skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, some of the people arguing against her were that. But definitely not all.

There were and are a lot of people who see this issue through exactly one lens: is the man right or is the woman right? They caught hold of this issue and made it part of their long battle. This issue got reposted to those various blogs and subreddits that represent those armies. (And they each monitor the other so summoning either army summons both.) I suspect that, had those armies never been involved, neither person would be fired today. Not that those armies care. The two people who got fired were acceptable casualties in their war on The Other.

Ugh, this comment turned into pop-psychology, sorry.
This is a spectacularly helpful response, speaking well to the culture and philosophy of those behind ember.js.

I'm not sure Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton could have put it better.
The big question is if our government is supposed to be "of, by, and for the people", then how did it manage to become this separate entity--with a life and agenda of its own--that has now turned against "the people"?

We all (myself included) talk about the government in the third person. Yet, it is supposed to be our representative and our voice. It is supposed to be "us".

So, why are we so powerless to stop things like this, the Aaron Swartz tragedy, PATRIOT Act, etc?
" There is horrifying sexism in the comments that have been posted over the past 24 hours, and it just brings to light the pervasive sexism in our industry."

Exactly. Which is why I'm happy this is playing out now, because I haven't seen the industry introspect on gender issues in a long time.
This was a great post. And I think it does a pretty good job at illustrating the absurdity of the situation: one sex joke and three people are out of a job, with one potentially unemployable in the same capacity.

Now, guys will feel compelled to check themselves every time they are in public. When being victim of actual harassment, girls will think twice about denouncing it.

And the worst part is that all the actually sexist guys will be able to point to this incident as a justification for why sexism in the tech industry is "not a problem".

Thanks, Adria. Thanks, Internet. You all did a terrific job.
For example, take this pic from LinuxCon last year: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitmason/7987595846/ (To be clear, I took this pic because I found it funny, not offensive. I suspect some might find it offensive.)
Right, and I've seen many pages like the rubyinside one leaving me still hungry with questions like, "So, no more test_helper.rb or what?" Couldn't find that in either of those links.

This is really more of a general documentation quibble on my part though, since I'm the dope who can't read through my questions and find the answers in the source (or wherever). I've been planning on making a blog post about 1:1 mapping of concepts between Test::Unit and Minitest learned from my own transformation, but as I've mentioned, I haven't been able to undertake that yet.
> Or are you being facetious?

Well, I do use vim, so I can't really hate it, can I? :) ...it's just the thing that some things should just be plain and simple imho, code editing should not be a "domain" in itself and one should rather learn unrelated new things than bother tweaking that last 10% ...it's just a matter of preference and take on life, some strive for "mastery" at something and work on that last 10% to get an edge, others don't bother to achieve "mastery" at one thing but prefer to explore more things and get that edge by "perspective shifting" or "thinking more outside the box". I bothered to learn vim out of "exploratory curiosity", because I found the concept of such an interface interesting. But though interesting, I don't consider it a good idea anymore - if you give people a tool to manage complexity, they will take advantage and add more of it, for very little benefit.
You could just say "Don't be an asshole". Assholes are gender-neutral! :D
Ruby HTTP clients features
FWIW, I think the colorful and abusive language in this instance did a good job conveying additional information about the poster's mindset, opinion, and how they relate to others.

Note that it doesn't reflect well on them. Part of their point is how they say it. To me, this says they're being reactionary and not mindful of others, which undermines their standing.

Bad language is a useful signal in communication. In this case, especially, it's a negative signal about the poster.
The value that gold derives from industrial uses is minimal today and practically non-existent historically. Assuming you are talking about jewelry? In that case it's important to consider how much of it's popularity in such matters depend on its ability to be scarce and store value making its value derive from a very similar psychological circle as bitcoins.
This is exactly how rape trials used to be conducted. The victim would be put on the stand and critiqued about every single relationship she had ever had, with the defence bringing all of her skeletons out in a manner carefully calculated to seem reasonable, fair, and balanced.

I'm fifty. I could put together two blog posts about myself, one of which would make me seem like a saint, the other a demon, and both would be factually correct. Which one you read right after I got into some hot water could seriously skew your feelings about my role in events.
They've all but abandoned making upgradable tools in favor of disposable appliances, which severely dilutes the energy savings from running them.
In the end, the consequences that resulted from how she reported the conduct put our business in danger. Our commitment to our 130 employees, their families, our community members and our more than 130,000 valued customers is our primary concern.

Is he referring to the DDOS there? Or the user exodus?
I'm interested in a different aspect here than the discussion of sexism and who fired whom at this point. If you're running a blog as a public evangelist for a company, and twitter is part of that public presence, and you emit a tweet which includes a picture of people and criticism of them without their permission, surely this constitutes a violation of commercial use-of-likeness laws in most states, doesn't it?
MC10 Tapping North Bridge to Advance Stretchable Silicon Business
Repo forking is kid stuff. Back in my day, we fscked and we meant it.
Nice! I'll check that out the next time I'm forced to work on a Mac (it happens when I do any iOS development...oh how I hate Apple...). KeyCue is a step in the right direction, UI-wise, regardless.
Who's writing all that content for Wikia (a for profit wiki)? it's starting to rival wikipedia.
She's allowed to be offended with those comments (or single pun), but the method of communicating her offense was definitely not called for.

And honestly, even if it were sexual, it isn't sexist. I think that's a distinction that certainly needs to be made. Calling Adria a c*nt and other horrible things online definitely is sexist though.
As a dolphin I am offended. I'm gonna sic my twitter followers on you.
You know, recently I had reason to look into the teardown method (DatabaseCleaner, dontchaknow), and I never did find anything conclusive that it was something that test-unit used. Sure, it was mentioned in many many DatabaseCleaner questions/answers/threads, but nothing I could really rely on since invariably these were also using Rspec. That is, my unanswered question was "Is teardown solely an Rspec thing?"
This is the most reasonable statement I've seen so far in this whole fiasco. It's a shame he took so long to post it; it should have been the first SendGrid comment this morning.
Sorry about that. It lazily checked for two characters before the @ instead of one. It should work now: http://whatdoitest.com/
I'm not sure why y'all are so interested in talking about the first ammendment with regard to the OP... what's it got to do with the first ammendment?

A lot more about the fourth ammendment -- unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to be "secure in your papers and effects" -- the one that says they need a warrant and ordinarily need to let you know the warrant was served). Don't it?
mmm...

What do you mean with 'A lot of places didn't even take credit card'? Are you sure you've been in Spain?.

I guess YOU know nothing about Spain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...
it's true, most people also aren't willing to throw away what they have built for themselves for an ideal.

is it cowardly? well, yeah. but can you really blame anyone else for not wanting to mess up what they have? I mean, let's be realistic.
The answer to both is "Yes".

When their service is down, companies can't send their email, when companies can't send their email using SendGrid they look for alternatives...
"No court would consider him guilty of anything for a joke about a dongle."

I'm not an employee of playhaven, but I'm sure new employees sign employment agreements. Usually those agreements reference standards of conduct and that violations can result in termination. The court would have to establish that the employment agreement is null and void, which is a much harder challenge.

"I doubt his company had a sexual harassment policy that was substantially more aggressive than what the law provides."

What we don't know is if employees of playhaven complained about his banter. If they did, and he was informed and asked to stop, then it's his fault.

"He should be able to get defamation"

He might get defamation from her but not from PlayHaven.
The mobile CCTV units with the periscope cameras are mostly for parking enforcement.
The docs really are lacking in this case; I expected the Test::Unit docs would document what's being stubbed and not in MiniTest but there's nothing there on that as near as I can tell.

As a rule, I miss the thoroughness of CPAN/Perl docs. Some ruby packages have amazing docs but often I feel at sea, particularly with regard to high level overviews and examples.
There are varying definitions of the word sexist that complicate the issue -- but here it doesn't matter!

Because Adria didn't call them sexist, certainly not in the twitter or blog posts I've read. She just said it made her uncomfortable.
So... you didn't then say "Okay, so why did you want me to sign a new one again?"
"...her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite. As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid." Anyone who thinks SendGrid were wrong to let her go should consider that. SendGrid did the right thing, they just took a bit too long to do it.
Amazon's James Hamilton estimates the north Carolina 171 acre solar array only generates %4 of the energy required for the datacenter

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/03/17/ILoveSolarPowerB...
funny thing is I've been wondering this all day myself.
While I agree it's eminently reasonable, it can sometimes take a day or two to work through a thorny issue, regain a sense of calm, and write something reasonable.
Huh, works fine for me. Try again perhaps?
>I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven

It's interesting that the story is about Adria and mr-hank when, in fact, it should be about their respective companies. There are probably thousands of tweets posted everyday by people who got offended with inappropriate jokes - many of them at work. The real story is about the decisions of the respective HR / management to fire them. Aria didn't overreact more than PlayHaven HR, and she was less affected by mr-hank than by the SendGrid CEO laying her off. These people took the real decisions and they're hardly in the public eye.
Yeah, if we got rid of everyone from tech that had personal issues, there would be about 2 people left in it. "Having issues" isn't a sin and we should leave that alone.
My country has a law about offending religion. Almost whole population is to some degree religious. So not only minorities get offended.

Recently local pop star was tried and sentenced because she said that Bible was written by heavily pissed and baked blokes and some people got offended.

Protecting the offended can be a tool for bullying people that speak their mind or behave true to themselves.

One might think that in this age of intense communication people would grow thinker skin. But Americans got more fragile instead.
I would say that using technical terms in a joking way is definitely a sign of enjoying one's job, and enjoying one's job is definitely a significant data point as to gauging whether one is good at it. If you can talk about your job without criticizing it and laugh, I would say you enjoy what you do and therefore that you do it well.
Adria Richards, you're fucking it up for the rest of us
So what we know now is that Adria Richards' issues are not just with sexism, offensive behavior in general or gender equality, but that she has an ideological agenda that goes well beyond that.

Her issues with pornography are ideological, in that they aren't shared by many men and women who would take issue with sexist behavior or gender based discrimination. However, like many ideologues, she doesn't make that distinction herself.

And what is also typical for ideologues, she doesn't have any issues with saying or doing things that disproportionately harm people who disagree with her, because they are "the enemy". They're not interested in change, they are interested in winning.

These kind of people will do more harm than good when it comes to fighting sexism in tech. They will actually alienate a lot of women.

(I do however find it inappropriate and borderline sexist to call her a prude. Being against pornography doesn't make you a prude, just like enjoying pornography doesn't make you a sexist pig.)
9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp
I agree she had an absolute right to complain. My point is simply that she had no legal cause of action against either the guys or their employer. So what did she really have to gain through this controversy? And did those guys really deserve to lose their jobs over some childish comments?
Nah. That would be to logical a conclusion.
'white knight' has nothing to do with racism. It evokes the mythical imagery of the paladin, whose surcoat is clean and white because he is so pure and uncorrupted.
I don't understand that ad TBH. If they are trying to get males to purchase tee-shirts, wouldnt you want to show a male wearing the tee-shirt? I understand the idea of selling for sexuality, but most retail companies advertise men's clothes with men.
This line of rhetorics is exactly the reason why I said that a character critique is unhelpful here, so I'm not sure what your point is but I'm choosing to interpret this as agreeing with me. ;)
I think the 'You're not helping' meme is pretty damn apropos here and I am a software engineer who happens to be female.

I'm not furious at her, because she's not high enough on my radar to actually incite 'fury', but I do think she's an idiot and that her actions are likely to cause the exact opposite response than the one she claims to have intended.

Oh and I also don't really find my field to be inherently sexist just because it's mostly men and there are a lot of dick jokes. I happen to like it that way, and much like every guy with some chops I've always been treated with respect due to my own abilities.

They do expect me to actually have ability to be part of the group, but that's hardly unreasonable.
I'm curious - did you consider whether mentioning the name of that filesystem check utility in a public forum might be considered inappropriate? I'm really (honestly) not judging either way, I'm just curious as to whether you checked yourself before posting?
Bravo. This is the only rational reason to fire her.
As long as you're on a *nix, yes. RubyGems works cross-platform, not just cross-POSIX.
Retro Database Making a Comeback?
Remember when your basic software suite consisted of WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBASE-III, and you coded listening to Wham! and Foreigner? Well a new company has acquired the rights to that pioneering database, which it claims is still used by "millons of software developers," and released dBASE PLUS 8. Does it have a chance? And why did it fade into obscurity?
I believe that it is the most reasonable statement because he took time to look over the entire situation and gauge it properly.
WebWorkers have also been recently enhanced so that it is possible to pass a message with no copy (by moving it out of the current WebWorker; it loses it's reference to the data).

I suspect taking advantage of this would greatly help in a game situation.
Not to mention the importance of a thorough legal review, and actually speaking to the employee in question.
Fact-checking at The New Yorker
Radioscloud
Listen the best online radio
This is huge. Never heard of Asm.js until now but this is the first time I'm really excited about Javascript.

I feel like dropping everything right now and start playing with this.
Is insulting a female inherently sexist? I wouldn't call someone a sexist if they called me a dck or a son of a btch. Obviously the response here is sexist, but calling somebody bad names is not sexist, regardless of their gender.
Great job. The slides are clear enough but I'll check out the video for the rest. I've come across some of those orm extensions before but not all of those.

Btw. Do you think those pooling managers are much better than pgbouncer ?
Oh sure, but you'd be diluting all existing fractional unit owners. So, being taxed 10% still sounds better to me than being diluted by 50% or more because someone arbitrary decided that there are 200 fractional units now, not 100 as before (figuratively speaking).
Is she?

She published this joke about sexual humiliation from the same conference:

https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425

And the company she was envangelising for on that twitter feed thinks that a visual joke about photocopying your genitals is not inappropriate for their jobs pages:

http://i.imgur.com/uWc8P39.png

I understand that speaker and context make all the difference, but she made a joke about sexual humiliation to thousands, and then, at the same conference, got offended by overhearing joke conflating dongles to genitals.

I agree with you that resorting to sexual slurs is immensely counterproductive and makes one look stupid, but I can also understand why angry people would reach for them, since this is in the line of the discussion. Understand, but not excuse.

Still the point stays - you don't make penis jokes and then get offended by penis jokes.
Yup, just set a new PrintStream(new ByteArrayOutputStream()) in System.setOut() and you're good.
Really? Taking a few days to decide on a course of action is too long? When you're discussing firing an employee? Who may have performed well in her position before the incident for all we know?
> What we should focus on is the terrible response from the tech community towards Adria.

I still believe (hope?) that those horrible things posted are not from the tech community but rather from a few random trolls and groups like militant mens right people.
It's retaliation if Adria filed a charge against SendGrid and then was fired.

"because they filed a charge of discrimination, because they complained to their employer or other covered entity about discrimination on the job, or because they participated in an employment discrimination proceeding"

I don't think this holds water.
I think part of it was something like "if you access corp from a device, you have just tainted it and we can dig around on it at any time, including when you quit", which I mechanically translated to "never read my mail, Buzz, or anything else from home unless I'm on the company laptop or the Nexus One which they gave me and is fundamentally tainted anyway".

This could have affected my personal iPhone, Linux box(es) at home, and anything else which might have accessed google.com/a/google.com/... resources. So, I basically stopped checking mail unless I was at work.

I also think they tried to make it retroactive to the day I started work, but I'd like to see that fly in a court of law. Retroactively tainting my machines? Good luck with that.
For the last three HN threads I have seen people casting aspersions on the guy who was fired, that maybe there were other factors at play. Now it comes out from someone that knows Richards that she is a bit of a difficult person herself. Maybe there were more factors at play in her firing than simply this event. Of course who knows, but it's fun and easy to cast aspersions!
This web site is really useful
To set the record straight I worked for Lockheed, and got to meet Kelly Johnson, who is one of my heroes, but I actually did not work with him. I did work for Doug Engelbart. Both true visionaries and engineering Samurais.
I applaud SendGrid's response to this debacle. It is carefully weighed and expresses the precise reason why action absolutely needed to be taken. It is worthy of praise that they are willing to step into a very controversial issue and do what is best for their employees despite the potential fallout.

I encourage anyone who was considering not using SendGrid's services in light of recent events to reconsider, given their reasoned, rational response to a difficult situation.
The situation wasn't that difficult, and Sendgrid's response was inappropriate.

Welcome to the Corporate State where every problematic statement you make as an errorful human being prone to making mistakes will be used against you to preserve the corporate bottom line.

An actual appropriate response from SendGrid and Play Haven would have been recognition that its employees are human's first, and all of us are subject to making mistakes of one form or another. That they back their employees, and support them, even as they disagree with their statements or their behaviors.

I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write

It is ironic, it is tragic that SendGrid, an email delivery company, chose to fire an employee expressing speech, as opposed to just offering more speech in rebuttal.

The answer to the ugly free speech of Adria Richards is more speech, not firings.

(Yes, Hacker News, downvote my comment. Make sure a reasonably stated position that disagrees with you is shown its place.)
Adria stated they had been talking for a while, indicating there were previous comments.

PyCon determined the guys had said something offensive.

So, either PyCon lives in fear of Adria, or other people also found the comments to be overtly sexist/sexual.

Unless PyCon publishes an investigative report, I doubt we will get the entire story.

If you personally don't find the things they said offensive, that's fine, but they were there in a professional representation, not a personal one. If PyCon and their employer both felt the guys said something clearly outside the guidelines represented to them by PyCon, that's the issue. Whether it was about dongles or donkeys doesn't matter.

EDIT: Originally I stated PyCon removed them from the conference, as a followup pointed out this was incorrect.
Sorry, I should probably have said took too long to talk about it, rather than do it. I completely agree that they needed to take time over their decision, but they should have posted this along with that initial statement earlier today.