skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what, either the vb got edited or there's a different post you cited; I said you "proved the point", but shouldn't have personalized this, because yeah, the issue I'm talking about isn't in that post. I apologize.

Meanwhile (apropos nothing you wrote):

http://4ma.me/481/hear-that-noise-thats-violet-blue-backpeda...

The woman Violet Blue was talking about was Piroska Szurmai-Palotai, a developer for NeoPlay Entertainment.

When confronted with this fact, Violet Blue doubled down, in effect accusing the developer of acting enough like a booth babe to be called one in print.
um, read it more carefully. It's saying women are a perk, then clarifies by saying that the women in question will be the ones serving drinks.
Paraphrased:
Perks:
* women: they're there to serve drinks.

The problem is not the "(female)" bit, it was the fact that the existence of women is reported as a "perk". Because after all, women are just objects that exist to serve drinks to men.
I would think so, too, but how then, can Mac OS X and iOS 5 show emoji in color? http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#text: "A color emoji font in Unicode 6.0 lets you display emoticons"
I'll second the "not the only one" sentiment. As a child, I liked the book. As an adult, I feel it used my childish mindset and desire to feel special as tools to manipulate me into thoughtlessly accepting a dubious moral framework. As such, I think it is largely over-rated as a work through the common mechanism of idolization of what one liked as a child.

Since I can't very well read it again for the first time, I was happy to find a couple of years ago that a narrative-astute friend of mine had happened to never read it. So I encouraged him to give it a try and was extremely careful to say nothing of the ambivalence I've had for it. He summed it up as pulp designed as a preteen want-to-be-a-superhero hook with an twist about on a level with a middling Twilight Zone episode. Thus ends my anecdote.
> Generally speaking men on average will enjoy themselves a lot more if there are pretty girls around.

Sexism aside, if I'm some place where I intend to get some coding done, pretty girls in short skirts are only going to distract me.
There is a difference between "We thought it was funny. We were wrong." and "We are sorry you were offended." The former makes the person in bad taste the responsible party. The later makes the "offended" person the responsible party.

When you say "We are sorry you were offended..." many people will read in to that "...but if it weren't for you being offended there would be nothing wrong with this."

A simple choice of words can make all the difference in the world.
I cut grass for a while immediately after college, and enjoyed it thoroughly at the time. I was always in shape, had a great tan and could do the job on virtually no sleep. I read a lot of books during that time and did a lot of thinking while I was behind the lawnmower, and the best part was that my mental energy was mine to spend. If all jobs paid the same, I'd have a hard time not going back to something like that.
It's not just that women reading this flyer wouldn't be interested in showing up, it's that they are instantly reminded of how the programming world perceives them and their place in the industry. It reminds them of the sexism they've endured their entire professional careers and it reminds them of how little has changed.

"Lots of hot men serving beers" isn't a very comparable example because male programmers haven't been discriminated against (at least, not professionally). A better example would be if the flyer were changed to "lots of Mexicans serving beers" or "lots of African Americans serving beers". Wouldn't that offend you even if you were able to somehow derive how the marketing people arrived at this approach?
Paul Graham has a nice essay on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Things that are "offensive" tend to change a lot, compared to e.g. things that are "incorrect." I've found that the best mental model is that they're intellectual allergies. I wouldn't knowingly serve someone a dish he was allergic to, and I'd apologize if I did it by accident, but I wouldn't feel ashamed. And my mental model would have to a running list of common allergies, not an over-arching theory of misfiring immune system reactions.

I mean, let's try this out: can you tell me why you, personally, are offended by depictions of The Prophet? What about a picture of two men holding hands? Or an insinuation that the Pharaoh is not, in fact, a god? There's just too big a cognitive burden to reverse-engineer everybody else's cultural or intellectual allergies. I'd prefer to work around them.
And at the same time on HN there's a link to Aziz Ansari's new standup special which I can buy for $5, despite the fact that I live in 'lil old New Zealand.

Tim Cushing is right; I don't want to hear your ramblings about licensing or rights. The fact is, Aziz and Louis CK can do it; why can't the music labels?
If you would spend 5 minutes thinking instead of playing the victim, maybe you could see the rediculousness of what you're saying.

As you well know, doctor/nurse fraternization is a time-honored pursuit.

Do you live in the 50s? Do you think real life is Grey's Anatomy??? The doctor/nurse dichotomy that exists today is a result of VERY powerful, and very wrong, sexism. For decades women were relegated to the role of a nurse in a subordinate position to a doctor simply because they were women. Beyond the blatant sexism, there exists a tremendous power play where the man is in a position to dictate what a nurse does, how her career progresses, what kind of roles she gets assigned to, etc.

Unlike TV, in real life nurses don't get into the field to fuck every doctor they meet. They go into nursing because they want to save lives.
Awesome!

Any docs changes we could make to avoid others hitting the same problem?
Iss is in the wrong orbit for that.
I see what you mean, since Y Combinator is an institution now, and its selection process has an impact on the overall ecosystem. But let's say Startup A, which is top-tier, would become a $75M company with Y Combinator's help, but would become a $50M company without them. Meanwhile, Startup B, which is second-tier, would become a $3M company with Y Combinator, but would become a $30K company without them. Even if we throw profit out the window (which an investment group doesn't do, obviously), Y Combinator would add a greater total dollar value to Startup A than to Startup B, even though they would multiply the value of Startup B by 100x.

Also, elite prep schools do try to fill their classes with nothing but brilliant students, for a variety of reasons, including money and prestige. There are some negative consequences, to be sure, but it happens. At least Y Combinator increases the size of its classes every year, unlike prep schools.
It would be good news for esports. Currently due to latency game companies opt to split the world into regions and sell regionally linked copies of the game.
It's off-putting to me too, and I fall into a category of overrepresented people in the industry (straight, white, male).

The pointlessness of this "perk" is what bugs me the most. It's an API hackathon - how is it relevant to include a statement that basically says: "nothing better than hawt women bringing you beer, amirite?"

That sort of copy has the target demographic of potential Hooters customers, not programmers.
On the other hand, if you can eventually measure long-term value and you can keep track of users over a long enough cycle, then you can eventually run an A/B test on long term value. This depends on accurately tracking users, having a quantifiable way to calculate long-term value, and eliminating other sources of error, but it should be absolutely doable.

You can also measure how well your proxy stat does correspond to long-term value and adjust your expectations accordingly.
Should I give up everything to be a bus driver, a photographer, and move to a quiet town, leave the city and all of my skills and knowledge?

If you like what you do just take a less demanding job in your field.
The phrasing of the squoot apology (and other similar ones) does not take responsibility for the action. It's a non-apology. It doesn't admit that they were offensive but instead implies that it was only bad that others were offended. It's about the placement of blame on the offended party instead of taking responsibility.

GOOD: I'm sorry that I hurt you when I punched you in the face.

BAD: I'm sorry that you were hurt when I punched you in the face.

The latter distances the puncher from the hurt in an unacceptable way.
> I like looking at attractive women. I like programming ... As a man, is this my original sin?

That is not the issue.

The issue is that attempting to herd software developers with promises of attractive females is tasteless, exclusive and offensive to decent people of both genders.
The Scary Consequences of A Lost Smartphone
> To not recognize that the tech population is dominated by men is to put your head in the sand.

To not recognize that advertising tech events that female programmers do not feel comfortable attending because they do not want to be treated like subservient beer-wenches is partially responsible for the continued decline of women in the tech industry is to put your head in the sand.

That's what people are taking issue with here. No one is putting you on trial for liking to look at scantily clad women. Trying to make yourself into some kind of martyr for "finding women attractive" movement misses the point so thoroughly as to defy belief.
Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men - Goethe
Why is that? Because I can't agree with big companies pulling their sponsorship because of a mistake? They apologized - which doesn't make it ok, but hey - now pretty much no one knows or cares how much effort has gone into the hackaton event. All it matters now is that they made a mistake.

So the whole industry is giving the message: Your effort is totally worthless (and unnoticed) if you make mistakes that offend someone.
Definitely will do. Thanks.
"What the hell are you talking about? Medical doctors are not..."

He is talking about the past, as indicated by his use of grammatical tense: "Medical doctors have been mostly men..."
A good solution for them would be doing an email confirmation before charging someone's card.
Those are weasel words, non-apologies that only confirm the notion that the people who wrote this are actually sexist a-holes.

It's an underhanded way of blaming the people that are offended rather than genuinely apologizing for doing something offensive.

"We realize this was wrong and offensive, and we are very sorry" would have been sufficient. No groveling needed. Instead, they chose to blame the offended parties and preface their "apology" with lame excuses.

It's neither genuine nor an apology.
I'd love if you exposed them. You may consider, however, how that could damage your career down the road.
Would be nice to get an idea of the fee structure, if any, for successful matchups (even if you're free during your beta).

Design of the splash is great, though your intelligent matching icon with its glowing eyes reminds me of certain religious imagery you may not want to convey; rotating it 36 degrees would fix that.
Ah.... different article. That one about the Saddest Booth Babe in the world is from 2 weeks after the one I posted. I'll stick by that point that Blue isn't much of a journalist, but I still don't think it overly detracts from what she said in the earlier article about booth babes being a degrading practice.
If a company can only succeed by getting funding though YC, they should not fund it, in my opinion. I don't think those founders are ready yet to start a startup.
There's a huge difference between "we're sorry for our offensive behavior" and "we're sorry you were offended by our behavior."

The first admits you've done something legitimately wrong; the second only says that others were offended, perhaps illegitimately, and that wasn't your intent. The first is sorry for the action; the second, the reaction.

In this particular case, all they have to do is say "We're sorry - we were being sexist. We've removed the sexist language and we won't do it again." If they want to clarify, they could say they were being unthinkingly, not deliberately sexist, which is almost surely the case.
> Generally speaking men on average will enjoy themselves a lot more if there are pretty girls around.

And I wouldn't argue with that. In the short time I was in Japan I blew I don't even want to think about it levels of money on hostess bars and just about all the other sort of fun you can imagine.

But really, there's a time and a place for that sort of thing and a hackday/tech-conference just isn't it.

> The problem is that what is a perk targetting 90% of the target demographic and appeals to probably 85% of those, happens to be off-putting to minorities some want to attract into the industry.

I'm in an ethnic minority for the industry and I simply do not care about attracting minorities. What I do care about is the mountains of gold in them there hills that are ready for the plundering when we learn how to start selling software to women. Having female engineers will probably help with that.
I see "disruption" as either removing middlemen (disrupting supply chain) or changing consumer expectations in a market. Adding a middleman in the supply chain isn't disruption so much as making it more efficient for producers to reach consumers.
You just described middlemen in general and didn't explain how these music publishing middlemen still add value.
This is great and I fully applaud him for this. But when I go, I won't be coming back http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay
All they need is to bring back the clickable Google logo for getting back to the Inbox.
Comics Are Now Selling Laughs by the Download
Guy in a polo shirt talking about "chicks": Garden-variety moron.

Guy in a C++ shirt talking about "chicks": Representative of the RAMPANT MISOGYNY in our industry.
So, the tech industry is dominated by men, and this announcement was intended for the tech industry, so it's fine by you that it was addressed exclusively to men? It's OK that any techy woman reading it might stay clear so that they are not mistaken for being a server and/or don't have to put up with sexism like this?

In what other situations do you not feel that the minority do not have rights?
Cassini sees Saturn stressing out Enceladus
It's pretty easy to run an instance for a few minutes while you rsync the whole thing wherever you want. We used AMIs mostly because we ran the CTF itself in AWS and didn't have a great place to store the images otherwise.
You clearly have not experienced discrimination before. It's not just the act of being discriminated against, it's the memories that it invokes and the reminder of how little has changed.
Combined with the sentiment about nursing and status, that's not remotely the message I took away from that paragraph. I'm happy to agree to disagree with you about this, because that's not what I think he wrote.
So? It's not hurting anyone. You know, there is a difference between an ad for a geek event that no one cares about and a woman not getting a job because she's a woman. These are not the same things.
Upvoted. And I just wanted to give some encouragement. It's become commonplace here to get downvoted not because you're belligerent or off-topic, but simply because you hold an opposing viewpoint. Please don't let that discourage you from participating in conversations here.
I can understand email validation for a service like PayPal or Yammer where money or access is truly tied to an email address. But it seems like there are a lot of service that validate email addresses unnecessarily (and could thus improve rates by 100%). If Kicksend only sends documents to email accounts then it would be one of the latter. If it actually makes docs available in an account, then, yes, it would need to verify.
I like to call this the "work theater" factor. Some people like to be able to see the work "being done." A large office stuffed with people makes the company seem more "real."

To that end, the (preferably open-plan) office is a set designed to demonstrate that "work is being done here" and everyone required to arrive at 9:00AM to type into their company provided computers during normal business hours are extras on the set.
You're sarcastic but I think we should be far more ravenous to go after them. Why defend, what purpose does it serve? Sure there is this anti-political-correct strain that is popular but this is just not acceptable.

Honestly, for me, it's not even about women. For me, I don't want my industry to be known as this "brogrammer" nonsense or just so completely sexist that it just shocks normal sensibilities. Even if there were no women in computing and there never would be, I don't think we want to be seen as being so openly ridiculous on this kind of stuff. We're supposed so forward thinking technologically but in the cultural sense we are stuck in the Mad Men days. It's sad.
Seesmic is dead? How come we aren't hearing about this?
"Do you have sources to back that up?"

Interesting article here covering sex (not gender) gap: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/programming-and-development...

...and then there's the actual BLS stats here (ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat11.txt) which suggest something like 20% females in the workforce.

In the game industry, at least as of the IGDA survey in '05, we see something like 92% identify as straight (http://archives.igda.org/diversity/IGDA_DeveloperDemographic...).

So, we could back-of-the-envelope that perhaps a figure of 75% is reasonable, and 85% is not absurd as a guesstimate if you don't fact check.
Here's more coverage: http://bostinno.com/2012/03/20/boston-api-jam-publishes-even...

The organizers' apology is:

"While we thought this was a fun, harmless comment poking fun at the fact that hack-a-thons are typically male-dominated, others were offended. That was not our intention and thus we changed it."

Which completely misses the fact that the other items on the announcement seem to be written by a 11 year old or someone after downing quite a few beers.

Here's the point though: Getting super worked up about this idiocy and saying "THIS is why there are few women in tech", as some tweeters did, is not constructive either and trivializes the problem of women (and minorities) in tech.
When I got to this thread the top comment (by ellyagg) 100% missed the point. He seemed to think people were upset by the idea of sexuality, or offended that a man might be attracted to a woman.

Sexuality or sexual orientation is not the issue. The commodification of women is the issue. When you list "Women!" as a feature of your event along with "Booze", "Gym Access", and "Food Truck" wares [1], you are treating them as commodities/paid for services like, well, booze, gym access, and food trucks wares. The unfortunate juxtaposition of "massages" and "women" in their list of perks makes the whole thing more unseemly (moreso than they probably intended).

Imagine you are a new female developer in Boston, and you're considering coming to this API jam, and you see that they are promising "women" to people who sign up to come.* Well, now you have to determine a) whether the organizers will see/treat you as a professional and not just a treat to dangle in front of lonely male nerds and b) whether others attendees have certain "expectations" about your reason for coming, based on what they were promised in the event promotion. This is bad. I won't speculate as to whether or not that would prevent anyone from coming, the fact that these considerations would even exist are unacceptable.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/HNdWg.jpg
*I know this opens my argument up to "well I'm a woman and I don't see it that way" but please note that the assertion that follows doesn't claim any particular person would react this way but that such a reaction is reasonable/likely.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ve always thought JSON2’s approach of adding all kinds of stuff to built-in objects was a dumb idea for such an important piece of infrastructure code. I’ve been tempted on occasion to write my own JSON codec. I’m glad they tested to make sure it works on every browser of the last 6-7 years: it means JSON3 can pretty much be dropped in and forgotten about for any project.

Unrelated: their readme reveals a bug in github’s markdown implementation. The bold is not properly applied in the following example:

- **`String.prototype` Methods**: `indexOf`, `charAt`, `slice`.
I am a man and feel insulted, the implication that I would go to a hackday to ogle at women is insulting to me.

Not all heterosexual males that are interested by such events are undersexed hormone bombs that care more about women than about actually building cool stuff.

I find this sort of behavior insulting to our trade.
I actually used a home-made framework that I have been kludging together since my first app, BridgeBasher. Back then, Cocos2D and Unity3D weren't as awesome as they are today. It worked out well though, having my own framework really lets me dig into the nuts and bolts and change any aspect that I need.

I have an email list of about 80k subscribers that I've accumulated from my other apps. About 28% have opened, and about 25% of those who opened actually clicked the link.

Yesterday I clocked 3879 downloads and landed at #52 in the charts. I'm not sure how many downloads I've gotten today.

I decided on the $0.99 price point because of the large e-mail list.
I totally hear you. The jQuery plugin actually wraps Kicksend.mailcheck, so it's easily decoupled (do fork it!). Since its main use would be on the client side, we released as a plugin for the ease of adoption.
Sure, you're not the only one who doesn't have a problem with that, but quite a lot of those efforts were company-wide. It does make sense for consultants who are out of the office 90% of the time anyway. Why keep N offices for N people then?

Your point about "everything belongs to the company anyway" is basically the gist of it: If you're shuffled around too often, you yourself might feel like company property. I would say that this is true for the majority of people, just like most of them are prone to "homesteading". The nesting instinct is quite primal…
(And in relation to the original point of this thread, familiar, interruption-less environments make it easier for most people to focus.)

One additional annoying point is the reason for this: Basically you've got two, either the one I mentioned above, where you've got a lot of empty offices due to consultants not in at all, or the company wants to turn everyone into in-house consultants. No fixed teams, quickly adding two new co-workers to a late project - we all know how well that works. Or one of the worst sins: Taking you out of your team because your job is done there for now, and instead of just idling along they'll just add you to another department, whether they need help or not.

Cost saving without mercy and regard to basic human nature. One might argue that it could work if you restrict yourself to those with a suitable psychological profile, but I bet this will only result in false "nomads" who are just trying to act that way to avoid losing a job (or to get it in the first place).
Jon Stewart had a rant on this not to long ago as Fox News tried to apologize for Rush Limbaugh's comments as "he's just an entertainer".

His statement was that there are repercussions to comedy no one gets to hide behind that the thin veil and say whatever they like without consequence.

Here's what I expect from these guys. Man up, take your licks and don't do it again.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-march-13-2012/the-vulg...

Its a relevant diatribe
A prank? It was a rather bad prank. Not in just in the political correct sense but in the "comedy" sense. It's awkward and weird; it's not funny.