skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So the whole industry is giving the message: Your effort is totally worthless (and unnoticed) if you make mistakes that offend someone.

The message is "grow up and stop acting like a hormonal 13 year old".
Annoying story, either way shouldn't cause any huge problems. Was the event launch? fits the profile.
I would like to argue that having success at getting founding is more predictable than being successful at bootstrapping a company. However, I think the majority of businesses are bootstrapped, you just don't hear as much from them. It really depends on business idea if taking venture capital makes sense or not. Some businesses are able to generate money quickly and don't require a large upfront investment, others do.
Mr. Byrnes, it is a little more complicated than that.

Many of the people angry about this incident will, in another context, back up someone like Richard Dawkins when he offends. Dawkins happens to be one of my favorite authors, but he is quite provocative. And Heroku advertises the Dawkins Foundation as a success story:

http://success.heroku.com/dawkins-foundation

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
(RDFRS) supports scientific education and advances
critical thinking and an evidence-based understanding of
the natural world, in the quest to overcome religious
fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human
suffering. The foundation’s namesake and founder, Richard
Dawkins, is a scientist and best-selling author of works
including The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene, and The
Blind Watchmaker.

As an objective fact, The God Delusion is surely a book that many millions of people around the world are on the record as finding "offensive" [1,2,3].

So the issue is really not whether a statement is offensive or not, or how the apology is phrased. It is whether the group that is offended has the power to force an apology.

[1] http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/religious-debates/65603...

[2] http://richarddawkins.net/articles/628795-duking-it-out-over...

[3] http://mattgrube.com/seminary-writings/dawkins-god-delusion-...
It would help if you explained your logic a little further. Why this fact is relevant? If this fact changes (e.g., once the last suffragist dies), will the conclusion change?

Note that if the conclusion doesn't change upon the death of the last suffragist, the fact is irrelevant, and you bringing it up is a red herring.
Thank you!

I don't feel like I'm being sexist at all. Scoot didn't say "HEH! We have naked women bringing you beer!" They said "We're having women server you beer". This is a perk for some men. What's the problem? Women coders/developers are sexist and don't want to be served beer by women? So be it. I, as a man, will happily serve those women who feel offended in the same garb the women will be serving men.
Dogs of Power: Congressional Dogs  Ultimate Insiders
Why does 'Ctrl' + selecting New Task from Task Manager open a command prompt?
How TwitchTV Built a Vibrant Community Around Game Streaming
Want Innovation? Hire for Skills, Not Attitude
This is insulting to everyone... Why would I take a break from a two day Hackathon to drink beer, work out, and chase women? It is only two days. Presumably, if I wanted to do that, I would go to a bar or the gym. Who the hell do they think their target audience is?
Maybe this will help: https://github.com/srhyne/jQuery-Parse
It depends on what you mean by right, its a very context dependent word. In one sense, rights are precisely the things which the government is not permitted to interfere with. So in that sense it really is about the ability of the state to interfere (or not) with the way a parent raises their child.

In the broader sense, it becomes somewhat hard to talk about because it might matter greatly much how old the child is. My 3 year old is simply not in an position to make many good decisions for herself, but my 6 year old gets a fair bit more freedom, and as they get older I will hand more of the reigns of their own lives to them happily.

It is also hard to talk about separately because in a sense a child's rights are what is left over after the state and the parent divide up their rights, any right absolutely given to the child is denied to one of those two entities. Should I have the ability to restrict what my 3 year old sees? I think most would agree that I should.

Should I have the ability to restrict what my 13 year old sees (when one of them reaches 13)? That is touchier, but I think most will answer, "Yes, but you should use it less and listen to their judgment more." I certainly think that even when my child turns 13 I will want to keep them away from materials that overtly objectify women and I will judge on a case by case basis if they are ready for horror films or not.

For what it's worth, I agree with your sentiment at the end that many parents overly coddle even older children. But I also respect that each parent has the privelege and duty of making those decisions for themselves and their children until those children cease to be children.
There's a big difference between understanding how something might offend someone else and equally being offended by it. I wasn't offended by this. I ran it by my wife, who happens to also be a programmer, and she wasn't offended by it either. Are we wrong or bad people? I mean, we see how others might be offended by it, so there's some level of empathy, but we're not grabbing our pitchforks over it.

On the other hand, we have friends that love bartending. The insinuation that they're not as good or equal to someone who wants to go into programming, or are nothing more than "beer-servants", could be construed as offensive as well. I'm guessing you're drawing from different experiences, so I'm not going to attribute malice to it. But these sorts of things have the ability to spin rapidly out of control.
Please, yes. Two use cases where I constantly bemoan the lack of comment support in JSON are configuration files and test fixtures.
What the hell are you talking about? Medical doctors are not "mostly men". Roughly 50% of all medical students are women, and current trends have women overtaking men in the profession long term.

Hiding somewhere in the rest of that somewhat nonsensical comment (ellyagg's, I mean, not yours, tptacek) is the kernel of a fairly good question, related to what you're saying here: why is it that in almost every other once-male-dominated profession, the ratios have been rapidly approaching parity, whereas in programming, the separation maintains itself quite rigidly?

Male doctors, lawyers, and bankers tend to be a super scummy bunch assholes as far as women are concerned. Anecdotally speaking, guys in any of those professions are far more blatantly sexist towards women than your typical programmer is, and based on non-anecdotal data, the wage gap in each of those fields is worse than it is in programming (I don't have the refs at hand for that, but the conclusion is pretty solid, from what I remember programming is one of the fields with the smallest wage gap, especially for more recent grads).

I can't help but wonder how much stuff like the asshattery that's on display in this article is really the cause of the lopsided sex ratio in this field, and how much is a side effect of the fact that so few women are around in the first place. You'd think if sexist attitudes of men in a field really had such a huge impact on whether women wanted to enter the field or not, women would rarely go into medicine, law, or finance, but over time, they've flocked to each of them in much greater numbers than they have to programming, putting up with tons of abuse in the process (don't get me started on finance, oh, the stories I could tell...).

Not that it matters when sexist crap comes up - it's wrong, full stop, and if we really want women to enter the field we are right to make every effort to stamp it out.

I'd just be wary of accepting too easily that this is the whole story, or even the most important part of it; it's certainly a piece of the puzzle, but I find that I've got to squint harder than I'm comfortable doing to imagine that it really makes everything else fit together. [edit: just to be clear, I'm not saying that you or anyone else specifically claimed this here, but it's a common enough sentiment that I'm addressing it anyways]
Learning about design in theory and knowing the technical aspects of it can't hurt, but the reason why people create bad designs is not because they don't know how to make a design. It's because they lack creativity. Designing things is a creative process, not a technical one.
> You're considering success or failure as a binary outcome

I think that's how it is, yes, and PG seems to have stated as much; in essence, you either die or don't die; if you don't die, the scale of your success depends on a lot of things that are beyond your control.

(Actual quote from PG: "The formula for the success of a startup includes a random multiplier of roughly zero to a thousand." — http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3050280 )

If one subscribes to this point of view then the purpose of YC is to help startups not die, and the purpose of the YC admission process is to

1. select all startups that have a chance of not dying if admitted (eg, refuse startups that don't stand a chance in hell of not dying)

2. if the sample from #1 is too large, reduce it at the low end first (startups that are not very likely to not die) but maybe also at the high end (startups that seem certain to not die no matter what)

Maybe reducing the selection from the high end is just plain stupid / counter productive, but if you don't do that, it's not very clear why one would be in this business in the first place (as opposed to other lucrative businesses).
I think you should be able to do it.

You can access S3 using this: http://code.google.com/p/js3db/

MongoHQ has a REST API, so calling it from Javascript should be easy. This document might help you: http://blog.mongohq.com/blog/2012/02/20/connecting-to-mongoh...
It looks to me like a well planned document, not a spontaneous remark. They could have quickly retracted it if they didn't mean it.
Yes, because you clearly have no rights if you're mistaken for an employee at an event.

How does offering to have women bring you beer at an event take away your rights? Shall we be boycotting Oktoberfest next?
"Perhaps I'm not in the best position to be commenting on this"

Yeah, perhaps not.

Try replacing "Women" with "children" or "Indian people" and reread that. Does that feel right?

Now put yourself in the shoes of an Indian person reading that. How does that feel?
I can imagine many women feeling unwelcome at an event that was advertised in that way. I don't want women to feel unwelcome at tech events for many reasons.
Asus’s Transformer Prime Laptop Built for Speed
Let your friends chat with you anonymously
We thought this was the case as well for some internal apps using an ancient version of Rails. The problems start to arise when you bring in new people to work on improvements to the project after the creators are gone. It is much easier to find someone that knows Rails 3 than to find someone who can dive into Rails 1/2 code. You have to know what the patterns of that "era" were and be aware of bugs and subtle differences that have been ironed out as the project matured.

Imagine trying to find a blog post explaining why your 4 year old version of an image upload gem doesn't work on JRuby. It's no fun :)
unicode support?

damn you u+2028
It's not an inclusive way to advertise an event. Making a minority in a community feel like an event isn't really intended for them is bad.
Now I have new answer for when people ask what value HFT adds.
You are correct. Most men like women. However, there is a time and place for men to express their admiration for women. An event like this (as represented to prospective sponsors) is neither.
Saudi Twitter 'Blasphemer' Supporters Fighting for Release
Friends and family of Saudi poet/columnist Hamza Kashgari continue their fight to have him freed from his Riyadh jail cell.
I do :)

One of our founders was supposed to create a thread on the AmberJack.org forum to show drawium to others(amberjack is like an outdated version of drawium). He apparently sent private messages to ~10 users there which was redirected as emails. One of them went ahead and gave us a bad WOT score and also let us know. We apologized and resolved the issue with him since then but the WOT score remains there.

I will see if he can fix that. (I am not sure if that's even possible)
Offensive comments are morally relative, though. Someone has to be offended, right?

In your examples, the victim certainly notices and cares; if they get a vote, they're going to vote "immoral." But if you did something "murderous" in absolute privacy--like, say, doing some target shooting--I don't think it would be considered equivalent to murder. Similarly, if you do something "offensive" and nobody is there to get offended, I don't see what the crime is.

Would it upset you if people were saying offensive things quietly to themselves in the privacy of their own homes? How would you propose to deal with that?
Well, technically, it's valid; it's just unlikely to be what you meant to type. That sort of case should probably be handled separately.
Quantifying SXSW aftermath - the peeps, the parties and the influencers
While I don't condone the choice of words used in the ad I am underwhelmed at the "offensive" content.

If you are offended by this you need to get some thicker skin.
Great idea, but the problem here is that what works somewhere, doesn't work elsewhere and it's all about testing.

But testing multiple fields, with multiple variables and experiments requires lots of traffic.

And what works for one source of traffic, PPC for example, won't duplicate to other sources of traffic like TV / Radio / PR / SEO / etc.

We recently ran a ton of traffic just around an inbound-email newsletter pop-up that lists out what we found to work best here:

http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2012/01/opt-in-email-ne...

Those are some "tried and true tips" that we'd stand behind for a popular affiliate marketing blog getting most of their traffic via SEO and referral, but unfortunately the entire addressable universe that we can guarantee those results for are the client we undertook the project with ;)
Hi HN,

This is my new startup and I'd love to get your feedback. It reached 140K+ members with only viral.

Basically you can think of it as Formspring with chat. You set up an account for people to chat with you anonymously. As their identities are anonymous your friends can ask everything to you that they normally cannot ask. They can tell their thoughts and criticisms about you.

Moreover, you have an opportunity to chat anonymously with celebrities you admire through Connected2.me. You can tell your problems to specialists such as psychologists by keeping your identity secret and get an instant answer. Companies also use Connected2.me in order to get anonymous feedback about their products and give support to their customers real-time.

Please try and tell me what do you think.
I do something similar with whitewatermap.com. The problem with what you are trying (which I have run into too) is that the javascript can only access either AJAX calls on your own server (which I know you don't want to do) or access items via a url. S3 allows you to make things accessible at known URL's but it costs a lot per PUT request (relatively) so it makes databases difficult. If you find a cloud/hosted database that makes all entities accessible via URL I would be very interested too.

Edit: aespinoza pointed me to mongohq.com which does exactly what I wanted. I'm so happy.
hmm, apparently he already fixed that and marked it as "Good customer experience" but I am not sure why WOT still says "Warning! This site has a poor reputation.". Maybe it gets updated at a fixed time of the day or something.
The objection is more about equating women with cupcakes, I should think.
> Note that if the conclusion doesn't change upon the death of the last suffragist, the fact is irrelevant, and you bringing it up is a red herring.

The fact highlights how recent this level of discrimination is in our history, and why "being a woman" and "disliking cupcakes" are significantly different characteristics when you're discussing power dynamics and discrimination.
60ms would make no difference to how fast a human can make a decision. This is for automated trading.

So can't they put a computer near each market that would get the relevant information quickly and place the order quickly as well?
"and I'm amazed that you don't sound more upset about it."

ZC is a YC company. He's probably afraid of the downvotes if he doesn't keep up the crowd fawning going on here.
Ten early new Basecamp interface sketches
Android forums
Ok, that's pretty embarrassing, but what does that have to do with work computer vs home computer?

And if you really wanted to compartmentalize things, can't you just logout and have two accounts on your computer?
If Unemployment Is So High, Why Is Hiring So Hard?
I go to Octoberfest events where sexy female beer servers are advertised. A lot of women seem to attend as well.
@spicyj I agree that recklessly paving natives is no good and can cause problems, but JSON3 is trying rather hard to not pave them (note that it doesn't even extend Date.prototype), and only paves parse/stringify when fixing broken implementations that are not cross-browser consistent or spec-compliant. With the fix in place it means the API will produce consistent output cross-browser which is a good thing.
Were these models in competition somehow?
The first benefit of global warming?

"Until now it has been impossible to lay cables in the Arctic Ocean, but the retreat of the Arctic sea ice means that the Northwest Passage is now generally ice-free from August to October..."
A good publisher can provide editing, formatting, graphics, advertising, and localization.

They can also add their stamp of approval to it (I know that this means nothing to a lot of buyers, but it does mean something to some. I have heard a couple of readers of mass fiction rave about trust Del Rey books to be worth reading because they trust Del Rey), and an established publisher can more easily get it into print if/when it is worth doing.

Of course an author can do all of those themselves or hire others to handle those steps for them. But it is certainly value-added to have all of that done for you.
If offered a spot now in YC, would you take it? Not going back in time, but actually, now? If so, and if PG has already admitted it was a mistake, what's to stop YC from offering you a spot in their next session and you taking it? Are there no "re-dos" in YC? Just asking.
"So they'll have to work on the quality of the restaurants they make available, but the service itself is great."

Their product is food. That's the important thing. All the CS and effort in the world is meaningless without the food quality being better than just acceptable and certainly not "pretty bad".

In the non-startup world a restaurant serving bad food would only survive on a toll road rest stop or where there are no other alternatives.
Targeting ads using background noise
Your mass scales with the cube of linear dimension. Parachute drag scales as a square of linear dimension.

What this means is that the chute gets bigger much more quickly than the payload as you increase lander mass, to the point that you quickly get outlandishly large and impractical chutes for manned landers. Hence the research into alternatives.
Inside INTERPOL's New Cybercrime Innovation Center
Please don't dumb down your sense of humour for people who get offended every time someone sneezes in a dream.
Honestly, when these sorts of things happen, I'd love for every man in the world to just shut up for a minute. I have a hard time stomaching this whacked out form chivalry where men somehow have to fight on behalf of women because they're unable to defend themselves. I understand it's of far purer intent, but it seems just as sexist to me. Actually, it seems worse because it has a tinge of hypocrisy to it. I'd much rather get a woman's reaction to it in an environment where she feels safe to speak her mind (and the Internet provides some pretty good avenues for this).
This seems relevant: http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_o...

It's a talk about how physical geography is being shaped by HFT...
i think the point is that paypal is much more likely to cut you off (or even run away with your money) than visa or mastercard is.
What CSPRNG would you recommend?
Mind blown. MongoHQ is what I have been looking for but never knew that was what they actually did. Thank you!!!

thinks of all sorts of 100% client side websites to make
"But there's another person who is to blame: the referee. Before inbounding the ball, the referee will signal to the player that they either can or cannot run the baseline. Sure, the referee can blow the whistle every time there is a violation, but it's better to prevent the error in the first place. It would be like letting players line up for a free throw in the wrong order, letting the player shoot and then blowing the whistle for incorrect order."

That is completely absurd. Letting the players line up incorrectly would be the referee's mistake — so, yes, it would be better to prevent the mistake from happening. But the player running on the baseline after a violation is the PLAYER's mistake. It's not the official's job to prevent players from committing violations.

It's not a technicality either — it's the same rule from when this kid started playing basketball. It's HIS stupid mistake. Period. You can safely assume that he has been playing basketball for 10+ years. The rule is the same throughout junior high, high school, and college. If the player doesn't know the rule by the time he is in the NCAA Tournament, I have a hard time feeling sorry for him.

Same goes for the players that got called for running in from behind the 3-point line on free throws before the ball hit the rim. The announcers and fans may not have liked it, but the rule has been there for well over a decade.
Email for hipsters, wouldn't that be something like Pine?