skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that proves much. Conditions in Gaza are bad, and most Jews don't have any reason to go there.
Famous people draw crowds.

Also, famous people use these conferences to talk about new interesting stuff that has not been revealed before.

Also, discussing stuff with famous people one on one is much more interesting than doing it on a mailing list.
Teens in Israel have to serve in the military. It is mandatory. What exactly is your point?
The IDF sends down pamphlets hours before doing a raid on an area. That's a decent lead time for a heads up. The IDF also doesn't aim for innocent civilians, which are the target of Hamas.

The innocent deaths are a tragedy on both sides. However, only one side aims to kill civilians. Intent matters. There is a difference.
"It's tricky. I know most of the people involved on both sides and you may be surprised to learn almost all of them are decent, every day people, and not brogrammers, militant feminists, or typical 'argument on Twitter' types."

But the net result is loss of coding/development related activity in Manchester, sponsor getting wet feet, loss of credibility for future events &c Seems a shame.

Note for US readers: UK is small island(s) and most of the fun stuff happens in London (my perception).
That's not what they're saying.

What they're saying is: "We reached out to the best, and it turns out that the ones who accepted our offer were white males. People complained about that; but we don't want to go out of our way to find a non white male just to tick a box".
I'm still a teen and this I made at home...
Meanwhile, Windows 8 sold 4 million upgrades in four days. And surpassed Android in web traffic in just 10 days. So much for the post-PC world.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/30/3576512/windows-8-upgrade...

http://www.techspot.com/news/50745-statcounter-data-says-win...
I've started thinking about all those banks [1] and other pages serving like/tweet buttons on the login page.

Or pages including Google Analytics. If the described behaviors really take place, given the massive scale of deployment of Google Analytics, Statcounter, FB buttons, jQuery includes from CDNs, you should be able to do arbitrary JS injections to a non-trivial number of users (though very random).

[1] http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/2012/05/11/social-media-ba...
You say, "take with a grain of salt". I'd say, "enjoy the seasoning provided by Gassee's decades of relevant industry experience".
> They have hours. Israel frequently text-messages civilians and asks them to vacate the area.

Can you provide a reference for this claim?
This is the beginnings of a wrapper around various windowing Apis to create a Window class https://github.com/Benvie/node-Windows/blob/master/Window.js

This is the beginnings of a windows registry library
https://github.com/Benvie/node-winreg

This is an example of creating a windowless event loop in order to create a low level keyboard/mouse hook https://github.com/Benvie/node-Windows/blob/master/input.js
They clearly didn't say that they rejected non-white males because it would be tokenism. They said they accepted the most qualified speakers based on content and irrespective of race or gender. They weren't making a political statement by having a nearly-all-white-male lineup.

Either way, being offended isn't an argument.
The issue is quite difficult so I will put in "believe" in here: I believe one of the problems with peace treaties with the Palestinians is that they do not accept Israel as a state. Feel free to correct me.
Wow, you should read some news.

Palestinian medics: At least 11 civilians killed in Israeli airstrike in ...
Minneapolis Star Tribune-1 hour ago
At least 10 civilians killed in Israeli airstrike, Palestinian officials say
Fox News-3 hours ago
5 women, 4 children killed in Gaza strike
International
-Ynetnews-1 hour ago
Yep, better title on Slashdot: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/11/18/0619247/new-malware-...
"This is really well made propaganda to portray Israelis as victims. They are not victims."

Why can't both sides be victims?

I don't really equate Israel and Hamas (and think it's a mistake to do so), but I certainly believe there are plenty of victims on both sides of this.

"I personally support human rights and religious freedom."

Many people do, on both 'sides' of this issue. And most of them are not evil or stupid, so you should consider whether stating so really accomplishes anything.
Some facts:

1. IDF has dropped leaflets in general areas that are to be attacked
2. IDF is calling the houses in building that need to be attacked because of stashed ammo etc.
3. IDF just now fired warning shots (no harm done) near homes.

If people are still there, it's usually because Hamas is holding them hostages as human shields, as Hamas is bound to do.

Also, IDF NEVER intends to harm civilians. As an Israeli I'm deeply sorry to see casualties, but I know there is no army that does so much to prevent it, and certainly when the enemy is boasting injuring civilians (Official Hamas tweet from earlier today https://t.co/jpB5SHWJ )
One of the best reactions to the Sinofsky departure I've seen has been from Jim Fallows at the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/the-wh...
I like what you're doing with lifeunderfire.com. I wonder if the other side gets a 15 seconds heads up too.
I used the title I did to avoid confusion, assuming someone already submitted a news story on the subject. I wanted to make it clear this was about the story, but not a blogspammy retelling of it.

I don't mind the edit, but I don't know that it was needed.
I don't think any conference should be allowed to have proceed without a single black person, Eskimo, female or badger on the speak list.

Here are a few shows that were also not diverse enough for my liking:
London Boat show - too many white males
http://www.londonboatshow.com/2013/whats_on/attractions__eve...

British Educational Training and Technology Show - not a single person with a double barrel name :(
http://www.bettshow.com/Conferences-Features

The baby show - only females speaking. This is COMPLETELY unacceptable. This show should NOT go ahead. Refunds all around
http://www.thebabyshow.co.uk/excel/new-parent/for-baby

Professional Beauty- not enough males
http://www.professionalbeauty.co.uk/page.cfm/Link=149/nocach...

/sarcasm
I still don't understand - Israel and its citizens claim that Gaza is the aggressor.

While the civilian casualties are much higher on Palestinian side. And while it's Israel who blocks shipping goods and humanitarian aid to Gaza.
My 100 Days of Rejection Therapy
It's rather clear through their actions and words that the organizers didn't have the goal of diversity when choosing the speakers. That was their mistake.

No, that doesn't make them sexist pigs. But that's a pretty serious oversight to make for the people who are curating a Ruby conference for England in the year 2012. Their sponsors are right to pull out for such an error.
Ask HN: A service to process hundreds of checks?
Hello fellas,

I've this interesting question. My company accepts payments via checks also and recently we've started getting an increase of number of users who prefer to pay by check. As a result we've about 340 checks to process this month. I've been doing it manually at ATM and it sometimes takes me two full days to deposit all checks one by one.

Therefore my question - does anyone know a service that would automatically process checks for me?
Far less offensive than including a speaker who isn't white male simply because they aren't white male.

This isn't clear cut, or black and white, it's hovering somewhere in the grey in between, in all honesty, if you were a minority would you rather be told "we were told we had to get a middle aged, homosexual black woman because we have a bunch of racial and sexual checkboxes we need filling or we can't go ahead"?

In this case the only options left to the people running the event were cave under the ridiculous pressure put towards them or press ahead and get a load of bad publicity and branded as racist, sexist ass holes instead.

It's all well and good to promote equality but when it falls on the other shoe and it's doing it for doing it's sake instead of actually trying to make a positive effect, what you end up with is everyone feeling uncomfortable and putting them in such a poor position that this event (that I'm sure as hell people of all ages, races and genders would have attended) got cancelled is downright wrong and actually shows one of the nastier sides of promoting equality, which is when it digresses in to mindless anarchical bitchyness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_aid

I'm not a huge fan of foreign aid, but if you're going to give money, at least give it to a country that shares our values and has a transparent democratic process for electing government. Outside of Poland, Israel is the only country that qualifies on that list.
Consumers are so stupid. Do you really have such little sense of self worth that you'll let yourself be scammed like that?
Please take your propaganda elsewhere. HN is not the place for it.
Just reason not to go: they'd get badly hurt or murdered if they even made it in.

"Hamas says that if only Jews still were in Gaza, it would be able to stage peaceful protests. Without them, the only choice is violence." http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/151386

Okay, so Jews should go in now.
Why is the Ruby community addicted to drama?

http://rubydramas.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/20080102040259/http://www.zedshaw...

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487963

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetargon/127984254/

It feels like an abusive relationship.
What's your criteria for "better"?
revolutionary

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
To play devil's advocate for a moment--would you rather go to a conference with diversity as its goal, or one with quality speaking?

(And I'm not suggesting either is the worse choice, or that they are mutually exclusive!)
Gassee is the only executive I know who will actually try something before talking about it. It's evident that he reports on his personal experience with products and software before writing about those. He walked to the Stanford shopping center store to buy a copy (I did too and got similar experience.) See his previous post on iOS maps with hands-on feedback. I like his witty somewhat cynical (French?) writing style too. It reminds me of 'Mac the Knife' column on MacWeek (Gassee's period at Apple). It makes me smile.
It's worth to note though, that music bought on iTunes Music store doesn't contain DRM anymore. It used to, but now it's all DRM-free.
Israeli teen pulls HN propaganda post
Recently a link was posted to a web page that showed a clock and sounds of Israeli air-raid sirens.

http://lifeunderfire.com/

killed thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801262

When the thread discussion brought up Palestinian perspectives, the post was deleted.

http://benjaminlang.com/about-2/
Who is going to tell you how it went from 2 or 3? The TSA? That would be certainly unbiased.

The fact is that he was arrested for having a wierd outfit. If somebody believes that this guy who has been an artist for many years, flies a lot and registered his domain in 1995 is a actually a terrorist they are delusional and shouldn't be in charge of any kind of law enforcement.
Were they using a speaker selection system designed to try and increase equality in the line up like for example JSConf EU have in the past?

http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got...
>It's rather clear through their actions and words that the organizers didn't have the goal of diversity when choosing the speakers. That was their mistake.

Why is diversity a noble goal in choosing speakers? Like he said, would it have been better to choose 90% of their desired lineup and then seek to fill the remaining 10% with minority speakers just for the sake of diversity?
Poor cache utilization on traditional shared memory arch when passing data (packet) from core to core. I wonder if, while going down this road, they made sure key structures were cache-aligned.

Flow affinity, locking "streams" to cores, is the way to go. Relevant linux kernel support: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git...
Here was my response to the original post:

This is really well made propaganda to portray Israelis as victims. They are not victims. The world needs to pressure Israel to end their special brand of apartheid. Some may say the Palestinians have their own state so it isn't apartheid. But they do not have a state in the normal sense of the word. For example, Israel dictates what planes and ships can land.

I personally support human rights and religious freedom.
TL;DR "kicking up a shitstorm on Twitter these days is easy"
A commenter on the OP said:

> This is awful. The accusations are a disgrace. Have considered suing for libel?

This may be actionable on Brit soil where libel laws are tougher, but not as likely in the U.S., which is a good thing. As far as I can tell from the OP, the circumstances were:

1. The lineup was indeed all white and male
2. People alleged that the organizers of being racist and sexist.

The OP used the word "allegations"...and if every allegation based on the reading of the facts were grounds for libel, then most of HN discussion would be shut down.

(Think about every time Zynga, Groupon, or even Apple, is discussed.)

It's disconcerting to see the hacker community so blithely call for the courts to step in when freedom of expression infringes upon their viewpoint.
Diversity is a problem in all of computing; to make it out that it is solely the problem of conference organizers is to miss the point and to over-concentrate the blame.
Such self righteousness. The only reason Israel attacks military targets in Gaza is because it has to defend itself. There is no point in getting into a "who started it first" argument.

It baffles me that the world is so ignorant towards the fact that Israel has been tolerant to decades of daily attack from Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

No one protests, no one shouts, nothing. But the moment Israel decides to defend itself it becomes the target of demonizing propaganda (for example: the picture of the injured Israeli baby, with a caption that says it is a Palestinian baby injured by the IDF. Or the picture of the dead Syrian child, with the same caption).

Israeli citizens ARE victims. Who are you to say they're not? They are not the only victims - war is messy and full of mistakes, but the IDF does everything in its power to not hurt innocent Gaza civillians (phone calls, pamphlets, canceling attacks altogether, etc.)

I also find it interesting that many started calling Hamas terrorists Hamas "militants". It's like someone would start calling terrorists Al Qaeda militants and scold the U.S. for defending itself. Hamas is a terrorist organization and it always has been. Back in 2004 it even recognized itself as such.

My point is - who are you to say that Israelis are not victims? I bet you're sitting very comfortable very far away from any missiles while you type these void remarks. Israel has a right to defend itself.
Indeed, I have been enjoying DuckDuckGo's zero-click results for over a year now :)
Is it brash to suggest that maybe those "8 white guys" actually did have the most merit out of all candidate speakers, and that you would have done the conference a disservice by bumping one of them for someone else, based on sex or gender alone?

Whatever racial or gender or economic biases might exist that influence the shape of the global developer community, these need to be addressed at the source: in kids' youth when many programmers take on computers as their lifelong obsession, or in high school curricula and college programs.

The conference organizer's job, as it pertains to race and gender bias, is to provide a neutral selection process that chooses the best speakers on their own merits. Their job is not to diminish the quality of the conference by imposing their own, nobly intended but horribly misguided, form of bias on the candidates. More than hurting just the conference or the candidates, I fear that this can have serious unintended consequences relating to public perception of the quality of e.g. female programmers, in the same way that "affirmative action" does on college campuses.
Also built Iron Dome Count

https://www.facebook.com/IronDomeCount

https://twitter.com/irondomecount
Given that the entire principle of asymmetric warfware, of which "terrorism" is an element, is based on attacking the enemy where they are weakest, the TSA effectively serves no function. If the enemy reinforces security at one location, attack another. It's a fact that you can't protect all locations all the time. There will always be weak spots.

Right now the weak spot is you usually have thousands of people hanging around outside the security gates waiting to get screened. Maybe they should have a pre-screening area for screening people who want to go into the screening line to make sure they're not going to do any terrorism!

If the TSA was disbanded, and instead a Keyser Söze-style response was instituted, where every week a random plane was blown up, the number of casualties would still be vastly lower than the number of people killed in vehicular accidents in the United States alone. Even with this absurd "lottery", air travel would still be safer than most other forms of transportation.

The thing is, air travel is largely safe even with infrequent and devastating incidents.

Reasonable security measures should obviously be employed, but the things they're looking for are not the real dangers.

For instance, if nail clippers pose a threat to the plane, then surely any of a hundred items in the aircraft itself are just as dangerous.

There are thousands of ways to bring down an aircraft and the TSA tests for, at best, a few dozen. It's like fencing off the drive-way of a high-security facility and leaving the rest open.

Motivated individuals will find a way around your security theatre. Meanwhile millions of travellers just trying to go about their business will be terrorized by the absurd TSA screening procedures that make almost anything seem suspicious and criminal.

"Why are you bringing an unusual amount of baby formula?" Arrest that lady with a baby who has an allergic reaction to other kinds of formula!

The FBI, by contrast, has uncovered and disrupted actual attacks because they use an entirely different approach. They try to discover the plan long before it ever reaches the airport.

That's what you should do to eliminate these 0.00001% type events.
I really thought about going to the US many times. Stuff like this makes me stay home in Europe or travel to other continents.
Both quality and diversity of speakers should be goals when curating a tech conference. And I think it's quite achievable, and has been achieved. Here's one example, just to the north:

http://programme.scottishrubyconference.com/schedule
Ignorance must be bliss, there is no religious freedom in Gaza under Hamas.Whereas Gay pride marches, Christian churches, Muslim Judges and Parliament members in Israel, Druze villages in Israel, Muslims and Druze serve proudly in the IDF. The missiles being fired on Israel of greater range are smuggled in from Iran and hidden under mosques, schools and hospitals. Israel drops pamphlets, SMS's, uses radio and TV to warn citizens of Gaza hours before any airstrike. Oh and as for US aid well not one weapon supplied doesn't rely on Israeli technology (but all are made in concert with Israel keeping those jobs in America), not unlike the medical tech, supplies, food and electricity supplied to Gaza. Israel chose to build Iron Dome over US CWIS technology so as not to endanger Gaza residents with automated 22mm Vulcan cannon. All this at a greater cost to Israeli life and economy, why? Because Israel values life and unlike Hamas will never use human shields be they Gazan residents, foreign journalists or diplomats. It's sad how misinformed and sold on Hamas terror propaganda so many otherwise bright people on this list are. Wake up and smell the coffee.
Why can't the goal just be to get the best speakers available? They know what their local community is most interested in and I assume would be inviting speakers based on that, not any type of racist or sexist agenda.
too bad scroll gestures on a touchpad are rather inaccurate on some laptops.
I'd suggest a kickstarter project for this. That way nobody is out any money until the conference is a fact. Conference goers would be given their ticket as a pay-off for sponsoring the project.

Assuming that kickstarter would allow a construction like that.
Indeed, that was a bit on the trollish side. I'd better go back to coding something myself.
The fourth state of matter
I was trying to make it clear that discussing the future of OpenBSD as a function of how much upstream support for Desktop Performance it has, it as meaningful as discussing the future of Cisco IOS as a function of how many video cards it supports. Not meaningful at all.
I can't fathom any definition of trolling that would include any of the comments that John Susser made about this issue (there's a grand total of 6 of them).

I have no doubts that once the ball got rolling, people were quick to throw around all kinds of accusations of sexism and racism (which to be fair, I don't think characterizes the Brit Ruby organizers at all.)

Pointing out that an otherwise interesting conference is less interesting because of a lack of diversity of the speakers isn't trolling.
> And while it's Israel who blocks shipping goods and humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Actually, those aren't blocked. Well, unless you consider missiles to be humanitarian aid.

Should they just let Iran ship weapons into Gaza to be used against Israeli civilians?
The act of organizing a conference makes one a leader for their technical community. We all know we have a diversity problem. And conference organizers are responsible for helping address that problem. Leaders should lead.
It's not clear at all that diversity wasn't one of their goals when choosing speakers. It is clear that diversity wasn't their primary goal, and considering that this is a conference about technology, and not a conference about diversity; I'm not sure, as are many others, why anyone would consider it relevant.
I'm sure most people won't like what I've said. I'm a pragmatist. Idealism is great and I get the sentiment but in the end we're just not living in the world as it "should be", we live in the world as it is.

That's a very depressing way of looking at things. :(
This probably includes port scans and such as well
I cloned a Letterpress app in Web
still simple, lacking lock tiles.
> I'd rather see people calling MOOCs 70% and flogging them towards figuring out how to provide the remaining 30% than sit around praising their 70% and being contented with that.

Praising progress and providing constructive criticism need not be mutually exclusive.

> community colleges,

Show me a community college course on computer science that's better than or equal to the least of these:

https://www.coursera.org/category/cs-theory

> scholarships, federal grants, state grants

Affording tuition is not the only constraint that limits people from attending a traditional university.
Found a good interview with the founders: http://outsourcedvideomarketing.com/fiplab/
To be sure, they don't say who they reached out to.
Maybe they should use double blind revision to select their talks..
Unfortunately, I can't read the buttons - can you offer an English version of those?
Oh. Well if "usability professionals" have offered opinions, it must be settled, right? They are the authorities on OS business models.