skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As a macho libertarian hacker type, I would be extremely uncomfortable in an extreme liberal, PC-gone-wild culture which glorifies east coast pseudointellectual preening. Therefore, the culture of modern universities should change.

I've heard this sentiment expressed on a couple occasions ^^ There's nothing wrong with trying to change to world, or even just your corner of it. It's important not to be too annoying about it, but that's not really an issue here (you can always just ignore the debate and keep on hacking.)
Yes, I'd much rather adopt a function... although I'd rather not pay more than $5 a month.

Perhaps a function could be adopted by more than one person? First two people get to be parents, then after that your title would be grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, and what have you.
There was no porn in the slides. (Edit: to be more specific, the "thong" picture on the front page was the most explicit one of the slides, and that looks more like an ad out of a women's magazine, maybe for underwear or perfume. Might be a better place to look for roots of sexism.).
He should have based it on military - drawings of tanks, ships, missiles etc. Most people seem completely fine with killing people. But sex? oh my god think of the children!!!
That's not an argument specific to garbage collection.
Also, Google trends (http://www.google.com/trends) can give a more impressionistic idea of whether a market, as judged by search requests, is growing.
Here is what I don't understand about iPhone App acquisition.

You cannot transfer an app from one account to another. So if a company develops 3 apps and wants to sell 1, I don't know how that can work.
I absolutely love your idea. I think the best thing about it is that it can be dead-simple or ridiculously complex, with dividends and whatnot, but the idea works for so many projects.

An added thought could be sponsoring modules that don't exist yet to spur on their development, maybe your company uses some open source product that supports a bunch of file formats but not .xyz, you could donate to a speculative XYZ Module and then everyone benefits and the developers have an incentive to write it.
$12,000 Prize Mobile LBS Application Contest using Intuit and Xtify
Codefest 3.0 in Montreal this weekend
Live stream on YouTube: the President's First 100 Days News Conference
I really don't see why people make this into a gender thing. Because there were more women in the photographs than men?

The speaker showed very poor taste. Such illustrations are totally inappropriate for a public presentation. But this has nothing to do with gender, so I don't see why women were more offended than men.
Tell HN: This Saturday in Palo Alto: The Art and Science of Bootstrapping
If you use TextMate daily I HIGHLY recommend the TextMate book from Pragmatic Press:
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/textmate/textmate
I think you are missing the point if you think the issue is about people's attitude towards sexual imagery.
You're approaching it the wrong way. TextMate inserts matching pairs around the selection. Just type 2*, then select a+4 and hit (.
I think next year, a woman should give a presentation at a Rails/Ruby conference that had nothing but slides of penises for visual aids (or muscled men in seductive poses and scant clothing).

I'm sure a metaphor could be worked in that would fit a stack of penises.

Then see what the community has to say about that presentation.

Because I think that's the biggest problem here, they aren't considering what it would've been like if the presentation had contained something that extremely marginalized them in the same way this woman felt. The community is saying "Whatever, boobs are fine. Fuck professionalism.", but they are only considering it in the context of what they saw and what they are comfortable with.

And from what I've seen, the Ruby community is championed by a bunch of self-important douchebags. And because of them, I'll probably never become interested enough to learn Ruby. It's that huge a turn off, I don't want to associated with that. Level of success/fame/money is unimportant because by that same metric, Bill Gates is an awesome guy and Microsoft one of the coolest companies around.
These things are very culture-dependent. In Europe, most people don't care much about breast feeding in public, and don't see why Americans seem to raise such a fuss about Janet Jackson's breast.

Which means you don't want to use these themes to illustrate your presentation, unless you are deliberately trying to annoy or offend part of your audience.
I use it on Linux, Windows, and my Blackberry, actually. I simply love it, though there are the occasional rough spots - like Google Docs or Gmail not loading. Thankfully, I don't make extensive use of them anyhow, so I'm solid.
If you were confused in such a way you'd end up thinking that i would be incremented with "i++" before the loop body ran. For "++i" to be confusing would be seriously messed up.
Wow Frontpage with jQuery, I think that more harm is done than good when people create things without understanding how they work. But, I'm probably biased as I spent (and continue to spend) years of my life learning and devoting myself to professional development practices.
I doubt that Apple will let this happen. I have had a couple phones with AT&T and they were crippled too: every single thing links to a store (wallpapers, ringtones, apps...); but they don't have a single thing on the iPhone, not even their logo.

Apple tends to not deliver something if it's not ready for prime-time and I would expect them not to have a phone with Verizon if Verizon insists on adding stuff. Plus, I would think it would increase the chances of people jailbreaking the phones, thus removing a big chunk of revenue from app sales for Apple.
I meant his choice of quotes is objective. The quotes themselves are not objective. That said, he seems to have quoted pretty much all of the women who've said anything about it. A great move, but not exactly collating the Bible.
Could one problem with the discussion be that people talk about different things?

a) was the presentation very tasteful and/or funny? (most would probably agree that it wasn't)

b) was it an unforgivable affront against women? (some think no, and end up defending the presentation even though they might not even have liked it much).

I must admit I have troubles understanding some things, like the thong picture making a woman feel unwelcome.
In all sincerity, I'd like to understand how and why you would use libevent instead of the approach outlined by Beej,

Is there any link or other reference you could recommend for further study? The documentation on libevent's home page is big on "how", but not on "why".
Laying it on a bit thick there, don't ya think?
I don't object if you want to change the world for the better. I object when you want to change the world for your personal benefit.

A good argument: "The number of great female hackers is much larger than the number of macho rockstar hackers. To get more good hackers, we should change our culture."

[edit: I'm not sure if the good argument is true, but imagine it is for the sake of argument.]

A bad argument: "I was offended, the culture should change to accommodate people like me."
Doing the Dishes
"FYI man, you can sit at home and do absolutely nothing -- and your name goes through like 17 computers a day, man. 1984? Yeah, right, man, that's a typo. Orwell's here now and he's livin' large. We have no names, man, no names. We are nameless. ...Can I score a fry?"

Seriously, this goes on all the time. I used to work for a company that could divine your age, sex, race, marital status, and income and education levels from your cable TV viewing habits.
I was just pointing out that we live in a time when some peoples attitudes to sex are ridiculously prudish, compared to other things (Especially in the US).

People should be offended by people being killed. But they aren't. Instead they're offended by some women at the superboll flashing a breast. Or some intern helping to relax the president. Or a tech talk with some scantily clad models in it.
If Verizon cripples the device, jailbreaking will provide Apple an opportunity for revenue from app store.
are you by any chance a Scientologist?
Here was a point-by-point rebuttal but I deleted it now since turning this to a Reddit-like argument is pointless.

In any case, my problem is not with Twitter. I see it as a neat niche app - maybe you're right and it will be a huge app. Nobody can really know at this point.

My disappointment is with its coverage. If the NY Times and CNN are this easily excited over a 6 million user website, what's their advantage over, say, Scoble? Are we rebooting the Web again? Watching them cover Twitter feels like watching middle aged parents trying to dress and act like their teenage children.
Your argument is ineffective. The point is not to swap one potentially controversial topic for another in a presentation, the point is to attempt to appease a majority of the audience in an entertaining way precisely by avoiding abrasive topics.
How job seekers rate Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM and others
This is relevant for python also (which comes with Tk in the standard installation), although the python specific documentation is better:

http://infohost.nmt.edu/tcc/help/pubs/tkinter/

However, in the past year and a half I've mostly eschewed desktop GUI frameworks for a standard html/js/css web interface with a python backend. It's more portable and a little bit more flexible (in some respects) with the ability to scale out to multiple simultaneous users (sometimes).
I'm too old to change the way I work ;)
The extra hassle for saving a keypress isn't worth it IMHO.
What's the Plural of 'Virus'?
I do not think the presentation was particularly offensive; but he tried to be funny and failed. He should have apologized and move on. But he didn't and that is what caused all this. Just poor judgment followed by poor damage control.
I don't understand the point of this article or why I'm seeing it here.

As far as I could tell, the author got an email from a friend looking for help and instead of helping him, he decided to humiliate him on the internet.
Good for him.

I, on the other hand, don't really care what machine I'm running on; I just happen to really like OS X.
SendForge.com
I enjoy using xmonad too. It puts you in a very different workflow. Also don't miss the great list of people's config files: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive

I ended up adopting this one almost without modification: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive/Thomas_... (warning, for Dvorak keyboard layout)
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In the future, you won't see posts from XXXXX
New drool-worthy WebOS screenshots emerge
Do you have a google account? All you do is click on the google icon on the stackoverflow login page and put in your info. It's not that difficult. It's certainly easier than creating a new account.

Also the point of the article you are commenting on points out that stackoverflow doesn't even need registration to fully use the site. Your cookie will identify you forever (or until you erase your cookies).
My comment on the blog repeated here:

"You correctly assume that the distribution follows a power-law, but you apply an arbitrary constraint on the maximum ($5bn). You constrained the maximum and then concluded that the distribution is not scalable!

Even if historically VCs haven't had a larger than $5bn exit, there is no reason it won't happen in the future. Unless VCs have some sort of self-imposed upper-bound on exits, this asset class is perfectly scalable as long as VCs have the intestinal fortitude to hang on to some hits for longer than they have in the past. (Also they need to invest in earlier stage startups and diversify more than they think they need to, to benefit even more from scalability). "
I think pictures of bodies from Iraq with a tagline "CouchDB kills the competition" would be equally if not more frowned upon.

No one ever said that this would be the ONLY thing that was unprofessional and offensive, you are arguing against a point nobody made.
Can someone link me to an article that explains exactly what is so terrible about Macports? I often hear Linux users moan about how awful and confused and broken Macports is. But, as a web developer who uses Ruby, Apache, MySQL, and git via Macports, I've never noticed any trouble. (A few years ago Macports tended to lag the latest versions by a little too long, but that seems to have cleared up as programmers migrate to the platform.)

My working assumption is that these complainers must be heavy-duty C programmers, or some other variety of coder that uses a completely different set of tools than I do. Or that they maintain some older codebases which link against older, incompatible versions of various libraries, so they need to install multiple versions of half a dozen libraries and then carefully control how the linking is managed. Or they're former Gentoo users who are completely obsessed with the minutiae of how their tools are being compiled and want to be able to tweak their compiler optimizations on a fine-grained level.

Or maybe I just don't understand Debian well enough [1], and if I did I would fall in love with its build system and spend all my working life in a Linux VM.

---

[1] I mean, I maintain Ubuntu servers, but that doesn't require a lot of understanding of the build system. By and large, aptitude or apt-get just work.
"It tends to break horribly as soon as someone does anything unexpected" is usually the argument used against manual memory management.
The problem isn't that Google tried to do it, The problem is that Google set up the deal so that nobody else could ever do something like this ever again. Google set up a per se monopoly. It pulled a Microsoft. Hell, based on publicly available information, it looks like Google has just committed a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act Sec. 2. (Note that the attempt to anti-competitively monopolize is just as much a violation as establishing an actual anti-competitive monopoly. Monopolies are only sanctioned when they arise purely from competitive market forces, i.e., Apple getting away with 90+% of the MP3 player market).

Both Microsoft and Adobe tried to pull off something like this in the past, but both failed due to a break down in negotiations related to orphaned works. Neither would pay the Author's Guild for access to orphaned works b/c the Guild doesn't have the legal right to bargain on behalf of those authors. The Justice Department did get involved in the MS attempt; I don't know if they were snooping around in Adobe's attempt.

The fact that Google is willing to arrange payment to the Guild for rights to works that the Guild doesn't have the power to grant says a lot about the lack of research and general shoddiness of Google's transactions and antitrust legal teams.
I can make you a vast list of books that are pretty well-received, but still unadulterated bullshit from cover to cover. I'd have proved nothing relevant either.

(Just to be clear: I'm not implying Ramit's book is or isn't bullshit - just that it's entirely beside the point)
But that is marketing to customers, this is a technical conference. Sex sells but sex does not belong in the workplace.

I can see an argument as to why that is a double standard, but it is what it is and if you are going to be a professional you have to respect that.
Would you take a person with no experience in startups (and hence no failures) over person who failed a startup?
I have trouble accepting the argument that the classical plural of "virus" can't be "virora" simply because it "does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker". While it's questionable whether the Romans ever spoke of "several slimes", if they had chosen to do so I don't think their choice of plurals would have been influenced by the peculiarities of people who would not be born for another 2000 years.
Yea I created an account, logged in, tried to add my first contact. I had the message that an error occured, retry later. I retried something like 3 times and I had a message that my account was blocked due to suspicious activities...
Great for a first time... I never connected again.
Amazon Gets ‘Em While They’re Young
This is poignant. On Firefox/32bit/Linux/Flash10 I see only the word "Specter" wandering aimlessly on a barren white background. Poor guy.
Flagged because Windows-bashing is dull.
Every country has urban and rural areas. So maybe nebula has seen only the slums :P and not seen places like Bangalore or Pune or elsewhere.

Anyway, OLPC-India targets govt schools. And if given to the state of Kerala, I would fully support it. Kerala is the state with the highest literacy rate (sometime back I heard it's 98%. so their state govt seem to be efficient in the area of education). There are govts that are corrupt. And I guess some of those OLPCs will go to corrupt bureaucrat's kids. But still a part of it would reach those for whom it was bought - the govt school kids. Many schools don't have blackboards? The situation won't get worse anyway. Think of it as money being used for a purpose rather than going to another bureaucrat's pocket in lump some.

P.S: Even if one of those who got an OLPC, gets bitten by the geek-bug / entrepreneur-bug. Turns out to do something for his locality/surrounding sometime later. I would say the OLPC has done it's job :)

[full disclosure: I'm from Bangalore]
I see more women involved in academic math and CS than I do in Rails (and many other industrial computing communities for that regard). And Rails conferences used to be a lot more female-friendly than now. Women are turned off when your ego exceeds your actual capability, and somewhere along the way the Rails community took the ego path.
Politics is poison. Let's leave it off HN please.
I dunno. I watch and enjoy documentaries on subjects I've got no particular interest in, and will likely never come across again. What's my motive there, if not learning for the sake of learning?

PS: Our brains aren't designed, 'that way' or any other.
I am.

Javascript (along with HTML and CSS) is the lingua franca of web UIs, and the browser is becoming the platform. Pushing that deeper into devices is a natural move.
"It kind of makes me want to never touch Rails code again"

Don't.

It is a free world out there and there's a lot of competing frameworks and languages. I seriously doubt any framework or language designer sets out to have "more women in the room" and neither should they.

DHH made his code available for anyone else to use if they wanted to. That doesn't mean he abdicated his values or thought process to to what the rest of the world dictates.

He is not an elected leader, who you expect to at least pretend to share your values. He happens to occupy a leadership position because he contributes code. Contributing code shouldn't have to imply political correctness in thought and speech.

I think all these complainants should really walk away from Rails (vs blog about it or whine about it day after day after day ) if they are so offended that DHH (or other people) don't share their prejudices on how the world should think.

Just. Walk. Away.

And how many people will do that (as compared to running a torches and pitchforks type campaign on blogs and twitter)?

Not many I would think.

And how much difference would it make to Rails if they did walk away?
I have no idea though I think, maybe not much.

All this looks increasingly like a storm in a teacup.
(not following closely)

I thought the difference between the prior attempts and this one is that:

- the guild doesn't have authority to grant rights to orphaned works

- but in this case the plaintiffs did a class action against google (where the class == authors, essentially), and thus in the context of this agreement the guild does have the authority to grant those rights, b/c the class's legal representatives have granted the guild that authority in the interest of obtaining a settlement

If that pocket summary is accurate it says a lot about the quality of Google's research, imho: it's quite a clever hack of the legal process.
The original presentation was not "nothing but slides of vaginas for visual aids". It was a normal tech presentation, but with LOLCAT FAIL replaced by ugly porn stars, and EPIC WIN replaced by pretty porn stars.

If the same presentation were made, but with LOLCAT FAIL -> ugly man in seductive pose, EPIC WIN -> muscled man, I doubt many men would be offended. I certainly would not be.

In my opinion, women (at least the ones who complain about such things) are simply less tolerant of edgy material than most hackers.

Also, the original presentation showed no full nudity. I don't think your comparison to a "stack of penises" is apt.
>> pictures of bodies from Iraq with a tagline "CouchDB kills the competition"

I don't think most people would have batted an eyelid at that. If they were 'anonymous' non close-up bodies without any gore. People are pretty desensitized to that sort of thing. Also it's harder to say "This is offensive to <insert minority>".

I think the moral is if you're going to use humor, be very very careful. You might miss the mark for some people, and offend them instead.
The python specific documentation is a reference document not a tutorial and I think that tkinter is based in the old tk library not in ttk (the modern themed TK library).
http://blog.tkdocs.com/2009/02/ttk-support-in-python.html
You lost all credibility with this statement, "Developers usually don't care for a unified user experience." You are talking about your preferences, and so was the guy who wrote the smashing mag article. You are both making far too general statements.
Do you intend to imply that women shouldn't feel welcome as Ruby/RoR hackers?

Because all this time, I just thought Ruby and RoR were about hacking in a powerful yet carefree interpreted language. I didn't realize it had anything to do with excluding women.
>> "a lot of guys, when they see a mother breast feeding in public will roll their eyes in disgust"

Seriously? In US I assume?

I'm in the UK and have never had such an impression. Old people seem to sometimes get offended at such things, but certainly not the general population.
Has the GPL out-lived its usefulness?
How Entrepreneurs Are Feeling in Downturn
did you watch the video of the shoes presenter from gogaruco? I suspect the poster is that guy.
"I'm sure a metaphor could be worked in that would fit a stack of penises."

Frankly (as a man) I wouldn't be offended.

"they aren't considering what it would've been like if the presentation had contained something that extremely marginalized them "

You can't "marginalize" me unless I choose to feel marginalized by what you say. I'll be damned if I give you that kind of power over me.

If I thought the presentation was full of shit, I'd just walk out. I am sure a decent tech conference would have better presentations elsewhere.

One thing I wouldn't do is whine endlessly about it because one of my "identities" got hurt. It is a free country and I am fine with the right of free speech sometimes causing me "offense".

This is the Danish cartoons on a smaller scale. It is all right to "offend" 6th century "prophets" (and their followers). It is all right to "offend" the political correctness of the day. That is what free speech means. You don't think a particular instance is appropriate, just walk away.

All we need are mobs burning DHH in effigy and destroying public property and then we can all go back to our normal lives.
Totally agree. Here are excerpts of my book -- feel free to take a look and decide for yourself:

http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/book/excerpts/
Does anyone have experience with a chording keyboard? The idea has intrigued me, but I haven't ponied up to try one out, yet. It appears there are now more choices; the last time I looked, I didn't find much other than the BAT, and the over $200 pricetag (at that time) was a deterrent.

http://tifaq.org/keyboards/chording-keyboards.html