skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is not a good first impression for someone who had never heard of Cappuccino before. It reads like a verbose rage quit. It would have been more respectful to his colleagues and their (small?) community of users to explain his career decision while also remaining optimistic about the project.
Got confused for a second, but then I noticed the url. Note to anyone else: it's on pavelgraham.com, not paulgraham.com
SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards
Agreed

I would have preferred if this entire ordeal was sorted out with a game of laser tag, it'd be a fitting conclusion to the level of bizarro-world-absurdity this issue has become.
In other words, it's OK if men do it, but not if a woman does it.
> The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years
> of building applications in favor of being able to put something together
> quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability.

I wonder, heretically, if maintainability/extendability is less important today... in the past, you'd build something, and then need to maintain it for years or decades. But today, if the pace of change really has accelerated that much, perhaps things change so much that it is easier to rebuild from scratch each time (instead of maintaining/extending) - even if you did carefully design it.

Is is just a small but prominent group doing web development (especially with ruby on and back-end and a front-end focus)? Is it just that we're still seeing industries adopt to the web, and old approaches slowly dying (i.e. in the midst of revolutionary times)? Or is this a permenant acceleration, that will only increase?
That's a false analogy. The original assertion was about the underlying technology being used, not about what they deliver.
That's exactly the issue here - rather than apologizing for her actions, she insisted on painting herself as a hero speaking out against sexism, and clearly thought that her actions were thus justified.
Done with the web, moving to Google to work on Google Now; an app that relies heavily on web services to provide information to users...

I don't know why but I don't see that as being done with the web. I see it as changing jobs/projects, but still within the web community.

And also I don't agree with: Meanwhile, the web community will continue to solve the same non-problems over and over again.

The web community is larger than the people referred to within the article and I don't think it's OK to generalize like that. In the last 5 years the web has evolved massively and I don't agree with the fact that we are solving the same non-problems. Progress and innovation is out there, on the web, within the web... you just have to look from a different point of view (and occasionally sift through the BS).
I know crackers have the same issue. They can't help not to look when people freely type their passwords in front of them during conferences. How can they not look memorize that password? And from there to use it or post it on twitter is just a small step right?

Admins has the same problems. A co-worker ask them for help fixing their emails, and the content of those email are just there. How can they not see the conversation about sexual diseases being present in the inbox. And from there to complain on twitter about it is just a small step.

Polite behavior is to sometimes not look/listen/read even if its being done right in front of you. At least one should have the decency of not go out and post it on twitter, even if one is "offended" by what you saw/heard.
Am I the only one who found that dongle joke hilarious?
Quicklinks:

- demo: http://zenpicker.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dropzone...

- source code: https://github.com/zencoder/filepicker-zencoder

- Full tutorial: https://gist.github.com/sh1ps/e0884be21fb3f45cbddc or http://blog.zencoder.com/2013/03/20/look-ma-no-backend-uploa...

Edited to add zencoder blog post
In fairness that could have been pretty toxic for SendGrid. Still feels a little reactionary and poorly thought out.

I don't feel good about it, but I can't help but feel that her actions were the spark of all this.
Stack Exchange gets pretty close, with its robust reputation/moderation system.
Yet we conveniently forget that loading just a few images will quickly surpass that 49K of code.

It's not about loading time, it's about bloat.

This reaction to Ember just baffles me. Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs?

Sure but when there are alternatives which you can jump into right away with the same good results, why waste two days?
I'm late to this story, but this is how I see it.

- Adria should never have done what she did. The best option would have been to turn around, ask the guys to politely stop. If they continued, she should have spoken with a con rep (like she did).

- I'm tired of people saying they're offended by things and not acting on it. Offence in itself is weak and means nothing to someone else. Saying "I'm offended" or "this offends me" while expecting people to stop what they're doing is self-centred and immature.

- Nobody should have gotten fired.
No, Google will not merge Android and Chrome, for obvious reasons
Even before Google Chairman Eric Schmidt dispelled the rumors that Google would merge Android and Chrome, we should have known it was never going to happen.
> The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top.

It won what, exactly? The war against Gopher for presentation of hypertext documents and information display? There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption.

The examples of genuinely great web applications are few and far between, if not near non-existent. Are Google Apps really the best the web has to offer?

Cappuccino provided one example of how to move the browser past the shackles of the traditional HTML/JS/CSS and into a world where developers could work with more accurate abstractions that actually represented the problem domains of application development.

This lesson has essentially been ignored, tossing out 3+ decades of experience our industry has in building applications.
but who decides what is a "loss" and what is a "gain"?

as an individual, you may be able to tell the balance on your death bed, finally and irrevocably.

as a society, the show always goes on.
Hooktheory - Improve your understanding of music
Posmetrics (YC W13) launches to help businesses collect better customer feedback
When is it ever a good idea to calculate the cartesian product of every X with every other X, for each user?
Why is that ironic? This incident was never about sexism.
Web apps != desktop apps, at least not for now. When I looked Cappuccino a while back, I was impressed by what it could do inside a browser in terms of GUIs. However, when I researched a bit how I could use Cappuccino to solve the problems I was having at the time, I quickly got stuck.

A common use case for web apps is to allow for collaboration and/or sharing (e.g. Basecamp, Github....). When you look at the tutorials for Cappuccino you can quickly find out how to make an image editing app, but if you want to find out how to do even basic stuff (for web apps) like saving data to a backend, you have to search really hard.

In addition to that, Cappuccino always looked somewhat immature - even now the home page is somewhat broken. You don't want to bet on a new framework AND a completely new language when it looks immature.
Every time I find myself in X11-Windows, I use twm. It's there, it's small, it doesn't promise more than it can deliver.
> Edit (forgot one thing): the other point illustrated by reader is that google is more focused than it was 8 years ago. I can't imagine a product like reader lasting 8 years if it were introduced today.

I can't see a product like Reader (in terms of its weak connection to any coherent long-term Google strategy, not its primary features) being released by Google today. Which is, incidentally, just another way of saying that cancellation of products that originated before Google's "more wood behind fewer arrows" focus isn't really a good yardstick for Google's commitment to products released under that new regime, for reasons which should be pretty obvious.
Nothing in the Constitution says that people have a right to not be offended. This is why the ACLU defends asshole Nazi/KKK idiots when they put up signs, perform protests, etc.

Are standards for not offending people much higher in the worksplace? Of course they are, and for good reasons. We want people to be comfortable. But lets just make this clear: if you have a zero tolerance policy at work for saying "offensive" things, and there is not a clear definition of "offensive", you are not working at a place that respects your rights. They didn't comment on her ass. They didn't harass her in any way.

The guy should'nt have said penis in public, right? It was unnecessary. And on that logic, my wife shouldn't breastfeed my son in public. It is unnecessary, she can just go to a private room. Why do those gay guys have to kiss in public. It offends me, they should have to go someplace private, this is a work event......

Do you see the slippery slope here? Evolution is offensive to a lot of people where I am from, does that mean I get fired if I say "evolve" at work in front of an idiot bible thumper?
Less than 30 mins ago: "Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards"

https://www.facebook.com/SendGrid/posts/10151502570463967
> This story is an embarrassment for everyone involved except perhaps the 2 guys who started the whole thing.

And PyCon, the PSF and Jesse Noller who behaved pretty much exactly as they should have (but still got insulted over it)
Amazed at the immaturity shown by pretty much all parties involved here. The dev. guy, his employer, adria and now sendgrid. I mean seriously sendgrid ? The only way to stop the DDOS is by firing adria (not that i am supporting what she did). This says a lot about where we stand in today's tech. world.
Sure, and let's say that I'm offended by your face, and I want a million dollars for that. How do we resolve this?

It seems to me that we exist in a community that has a pretty well-evolved process for determining what is reasonable.
Ask HN: Is Revenue Sharing a scam?
Recently I was offered some work as a programmer by an acquaintance from highschool, outgoing friendly guy. He said in return for making his website that I would receive 5% Revenue Sharing of the website. This seemed odd to me as I've never herd of doing work for a share of a startups revenue. From what I know most startups don't produce revenue ever so in essence Revenue Sharing would be a scam. Does anyone else feel this way?

Edit: for grammar
direct link: https://www.facebook.com/SendGrid/posts/10151502570463967
That's a horrible lesson, you should always question. Do things because you understand why, not because someone tells you so.

Also, respect is earned, it is not given away or it is meaningless. A person in a leadership has to earn respect, and he has to earn it from everyone. Simply giving it to them because they are in a leadership position means nothing.
> Why can't we have icons that just launch a specific URL? Because then App Stores wouldn't make any money then would they?

That's what iOS 1.0 did. There were no native apps, just web apps that had cute icons that launched a specific URL.

People tried very hard to make that work. It didn't. The breadth and depth of mobile applications we see today only occurred once Apple provided a native SDK.

The reasons for this are simply technical ones.
I don't see how it could have turned out any other way. She was a PR manager, essentially. Her twitter account is her professional soapbox. She abused this platform and her association with SendGrid to instigate a personally-motivated political correctness war on the Internet. Against people who didn't even know a war had begun. Then she _explicitly_ stated that SG endorsed her actions.

How could SG possibly have trusted her to responsibly represent their brand, with good judgment and tact, after this?
Which is such a pity, because it only reinforces the 'tech world systematically suppresses women' meme. There was no win to be had after this.

I guess this is how we iron out what the Code of Conduct stuff really means, hopefully we learn from it.
A Fibonacci A Day
Letter to Google alleging unfair search practices in the UK
>Thoughtcrime? Crime by association?

I think this point rings especially true, especially in the light of recent events at PyCon. Social media has vast power to build or ruin reputations, and having all your private information on facebook can give you a larger surface area to attack.
There are also male devs who agree with Adria.
Fault is a legal concept. There is always a chain of events with many events that were necessary. But who had the power to make the decision? Who made it? That is who is at fault. In this case that wasn't Adria. (Not that her behaviour is anything to be proud about.)

I'd also argue that your two theories represent a false dichotomy...

Actually they don't. Are we agreed that this event is insufficient cause for a firing? If so, then if this event was the real reason for the firing, then the manager fired for insufficient cause, which is my #1. If not, then there is more to the story, which is my #2. Those two possibilities are therefore logically complete.

However they are not mutually exclusive. There might have been more to the story, and yet the manager still fired for insufficient cause.

That said, what's going to happen now? The guy who got fired has just become a cause. If he's got any skills at all, he'll get another job. I'm confident of it.

Adria has become radioactive. She hasn't been fired, but if her employer keeps getting attacked because of outrage over this, that's a possibility. If she does get fired, she's going to be radioactive for a while. Her line of work requires her to be public about where she is. And no sane company wants to be included in the outrage aimed in her general direction.
> The soldier that originally started the helmet hitting should have taken the heat solely for starting the ordeal.

Not how it works. In battle, one man's screwup can get the whole team killed. So it's up to the whole team to stop that one man from screwing up. Everybody works as a unit.

Another thing about the military that people don't understand is just how wide of backgrounds that recruits and conscripts come from. There's smart people in the military, and there's very very dumb ones. The military can't turn dumb soldiers into smart ones, but they can make procedures so simple that even the dumb ones can follow it. This combined with the first dynamic explains why the military seems as crappy and backwards in its training as it is.
I just released a quick update that makes the mobile view better by hiding some columns.
Why Financial Literacy Fails
unless inovia has invested in disqus (not in the portfolio page from what i can see), it looks a little tacky to have Disqus advertising on your VC company's blog.
The PyCon code of conduct[1] appears to clearly disagree with your characterization that the event is not for a professional audience:

> All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.

> Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for PyCon.

I understand you're trying to use "professional" in the sense of being someone who earns their living using the language and wears a stuffy suit, but that's not the sense used by the GP or PyCon.

[1]: https://github.com/python/pycon-code-of-conduct/blob/master/...
Well.. That escalated quickly...
They seem to be in the minority.
Fauxpreneurs-What Should We Do With Them?
Maybe these need to be updated?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_Window_System_d...
Just remember one thing: war is a totally different environment from your everyday company (Yes, even different from YC-backed startups ;-).

There's a reason, why it is useful to have disciplined soldiers - it saves lives on the battlefield.

That's not to say, that you want drones. It just helps the group (not each individual soldier) if - at times - everyone just does what he/she is told to do.
Equality is a good thing.
https://github.com/libav/c99-to-c89/
This was taken off the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416021
Edit: this thread is also gone
It's almost as if you've drunk your own kool-aid.

>And they all fell by the wayside. They lacked in features. They lacked in agility.

No, no and no. The web "won" because its simple and the lowest common denominator was good enough for most people. The web has always been far behind in terms of features and agility (depending on what you're trying to optimize when it comes to agility). The web won solely because it was "open" and every company had a stake in ensuring no one company could sustain their monopoly. The web sucks and it did not win on its merits.
If someone intercepted an email you sent to your friend and your friend only, would that email be considered public communication?
I have several books out now, and I'm jealous of anyone who gets marketing support from a "traditional" publisher. The most I've seen in the past four years is that occasionally the publisher tweets about it.
Given she tweeted shortly afterwards that pycon staff were dealing with the problem and she was happy with that, I think she implicitly wasn't condoning any action taken by anybody afterwards.

Making that explicit might have been a good thing to do at the time; I don't see that such a statement would've needed to be in the form of an apology though, merely a clear dissocation from the stupid choices made by an HR department she has no control over.
I am not a person prone to hyperbole, so please understand that when I say this is one of the stupidest things I have ever read on Hacker News, I'm not saying so for the hackneyed dramatic flair. This... is one of the stupidest things I have ever read on Hacker News.

You appear to not have given this even one iota of critical thought, or are a complete psychopath, or perhaps you are using a language superficially identical to English but semantically entirely unlike it.

I cannot think of any other reasons why someone would express the idea that people don't have a right to feelings.
comment thread of that link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416021
The point seems to be that the web is cool and hip, which attracts people without computer science backgrounds. Without a solid footing in software design fundamentals, "hack it until it works" seems like a perfectly valid way to run a development cycle.

The desktop is not cool or hip, so the people doing it tend to be people who really want to be there, not chasing trends. It's a vast oversimplification of the situation, sure.
> [i]f you do not know your environment, you should not work in it.

I think part of the issue is that Adria's been in this industry for long enough to know that these situations are not new and we've all seen examples of how it should be handled. Furthermore, dick jokes are not exclusive to any gender or any industry. Despite that, she did something extraordinarily and knowingly cruel. Cruel because she has so many followers. Cruel because she was representing her (now former) employer. Cruel because she was trying to use the situation as a talking point for women's issues and claimed to be fighting on behalf of women in this industry - so far as to call herself a modern day Joan of Arc - when it wasn't a women's issue at all. It was irresponsible all around.

What you said about the men here knowing their environment applies just as much to her as it does them. You gotta know when to fold, and it has nothing to do with silencing victims (as some people are claiming) and more to do with common sense and picking the right battles in the right ways. Not public battles intended to humiliate that actually end up hurting your gender and get you just as publicly, and humiliatingly, fired.
Second this; while I'm not a web dev, I do bump into it occasionally, and it pains me any time I see someone re-re-re-inventing the wheel, often badly. I don't know about Obj-J or Cappuccino, but just the OP's comments about modules had me nodding in agreement.

Another related example, I recently learned of H2 (http://www.h2database.com/html/main.html) and I honestly had to ask myself, why is this needed? If you want an embedded SQL DB why not just use SQLite? If you want a full featured enterprise SQL DB, why not just use PostgreSQL? And don't even get me started about Walyand/Mir as opposed to Xorg, or the whole debacle of disabling separate /usr because of rewriting things like init to use glib and other non-base system dependencies. The hubris, lack of knowledge of history, lack of foresight, and just plain lack of professionalism (to put it politely) are staggering.
This is why I've pointed out time and again in some other very passionate HN discussions why I don't like lynch mobs (of the Internet variety or otherwise).
It is blackmail when you DDOS a company until it capitulates to political demands.

Actually, there is another name for the use of force against soft targets in order to get capitulation to political demands
I don't see how legal realities are at all relevant here. What is relevant is social expectation.
Personally, batteries-included frameworks like Cappuccino scare me off for a few reasons:

1. I have to learn Objective-J. I've been web programming for years and I've become really good at Javascript. I even enjoy it. Other frameworks don't require learning a new language.

2. Time spent learning Cappuccino is only good for programming Cappuccino apps. Time spent in micro frameworks generally translates to other frameworks. Backbone is so bare-metal that it is very easy for Javascript programmer to feel comfortable.

3. Batteries-included frameworks often have "their" way of doing things that are not extensible. This can lead to awkward situations where you need behavior that is just not possible without monkey-patching the hell out of the frameworks and getting yourself stuck on a particular version.

4. I can't speak to Cappuccino, but a similar framework, ExtJS, has (for 4 major versions and nearly 10 years) lacked a build and minification system that didn't suck. This means you must include all dependencies, leading to 1.2MB+(minified!) blobs of JS that can take upwards of 10 seconds or more to load even on fast connections. For business-class apps running on B2B contracts, that might be fine. For public-facing webapps, this is murder.

5. People like micro frameworks because they can use every brand new & shiny piece of JS that shows up on the web without worrying about compatibility. And they can use {HTML5 feature} without worrying about compatibility. I'm sure Cappuccino does a better job than most when it comes to this sort of thing, but what happens when the devs lose interest? Years of "Objective-J" experience go to waste.
Many years back I was trying to sell my ipod on ebay. I restricted to the US only because I didn't want to deal with overseas shipment. The winner goes on to tell me that he is on a short trip to the US and to ship to his hometown in Nigeria. Feeling a scam going on, I worked with ebay to get the auction voided to resubmit. By the time that was done, Apple released a new ipod and the value of my old one plummeted.
Small thing, but it would be a big help if you could expand the font choices for your template maker - I could definitely see myself using this but would need to be able to drop in text in Times New Roman.
Security through obfuscation is not security.

I'd never want to depend on that for anything, it's really just a novelty; a simple regex will nullify any effect you'd gain for using that.