skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've seen the same underlying assumption (that people should avoid accidentally offending other people even with things that aren't offensive) before.

It was when a bigot tried to explain why gay people shouldn't make public displays of their sexuality because they made him uncomfortable.
That's a good suggestion. Hypothesis on problem is that people have a problem transacting with each other, due to shortage of cash, and thus businesses are losing out on revenue - thus a trusted means of exchange would see adoption. Tricky thing is that it's a volatile situation, this might be true this week but all will depend on what resolution the politicians come to on Monday. I'm not sure how to operate lean in a highly volatile situation like this... any thoughts?
I love how you turn this into a talk about re-solving old problems to how mainframes are the way of the future.

Kind of sounds stupid without 6 paragraphs filling it out, huh?
No deal. Why do you always have a need to "ask women what they want"? What about what men want?
> Pray tell

I will testify, brother. ;-)

It think what the gp post was saying is that usually (in most companies) developers who are not very good or are not pulling their weight, are not sent to conferences. What is the freaking reason to send someone to a conference to learn and bring new ideas if they are about to be sent out of the door?

I don't know about friendly coworkers. Maybe other companies do that, we don't. In my experience it is not about friendliness but about who deserves to go and who is passionate about programming.

And, yeah, I agree, I don't see any correlation between him making dongle jokes or being or not being a good programmer.
Hey, sex jokes are not always about women. Big dongles and forking could totally describe male-male sex! Also, why get so upset about sex jokes? Is there something wrong with sex? You wouldn't even be here without it!

I think that people who complain or argue quickly have some unresolved problem. I think this because I am one of those people and I KNOW that I have unresolved mento-emotional issues :) I know that I should be cool and appear to be agreeable all the time, but sometimes (more frequently, mornings or certain topics) it's very challenging. The payoff is so much better than bickering though.

The important thing is to realize you're being a righteous asshole. Then you can start changing.
Thanks, emailed :-)
That would require reading her blog, which I am not inclined to do. You might be the first to actually read back.
So the old saying goes that correlation does not imply causation. Why are spaniards, but no portuguese or italians or irish seeing this spike in bitcoin-related app downloads?

Theres a far more simple explanation that just sticking the "its Cyprus fault". Several popular spanish blogs and newspapers have run big stories about Bitcoin recently (Xataka, El Mundo...). That probably has sparked curiosity among spaniards on the Bitcoin phenomenon. Simple as that.
"But at the Boston conference, great strides were made to have a strong female presence. Almost 40% of attendees at Boston were female, almost 40% of speakers (at the time these numbers were VERY high),"

That's not gender equality though, that's positive discrimination. I think conferences should try to get the best speakers available regardless of their gender.

"She didn’t get the developer in question fired"

She is clearly partly responsive for the company's reaction to the "incident".

"How it Could Have Gone"

The best alternative future is of course clear: act like an adult in a conference. If you think an overheard joke about "dongles" is not to your liking, then too bad. It's rude trying to control other people.
Those slashes are escaped with backslashes in the response
This is a truly well-written piece. Props to Amanda.
> 12 hours is possible on occasion but not daily. You will burn out and become brain fried, but if you break it up, say 4 code 1 doing something completely different 4 code 1 something different and 4 code you can do it on a more regular basis.

Before I had a real job I used to work in a supermarket. Other than that I'd usually game or code and now and again watch TV. My favourite was Saturday when I worked from 1pm to 10pm. I'd then come home and be up until 2 or 3am gaming or coding. The next day I'd wake up around 8 or 9am and code some more.

For the past few years I've had a proper 9 - 5 (+) job. Here in the EU nobody seems to work crazy 80 hours weeks, but I hardly ever get home before 6:30pm. This year I've been trying to do One Game A Month [1], and really I just haven't had the time or energy to do it. In the evening I hardly ever feel like coding more, and at the weekend I can usually only get around 6 hours before I've had enough. I would love to be able to spend as much time coding on what I want as I did 5 years ago :)

[1] http://www.onegameamonth.com/
Heh, no worries. We probably don't actually disagree that much. Things like "significant contribution" are subjective anyway.
At the end of the day, they both did it to themselves and they only have themselves to blame.
What if we polled all conferences for all language that some attending population feel is off the table? Should lawyers plan to vote to ban all lawyer jokes, even if said by insiders? What about bankers' conferences, maybe have them keep attendees from asking pointed questions about bailouts and fraud, etc?

I don't think people should be jocular and act like college fraternity members all their lives, but at the same time, I think, some times people become overprotective and over reactionary.

I think the minds of people who speak up are in the right place (want civility) but are somewhat in denial about what living in a society is (it does not mean we get to proscribe other's behaviors in minutiae).

What I mean is, I prefer most conversations to be free of vulgarity and expletives; however, on occasion, I think those same offenses can be a relief --it shows me, "You know what, society is still organic and it has its blemishes." It's not all purified and true.
The NRA only protects hunter's rights (sometimes at the expense of non-hunting gun owners). The most recent victories in the supreme court were by the Second Amendment Foundation, and think-tanks like the Cato institute have done much more for the second amendment than the NRA.

While the last decade or so has been good for supporter of gun rights, the entire 20th century was not. A lot of what gun rights activists are trying to do now is gain back some of the rights they lost in the 20th century.

As a side note, I think it is interesting is that 3D printer and other consumer-level CAD technology may be for the Second Amendment what the internet was for the First: a way to bypass government regulations altogether.

Please do not mistake my post for an endorsement of pro- or anti-gun viewpoints, I just want to clarify that the NRA isn't actually all that great for gun rights, and gun rights activists haven't been all that successful until recently.
Looks pretty much back up now

Edit: Never mind, still getting sporadic service
If you assume that all women are Victorian-era pearl-clutching girls for whom anything remotely sexual is scandalous, it makes a lot more sense.

The subtext is "women must be shielded from the world".

On the other hand, for people who have actually met women raised, say, post-1940, it's pretty bizarre.
One thing everyone needs to remember is that this event hasn't occurred in a vacuum. The man who was fired from playhaven may have already been on notice for other actions or poor performance. Similarly Sendgrid may have already had Richards on thin ice before the incident. We can't know for sure, but we can't assume that any of these actions are solely due to the inflamed internet.
I think even "casual misogyny" is hyperbole, given the original comment that sparked this whole mess. I think the worst you can say about it is that it was crude and unprofessional.

The hateful aftermath, though, clearly should not be tolerated.
Online backups can be risky if you are not encrypting them, at least for sensitive information.
The 'fire in a crowded theatre' standard was a metaphor for opposing the draft originating in Schenck v United States.

Neither Schenck nor Brandenburg (which is considered to relate to Schenck) relate to actually yelling the word 'fire' more than indirectly.
She's not offended by sexual overtones, and neither is her employer. 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, and then, at the same conference, got offended by a joke conflating dongles to genitals.
Attended Angel Hack last year and had a great time!
Oh, yikes! Weird, wonder why it works on browsers, then. Hm. I'll have to dig into this ;)
Show HN: Matter.vc-backed news app Inkfold, by former Apple engineer + designer
I've spent a few weeks abroad (outside of the US) with the knowledge that I might be exposed to work despite being on vacation (my domestic "vacations" mostly mean working a little less and maybe being in a different place while doing it).

The best experience was by far the first, when I had almost no contact with clients/partners and actually did manage to spend almost all of my time being half-lost and confused, entertaining the natives with my awful language skills, and generally learning about what another place is like rather than learning what it's like to do the same thing somewhere else.

Disconnecting is only half of it, but it's the most important half. Being connected to all things Work means you're still in the same place, wherever you might be geographically, and you can't possibly concentrate on the other half -- actually immersing yourself in something different -- enough for it to impact you as much as it otherwise could.
By the same token, we don't really know why SendGrid fired Adria. The post mentioned that SendGrid failed by not immediately making a statement (or forcing her to publicly apologize), then over-reacting by firing her too late. But we really don't know what was going on at SendGrid behind the scenes. Maybe they were trying to work with her and she wouldn't change her position, or maybe they just didn't know what to do.
> crass comments about/towards women

I think the original comment is raising the point that the comments were crass, but did not appear to be about or towards women in the slightest.
It's beyond privacy, you can do time for a tweet!
Catch-22s and Bootstrapping Your Life
Dart has been developed in the open as well. It's not even released in Chrome yet, it's been fully in the open for 2 years, which is most of its existence and has undergone massive revision since the original seeding of the project based on community contributes. Yes, my comment was snarky.

No matter how you slice it, adding a pragma, and requiring code to be written in an idiomatic format to gain maximum advantage by a conforming VM implementation is essentially introducing a new set of semantics to the VM. The fact that you can sneak it into the existing grammar (x|0) instead of needing to extend the grammar (int x), is a neat trick.

I fully support what asm.js is doing, I don't have any objections to it, and once the Garbage Collection support happens, I will look very hard at making GWT support it as an output format (primarily to support PlayN). But I wish Mozilla would stop peppering everyone of their press releases with a thinly veiled snipe at competitors.
> Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS?

You don't??!
AngelHack London Nov 2012 was so inspirational that even if it hadn't produced two WW Finals Winners (Osper & Testlio)it would still have been the most important hackathon in London last year
Here's something that's been bugging me, perhaps you may have an answer:

How the hell do we measure a police department's effectiveness?

If we reward increasing arrest rates (because presumably we're arresting more and more of the criminals) the straightforward solution is to arrest more people, and that would seem to lead to more and more draconian law enforcement to reach quota.

If we reward declining arrest rates (because presumably there are fewer and fewer crimes being committed), then the straightforward solution is to stop making arrests and thus allow real crime to proliferate.

This just seems like a no-win solution for honest departments and civil rights.
The argument in Wickard is that growing wheat on your farm is interstate commerce because if you grow your own wheat, you won't buy someone else's wheat, which affects the interstate market for wheat. How does that depend on technological progress? Seems like it would apply as long as wheat were sold across state lines at all.
"At a tech conference, women are in the minority, and so crass comments about/towards women are not perceived in a safe way."

Which didn't happen in this case.
I don't think either of you are representative of the vast majority of computer users.
Ah, but they didn't make any comments to her, by her own admission.

Her story goes like this: She was sitting a row in front of them and they were having a private conversation with "dongle" and "forking" jokes.

It could have been me, making those jokes. Luckily nobody could fire me if somebody went nuts and posted my photo on the internet and tried to publicly shame me instead of asking me to stop doing it in her earshot. But perhaps more importantly, she probably wouldn't have said a thing, because I'm a woman. Who's been laughing over the word "dongle" since 1997.
> But it's not, by your logic a compiler producing machine-generated K&R C in the late 70s would also be a blob.

Seeing as generated C is essentially unmaintainable and unsuitable to serve as a source language, then yes.

> Native Client proponents and similar such "VM fundamentalists" are effectively claiming that we can invent such a format, when it has never been done before in the history of computer science.

I'm confused. Asm.js is an ASCII bytecode. We have plenty of other examples of abstract bytecode throughout the history of computer science, but they tend to be binary, not ascii.

Other than asm.js using a silly encoding for backwards compatibility purposes, what's the difference?

> (Pre-emptively rejecting boring VM counterexamples like Java for reasons that can be extrapolated from what I just described)

Huh? Now I'm even more confused. Are you arguing against Java's virtual machine specification, the constraints of its bytecode as defined, or what?

Notably, Android converts stack-based Java bytecode to register-based Dalvik bytecode; it's not as if the JVM bytecode strictly defines all conventions in an immutable way, or even that asm.js is all that different in practice.

I wanted to address this one last, since it's a bit of a tangent, but it demonstrates the issues of "architecture agnosticism" fairly well:

> Those C source files do not, for example, make assumptions about Harvard/von Neumann architecture, stack layout, calling conventions, the presence or absense of SIMD instructions, and so on.

That's not exactly true. If pure C is output, then yes, this is the case. In reality, especially with Harvard and modified Harvard architectures, one must take into account architecture differences to achieve reasonable performance, especially on the hardware as developed in the late 70s.

For example, there is often limited RAM, in which case one might want to store data in program space. However, C pointers do not, in any standardized way, support annotating the memory space (program, data) in which they live, and code itself can not necessarily portably extract data from program space as to operate on it as if it was in data space.

So, for a Harvard architecture, you often either wind up writing non-portable C, or you deal with inefficiencies -- some of which may not be possible to overcome, as there's only so much RAM or data storage to work with.
Agreed. Even though I'm sure Adria has been putting up with tons of real sexism over the years in the tech industry, and that this may have been the figurative straw on the camel's back, this is definitely the wrong thing to focus on. Sex jokes are definitely not necessarily sexist. These guys were perhaps a little crude, and their puns maybe horrible, but they were essentially harmless and at worst, just annoying.

What we should focus on is the terrible response from the tech community towards Adria. 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. Let's focus on that and denigrate those comments, not some random crude comments a couple guys said in private.
Very much agreed. Whether or not I agree with it, it's very nuanced and avoids the kind of "laying blame for the purpose of laying blame"-type of argument that has dominated any discussion of this absurd series of events.

This is a great article with which to start a discussion, not end one. Hopefully the tolerance for less nuanced and more reactionary discussion will abate. I wouldn't put money on it, but I can hope.
US plan calls for more scanning of private Web traffic, email
Also, just checked: they do have a General Counsel, Michael Tognetti. Whether he was involved or not, I don't know. It was pretty ballsy to go about this the way they have, if you ask me.
"because Test Unit documentation is terrible"

Are you confusing Test Unit documentation with 'How/What to test' documentation? I can't think of any documentation required if what you use is a group of asserts.

Test::Unit in a nutshell:
`test "should do something"; ...; end` is what gets run in each of the files. `setup` is called before each test. `teardown` is called after each test. use `assert_*` at your discretion.
No, she had every right to complain to the conference organisers.
Unfortunately I can't name names, because we consider applications confidential. But one advantage of all the other incubators that have sprung up is that when we miss a good group, they tend to get funded by one of the others, and as a result we hear about it. So if you made a list of the most successful cos funded by incubators other than us, it would not be far off our antiportfolio.
A Difficult Situation
It was hilarious: http://bigbangtheory.wikia.com/wiki/The_Beta_Test_Initiation
Taking a comment from someone on this thread, named xal:

asm.js is the hack of the year.

Because it makes simple, to get good performance.

Probably the biggest roadblock in software development, is the cost of complexity. Many great projects fail to be realized, because of the development costs. And development costs rise exponentially with complexity.
Software development needs to become simpler. The success of simple and agile programming languages, like javascript proves that. Want to learn it ? just open just browser and type some code.

This is one huge step in the right direction. It makes very easy to get good performance, on the most ubiquitous platform, the web. It makes many things possible, at lower costs. And this is the same big reason why, a platform like firefoxOS has the potential to be awesome. Because it makes things simpler.

Now I wish that the same thing done here to javascript, were also done to html, CSS, the dom, etc. The web needs simpler bases. And modularity on top of it.
Actually, sexual harassment laws that actually exist are reasonable and conservative. There are a few women who try to sue over dick jokes, and "men's rights" characters who make a big deal out of it when that happens-- just like people blow the McDonalds case out of proportion (short synopsis: McD was in the wrong for bad cup design and serving over 160F/70C, the court assigned her partial blame, and she originally only wanted her medical bills paid, not "legal lottery" nonsense)-- but the stuff that's actually covered by sexual harassment law in most jurisdiction is leagues beyond mere dick jokes.

No court would consider him guilty of anything for a joke about a dongle.

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

If she asked him to stop, and he kept going, then I'd say that he did something wrong. If he made a dick joke, then no. People make dick jokes in semi-private conversations. Women do, men do, because dicks can be funny. If she says "I wish you wouldn't make jokes like that around me", then he should have stopped and would be in the wrong, but I've seen no evidence of that.

The termination suit is uncertain. It's far from a slam dunk, obviously, especially since he admitted making comments that he considered wrong and embarrassing. Bad move to discuss this in the public so soon. He should be able to get defamation, at least with good enough odds to get a settlement that'll cover him till he gets his next job, given what PlayHaven's management said about the termination and about him.
> Please allow me to be more specific. Western European and North American governments are not, in terms of quality of leadership or structure of administration, tangibly different from many governments not present in those regions.

There are despots and tyrants all over the world. They are very tangibly different from Western European and North American governments in terms of quality of leadership or structure of administration.

> Further, seizure of land is not unknown in the US.

We're talking about grain, not land. The specifics of the example are particularly relevant.

> If the government isn't particularly different, is it some quality of the people present in those countries that makes you so confident that they wouldn't take physical property?

I'm not confident at all that they wouldn't take physical property. Once again, this is irrelevant. We aren't talking about probability, or chance, or anything of the sort.

Once again, the top parent is a commentary on cognitive dissonance using factual observations about the world. Governments are not taking grain from farmers, but governments are taking money from banks.

> That's an interesting point to make because prior to this instance, governments in the developed world didn't take 10% of deposits, either.

Well, yes... The top parent was contrasting this with something the top parent believed was morally equivalent, but was not practiced.

> "if you say so." ... This is generally something people say when they don't agree, but can't or don't want to prove their point.

Actually, I meant it as, "I don't care to argue that point because it's irrelevant to the topic of conversation."
Basel Action Network Turns Back the Toxic E-Waste Tide
Stabilizer: Statistically Sound Performance Evaluation
The New Yorkers I've worked with--me being a good innocent God-fearin' Texan--would certainly support your opinion.
Not puns - just one pun.

The repo forking was, though informal, a thoroughly unpurient and non-sexual comment that she read meaning into.
When people stop using bitcoin, this value will disappear. It is not intrinsic value. It is value assigned by group psychology, like a bubble.
Your post is exactly the sort of ostensibly jokey comment that makes women feel unwelcome.
I think you're on your way to praising the god particle: http://abstrusegoose.com/98