skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a woman in tech. I think she can continue to function as a women's tech evangelist. Yes, there are women who are furious with her, but there are also plenty of women who have been in her corner, whether or not they agree with how she handled the situation. And for a lot of the women who've been on the fence since all of this exploded, this firing will probably push them into her corner. Loss of credibility as a dev evangelist? I'll buy that to a large degree. Loss of credibility as a women's tech evangelist? Probably not as much as you think.
Cool, that's your right.

Congratulations on winning the birthplace lottery, btw.
If there were any justice in our system, lawmakers who put that confidentiality clause in there could be sued for dereliction of duty and/or negligence. The same goes for Bush for not vetoing it and thus breaking his oath to uphold the Constitution.

It's one thing for lawmakers to get tripped up on finer points of Constitutional law with which the Supreme Court disagrees with. It's quite another to just play this "catch me if you can" game trying to push the limits of what is possible while ignoring the Bill of Rights.
It also happens to men in female dominated fields and social enviroments.

It's not inherently sexist - humans use stereotypes to categorize everything and everyone, and we haven't, as a society, codified how we should navigate these kind of conflicts without butthurt.
Your experiences sound awful and truly disheartening, and I hope we can move towards a better and more inclusive future for everyone.

However, I do feel compelled to make one point about this part:

>Okay, time to speak up! Hi, I'm a woman in tech. And this upset me, but not for the reasons you think. I agree that Adria went too far in publicly Tweeting and "name and shaming" these guys. But the vitriol and hate that has spewed forth online to her is what takes my breath away. Comments calling her a "cunt" and saying she should be raped (this I found on her blog, presumably before she had a chance to delete it.)

I agree those comments are absolutely horrifying, and the act of people I would never associate with. However, I don't think it's fair to attribute them to the 'tech community.' This incident was linked to by extremists on both sides of gender issues, and I believe it's largely that community that was responsible for the worst behavior (many of the most egregious twitter accounts featured imagery that was taken from some of these extremist communities). These extremists on both sides have pre-existing ideological war that's been going on for decades and has intensified over the internet, especially recently, as they isolate themselves in echo chambers like private subreddits and tumblr cliques. Of course, there is some overlap between that and the tech community, but if this topic was only being discussed by people who had previously heard of PyCon, I imagine the tone would be far, far different.
Development environments with Vagrant, Chef, and Git
"I was amused by the entrapment bit... you've got to be a dope to fall for that."

Or you can be poor or indebted or having some weakness they know how to exploit.

Everyone has buttons someone can push, especially if they have access to your online data.
I agree with you that it is at worst an anatomical joke that is not funny and hasn't the slightest sexual undertone to it.
Cool! I should rtfm once in awhile before I post! I just didn't want anyone to start a project only to have it removed for ToS violations! This is really cool, and excited to see what people build with it.
Sorry to hear about you losing your job, that was not cool. As a woman in tech who is also a mother and raising 2 daughters, I experience the boys club every day. I love all the men I work with, I think they are great. I don't think that they are aware of some of the things they do that are offensive to women and I try to give them feedback to help them understand. I want my daughters to go into their career of choice and be comfortable in that environment. Maybe something to reflect on as a father is how you can foster a future in tech that isn't all about the boys club, especially if one or more of your 3 kids is a girl.
Google Now has not been submitted to Apple
The Mathematics of Queues
Yes, but the owners have four different support lines to call to get their account back, so the odds of it staying compromised is that much lower.
This marketing might make some people feel good, but it is deceptive.

I just assume marketing == deception, anymore. I know that isn't really an accurate view of reality, but it leaves me less upset when I find out they are in fact being deceptive.
If it's for adults why not charge to get in? It works for somethingawful.

Their funnel is an absolute scream: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=322...

Note: this is not meant to imply somethingawful is for adults. Just that they charge to get in and moderate ruthlessly.
So in a nutshell:

It was sexist and offensive but her reaction was unprofessional.

As you wrote, "you just snap."

Unfortunately, just snapping is a firing offense. If I have a bad day, and I yell at my boss, I suffer the consequences.

The shame of this situation is that the problems of the industry's sexism will be ignored because of her (perhaps momentary) lack of professionalism.
Game development in Clojure : Alchemy 7DRL post-mortem
I don't understand. The article clearly says the data center is using renewable energy right? You say it like its a bad thing. Every one knows the manufacturing side is what it is. Where is the intent to fool anyone here? Please point me to it.
First off I agree 100% that the trolls that threaten and slur her on the blog/twitter etc. are morons. I would also like to point out that THAT is what trolls do!

As a footnote: Adria moderates ALL comments on her blog, and allowing these trolls a forum seems a little counter productive as she must have chose to let these comments appear.
I've recently replaced Google as my browser's default engine with DuckDuckGo. It's good, and not as... hmm... scummy as Google seems to have gotten? Not sure if that's the right word.
I was a little disappointed in this article. What I've always wanted to know is: Why do Rails developers use Rspec when they can use MiniTest::Spec? I was hoping the OP would address that, since MiniTest is the default Ruby testing suite he refers to. Do Rails devs continue to use Rspec because it's what they're used to? Or is Rspec a dependency for other testing tools and libraries?

I don't agree at all with this premise by the OP:

> Just from skimming over the tests, it’s obvious that Rspec is more readable. The Rspec DSL was designed for us humans to be able to understand what is happening at a glance. This is where Rspec gets my vote. Unfortunately, we aren’t talking about reading or sharing tests. We are talking about writing tests, and this is where Rspec has a heafty learning curve.

I think the MiniTest::Spec API is both easy to read and write...(I'm assuming the OP is criticizing both Rspec and MiniTest::Spec here). I'm just saying this from personal experience, as I learned both the Spec and standard testing syntax at the same time.
What seems more suspicious is why the termination of an employee would be so public -- on all major social networks -- rather than a formal dismissing on the website or to a reporter.

Perhaps I'm uneducated on the topic, but it still seems suspicious.
While there are limits in the first amendment, its primary purpose is to allow individual citizens to speak out against the tyranny of government.

So while you can quibble over yelling "fire" in a theater, silencing speech against prosecution from the government is diametrically opposed to the intent of the first amendment.
How could she sue them? She'd have to have been terminated wrongfully. I can't think of a better reason to terminate a PR person than for the type of misconduct she displayed. If anything I'm surprised the company isn't suing her for the damage she's done to their business and their reputation.
you are done with the web community because its developers cant take the time to learn something difficult:

the web has produced as gateway to see programming work with little code. This will produce creators that do not have very much in depth experience/desire for hard problems. It also allows projects to ramp up and see results really fast. This is the trade off of the web ... deal with it or get out. You can be a teacher to these noobs or a nah sayer ... seems you picked the latter.

It sounds like you are surrounding yourself with poor programmers.

Google Now is not a framework its a product. Im sure youll be working with some web guys soon that will be implementing the web version of the product. Dont be surprised if they dont use the best tool ... things need to get done ... the most precious resource is time ... other things can be wasted before we let that one go.
Here is the definitive thread on how to cook a steak. On a poker forum no less:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/34/other-other-topics/cook...
If I may be so bold as to ask, in your opinion, are there any minimum requirements for being offended? That is to say, if apples offend me, and you're eating an apple, is it noble of me to speak up?
"with ruthless moderation"

Yea, but that seems to just push the problem one degree away..."Quis custodiet ipsos custodes"-type situation. I've been part of a few niche forums over the years that have ruthless moderation, and it's not a fun place to be a lot of the time.

http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/ is a forum for primitive skills discussion, and by far the most civil and "adult" forum I've been a part of...I have no idea how they do it.

I love their rules though: http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/16448/Welcome-to-the-...
6 Daily Habits for Innovators
Average smartphone satisfaction is up, fights are fierce for second place
yikes, I can't remember the last time I saw a TOS on my iPhone, can anyone else confirm that this happens?
Yeah, I'd like all deleted/hidden post moved to meta so I can browse them.
Aren't you going to have to re-accept the ToS every time Google changes it?
As far as I know, Microsoft's ASP.NET was kind of a failure. It produced Frontpage-grade (e.g. dirty) html. It did the wrong thing by default and didn't help much with the right thing.

It also brought in some clueless people who had no idea how HTTP, HTML and JS work, with questions like "why my button.hover event does not work" (this was pre-ajax, the event code was on the server and had no ways of knowing the user is hovering over the button).

Maybe it was OK for CRUD and internal applications but not for ordinary websites or sophisticated web apps.

.Net MVC is seen as a success: clean HTML, predictable things under the hood, jquery.
That figure is to power the whole world. The original questions was about the US, which requires a substantially smaller area.
Ooh I like that one. I had to learn that PDQ.

Good lesson for life too. Be slow to anger and strike, but when you do, make sure nobody is getting up.
Firefox:

* No CSS shaders

* CSS 3D is still very buggy (http://acko.net/#force3d) despite the support being over a year old now. Also renders without anti-aliasing, which makes it really ugly.

* Both Firebug and the built-in inspector seriously lack compared to Chrome's dev tools which has a per-frame timeline, profiler, etc. Instead they added the rather pointless 3D tilt view of the DOM which doesn't show you the actual DOM layers (unlike this 5 minute CSS 3D hack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-oQj9Y9I6I) and hence is just a misleading gimmick.

* No in-browser code editing/saving

* No Web Audio API

* No desktop notifications

* No MP3, no AAC, no H.264 support (on OSX anyway), the three most common audio and video codecs.

* No date/time picker, no color picker, no number range field

Yeah, I know there are reasons behind this, but still, the picture is heavily skewed in Chrome's favor

As for IE... CSS 3D support is incomplete (no nesting), its dev tools are pretty crap, and they seem to be actively ignoring standards like WebGL and pushing their own spec for WebRTC.
tl;dr version: his recommendation algorithm stored an amount of data that was Θ(n^2) + Θ(n*m) for # of users, beers. He optimized that to put a constant limit on the storage space used.

The clearest takeaway is: if you want to reduce the disk or memory footprint of your DB, you need to figure out what tables/rows/columns are consuming the lion's share of the space (there's almost always one column that's way worse than the rest) and figure out how to change your app logic to store much less data in that column.

The OP's lessons learned apply no matter which DB you're using!
By recent win, are you talking about McDonald v. Chicago? That's actually Alan Gura and the Second Amendment Foundation. They're also responsible for Heller v. DC, which the NRA tried to interfere with. In fact, most of the recent 2nd amendment successes have been Gura's work, not the NRA's.

The NRA is pro-hunting instead of being pro-second-amendment. Sometimes the two interests intersect, but not always.
I don't think anyone here is judging the comparative difficulties of various groups of minorities. It's recognized that most minority groups do face discrimination.
Gizmodo will just summarize mashable. Eventually AOL will decide they should be the #1 search term for 'python' and 'sendgrid' and their content mill will start working those phrases and beat them all.

Then they'll all congratulate themselves for raising the journalistic bar one cheap SEO trick and even cheaper "I can't believe it's not plagiarism" rewording at a time.
> I would feel really uncomfortable if I was in the same
> room as this person. What if I accidentally say
> something that she finds offensive? Am I next?

I wouldn't feel uncomfortable around her at all, because I find it very easy to avoid saying sexually inappropriate things to women I don't know.

I have quite an off-color sense of humor myself. I joke a lot and a lot of those jokes involve sex, bodily functions, and imagery many might find disturbing.

And yet I have no problem restricting this kind of humor to friendships and relationships where we've established the fact that both parties find that kind of humor funny.

It just honestly doesn't seem difficult to me, and I'm not a genius.
Danilo, I want to preface this with a note that I respect the hell out of you and I think you're coming at this from a good place, but I think you're mischaracterizing the argument that disagrees with you (at least, for some people, I don't claim to speak for everybody). From where I stand, it appears that very few people are mad that she said "hey, PyCon, these guys are being annoying, can you send somebody over?". (And that the people who are mad at that look like crazy people.) That's a good thing to do. I, at least, am 100% on board with this.

Here's my hangup. I will under no circumstances claim that privilege is not a very real thing and it needs to be considered; my posting history here will bear out that I'm usually saying it does and needs to be. And I'm not even against public shaming as a concept - sometimes, it's the only tool left in the box. But I don't think that's the case here, and I read the backlash to this situation as people getting pissed because somebody with a lot of social influence decided to use it like a magnifying glass to burn some ants. She has (had) power and she has (had) standing that they didn't. She was able to--and, I don't think it's unfair to say, did--point at them to many, many people, and attack them in a way that they can't even respond to effectively, let alone defend themselves if she happened to be wrong (and there's sufficient churn among the stories going back and forth that that's a possibility that needs to be considered).

That, I do think, deserves an apology. And a real one.
Yeah, kind of makes all this even scarier. Too much power for supremely fallible human beings.
I sympathize, but your story seems a bit of a stretch. I thought somehow you were going to lead to how he implied you weren't smart enough to be an entrepreneur or something absurd like that.

The last time I innocently chatted up a "taken" woman next to her boyfriend, I was later told by a number of individuals that it seemed like I was hitting on her and it was inappropriate. The allegations totally blew me away because that couldn't have been further from the truth. I was not flirting, I was not touching, I simply asked a lot about her work. I guess old school "bro code" says you shouldn't be too friendly with taken women. Personally, I think it's dumb. Maybe your "perp" thought likewise. And I too would be a little curious why a front-end non-entrepreneur would be at an entrepreneur's conference. Maybe he has some hot new app idea, maybe not.

As for your other examples, though, sorry to hear you had to go through that. With the big-wig, personally, it would come down to how witty of a retort I could come up with, because really, f him. Otherwise, I'd just hold my tongue, which is the safest route, sexist or non-sexist insult alike.
If you don't plan to provide significantly different mechanism for discussion, I don't see why you'd want to build completely new site instead of utilizing Reddit by making your own subreddit with the "ruthless moderation" you want. That's the real power of reddit, that it is as much a platform as it is a community.
"you don't need JS/HTML/CSS knowlede"
But what would you do when it breaks?

Or when a change of behavior asked that is not supported by the framework out of box?
> She then makes some strangely bizarre comments about racism

Actually, that was not "then", that was 4 years ago. Doesn't make it any less wrong or racist, just saying that it's not connected to this scandal.
It speaks to the corporate "Human Resources"-ificaiton homogeization currently engulfing the hacker space. Should anyone be surprised that a culture that fires an employee for fairly innocuous jokes is also one that fires an employee for speaking up? I'm going to bet HR departments were behind both firings. They can't "risk" having employees that aren't zombie drones.
Let's go to Cyprus and promote Bitcoin
Cyprus is in chaos, and may be forced to exit the Euro on Monday. It's time that governments stopped messing around with currencies and peoples savings and investments. The banks have shut down and businesses are not accepting credit cards for worries of not getting paid.

Why don't a group of us hackers go there and launch a Bitcoin currency to let people start trading again, and rebuilding their livelihoods.

Currency by the people, for the people.
IBM's Watson Gets Down to Business
That's not a good snapshot unless you're running LVM or can afford to suspend writes and fsync + lock.
To be fair, their products are really improving in the area of energy efficiency

EDIT: If you are going to downvote, at least point to proof that it isn't happening
The timing is, "the story isn't going anywhere, people are still pissed off, and she continues to make an ass of herself on twitter while all eyes are on her".

I'd have fired her, too.
"The loss of the right to bare arms"- I really hope they don't ban t-shirts!
How does this square with their new campus that's slated to be ready in 2015 and be primarily powered by their own natural gas generating station? [1] Have the plans changed?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Campus#Apple_Campus_2
I just hope this 'story' ends here. Both parties having learned a lesson and walking away a little bit humbler and thoughtful.

I would absolutely HATE to see this become a drawn out legal battle comedy. And I would hate it even more to see Adria end up playing the victim and become some sort of 'women's advocate' showing up in some morning show couch crying and blaming 'the male tech industry'.

Then again, no high hopes on it being over.
Jobylon turns your friends into rewards
Recommend jobs to friends and get great rewards!
Very interesting, I've got a project this might be very useful in. Bookmarked.
Simultaneously correct and incorrect :-) A number of great studies have shown the futility of depending on transient energy renewables (solar, wind, tides) for all generation, and yet the ability to cover peak loads does directly reduce the required amount of non-renewable fuel. If you're renewables generate the same amount of energy during their 'active' hours, that you consume in total, you have effectively arbitraged your use of non-renewables by carrying the load for others during the 'active' time and using their power during inactive times. The total amount of coal/gas/oil burned to create power for the 24 hr period is not affected by the amount of energy your datacenter used.

Given the drop in gas prices I expect that even in NC the power folks are considering changing/upgrading their power plants to burn that instead.
Likewise, no one should think all women behave like Richards.
We use http://partychapp.appspot.com (it was recommended on a previous HN posting). We already used Google Talk for one on one chats so this just adds a group chat into that, and works really well. It also doesn't require additional clients, doing group chats differently than one on one, yet more usernames and passwords etc.
If you're going to publicly shame people for making inappropriate puns you'd be well served to keep your own semi-public behavior impeccable.
> the women I've talked to about this are furious with her

This doesn't represent the views of all women in tech. What happened to Adria could happen to any of us outspoken women. She didn't handle the situation perfectly, but there's no way she could have known this would unfold in this way. She said she didn't want the guy to get fired and apologized to him. I'm horrified by what happened to her and now afraid the same could happen to me.

None of us should have to be afraid that a tweet like that could get someone fired, provoke threats, or warrant attacks on our companies.

The nature of the attacks against Adria are EXTREMELY misogynistic (rape threats, death threats, people calling her a c_nt, b_tch, wh_re, etc) and many people have taken up a "burn her at the stake" mentality. They've also pulled into question her professional credibility and called her an affirmative action hire. They are saying this kind of behavior should be expected from someone with the domain "butyouragirl".

There is a simply an undue level of hatred for Adria which is correlated to her gender, I think in large part because she is an outspoken feminist.

I'm trying to be more outspoken about gender bias I encounter in the workplace, but incidents like this are a terrifying reminder of why that can be dangerous.

I'm not mad at Adria. The larger and more striking problem is how much hatred for women exists in this community and how threatening that feels.

If anything good came of this, it's that these biases are now coming to a head, right out in the open for all to see.
Future of Food
Can you tell me what they said. All I can find is something about forking and dongle? Because it just seems to me like hearsay.
keeping it a secret until its actually released?
Maybe we should gather together a group of hackers and fly to Cyprus to launch a Bitcoin currency to help people restart their livelihoods. Opportunities like this don't come around too often.

What do you think HN community?

Edit: By launch bitcoin currency I mean raise awareness and tailor existing bitcoin tools to local needs
She deserved to get fired. She made up a bullshit story that got a developer fired.
I've always assumed that they have backdoors into all of the publicly common crytography protocols so they are effectively violating Moore's law (by not having to brute-force).

Remember, it was the NSA that designed most of them to begin with and still hires the best of the best to continue the work. It's also probably a lot easier to just tap into everything and record it for later decryption if necessary than try to target various networks or systems individually.
I'd see it as also being that all night is a lot more conducive to no interruptions.