skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm one of the women who don't share her feelings. Maybe it's the word sexism that I have a problem with.

I'm not a programmer and I don't know the specific environment that she described, but I'm a female motorcyclist and I've worked in lots of kitchens and a couple in molecular biology labs. I know the behavior and I've dealt with it. Men behave in curious ways when there's a low female/male ratio, but in my experience, half of it comes out of awkwardness or plain old stupidity on the other side. Some of the more honest comments on this thread testify to that.

The other half is intended to belittle. But seriously, this isn't just at work. This is walking down the street in the city. This is buying something in the store. This is sitting on the bus. And as much as it sucks, getting offended doesn't help.

If this sounds like a long winded "lighten up," please think of it more as a friendly "toughen up." It's the only way to signal the change that you want.
> That's just not true; claiming so is not "rationality"--it's literally the definition of bias.

There is no person without bias. Just being a different person is a bias. It's ridiculous to exclude opinions based on the existence of any bias.

> Assuming by villainized you mean down-voted

No. I mean the twisting of words. The very comment I was replying to implicated me as "sexist asshole." There's some vitriol in this thread.
"Why wasn't he able to save all the jews?"

Because all of the other Germans who didn't agree with what was happening just accepted it and went along.

Are we done here?
This wouldn't have happened on Steve Jobs' watch
Depends where you get hired. This article seems to deal with getting hired at a company whose main line of business is not technology (say finance, which Dominic seems to recruit for). In that case, your employer will not care about your beautiful C++ code or super-efficient way to do X -- unless you can tie it back to the company's main line of business and making money for the firm. An internal squabble about the more correct way to do X will mean nothing to the non-technical upper management in a non-tech firm. Non-tech firms don't care about technology for the sake of technology because they don't sell technology -- the firm has other priorities and IT is just a side show to help get the firm's mission done.
I see plenty of light dresses that would be suitable for professional situations that wouldnt bring out these comments

I think you might not be fully aware of the extent of body-related comments that women get. I know women with breasts of such a size that they ALWAYS get comments, regardless of what they're wearing.
This is bullshit. There is a big wide area between joking around and sexism and unwanted flirting etc.

Guys like you are all like "it's just fun and we tease all the time" right up until another dude in the work force hits on you or makes a sex related comment about you, and then you freeze up, get awkward and generally hate it.

How would you feel if one of your male coworkers tried this stuff with you?

And do not even try to say its different because women are supposed to like men or something like that, it's 10 kinds of wrong. just don't.
I think "I can imagine myself saying" implies he thought it was "reasonable".

No, it doesn't.

I can imagine myself saying all kinds patently disturbing and offensive things — things which, to a certainty, are not remotely "reasonable" — but I would never actually say, let alone mean, them.

By analogy, I can imagine pulling my Leatherman out of its sheath and sticking the blade between someone's ribs. Doesn't mean it's reasonable, or that I'd ever do it, especially not in jest.
This is about to get massively downvoted... but oh well.

Of course it matters!

Would you say it's "complete account of my reasoning" if I wore t-shirts to work because they are comfortable?

But I wear a dress shirt and tie because my company is trying to project just that type of stuffy image. The tie is uncomfortable... but that's life.

The breast-comment in this story wasn't the appropriate way to tell her if she was dressing unprofessionally... but most of us sacrifice comfort to dress professionally every day we go to work.

Are you suggesting that she is an exception, and she should wear whatever is most comfortable?
Slaves were in imminent danger of being killed for minor offences.

Were they? I'd bet that everything you've ever read or seen about slavery was produced by abolitionists and their intellectual descendants. Perhaps this might slightly color your views on the subject.

By the way, before you call me a horrible person again, please read carefully. Nothing in the above paragraph implies an endorsement of slavery.
If you go down the API route, Flask-Restless[0] and simpleapi[1] are also worth a look.

[0] http://readthedocs.org/docs/flask-restless/en/latest/
[1] https://github.com/flosch/simpleapi
If you worked with me, I would tell the entire office that everyone is welcome to the 24-pack of beer I brought from home ... except you.
I can totally see how you read him as justifying himself; I read him as being conflicted about being brought up to believe that it was OK to do things he now thinks aren't OK, so I wanted to speak up in appreciation that someone would put himself in a position to be criticized like that--I think "masculinity" (whatever that is) benefits from having people say that.
I'm sorry, my English is failing me during this conversation, but I'll try to be more precise.

I certainly don't think that's reasonable think to say. That part was more like "Fuck, I could actually say something like this, and this is BAD.". It comes from teenage-and-trying-to-get-group-approval-me saying things before slightly-more-adult-and-trying-to-not-be-an-asshole-me has chance to suppress those thoughts or words.

I don't mean to imply in any way that was "reasonable", just something I could at first glance recognize as harmless and say, whereas when you just think about it for a second, it totally isn't and you shouldn't.
After reading the wikipedia article, are you still arguing for teaching "the five senses"? Did I not satisfactorily dispel this notion?

When we learn the Bohr atomic model, teachers explain that it is not completely accurate, but a useful starter mental model. Teachers should explain that there are more than 5 senses as well.
Just a few comments:

1. Wish the huge icon was clickable that lead somewhere.

2. The name tag has no hover feedback. It's actually a link to twitter but it has no hover effect and it's not a usual 'link' graphic (underline/blue color/button).

3. Really jarring 'timeline' (the exploded/expanded icon view) section. Very spread out and small, forcing me to bounce my eyes left and right, and scrolling down to read one side, then scrolling back up and down to read the other.

4. The 4 circles (I'm CEO etc) needs the flow reversed. People usually read left to right, so the first circle should be top left instead of top right.

5. Is there a reason why the icons get smaller and smaller as we scroll down? Kind of a jarring and inconsistence viewing experience, especially the tiny text. (The expanded/exploded view of the icon).

Those are just my 2 cents, good luck with the search!
I see no reason to go so far as to call the actual students in question "clueless" - but there is definitely serious bias in where certain companies do and don't hire. Apple recruits heavily from Stanford for CS, but recruits from MIT for ID, for instance. Some companies only look at MIT, or CMU, or Berkeley - or hire there "first", for no other reason than the founders might have gone there, and thus feel better equipped to evaluate the curriculums and students from those schools.

It's interesting to see where the top 1% of CMU kids go, but looking at the top 1% of every top CS school independently of each other would yield dramatically different results.
Your notion of what's funny is sadly impoverished.

But even within that context, there's a line between saying something funnily negative that the person can take and saying something that hurts them. If you've attempted a joke that fell flat because it was hurtful, then the problem isn't the target being too thin-skinned; the problem is you having poor judgment (or a taste for cruelty).
The bigger question, to me, is what drivers are included. Many of the chips in all these phones do not have specifications freely available or community-built drivers. Does this include, say, the GPU driver? Or is that still a binary blob that has to be (usually illegally) copied from the device's built-in software?
A bit cynical, but quite close to my experience in big companies, where employees are just seen as expenses.
I'm all for holding government officials more accountable. The only issue here in Canada is that the political corruption is so far removed from what your average joe understands as corruption that no one cares.

We've currently got major election fraud under investigation and the provider of air ambulance services, a non-profit, of creating for-profit subsidiaries for the non-profit to buy services from.

That's not even covering your usual fraud, like provincial governments holding standing comities that haven't met in years, but the members still get paid monthly at the tax payers expense.
Effects of daily aspirin on cancer incidence
they can use part of the $210M to start another company.
So women who are demonstrably and statistically still suffering under male oppression now need to treat you softly and with love while you are accidentally crappy back to them? Nurture you back to health?

What was that you were saying about men not being puppies?
yeah. and they can always use part of that money to start another company.
Depending on your proportions, some necklines might work better for movement or fit. Like, high necklines on a rectangular t-shirt, if you're well-endowed, have a tendency to creep up and get all chokey. Scoop necks do a better job of this.

Some people might consider scoop neck to be "low cut" (because the collar bones are visible--something generally not accepted/expected of men) while others might not call something "low cut" til cleavage is visible.

Now, a button-up shirt does a nice job of leaving space for your throat so you don't feel like you're choking, but in case you haven't noticed, it can be difficult these days to find button-up shirts for women that have all the buttons. It has become extremely common to manufacture women's blouses without the second button, or rather, with the second button roughly 6 inches below the first one. I suspect this is due to rules in schools and workplaces allowing for the top button to be left unbuttoned. That way, you're following the rule and showing some decolletage. I once went through every button-up blouse I could find at Target. I came away with having found one rack that had shirts with an upper-chest button. (Oh, and if you button all the buttons on one that's missing that upper-chest one, it just gapes open)

If the shirt itself is not quite wide enough to accommodate being well-endowed, a lower neckline can allow the fabric to move horizontally to better fit around the girth involved by opening up a bit wider. On the one hand, you could get a bigger size (if that's even available--there are limits), but if you've got a small waist, there's a tailoring problem for you. And if you've got shoulders that are narrow but a chest that isn't, that's a much more difficult tailoring problem.

---

Re: bar. I'd rather be asked "read any good books lately?" than told "that dress makes your boobs look good." But then I'm someone commenting on Hacker News, so that might be to be expected.

---

Re: your wife. I suspect there's a standing agreement with her regarding how you interact in terms of expressing your sexuality. I doubt you'd comment to a male coworker on how his trousers make his lower half look, but if you were married to a man, you might to him.
This story won't be around in 50 years. We think it will because when we grew up, our social flubs simply disappeared. Now they're around forever, but the important thing is they don't exist in isolation.

This story, like all the embarrassing comments I have personally published in forums across the internet, can for all intents and purposes be just as lost to time in a deluge of data as it can in a drought.

A year from now, when one searches the names of one of these founders, or the name of their company, this episode will not even appear in the first few pages of Google search results. Perhaps for a person with a sufficiently strong memory that he/she was specifically searching for this exact story, the incident could be dredged up. But for the vast majority of humanity, probably even those looking for some vague form of dirt on sqoot, the episode will have vanished.
We're not talking about "life" in any sort of universal context. Whatever 'female privilege' you can try to conjure up in general is largely irrelevant to this very specific setting: a technology profession. Is it really unobtainable to not tend towards choosing the woman to be the head of the potluck or to take notes just because she's a woman? Is it really that unobtainable to not make jokes about PMS or breasts? We're in a really sad state if it's impossible to go to work and not do those things, and a sadder one if those things are so important people will fight for the ability to do them.
Your justification of bullying and aggression is just sad.

Life isn't intrinsically fair, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying to make it so. Further, that men don't have perfect lives does not somehow imply that sexism is ok. We can end it. We will.
I was talking life partner rather than business partner but I can imagine business partners having enough after a while too.
Hi:

Since I wrote this I just want to clarify that I did not say that newspapers were the only ones in the accountability business; I intentionally said news media, which is a wide swath that also is meant to include certain bloggers and others. Newspapers do NOT have a monopoly on that.

Also, I intentionally did not include 'government related funding' in my mention of what's worth learning from public media's business model. I stressed the role of listeners and the value that public media has been able to gain from developing a reliable and meaningful RELATIONSHIP with listeners. That has taken 40 years to build.

I agree that investigative reporting is a high point and necessary one for journalism, but let's not discount the importance of day in, day out reporting that informs and accurately reflects the life, doings, role, malfeasance of institutions and people of a community. There are some impressive local blogs and sites that do an ambitious job of capturing a pretty full picture of what is going on. My hat's off to them. They need support. Reporting on scandals and forcing out the scoundrels is only one measure of the value of a good news outfit.

Newspaper ownership is a mixed bag; some owners would not know the First Amendment if it bit them. But then there is the McClatchy chain whose DC bureau did some of the most outstanding and aggressive reporting on the lead up to the Iraq War. No one paper or news organization performs well or poorly all the time. But I take the point of one poster here, I think, that a newspaper is only as good as its owners' and leaderships' commitment to independence and the role of an aggressive press.

What is killing a lot of papers -- and my op ed only touches on the mix of factors -- is high production costs, debt and relevance of these brands and forms to audiences with many other choices. The NYTimes HAS an audience, so does the WSJournal. But so does Google and Slashdot and Mashable and Gawker. The news space is crowded with a lot of value for new audiences hungry for the right mix. If you find your news sites valuable to you, then support their business model. What we need are credible, accurate and competitive news businesses.

Thank you all for the thoughtful feedback. This is the sort of debate and discussion I was hoping the oped would generate.

Finally, this crazy notion that journalism is not that hard. It is. Good journalism is very hard, demanding, damning and public. Go to a crime scene at 2AM, or into a courtroom, or try an election night and let's see how good you are at getting the story of what is going on. Only an uninformed cynic would think that ANY profession done well is 'easy.'Take a look at the LV Sun link I included - that investigation into patient deaths and suffering at local hospitals was groundbreaking work. Not at all 'easy.'

-John
There are many problems with your post. First of all, women used to be far more represented in programming than they are today, with nearly 40% of CS degrees going to women in the early to mid 80's. These rates have been declining ever since and are continuing to decline. This is not a case of "women invading the man's space" as you seem to think, this is a case of women fleeing it. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html?_r=2

Secondly, you pass off these crass remarks by male programmers as mere awkwardness from poor social outcasts. How then do you classify the same type of remarks when made by, say, construction workers to attractive passers-by? Are they merely sad social outcasts, or are they brutes for taking advantage of their social setting to harass and demean women?

Women are harassed regularly both in and out of the workplace, and the responsibility needs to be on the harasser to change their behavior, not on the harassed to "find compassion".
You don't pick Rails as the engine for powering your API simply for the asset pipeline, you pick it for all the other stuff @macaw pointed out! If you hook up Sinatra and Sprockets, you are without Rails' ORM, migrations, generators, routing, test infrastructure, plugin ecosystem, and arguably most importantly, the conventions and agility. As you pointed out, the increasingly evident separation between client side JS application and "JSON pump" server side application is useful in that you can swap out the backend far more easily once you have the always increasing performance demands, but until then don't abandon Rails. It's not worth the sacrifice of all the things above simply because it isn't as performant as something else from the get go.
Why not all the above?

You can hack up a quick library (or find one online) that will take the output of a query and output in the selected format.

Not sure what framework/language you are using but, something like this can be very easily done using PHPs inbuilt functions (ie: get from db and store in array..then output array as XML or JSON etc...).
It understandable though that years of financial pressure can take a toll on a partner.

Even worse, consider the case where your personal finances would have been great if the money had not all gone in to the business - hard for a partner not to feel resentful about not having a house, but instead having 100,000 lines of code that no one wants.
You're the one that chose to work in an environment where a coat and tie are de rigueur, and the comment about a low-cut dress had fuck-all to do with whether she was dressed professionally or not. It was verbal leering, pure and simple.
Totally off topic, but his name and my name are both pronounced the same, but different historical roots. Interesting stuff.

He's probably one of the rare people to appreciate the "but why not Owen?" question I get all the time :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eoin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%C3%B3gan_(given_name)
That's not a clear definition. If I guess what you are implying is that "big" means a top 100 site. Enterprise is not the same thing as big, at all. They may co-occur often, but they are orthogonal.

"The big sites you have worked on are comparatively small if Ruby is backing the show."

That's a big assumption. You have no idea who I am or what I've worked on. One of the sites I worked on was yellowpages.com. That's a top 1000 site, but even that doesn't tell the full story. When I was there we were serving ads for most requests to bing maps. Do you consider bing maps comparatively small?

I currently work for disney who runs espn.go.com. The person sitting next to me right now worked on espn.go.com before she transferred to my group. I can assure you that espn.go.com could easily be served with ruby instead of java.

I'm questioning a couple of specific claims made by bad_user. That all big sites use the JVM or c/c++ or .net. I think that is false, or the definition of "big" is so narrow as to be meaningless for 99.9% of programmers. I'm also questioning the claim that the best backend is the one that is the fastest. I'd argue that the best backend is the one that is fast enough and the cheapest, wouldn't you agree? As I mentioned before, I was working on an api that served requests for bing maps with a very tight SLA. We ran it on MRI ruby, and we met the SLA.

Here's something that people often forget, you can put things like varnish in front of your API. This doesn't work for everyone, but if you're API is easily cached, then you shouldn't have any problems scaling it even if you're using a language like MRI ruby which has a GIL.
IMHO the whole film IS an inception: it's planting the "wait what if MY LIFE is all a dream" idea in the viewer's mind.
For reference:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3734497
And more:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3736847

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3735996

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3736261
The silence of Mike Daisey
A female friend who worked in an office setting described it this way to me:

"I can't wear anything too revealing, because I'm perceived as easy or slutty. I can't wear anything too modest, because it makes me seem prudish or not fun. I have to find that perfect middle ground -- between professional and cute. Every single day."
It sounds like you are looking for a 'Cofounder', not a programmer.
I agree completely. I can't remember how many times I clicked a link on HN, discovered that there was nothing but a video on that page, and just closed the tab. Text is great, pictures are OK, but a video? You just added unnecessary friction. There goes your conversion rate.
Absolutely, I agree - I appreciate him expressing his opinion, as it's provoked a good discussion. However, I still disapprove of that opinion.

Also, I misread that as "censor", my mistake.
This is really cool - thanks!
I do not feed trolls.
Actually, you are paying for the content too. The content is the driver for the scarce space in a venue. Ever been to a concert bar on nights without a show? They are dead, there is no reason to be there without the music. Similarly, most people don't say "will there be a band there tonight?", they say "which band will be there tonight?", implying the music is at least as important as the fact there is a band and a bar. Putting it on the internet doesn't actually matter, many venues do that, and are sold out anyway. Being on the scene is actually important to a lot of people.

As for authors, I wasn't talking about them, and I'm not going to play strawman games with you.
It's not the same level at all. Telling a guy to stick to computers because he sucks at talking to girls in a technical industry is like telling a woman to go back to the kitchen when she's a chef.

Telling a guy to stick to computers because he sucks at talking to girls when his job is to run and promote a female-targeted wedding convention is a little closer to the mark.

As a female, getting told "stick to computers, you suck at flirting" when you're technically-inclined is a lot less offensive than "go back to the kitchen" -- not to mention that the first is a jab related to observation of an individual (presumably there isn't a stereotype that all men suck at talking to women) rather than a jab related to your chromosomes. It's exacerbated by the fact it's highlighting "something here doesn't belong with the others~...".