skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be extremely cool if now it turned out that Adria and this guy were actually friends who came up with a plan how to troll everyone who has stick up their ass and/or is afraid of his/her own shadow when it comes to gender.
When I lived in Holland, we'd have problems with employees that would linger for months, sometimes years, wasting tons of time/money/effort, damaging morale of the team. And the outcome was always the same: the employee left.

I came to believe that its better to bring things to resolution very fast, for both the employer and employee.

YMMV.
This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of this whole debacle. It has simultaneously trivialized sexism & discrimination while promoting the paranoid fear that any minor innocuous comment could end up as a shitpile trainwreck on Twitter.

By calling out a non-thing as a wolf, she has effectively raised the bar on real harassment being reported. Likewise, otherwise well intentioned men will be looking over their shoulder when making even harmless comments, promoting a gender division in the workplace.
"... we arrive at 496,804,500,000 square meters or 496,805 square kilometers (191,817 square miles) as the area required to power the world with solar panels. This is roughly equal to the area of Spain."
That's like saying that in Europe people can legally own guns too.

It's factually true (in fact, it's not even that hard in most countries), but the way it is legislated is so vastly different that the labor laws the US has are almost insignificant. (The power of certain unions is a different matter, but that doesn't apply here.)
Ask HN: Your opinion to current web search engines?
Which web search engines are you using? Primary or not primary? pros, cons?
I don't think she could've imagined that he would've been fired over something like that. I'm sure that surprised everyone. The "bullying" I referred to was simply exposing those developers' picture to her considerably-sized twitter audience. With her position and the scope of her influence, that alone is bullying. The firing, her followup posts, etc. just make everything worse.
Now your MongoDB can scale to Hadoop size with no performance hit
Please be more condescending. It really will help your cause.
Don't you need a copyright to license it?
So for the dumb people like me, what is a NSL? A quick google define doesn't really help much (https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+NSL)

National Soccer League?
Github sells "fork you" shirt. http://shop.github.com/products/fork-you-shirt-mens-medium

Can someone please fire whoever is responsible for that? I am offended.
>Some sociologists have defined racism as a system of group privilege

The commonly used definition of racism is hatred against people because of their race.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/racism

>hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

A couple of black kids beating a white kid to death because he's white, for example, would be defined as racist under this definition.
National Security Letter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
Ask HN: Do You Use Cloud IDEs?
Anyone around here ever used cloud ides before for production?
so much for company loyalty

The notion of company loyalty flew out the window 10+ years ago.
Indeed. I'm just disappointed, all around.

I respect the handling by PyCon staff/volunteers (who didn't kick anyone out, but supported keeping PyCon a welcoming, comfortable environment), but beyond that, I feel like this whole incident has just shown us how bad people can act.
She was using her personal twitter account as an extension of her job, which does make her comments 'speaking for the company'. It's part of the role of a tech evangelist.

If she was not comfortable with this, she should have maintained a greater separation between her professional and personal online behaviour.
Mashable just did!
Total Surface Area Required to Fuel the World With Solar
Just wanted to say thanks for defining this! I hate it when people use a term but don't define it and then talk about it like everyone else knows.
In the US, lynching is heavily linked to racism, so much so that uses of the word are effectively captured by that racist legacy. If you are going to get into a dialog with a black person and you are white or white passing, do not use the word lynch or lynching ever unless you are talking about historical events or a person whose name is Lynch.
Agreed that this is a pain, but _much_ less so than getting a working compiler/paths/libs/etc on Windows for doing Ruby work. (Unless you go with an all-in-one installer...)
The voluminous Internet reaction is an example of bike shedding, I think. We don't have strong opinions on a given topic that we don't know much about, but we all know what it's like to be ourselves in social and professional situations, and we all have strong opinions about that.
"just in case the text changed between my visits"

I've seen that happen before, so I apologize for my insinuation if the quote was added between your reading and mine.

"the post provides no information whatsoever and crucially does not at any point indicate this was not the reason"

You can't assume that the firing was 100% due to the issue at hand, and I'm saying that I don't think it was 100%. Other people seem to be acting as if that's the only reason he was let go.
He's talking about Invader Zim; Zim is racist to the other kids because he is literally from an alien race, even though they have the power (he is a very ineffective invader).
How do we know that SendGrid fired her to stop the DDOS, and it wasn't due to her poor conduct on Twitter? (calling herself Joan of Arc, posting email and IP addresses of blog commenters, baiting trolls, etc.)
Packaging systems that are not language specific were created to solve this exact problem. Making the switch is a sensible decision that has nothing to do with Rubygems.

Your project is maturing which is great. There's no need to throw the technology that helped get you there under the bus.
How much energy would they get from burning $1 bills that they've collected over the years from all the Pabst swilling hipsters?
What if you don't comply though and let the user know?
More suspicious things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418204
It doesn't, which is why the confidentiality clause of NSLs was ruled unconstitutional. That's the case this article is talking about from the first sentence.
Yeah, maybe it's because I'm hard of hearing, but I find that I never hear inside-voice comments from the audience when I'm listening to a presentation. I actually have some pity for those whose hearing is so acute that they suffer from such distractions.
)

Sorry. Just a little neurotic. Carry on.
Or "Information Superhighway"?
Yea, we're all being monitored either way, just some more closely than others.
I think you are selling yourself short by comparing Sketchfab to About.me. About.me is a simple landing page to connect all your social networks so people can easily find you. Sketchfab is more of a personal portfolio for 3D Pros. By pushing the personal portfolio to the forefront, you can easily monetize Sketchfab.
The point is that this is green washing, and the bulk of their manufacturing operations is excluded from this "100%" figure.
Until the day a man feels equally comfortable telling a sex-related joke to a woman as to another man, all such jokes are, by definition, sexist. We as a society are not open towards sex and the real sexist men feel that it is to their advantage that women should feel more embarrassed about sex jokes, even a woman have no reason whatsoever to feel that way.
This is a situation where somehow EVERYONE managed to over-react.
At least you can haggle there. Real estate brokers get a percentage cut no matter what you do if you involve them.
I'm of two minds here. Normally, I would agree that it's an innocuous thing to say; I mean, I use the phrase all the time at conferences! That said, I am not so sanguine here; between Ms. Richards's bad faith actions (and you may disagree that she dealt with them in bad faith and that's fine) and her non-apology (I think this is fairly inarguable), I think that it's not unreasonable to infer a negative connotation to the phrase. Especially if you look at it from that dude's perspective, where a not-unreasonable reading might be "she started a massive shitstorm over a joke that could offend a hypothetical person and now I'm fired and why would I ever want to see her again?".

Context does matter.
I agree. It seems to me like better sights would be on Dribbble, but for 3D modelers
That's not bravery. It's just cheap anti-intellectualism.
Maybe not a "good" business decision, but an "understandable" one. If the "errant children" are among the group she was evangelizing to, she clearly could not have been effective in her job, especially since the "errant children's" peers were not coming to her defense - at least not in large numbers, as far as Sendgrid was concerned. I do hate that they caved to bullying/blackmail. I would like to see both fired parties re-hired after the dust settles, but I know that's very unlikely.
And it reads like Steve Marx was supporting her too. I can't believe her response! I imagine she misunderstood, from reading so many insults on twitter.
Very true. Which is why I preface my comment with "in events like these".

Getting rid of a dysfunctional employee can be an nightmare for everyone involved. We usually try to buy their resignation, it's expensive and a bit dirty, but relatively painless.
My takeaway from it was not him venting about nobody using Cappuccino, it was that developers wouldn't spend even a small amount of time to evaluate it in the first place.

"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?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5411474)

If you have not spent that day or two to understand, how can you know it does not fill your needs?

I actually do not think Cappuccino is a good fit for a lot of the places Backbone and the like are being used. The unfortunate part comes when people will still use Backbone where Cappuccino is the right tool just because Objective-J "looks scary", or some other non-technical reason of emotion.
By the way, this isn't exclusive to tech. Women [unfortunately] face this in every male dominated field. It sucks, I know.

My girlfriend works in a traditionally male dominated field, and she has to deal with this sort of thing constantly.

But that interaction where the person assumed you weren't a dev[1] is only made worse by things like what has happened here. The signal to the dev community from Adria's reaction to this joke about dongles is that "women are different".

Obviously I can't speak for you, but I can speak for the other women that I know. They HATE that. They don't want to be looked at as different.

[1]: I see this interaction ALL the freaking time, and we usually just make a point of embarrassing the guy that does it. I should clarify, I mean "embarrassing" as in: making a point of demonstrating how wrong the guy who assumed the girl wasn't an engineer is, not trying to publicly shame them on twitter.
no they weren't making sexual jokes. (a) the man has said that his statement about forking was taken out of context, which I'll grant your sensibilities the benefit of the doubt and say maybe he's not telling the truth on that, but then again we shouldn't assume andria is telling the truth, either. so we'll make that one a toss-up then.

Now (b) noting that the word dongle sounds like dong is not a sexual joke. it is a joke, many would say in poor taste, but it isn't sexual in anyway unless your understanding of sexuality didn't evolve beyond age 12 and you still laugh every time the guy at the hot dog stand says wiener.

neither of them should have lost their jobs and this issue has evolved into something else completely. However, there is no denying that what she did was a gross abuse of whatever influence she had and was little more than playground pettiness on her part. They said something that was not in her taste and rather than be an adult and point out to them or to pycon that she was uncomfortable, she decided to publicly shame him. that's just the truth of the matter.
I'm glad I live in the UK/Europe where privacy (certainly of physical post and my local network, plus the various services I use around Europe). Shame my Gmail is firmly under the US authorities.

It makes me sad to see the authorities of countries like the US using entrapment and other dodgy tactics to catch criminals. The US is soon to become like 1984 with drones monitoring people in cities, huge cloud computers monitoring all internet traffic, and feds running lawless tapping everyone's phones.
No, you're missing that racism is a systematic oppression of a certain group or people. HN isn't the best place for speaking about social issues, so I won't write you an essay about what's wrong about what you're saying. I'll just say I believe you and others are conflating the terms prejudice and racism. I'm guessing that's what you're describing by "common-usage-racis[m]." Indeed, black people can be prejudiced against white people, and that prejudice can be because of race. Racism, however, needs a little bit more than that. Particularly, institutionalization.
On the upside, this means that employees don't owe their companies any loyalty either. Fair play, and all.
The difference is that on a battlefield, your life isn't any more paramount that anyone else's. As a first responder this is in fact the opposite - their life (because of their skills) is key.

Of course it's not completely without applying your brainpower. Putting on your gas mask is done exactly as you describe - you first. Maintaining your fighting effectiveness is often the best way to help your unit out.

But there are many times in combat where soldiers do things completely without self regard solely for the betterment of their friends. Read a few MOH or VC citations for examples of why this attitude is so prized.
Or he could have, I don't know, tested it first? Nah, no one tests first before making such a large change on a production server.
And don't give me crap about it's a one man operation either and we should feel sorry for him, if he's hoping to take over a good portion of Google Reader's subscribers (which he seems to hoping to do) then he should be planning better. If he can't plan to cope with a big influx of new users, that he's asked for by advertising his service, then perhaps migrating to his service isn't the right thing to do. I'd rather have Google Reader notify me that they're shutting down in 3 months than a one man operation shutdown without notice because they can't handle the load and the hassle and costs are way over what they were expecting.
You think women are having hard time in tech ? then you sure dont want to be black like me ,with people refusing to work with "niggers" ...
You have to walk a fine line as an employer -- you don't want to be sued for wrongful termination.
Heh, I think we've all been there in some way. Nothing like taking in a nice deep breath of CS to ruin your day.
jwz probably does not bother to blog about all the times he interacts with the government and doesn't get screwed.
The runtime has been thoroughly compromised. Use in new software is not recommended.
Readymag: Let's change digital publishing forever
> You can't assume that the firing was 100% due to the issue at hand

Of course not (especially as his colleague was not fired) but in a blog post purporting to "provide some clarity" on "a number of inaccuracies being reported", considering the basic assumption that he was fired for it, you'd think that would be part of the clarity.

Instead the post weasels around with no specifics whatsoever, declaring "a thorough investigation" (of a few hours) but that not "all the factors" would be commented on (none whatsoever were commented on). They've also refused to publish (let alone respond) to a single comment so far.
IMHO, it's more public and potential offensive than muttering 'dongle' in a crowded theater.

The point I was trying to make is that every party involved is in definitely in the gray area between offensive and unoffensive. She made sexual humiliation jokes in front of thousands of twitter followers. Her company made scatlogical jokes in a much more professional setting than a conference. Compared to these, muttering 'dongle' in a crowded theater is, you must admit, at least equally as offensiv, if not quite a bit less.

And nobody gave a damn about her twitter jokes or the company jobs page before this.
That's easy to work out either way.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them." -- Hacker News Guidelines.
This is the classic operating-system package management/programming-language library packaging dichotomy. You see the same conflict of philosophies with Perl and CPAN packages versus Red Hat / CentOS .rpms of the same package.

Sysadmins frequently seem to like the operating-system approach. Developers frequently seem to like the programming-language approach.
Phalcon 1.0 released (native PHP framework)
Are you saying gizmodo was beaten to the punch?
Because citizens accept that you need a government license to... do virtually anything of significance. And unlike laws passed by legislative bodies, nobody ever looks at these closely and checks what's in there, and since onerous license conditions are not considered rights violations, basically anything can be there unless somebody gets pissed enough to go to the court and lucky enough get a court ruling on a specific thing. Since most people don't have time/money to do this while trying to start a business, not surprising what happens there.
i get very regular Google alerts....
If I had to guess, Adria at least has a pretty easily won harassment lawsuit against SendGrid for this. She was fired for speaking out about an instance of sexually inappropriate humor while she was acting in a professional capacity. Um? Even if you think the way she spoke out was not appropriate, you can't fire someone for this without running some serious risks of large lawsuits.

For anyone who's curious, the texts I'm working off of are http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/retaliation.cfm and http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/facts-retal.cfm. It seems pretty clear that Adria is a covered individual and that an adverse action has been taken. SendGrid is almost certainly a covered entity. The remaining question is whether Adria has engaged in a protected activity and if that is what she was fired for.

The protected activity I think most closely matches what she did is, "Complaining to anyone about alleged discrimination against oneself or others." Now, in the case of this document, what they mean by alleged discrimination is any harassing behavior. But, I believe it is also typically only such behaviors by someone working at the covered entity. So the open question in my mind is whether the law covers adverse actions for complaints about harassment by third parties. I guess we'd have to ask a lawyer.

To the question of whether that is what she was fired for. If it isn't, it's quite a coincidence. I think it would be hard for SendGrid to convince a judge that she was fired for something other than her complaint.
HipChat's API's are severely lacking. There's no way to read messages from chat without using their halfway working XMPP implementation on a separate user account.

On the other hand, sending and receiving messages to IRC is pretty simple and straightforward. There are also tons of IRC libraries.
I absolutely agree with you that this is potentially the greatest travesty and that the whole thing is a debacle.

I reposted this story on my Facebook and literally the only people who commented on it were my female friends/colleagues in the technology industry. Needless to say their reaction was a collective groan.

It is so unfortunate because - as we agree - sexism is such a huge problem that we are certainly not exempt from. And situations like this dilute the real struggles women face in a male-dominated industry.
No.

She made a big stink about what she overheard in a private conversation between two friends, and posted it on Twitter. Probably would not have been a big deal except that one of them, a father of three, was fired as a result. Not her direct doing, but seemingly a consequence of her actions.

She then was found to be a bit of a hypocrite, based on her own tweets: https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425 (she makes her own dick joke)

Some more digging found that she's made some strangely bizarre comments about racism, saying "Black people can't be racist". https://twitter.com/adriarichards/statuses/6039856858

She then says that her company stands behind her, bringing them into the mix. https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/314452708549603328

That was her undoing.

She made a big deal out of something that shouldn't have been, handled it in a totally unprofessional manner, brought a bunch of unwanted attention to her and her employer, and made her association to her employer a problem for her employer.

She was the author of her demise, nobody else.

EDIT: Edited to better reflect the timeline, which I totally mis-tense-ified initially.
The same agency that raided a role playing game publisher because they thought a fictional game was some elaborate criminal conspiracy..

I think there are going to be a lot of sadly amusing and moronic stories to come.
That's a bit of a red herring because virtually everyone (including the courts) agrees there should be some limits to free speech: copyright, trademarks, fraud, consumer protection, libel/slander, obscenity and more that I'm forgetting.

So the real question (whether NSLs should be allowed) is quite a bit more nuanced.

I don't think they should, but not really on the basis of free speech.
I have plans for something like that in the future, but first I'd like to perfect the client itself (a persistent connection would require a server).

For now you can always try out https://www.irccloud.com or https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway
She wrote: "I'm sorry to hear your employer deciding to not to work with you on this and I hope they reconsider, bring you back on and dealing with it constructively." (emphasis mine)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047

I think that's the most we can expect from her regarding the guy getting fired. She didn't fire him, and she clearly expressed that she didn't think he should have been fired over this.
base698 isn't saying take a snapshot of the server, he's saying take a snapshot of the DB; find the directory it is stored in and `cp` that.
Please do not mistake the social ineptitude of others in the tech industry, as applying equally to the rest of us.
> I feel that all the threats and horrible comments she received are disgusting.

No arguments here, but this sounds like typical Internet comments. The tech community is pretty big, a percentage of them are going to be assholes (and given the gender imbalance, most of them are going to be men). Point being: these comments are no more representative of the average tech worker than YouTube comments are representative of the general populace.
In Defense of Maven
Discrimination is not a zero-sum game.

Just because people are talking about the way women are treated doesn't mean that people don't care about or are ignoring how black people are treated.

Your experience does not negate the offenses directed at women, nor does their experience negate yours.

It's unacceptable to treat people like this full stop, whether you're in tech or not.