skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
so the moral of the story, according to raganwald, is that Adria Richards worst mistake is that she trolled somebody candidly instead of anonymously?

indeed Reggie, what can be done about anonymous trolling on the internet? this is an honest question to which nobody knows the answer.

do we all need to admit that we are powerless to stop anonymous dickheads from making death threats on the internet? I admit it. We all would admit it. We are powerless. We don't like to see that. But the world is ugly. Adria Richards did something ugly and got something much much uglier in response. She didn't deserve the death threats, but she did deserve the firing.
>And it'll have to be worse than a website getting hacked or a hardfork, which were the kinds of things that caused crashes years ago when the market was younger.

Actually, despite the market being older, there's still only one major exchange. If there were another competitor to MtGox that was moving the same volume, I'd agree with you; but as it stands we're still only a MtGox hack or crash away from some major changes in the BTC->USD prices.
Agreed. And was she not at the event in an official capacity?

If someone's job is to be a public figure or spokesperson for a given company then everything they do publicly online is relevant (I'm a huge advocate of using pseudonyms and anonymous communication online over personally identifiable communication.)
That hasn't been the case so far. It has become more volatile as more people enter the market.
2008? You're two-thousand and late!
I think you all need to spend a few weeks in rural Africa and realise how fuckton crazied we westerners can get at times. (Am nicking that phrase if thats ok, @bobwaycott?) Word!
My letter to Jim Franklin about why I'm leaving SendGrid
Maybe he was more junior. If you look on Alex Reid's linkedin, it says he's a core engineer. I don't see anyone else in Playhaven with that title.
Sometimes skeuomorphism is useful, when used right. For example, Microsoft's Fresh Paint app for Windows 8. Extreme skeuomorphism which actually combines well within the flat W8 interface, screenshot: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Freshpain...
This probably would work well until you sold one to an FBI agent.
Without knowing PlayHaven directly in this context its hard to say what those words mean. They come off as PR for covering their ass. I'd be surprised if any thorough investigation could be concluded so quickly.

The fact that they state employee privacy is of importance yet clearly outline he was dismissed also sends flags up for me. To specifically say their decision goes beyond privacy when he is clearly identified through the picture and other channels is to say "we fired mr-hank" a point that is already covered within this thread of discussion. To say "we have investigated the complaints and taken appropriate action" is a safer bet legally.

These are just speculation, but my interpretation is that the response was a hasty PR damage control rather than a rational response.
I don't think anyone would have blamed her if they insulted her, It wasn't an insult, it wasn't directed at her.; It was said to his friend unaware she was listening and she was offended. There's a difference there.
You mean like Notification Centre?
We're assuming these are fake, and that someone just got hold of their Facebook and Twitter passwords.

pg posted that earlier. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416979
I'm not sure she has grounds for a lawsuit.

SendGrid received quite allot of customer complaints about her. Customers were quitting them, and/or making threats of going to a competitor. Then they got DDoSed over this.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, they are located in a - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment - state.
I completely agree. When you're a small startup, few things are in your favor. It's worth every minute to pour over creating a great experience, even if it's done by hand.

@MassageJoy (http://www.massagejoyspa.com), we're currently going through Pinterest and the wider web, and pulling things together to create thoughtful Care Packages for our clients.

Is it hella expensive? Yes.
But that doesn't matter. The basic point is to make sure the experience that we deliver is unmatched. And we're either going to do that or die trying.
Not to mention being developed in totally different environments than your average website, application, or framework.
Can you fire someone for being the victim of a crime? They clearly fired her here in response to a DDoS.

I guess I wouldn't be surprised if shitty American employment law permits it, but it's not ethical on the employer's part.
If your job is evangelism and you get to the point where you are claiming in a tweet that your employer "supports" you there is a real risk that you are asking them to evangelise you rather than the other way round and then your position is likely to be precarious.

When you are employed, particularly in a PR or role or any other where you speak for your employer your speech is not fully free. Even when in your own time on private accounts if you claim views and opinions as your own rather than your employer's it can still have an impact. Anonymity is valuable if you have something that you want to say without bringing your employer into the issue.

This is not to deny that there may be sexism or that it may be right to publicly stand against it but when in controversial territory speak for yourself and let PR or the CEO back you publicly if they want to and do consider the affect on ability to fulfil role and then balance the need to make a societal impact against that (or quit and speak freely).
> It depends on your definition of racism, and most scholarly definitions are "power and prejudice." In other words, a white person who is in the majority has more power than a black person (think Silicon Valley[1]), so the actual impact of the prejudice has a greater magnitude that turns it into "racism."

I don't know what scholarly sources you've seen that use that definition, but most scholarly sources I've seen define don't factor power into the definition of racism, but do certainly acknowledge that power dynamics have a pretty big impact on the effects of racism.

OTOH, the "only people in positions of power can be racists" thing is something I've seen pretty much exclusively in non-scholarly sources.
> Objective-J

Ya blew it.
Hate to be a fanboy, but probably because they'd do an awesome job of it (where MS certainly has not).
Apple Finally Offers Two-Step Authentication
My email to Jim Franklin:

Hi Jim,

You have a mess on your hands, and I understand how hard it must be at SendGrid today.

I think you've made a defensible move, and it is hard to hold you in contempt for putting your employees and business first.

That said, I'm really disappointed in your response.

For as long as there have been tech conferences, they have been hostile to women. Sexually exclusive language is the starting point for harassment and assault that have been the status quo for the tech industry for decades. (tech isn't alone here, of course)

A woman trying to report these offenses often went completely unheard. The crimes were completely silenced by a community that protected itself with homogeny, and the results are strikingly obvious in the number of women working, participating, and attending conferences in technology.

This deeply-rooted problem is finally beginning to surface, and we're starting to talk about solutions in a productive way. PyCon was at the forefront of that as they worked incredibly hard to make women feel accepted. Their no-harassment policy and work to get more women speaking and attending represent a huge amount of progress.

It has been a very public effort by the conference, and the results were impressive. A huge number of women showed up to a space they thought would be more welcoming.

Of course, it wasn't perfect. Though we've made a lot of progress, there's still a long way to go before we'll get rid of exclusive attitudes towards women.

What's really disappointing, though, is that when a woman at this conference felt uncomfortable and made her discomfort public, she lost her job.

Her peers, our technology community, responded to her statement with incredible hostility. Threats of rape and murder were abundant yesterday, and we attacked a woman for expressing her discomfort publicly.

Some people, like yourself, said that it would be okay for her to express her discomfort privately, but that the publicity is what made it a problem. But in doing so, you're asking her to give up her voice. You're asking her to stay silent about an incredibly serious problem.

All she did was report factual discomfort publicly. She didn't lie or slander.

And now she's lost her job for it. The message is obvious: women aren't allowed to report misconduct like this. We don't want to hear about the sexual misconduct in our community. A woman's discomfort is her own problem, not ours.

That's the wrong message.
>OK, so where is the revenue stream for filmmakers?

Where is it right now?

There is a lot of movie piracy. Making movies is very profitable. Both statements can be, and are, true at the same time. So where's the problem?

New technologies tend to increase the amount of piracy and the amount of purchasing, because making media consumption better or easier means that people do it more, both legally and otherwise. In many cases the rate of piracy increases more than the rate of legitimate consumption, but when both increase as a result of the innovation, why prohibit it?
"How the hell do we measure a police department's effectiveness?"

The number of crimes committed in an area is often used. If the number goes down, the police are doing a good job of discouraging crime.

This results in in things like absurdly dysfunctional web forms for reporting crimes. People just give up on reporting their car being broken into rather than waste an hour figuring out why their report keeps getting rejected.

Thus there is less reported crime, and the police pat themselves on the back.
In her blog post about this, she was likening herself to Joan of Arc over this event. And that was just the beginning. Too bad that website is down.
I doubt they'll go as flat as Microsoft did, it would create a mess of designs on iDevices. I think it will mostly be like Apple's new update to the Podcasts app - remove all the gimmicks, but keep the shadows and gradients on the same level as on OS X (outside of iCloud apps).
I'd rather buy Euro then I would buy bitcoin
Considering it's something any script kiddie can do: yes.
I don't think you have to worry about it. They aren't going to make radical changes for the sake of tech geeks who are bored if the rest of the customer base likes things the way they are.
Go on localbitcoins.com and type in 'Tehran'.
There's also a very popular mailing list/forums for trading in Farsi I have to dig up the link when I leave my office.

Argentina has also embraced bitcoins en masse considering it's now illegal to transfer any money out of the country, and no Argentinian trusts their bank to not steal all their deposits. On payday in Argentina you see huge lines of people at the ATMs withdrawing everything they own to keep under a mattress, or smuggle to Uruguay to deposit in a stable bank.
Excellent, thanks! Here's to hoping I can get it to work with nyan-mode, the most important emacs plugin :P
I think there are several ways that she could have handled this, she picked the wrong one
Such a lawsuit would be a confirmed kill on her career though. At least now she has a chance to someday salvage her work. Adding a lawsuit to the mix will probably mean she'll never be hired by anyone (who can read and is on the web) again.
When I lived in Chicago back in 1998 I distinctly remember feeling that the common use of credit cards (and mobile phones) was much more primitive compared to Spain. 10 years later, I needed to use cash way more often the 3 years I lived in Vancouver than the 3 years since I came back to Madrid. Heck, I haven't visited an ATM in at least 3 months.

That said, you are probably right that the technical education and trust needed to embrace bitcoins is much less common in Spain. I first heard of bitcoins in, of all places, an episode of "The Good Wife" couple years ago, and have only found a handful of people who know about them. I imagine this will be changing rapidly in the following months, just like it's doing everywhere else.
Square is, IME, ruining the customer experience pretty much everywhere it is used in regular, fixed-premised established retail/restaurant businesses.

Its an improvement in other places, though.
No, it's a lack of consistency. This is required of every person making a claim, not her specifically, so this has nothing to do with ad hominem.
Not quite Chrome Maze, but it's good
I bet they are real people. AngelHack sent an email and promised "free AngelHack tickets to the first 200 upvotes!"
This is one of the most virtuous pieces of software I've seen in recent years. Kudos.
To expand on your comment: when a small number of users with a large store of bitcoin sell out, they are selling into the hands of hundreds of small scale owners who have diverse motives for holding the coins. The chance that they all cash out together diminishes because they are using the coins for individual purposes. You're witnessing the growing spurts that will shortly settle down.
Well this is the most ridiculous logic I've seen for a while.

Just because I send two emails from my Gmail account doesn't mean they are related and/or relevant.
Question for the local counsel: how much harder is Kerr's job made by entering only at the appeal stage, as opposed to if he had been representing Auernheimer from the beginning? e.g. are there issues/arguments he won't be able to bring up now that he could have earlier?
If You're Doing A New RSS Reader...
"The problem is, unless more mental energy is expended on this topic, it will be repeated. Better to have the full conversation now than to continually punt the issue."

As much as I support discussion on these topics, it's the internet. Any message board will continue to bring up these issues in waves, as new events occur, as new posters join up, there is not going to be one article where everyone achieves some sort of understanding, now or ever. Set your expectations realistically :)
I wonder what would happen if the party responsible for the DDoS blackmail was found.
> "Doug Walton, Canadian academic and author, has argued that ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, and that in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue,[10] as when it directly involves hypocrisy, or actions contradicting the subject's words.
The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that ad hominem reasoning is essential to understanding certain moral issues, and contrasts this sort of reasoning with the apodictic reasoning of philosophical naturalism.[11]
Olavo de Carvalho, a Brazilian philosopher, has argued that ad hominem reasoning not only has rhetorical, but also logical value. As an example, he cites Karl Marx's idea that only the proletariat has an objective view of history. If that were to be taken rigorously, an ad hominem argument would effectively render Marx's general theory as incoherent: as Marx was not a proletarian, his own view of history couldn't be objective."

(wikipedia article on ad hominem)

In this case, i'd think it's pretty fucking valid.
Wow. Sorry to harp on this but you can criticize Apple when they deserve it not because you want to. You are essentially saying they are lying (green-washing) and accusing them of covering up their energy usage in their manufacturing flow. When all they talked about was their energy usage on the corporate side. Are you even reading the same article that the OP posted? Where are you reading that Apple tried to lie? This is a non-story, nothing to read into it at all. A simple nod would have been enough. There is no conspiracy or lying or cover up here. If you see it point it to me.
Well, speaking as a publisher, I would also want to confirm this sort of thing with the company before disseminating it widely. Companies and livelihoods are at stake in situations like this.
In short, yes, we are, and it's shitty. Reg, everything you wrote here is pretty spot-on.

Adria Richards' behavior was definitely a tactical misstep. With the benefit of hindsight, she should have reported the inappropriate behavior to the conference staff more discretely. Or, even, turned around and told them to show some respect. (And, if they didn't cut the crap, THEN get them kicked from the conference.)

I don't believe that what she did was inappropriate/unacceptable in any kind of moral sense, and I would gladly hire Adria if I was hiring for that kind of role. If a person is making jokes with sexual innuendoes during a talk, they shouldn't be at that conference, and shouldn't be surprised that there are consequences, no matter how many kids they have. Behavior in public is already public; putting it on the internet may make it more so, but it's not as if they had any expectation of privacy in the first place.

At the root, I'm glad she stuck up for herself somehow, rather than just kept quiet. She did so in a clumsy way, and has been castigated for it far more harshly than is useful.

Furthermore, this is a clear incident of sexism in our community. If I had done the exact same thing, there's no way that /r/mensrights would DDoS Joyent into firing me. This is why women feel unsafe and mistreated in our communities: because they are. If they stick up for themselves, they're going to face an onslaught of trolling, and even the ostensible "good guys" are quick to point out that yes, yes, we don't condone this sort of thing, but come on, She Was Asking For It.

As I said, her reaction was a tactical misstep. At a higher level, there's a strategic point about preventing these sorts of things from happening in the first place. How do we ensure that the next Adria feels empowered enough to tell the boys behind her to cut it out, where they realize their inappropriateness for the environment and apologize and the world moves on with dignity? How do we build communities that are compassionate, without so many pikes looking for heads?

Every time some shitstorm like this happens, we all lose a chunk of our humanity, no matter what side we're on, or who does or doesn't get fired.

I feel like a parent of a 14-year-old child, reading a news story about a 16-year-old dying in some horrible car wreck on prom night, knowing that mine will be that age soon enough.

Node is SO nice right now. As technology communities go, it's astounding how compassionate and friendly we've managed to keep things. Even in the face of some strongly held religious feelings about CoffeeScript or async or promises etc, we still talk to one another, like human beings. Our IRC channel and mailing list has a zero-tolerance policy for rude conduct. Our meetups are small and there are enough regulars to keep up a culture of "We don't do that sort of thing here" with respect to lewd jokes, homophobia, sexism, ableism, etc.

What happens when Node is as big as Python? How do we keep this going?
wait...wat?
The one about the photo. I hadn't seen the tweet you linked.

Can you explain why you're not comfortable interacting with her?
Lean in or Juggle – TypeWhale
I'm curious to know whether you actually read their response.

"To be clear, SendGrid supports the right to report inappropriate behavior, whenever and wherever it occurs.

What we do not support was how she reported the conduct."
Tool Assisted Speedrun uses bug in Pokemon Yellow to execute arbitrary code
Except that's not the message.

The message is: Nobody is allowed to report misconduct in this way.
From what I've gleaned, /srs is pretty brutal, but towards the behavior of the MRAs. They are most likely a good mix of men and not attacking MRAs for being men who dare talk out about... the "gynocracy" or something. Your false equivalency is unnecessary and misplaced.
That's what I don't understand. What is this "rift"? What is the chasm, and why is anyone on the side across from her?
I don't think we're powerless, and the first step to you not thinking we're powerless is to stop and ask yourself, what would it take for things like this to be reduced to a few weird cranks and outliers instead of a flood?

I would be very surprised indeed if your response is, "There is nothing we can do to change human behaviour around this."
Even as someone relatively new to development and a native of the web this seems so clear to me. The web was originally just a way of sharing documents. It is both a miracle and heresy that we have managed to do so much with it. We could very well do with some foundational rethinking of what the web is beyond all the web 2.0 buzzwords.

That said, I have never understood the driving need for desktop like frameworks. The problems that ubiquitusly networked applications and communications technology face are nothing like those of kernel code, commandline applications, or modern applications like CAD Photoshop. All the things you mention that need fixing desperately need it, but I don't think a desktop like framework/library/standard for the web will ever 'win' because the web is not trying to solve the problem of a virtual desktop, it is trying to solve the problem of a non-homogeneous ubiquitously networked data exchange layer.
The iWatch is 200+ tris so takes a long time to load anyways. WebGL/3D is around where mobile 3d is, safe range is up to 140-160k but for older really under 100k total per frame is needed to perform/load reasonably well. For mobile if you can stay below 60-80k you don't have mesh loading issues.

Hint to artists, low poly is in and will be for a long time again due to web and mobile games. 2k for a game character is fat, 1k is usable for many enemies to be drawn at once per frame. Show off your skills but also show off for the markets you target, gaming is still low poly in web + mobile.
https://github.com/leedo/alice is another one. Used to be hosted but they stopped running it.
and https://github.com/leedo/alice
And that's probably why this was written: https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/
I haven't seen the industry introspect on gender issues in a long time

I value industry introspection as much as the next person, but these last 24 hours have been actively painful to me.
So I'm guessing she's getting camp all summer and a new Retina Macbook Pro to code on :-)
> "More productive out of the box."

> "Write dramatically less code."

> "Absolutely right. Ember promises—and, we think, delivers—tremendous value."

No matter how often you say it, doesn't make it true. At a certain point, we have to stop just believing the hype at face value, and start actually evaluating what the piece of software really does with a critical perspective.

Aren't the same guys who are telling you that Ember is simple and easy to use and high-performance and well-designed and ambitious and removes boilerplate and cures cancer and kisses babies ... the same guys who were saying the same things about SproutCore two years ago?

http://web.archive.org/web/20110530004346/http://blog.sprout...

Isn't the data layer still totally unfinished? Didn't a lot of folks just get burned by wildly changing router APIs? Isn't it obvious from what few public production apps there are (after 2+ years) that the results end up sub-par, glitchy and wonky? Why would you want to spend time banging your head against the limitations and poor design choices of an over-marketed experimental framework?

Let them actually finish the damn thing first, then let's talk about "getting started" with it.