skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please learn to read more carefully.

He said he didn't understand why these "jokes" are supposed to be offensive to women. He did not say why any jokes are supposed to be offensive to women.
I talked with Brad this morning, and these guys know what they are doing. This product is very, very effective, and I recommend it.

Disclaimer: I have never worked with this company, and have no business interests in it.
The problem is the fact that the marketing copy on the site + the messaging by the contributors would lead one to assume that Ember is pretty well polished, stable and ready to build big things on top of -today-.
Ummm, my reading of the thread is that we're not going to do business with Adria's employer because of her actions. That's a different thing.
So, just to be clear, you are boycotting a company that employees someone who upholds the code of conduct agreed to by all attendees of pycon, but make no mention of the company that actually fired the guy.

Gotcha.
I took a post-grad marketing course that covered these Senior Creative guys! Doyle Dane Bernbach creative people really changed the business in the 60s and changed the way ads spoke to people. Until they came along nobody had thought of selling products with a combination of intelligence and humor. The ads they did were amazing, unlike that mediocre stuff they "do" on Mad Men! Bet they have some stories to tell.
Definitely _not_ the wrong place. Glad you do not give up and try to do something against your current situation.

You should seriously get professional help. From what I read you seem to have had a therapy in the past and it doesn't work anymore. Did you try any alternatives ?

I'm sure other commenters can recommend professional where you live.

Wish you the best.

PS: I'm everything else but someone with good advice but to me a combination of medical therapy and mental training seems to be an idea (so that you do not rely on only one thing to work out)

Update: due to what you wrote in the 2nd paragraph here is what I found please make use of it:

http://support.twitter.com/articles/20170000-suicidal-and-se...

http://www.suicide.org/suicide-hotlines.html
Am I the only one who gets a CloudFlare captcha (from two completely different German IP addresses ) when trying to access the blog?

Your IP address based on the country, region or network has been flagged by the website owner.
Completing the challenge above proves you are a human and gives you temporary access. You can ask the website owner to permanently whitelist you.
I think this point is key. There's plenty of blame on both sides here.

Yes, these kinds of jokes are immature and this conduct was ill advised.

That said, taking ambush pictures of nonconsenting parties and very publicly shaming them shouldn't be your go-to response. I'd say that response was completely disproportionate to the initial crime.

Far better to throw an (in person) "come on guys, be professional" their way and escalate from there. If that's too confrontational for your tastes, go talk to one of the PyCon volunteers and ask them to step in. I think it's kind of ridiculous that they (PyCon staff) didn't get a chance to resolve this issue discretely and had to hear about it alongside however many thousand other people.
Well, this all sounds remarkably familiar: https://github.com/regularfry/website/blob/master/source/gui... https://github.com/emberjs/website/pull/316
seconds don't have (consistent) meaning either, in a universe with a speed of light.
Why do new languages like Rust, Go look so funky? Can't they make a language that is familiar? i.e.:
- type comes after variables
- for list.each |dog| <-- wtf, weird syntax?
> But if you say something offensive to women or minorities, they might take offense, surprisingly enough.

Possibly. Or, they could be cool with it. Or, they could refrain from passing their judgment to the rest of the world and inform me that what I said was offensive. The thing is, this is less about being aware of women and minorities and more about knowing if there are any people in the room who are easily offended by scatological humor.
The x86 architecture is the weirdo: Structured exception handling
And a hashtag. #joanofarc or something.
In fact, the next day she made a phallus joke herself (http://imgur.com/7XGY8wB). This suggests that her motivations may be questionable.

When you read her blog, you notice that she felt that she was taking a stand for other women and for girls who may want to enter the industry. In a way, this is not offense, it is meta-offense. She wasn't offended as much as she was thinking about the effect of the men's actions on others. To me, that is a very real problem. You can not play the sensitivity card on behalf of others. It is a bankrupt position, and as this incident shows, extremely dangerous.
Hmm, no. If anyone did, it the guys. As for them being fired, it was excessive but that responsability lies with their employers. Not her.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there's an increasingly blurry line between someone's employment status and someone's personal views and I think that should be extremely uncomfortable for everyone involved and generally means our community will be less likely to engage in honest and forthright dialog as people with personal views.

And I think the extent of this is a whole big can of worms I'm not sure I'm in a great position to address as a researcher at a university with surprising levels of freedom to shoot my mouth off and not care what anyone else thinks.

While I personally know plenty of people in evangelist roles and while I consider them friends, I can't say I'm qualified to really talk about where a line should be wrt separating their personal and professional speech. I hope someone who is qualified to discuss it approaches this point, because I think it is worth discussing and increasingly important.

tl;dr: I really hope this discussion continues but I'm probably not the right person to talk about it down this particular wormhole.
Based on just this pastebin, I'd be inclined toward crucifying her.

However, after reading her longer blog post (http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont...), it seems pretty clear that the guys were in the wrong for a professional setting (as were several others at the conference). Ideally, another person who was less personally offended would have said something (such as a coworker -- if I heard a coworker making potentially EOE/etc. offensive comments, I'd just say "hey, not appropriate, we could get in trouble for that".) and it would have gotten resolved politely. She has some elements of "concern troll" going on, but not unjustifiably.

I have no real problem with people being offensive at social events if they want to be, or at a conference on their own dime (although it's stupid, and if the consequences are their professional reputation, that's their own fault), but if you're identified as an employee of a company or representing another organization, you have to abide by that organization's code of contact.

(Which is why my car has no identifying marks beyond a license plate, and why I never wear corporate logo-wear; I like being able to be an asshole when necessary or appropriate without representing anything but myself.)
The author slams Adria for taking the "cowardly" way out, all while remaining completely anonymous. It takes courage to accuse someone in public. It's a shame the accuser lacks courage.

The author's claim, "You've taken feminism in tech a step backwards" stinks of sensationalism in the same way Adrias closing sentence, "Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard."

Get a grip, people.
Thinking before you act is a good idea. As she mentioned, she didn't feel like part of the community so it's not really her job to police the event. Her description of the organizers' reaction seems pretty OK. I don't see how she can be held responsible for a guy being fired, that seems like an overreaction by the company.
"I'm pretty sure relating and disclosing a situation that happened in a public place fully to the best of her ability shouldn't be something we call irresponsible. In fact, women who do otherwise are often asked to disclose in exactly the manner she did."

That doesn't follow -- you're begging the question. Why is disclosing something public, if well detailed, not irresponsible when it can cause harm (as this situation did)? And why should people being previously asked to disclose such information make it a responsible action? Furthermore, do you have an example of such disclosures -- you speak as though you do?
Indeed. And if her personal actions and the resultant bad press for Sendgrid causes them to ask the person in question to step down, well, going on the logic in this thread, the employer is the bad guy, not the person acting like a jackass in public.

..In which case the decision to stop or not do business with Sendgrid would be all the more justified.
Perhaps ridicule was the wrong word. My point is she is seen as a face of the company by many in the tech scene, anything she does publicly (yes twitter is public) will be seen by people and they aren't wrong to have this reaction. Nowhere in sergiotapia's post did he argue that they should fire her. Talk about strange conclusions.
The emerging trend of people thinking they can just take photos of anyone anywhere for the sole purpose of uploading to the web for groups of people to laugh at or make judgement of leaves a pungent aftertaste in my mouth. Sure you might be legally allowed to but it doesn't mean it's not incredibly rude and inappropriate, with total disregard/ignorance of potential consequence like we are witnessing at the moment.

I see it on social media sites, people who feel comfortable sitting on a bus and just lifting a camera up to snap someone going about their day who just happens to look different to someone else so everyone can have a laugh at them. Sometimes presented under a thin guise of intelligent wit when actually it's vacuous bullying. Totally oblivious or carefree to the fact the subject matter may have actually noticed them photographing them, I wonder how that makes them feel?

This situation feels associated to me. I just don't understand how anyone can be comfortable just snapping a picture of someone to immediately upload on the internet to share with people in a negative way. Are people starting to lose their common sense and decency?
Her post is quite good, and provides a very good argumentation for her actions. For a moment, I almost agreed with her.

Then I realized the problem, the same one that feminists are facing more and more; women want to be equal, but they want to keep certain privileges. They want to be accepted by men in tech as equals, but be spared sex jokes (that, btw, have nothing to do with tech, but have a lot to do with men; in my group of (male) friends, they are completely normal, along with all other jokes). I don't think both are possible.
I think that the PyCon staff would have been a better group to escalate to, not a 9000 person mob (one of whom presumably did the intelligent thing and notified the staff)
You should talk to more women about this.

I'm not suggesting women are scared little rabbits, running all the time.

I'm saying that they are at substantial risk of sexual assault and other predation (US lifetime chance of sexual assault: 1 in 6), and are frequently aware of situations where they might possibly be in danger. It's an entirely rational response.

I'm trying to help Joeboy see why well-meant and innocent-ish sexual jokes can sexualize a context, tripping that feeling of risk.
Yeah, if I wanted to be in such a stifled repressed environment I would have stuck with finance or accounting. I'm a woman- making bawdy jokes is part of my culture and personality. I almost feel it's slightly discriminatory against those of us who don't come from a certain background.
github/tageorgiou
Hurry Copy Pinterest Oh wait pinterest is now different?
Funny to see how a year ago everybody was copying Pinterest's UI, but Pinterest goes and changes their UI. Goes to show how little people pay attention to the real secret sauce. ie. Bookmarklet and awesome email marketing.
Can the guy(s) who got fired pursue legal recourse? Could they sue her for defamation or something? They got their picture taken and posted without permission, but I don't know if they can argue that they have a reasonable expectation for privacy at the conference. But what about losing their job and having their reputation tarnished? Maybe some legal types can weigh in.
She works for Sendgrid.
I hadn't don't any programming since some BASIC and Fortran during my physics degree in the mid 90s until 2010 when the loss of a technical co-founder in back to back startups made me recognize I needed to make myself my own technical cofounder - at least to get through the MVP phase. I'm writing a blog post about this at the moment including links to the key resources that helped me go from a sales, marketing, biz dev guy to competent developer able to produce my own MVPs.

Railstutorial was a key part in that, a brilliantly written resource which helps explain lots of complex concepts in simple ways. Very excited to see the new Rails 4 version come out. I cannot recommend this highly enough to people who are starting from scratch with Rails.
No sane company fires a developer over some random acquisitions on twitter.

I wonder if he can sue them for wrongful termination. He can probably even claim gender discrimination - would he be fired if, everything else being the same, he was a girl? It would be ironic, given that this kind of lawsuits is probably the reason why his employer reacted this way in the first place.
This was pretty much my pathway to developing my current app on Backbone. I think Backbone hits the sweet spot in terms of abstraction needed to structure an application in a maintainable way (and plays pretty nicely with require.js, which buys you a much better ability to break your app apart)
> it just screams "look at me i'ml so awesome give me some attention"
My exact thought.

Most women I know that want to be treated equal, just like blback said they just want to be treated like "a person", not any kind of special treatment for being females, they say any kind of jokes politically correct or not and really act in a way that shows that their gender does not matter.
There are no complaints about improper jokes or anything, (except some cases and even then, the problem is not any kind of sexism, just a matter of context or seriousness of the conversation), there are no demands on special treatment. And that is in my opinion the best way to contribute to equality.
I met Tom at I/O last year and have been following Ember ever since. It's striking to me how consistently the message among newcomers is "this is hard/confusing".

I considered evangelizing it at my then-employer when it was still called SproutCore, but remember thinking "if it's going to take me at least a day or two before I begin to understand, how long is it going to take the rest of my team?"

There are a lot of interesting ideas in Ember. I'd love to see it take off. Hopefully we'll start to see documentation that makes it approachable for a wider audience of web developers.
She says: "I agreed with him so I turned around and said so." So she interjected herself into this private conversation, and it is not clear if the other guy's allegedly sexist comments were to her in response to what she said, or if they were just directed to his friend privately.
Her tweet is appropriate and mild. "Not cool" is the right response.

But they lose their jobs? Huge overreaction by that company.

This pastbin piece is an attack on HER however. "She's setting back women's rights!" Also a huge overreaction.

If nobody got fired there would be no conflict here.
It's not so much that we don't have time as that hiring is not the startups' focus at the early stage where we spend most time with them. We mostly talk about what to build and how to get users.
Of course she was involved in the firing. She supplied publicly searchable documentation that made the employer fatally vulnerable to every "hostile environment" lawsuit that would follow until they fired the guy. Adria Richards is professionally offended and vindictive and no space can remain safe for others after admitting her.
I also got one. I think it's just ddos right now from everywhere.
Not mentioned is the fact that Adria has received a FLOOD of hateful, violent, racist, and misogynistic comments as a result of a _tweet_. Adria DID NOT get someone fired. She tweeted a picture and comments about something that made her uncomfortable at a tech conference.

As a result she has now been called a b_tch, c_nt, wh_re, n_gger, and an "affirmative action hire".

People are saying things like "someone with her sensitivity level should stay home and have babies".

People are saying she is privileged and has nothing to complain about (despite the fact that she is a victim of domestic abuse).

Is this how we should treat women when they speak out in public? Two months ago I mentioned some sexist remarks I got at a hackathon and this community told me to SPEAK OUT. Reveal the identity of the person. This tragedy is a good example of why that's scary.

It's hard enough to speak up when something makes you uncomfortable. Now it's terrifying.

No one deserves this kind of all-out character defamation because they thought a comment was inappropriate.

No one deserves to get fired for this kind of joke either.

Out of all of this I'm most shocked by how many people are OPENLY and PUBLICLY misogynistic and racist. It is a very sad day for our industry. Deep-seated resentments are being voiced loud and clear.

Look at the Reddit comments and Adria's twitter mentions if you want to see just how hateful people can be.
Sure. Single gender teams tend to achieve less in the long run so you basically get what you deserve.
I'd like to step through this line of thinking.

First let's agree on three things:

- Recently the gender/sex/sexism issue in software has grown. There are programs to try and get more women involved, which is cool. There's generally a post or two about it on the front page of HN every day. It's a major theme.

- Due to the fact that it's a major recurring theme, I'd wager that it's a big problem in tech and therefore it upsets lots of people.

- Because it's a major recurring theme for many people, any change in either direction (greater or lesser equality) is a pretty big deal.

If you're still with me, then here's where the disagreement arises. If you're of the opinion that this debacle has moved the "get more women in tech" issue backwards, then it's plenty of a reason to be upset. Likewise this works in the other direction.

So if this is an issue that you care about, and the developer evangelist (and I assume that's sort of like PR? Represents the company on a more social than technical level? Correct me if I'm wrong) has moved this movement in the wrong direction I think it's perfectly fair to not give them your money.

Maybe that's reading into it too much, but I would guess that that is the logic behind that sort of decision.
What upsets me is not so much that someone posted something on twitter - who cares? But that someone got fired over it.

Surely that is the real issue - not so much what Adria did but that some other person decided an (esentially unsubstantiated) tweet from a third party was sufficient reason for dismissal.

If nobody got fired there would be no issue here. Let's ask for a response, not from SendGrid, but from whoever it was that fired the fellow in question?
> They don't want to get treated like "a girl"

That's the thing. If this isn't what she wants, then she shouldn't act like such an incredibly immature child. What she did was many times more 'immature' than what the men allegedly said.

They allegedly exchanged a harmless, obviously immature joke between themselves, and should have been quieter given the setting. That's their fault.

She then responds by posting a slanderous/libelous covertly-taken picture that could only be described as a "creep shot" of these men to thousands of people (under the Sendgrid brand). And accompanies it with a baseless quote that is entirely unprovable. It doesn't matter what they said, if she has no proof then she has no right, NO RIGHT, to post such claims in a public forum.

What if she decided to 'teach them a lesson' and go even further with it? "OMG, two guys behind me talking about having sex with underage gurls! (insert creep shot here)". Why not? Clearly she doesn't feel the need to have any proof of her claims.

Sickening conduct. My company and our partners will also be boycotting Sendgrid if they do not respond in the appropriate manner.
Are you saying that our Oort Cloud potentially intersects with Oort Clouds of other stars? I didn't realize it was that big. Maybe interstellar space is ALL Oort Cloud, and we just haven't noticed because the masses are too small and cold to see (and obscured by closer stuff.) Maybe that's enough to make up the dark matter mass?
It's a sane move if you want to discourage the culture that Adria is encouraging. Certainly her employers don't deserve any blame, though.
> Posting a tweet on your twitter account. -> Public actions representing a company.

I really don't want to step into this... but just to clarify the tweet did say: "@SendGrid supports me. Stop trolling." so yes, that makes it a position of/by/with-the-permission of the company.

quickly runs out of thread
I disagree. I count writing and selling commercial software with said technology as 'knowing' something. Academics be damned.
I'm a woman programmer and I'm probably the most likely person in my company to make a big dongle joke. I often cringe at oversensitive women whining about gimme t-shirts and other inconsequential things such as mildly raunchy jokes.

Somebody not hiring a programmer because she is a woman is a real problem. Somebody not paying a woman the same as a man is a problem. Somebody firing a woman for getting pregnant is a problem. Why can't we worry about the real problems and just get over the silly inconsequential stuff?
> It'd be fascinating to know what they're working on now.

They're almost certainly not working with technology that's "ahead by 10 years", as their recruiters like to advertise: Their hardware is basically standard stuff shipped by Sun (... I guess that's Oracle now), running mostly Java.
Except that the person most prominently featured in the photo (with his legible name badge) was not involved according to person who was fired. I haven't seen Adria, either on twitter or her blog, clarify which attendees in the photo were the ones making inappropriate comments.

I would say Alex Reid may have been libeled by Adria.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403250
Obamacare is a bonanza for startups – but do they know it?
Nobody's arguing Adria doesn't have the right to post what bothers her on her blog. Just as much, the community has the right to vocalize their disagreement with her actions because of their potential consequences. On Twitter and elsewhere, many women have been criticizing her, not just for her overreaction to a type of humor they themselves use, but also because of the backwards effect on gender equality in tech this might have.

That said, the biggest question for me is why she seemed so upset by the joke when she made the very same type of joke in public with a friend. I'm finding it very difficult to see where she's coming from because of it.
Thanks for the heads up on Mandrill, I'll check out their solution for when I launch my project.
There goes the saying, "innocent until found guilty".

So if I were a popular tech individual who decided to tweet about something I may misheard in a bad way, I can actually get someone fired. The company who fired the guys should have done some investigation instead of basing it off tweets. This is ridiculous; this is the number one reason why I never went back to PyCon.
Know thyself and compete accordingly
maybe spend a bit more on your website devs though, http://i47.tinypic.com/15qzrbt.jpg