skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except that this is far from the only instance of it happening. The reason it is a problem for the entire industry is that people decide it's not their problem and continue to associate with and work with the people who perpetuate these actions. There is very little self-policing that goes on, and that does make it a community problem.

(The problem is considerably worse in the open source software development community, but they at least some provinces therein have started to figure out that institutionalized and institutionally-accepted sexism are unhealthy. Apparently the message has not percolated to the startup/tech-company side of the fence; it does seem to still be very much a men's club.)
the person she was dealing with is just as likely (i can't justify saying more likely) of the jock / business ilk.

what the "high school" social rejection you point to really contributes to is a certain lack of empath if not satisfaction with the plight of women in the industry.
Google are actively encouraging people to circumvent corporate IT policies?! No wonder so many corporate IT departments are sticking by Microsoft: at least they make it reasonably straightforward for sysadmins to manage policies across a whole workplace.

I hadn't heard of Chrome Frame until this discussion, but the basic suggestions at http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/ sound a lot like "This page best viewed in $BROWSER at $RESOLUTION". Didn't we learn that lesson yet?
But that's very different from the situation which Tammy Camp found herself in, i.e. requested to have sex or leave the conferences. Being socially inept is one thing, being a discriminating douchebag quite another.
Unfortunately, prior art doesn't mean as much as we think it should sometimes.
Changing data formats all the time is usually not worth any of the effort involved. XML to JSON seemed to take long enough, and now that we've got a lightweight, internationally accepted, easy to read by humans and computers alike, data interchange format, I think we'd like to keep it for a while.
It uses a DHT-based distributed system as DNS, so there are no root DNS servers that can be got at by attackers. The DNS database is contained in the nodes themselves.
Bayesian model averaging of the curvature and size of the Universe
Nobody on the Mongrel2 project uses hg or asked for it. But the github fans constantly complained like this was the end of the damn world. I figured since I had to move anyway, I might as well shut them up so I can get back to coding instead of spending hours on end having some dipshit preach at me about how much better his stupid ass religion^Wcommunity is.
And in a professional environment, they should be expected to deal with it responsibly and in a mature manner.

Is propositioning Ms. Camp either responsible or mature?
There's an even better version that works with video: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/site/seam-video.asp
How does this even work? I'm not accusing Tammy of making it up, but how does this even come about? The mind boggles.
you've got some points.

actually, i don't excuse this behavior; if a i caught a friend sexually harassing somebody, i'd give them a really hard time.

on the other hand, the culture as a whole is experiencing a "crisis of object relations." young people in Japan and Europe aren't marrying and having children at a rate that can support a stable population. i know so many people who've made it into their 40's lonely and i know many people who've suffered the wreckage of divorce both as adults and children. i'm appalled by the murderous destruction that homophobia causes to our communities.

the fact is I'm in a committed relationship with a women that's basically successful. we talk about stuff like this all the time. i can definitely say i've had serious pain in the past. if i've got any real fault, it's that i'm terrifyingly able to work within different and contradictory viewpoints.

it's terrible. but the structure of institutions is that they subject people to traumas and then compel them to transmit those traumas to others. they're selfish memes.
This does not tickle my intellectual curiosity. The issue is a very important one, but HackerNews isn't god_damn Oprah. Bring on the downvotes.
That just makes me cry. Absolutely no sense of style, just a bunch of obscene hacks that only work because a billion people use it.
Exactly... the other side might be "she tried to flirt her way into the conference for free, and things got out of hand". I highly doubt this given what she's said, but there are three sides to everything (mine, yours, the truth).
It didn't, it's just this bug put me in a state where the only thing I could do was revert.
Does that mean we should accept it? Does that make it OK?
You're presenting a false dichotomy between staying completely silent and putting something on the internet. A victim can limit him/herself to talking to the police, his/her community, HR, the principal, his/her friends, his/her acquaintances, etc. The victim can also blog about it once the accused party is found guilty. Until then, putting something like this in writing is considered "bad" (if it's false), broadly speaking, by society, which is the reason behind libel laws.

> As to your "shit like this shouldn't be blogged about" comment,

He didn't write what you quoted.

> Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that victims of sexual discrimination stay silent?

No, he's not.
> Why? Why is a woman, just because she's a woman, supposed to be treated unfairly? Just because some people were treated badly (supposedly) by other women? That's just... random. If I were treated badly by a blond person once, or even more times, that wouldn't make it OK for me to treat blonds badly, just because they're blond.

I don't think you understand the magnitude to which this occurs. When a man has been rejected/ignored by EVERY SINGLE woman he has met thus far, you can't really blame him for not being very friendly towards the next woman he meets. This is a far cry from being "treated badly by a blond person once, or even more times".

> They just don't put as much effort into "socializing" that they do into other things.

Then perhaps women that want to be a part of the tech scene should put more effort into "socializing" as well. The high school social scene is every bit as brutal to nerds as the tech social scene is to women.
Yes, there are certain things you aren't allowed to discriminate against. However, these laws are only applicable to organizations of a certain size. IANAL
I don't give a flying fuck about your psychological scars. They are no excuse for improper behaviour and do not absolve yourself (or "technically oriented men") from responsibility from their actions.

If you want to see improvement in this area, stop making excuses for sexists and let them realise that their attitudes are not tolerated, let alone actions like the one related from the blog.

It may be "presumptuous" to expect equality and fairness but it is exactly what everyone ought to be expecting, and in its absence the correct action is to fight the culture, not silence.
One thing that's a required feature for me is the "show more" feature.

I don't get to read enough and I only get bursts to consume and I need more than the default number of displayed links.
"If there is a real issue here, take it up with someone who is actually responsible for fixing it." <-- the problem is that addressing the issue with the person who is actually responsible doesn't solve the problem. Unfortunately, in many cases, some sort of public shame is the only real way to rectify behavior. We see these issues of sexual discrimination and harassment all the time, and even with years of lecturing people still don't get the message.

"If you want to publicly shame people, then keep posting it on sites like HN." <-- Unfortunately, I don't think that was her point. If others are made aware of the circumstances, and see that someone relatively influential is making a comment about it, other women won't feel like they are alone. Having been on the receiving end of other types of discrimination, I can empathize with the feeling of loneliness and desire to keep quiet.
See, I find what you're saying here much more reasonable and without a trace of misogyny--I agree with you here almost entirely. These problems do exist. Where my dander went up (and I apologize for being a bit overly pointed) is in the impression that it's understandable-thus-should-be-tolerated. It is certainly understandable--and I was shot down plenty of times in high school--but it can't be tolerated.
Also, TeX's DVI format, Metafont, and their common structure of platform-independent font metrics and layout computations, and the notion of testing for consistency across platforms.
I don't know this person, but it can't be that hard to actually deduce the conference...
Why does the RIAA have so much power? If their businesses really are shrinking then, well, does the music industry even matter? It's depressing how much damage you can do to society when you use your ill-gotten gains to hire lobbyists to turn ordinary citizens into criminals.
"I hadn't heard of Chrome Frame until this discussion"

> Google I/O 2011 - http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/html5-today-wi...

> Google I/O 2010 - http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/using-chrome-f...

"at least they make it reasonably straightforward for sysadmins to manage policies across a whole workplace."

> Google recently came up Administrative templates for Chrome. But I wonder why they didn't push it enough to IT departments - http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?answer...
Wrong on both counts. Git's bizarre contrarian UI has screwed up many a repository. I can't tell you how many times some dude's weird "workflow" he decided was the best screwed everyone else on the project over.

In this case with fossil, the bug tied my hands so that the only way I could get the code back was to revert. It was a choice between trying to reverse engineer my original uncommitted work or revert and at least try to recover the repo. Since I don't work on more than one thing at once reverting was the best choice.
Honestly, I don't think we really know that. We only know Tammy's interpretation. I think there must be some background story at least? Or do conference organizer just go through the photos attached to applications and say "hey, she's hot, let's blackmail her for sex"?
I have some female friends that work in this industry and none of them complained or even mentioned this kind of incidents. You might say that this is anecdotal evidence, but so is the blog post.
Fantastic. I do 90% of my hacker news reading from a mobile. Can't stress how worth $5 this app was for me. Nice job! And thanks also for releasing it under the free BSD license too.
Again, wrong. The work force has a reputation for being a mens' club. There is nothing specific to computing about it.

Please do not disrespect the industry you and I are a part of by kidding yourself that we are different and somehow a problem.
The downvote button – it works only once! Why?!

> Men who go into technical fields suffer serious scars from social rejection that's every bit as painful as apartheid

Lacking social skills makes one a victim of a crime against humanity? Really? Do you want to go read this and then tell me you still stand behind your remark?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_under_apartheid

> Considering that techie men spend their sensitive formative years being completely shut out and excluded from the company of women, a woman is pretty presumptuous to think she will be treated fairly by technically oriented men.

That's a little thing called misogyny. The fact that you had a hard time with your social skills in high school doesn't give you, or anyone else, the privilege to be shitty to women. If a particular person did a particular thing to you that's unkind, then you have a right to be aggrieved only with that one person. Anything beyond that suggests you're in need of therapy. Someone having a vagina is entirely unreleated to your traumas and I'm disgusted that the community hasn't downvoted you into invisibility for this nonsense.

Downvote me all you want, women haters of HN. I'd say the same and worse of this stupidity to this "man's" face as well. There's a place where points of view become so poisonous and pernicious, it's a moral duty to become angry rather than tolerate their continued reasonable discussion. This is bullshit of the highest order and if that needs to be explained to you then you're beyond anything my communication can do to help.
Hehe, I think the exclamation marks are removed to prevent posts from being too "sensational".
I think the point of the sub-parent was that some nerds never got a chance to mature. This is not meant to defend such behavior.
When a man has been rejected/ignored by EVERY SINGLE woman he has met thus far, you can't really blame him for not being very friendly towards the next woman he meets.

Of course and without question you can. The imposition here is that your constructed nerd is emotionally immature to the point where he cannot divorce the actions of one person from another. He may even be so emotionally immature--but that is his problem and nobody else's. Accepting and condoning it cannot be borne.

Then perhaps women that want to be a part of the tech scene should put more effort into "socializing" as well.

I am hoping I am reading this wrong, because the implication behind your use of the word "socializing" seems to not be the same as your post's parent. Please expound on this. What do you expect them to do?
No, but it means women aren't always discriminated in favor of men.
The "4x faster than Protocol Buffers" claim is misleading, as I have explained before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2146147

I'm working on a Protocol Buffer library that can serialize/deserialize to either JSON or Protocol Buffers. That way you can do all your development with JSON, but if you ever find you need the efficiency improvements of a binary format, you can just change your Serialize() call.

Having a .proto file gives you the benefits of something like JSON Schema: a place to document all your fields and what they mean, and a few very simple validation constraints like the expected types.
4.99 ????
"some more machismo [...], some cooking experience [...] or maybe some more muscle -- all those would've done a lot more to get me a higher paying job than math."

In the short run.
You could, you know, spend it on people other than yourself.
> When a man has been rejected/ignored by EVERY SINGLE woman he has met thus far, you can't really blame him for not being very friendly towards the next woman he meets.

a) "Not very friendly" is a different thing from assault and harassment. Don't use weasel words; you are writing a defence of the assaults and harassment in your comments, not "unfriendliness."

b) Where do you think the rejections are coming from?

I can't imagine that many women would want to date someone who resents their entire gender based upon some juvenile grudge.

> The high school social scene is every bit as brutal to nerds as the tech social scene is to women.

Thus the two evils are cancelled out, and everyone is absolved of all responsibility for their actions!

Wait... that's not how it works? </sarcasm>
Any kind of accusation made public is a tricky beast.

There are 3 possibilities for the accusation:
1. The accusation is correct in it's entirety and should be taken at face value
2. The basis of the accusation is correct, but additional information casts it in a different light.
3. The accusation is false.

If you discuss it, publicly stating that option 1 is true is the only strategy that will keep your reputation intact. Anything else makes you look like a douche.
> That people who talk the way you are have unresolved issues means they need therapy--it is not a license to hurt other people because they can't take care of themselves.

sadly you're also making a mistake expecting the victimizers to go out and get therapy.

as an analogy, it would be great if post-civil war impoverished whites had a round of therapy to adjust any racism they harbored towards blacks. more likely only addressing their economic situation was ever going to be effective.

there really is a causal relation between the high school cultural problem paul describes and the situation the op author encounters. that's probably the level we'll have to address this at.
"Men who go into technical fields suffer serious scars from social rejection that's every bit as painful as apartheid." <-- That is true of men who go into nontechnical fields as well.

"techie men spend their sensitive formative years being completely shut out and excluded from the company of women" <-- that is not true at all. These prototypical 'techie men' actively focus on things other than social development. There is a way to develop socially whilst going into technical fields, and that involves actually trying to be social.
My concerns are that Heroku's prices are rather high. I understand paying for what you use, but you get charged for as long as something is on, even if it's not in use. Add to this that there's no built-in shutting down of inactive dynos or workers, and you can't help but feel like you're getting fleeced.

I haven't looked at Rackspace too much. Is deployment as simple as a git push, like Heroku? How's their pricing compared to Heroku? Is rolling your own scalable Rails architecture using AWS directly too complicated?
I did not accuse those who disagree with me of misandry. I said the misandry will drown out objective discussion of the topic.

You are kidding yourself if you think blog posts like this change things. As long as men have had penises things like this have happened. It will always happen. Ranting about it on a blog will do nothing except ostracize and jeopardize the life of the accused.

There is nothing special about IT when it comes to gender affairs except a bunch of people who think it is okay to publicly ruin lives and justify it under the guise of "defending a profession from sexual impropriety".
you've got to recognize the tragedy here.

many young men feel like they're destined to go to the grave alone. they can't picture any chain of events that could lead to having any relationship at all with a women. they get angry and hateful which seals their doom.

yes, they should resist the urge to commit unconstructive behaviors. the fact is some of them won't.

really these people need to get past their traumas AND learn new skills; non-directive therapy alone doesn't work because these people need to develop entirely new software. I hate saying it, but people like Ross Jefferies have come the closest to identifying the needs of these people, but we badly need relationships skills training that's effective through the lifecycle of the relationship.

sexual harassers should be punished, but punishment doesn't get to the root of the problem; it's terrifyingly easy to be born into the wrong family and social context and to just not be equipped for the world of relationships and work -- yet that kind of family background is something you can't choose just like you can't choose to be black or gay.
That's something I would definitely bet on (likely).
It doesn't seem fair. We are intelligent entities who can isolate the different points he makes and decide for ourselves whether they make sense or not.

these problems go beyond individual occurrences and permeate the startup/IT culture

Can you provide some dependable data to support this? My experience is that most IT people are terrified of being considered sexist and would go out of their way to be fair and just to women.

In fact, my experience is that women get much better treatment in IT than men any day. The few cases where this does not happen are exceptions, not the rule, and this shows the anti-male perspective of people like you, who carelessly accuse the entire IT culture of being sexist when the truth is that our culture couldn't be farther from that.
Maybe people aren't speaking up because they don't know what to say. If I witnessed this, what could I do? I'm looking for specific ideas here.
At those who are saying high school mistreatment by some women shouldn't influence your interactions with other women ... sure, I won't argue that point.

But the fact of the matter is, humans are learning machines, and they will generalize their experiences. So, if a male geek is terribly mistreated by women as a teenager, he will almost certainly resent them for it and probably treat women worse later in life. At least, they'll have a prior belief that women are cruel, cruel creatures unless proven otherwise.

Thus, justified or not, the way group A (women) behaves towards group B (geeky men) does have an influence on how individuals from group B behave towards individuals from group A.

But I don't think dating someone is the only way to show kindness.
Coincidentally, news out today of some impressive research results on using graphene in li-ion batteries:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/05/chang-20110521.html
What I walk away from discussions like this with is:

Everybody in IT is like this so my behavior is justifiable.

That's the only explanation that makes sense for the sweeping generalizations of men in computing.
Shaming victims into silence

You really need to calm down and think things through. Just because jsprinkles said that blogging about this accomplishes nothing (and he's absolutely right btw), doesn't mean he's saying that she should stay silent. Since when is blogging/tweeting about this the first line of action?

Go to the police. Period.

P.S. Try not to throw the word 'victim' around. All we have is her word. If the allegations are proven, then yes, she's a victim. Till then, she's a blogger.
Get something with Cherry keys- it makes typing feel like you're caressing the keyboard.
When Noirin Shirley wrote her blog post reviling Florian Leibert there was no mention of the police in the post. When the top comment on Reddit was calling her out for that for a while she added in "thanks to the police department!" in an edit.

Why get the cops involved when your faithful blog readers can direct their hatred at your whim?
> but that is his problem and nobody else's.

lol, then why are we reading this article?

you can have all the expectations you like towards realizing your gender-equality utopia. very few of them will ever be respected.

whereas paul points out an actually addressable cultural issue.
> "Not very friendly" is a different thing from assault and harassment. Don't use weasel words; you are writing a defence of the assaults and harassment in your comments, not "unfriendliness."

I am not condoning sexual harrassment or any other illegal activity in any way. But I don't see a problem with giving what you get (i.e., not going out of your way to help out or be friendly to women in the industry).

> I can't imagine that many women would want to date someone who resents their entire gender based upon some juvenile grudge.

You're putting the cart before the horse. The grudge is a RESULT of women not wanting to date them, NOT the CAUSE.

> Thus the two evils are cancelled out, and everyone is absolved of all responsibility for their actions!

> Wait... that's not how it works? </sarcasm>

You're still missing the point. People are not impartial and unemotional, even in a professional setting. Years of mental conditioning cannot be undone by just stating that certain rules of professional conduct must be followed.
I'm expecting the victimizers to not victimize people. They can get therapy, find Jesus, or just realize they're doing things that are wrong--I don't care which.

The high school cultural problem you're referring to, at least with regard to people who end up in tech fields, etc., seems to be much more along the lines of "they won't turn off their computers and go hang out with people." And I say that knowing full well that for most of high school that was me, too. Look inward, people.