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Comment by basisword | Hacker News Reader

The only stories I've ever seen about Rap Genius have been ones which would make me never want to use their service.

Agreed. Seems they enjoy testing the limits of there's no such thing as bad publicity

even in apology ... "especially since Elliot is talking about my neighborhood growing up" ... it has a bad tone, particularly when you consider the bullying the kid faced. was mahboob the kind of guy to be part of the problem, or part of the solution?

I actually enjoyed these series of articles:

http://rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-annota...

I did too. Learned a hell of a lot from them that's for sure, lol. Their Engineering team does a lot of, in my opinion, cool things and I really appreciate them taking the time to write about it.

The takedown on Heroku's dyno scaling was impressive. But also funny how they got themselves in that situation to begin with. If there's one thing about this world, RAP music will pay for $20k worth of Dyno's a month! Sad sad world.

edit - I like rap music.

This one is one of their less commendable efforts: yes, there was a discrepancy between what Heroku's docs said and the actual behavior of Heroku's routing. No, RapGenius's simulation is nowhere near correct: multi-tenant resource allocation is a pretty difficult stochastic optimization problem, and their simulation does not take this into account at all.

Heroku should own up to - and has owned up to, in my opinon- their communications fiasco. But I really, really hope the linked RapGenius article doesn't mislead folks to believe intelligent routing is easy (Tom Lehman, the then CTO of RapGenius, admits that he himself is a novice about distributed locks and such: http://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/1361210233_heroku-adam-con...)

EDIT: minor grammatical clarifications

And _that_ is why Maboo stepped down. Tom Lehmen is a much more personable guy, who doesn't have at all the same personality Mahbod does. This one incident was really the straw that broke the camels back.

Here's the thing. I don't know Tom Lehmen, but the mere fact that he'd associate with a guy like Moghadam, let alone found a company with him, speaks volumes to me. I just took a look at Moghadam's twitter feed. Within the first score or so of entries I came across ""your pussy is wet, my floor is slippery" - persian proverb" and "Donald sterling dissed magic cause he's jealous of his aids." This is simply a repulsive individual and there's nothing subtle about it. I don't feel I'm at all off base by judging Lehman and Rap Genius negatively by their association with Moghadam.

Wow, I'm actually embarrassed reading through these tweets, I really hope people don't end up seeing him as the Persian face of tech...

And yet... Moghadam was the one who built Rap Genius (with his partners), when no one else did.

It's hard to separate the product from the creator. We can demand a higher standard of creators, but one of the consequences will be fewer creations.

Moghadam's behavior, while not one of polite society, isn't necessarily separate from the community that Rap Genius serves. Compare Moghadam to famous and successful rappers who haven't been fired from their jobs for quite similar behavior.

I mean, I don't get all the fuss. One look at his twitter and it's pretty clear that he really doesn't care about being "tasteful." Was this just the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak? Because it's not really that much worse than anything I've seen on his twitter.

> It's hard to separate the product from the creator. We can demand a higher standard of creators, but one of the consequences will be fewer creations.

It's not a "higher" standard. It's the same normal standard of professional behavior I expect from anyone I do business with, and Rap Genius consistently fails to meet it.

In that case you're mistaken for taking an industry that is far from normal and expecting "normal standard of professional behavior."

I'm sorry, but that attitude is gross and only serves to worsen the problem.

You might be able to argue that "professional" behavior is not the standard in SV, I'll give you that.

But making disgusting comments like he did on Rap Genius, twitter, and his blog is not "normal" nor acceptable in any industry. We should all expect and demand better behavior than this from all business leaders- no matter what.

I can forgive someone for making a mistake. 1, maybe even 2 times- make a slip like this, realize you fucked up, apologize, get on with it. But he has a history of comments like this, and that's what has to stop.

With that said, I'm not sure I can get on board with firing someone just for making comments, as terrible as they might be. Is Rap Genius really going to be worse off by keeping him around than by firing him?

I feel like I can't come up with a strong enough argument to fire him, so why do it? The burden of proof is on the other side.

I'm willing to bet it was him that got investors to invest in the startup, and get PR attention, but the rest of his partners did the bulk of the other work in building the product. After awhile, people like Moghadam are useless to your startup.

"It's hard to separate the product from the creator. We can demand a higher standard of creators, but one of the consequences will be fewer creations."

I don't understand your point here. I can quite easily imagine a RapGenius like service being created by someone who's not an utter dickbag. In other words, I fail to see anything inherent to RapGenius which requires douchbaggery of its creator. Are you suggesting that there is?

> I can quite easily imagine a RapGenius like service being created by someone

I can imagine quite a few things too, but reality has a different take on things. At the end of the day, he did ... and nobody else stepped up.

Is he immature? Yeah. Rather than firing such individuals, I think a bit of social pressure can make them behave like civilized people. Firing them is a bit overkill.

I don't want to live in a society were people lose their livelihood over saying something stupid, even if saying intelligent things is part of their job description.

Frankly, if I had to guess, I think they wanted him gone and used this as an excuse to get rid of him.

I don't think you got what I was saying. The post I was referring to claimed that it is difficult to separate RapGenius from it's douchy creator. My point was simply that I don't think it is at all difficult. I.e. it's quite easy to imagine a RapGenius like service without a douche as creator. The fact that RapGenius was in fact created by a douche doesn't negate my point that a douche was not a necessary condition for the creation of RapGenius — unless you take a sample size of 1 as meaningful.

It seems to me the curse of any company or project that begins with controversy or edginess as a cornerstone of their image. It's easy to have a f--- it all attitude when there's nothing on the line. As the company grows, people's lives and fortunes start to depend on the company. The loose-cannon founder who was great for attracting initial attention starts to become a liability who seems totally willing to crash the whole thing.

It is funny you mention this in regards to RapGenius because I always thought about how difficult this transition is for rappers themselves. If you build an audience as a rapper talking about the struggle then its difficult to maintain that once you've become wealthy. There are only two options that I've seen - 1. Leverage the money and fame to switch to a different line of work. ie. Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Ice Cube. or 2. Disregard the money and stay in the struggle (I think people only take this route if they have mental issues.) ie. DMX. I'd take option 1 everytime but unfortunately its not an option for some.

Yea I think that's true for musicians. I saw a Jimmi Hendrix interview about singing the blues when you are no longer poor. He said that sometimes the more money you have, the more blues you can sing! I thought that was pretty interesting.

This is a story of privileged white Yale alums starting a rap Web site, at least one of whom needs to try to sound badass.

I'm sure mining his tweets and IMs will provide endless entertainment but the two I like best so far are how he blamed his brain tumor for making him act like a dick. Now that it was removed he blames the operation for making him act like a dick.

The poor guy had his skull sawed open and a thing pulled out of his brain. And yet, effortlessly, he sucked all the sympathy out of me. THAT'S genius.

Every time I hear 'white privileged' I detect envy of the upbringing these kids had.

Perhaps you should channel that envy into giving your kids a similar upbringing instead of moping how your parents did not?

My daughter graduated from CMU SCS last weekend. Good enough for you?

So that makes her a privileged [ethnicity] girl in the eyes of less prestigious school graduates? :)

How is it logical to condemn his friends and a company he co-founded because of something _he_ does? There is no point to it. If everyone was judged because they have friends who like to say stupid shit then I'd bet most people would be deemed assholes.

Yeah, the alternatives to Rap Genius are great... sigh.

songmeanings.net has been around since I was a pre-teen and it's served me quite well. It's full of ads now, but at least the quality is good.

It's full of ads because it licenses the rights to the lyrics, which is quite expensive. Most lyric sites don't.

Oh, are the alternatives to Rap Genius attempting to profit, through pageviews and ad revenue, from re-posting the horrifically, murderously misogynist rantings of a spree killer? And then going beyond that, adding their own misogynistic thoughts to the text, as a cherry on top?

I mean, that's not a real high bar there.

Speculating on the attractiveness of the Elliot Rodger's sister, particularly in the context of Elliot's hatred and disgust towards women that he goes on about at length in this very document, leaves me struggling to describe how utterly disgusting a person I find Mahbod. Even if this was a tasteless attempt at humor someone who isn't a piece of shit would see how wildly and utterly inappropriate that was. Not only not funny, but in the context of Elliot's misogyny just disgusting. I'd hope that Mahbod would take some time for reflection, both on how to act like a decent human being and whether he thinks of women as fellow human beings.

For us, this is yet another startup exec who most likely has a serious problem with women.

I would expect even the btards to not behave like that.

Edit: there is a sorority full of women who where targeted by Elliot and are lucky to be alive today because they didn't answer their thick door when he attempted to get in [1].

   Elliot Rodger pounded on the sorority house front door while, inside, the 
   young women he yearned to slaughter were preparing for another Friday night, 
   authorities said.
   
   The awkward 22-year-old was obsessed with exacting "retribution" for what he 
   experienced as a lifetime of social and sexual isolation, and had planned 
   meticulously to target as many people as possible, according to a manifesto 
   he left behind and a YouTube video since removed. But here again, he was 
   denied access to those he felt should worship him.
   
   So when no one answered after several minutes, Rodger improvised.

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/thwarted-in-his-plan-california-...

You're missing the point. The RG founders (especially Moghadam) clearly have many issues. But the actual song lyric database and associated annotations is the best on the internet by far.

The comment you replied to was lamenting the fact that there are no quality alternatives with more respectable people behind them.

Also FWIW, a huge number of news organizations have attempted "to profit, through pageviews and ad revenue" by posting stories or otherwise commenting on the murders in Isla Vista. Should we also be complaining about CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC and just about every other news organization in the United States?

I was talking about the product, I'd never work or partner with Rap Genius, but use their service? Yes, because is the best out there and nothing comes close to it.

Absolutely agreed. At this point, I don't care if Rap Genius somehow comes up with a cure for cancer. I won't support them and I will never use their service.

Sounds pretty stupid.

Benefit gained from cancer cure is far higher than detriment from some idiotic comments online an a semi-spammy marketing campaign that was swiftly punished. Net effect is very positive.

"I'm not supporting this by principle!" people vary from legitimate and caring to just pretentious and snobby.

I would understand not supporting a lot of the biggest hardware OEMs for prioritizing machine production cost over the quality of human life (Foxconn and other very popular, very cheap Chinese production manufacturers that employ some really sketchy tactics to keep that production cheap). Obviously for you to make such a strong decision, I'd expect you to have read a lot, way more than whatever Apple-scapegoating bullshit you've read in mainstream media and on Reddit (the whole Foxconn thing is very popular with, like, every OEM, by the way, not just Apple), making sure you knew who and who wasn't actually breaking your very strong principle and to what extent you can expect a company to provide "quality of human life" and what that even means, etc.

But when you boldly declare you won't support a company, no matter what they do, because a co-founder made some stupid and tasteless comments (said company later fucking fired said co-founder) and because they unwittingly executed on a really spammy marketing campaign (which caused them to get kicked off of Google for WEEKS as punishment)?

Where were you when RapGenius made apparent some glaring inefficiencies in Heroku? Where were you when RapGenius was building the most accurate, most well-designed, most comprehensive repository of lyrics and text annotations on the web?

You're really deciding to wave your huge "muh principles. I HAVE STRONG BELIEFES" cock on the Internet because of a couple insensitive comments?

As for the general culture on HN regarding hating the general culture around RapGenius ... so what if their general behaviors are different than yours. What's unprofessional to you is just fun to them. Everyone behaves in different ways; ivy tower academics from researcher academics from front-end web developers from game developers from humanities majors from STEM majors from musicians from DJs from ... there's nothing objectively worse about the rap culture behind RapGenius.

Sure, that culture may sometimes throw around otherwise offensive remarks. But remember that the context behind a word is infinitely more important than the word itself. The context behind the usage of the word "faggot" is much, much more important than the meaningless combination of the letters 'f','a','g','g','o', and 't' and the pronunciation of those combined letters. If an immature 13 year old were to input "faggot" in a text-to-speech program, the text-to-speech program would very clearly say "faggot". You wouldn't blame the program : it's just executing on a pronunciation algorithm. The context is just the manipulation of bits and bytes on a stream. It's harmless. You wouldn't exactly flog the kid, either, he just has a poor sense of humor, and you'd just roll your eyes at that.

The problem we have with the word "faggot" is that, in the majority of cases, it's being used in a pretty offensive context, and said context says a lot of things about the person using the word.

But when the RapGenius cofounder says offensive stuff (I heard one of them insulted Mark Zuckerberg at a conference?), often the context is just lighthearted jabs.

They may be unprofessional and insensitive jabs, but given that they're A) just meaning harmless fun and B) building one of the most comprehensive and well-designed text annotation sites on the Internet, we give them some cultural license to have their shitty taste in humor. In this specific case, obviously, they really overexploit that cultural license by saying such insensitive things on such a raw , emotional topic, but again, the guy got fucking fired.

Downvoted. Here's why: this comment doesn't add anything to the discussion. It informs us of an irrelevant personal opinion, by adding the marginal extra information that there has been additional bad publicity. A comment actually worth anything would at least have linked to that, explained the stories or explained how they are relevant to this story. It only functions to bask the author in the relative bit of light that appears by casting a shadow on the subject of the discussion.

The suggested motivation is disingenuous: someone actually interested in Rap Genius would at least have to admit that they have something pretty unique: there is no other place where a community actually sensibly annotates lyrics and texts. If you are interested in that, they are interesting to you. If you are not interested in that, the stories about them are irrelevant.

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