skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
re: whether Crockford has a case about libel.

The allegations are published and the OP links to the original complaint on Medium: https://medium.com/@nodebotanist/why-i-won-t-be-speaking-at-...

Furthermore, the best defense against libel is the truth. Part of the complaint is an opinion based on public statements made by Crockford (the "slut-shaming"). The other published complaint is that Crockford said to the complainant before her talk, "the talks as the day went on just got stupider and stupider.” Unless he can convincingly prove that he never made such a statement to the complainant, he's not going to have much of a libel case. He could argue damages based on "false light", I suppose. [0]

On a (computer-related) technical standpoint, I disagree with what you think is the right reason ban a technical speaker, e.g. Crockford "for his stated prejudice against comments in data-interchange formats". That's the kind of strong diverse opinions that a tech conference should be thirsty for, just like a Ruby conference should be thrilled to have Edsgar Dijkstra talk about object-oriented programming.

But if someone says, "People who think comments belong in data interchange formats are fucking morons"...Yeah, I could see why some conferences wouldn't invite them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_light
I've been wondering about this lately. Is it really feasible for a small (one man?) team to keep master-master MySQL replication over WAN running smoothly?
This is wrong. Actually, the LRF was only sanctioned in 2000, when inflation was already at 5.97% yearly.

The main factor behind reducing the inflation was not the URV hack, but the government's fulfilled commitment to markets to keep inflation low at all costs: through skyrocketing interest rates [around 25%], for instance (thus reducing credit -> reducing consumption -> reducing prices); or by binding it to the US Dollar and bankrupting many national industries.
Anatolian history would have been far more accurate.
I remember it was a big deal in the 80's for Iron Maiden to play behind the Iron Curtain.
Because even HN readers might need this advice, or wish we had when the time came. Software lifecycle isn't the only lifecycle we will have to deal with.
Yes, that's me. Hacker News is the only place I feel I can talk about this kind of thing so it's cathartic. And no, it doesnt work on SSD's. They're black boxes. However I think data recovery on them is possible with hardware. It's the controller that returns 0's after it has been sent the command to TRIM some free space.
No, dude.

Not the same thing at all. In fact - your very statement clearly indicates that it's not the same thing.

The US 'gets money' by taxation - and by selling bonds. Some of those bonds are later purchased by the Fed, using money printed by the Fed. That's how money gets into circulation.

In short: US currency is backed by US Government bonds. That's the 'asset' that backs US currency.

It's not 'money printing' - because the US Government has to issue debt in this case. Someone - somewhere - in the USA, Japan, China etc. has to actually lend the US money - at a certain interest rate in order for the transaction to happen.

So the US government does not print money. It just issues debt. The Fed's actions are a totally separate process.

Now - when Venezuela 'prints money' - it just does that. It literally just issues currency to itself to pay it's bills.

That is completely crazy. And that causes hyperinflation.
The introduction to Concrete Mathematics expands on some of the themes here: http://cs.ioc.ee/yik/lib/1/Graham1pre.html

Teaser:

"When DEK taught Concrete Mathematics at Stanford for the first time he explained the somewhat strange title by saying that it was his attempt to teach a math course that was hard instead of soft. He announced that, contrary to the expectations of some of his colleagues, he was not going to teach the Theory of Aggregates, not Stone's Embedding Theorem, nor even the Stone-Cech compactification. (Several students from the civil engineering department got up and quietly left the room.)"
I generally feel like there's a kneejerk reaction from people (especially in the tech community) to be "PC compliant", at the level where you almost can't have any discourse because it's such a minefield (can't imagine a rational person whoms first intepretation of the tweets is "that's sexist" to be pleasant having a conversation with).

I almost feel in the minority (or just a silent one?), but I honestly don't care what kind of political views, personal preferences, outrageous statements or whatever problems a speaker at a conference might have, as long as he gives a good talk/presentation.
> It's almost entirely contained in the javascript community.

No it's not. Did you forget about the lambda conf already? it's everywhere in the Tech community, which is less and less about tech, and more and more about pushing some unrelated political drivel.
Not really, because hardware is not amenable to boot-camp style things.

Basically, hardware is way /way/ harder then software. Imagine software where each compile took multiple weeks, and cost lots of money (hundreds of dollars for the simplest of projects, to tens or even hundreds of thousands for really complex things). Changing the layout or design almost always involves a complete board respin.

There is no easy getting started (maybe arduino stuff, but there is SO MUCH horrible misinformation in the arduino communities), because the minimum functional system is a complete system. You basically have to get everything right the first time in hardware, or it won't work. The learning curve is more of a learning wall.
What an awful article. While it makes some decent points provided you mentally substitute terminology, it's entirely based on a false dichotomy and a conflation of concepts, such that 'open source' means software you obtain and then host on your own premises, while 'lambda' is stuff that's offered as utility computing with economies of scale and their pieces will magically integrate with your custom business logic.

It's not entirely garbage, as it's true that cloud computing is a threat to on-premises computing; and that reliance on cloud computing typically means their offerings are closed source black-boxes that behave according to their APIs, which you have to code against.

But there could've been a less sensational, and more disciplined way to make that (oft-rehashed) point.
We smash people for this and don't blink an eyelid to the violence and privacy violations of our government.
> The perpetrators of that oppression and violence should get justice

I don't see any justice in that story. Justice means the accused should have the right to defend himself and be confronted to his accuser. He often doesn't as "political tribunals" have already decided he already is guilty. Don't conflate "justice" with witch hunts.
It seems like sampling based inference approaches are the most common. Could you possibly comment on the current state of the art regarding more analytical approaches? I sometimes deal with problems where it's possible to find closed form solutions but they're very painstaking to find by hand and can be extremely complicated. It would be incredible if a PPL compiler were able to do this grunt work and then produce code that could compute desired quantities directly.
It just goes to show that SJW bullshit is what happens when you've solved all your real problems. The JS people got tired of making frameworks every three weeks, so now everything is some kind of oppression.

People who use other languages have real problems.
It certainly feels like I have had a series of lucky events in my own life, but who knows...
All of the places mentioned in this article are subsiding (and therefore doomed); the increase in apparent sea level with respect to the local coastline does not mean that mean sea level is rising planetwide.
IBM's Watson doesn't detect sarcasm, but it does detect anger in your post.

https://tone-analyzer-demo.mybluemix.net/
video demo from email thread https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quHlMiwTQZs
> We will also be removing Douglas Crockford from our keynote speakers list to help make the conference a comfortable environment for all.

If they are going to insinuate things about what he said, they should mention exactly what he said or did.

The fact that they don't somehow tells me there is not much there to go on.

To put it another way, if they have the guts to remove Crockford that should have enough guts to clearly explain why.

I've been saying this before, and maybe it is just me, but it seems Node.js community somehow attracts a disproportionate number of immature people but with big egos. Because, let's call this for what it is -- childish immature behavior. That's at best, at worst it is getting attention and hurting someone's reputation just for a power trip. "Look how important I am, I kicked Crockford out of a conference with a single tweet".

Well the lesson is when you pick some open source technology, the community comes with it. Maybe even if technology has good merits, it makes sense not to pick it because the community behind it is not compatible with what you think a community should be.
Cisco has the easiest to grasp fundamentals [1], but to really understand DDOS attacks you'll have to dig down into learning about how TCP works and network layers.

Mitigation sounds non-commital because it is. I don't personally have any experience with mitigating a DDOS attack on Heroku, so I'm not qualified to talk about their prepardness, but DDOS mitigation varies quite a bit [2][3], running the entire gamut of "block a single IP address" to "there's hundreds of IP's rotating and attacking". So the answer to that would be: it depends on who you've pissed off or who's feeling particularly nasty that day.

[1]: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/security/t...

[2]: http://www.continuitycentral.com/index.php/news/technology/6...

[3]: https://www.radware.com/newsevents/mediacoverage/changing-ch...
Did we watch different videos? I didn't see any money burning in the one I watched...
What do you think happened in Lambda Conf this year? no community is safe from this warfare.
No VHDL? ( :) ) Also, TCL - WHRYYYY..

ASIC work is fascinating.
My goodness, a respected dev dares to defend his philosophy and implementation and is vilified for being "abrasive" ? JSLint has never not been pedantic, that is why you use it.

"You can write all the crappy code you want. I don't care, because you don't work for me. The purpose of JSLint is not to make you feel good about your bad choices. It is to help you conform to a more reliable subset of the language."
I only tried Altium in "depth" (And some open source shallowly). It is surprising to me that competing products are even worse.
Yeah that's called bullying, or blackmail, from one side and cowardly appeasement from the other.
That is quite a nice area to work/commute from. I hear they're extending the gold line down to El Monte--that would have made my life a lot easier at the time.

I certainly hope LA has strong, long term plans to improve the commuting/traffic situation for the area.
I am sorry for your loss.
with linode for 10+ years and never heard about this, can you back this up with some evidence?
I've read Olmstead's book and his beef (pardon the pun) with shrimp is how easy it is for bad players (who stuff their product with carcinogens and various unsafe chemicals to achieve maximum yield) to repackage, relabel and trans-ship their stuff to get a stamp from a new country of origin. When the FDA banned the import of bad shrimp from China http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06..., imports of Philippines and Indonesia shrimp skyrocketed (sometimes beyond those nation's total shrimp harvesting numbers). Upon inspection it was same old carcinogenic shrimp.

Honey, tea and spices of unknown origins are also frequent targets of dilution in order to boost the margins.
Yes.
- Keynesian economics major
This is fucking rediculous. Slut shaming? How about opinion shaming?
Watch the giddiness.
While this is true, there are a lot of people who commute to LA from as far as San Bernadino by car. As another commenter mentions, there's a ton of work to be had in LA with very little in the way of nearby housing in the price range of someone who's often driven (pardon the pun) to commuting by car.

At the end of the day I gave up on the job that required that commute--it was very stressful and not worth my health. It makes me wonder how many other people are effectively locked out of job markets in LA because they don't have cost and time effective ways of commuting there.
As someone that has very little involvement in the JS community, Crockford definitely comes off as abrasive in that issue. He could've just as easily said "scope confusion is an issue in JS, I don't see a reason to implement this" instead of calling someone's decision stupid. Is it bad he's abrasive? Not particularly, any undergrad worth their salt would've come across a professor who's abrasive in college. Abrasiveness is a personality artifact, and I'm not belittling him for that matter, just pointing out how someone can interpret his personality.
+1

“There is only one major river in the world which flows northwards. Which one is it?” the professor asked.

Ob', Yenisej, Lena. All great Siberian rivers flow northwards. I don't intend to explain that ancient Chinese text. The only thing I want to say is that the article is complete BS.

So, foreignpolicy.com is a less-trustworthy source.
My thoughts:

Maybe someone can tell me what's offensive about the first comment. It seems to be poking fun at programmer machismo.

The second quote is more problematic. I'm firmly of the opinion that it is not slut-shaming because it presented both promiscuity and commitment in a positive light. On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable for a conference to not want sexual metaphors in presentations. The whole "he used the word correctly" in TFA is a non-sequitur when the first definition is clearly sexual, and promiscuity is contrasted with commitment. Still, I would hope that less extreme measures than banning would be used to address this.

Now to one thing not in TFA, but in the linked medium post:

> I’ve never dealt with Crockford in a way that I felt pleasant afterward. He is rude, unrepentant, and completely (one could argue willingly) oblivious to the meaning of his statements. I’ve never seen a person use the word ‘stupid’ so liberally in replacement of constructive criticism.

A conference is more than a bunch of people giving talks, it's a social gathering. If there were a lot of people who agree with Kas on this, then it's a much more reasonable reason to keep him out.

On a much smaller scale, I often run pencil-and-paper RPG groups. Being a jerk is much more likely to find yourself out of my group compared to game-mechanics related issues.
TLDR; personal vendetta against Crockford led to accusations of "sexism", and him getting uninvited from Nodevember conference. There is absolutely no proof of sexism anywhere ,only a bunch of people who want to take him out professionally because he might have pissed them off for whatever reason in the past. Only now these people can use dubious political arguments to justify their vendetta. This can happen to anybody in any community.
Maybe you misunderstood what I meant. "The perpetrators of that oppression ..." referred to "... legitimate disclosure of unacceptable behavior...". So, concrete examples could help clear this up: disclosures of sexual assault [1] and occasions when law enforcement have killed unarmed minorities [2].

I referred to the fact that many women no longer feel embarassment or shame that would prevent an attacker from getting justice, or minorities with a policeman's justice -- I said that was a "net win." In earlier decades these legitimate evils might have gone un-punished, and that's bad.

But unfortunately with that good comes the potential bad that some folks are emboldened to cry wolf.

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-let...

[2] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-police-deaths-20160707-s...
I believe Foundation has a flexbox mode.

There's also this: http://flexboxgrid.com

I just use whatever I want and use LostGrid in flexbox mode for my grids.
My youngest brother died of a Fentanyl overdose just nearly a year ago. We assume he thought it was heroin, but whatever was going around at that time managed to kill almost a hundred people in the same weekend. Truly a horrible, horrible drug.

I know it doesn't count for much right now, but I promise that things do get better in time. If you ever need to chat, feel free to message me anytime.
I don't mean a couple of spares, I mean a warehouse good for a year (thus "plenty"). Or, multiple suppliers. There are multiple options that can work, but you have to do one correctly.

I'm particularly bothered by throwing hands up and saying "it's not our fault, it's because of a problem at X, it can't be helped", where X is Microsoft, or Oracle, or Fujitsu, or Samsung, or whatever.

It can be helped. Yes, it's more expensive, and yes, consumers probably won't pay for it. Just be honest, it's to control costs, things were not set up to keep working if conditions weren't perfect.
Thanks jcbeard, its was really helpful.
Yeah, that's not really a software agent.. Anyone who actually did some research knew that was a centralized pyramid scheme.
One more link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12415755
EE & programming skills combined are superb if you are into robotics, embedded stuff, physical products in general. I do front-end web programming for living but spend my freetime in my "EE lab", self-taughting¹ myself to get out of "yet another React app" limbo.

¹) I don't expect to find a real EE job without a degree, more like a generalist who also has clue about electronics.
How would he defend himself is my problem. It seems like anonymous other parties can make accusations that can sink someone's reputation.
Yes, vegans consistently run into the problem of people selling non-vegan stuff and misrepresenting it as vegan, and sometimes the unscrupulous link of the chain is at the wholesaler, supplier or importer level, not the local restaurant. E.g. http://www.livingvegan.org/Articles/viewarticle/25/Los%20Ang...
A great idea. The effort to establish a Mars colony should be an international effort.

http://imgur.com/a/n5oAU
Frankly, I see this comment as more offensive than what has been dragged out out on Crockford.
Saying, "Back in the day, you could browse the web like a whore, not caring what your computer connected to. But with the new web..." But that's not what he says at all.

For sake of argument, let's assume that he had said exactly this. Even so, I still don't see the claims being met. First, even though the metaphor may be "sexual", I don't see anything that would make it "sexist". Promiscuity as a behavior is far from limited to females, and he's at least equally addressing males with his "you".

But further, the quote leads off with "So the old web was great because it provided promiscuity". Rather than "shaming", if we apply a sexual interpretation, his statement seems downright "sex-positive". If anything I'd expect the critique to be coming from the "family values" side, for putting such a positive spin on promiscuity.

My guess is that dissecting Crockford's language leads won't produce useful insights, either into him or his detractors. Instead, I think this is increasingly about "power". Some individuals realized that with the right accusations (regardless of validity) they can replace the old leadership, and others (seeing their success) are excited to try their own hand.

The scary part is what happens when the accusations are replaced with actions, as this is when it sometimes get really ugly. I don't know the history well, but I can't help thinking of the violent excesses of the youthful Red Guard in 1960's China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Guards_(China).
Responsive design is the norm so I guess the answer to your question is "all the code together"
I see this assertion made often but never with any justification. Please provide evidence that we are a "extremely sexist community". I posit that the opposite is true, and provide the same level of evidence.
There is also a video of that lecture too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0
Why hate the absence of tragedy?
Assuming you're not being sarcastic: they already are, the purpose of libbfd[1] was exactly that. After all, they already support A.OUT, ELF, COFF, PECOFF, Linux on various HW targets, Windows...

...but not Mach-O, Apple's format.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_File_Descriptor_library

https://sourceware.org/binutils/binutils-porting-guide.txt

https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.27/bfd/index.html
I'm a one man operation keeping a master-slave setup with a manual failover and it's been pretty smooth sailing once I got it setup. Don't know how much more complex master-master would be.
It depends on what you consider optimizing.

It's one thing to do evil floating point bit level hacking and such to save a nanosecond or two, and another to write a FizzBuzz in a way that doesn't require 700 external libraries to begin with.
He's a geochemist, not an archaeologist. Racial issues aside, there have been many instances where a scientist in one field tries to make sweeping statements about another field. In most cases they lack a deep understanding of the other field and are unaware of mountains of evidence that otherwise contradict what they say.
Well, you do seem judgmental. If parent had talked about military or police, would you have posed the same question? If not, why not? I'm no pacifist, but I also don't like to follow orders, so I wouldn't do any of that work. And yet, who am I to judge?
I think they very much want to, but what can you do if all of your IPs lead to tor exit nodes?

From what I've heard, the FBI will collect a whole bunch of information and then sit on their hands because of the above reason.
It was colossally stupid and unfair of them to tweet what they initially tweeted. I don't have a strong opinion on their larger statement, but they should have tweeted, "A statement about our speaker lineup and concerns [URL]", not a self-contained announcement about Crockford being booted in order to make a "conference a comfortable environment for all". There's almost no way to read that statement without the connotation that Crockford is accused of sexually or otherwise assaulting someone.
Funny, I just read PG's essay about "taboo" thoughts today.
This seems like some hosted video player with a confusing interface and a set of strange functions (look closer, world wide chat).... Am I wrong? This is confusing.....
Google's Plan for Quantum Computer Supremacy
Pretty much the same exact reaction I had: What is this? I like it
The intersection of white nationalism, the alt-right and the libertarianism
It's pretty much the same. You almost never want writes on both sides (now in a failover plan anyway), so as long as you have a switch for which side receives the writes, it's simple.
Although (in the US), many cities will bill you for ambulance service. If things work out ideally, your insurance will then pay the ambulance fee.

There are also cities that charge fees for sending fire trucks to vehicle fires and accidents if non-residents are involved.
None of that in Portola and the Excelsior. Ingleside, too. I've also found Bernal Heights quite pleasant.
Doesn't seem to do much on iOS.