Hacker News is a fine place for anyone who posts substantive comments, like zzleeper.
What it has no place for are personal attacks. Since this account has done so more than once, we've banned it.
Anybody with a banned account who would like it to be unbanned is welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to unban users who give us reason to believe that they will follow the HN guidelines from now on.
I thoroughly disagree. Net Neutrality, today, is case in point. Until Chrome came along, Firefox was going it alone against IE. Until Google Fiber came along, we all had less than 10Mb downloads for $80/month.
There's much, much more. Pick better battles. Google is not your enemy.
A company can achieve good things, and still be an enemy. There are other examples of unsavoury things Google has done as well.
That said, I think applying morality to a company is silly; despite what the law may say, I'll never consider a corporation a person. It's a collection of people, and people can do good and bad things.
That's suggestive that Google is our friend, which it is not. It's a for-profit entity, thus just as much as our convenient friend as any other and in general an enemy whose sole purpose is to separate you from your money. Don't get it twisted any other way.
lol people like you are going to be happy when in a decade, everyone is going to be wearing google glasses, browsing through google chrome, having a google fiber internet connection, and 'renting' self-driving google cars. Cameras everywhere, control of the source internet, control of the browser, and I bet through some magic prominent universities decide that Go is the perfect language to teach beginners, over Python/C++/others- and start issuing free chromebooks to students.
Just look at how they've been fucking up google voice to drive users to Hangouts to get more control. Look at how sometimes, Hangouts randomly doesn't give you notifications of new messages, so that you're kept on your toes and keep checking your mobile frequently. Look at how google maps absolutely _degrades_ and the 'famed' UI starts to look retarded when you turn off 'Location sharing'. Haha, google is definitely going to have the last laugh. Edward Snowden must be crying somewhere right now.
There's going to be a day, when your 3 months old search for 'google services open source alternatives' gets you flagged as disqualified to being hired in Google/(maybe) other companies. And it's not going to stop. Google is going to keep getting bigger and bigger, keep growing tentacles, and keep getting more and more in control, and omniscient. I wonder how the great hackers of ages past allowed the whole technology industry to come to this, to let the situation become so bad. There should have been dozens of rms', but everyone kept quiet and rolled over. Now, it's near impossible to be free of google's touch when browsing the internet.
EDIT : Hmm, downvoted without a comment. Looks like the 'crawlers' picked this up. I'm scared now.
Yes. As I said, we all screw up, and we all come at things from our own perspective. As members of the dominant group, we have the luxury of not having to see others' perspectives. Any movement dependent on legitimizing minority perspectives has an uphill battle in that regard. People who care will provide solutions from their perspective and feel alienated when they're told they're participating in the marginalization of minority perspectives.
Minorities don't need my solutions. They need my support for their solutions.
> Minorities don't need my solutions. They need my support for their solutions.
This is a common but, IMO -- speaking as a member of a minority on one important axis and a non-minority on other important axes -- misguided view.
As a developer, I wouldn't say "business users don't need my solutions, they need my support for their solutions" -- though I might say "business users need me to be attentive to their interests and needs in proposing solutions".
Similarly, minorities don't need blind adherence to their demands from the majority any more than vice versa -- certainly, people who are outside of a particular minority can often have important and useful perspective on solutions to the problems faced by minorities. But a key part of that is really paying attention to the interests of people in the group at issue.
Who, usually, aren't going to be monolithic, and some of whom are going to disagree with any solution, whether its proposed by a fellow member of the minority or not. And, yes, they'll often bring lack of minority status into it if the person they disagree with is outside of the minority (but then, they'll often bring betrayal language into it if the person is a member of the minority -- that's not because either is a valid critique, its because both are convenient emotional attack vectors.)
I guess it's not right to say our solutions aren't needed. It's just that our voice and the sorts of solutions we'll tend to come up with are not underrepresented. Far too often our solutions are "be more white", "stop being poor", and the like: "Abandon your perspective and become a member of the dominant group."
We need solutions that acknowledge minority experiences and treat them as valuable, not solutions that simply impose majority viewpoints.
So? The Linux ecosystem is the best there is for science. Period. Even OSX lags behind, just look at all the work people put into MacPorts and Homebrew just to get it almost on par with Linux. To this day, none of those systems properly handle the case of multiple packages providing implementations of a library that other packages depend on (e.g. OpenMPI vs. MPICH). Not to talk down on the guys working on that, they are very talented, and the amount of effort they put in is of huge value to the community. (Hello Sean, hello Geoff.)
