and at the same time she moved the goal posts entirely so now the new CEO and board can "scale back" Ellen's initiatives but only part way, therefore simultaneously putting them in a more monetize-able position AND making them look like they are "fixing what Ellen did".

My best guess is that she fought too hard to monetize by bringing a level of "mainstream" quality and standards to the site which would allow reddit to sell more and better ads (big complaint for advertisers: I don't want my products next to weird subs, etc.), which clearly was not well-received by the community BUT which the board may have encouraged, at least partially.
> Reddit banned several subreddits for organized harassment behavior

While leaving up other subreddits that also have organized harassment behavior. If they had cleaned out all the trash at once, the community impact probably would have been minimal.
> this second backlash revealed her to be politically compromised

could you elaborate on this?
That's a pretty poor analogy since it's basically just the regular explanation with s/website/pub/ applied.
Really? Didn't know that. I'm pretty sure Victoria at least was still in New York when she was fired... 3 years after that decision.
Brake non-driving wheels and apply power to at least one drive wheel. Result: lots of smoke!
Humans aren't really individuals, though they labor under the illusion of such.

They're weak hiveminds. Individuals, if they exist at all, are rare and want nothing to do with the rest of you.

When foreign hiveminds come into contact, one attempts to absorb the other, and failing that, to destroy the other. Memes are highly infectious, and so it's often important to police memes to make sure no foreign ones disrupt the hivemind's self.

One or another hivemind sent off a few spurious signals, and a few highly excited human units acted on those. The hiveminds in question don't feel responsible because they didn't intend to send those signals (or want to pretend they didn't).
Though you do have a point, I think it's really not binary like that; you've given end-members.

There are a good number of scientists (myself included) who spend at least part of the time making applications for other researchers; it's best when the products are multi-platform, because there are a lot of scientists who only use one platform. These application can be anything from plotting and basic analysis tools to simulators of various sorts. They're more specialized than Evernote or something but are still designed to be installed and used by members of the community, because it's a waste of time for everyone to write their own finite element models (even if everyone knew how).

When done right, not only are these tools enabling but they become very widely cited. For instance, in my field (geoscience) a tool called GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) has over 6000 citations, even though I'd estimate 70% of papers that have used it in some form don't cite it. This is an enormous number of citations in the geosciences; most very famous and influential papers have ~1-2000.

Maybe it's different in CS; I have heard that much of the software is illustrating a new algorithm or something.
I don't think it gives the impression of organization at all. Rather the opposite: it gives the correct impression (unlike in the case of terrorists and criminals) that quite a large number of unconnected people were actively participating in attacks on Pao to some extent or other, rather than it being a smaller organized subgroup of the community, which frankly wouldn't be as bad.
The real question is will Ellen Pao sue reddit now?
It's odd that you call the article pure opinion, because I don't see you providing anything more substantial than your own feelings here. Can you provide any citation or even a thesis to evaluate rather than just flinging around epithets like "tabula rasa," asserting that someone is ignoring evidence of something, and sniffing at institutional affiliations? The article is just a magazine article, but at least it provides the name of the book so people can track it down and look at its references if they want. You don't provide anything for readers of your comment to look into at all.
Not really a matter of fairness or unfairness more an explanation of why I prefer Facebook to Reddit in that it allows that curation.
And there are a lot of cases where it doesn't work, specifically with elaborate MPI scenarios and over a network/VPN. Specifically, I do not wish to jump through hoops to enable remote profiling over heavily IT-restricted networks.

For simple apps, nvprof is great. For real low-level blood and guts CUDA optimization, the command-line profiler is still indispensable. Killing it is enough reason for me to go code FPGAs in OpenCL instead of GPUs in CUDA.
The article never claimed that all small fish eat big. That's not at all the point of the article.
I think it's a little unfair towards Reddit. Any community large enough will be taken over by trolls if nothing else for the fact that they're the ones making the most noise. Subreddits are perfect way to contain those people away from others since the majority won't be posting in niché subreddits, and those few who do can be moderated.

If anything might be a lesson on community design it might be to put up a few more "barriers" between subreddits and the general population and think about how to control interaction between them.
"The End" kind of gives it away. More of a long essay than a short book. I'm going to check it out regardless, I really need to level up my classical and pre-classical philosophy.
> Pao does not get a pass on this dynamic for being a woman.

It seems like she's been the subject of vitriol primarily for being a woman, since a lot of the vitriol predates the past few days.
They would probably raise her a statue just to avoid the kind of lawsuits she is famous for.
>>>And logically, if the poor as a group were good with money, they wouldn't be poor.

Give poor people a reward/goal within reach and then see how they do.

I know working on long projects can be very draining because weeks can pass by and I'm still very far away from the goal of project completion.

Poor people's lives are like that. They have to jump through more hoops and exert much more discipline for their life to get better.
Pao was CEO for only 8 months until now, she even says so in her resignation note.

http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha...
> She didn't do a good job of it, but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit.

These are two separate things. The fact that she tried to stand up against some of the idiots that inhabit the site doesn't mitigate against the fact that she did not do a good job. She should have resigned or been fired for not doing a good job regardless of how well she coped with the jerks en masse.
I deposited 0.6 btc, messed around with the site a little bit (didn't play a single game) and ended now there's only 0.07 btc on my account.

I'm not sure if losing your customers coins is such a great business model.
I think the last line may resonate a bit negative (and possibly sexist) with people but I do agree with your larger point of: when do corporations actually tell us the truth about these ousters?
Why is everyone so shocked? Has anyone ever talked to a friend that works for the Federal govt.? They are well known to be completely incompetent when it comes to technology. Even the DoD, which gets billions of dollars for cyber defense, often doesn't do things right.

How can you expect the Fed. Govt. to handle things competently when some of the best paid private contractors F' things up too. Security is hard.

What IS a bit surprising is not the fact that they were hacked, but that they actually found out they were hacked. From what I understand, the Fed. Govt. has lost even more important data (like designs for weapon systems), and not even realized it till like years later when the technology shows up in foreign weapons.
Please don't get me wrong I'll love to use openresty, I love nginx, etc. But there are other reasons to use node: ecosystem and npm.

Try searching a driver for a not so popular db on npm and you might find two different implementations in addition to the official driver.

I'd love to see something like this on openresty.
Sam said it for PR reasons. He also posted this one a Friday afternoon!

Basically they want to give something for news articles that doesn't further paint reddit management as being anti-women or something.
The benefits and pitfalls of coding bootcamps
I believe that is exactly what he does in the article.
Here's an interesting talk from a psychopath https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzqn6Z_Iss0
He made previously an other confession, which was less funny and much darker. Unfortunately it's gone now. I guess, he had a second thought, and asked to remove it. As far, as I remember he mentioned, for example, that if someone did something bad to him, he could not forget it and he would get even in some way, no matter if years had to pass. Also, another interesting talk related to the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bysVPcKQfeY
No worries, I'm definitely guilty of quickly editing my own comments to phrase them better :)

I still feel like I'm a little lost in the essay, though. It's easy to say that all data requires senior people to sign off before data can be decrypted. But that sounds really hard to implement and even harder to legislate. What specifically are you asking for? What am I supposed to be asking my representative to do?
You can always find examples for all sides.

But it is just a statistical fact, that moving up from being really poor today has become much more difficult than it was decades before, maybe with the exemption of being a computer scientists (but also there it is not so easy for a normally gifted person to finish studies and so on without help from the parents).
Augh, seriously, I just followed a link from Google through Pinterest and they made me connect facebook and choose categories to read an actual link that I found in a search engine.

I used Pinterest some in the early days, but I'll avoid like the plague, now.

The worst part is all they did is intercept the search result for someone else's website and force me to give them all sort of marketing data they can sell in order to get it.

Gross.
I came this close to not even knowing about this, until someone posted something in /r/dataisbeautiful about Ellen Pao's comment karma over time.

Just like Facebook, it's almost entirely related to what you subscribe to/follow. /r/chess was entirely mum on the situation, for example.
> but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit.

I'm baffled at how people misunderstand Ellen's actions in shutting down a few subreddits randomly.

She did not 'clean' reddit of the worst of reddit nor 'hate' subreddits. In fact, there are still dozens and dozens of really disgusting stuff on reddit like /r/gasthekikes and /r/coontown

Let's please stop this false narrative that she was a champion of some kind who came in and tried to 'clean up' reddit.

Not only are there plenty of reprehensible stuff on reddit still, Ellen's claim that she targeted behavior and not speech rang hollow for the majority on reddit because communities like SRS were and are getting away with the same or worse behavior.
That doesn't really hold water. You can choose which subs you're subscribed to.
It does, however, require a potentially large amount of work for a SPA. Granted, server-side rendering for JavaScript libraries like Ember and React is doable now.
Which was explicitly denied by reddit and is no different than any other piece of baseless speculation.
It can recur, and you can get it multiple times, but no, not a lifetime affliction.
> The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you.

That is humanity. People are narcissistic assholes. If the average person wasn't scared of what would happen or how they're perceived they'd punch you right in the face for looking in their direction.

That's what internet anonymity does. Brings out people's true essence. You see it with road rage too. The protection of the vehicle and the quick flight make giving the finger in response to a reasonable mishap an easy answer. A "FUCK YOU" for accidentally veering into your lane. Sound reasonable?

Yeah there's a few Mother Teresas out there, but most of them are self righteous a-holes too. What a world.
I think that this is a myth, perpetuated by people who wish to rationalize their position (which also happens to be wealth-maximizing for themselves).

Empirically, giving people money helps them. This experiment with the homeless in London is a good place to start: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-t...
It's the Bay Area. Everyone is always talking in superlatives.
I'd suggest that the 'safe spacers' are on the wrong site.

When anything gets as big as reddit there will always be unsavory things posted - flying the banner of 'free speech' for so long and then suddenly doing a 180 is what has made people annoyed
An Uber Experiment: connecting entrepreneurs, investors, and ideas using Uber
>I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS

Anything less doesn't get heard - or it gets ignored. A certain pirate group that asked the U.N for help, was ignored, and resorted to boarding ships and capturing prisoners comes to mind.

I've known very few people who cared to have Pao as CEO since her taking the position. Anyone who gave attention to Reddit Corporate disliked her being in that position and felt her politics would get in the way (and they did). The only people who seemed to like her in that seat were those with the same ideological and political leanings as her (not a big surprise there). [0]

The fact people had to get "up in arms" and make a huge fuss about her to get her out of the position shows action should have been taken sooner, rather than later. But nobody pays attention to the quiet protests. They only give notice to the extreme.

Yes - some of the comments against her were extreme, unnecessary, and irrelevant to her position and the problems surrounding her. I saw death/rape threats, totally uncalled for. Anything less was ignored.

[0] And her Karma tells the story. It's almost always been negative. https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png
This works in small experiments because when you give money to a small group of poor people (A) within a larger group of poor people (B), group A gains leverage compared to their prior position and compared to group B.

When you give money to all poor people, the net result is simply inflation[1]. If transfer payments were made to taper up from max(wealth) (receives $0) to min(wealth) (receives $average(wealth)), disparity would be brought to 0, which would naturally lead to everybody doing what they wanted rather than what earned them income. This would be a lot of fun, but it would unfortunately reduce the developmental value of humans to zero[2], and machines would evolve to replace us all (could be gray goo, could be the borg, etc.).

The true path to freedom from work is to work collaboratively on a humanoid robot with some basic rules for human interaction: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Those should suffice for a while, but I know not what will come of them down the line.

That's all for now :) Have a great weekend, everyone!

1. http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/Lesson-4/Newt...

2. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/05/robots_of_the_f....
He did call redditors out in the announcement though, maybe it'll be alright

https://reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_te...

" As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you. "
Anecdote: I meet quite a few people from lower income levels in my side job as a musician. Once, we were chatting about our cell phone plans, and I cracked a lame joke, like "the cell phone will truly liberate the homeless."

One of the other musicians said, in all seriousness: "Hey, my cell phone is my lifeline when I'm homeless." Another guy chipped in: "Me too."

It used to be cited that lack of a mailing address was a real impediment to the homeless getting back into a normal economic life, and the cell phone may play a similar role today.
Contrast that with the following scenario.

Alan has a web application that shows you all funny tweets. In order to see those tweets you must first create an account.

Username/Pass

You pick a username, you enter a password. That combination is attached to Alan WebApp UserID: 12345

Everytime you login with that username and password combination, you get back Alan WevApp UserID 12345.

Google Login

You click the "Login with Google" button.

It redirects you to say "Do you want to associate your google account with Alans Web App?"

You click yes.

Google ID: XYZZY is returned. That id is tied to Alan WebApp UserID 12345.

The next time you go to login, Google returns "This is Google ID: XYZZY". Alan WebApp finds the association XYZZY with Alan WebApp 12345.
Calling her "Chairman Pao" is racist, but moreso, reductive.
Ruby on Rails vs. Node.js
The question is which should new web developers take up learning, and why? Now, hold your horses - I know that comparing Ruby on Rails and NodeJS isn't completely a 1:1 comparison. Rails is a full web framework and NodeJS with ExpressJS is more comparable to the likes of Sinatra - that's not the point. The point is going forward which is the more progressive and powerful tool to use to develop user-friendly web applications?

Let's discuss...
As a very fat guy, I felt very much the opposite. Context matters. The author was mocking himself and is a precise enough writer that we know the comment was in jest.

And did I mention that I'm morbidly obese? At 300lbs I'm probably worth two Midwesterners, at least in gross tonnage and displacement.
I hope you are subbed to /r/diy if you read /r/homeimprovement!
Such a depressing post. So the poor lad who spent his time to come interview doesn't deserve you to spent, literally 2 minutes sending him a rejection email?

People are so self absorbed nowadays. You can't even find the time to at least thank someone for their time (and we're talking many hours here, and probably money to commute to your office) and wish them good luck.

Surprised to see you on HN mister overwhelmed.
Some poor people are just born into bad situations and stay that way. You can't extrapolate your limited experience onto all of them.
The issue is that these communities aren't frequently in the top of /r/all and causing outside issues. FPH just got too big and too obnoxious to ignore.
Also plenty of wealthy people that completely earned their money themselves but still ended up poor once the fat pay checks stopped coming. Athletes and musicians are probably the most obvious examples.
Toshiba's 3-D Magnetic Recording May Increase Hard Disk Drive Capacity
(responding to undo an accidental downvote...)
I do help others financially, quite a bit. And actually giving someone money in a way that helps them is a lot different than talking about someone else helping out people.

And what's with the childish ad hominem? Do you think you're still in high school?
It doesnt really matter, reddit users move as packs, and they have been divided, so there's a danger the entire place will become deserted.