skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is going to be a long reply. I hope people take the time to read it before responding, because this issue comes up a lot in many walks of life, and there's no easy answer.

I spend some of my free time doing international recruitment for my alma matter. One question I get asked occasionally is about affirmative action, which is effectively what we're talking about here. To be honest, I don't find the post-mortem being linked to particularly productive or helpful: if anything, it shows a lack of empathy:

> "It doesn't matter who speaks at a conference, as long as they're capable, interesting and relevant. That's what matters: content, not style"

This is a frequently made argument against affirmative action. It's based upon the assumption that the only purpose of college (or, in this case, a conference) is to learn. However, that's not true. Conferences provide social opportunities, and a chance to interact with your peer group. Some people argue conferences are primarily networking opportunities first, learning second.

Because of this, you ideally want to attract as wide a group as possible. Organizers can attract this wide base by providing a diverse group of speakers.

There have been in the past several posts here on HN about women being treated very badly at conferences. We know that sexism (and racism) can and does happen. Ensuring that your conference audience is diverse can help mitigate this. To have a diverse audience you need to consider what barriers might exist: perhaps an all-male caucasian panel is one such barrier.

> "Turns out, a lot of the famous Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys."

This may well be true. But perhaps the pool of speakers was rather self selecting. Colleges like the one I went to spend a considerable amount of time and money actively engaging with minority groups, because those minorities might not otherwise consider applying. The same is true for conferences.

If you're organising a conference, or any public event, you need to be aware of these. In the UK you're required by law to have a disability access policy for your public event: why not spend the time to put together a diversity policy as well?

This whole situation is very sad. I don't think the conference should have been cancelled. People could have approached the organisers with their concerns in private first - it doesn't look as if this happened. Stuff snowballs on Twitter. Nobody comes out smelling of roses here.

However, it does also seem that the conference organisers didn't give particular thought to diversity at their event. The bottom line is these are very sensitive issues. There is no right answer. This sounds like a cop out, but it's true: if affirmative action has taught us anything it's that somebody will be unhappy with whatever approach you take. That somebody may not always be morally or ethically right, but they will be vocal.
I wish you couldn't sue anyone for anything they say or any information they distribute. May it be a bullshit opinion or nuclear launch codes.
Free speech is under attack enough. We don't need to start suing people because they voice their potentially oversensitive concerns about equality. If that happens, we soon won't be able to say anything without fear of being suit!
Why should that have been their goal? This isn't a conference about racial issues or gender issues.

Should they have also made it a goal to include a token gay speaker? But then they're discriminating against people who don't fit into the standard classification of gay and straight!

There's no reason it should be a goal of a conference organizer to have a diverse collection of speakers, just to put on display how not-racist and how not-sexist they are. They should of course not discriminate against a speaker for those things, but to make it a goal to seek out diversity is perverse.
Your first point is dead on, although I'm lazy and just go to XOCO in terminal 1 most of the time ...

I think, perhaps, you interpreted him differently than I did on your other points:

2. I don't think he's talking about paternalism, I think he's talking about dealing with very intense, private insecurity about the state of a company. There is something not quite unlike doom facing company nearly every day, and it's incredibly hard to filter actual uncertainties that companies should account for. It's important to be both transparent and conservative with negativity, but not for paternalistic reasons.

3. There's not a special type of person that handles stress better, exactly, there's a special type of stress that comes with trying to start/run a company. And it's not really worth it if you're thinking in pure outcome based terms. As an example, I picked my family up (we have 4 kids) and moved them cross country in August because it seemed like the best decision for my company. It was an excruciating choice in a way that a normal, career based moves haven't been. I suspect anyone could have handled that flavor of stress since I'm not uniquely stress resilient.

x. I think intense word choice can occasionally reflect the intensity of what you're talking about in a way that forced mildness undermines. So why not?
Don't put words in my mouth. I do not agree with that at all.

A lot of words that say nothing? What kind of argument is that?

Israel has tried to make peace with the Palestinians for years. It never worked out. Do you even know how this "so called" occupation started?

The day after Israel declared independence, it was attacked by all its neighboring countries and somehow won. That is how these territories became a part of Israel.

Israel is a democracy. That is correct.
The citizens are responsible for what their government does. That is arguable.
But if what the government does is defend its citizens, then I'm sure that all would be more than happy to have it continue be that way.

Here are some links and pictures that you may find... educating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuN2oGdnwHI
https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/553696_101512570...
I will give you one thing: euphemism is an artform. :-)
Well, the guy is an artist. If he wanted to be unusual, he's doing it right.
The technical community has a diversity problem, but they are a victim of the problem, not the cause of it. Even when I was 13 years old, girls were choosing to not engage in technical subjects - my 7th grade elective programming course had 23 males and 1 female.

Are you going to blame the technical community because 13 year old girls don't like it?
Lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions (updated)
Google’s Master Plan: Control The Infrastructure
If there is one thing I don't like it is exactly that follow ups are so rare.

The 'whatever happened with 'x'?' feeling is something I have quite frequently and most of the time other than the initial burst of coverage there usually is nothing afterwards to indicate how the whole thing ended.

Depending on how strong you feel about a subject that can be quite irritating.
"Oh ok, you called us out on minorities / women / just about anyone who isn't white not being in the lineup? FINE, no one gets to go to Disneyland now, the conference is cancelled."
Been there done that. When I switched I wasted a great deal of time turning Vim into a TextMate clone with more than 40 freaking plugins and a miles long vimrc with dozens of insert-mode mappings.

Until I had to use a bare Vim on a remote Linux box. Luckily I knew enough basic stuff to get the job done but boy was it a slow, painful, eye opening and "life changing" experience!

The "life changing" part was of course when I thrashed my ~/.vim directory and wiped out my ~/.vimrc.

Now, I run with 13 or so carefully chosen plugins (which I find too much, some times) and my own sane vimrc where everything has its purpose. And I'm perfectly able to use a bare Vim without breaking a sweat.
I know of two interesting data points here, actually. In the state of Maine, there were 3 programs which allowed high school students to simulate the state government (write bills, hold committee hearings, etc).

Boys State / Girls State: Open to the two best students from each high school in the state. Had a reputation for being incredibly boring, largely because there were few differences of opinion.

Model State: Open to any student who wanted to come. This featured intense debates and was generally awesome.

Similarly, the best programming conference I ever attended was Lightweight Languages 1 at MIT. There were about 30 attendees who worked on major open source programming languages and on academic research languages. The Perl people and the Python people and the Scheme researchers got into some really intense and amazing debates, because they came from intellectually diverse backgrounds.

Given these experiences, I actually favor diversity of opinions and backgrounds over speaking ability. Of course, I'd rather have both.
I have discovered popcornjs just 2 days ago and yes, presentz seems to me too a less capable popcornjs.
they grew independently and do things differently.
It would be nice to see presentz.js plugins merged into popcornjs
Thanks for flagging this for us. Can't replicate the error at the moment, but will take jQueryIsAwesome's advice. Meantime, if you get a sec please send a screenshot?
"Time of Death" is a little deceptive here - I was expecting the article to pinpoint a year, not a time of day!
I agree with the "it took 3 hours to install RVM". Ruby was by far the most time consuming for me to install and get started with. It didn't take 3 hours, but it was way longer than Go, node.js, Python, D, Dart, Haskell, etc., and I did most of these before I installed Ruby...

I don't understand all the Ruby hype out there...
Counter-devil's advocate: Yeah! Let's have a real conference, not one with all those minorities-who-aren't-very-good-at-ruby...

This sounds remarkably similar to "women are too hysterical to vote", doesn't it?
Hah! No users have asked for this yet, but if you can think of features you'd like that would make this super easy, we'll build em. :)
Toro: synchronization primitives for Tornado coroutines
Thanks, I hadn't considered that, and it's a good point.

Although perhaps I'm an oddity: I rarely see myself as among the speakers so I don't look at them as a guide. Also, I've been to "gender-equal" conferences where almost the only women there were speakers. So speakers != audience
Actually, your idea of racism is precisely inverted. Racism isn't just about calling people names and hurting their feelings, racism also includes a systemic exclusion of a group. And if we end up with 100% white guys time and time again that is racism, again, whether you like it or not.

Selecting qualified underrepresented people would not be racist or sexist. Ending up with white men all the time would be. And we should throw these labels around, this is something that should be discussed and addressed in variety of ways.
There are many types of entrepreneurs but we could define a two major groups - those who are seeking a niche to make money by what they produce and love to do, and those who are seeking a niche to become a middle-men, a parasite, a cheater, a wise-guy, a "manager" of others.

It seems that in every kind of business, including criminal, those who are capable to produce have very few troubles, while the second group, the wast majority, have much more suffering, just because, well, no one really need them.

So, before thinking about entrepreneurship, become good at something first. Then you will be able to create and notice opportunities. It doesn't not work in opposite direction - one cannot create an opportunity being of no good in any other field.
IMO you can't compare an editor to Vim/Emacs if it can't run in a console.
Here is how Netbeans does it:
http://netbeans.org/projects/versioncontrol/pages/Git_ui#Inl...
I live in Ireland. Manchester was only a short hop and a single night's stay.

Accessible in my case was not (just) about money but also about time and convenience
You still have not explained how Israel has not been ethnically cleansing Palestinians, other than saying, "it didn't work out".
That isn't a strawman argument: the point that the detractors were making was "This is not the correct assortment of speakers because there aren't enough of X race or Y sex."

They are arguing against speakers only because of their race and gender. Would more diversity be welcome in the Ruby community? Absolutely, but judging a speaker based on their race and gender is idiotic - it says nothing about what they'll bring to the table.

Imagine if people were criticizing a lineup because there were too many women? We would flip a shit - and rightly so! Pointing out verbally militant discrimination that causes a conference to be cancelled isn't a strawman, it is a reality.
Can someone provide links to the trolling and the careless and ignorant comments and the accusations of sexism and racism that you're all talking about?

The worst I could find was this from Josh Susser that apparently started the ball rolling: "Nice speaker lineup for @BritRuby. Except for the 100% white guys part."

Did pointing this out drive sponsors away? Or were there some stronger statements I missed?

I saw many tweets offering helpful advice on diversity to the organizers. I saw a lot of discussion about whether and how it is possible or desirable to have a diverse set of speakers. I still haven't seen any accusations of sexism or racism but I have seen a lot of complaints about those accusations which I can't find.

Can someone provide links to the accusations?
Even with this absurd "lottery", air travel would still be safer than most other forms of transportation.

I believe that actually depends on the metric you use. I think it was something along the lines of, compared to car/bus/train/etc it is the safest per mile, but not very safe per trip.
Well, as long as those fools are littering their own pages I think the problem isn't as bad as you make it look.

As for whether it works or not: yes, it works. A 'call to action' as it is called has been proven to work long before Drew Curtis added his to his twitter button.
What are Rhodiola Rosea Benefits and Side Effects? (Rodiola)
More than anything it seems to be a failure to communicate their intentions and/or write contracts with their sponsors.
It really doesn't matter how well Surface RT does. Windows 8, even if it's another Vista, will sell a stupendous number. This will cause a tide a W8 apps that will be RT compatible, dramatically raising its viability. RT sucks now because it's a V1 and because Surface Pro's not out yet. When Surface Pro gets penetration RT's time will come.

It's classic microsoft, to translate their monopoly in PC OS into tablet marketshare.
Yes, there are women in the Ruby community who fit that criteria. But the question isn't whether there are women, it's how many of them are there vs how many men are there with similar qualifications? If there are 100 men for every 10 women (which doesn't seem too far off based on my experience), then it isn't unrealistic to have a panel of 6 composed entirely of men with no gender discrimination taking place.
Those Hamas guys couldn't make peace with a Tulip. Maybe an Opium poppy. They've proved this time and time again and may have even been created for war. You live in cuckoo land.
INFOGRAPHIC: Why JavaScript is the Future of Programming
Scale is going to be critical here - it has to make sense for a shelter or a food bank to pick up whatever a restaurant is offering, and there's probably a threshold number of meals below which the cost of gas and travel time doesn't justify picking up the meals. Meanwhile, if the shelter collects and saves up its tickets, the restaurant has to be ready for bulk orders, so to speak.
I would like to see news about attacks against in-country jewish websites because of what they are doing in Palestina (and the rest of the world)
To all of you trying to justify this, I only have this to say. I am sorry to have to repeat the obvious but it is true and it needs to be said.

The best test for injustice in all these situations, if you are unable to see it staring in your face, is just to turn it round. Imagine the best rubyists just happened to be all black and their conference was cancelled because they were all black. If you still think it was justified, I have nothing more to say except: `Please, beam me up, Scotty!'
There's an interesting meta-consideration here, and that is how humanity wants things to be in 500 years. It's almost like Stross is considering the weight of action as something that we can't choose. But really, I think our collective choices can make a world of difference.

If we choose to protect biodiversity today, if we choose to keep our climate optimal for naturally evolved life, then our future in 500 years can be a lot better than anything Stross has described.

For example, I think we will indeed have AI, but it will turn out that AI, like a human baby, has to be raised by parents. The process of "programming" an AI is just like the process of "programming" a person - it's messy, and it takes a lot of personal effort and fortitude.

I also think it is likely that the rules of our universe allow only one successful colonization attempt per home planet, or perhaps home system. This limits the spread of any Life to linear (rather than geometric), and it also means that the odds of life meeting each other on the same planet are extremely small. (It goes without saying that there is Life in a lot of places, but that it rarely succeeds in the singular effort of colonizing another system).

More and more of our productive efforts will be created and consumed in virtual environments. But that doesn't meant that the physical will be ignored. "Slow space" is important, and beautiful in it's own way, and we evolved with it. We're not going to leave it behind.

Social constructs will become self-aware, and driven by ever greater understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world. We will truly choose our beliefs, and aggregate (virtually and physically) with others of the same belief. Indeed, I can imagine a world government who's primary purpose is not adjudicating national disputes, but rather protecting the rights of new adults to choose what they believe, and to live their lives wherever those beliefs are most closely held.

The US and all nations will evolve according to what they really are: explicit belief systems that exploit energy/food/material resources in order to protect/promote their belief system. We will probably see a spectrum of US-like nations, that differ only on second-order considerations. Basically, what we have today, only more explicit and with far more porous borders.

It seems very unlikely that the majority will actually modify their bodies with computer interface technology. The inherent risks are far too high when a device doesn't have a physical off switch. Consider the nightmare scenario where a hacker hacks into your visual cortex, and Rick rolls you. this is far worse than blindness - it could drive you insane (really).
Even if we had perfect gender and ethnicity equality, probability tells us that we would still expect there to be some proportion of conferences where the best available speakers are all white and male.

In this case, there is self selection too. Britain is still predominantly white. And even as I accept that there must still be factors which make women feel less welcome, I remain convinced that even if no factors of unfair discrimination existed, more men than women would self-select technology careers.

These factors mean that we would expect even more conferences with all white and male speakers, still without unfair discrimination.

To pick out a single conference in our industry with this property is textbook selection bias [1] and doesn't demonstrate any kind of discrimination at all.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
Sshhhh...don't let this individual know that Windows 8 API, Windows Runtime (RT), is available in JavaScript.

That said, WinRT doesn't expose Win32 API. Well done. That takes dedication, skill, and lack of sanity.

> Edit WinRT API link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br21137...
You can usually arrange in at least one ally (and now you're 2/6) and then tax other powers for premium features of the solar shade if they want them (that is, climate control).
Sorry to follow-up a day later, but another HN post seems very relevant ... the article linked to this post describes a gene that determines whether you're an early-riser or not. Perhaps not to the extent of the difference between morning and night programmers but with at least an hour of variance.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801498
I agree with you.

But what with the re-generation time of the blog and the fact that this wasn't meant to be a blog post to begin with (HN has an upper limit to the length of the text in an article header) I feel that leaving it in there is ok.

It would be a ton of work to get it excised for just that one posting and frankly I have more urgent things to do than to worry about being perceived as politically incorrect.

Those who know me do not care and those who don't are probably not going to be persuaded that this wasn't a ploy to get some more twitter followers or karma points.

So, now that we have that out of the way, and since you started it: I personally don't like it - even if I agree - when people are bitching all the time about formatting and things external to the body of the article that is posted.

It isn't rare at all to see a whole thread about an interesting or important text unravel into a discussion about fonts, style sheets in general, various plugs for readability or suggestions like yours. It's off-topic and detracts from the original message, which was a simple, genuine and heartfelt 'thank you', without any ulterior motive or other ploy. I'm not selling you anything, not trying to get people to click on advertising and I frankly couldn't care less about how this impacts what people think of me. I simply felt that we owed HN a sign of gratitude and found the easiest way to express that.

Of course it is much easier to nit-pick about style and format rather than to contribute positively (or even negatively) on the substance. And so you'll find lots of people vote such non-contributing stuff up, which often crowds out the real discussion.

I used to work in a bike repair shop where they had a large sign that said 'if you've got nothing to do, don't do it here'. Something similar applies to off topic gripes about the format instead of the message.
I hear this argument a lot, but how do you think most people would respond if asked outright "do you want to increase the size of the federal government, and spend around 8 billion a year on making air travel more annoying and humiliating, while doing nothing to actually make things safer in order that people will feel safer?"
What makes you think women and men will have different opinions about software development based solely on their gender?
Well, then they should be able to sell enough tickets to cover costs. You can't have it both ways - we want "famous" people to attract crowds (who generally pay for a ticket) but also want sponsors to cover the costs.

EDIT: can't
+1 for PyQuery - it is definitely my favorite out of them all.
I just tried it out and parts of the ncurses UI seems less responsive than I'm used to in vim. For example, try hitting ctrl-alt-f for incremental find, then hit esc to leave it. It seems to take a second to exit incremental find mode. Does anybody else see this?
Five-hundred and twelve