Crazy New Ideas

(Although your account is rate-limited because of the quantity of flamewar comments you've posted, I've temporarily turned the rate limit off so you can reply. You don't need to create new accounts, which HN's anti-troll software is rejecting anyhow.)

You posted surprisingly vicious smears in this thread, even blaming one person for the death of another. Some of that you edited in an extremely misleading way, so that the community's original response seemed unreasonable, when in fact it had been appropriate. Even in the above comment, which is still up, you've accused someone of being fake, fraudulent, and dishonest, with zero basis. When asked not to do any of this, you haven't even acknowledged what you did—instead you're changing the subject dramatically. Isn't that a little distasteful?

> I'm sure you've seen where people have accused you

Since you saw the thread where people were bringing it up, I'm surprised you didn't see the explanations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959559

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959675

> is HN not the place to discuss that

People discuss companies, including YC-funded companies, at great length on HN all the time. That's not the issue here. The issue is that you've been breaking the site guidelines very badly, and we need you to stop.

> Do you not have a conflict of interest

I've written extensively about that over the years. If you or anyone is interested, some of those past explanations can be found at the following links:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

The short version is that we don't moderate HN to suppress criticism of YC or YC startups, because that would be (a) wrong, (b) futile, and (c) dumb. We moderate HN to try to keep it interesting and in line with the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) — that's all. I'd never claim to be immune from bias (who could?) but I can tell you what principles we try to apply and can at least claim to have years' worth of practice at them.

There's nothing secret here, by the way, in the sense that anyone can get an answer to any question about how HN works (other than technical details about anti-abuse software, and that only because they would stop working if they weren't secret). Trying to run an online community any other way would be inefficient and self-defeating. We try to never do anything that isn't defensible to the community, because the community's good will is the only asset HN has.

I completely understand how easy it is for unexplained details to compound into weird and sinister pictures. That's a fact of human life that we all have to deal with, especially online. But really the cleanest and freshest way to deal with it is to check what's actually happening, when that option is available. HN, even though it has millions of users, is still small enough that that option is actually available. Why not take advantage of that?

> twitter: couldn't you just not?

This is, actually, still true :)

Yes. Unless they can figure out how to be free to consumers.

The alternative, of course, is when a plausible person expresses an implausible-sounding idea which turns out to be, well, wrong. For instance when Noam Chomsky presented his theory of Universal Grammar[1] which managed to impede and derail the study of linguistics for decades[2].

[1] - This is my own personal opinion supported by no evidence whatsoever.

[2] - Again, an outrageously subjective statement without an ounce of evidence to support it.

This is slightly what I'm thinking, for that particular use case.

The idea that you're going to shove 1TB of data down to the client strikes me as slightly unhinged. Even if we assume you can achieve a sustained transfer rate of one gigabit per second, it's going to take over 2 hours to get a terabyte shoved down to the client. I'm guessing, though, that the actual vizualization is nowhere near one terabyte. Data's going to have to be aggregated somehow, because no computer monitor can display a terabyte worth of information all at once. Even a 4K monitor would fall short by many orders of magnitude.

It would be much faster, and, I think, simpler, to keep the data on a central server, have it generate the visualizations, and push them down to the client.