skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm honestly surprised that anyone is attacking Sendgrid, defending Ms Richards, attacking PyCon or defending Playhaven in this incident.

The fact is that what you do reflects on your employer to a degree. If you're a developer evangelist, that's quite a high degree, particularly if you drag them into your public spat.

Most people in the media (news readers and so forth) have a "morals clause" in their contract because they publicly represent the company. This situation is much the same.

I, for example, am just a software engineer. I pretty much stay away from any thread involving Google directly as I don't want anything I say to be misconstrued as representing the company's view. We have a media relations department for that. Those defending Ms Richards might say "on your personal time you can do what you want" (to me). Well, yes and no. It's certainly at my peril. Also, in Ms Richard's case, at PyCon she was on official (or at least semi-official) duties so the "personal time" argument doesn't even apply.

This whole incident reads like two guys making jokes to themselves. She overheard and decided to make an issue of it by naming and shaming them in a very public way while waving her employer's flag. Nevermind that this wasn't called for (IMHO), I don't believe for a second that the comments were directed at her or intended for her to hear.

The fact that Playhaven fired this engineer over this is disappointing. A public statement about supporting diversity and a warning from HR really should've been sufficient (again, IMHO). It makes me wonder if they wanted to fire him anyway.

Some other commenters suggest Ms Richards can sue. I tend to disagree but IANAL. I do however think the fired engineer may have a case. He can show damages (losing his job) and argue that Ms Richards (and her employer had they not fired her) had acted with reckless disregard. I'm not sure it's a strong case but I bet it's an arguable case.

Sendgrid's statement is (IMHO) excellent. It is measured, factual and has a great tone. This is not a position they wanted to be in (from reading the post). They've deliberated. They state a great bottom line that this issue and the subsequent fallout endangers their business. They don't want to be the story here and Ms Richards made them the story. That's on her.

Let this be a lesson to all reading this: what you do can affect your employment. Act with care and restraint. Once something is said or done it can be very difficult to roll it back.
Love how you do the text handling - click, with little draggable, resizeable text area with handle; how did you build that - jQueryUI with lots of mods, or something even lower level?

And have you seen paperi.st? (http://paperi.st/) Similar kind of idea as far as text entry - and i'd also love to know how they did it.
I never considered flat and skeuomorphic to be opposite ends of the same design continuum. Those aren't the only options. I'd like to think the Apple design team is going to wow us with something new. Something better.
> She didn't force them to fire her.

What would you have done in the situation? You're the CEO of a company. You have someone in a glorified PR position. That same person has caused massive blowback by not once, not twice, but multiple times showing extreme poor judgement. This person then makes a public statement saying your company "supports" that person thereby ostensibly pulling the company into the fight. What would you do?

It would take all of five seconds for me to ship that person out.

Even if you are working on a three strike position; all three strikes came in the last few days.

This has nothing to do with the DDoS. This has to do with having someone in a position representing the company to your target audience and not just doing a poor job of it, but doing such a trainwreck of a job that the company's PR needs to spin up to defcon 1.

Doesn't that person seem unfit for the job?
The bit you quoted makes no reference to the DDoS. You decided that the quoted text implied that. You then talk about interpretation, having claimed a specific reference that doesn't exist.
Oh, very nice. Is there a way to get in the beta?
Notification center isn't designed similarly to Android's equivalent... Like, at all. They function similarly, but if you're referring to Apple copying functionality then you've missed the whole point of this discussion.
Yeah, to be honest, I hadn't been following all the details until today but it was just a childish little temper tantrum. That seems dismissive but if this was genuine, which I don't think it was, she could have handled it in a much more adult way than just taking pictures of people, and making potentially libelous statements.
The unofficial part of SXSW, as told by Eventbrite events
Once a year, the tech scene goes on Spring Break and travels to Austin for SXSW. People go to sessions, take meetings, and ... party. Here are some stats from the Eventbrite blog.
This is fantastic advice. Being small can be an asset, yet it's often treated as a liability. Sure, there are some things your company can't do because you don't have as much cash in the bank as Google, but there are some things your company can do that Google can't compete with because it's too big.
Monocles?

I believe you're in the wrong room sir, that would be the Steampunk convention down the hall.
I don't dispute the utility of Bitcoin transactions. But I don't see how this translates into BTC value.
There are two really interesting, and frankly devastating, double standards at work here:

(1) We all know Adria Richards's name. We know all about her. Her personal address has been spread. Things she wrote in the past have been used against her. But we don't really know anything about those guys. We know who they work for and what they look like, but there's been no widespread effort to expose them in the same manner that Adria's been exposed.

(2) When that guy lost his job, everyone thought it was a great injustice, and that Adria should make a heartfelt apology to him. But when Adria lost her job this morning, there were no such pronouncements going the other way. No one declared, "That dude really needs to apologize to Adria for making the dick joke that eventually led to her getting let go." That's not an argument that's being made anywhere.

Ask yourself why these things are happening in one direction. In an equal world -- a balanced world -- things should cut both ways. These tactics should be used by people on both "sides". But in this instance, that's decidedly not happening.
The bit you quoted makes no reference to the DDoS. You decided that the quoted text implied that. You then talk about interpretation, having claimed a specific reference that doesn't exist. You can't have it both ways.
And wouldn't the analogy be monitoring internet usage, rather than video surveillance? Something that is extremely common at most major corporations?
Curious - did I do something "unauthorized" by entering:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5419914

Into the URL bar? (One less than this article's URL)
I really hope my daughter gets into D&D, thankyouverymuch.
Man selling house for Bitcoins.
Using that interpretation the Federal government has no meaningful limits on its power, if "regulate Commerce... among the several States" includes every physical thing in the US.

Let me ask you this: What activity isn't covered in your interpretation of the commerce clause?
Like I said in another reply, and like the author of this submission said in her post, many of the threats and harassing statements were very much specific to her gender (and some of her race.) Why is it that when a woman does something wrong, the hacker/tech community's first reaction is to throw around gendered slurs? Don't give me this crap about how every other community does it. That's not an excuse. We have to start somewhere, and we should be better than this, but we're not.

WRT her not apologizing for posting his photograph: What do you think would happen if she did? She's been fired, she's been threatened with rape and with death, she's been harassed on a constant basis since this began. Do you think her apology will have any effect? Look at how her (rather benign and polite) comment was received: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047 Scroll down and look at all those dead comments. Do you think her coming out now and saying, "I'm so sorry for publishing your photograph" would do anything?

I'd like to add, where is the lynch mob against these guys that their photograph was supposed to cause? I see a lot of people saying "you're publicly shaming them!" and "you tried to get a witch hunt going!" but... there wasn't one. She was just posting their photograph, and nothing in the public sphere happened to them. Only one guy was fired, and no one knew about that until he went and made an account on HN himself and said it.
Good on SendGrid for owning up to their decision and not gracing with a mention the (rumored) threat of DDoS.
I still hate the x buttons on their notification centre.
Pseudo Lens Flare with GPU Shaders
Everybody that's following her twitter stream chose to follow her twitter stream. That makes a huge difference. And it's also trivially easy to unfollow her stream if what she says offends you.

Also, the context is very different. You may think of PyCon as a social gathering, but it is in fact work-related for a lot of people (including, presumably, Adria in her role as a developer evangelist). What's acceptable in an informal, personal setting (e.g. jokes made to people who explicitly chose to view her personal twitter stream) may not be acceptable in any kind of professional setting.
GCing is a concern, yes. With the Binary Data API and some extensions, it might be possible down the road to have GC'd objects in asm.js compiled code. Definitely an interesting area to investigate.

Multhreading is another concern, if you want shared state (with the JVM would need). It can't currently be done, but again, is worth thinking about and perhaps new web APIs could enable it some day.
To me this seems kind of like what I was afraid of way-back-when, when choosing a CM system. I eventually went with Puppet because basically I was afraid of this kind of thing happening. Because Chef uses Ruby for the configuration language this seemed to me both an advantage and a huge disadvantage.

Basically, Chef is giving you enough rope etc. With Puppet at least, you CAN get into trouble and make your manifests take these kinds of length of time to compile, but it's relatively difficult. Additionally, I believe the equal of 'searching' in Chef is PuppetDB. In my experience at least, resolving stored facts from PuppetDB is extremely fast, as in, fast enough that you don't know it's actually doing much of anything on a database level.

Really I think the take-away from this is be careful what you do with CM. It could end up making more, not less work for you!
My point is that she was not harassed. She wasn't even in the conversation.
Darpa Sets Out to Make Computers That Can Teach Themselves
Here's a possible answers: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/09/apple_maiden_data_ce...

Possibly giving HP some money :)
Since 2006 PyCon chairs have followed an unofficial pattern of chairing two conferences and then stepping aside. Jesse chaired PyCon 2012 and 2013, so this isn't a surprise.

(I co-chaired PyCon 2006 and 2007, and trust me: two years of conference planning is enough for anyone!)
The joke was between 2 people seated behind her -- were both engineers at Playhaven? Was the other person fired?

Edit: Why the downvotes? Is there something I've missed? Does this comment really prevent further discussion on the issue?
> Due to a misplaced parenthesis...

I know this isn't the (main) take away message, but it does make me feel a little better about some errors I've made in the past to know that even heavily vetted code can have these types of errors.
Their brains work at a high rate and it puts the brain on an additional task to slow their processing rate as not to cause a jam up in the firing of the neurons. They would shake their hands (and some do tap) but they use them for writing. This is not a joke, this is why some of them do this.
Due to a misplaced parenthesis, if insufficient GOOD
bits were available to satisfy a request, the
keying/rekeying code requested either 32 or 64 ANY bits,
rather than the balance of bits required to key the
stream generator.

I think this paragraph is a nice reminder, how hard crypto can be.
No, she didn't. The Internet hate machine went out of control as it has a tendency to do. The fact that gaooened afterwards, however, doesn't make her initial reaction to name and shame these guys more acceptable.
I can see where you're coming from - it does sound weird. If it makes you feel more comfortable you can think of it as if the daughter spoke of what she wanted to say, and the Mom cleaned up the grammar.
This whole situation makes me deeply uncomfortable.

First, because it demonstrates the extent to which a company can be brought to its knees by a group of hostile people organized online.

Second because hundreds and hundreds of men here and elsewhere seem quite happy to align themselves with an overtly sexist, violently threatening campaign against an individual whose views they disagree with.

I am not in a position to comment on the firing, or what qualifies someone to excel as an "evangelist." The statement is right that she probably couldn't do her job well anymore.

But this is a sad thing, not a victory, and the further abuse and ignorance happening and being up voted here is really unsettling. Why are so many really so angry? I promise it has nothing to do with this woman.

Taking a photograph of someone in a public place and reporting what they said within earshot, without any expectation of privacy, does not warrant vitriol.

Joking about big dicks and sex disruptively in the context of a public event held for a profession which continues to struggle with sexism and misogyny means something very different than joking to a friend, and those people who have chosen to listen to what you have to say, about pretending to have a big dick.

And guess what, her sentiment about racism, whether I agree with it or not, is shared by many scholars of American race relations who are decidedly more informed on the subject.

Instead of shaming a stranger who has a different frame of reference than you (assuming you haven't had much experience as a black woman) why don't we all take a deep breath and think about how we can protect against the kind of fear so palpable in Sendgrid's statement, the kind that cowed them so extremely?
What is Digital Public Space?
No, you can say "so and so argues such and such" all you want, that doesn't make it valid. I claim it is not valid and also claim you have not provided any justification for it. It simply does not follow. As for rhetorical value ... Being a sophist is not the same as being logically consistent.
I appreciate you using my actual words this time! Is that what you wanted me to look for? I will disagree that it was the spirit of my post though. I take no stance in my post as to whether the reaction and ruining of his career were valid or not.

My comment you replied to dealt specifically with the point that SeanDav made about Adria not knowing the "history and social dynamics" of the people she was overhearing, implying that she may misinterpret their jokes. I think this is pretty valid. Inside jokes can certainly seem one way when they're actaully another.

My suggestion was that the history and social dynamics at tech conferences (defcon included) is also an important factor here. If you're in an environment where you know there is a history of offensive behavior. I think it's prudent to be careful about saying something potentially offensive, unless your goal is to make some point or actually offend. Also, due to conference experiences such as Defcon, attendees may be more vigilant regarding perceived offensive behavior, resulting in overreaction.

I've been careful not to agree or disagree with any of the parties involved, rather, I'm just trying to lay out additional factors which could be contributing to this fracas.
Drawscript - Illustrator plugin turns shapes into code: C++, Obj-C, JS
Drawscript is an extension for Adobe® Illustrator. It generates a graphics code from vector shapes in realtime. OBJ-C iOS, C++ OpenFrameworks, JavaScript HTML5 Canvas, Processing, ActionScript 3, JSON or raw bezier points for custom usage.
We can debate about whether URLs have elements of an access control mechanism or not, but if obscured URLs don't create a legally protect-able boundary, the argument should be because they're not an access control mechanism, not that they're a poor access control mechanism (which is the usual implication of "security through obscurity"). In other words, the argument should be about how clearly the boundaries are drawn, not how effective the security mechanisms are.
YANAL. It was copyrighted the moment it came into existence as his work.
Do you people realize that women, when between women, can be just as gross as men? They talk about guys as "food" and "expendable" things. They really do. Also they typically give way more details about their sexual life to their women friends than man do to their men friends.

The difference is that in the coding world it's something like 90% men. So of course you won't have enough women "teaming up" to make gravvy jokes about men's short appendages or whatever.

What about we stop it?

I was playing tennis with a friend the other day: two men. On the court next to our were four women. My friend was making a few jokes during pauses and being "gross". I can tell you that the four women were doing exactly the same: you can't hear it but they look at you and laugh and you know they're talking about you as meat they're going to eat or something. Because that's what women do when they look at men and laugh between them. Just ask them ffs. They can be really gross too.

Now I try not to make these jokes and sexual remarks: not because somehow I'd try not to offend the other person (honestly women can laugh as much as they want when talking about me, I don't give a frak). No, the reason I don't do this is because I've got a girlfriend and I don't want to be disrespectful to her by making sexual jokes about "wanting to fork other women's little hidden repo" or something.

It would be great if people stopped doing these lame remarks but it would be great too if women stopped playing 16 years old virgins who are never saying anything gravvy about men when between them.
"The latter makes the environment hostile to women. This is not specific to women." Uuh... You don't see the self-contradiction there?

Women are just as much sexual beings as men, so why should any talk about sex necessarily "make the environment hostile" to women but not men?!? That could only happen if there were some cultural norm that everyone should pretend that women are actually _not_ just as sexual as men, and then the problem would be _this hypocritical norm_, not the jokes. (Which, as several posters have already pointed out, seems to be exactly the case with US society.)

Actually, come to think of it, a policy to shield women from sexual jokes, in stead of one to encourage them to _make_ sexual jokes themselves, will of course only work to perpetuate this status quo, to reinforce the oppressive norm that "women are poor weak little asexual creatures, whose innocent little rosebud ears must be protected by chivalrous society form ever, ever hearing any innuendo"... THAT is the real sexual oppression here: This stupid policy is in fact _extending_ the (US medieval-style) status quo.

The real feminists here were the dongle-jokers.
Testing a New Class of Speedy Computer
What if leaving the embarassing shit shows hanging around is necessary to show people the extent of the problem?

In much the same way that sometimes in a parent's life they need to stop doing the laundry and let their teenager head out to town with smelly, mouldy, crusty garments until the teenager learns that dirty clothes are horrible and that perhaps it might be worth helping parents with housework without the need for bribes.
Hi, it should be there already... let me know if you can't see it.
I have never seen a successful (rich) founder posting here. Is there a reason for that? Is it that once they become rich, they have to shut up? What about before they got rich? There is no trace of any activities of these people on the Internet/any forums. Or is it because a successful founder tends not to spend any time on internet/forums?
As someone that has a 3D portfolio, I think it is priced too high. But I'm not a modeler either, for game artists it could be quite nice. But I'd be somewhat afraid of people somehow nicking my vertices.
I'm not clear that you understand what a straw man is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

People are saying that what the two guys did was not sexist and that Adria's response was inappropriate. So, debate that, rather than introduce other examples. Whether or not your other examples are sexist has nothing to do with whether or not the dongle jokes were sexist, but they were straw men in the context of your original comment. In particular, Adria's response does not somehow become appropriate because you experienced or heard about some other bad things, or because people were vicious to her in the aftermath (they were). All that this does is muddy the water and polarize people.

If you want to have a general wide-open debate on sexism at technology conferences, I guess that's what you'll have, but it will never be as effective as addressing specific issues.
You'd think they'd go Open Compute and cut out the middle man (Dell, HP, etc).
Stealing something I wrote on another thread here:

Dick jokes are perceived to be almost exclusively a part of "guy culture". Want proof? Watch how fast a group of guys making those jokes suddenly clams up and changes the topic the moment an unfamiliar woman walks up. (And when a woman joins in and shows that she's comfortable making those jokes, too, watch how glad everyone is that she can be "just one of the guys".)

So when guys at a conference routinely make dick jokes in public, that contributes to a sense that the conference is a male space. It's not a conscious thing, but it's a real thing, and it would be good for it to change. I don't know that the public shaming in this case was the right way to go about that, but I'm not sure that I have a better alternative to offer, either. (Women are all too aware that quietly saying "Please don't act that way" tends to have no impact at all, apart from the guys thinking she's a humorless busybody.)
I agree with you completely here.

However, I think that it's worth arguing from that weak position. I've had a hard time articulating why I think that a) weev's online actions aren't illegal, and yet b) why weev should still be punished. But arguing from that weak position and getting the CFAA charge dropped would actually resolve this issue. My problem with what weev did, and why I think he should be published, is because of his malicious intent. So getting the CFAA charge dropped would be a win for everyone, but leaving the fraud charge in place would still appropriately punish weev (although I think 41 months is too high).