skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of the philantropic efforts are dealing with manifestations of the problems instead of root causes. They're giving the man a ration of fish instead of fish rods.

Charities that give out food to the hungry take the money away from research that could result in genetically modified foods that are extremely cheap and easy to grow.

Charities that provide college scholarships for gifted/athletic/underachieving/overachieving students contribute to overall inflation of the cost of education for everybody else.

Splurging doesn't achieve a net effect of life improvement for society in general, and neither does blind charity.
Which will be released in... 18 to 24 months? Will the adoption rate of IE 9 even be 25% of IE users by then?
(From Techie-buzz : http://techie-buzz.com/discussions/mozilla-vs-homeland-secur...)

"Recently, Mozilla started offering a new addon. called MAFIAAfire, in the Firefox Addons site. If you are using MAFIAAfire when you try to visit one of the seized domains, you’ll be redirected to the new address for that website, if they have created one.

Note: MAFIAA means Music and Film Industry Association of America

Naturally, Homeland Security didn’t like that and sent Mozilla a take-down notice for the new addon. Mozilla’s written response to the request was a classic “Why do we need to?”, in the form of 11 piercing questions that will probably never be answered."
Rate My Side/Weekend Project [abt.io]
Hi,

I just packaged a nifty tool we've been successfully using to help us pick a winner among a set of logos / designs / ideas / ...

http://abt.io/ is basically a "Facemash" for pretty much anything. You upload images or text, you share a link on your social networks, and your friends & followers give you the answer you are looking for.

I'd love to get your feedback on the usefulness of this tool for startups & projects. It's entirely free, and I hope it'll be useful to some of you!

PS: Somebody got that algo on the Harvard dorm window back in 03 ?

Cheers,

-stan
I think this post is mistitled. Sexual discrimination is about unequal opportunities -- passing over women for promotion, asking inappropriate questions in job interviews, etc.

The OP is describing something more like a crime. Extortion.
I recently purchased 3 sets of AA Energizer brand rechargables. They kept their charge in some of my electronics for all of 24 hours in many cases.

They seem like a great idea, but in my recent (last 2 years) experiment, the performance actually does degrade that quickly. It could have just been a bad batch, but it was 3 separate 4 packs of battteries, all with their own chargers.
Actually as far as I can tell computing has a reputation of being especially this way.

Personally I don't really understand why you'd want to defend the "there's nothing wrong, ignore this woman" point of view. You acknowledge there's a problem, although you don't think it's specific to this industry. Why take the course of action/defend the point of view least likely to improve the situation?
Clickable link: http://abt.io/

Some more details: http://abt.io/discover.html
I appreciate the links from a personal perspective, but they don't seem to contradict the advice on the Google Chrome Frame project page I mentioned, which actually suggests redirecting users to an installation page if they visit your site in IE and don't already have GCF installed. That sort of tactic is usually associated with either malware or the 1990s where I come from...

In any case, there is something very shady about the whole project. If people want to use Chrome, let them use Chrome, but please let's not start making IE pretend it's Chrome (or was it the other way around?). How on earth are corporate IT support people supposed to deal with requests for help from non-technical people once we start down that path?
given that we've only heard tammy's one line summary of the encounter, maybe.
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)

Who's talking about "helping women out"? They don't need help. We're talking about not attacking them. You continue to use weasel words, except when directly confronted with your acceptance of harassment and assault, that imply that--hey--it's just not that big a deal.

You are wrong. It is that big a deal. And acceptance of these behaviors--you can say you're not, but to be entirely honest I suspect disingenuity--is also wrong.

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

And if they're emotionally unstable and immature enough to hold that sort of grudge, why exactly would anyone want to date them in the first place?

It does, at the end of the day, go back to people who are reasonable and well-adjusted having little interest in close personal relationships with people who are unreasonable and ill-adjusted. Why should they behave otherwise? Why can't the ill-adjusted people with the seething rage toward anyone who doesn't have a Y chromosome grow up a little?

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.

It's hard, so they shouldn't do it?
> 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 what is your solution? When someone gets treated like shit by a group of people for years on end, you can't expect them to turn around and smile to that same group of people who are suddenly interested in him because he's overflowing with cash. It might be a surprise to you, but nerds are not unemotional robots.

> 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?

Just as the quintessential nerd sticks out like a sore thumb in high school, women tend to stick out like a sore thumb in the tech industry. A lot of women in the tech industry tend to capitalize on their "otherness", just as nerds do in high school. In both cases, it's counterproductive.
And your sweeping generalization of computing is based on? Some things you read on the Internet? A story you heard once from a female coworker?

I don't know how your shop is but in my shop this shit does not happen because we are overly selective with our hiring and extremely quick to fire. One tactic we have in interviews is to take the applicant to dinner and get him drunk with a female colleague present. Multiple otherwise-awesome applicants have earned a circular file at dinner.
Here is how it's done in photoshop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI (2:45)

It seems someone decided to remove the banner from the video frame. Have a look at the left guys hat, there is a little "v" from where the banner was (in the top red oval).

Edited: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/5733655921_b28748984b_o....
Original: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5734289061_34f76398e9_b....
Fuck you. There's no upside for women and enormous downside for them to go public with crap like this. For you to cry misandry pretty clearly shows your position. And your claim that she should just shut her mouth and keep quiet is at bare minimum enabling of the abuse you pretend to disdain.
Breeder Island looks pretty interesting. I've followed the Tumblr page to keep track of it. Can't wait to try it!
I would change your statement to read "never chose to mature" rather than "never got a chance to mature."

If you spend your formative years not taking advantage of the opportunities that exist, I have trouble mustering sympathy. (And like I said elsewhere in this thread, I certainly did that until the middle of high school. It's not easy to break out of it, but the only one who can is you.)
Now a followup question, and it shouldn't be taken as a hostile one because I agree with you entirely:

Would you like the taste more or less if it didn't cost $2 a can?
The Birth of Plenty (Chapter 1)
i gave you an upvote. ;-)

personally i've avoided overt sexual harassment. there might be a few times I was looking at some {lady,chick,bird,gal,differently-chromosomed person) the wrong way and received a message, sent by a third party, that i smelled bad, but that's it

personally i think the race, class, gender analysis that goes around looks at race and gender too much and ignore class. considering class, I'd say that only 20% of white people are really white.

if people treated every person they faced as entirely as an individual, they'd have no ability to cope with other people at all. you've got to make generalizations and expect to have a certain shared reality if you're going to communicate. for instance, there are different social conventions when you interact with women and men -- a 'feminist' who wants to change that would be on a project to eliminate the feminine.

when that shared reality is out of whack, people make a lot of pain for themselves and others. if you want this problem to change, you should assert your point of view, because this behavior is unfair. but please recognize that these people are suffering too... they're not getting any pleasure out of this BS, they just aren't. they need a kind of therapy that's very hard to get these days.
When Great Firms Cause New Technologies to Fail
I was simply suggesting that you can use those actions in the app and randomly assigned what they should do. I like the double tapping for the article directly idea a lot.

I think the details toolbar is more useful where it is since I generally don't flag or upvote an item unless I read it. But that is a great idea (the swipe-for-options). You can include adding to Instapaper, and perhaps twitter/facebook/email sharing.

Also, a small bug: All the comments on the submissions say 0 points.
Not a technical point, but—

Anonymity/privacy software written by a bunch of people with gmail addresses? Does that strike anyone else as weird?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1875927

I'm curious -- do you run around posting in every thread that concerns sexual assault with pitchfork in hand for the accused and ad hominem attacks for those who disagree with the methodology?

Take your pants off to e-mail you? Seriously?
IMO, she's a victim if the events happened. It matters little whether they are proven.
> Who's talking about "helping women out"? They don't need help. We're talking about not attacking them.

I'm not suggesting women in particular need help. Whether it's high school or the tech industry, a helping hand is always nice when you're getting started. But there's no reason to give one to someone who never gave you one when you needed it.

> And if they're emotionally unstable and immature enough to hold that sort of grudge, why exactly would anyone want to date them in the first place?

Emotional instability and immaturity are not personality traits inherent to all nerds. They are a RESULT of years of being ignored by women.

Like I said before, the grudge is a RESULT of women not wanting to date them. At the beginning of high school, the nerds weren't emotionally unstable or immature. That is a RESULT of social isolation.

> It does, at the end of the day, go back to people who are reasonable and well-adjusted having little interest in close personal relationships with people who are unreasonable and ill-adjusted. Why should they behave otherwise? Why can't the ill-adjusted people with the seething rage toward anyone who doesn't have a Y chromosome grow up a little?

For the same reason that high school girls can't grow up a little and stop ignoring all the guys who aren't wearing jock straps and walking around with footballs.

> Oh. It's hard, so they shouldn't do it.

And it's hard to socialize with nerds in high school, so women just shouldn't do it, right?
A Rational, Informed Response to LNKD's IPO
Nobody's talking about "smiling" at them. They are, however, talking about not demanding sex from them and barring them from conferences because they refused. There's a pretty broad separation here.

You don't have to like every person you meet. I certainly don't. But you do have to tolerate them.
> He didn't write what you quoted.

Yes, he did:

"Personally I think shit like this should not be blogged at all but whatever. I am not ready to fight this battle again."

It's in the first damn comment. Read it.

> No, he's not.

He's advocating that they not speak about their experiences in a public forum. That's a type of suggesting that they stay silent.
> Look inward, people.

that's just not going to spontaneously happen across all the individuals concerned.

where as paul has actually identified a situation that can be addressed.
It makes me sad that the fact a company is actually questioning something so obvious is news. =/
I wonder: would Apple allow you to submit a few different copies of the app, with different prices?
Not when it comes to security abroad. Some Google people were deeply involved in aiding the Egyptian revolution.

Can't speak for their domestic philosophy, though.
Having read the paper I'm interested in the fact that a card issuer was actually willing to work with you on this. Especially with providing far more details about each transaction than a consumer can normally obtain.

Do you have any further details about this issuer and the details they were willing to provide? Or have they asked to remain anonymous?
> Nobody's talking about "smiling" at them. They are, however, talking about not demanding sex from them and barring them from conferences because they refused. There's a pretty broad separation here.

Like I said above, I am NOT condoning sexual harrassment or any other illegal activity in any way. I'm speaking in more general terms as to why the poor treatment women receive in the tech industry is not arbitrary or unfounded.
Not really. Email is not particularly secure to begin with.
Avoided? Microsoft's stock price went on to increase 600X. Anyone who could get in on the IPO stood to make millions.
Ha, its a little disgusting to think that it makes sense to say that naturally DHS would be concerned about groups like MAFIAA
$100k/yr in the USA? I guess if you're in Silicon Valley...
Look up projecting. You're doing it.
There's an element of brand in there, for sure. But.. I'm a bit of an energy drink junkie and I've tried almost all of them over the years.

Red Bull is a bit like the Coca Cola of energy drinks to me. It might not be the absolute best tasting one but it's the best to fit almost any situation. That is, a specialty cola can taste better than Coca Cola for a once-off, but you'd find it too sickly on a long-term basis. That's where I stand with Red Bull. It's not the best but it's the most consistent and most palatable I've found.

I can't put my finger as to how much the brand plays into that but acknowledge I'm as human as anyone else and that it undoubtedly reinforces my preference.
Batman Games
> And your sweeping generalization of computing is based on?

The same thing as yours. My personal experiences and what I've heard. You have no more evidence that there is nothing especially wrong with computing than I have that there is.

> "but in my shop this shit does not happen"

That you've heard about. Although I suspect that if you share the same kinds opinions around your coworkers as you are sharing here, you've made a fair number of your feel uncomfortable and unwelcome without ever realizing it.

> One tactic we have in interviews is to take the applicant to dinner and get him drunk with a female colleague present.

Wow. IANAL but using a female coworker as a honeypot is probably opening your company up to liability. The standard for harassment or unfriendly working environment is what a reasonable person would consider the same. I'd vote in favor of the plaintiff if a colleague of yours asked to perform this duty ever sued your company. As a matter of policy you're knowingly putting an employee in a situation where they are more likely to be harassed specifically for the purpose of seeing if they get harassed.

Well, it's your ass on the line and not mine; for that I am thankful.
Read the full article. He's clearly positive on the bailout and explicitly says the government's first reaction about how to "save" the banks was the "right one".

Case in point, it turns out, is the banking crisis. It
sure looks like the government’s first impression about
how to save the banks was the right one, after all

And here is that quote in context:

Thanks largely to actions taken by the Federal Reserve,
the commercial paper market has thawed, and banks are
lending to each other again — if not to the rest of us.
Customers aren’t racing to pull their money out of the
banking system and stuff it under a mattress.

Most important, the government has made clear it will not
allow a major bank to default, to avoid the replay of the
Lehman catastrophe. (Though it would have been nice if Mr.
Geithner, who had been involved as head of the New York
Fed, had acknowledged that the Lehman default was a
terrible mistake. Instead, he fell back on the old “there
was nothing we could do” dodge. Not exactly confidence-
inspiring.) The government showed its determination to
stick by this thinking when it rushed in to shore up the
faltering Bank of America.

That is a highly supportive take on the bailout, at the time it was happening.
Why Does Google Dominate Search So Completely? Top 15 Search Engines...
> 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.

A response, in several parts:

1) So men are mere unthinking animals, victim to their penis and incapable of higher reason, and thus innocent? Who's the misandrist here, again?

2) Perhaps you also believe that skin-color based slavery is also inevitable, natural and inescapable. After all, it's been happening for all of history!

3) IT (and more so, startups) are significantly and noticeably more sexist than many other professions. Also, it's my profession, and I'd like it to be one I can be proud of.

4) Really? "Jeopardise the life of the accused"? The only death threats I recall from recent situations were made against the woman (accuser).

5) Things have changed. For one, others who have experienced similar harassment have another data point to know that they're not alone. For another, those of us who aren't as tolerant of jackassery as you are have been reminded of how far we have to go.
The App-oriented UI Model and its Security Implications
Even though the false dichotomy has been presented to you you are still sticking with it.

I am advocating that the soldier's story of a grave misstep by a person not be presented one-sided with no opportunity for recourse in a very public manner on a very high-traffic blog.
You are looking at the market price today. Morgan Stanley's consideration is the market price in the future.

I believe the market price today is overvalued, and it will come down in the future.
Applied Single-Source Longest-Path Algorithms
> DEFINITELY nobody is picking them up as "mysql and apache servers instead of linux" because OSX is a terrible server OS and not worth the cost.

"Not worth the cost" I can certainly see, but why is it a "terrible server OS"? Not saying you're wrong and I'm not in a position to argue the opposite, just curious.
I'm sorry you're getting downvoted for that little insight.

I won't give any contractual undertaking to a client that anything I produce will run on Chrome when delivered, because it's a moving target and for some projects it updates faster than a complete test cycle.

If Mozilla are now switching to crazy-fast auto-updates as well, then I'm going to have to start excluding Firefox too.

At this rate, IE will be the only browser I will be able to commit to testing on and supporting. If that's not irony...
If I were a woman I would take a picture of the guy and post it to my blog and just let it out. There isn't enough for anything to be done otherwise it will get worse if the person is just left to do it again without any consequence... even if the only consequence is a blog post.

It does appear all of the guys decend upon the women and try to take them apart but they have nothing to gain in this... well except for hopefully the next woman in line hopefully won't get harassed (and excluded) in such a way.
pretty funny admittedly ... good waste of 30-45 minutes on someones part lol
It's hard to take this blog post at face value. My experience with the industry has been that IT people are terrified of offending women and go far out of their way to avoid being perceived as sexist. I do know a couple guys that flirt with women at work but that's a far cry from sexual discrimination.

As long as we're sharing anecdotes:

* My girlfriend of 3 years also works in this industry, and she has never complained about an incident of any kind.

* I worked with a female developer who was fired and complained about discrimination. But this was not the case, she was fired because she was terrible at her job.

* I also worked with a gay developer who was fired. He complained loudly of homosexual discrimination... but I saw his check-ins (or lack thereof)--he was also terrible at his job.

So the two major cases of discrimination I personally know about in Silicon Valley have both been frauds. Is discrimination real in Silicon Valley? Certainly, yes, there's always a few bad apples in any large community. Is the problem being blown out of proportion here? I think so.
Ah. I see now. It is women's fault for not understanding the special inner beauty and desirability of nerds, but not nerds' fault for choosing--as in, an active choice--to be avoidant shrooms at the computer. That makes complete sense.

...

Wait...sorry, no, it makes no sense at all. And it's bullshit, to boot. Hell, I wasn't "wearing a jock strap and walking around with a football"--I'm overweight, tried out for the baseball team and totally bombed it, and was legendarily bad at sports in general--but I did all right. I could have been called a nerd in high school and college. I had serious computer interests (and in college I did Google Summer of Code twice), I was horrible at sports, all that. But I chose to socialize and act like a reasonably normal guy. Sports and all that are nice, I'm sure, but a decent--not great--personality, a willingness to take risks and sometimes be embarrassed, and a modicum of wit did, and do, me pretty well.

It's not about playing sports. It's about leaving the basement and choosing to not adopt a victim complex just because some--not all, but some--people don't like you. These are things that our hypothetical nerds can choose to do, but don't.

.

Nerds make it impossible for people to want to socialize with them. I know this from experience, 'cause I did it too--I just realized what I was doing and stopped. Then they turn around and make other people--who, in this case, want to socialize with them, want to go to a conference where they are--miserable. That is, to be completely blunt, utterly fucked. And the blame lies solely on them for refusing to grow the hell up and act like a halfway decent human being.
You're right, you're not a lawyer so you should be less willing to throw the word 'liability' around. You're armchairing your way to a legal conclusion based on two facts and a situation you're unaware of. Namely that this colleague was the one who came up with the idea and enjoys the responsibility. Look at her angle. She gets a less hostile workplace by helping screen out the creepers who will come after her later.

Feel free to armchair lawyer someone else because you really suck at it.