skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now, that is especially interesting. Because Jonah Lehrer has proven to be a plagiarist and a fabricator on a large number of occasions. On top of that, he demonstrated that he does not understand that he has a responsibility to the truth and accurately representing the world to others.

That's basically the journalistic death penalty. I don't trust anything he writes, and neither should you.

Adria's behavior was dumb, and egregious in a way, but i doubt she anticipated that it would lead to anybody's firing (let alone her own). She was not acting out of malice (so far as anyone can determine) or in direct contravention to the core tenets of her profession. It was also a single incident.
Author here:

First off, thank you all for the comments! Also, thank you Paul for posting this and helping me articulate my thoughts while writing it! Finally, thank you to everyone who has wished me success in my future endeavors.

Although I expected this post would step on some toes and anger several people (although I tried my best not to), I'm happily surprised by the reaction in general. HN tends towards the negative, by the Twitter feedback has sparked some great discussion.

I can't respond to each thread, but I'd like to take a moment to address some misunderstandings about the post. First off, I'm not trying to sell you on Cappuccino. The project as just as strong as it has ever been and the people doing the day to day work are very dedicated. I'm also not upset that Cappuccino wasn't a massive success or that it didn't dominate the world. The use of Cappuccino in my post was purely to illustrate my point of view. We built some great software, and I'm really proud of that.

The post is more about the stagnation of the community as a whole.

It's very difficult to write this kind of post without sounding defensive or like I'm bitter because my projects weren't massively successful. I tried my best, but ultimately you read the result. The tone of the post should read more as disappointment rather than anger. I'm disappointed in what hasn't been accomplished in the last 3 years. Many of you saw how great 280 Slides was when it was first introduced, and it's regrettable that it's not available today.

I want my friends to be very successful and I have no animosity towards them. The tools exist to build great things on the web and I hope this post inspires someone to make use of them.

Many of you disagree with my assertions, and that's fine. But I'm not the only person who feels this way. Paul Irish an avid web evangelist and Tom Dale of the Ember project share my concerns. And while we might disagree on the role of the web, I think many people agree that it should empower developers to build great things.

I've seen a lot of really great developers move on to other things because they share my frustrations and disappointments.

… and yes, the bits vs bytes line about dial up was my mistake. :) but I don't think it really changes the point.

[edits for clarity and spelling]
"Having video surveillance in your [office] as an owner isn't a bad idea. It is useful to monitor your [programmers] remotely to ensure that [they are busy writing software] and no one is [reading Hacker News] even when you're not there."

No. Just no.
No, but males do get automatically suspected of being pedophiles. Companies / daycare / pre-k - 6 have a strong prejudice against hiring males in education. Insurance companies and some parents play a pretty big role in this situation.
>> And honestly, she can't even function as a sort of "women's tech evangelist" anymore. Most [all, actually] of the women I've talked to about this are furious with her over how badly this portrays women.

Female here. I'm a newbie in this field coming from science -- another male-dominated arena. My takeaway is that while I would not have a problem interacting with Adria I don't think I'd want to work at a place where top male talent is being repulsed by her actions or reputation. As a junior dev, I want to work with and learn from the best team that'll have me. That makes her a liability.

I do wish she'd handled everything differently. Women shouldn't freak when men say man things to other men, and even if you are offended you should just speak up for yourself and say so. This gives everyone a chance to behave properly without escalation. Most guys actually aren't jerks, they just lack self-awareness.

Women in tech should not behave as damsels in distress who cry out for help (to twitter) and need shining knights (pycon organizers) to intervene in minor situations like this. Take back the locus of control and own the situation.
As I said, there are exceptions. As there always are with the law. Here they are (in German): http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/kunsturhg/__23.html

You don’t need permission to publish photos of historical significance. That’s pretty much why newspaper photographers can exist in Germany. All those kinds of photos – if they do not invade some private area of life of the depicted persons – are totally fine.

As I already mentioned, the same is true for photos in which the people are not the main subject – though if some person is easily identifiable you likely do need their permission, even if they are not the center of the attention. This exception is mostly so that someone ten pixels in size or so cannot rain into the photographer’s parade.

Or – and this can apply to street photography – if it serves a higher interest of the arts. I think the general recommendation for street photographers is to make eye contact with who they photograph and check that way whether it’s ok. Also, walking up and talking to who you photographed isn’t super hard. As I already said, photographing without publishing is nearly always ok, so you can shoot first and get permission later. Also, since those depicted actually have to press charges it’s not like the police will bust your exhibition and confiscate your photos. Someone who is on some published photo has to complain. And even then there still is legal wriggle room. The right to privacy is one of the rights defined in the German constitution – but so is the freedom of the arts. If those two collide judges have to weigh them against each other and decide which wins. I guess shots of someone picking their nose in public might might make privacy win, shots of someone drinking coffee in a cafe might make freedom of the arts win. (Also, it’s not like this is a felony. It’s a private law issue.)

Photos of assemblies or demonstrations or similar such events are also ok. Huh, now I’m questioning my statement that the published photo is not covered by one of the exceptions. My interpretation of this was always that this covers all kinds of political events. Being able to publish photos of political events or demonstrations is important for a democracy, that’s the light in which I always saw that exception. However, the actual text of the law is very generic and probably makes reference to all kinds of events, not just political ones. I wonder how the courts interpreted this in the past.

So I guess I can’t say after all whether publishing the photo is ok – not the least of which because the paragraph ends with a sentence that screws up all clearly delineated lines: All those exceptions are null and void if those depicted have a justifiable interest in preventing that. So an exception of an exception.

Now I’m frustrated. And actually want to study law.
More honesty, my original composition was a bit more inflammatory, but I do (sort of) understand where the urge to package comes from. I've been someone who's pulled things quickly together, whether it be through CPAN or the incredibly convoluted checkout-build scripts of ROS (http://ros.org), and yes, very often I will clone and build things from GitHub, cause dangit, it's not packaged yet.

But I've come also from the dependency hell that was GNOME on RedHat over a decade ago, and I just love the fact that I can almost always type "apt-get install $name_of_new_toy" and be playing with it in under five minutes, all without having to worry about breaking other packages or strewing files god-knows-where, or having multiple, redundant, possibly bug and security hole ridden copies of dependencies, and knowing that I can deploy it instantly on my web server. Windows and OSX also don't figure very much into my worldview, so I don't really care much that they need bolted on package managers to fix their brokenness.
In your theory, how do you make sure that only good shaming and not bad shaming happens? How do you be sure that people don't post hateful provocative lies about people that make them the subject of this social pressure, or at the far end, mob violence?

It's not about "keeping it quiet," it's about being responsible and filtering what you say before you just upload it to the world, because it could turn into a conflagration.

>you've seen how this works at universities

I saw a while back how a campus exploded because somebody saw a person walking at night with a blanket wrapped around them and thought it was a KKK member. Great plan you got here, have you ever considered how it could go wrong?
Well a couple of stumbling blocks come to mind here.

What is a "Bitcoin currency" is the largest:) I have no idea what this even means and it's not explained.

Cyprus GDP is about 24 Billion. Say you'd need even 1% of that as actual currency, that's 214 Million in bitcoins that you'd need, and I think i'm really understating the amount you'd need.
Yeah, I think that's one of the more frustrating parts of this. My female friends make much more crude penis/anatomy jokes. It's almost like she's saying "talking about the penis around women is inappropriate", which to me is more sexist than anything. I think her real gripe was that they were being crude/unprofessional/immature, but she decided to take it in the sexist route for some reason.
Another Abelson/Sussman gem comes to mind: "The secret to engineering is knowing what NOT to think about"
And that's why there's the computer fraud and abuse act...
7 Habits of Highly Effective APIs
RSS is full of embedded HTML. It's practically impossible to make a good news reader without doing some heavy manipulation on it and trying to extract/modify ugly elements. We have a full blog post on the topic here: http://blog.streamified.com/post/45846467833/the-future-of-s...

There's a discussion below this one why it makes sense to have a single API for this, instead of open-sourcing the code. The benefits are numerous (we're hooking into many paid APIs and covering the costs, for example).
It's much too vague and subtle to warrant an official statement in my opinion.
> Sure, and that is a legitimate problem that everybody has to face. "How much should I let myself be offended before I speak up about it?"

For someone in a marginalized group, they hear constant micro-aggression from a large amount of people daily. Each one of those comments and encounters builds that feeling of not belonging and resentment. That is the context in which folks have to deal with this kind of thing, so they are typically dealing with more than just that one incident you hear about.
I thought that there was no way to track how many people buy bitcoins. Would this exclusively be through a public market, then, or is bitcoin less anonymous than I thought?
Lets think about how this could work. Houses at this time of year will be cheap, so we can get a few apartments. We would want to engage with local media to get the word out, and work to make sure locals have the tools and infrastructure they need (eg language translation) to make this work.
Hear hear. I am dreading the technical debt I have in test-unit, and meanwhile the (Rails) world is moving on to Minitest and the world appears to be settling on Rspec syntax regardless. Nowhere to be found is even a conversion HOWTO, so test-unit starts feeling even more like a ghetto, and increases my conversion anxiety, which is all too bad, since I like what I consider to be the simplicity of test-unit.
What does this say about the power Richards has? This whole situation sees one person over-react after another. It's quite bizarre, really.
"For me it was a simple decision: If I want community support, I need to be using the tool the community is actually supporting."

Truth. And the community is really split on this one. The side that makes the decisions about what goes into rails prefer unit tests, while a large chunk of the users prefer spec-based.
Show HN: Start-up Idea
Hey HN, I'd like to share an idea for young geeks and revolutionary dreamers to chew on.

I'd like to see in the future some sort of "karma indicator" linked to every single financial product sold out there: mutual funds, hedge funds, stocks, bonds, commodities....any kind of product sold by a bank or financial institution. This of course with the purpose of raising awareness about what you're encouraging with your money. It makes me sick to see that retirement pensions from people such as teachers (who I assume have a good overall karma) being invested in oil companies and other kinds of conflicting resources thus contributing to the chaos of the world (war & pollution mainly).

It would help if this was enforced by law, but if it's made popular online who cares about the law right? At least people would be more aware and cautious about their black box investments and perhaps monsters such as wall street would start walking down a new path.

I have a dream...
> Just from skimming over the tests, it’s obvious that Rspec is more readable.

And that's where I'd disagree and my tastes differ, I never quite got the Ruby fetishism for almost-sort-kinda English DSLs. It's still baffling to non-developers and I'd much rather read a more regular programming language syntax, never mind that abusing the syntax can lead to some weird error messages. (Not saying that RSpec/Cucumber fall into that trap, as I never had that much experience with them. Like I said, kinda turn-off for me)

A bit like Lisp macro abuse or too much parsing in Tcl.
Why cell phone unlocking bills fall short
That's a valid observation I hadn't made yet, concerning manufacturing in general. You're right about the prototypes being made with software as well, I mostly meant that to physically produce the prototype is different then when you produce the prototype for software, given the click and compile nature of it. All in all though I agree that the terms really need to be reconsidered, but I don't see our legislative branch making an real changes to our governmental system in general, it works out for them pretty good right now.
You're right, but part of this is our tolerance towards others and how they screw up. And there are definitely unequal amounts of tolerance here directed at the various parties involved.

Some of that probably is due to the fact that the dude who got fired did make a public apology, and Adria didn't. But again, that's on her. That's not about what's ethical about the way we treat others. The way we behave as 3rd parties to all of this i don't think is contingent on whether or not Adria apologizes for something.
one more person to agree with comments, about.me is a landing page. Dribble in 3D is better.
Need to help migrate to a http://blog.unibulmerchantservices.com/tag/point-of-sale-pos... that easily allows for QR code reading/btc sending of addresses

Also - how does one deal with the "pending" status when buying small things like coffee/sandwiches/lunch - Should a shell company exists to have faster verification?
Are you seriously telling web developers they don't deal with learning a new tool almost every day?!

How many damn Javascript libraries do we constantly integrate and learn? New css like languages (scss,less). Server side languages?

I'm sick and tired of people saying web developers are somehow 2nd class programmers who only understand HTML.
Right, because no-one has ever disagreed on whether a game or game mechanic is good.
That is neither here nor there in relation to the issue we are discussing.
You could be right but I'm not sure I've heard it discussed much in a British setting.

In fairness you don't hear many dongle/large feet type jokes but I think that's because they are crude, not really funny, and not really suitable for a professional environment.

Having said that I don't think I've ever heard anyone linking them directly to sexism.
I don't understand why you think I don't believe in proportionate response, based on my previous comment. The reaction by Richards was not an official reaction by the organizers of PyCon.

If a teenager shoplifts a stereo from a store, and a vigilante witnesses it and shoots him in the head, I think we can all still agree that the teenager was in the wrong. The fact that the vigilante was even more in the wrong doesn't change that.
OK, so I should have clarified the type of dick joke.. if the joke was "I'd like to put my dongle in her input jack" it'd be at the very least sexist. This one was not.

"The default assumption that a woman's actions are to attract attention"
That is not at all my default assumption. In fact, I'm very much on the side of the women who do experience sexual harassment at conferences and are brave enough to speak up about it.

But as for the circumstances here (joke that was pretty benign and didn't concern her, public shaming) and the person involved, yes, I do believe it was for attention.
AppleID page
I love the idea of flashing the wifi details onto the device and skipping WPS. Someone did a similar thing for a project at the launch festival hackathon a couple weeks ago. Looks like the video is down, but the demo page is still up with viewable source. No app to show it working though: http://theboxforgotten.com/bridge/

A question re the imp - why would they decide to use an SD card format?
I would not have reacted as she did. I would have tuned it out nothing or spoken to them privately. And I know that a lot of women, including me, would have not have been offended at all. But there have been times when I've told guys (that I know) that even though I wasn't offended by what they just said, some women would be. I don't tell them not to say it; I just give them a heads-up.
"Most [all, actually] of the women I've talked to about this are furious with her over how badly this portrays women."

And I'm furious with how badly the comments here and elsewhere portray men. The worst are the threats of violence that I've heard that she's gotten, of course. I know that's a minority behavior, but we can't kid ourselves: the people making those threats are only comfortable doing so because they see the rest of the community as being "on their side".

Women (and men!) need to speak up when they see manifestations of the culture that continues to drive women away from tech. Would I have made the same judgement in this case? Maybe not. But we need to find some way of changing the "bro" culture on display here, and I can't really blame her for trying.

"What if I accidentally say something that she finds offensive? Am I next?"

If 1) you choose to say something 2) in a public place that 3) your employer considers grounds for termination, I think you should probably be worried no matter who's in the room. I personally don't think that public shaming is the best way to respond to low-level offenses as in this case (but then, I really wouldn't fire someone over it: that seems like 100x as much of an overreaction). Nevertheless, it's unreasonable to expect in this day and age that transgressions in public will always go unnoticed. If you knowingly say something that you deserve to be fired for, it's not the photographer's fault when it happens.
Adria, can you please do us all a huge favor and provide for us the exact wording of both the "dongle" and "forking" remarks that were made?

All we have so far are assertions that these remarks were sexual in nature, but not evidence. I'm not saying I'd be surprised if one, or both of them were (knowing all too well the way men sometimes are, at these conferences).

But really, it shouldn't be too hard for you to just tell us exactly what you heard, along with any supporting context that you feel would help us understand your position.
How we teach at Makers Academy
As jwz has explained, the requirement to have CCTV and make CCTV recordings was put as a default-clause in the permits club owners have to get. jwz fought against it and had the clause remove from his single permit, but no other club or bar owner apparently did the same. (I reckon "Barry" quoted in the linked blog-post is his lawyer).
I saw that. Of course we know that is bullshit. Just like it would be bullshit to say: "women cannot be sexist against men"
Wouldn't this violate app store rules? I was under the impression that the Kindle app almost got banned for this.
The most obvious problem being that transmitting the power from North Africa, to say Hawaii would pose a significant challenge.
Well it depends on what you mean by backdoor. Just to pick one... let's take AES. There are a lot of open-source implementations, depending on your platform. Almost all of them are open-source [0]. Furthermore, AES is based on the Rijndael cipher [1], which is simply a mathematical process that an undergrad could understand and implement. Ignoring the fact that the major implementations have been poured over and audited by many researchers (and that you could do the same), it'd be just too risky to put a backdoor into an open implementation.

It might be possible that the NSA has discovered some side-channel attack [2]. If that's what you mean by backdoor, then I suppose you could be right. (Perhaps every CPU has been manufactured so as to facilitate timing attacks.)
I still think that the probabilities combine to some astronomically low number because those attacks still take time, and I don't think they have the computational ability to simultaneously run attacks against any very large subset of the US population.

I don't trust secret, unaccountable organizations... but it just seems too extraordinary to imagine that any organization could actively monitor billions (millions, even) of communication streams at a time.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_implementations

[1] http://csrc.nist.gov/archive/aes/rijndael/Rijndael-ammended....

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attacks
We had some emails delivered yet. While the drama was fun to watch, I'm a little annoyed with the kiddies who decided a DDOS was a good idea.
By 'bitcoin currency' I meant launch bitcoin infrastructure locally, carry out publicity and educate people about bitcoin to make it easier for local people to use. Would also need to do things like translate into local language, and probably build specific tools to make the currency work locally. It would be a unique opportunity to really engage with people, and understand their currency needs as users. I think there would be quite a lot of infrastructure to build to get a working ecosystem going.

The point about volume of currency is significant... though any break from the Euro will likely collapse that value significantly... any ideas for how to hack that?
It does work fairly well as a honeypot though.
By verbal I meant spoken, in person or over the telephone. there was some confusion earlier about the authenticity of the FB posting.
> She claims jokes were offending, she then posts
> racists and penis jokes on her twitter account.
> Not only does it smell of hypocrisy it smells of
> maliciousness.

Wow, so if your mother (or sister, or girlfriend, or wife, or daughter) has ever made an off-color joke in her life, that gives any man in the world the right to discuss penises with her in person?

I mean, wow. That's what you're getting at.

Twitter has elements of both a public and private space. It's public, obviously, but people read your Tweets voluntarily.

It's not at all comparable to making unwanted sexual comments to a woman you don't know on a bus, or in an alleyway, or in a convenience store, or at a conference.
It's not comparable to subjecting
It's
End of life does not equal non-functioning. Companies continue to use end of life gear in production environments (Cisco Pix anyone?).