skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got into an interesting debate about nuclear weapons with a person who works on non-proliferation. Nuclear weapons are pretty stupid, especially today, since they do a huge amount of damage and provide limited to negative strategic advantage (if you nuke a city, just clearing the rubble it a 5 or 10 year project before you can even think about having it be functional again, so no advantage gained and a lot of work to have it re-contributing to the nation-state economy)

His point was that nuclear weapons were seductive because they were cheap. And even though they might cost $100M and require $25M/year in maintenance, that was a pittance compared to training, equipping, and deploying a couple of armored divisions which could similarly level a city. So having a "cheap" nuke meant you didn't need a couple of divisions of marines.

Cops have the same problem. There are only so many of them, and yet there is a lot of crime. So the combined forces of budget cuts and crime fighting pull them toward solutions of "efficiency" (which is code for more crime fighting for less money). At a logical (but immoral) extreme, if you have cameras recording everything on every street in a city 24/7 with cameras that can see in all conditions, and a crime occurs, you don't need cops you don't need witnesses, you just rewind the tape to when it happened, see who did it, and go arrest them. A police force of 150 officers reduced to one fat guy [1] sitting in a room full of monitors and recording devices. That is why these guys practically orgasm over things like the DARPA Argus-IS system [2].

Watching re-runs of Starsky and Hutch and Cagney & Lacey vs modern cop shows like Castle or NCIS gives you a good feel for the difference in efficiency that tech has brought into law enforcement.

So the weird thing is that people demand these sorts of capabilities and tools for good reasons (crime mitigation, catching bad guys after the fact) and ignore the potential for abuse (which is more often covered up). When you see editorials that the biggest drug gang in LA used to be based in the Rampart police station you realize that no amount of "good intention" protects you from a few now truly well equipped "bad apples." I've proposed to my representatives a law that would make "violation of the public trust" a capital crime. It is the civil equivalent of treason. Not a lot of traction on that effort though. That is what it will take though to protect yourself from folks who would abuse these toys to do bad things. I can't see trying to deny them the efficiencies as a winning proposition you come out looking guilty.

[1] Its a trope I see all the time, the guy watching the monitors is morbidly obese (always male) and generally portrayed as a loser. Of course their job is redundant so in the "real" world nobody would watch the monitors.

[2] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2013/01/29/watch-t...
Seconded; I love the community around RSpec, and it works perfectly well for me.
That's the first time someone has made that distinction, so while that might be your belief, that's the general public in outrage over what she did does not follow in this belief. The comments speak for themselves: publicly outing someones mistakes is not the way to resolve these situations.

You, obviously, feel differently.
Aren't the names of new users shown in green? So unless they already had accounts waiting around then people new to hackers news would stand out pretty easily.
IANAL but I think the moment you put a license on it you claimed copyright. IIRC you don't have rights to license someone else's creation without consent
Weight loss and habit forming — Let’s not pretend we have it all figured out
Agreed.

It seems that she involved them in a battle not of their choosing, one that they apparently don't want to fight, and she has since suffered the consequences.
This post mentions IonMonkey, which is the newest enhancement to Firefox's Javascript engine. According to http://arewefastyet.com/ , it appears to be doing pretty well so far (red is old Firefox, purple is current Firefox, black is future Firefox, green is Chrome, lower is always better). Excited to see what'll happen once OdinMonkey gets added to the mix.
> This doesn't portray women as badly as it portrays our entire tech culture badly

Yep. Even after the tweeted photo it seems like this could of ended with an apology going both ways. An apology that did actually occur at PyCon from what I've read.

The guys employer knee-jerked with a firing which should have been unnecessary and the ripples of that action have just gone way out of proportion.

I don't think she needed to be fired, and she definitely doesn't need or deserve to be called some of the things that have been said. The people doing so are actively harming any real discussion that is taking place.

I feel for both sides here.
It most certainly wouldn't have. There are legions of morons shouting about feminists in almost every discussion about these events, even when Adria said she doesn't identify as one.

After this whole debacle, I've given up hope for both the self-proclaimed "hacker" community and the tech industry at large. The response to a woman posting a photograph of two people and reporting them to convention staff should not be "send her death and rape threats," "dig up every bad thing she's ever done in an attempt to discredit her," and "DDoS her employer."

It's disgusting, and I'm not going to cop-out and say, "Well both sides were at fault!" No, the side that stirred this non-story into a full-on witch hunt resulting in her harassment and termination is the side at fault.
Yes! Michael Hardt's tutorial is the culprit for me as well.
Yeah, soundcloud is OK. Unfortunately, their file limits are frustrating and I'd just as soon launch without their social features.

It's a lot more like flickr than it is imgur.
Remind me again why that you think MongoDB is "still not a good technology choice" ?

Given that you're (a) not using it, (b) making judgements based on a series of blog posts, (c) extrapolating bugs that only manifest under specific scenarios, (d) are clearly new to technologies like Apache, ElasticSearch, Git, Redis etc so haven't seen some equally disturbing bugs.
Lets play my favorite game: How should it have happened?

Acceptable case: Adria turns around to the guys in question and politely lets them know that she is not cool with middle-school humor at a professional event. They are embarrassed, and think twice about it next time.

Best case: The guys around them do this first.

What actually happend: A chain-reaction of explosive over-reactions.
That's a lovely theory and all, but literally nothing has a ratio of social:real registration anywhere approaching 24:1. Those casual use apps you are talking about get 70% social if they have really bad registration processes. Under 50% if they have decent registration.
The issue as you frame it is not a liberal/conservative issue. It's an authoritarian/libertarian issue. It seems to me that most of jwz's problems are to do with people who are relatively conservative and authoritarian.
How do you know that more about this than Apple does? I don't see any reason to believe they're lying, from what you said?
Not at all. Feel free to be _that_ guy. First thing I noticed about the example was that it was badly written RSpec - which undermines an article advising on what you should/shouldn't do for testing.
Php is still used and developed. Perl is still used and actively developed (both 5, which is the stable version with backports occasionally, and 6 which is a complete rewrite, but still very much in development).

You can get a job as a php coder. Plenty of companies use it.

People like to give their first languages love, and lots of people learned to program in something like ruby or python, so they keep programming in them. But that doesn't mean that older languages or legacy code go away.

That doesn't mean you should stop learning. Learning more than one language or framework can help you become a better programmer. But don't let people tell you php is over.

There are languages that are pretty much gone, except for legacy code. Practically nobody learns pascal anymore, from what I can tell.

Php, however has held up surprisingly well, compared to a lot of languages/frameworks. You might try picking up another language, like java script.
By that standard, people who make sexist jokes should automatically get fired, because it makes it much more difficult to effectively work in a job which involves working with women and male allies.
I thought you cannot just change an already given Creative Commons license just when you want?
A lot of people on HN were critical of Adria Richards but I didn't see any of the extreme hate speech that I saw on some other forums towards her.

I'm sure it would be naive to believe that there was 0 overlap, but HN (and most programming sites) are not bastions of hate speech.
I would not have reacted the same way in this set of circumstances -- I feel sort of bad for those dudes wondering why their picture was being taken -- but I am far from "furious" with Adria. I will, on the other hand, never do business with SendGrid.

I worked with a bright, lovely young woman who had taken two terms of Java, with an eye toward a CS degree. One of her professors told her in office hours that she smelled really good. So she was doing marketing. Little creep-outs can have a huge impact, and you will unfortunately find so many of them in nearly every tech setting that if you hang in there, you just get accustomed to saying nothing. But saying nothing is not the ideal course of action, because based on the numbers, lots of women don't hang in there. Adria is right that the little girl on the slide might never make it to PyCon (in a dev role...) if things stay the same.

Imagine if roles were reversed, and lucrative, enjoyable, interesting jobs were mostly held by straight women, and every time you went to a professional conference, you had to endure non sequitur pictures of men in bikinis, and uninformed, under-dressed plastic booth bros, and people assuming you're an uninformed booth bro no matter how you look, and the after-party at a male strip club, and countless unattractive old women chatting you up when you'd rather write code and all manner of little, alienating crap. In this bizarro world, you would likely not believe the sense of relief when another man spoke up about all this stuff that had gone unquestioned.

Your comment about feeling uncomfortable around Adria is ironic, given that feeling uncomfortable is exactly what Adria was trying, however imperfectly, to fix. Unfortunately, the comfort of straight white men has again ruled the day, and SendGrid fired a black woman to preserve it. I hope she finds a truly wonderful lawyer.
Pretty sure `define` is not a keyword in RSpec. The author means `describe`.
While I agree about the "no reinventing the wheel" part (after all that's one of the benefits of our product), I think Cappucino had made some choices that the random developer could not come to terms with.

I don't think that this is due to laziness or rouded-corner cravings (although the "new shiny toy" effect is very much existing).

I think this has more to do with the different timelines web developers face when building apps. Not all of them can afford the long learning curves required by Cappucino and the fact that objective-J is only useful for Cappuccino. Not all of them need to build app-looking apps or spend lots of time bending the defaults to look like something else

So the web community turns to low learning curve libraries as a side effect of not having the time to commit (as opposed to not wanting), better ones coming out all the time (things moving at a whole order of magnitude faster than in other software development areas), and using only 10% of the power brought by cappuccino.

This encourages more quick, single feature libs, which in turns brings more developers into that worldview.

Note that this argument is not about wether this is right or wrong. More about the why.

One can note that making those micro libraries work together is getting harder and harder, and that some folks (full disclaimer, we are one of those) are building glue layers and light architectures to guide developers and ease integration and make those libraries interact together seamlessly.

Take http://github.com/aurajs/aura (that's the one we're working on). It acknowledges both the fact that small, single-feature libraries are the way the web is heading, and that making those interoperable, and easy to load (a clean module system is central to aura) needs work.

Maybe small, badly written, non interoperable, single use libraries are just a step on the way to a truly modular, flexible and light web development process.
I upvoted and completely agree with you, now let me play devil's advocate a bit. :)

The constitution is not a suicide pact. That is, the system cannot interpret the various provisions of the constitution in such a way that would destroy the country. The Declaration of Independence is a statement of philosophy. The constitution is a rather vague and self-contradictory description of structure. Different thing entirely.

Having said that, what has happened is that 240 years has given all the players in government a chance to find edge cases where they can have their way at the expense of others.

What we're seeing now is a state of perpetual war. This was never envisioned when the country was founded. So we're way off the script.
I see color (and gender, and sexual orientation, etc.). I just don't let them effect how I treat people. But it seems pretty clear that this is a standard only some people are held to.
Back up just a second there. As far as I can tell, posting jokes like that to twitter and hearing jokes like that at a conference are entirely comparable in every way. They're exactly the same thing - both are jokes of a sexual/race based background.
YouTube reaches a billion monthly viewers, boosted by 'Generation C'
I agree with you, I can't stand when I see @article and stuff strewn through out the tests. It's just asking for test pollution.
People really, really oversimplify these situations when they focus on ideas like "feeling offended". Yes, everyone is allowed to feel offended. That's not the point.

The point is that women in our society live their entire lives under a constant barrage of related offensive behaviors that men do not. Black people in our society live their entire lives under a constant barrage of related offensive behaviors that white people do not. (Black women get hit by both barrages.) In each case, some of the offensive acts are overt and nasty, but most take the form of countless tiny slights that seem harmless on their own but add up to an intensely oppressive environment.

So yes, everyone is allowed to be offended. But it's really, really unwise to "question the validity of others who are offended" if you aren't subjected to the same continually hostile environment that they are.
This whole thing is elevator gate all over again. Feminists heading into "male dominated spaces" with the intent of shaming men over whatever minor transgression they can find. The foulest mouth in my workplace is a woman, a dongle joke would be a cake walk for her. The day I see a feminist publicly shaming a woman in a context like this is the day I'd take feminists seriously.
There's a huge difference between talking to her about penises, and making a penis joke to your friend next to you that she overhears.
One possibility is to bundle your work with others and create your own stream-on-demand network. A walled garden where you publish trailers and maybe one or two free-to-access programs to YouTube with your branding on them, charge a nominal fee for access to all content and comment privileges on site, and a larger fee for site supporters who get some extra perk, signed stuff, or whatever. Stream live events on the site from time to time, allow users to interview talent, etc.

If you only have one or two things you're selling, and somebody has already downloaded and watched them, you're out of luck. But if you're bundling with other content serving diverse interests, offering the promise of new content down the road, and giving your audience something for paying that they can't get for pirating, you can set a better hook. Suddenly, when content from you or your partners is pirated, it becomes a loss-leader advertisement for your venture, and the cost of that (and benefit from it) is shared across your group. There's a site that just got featured on Reddit not too long ago, http://www.swearnet.com, that really captured my interest in this regard, if you want to see an example of how this type of thing could work in action.

Piracy always struck me as something only the biggest interests could gain anything from worrying about; an efficiency problem where so much product is being moved that getting 1-2% more of it paid for could make more sense than trying to reach 1-2% more audience, perhaps because they've already saturated their target market.
Windows won...then lost to the web.
Can you imagine how bad this is going to get when Google glass is on every nose?

I'm usually the guy seeing opportunity in every "doomsday" prediction but, I really see no upside for most people in being recorded all the time.

This is going to compound cyber-bullying effects by orders of magnitude.

I find the focus on her gender irrelevant. Is the story any different if it is a man vilifying and excoriating women he overhears? No. She is/was basically incompetent. A tech evangelist is basically a salesperson, her job is to create goodwill. You don't report your customers as offensive even when you think they are. And you especially NEVER bring bad will on your company brand. You deal with it and move on.
TechCrunch reporting on misrepresentation of a quote that TechCrunch originally read too much into?

This is my surprised face.
I think that compile-to-JS languages are going to explode in popularity even more than they already have when they can compile to an optimized asm.js. I might be misunderstanding its impact, but I'm hopeful.
I think you'll have a hard time getting traction unless you make these free for artists. I'd investigate other business models. Perhaps you could come up with a way to charge recruiters for browsing the portfolios? Perhaps an affiliate recruiting program where you get a kickback for every artist they find on your site would work.
I also wouldn't assume at a conference the person sitting in front of me is intently listening in on my conversation...

She exchanged a sentence or two, then a couple min later after she had turned away after they continued the semi-private conversation the guy made the penis joke.
I'd go with you. Just go with PHP for now, and once you feel you've got a good grasp of it, go in for Ruby or Python, as well as Javascript and a functional language like Haskell - Clojure's a great bet too.
I'm sorry, but there is zero equivalence between a bar and offices.

Bars lose about 24-26% of their gross revenue to theft [1]. Further, bars are about customer service and every bar has a GM or owner who is there most of the time monitoring their employees. Adding cameras only allows them to do it remotely, it doesn't change the fact that they are watching.

The fact is that bartenders are mostly paid in tips and handle a lot of cash (some bars can pull in $60K/week gross). Not only is there a lot of opportunity, but frankly, most bartenders aren't paid very well. Combine this with lax monitoring and you are asking for theft.

Show me an office that has that kind of theft and I'll happily recommend monitoring there too.

[1] According to Bevinco (they do auditing of bars/nightclubs by doing things like weighing bottles at the end of the night and comparing it against the POS) - http://www.nightclub.com/bar-management/employee-theft/thwar...
There is really nothing to be gained in those "rage fests". And this whole incident clearly shows that. One bad decision after another escalating the situation. When it's over there won't be anything gained but only destroyed. So far we have two people without a job and two companies with a tainted reputation.
> whenever I have to do some web programming, I feel like writing in assembly, having to micro-manage things I should not care about.

That applies in the opposite direction too. Native programming seems to involve jumping through insane hoops just to do simple things:

Like "put some text on the screen, this part is bold".

Or "open this web page".

Or "put these things next to each other, with 10px in between, unless the screen is a little narrower, then put the second one below with no margins".

Or "I want to play with the layout of this every day for the next month, have the new layout download every time someone uses this app".

I can write complete, ready-to-distribute web apps that do those things in 1-3 lines of code. Doing so in iOS takes many layers of indirection.

Look at something like Ember.js. The abstractions being put in place are fascinating. Or CSS. It's is an incredibly powerful abstraction on something that iOS just scratches the surface of.

The truth is, both the web and iOS have evolved to deal with specific pain points. Some things that are easy on one are hard on the other.

This idea that web programming is under-abstracted seems really narrow-minded to me.
I tried, and they did respond that it was true:

http://cl.ly/image/0V2w0s0u0G3z
Nothing, at least not to the benchmarks currently on awfy. You need to opt-in into OdinMonkey optimizations with "use asm". And of course these benchmarks don't do it.