skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Peter you and i are going to have to sit down and catch a meal at railsconf, so i can figure out why you've become so curmudgeonly over the past couple months :p

Rubyists are -not- all that liberal, just like most programming communities are not all that liberal. There are a lot of very outspoken liberals, however, there are just as many conservatives (and i use this in the American liberal/conservative distinction) out there to argue with.

=====================================

Frankly i find your sentiment dispiriting and unhelpful. Discussions like these are indicative of a problem. I vociferously agree that we need action more than words, but simply disregarding the discussion, and there by the problem, sounds like willful denial to me.

Fundamentally it comes down to this. If ruby is supposedly more egalitarian and accessible than other programming languages (which is something we tell ourselves as Rubyists), why are there -fewer- women than in many other technical fields? Why are we doing such an awful job of recruiting and retaining people so that our gender ratio is at freaking least >5% women?

Pragmatically, the question that needs to be answered is what can you or i (or any individual rubyist) do to alleviate this problem? What are the pitfalls and impediments to attempting to help?

If nobody talks about the issue it's hard to see how we can make any progress. If you don't like the tone the conversation has taken, try and spin it off into something that is more constructive.
Wow, the comments on that thread are great! Thanks for the link.
This is one of the better pieces linked to from HN in some time, yet most of the comments here are critical of either the author or her husband or both. Critics, please raise your hands if either you or your spouse has raised $10M in a depressed economy, nationally launched a new consumer product into a hyper-competitive industry, and achieved multi-million dollar revenues while trying to hold a marriage and family together. Anyone? Bueller?
I don't know if the pattern has a name, but equivalent of this in GTK+ (and QT, IIRC) desktop world would be called an idle callback (function scheduled to be run at the next iteration of the event loop).

More info here: http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD/sec-mainloop.html#Z63
Putting gratuitous pornography into a presentation that targets members outside your direct social circle is unprofessional and bad form.

I don't see what's wrong with people pointing that out.
But I still admire the bloggers who take the time write a post, knowing full well they'll get tons of cruel, off-topic comments on their blog from Digg users, and bite the bullet and write anyway ...

I see it more along the lines of unnecessary repetition, like the incessant blog posts about how "Rails sucks" or how "slow" Ruby is. We get the message. If one can't bring something new to the table or at least let a year pass to see how things progress, does it need to be said yet again?
Wow.. what an incredibly offensive presentation that Matt Aimonetti gave. That he needed to resort to such crass tactics speaks volumes about both him, the audience, and what he thought about the audience.

I'm a little disappointed that there isn't a strong tone being taken against this guy; perhaps I'm just missing it? Even the woman bloggers seem to be apologizing for the offense they've taken.

Those slides were hugely sexist and misogynistic; the imagery was stereotypical and gratuitous. I wasn't there, so didn't hear any accompanying commentary, but he would have to be an amazing speaker to make those slides appear not objectionable.
At least it promises to be better than Transformers. That movie was like watching a large, HIV positive felon rape my childhood in the jailhouse shower.
It's probably a very low-margin business and that doesn't leave much room for error. Software businesses are about the highest-margin ones out there and that can skew your perceptions when you look at other fields. I think this guy took on a lot more than he expected to and that was the source of a lot of the problems: energy only takes you so far. At some point you need actual knowledge and that's where hiring experts helps.

The instability comes from the fact that he's not just getting these big contracts, but at the same time is trying to grow rapidly. Were he just to settle at a certain level of sales and stay there for a few years, he'd probably be running a profitable, but smaller business.

Instead he swung for the fences and struck out.
Fairly entertaining either way :)
No, it's NOT the usual supply and demand that's at work here. Government has deregulated finance to a point where financial leverage went haywire. Further, you have information asymmetry going on here, where the guys causing all the ruckus leave the boat before it sinks. And further, being so close to large amounts of capital wealth brings with it great problems of moral hazard (we lack tools to deal with this).

Those should be enough reasons to point out, that all is normal and supply an demand on the market is working is NOT the reason for these income spikes: the more fundamental (systemic) reasons win out here.
That's how running a startup feels, often even when it's going well. You're one bad beat away from the edge.

Plenty of companies that sell goods through Costo or 7Eleven end up bankrupt. Having a decent distribution channel does not mean profit.
Hmm. I'm not sure the "Ruby sucks," or "Ruby is slow" is totally accurate analogy.

If somebody made something new with Ruby, and then it did something really cool or really bad, I would want to hear about it that developer's experience and opinion with it.

The anecdote described in the blog post, whether you agree with it or not, just happened, it was "new."
> strikes me as hysterical

Why? KPCB is a tech VC fund, so it invests in high-risk companies that use technology to solve problems. Why is that hysterical?
does it need to be said yet again?

Apparently so, since certain ruby programmers think it's appropriate to put soft-core porn into conference presentations.
"What is the largest number that we can put in the units and multiply times the divisor and still be less than or equal to what we have?"

Oh my goodness.
Cruise control for under $6
these are incredible.
Curmudgeonly: An ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions.

These traits are more common in people who keep perpetuating the gender debate. People who show resentment for how communities naturally behave and who stubbornly think a demographic quota has to be met for the world to be a friendly and fair place. I'm of the live-and-let-live mentality. I resent no-one and I'm only stubborn about people doing what the heck they want as long as it harms no-one else.

If people want to continue complaining about gender equality, whether Ruby is "slow" or not, whether Rails sucks or not, whether Kevin Federline's album is really the worst ever, or any such thing, I have no personal issue with that, but I felt, at least, it was finally worth noting that these discussions have all taken place 101 times before and that they're not making a scrap of difference.

I'm impartial, apathetic, and weary of seeing good people get mired in these arguments. Being curmudgeonly would demand I actually care about the essence of those same arguments.
I wonder if age and raw cognitive ability are negatively correlated.

I wonder if age and conservatism are positively correlated.

I wonder how many significant lurking variables are ignored in the study.
It depends. If HP is going to stay a commodity provider of regular items, then no. Its current discipline is well suited to that. If you're just making laptops and printers and monitors and whatnot that are generally interchangeable with Dell's or Acer's or whomever's, you need to be as lean as possible and as disciplined as possible.

And that's what HP is: a company whose products you can substitute with those from their competitors pretty easily. But it's not just HP. It's most PC makers. Really, it's just that Apple is creating and defining new markets and distinguishing itself from others by making different things. In my opinion Apple is making better things, but from an objective standard they're at least different - Mac OS X (whether you're a fan or not) is different; the iPhone was very different from PalmOS and Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices that came before it.

But it's really easy to screw that up - and Apple did for many years. Let's face it, the Newton was different too - different in a way that people didn't like. The classic Mac OS had its fans, but not like OS X does.

So, HP can continue to run a lean business providing essentially the same things that other companies provide or it can try to be Apple - to create something new and shoot the moon. But the latter is risky. They risk pouring money into things that are crap. Very few companies succeed in this arena and I personally don't think HP has the vision to pull it off. I'm not saying that they don't have talented people or that I'm any smarter or anything of that sort. It really takes someone special to make markets like you need to in this situation - someone like Steve Jobs.

I'm not saying he's some sort of genius. I'm saying that he's been undisturbed by past failures, willing to get up and say that he's just invented a better sliced bread when it's actually nothing special, willing to have the sort of "I know better" attitude that allows you to ignore all of the naysaying that comes along with doing what hasn't been done before. Because every great thing looks stupid, impossible, unprofitable, etc. until it's been done.

And HP doesn't have the arrogance to make the stupid, impossible, unprofitable a reality.

/I used the word arrogance there. I didn't mean it in a negative sense. I just wanted to portray that it requires a certain chutzpah to believe that you can do something that so many brilliant people haven't thought of or haven't been able to pull off.
I was taught this method of calculating a square root by hand when I was a child in public school. I have since been surprised by the number of people my own age who were never taught.

Since many Canadian high schools only teach "pre-Calculus" now, it makes me wonder if anyone is learning the "long hand" method for square roots these days.
"So, sure, people are talking about the presentation. They're just not talking about the technical content of the presentation."

A few times recently I've heard people remark on one or another presentation, but they were captivated by the jokes or visual gimmickry.

When I was watching some of those talks, my thought was, you've only got 30 minutes, and you're wasting it with jokes?

It's nice to have a talk that's remembered, but it should be for the essential content, not for the fluff (or, in some cases, the fluffer.)
"Algebraically, what is d such that d × 4d ≤ 265?" made it much clearer. :)
I feel it necessary to speak to defend Matt's character. Having met him, and spoken with him, and conversed w/ him, i genuinely believe that he intended no offense.
The magic of python decorators
This has been bogus "research" since the 1960s.
...

Your childhood was in jail?!
I think people like this help balance the population. They provide an example that a good life is possible without all of these things that some of think we can't live without. They also point out what we are missing out on by not have time to read books as much, for example. However, just because they do it does not mean that everyone must go as far as they do. I think the reasonable reaction to a story like this is to reevaluate one's life and possibly make some adjustments, but for most people it would not mean giving it all up.
Yes, I do have a huge server in Texas that could be the DB server but I hope to have some low latency cloud based solution.

I haven't looked at NDB + Mysql cluster. Is mysql cluster a free download?
Sure it is; I agree. This blog post, however, does not make the lucid point that you do. Instead it goes on about gender and I thought we were meant to be blind to other people's race and gender by now; we're all just characters flying over a wire..
The difference is that microsoft deliberately enacted a monopoly and did dozens of highly questionable things just for the sake of profit. Just think about a company where the policy is, write code that is as inefficient as you like because hardware will catch up oh and btw we are in bed with intel...
Almost every C project re-implements some of the same basic data structures and algorithms (strings, lists, arrays, queues, hash tables, trees, unicode, etc). It's remarkable these haven't been standardized yet and it doesn't appear that the C++ standard template lib has solved the problem.
I understand what Guido is saying to some extent. I thought through it, and my logic seems to go as follows.

1. Compilers are not perfect. In fact, they are incredibly dumb and get things wrong all the time. Add in the fact that the compiler often does not have enough information to properly make an optimization, the output goes from "retarded" to "braindead."

2. If you make certain types of optimizations and tell people that it is fine to rely on them--even if those optimizations will not always work--performance on average will get worse.

Tail recursion seems like a classic case of an optimization which, if one relied on it but the optimization failed, would have catastrophic results (a crash due to running out of stack space). In a very simple language like Scheme, relying on tail recursion is probably not a problem because of how simple such an optimization is. But with something of the complexity of python, it might not be as safe. Given the catastrophic number of regressions in compilers these days, imagine what would happen if your program was made for Python 2.5, which had tail recursion optimization, and then you updated to 2.6, and due to a change in optimization code, it failed to do tail recursion optimization on one particular function? Your program would crash.

I think in general it is never safe to make the assumption that an optimizer will make a particular "good decision". Compilers and optimizers are incredibly stupid, and relying on them to be smart is a sure way to end up with all sorts of problems. Yet with something like a C compiler and loop unrolling, the consequences of such a thing can never be too bad: even in the worst case, you only lose performance. But with tail recursion, a failure could mean an actual crash.
/me laughs

Peter, i really mean this good-naturedly, your responses want nothing for lack of consistency.

The distinction i would make here between Kevin Federline's artistic merit, and equality in the work place is that one matters, and the other does not (sorry K-Fed :P ).

You can claim that any discussion of gender equality shares the same futility as arguing over cultural minutiae, however that does not mean they are equally trivial.

Nor, do past results indicate future performance.

I'd like to stress that i agree with you, that the previous discussions have not resulted in much change, and that conversations should gear towards the constructive. But, engagement is the only way forward on the issue. Ignoring it will not make it go away, and will not make it better.

===================================

Just to be absolutely clear the "I'm impartial, apathetic, and weary of seeing good people get mired in these arguments." is the curmudgeonly bit ;) People care about this subject, so telling them that it's futile and not to discuss it is sort of a dampener, innit.
You've got to remember this guy is speaking from the perspective of a biologist. To him an economic events like the like the Global Financial Crisis are pretty much irrelevant. Even if global warming had a an effect like 50 years of GFC it wouldn't harm the world biologically but it would totally suck to live through.

Even if the necessary relocation of many people happened in an orderly fashion the cost would be huge. Imagine cost of abandoning most of a significant city because the climate could no longer support the population.
I think the common answer to questions of server administration on HN is to send people over to http://www.stackoverflow.com

They handle the more nuts and bolts aspects of setting up servers and programming.

The reason that Microsoft calls it a "server" os is because on the XP/vista they limit the number of concurrent incoming connections that the server can handle at any time to something like 5 or 10. They also limit the number of processors to 2. So basically installing software in the server version is identical to the consumer version.

But to answer your question briefly, setting up server programs in windows entails going to each of the websites and downloading the programs. Double click and install. This is a bit different than the *nix way of having a central repository where you can apt/yum/dpkg/etc... to your hearts content. Also, while it is of course possible to install software from source it is not really common on the windows side of the fence.

lightweight webserver: nginx(http://wiki.nginx.org/Main), maybe apache if you configure it. I would steer clear of IIS(which is preinstalled in the server version usually)

I don't know of a good sftp server for windows but there should be plenty of them out there.
It also helps that such "super-users" are people who are actually interested in helping, rather than potentially a tech support person who can't wait to get home and see his family after a crappy day at work. You're more likely to get good information and useful help from someone who is only helping you because they want to.

I find this sort of phenomenon also applies to support for open source projects. Many companies I've worked with are very satisfied with the kind of support they got merely by dropping by on IRC--they could get information, assistance, explanations of code, and even patches in mere minutes or hours from people who actually want to help. In a sense, open source is the merger of the two concepts: the "developer" and the "volunteer" are often the same person, meaning that you're talking to someone who both wants to help and knows the application backwards and forwards.
"I vociferously agree that we need action more than words, but simply disregarding the discussion, and there by the problem, sounds like willful denial to me."

I think Peter's point was that the action needed has to come from those who want to play a larger role in their respective Ruby community. What's needed are more code and talk proposals, not blog posts.

One poster referred to women being excluded, which is an interesting claim. I've never heard another Rubyist make a comment to suggest that anyone should be excluded from any Ruby activity. If anything, the people I know are on active lookout for anyone interested in Ruby.

One way to have more women at Ruby events is for more women to write more notable code and step up to give notable presentations.

If anyone thinks this is already going on, and women are being deliberately put aside in favor of men, I would love to see some evidence for this.

I was part of the advisory group for the recent Mt. West RubyConf, and out of the 50 or so talks proposed, I don't think a single one was from a woman. So, who needs to step up to make things change?
quote:

"<Thumb> do you know of any major organizations that are similar the CDC?

<Lucent> who?

<Thumb> center for disease control

<Lucent> i said WHO

<Thumb> what? i'm asking you

<Lucent> World Health Organization"
http://www.salon.com/wlust/feature/1998/11/cov_09feature.htm... is page one of story linked to in the parent comment.
Wow -- go read the presentation (available http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-... ). The kindest thing that can be said about Matt Aimonetti is he simply has no class. Or, apparently, a grownup relationship with women.

I was going to criticize the blog hugothefrog linked to for indicting the whole Ruby community because of one asshole, but then I thought about it a little more and really? Nobody organizing the conference looked at his title and said hold on a minute? Or asked to vet the slides beforehand? Or in the audience stood up and said, "Matt, you're an asshole."

This might have been funny in 6th grade. Now it's incredibly tasteless and probably actionable.
This forum post (http://www.namepros.com/3416506-post4355.html), and others posted it elsewhere.

It's a 20% project.. 80% of my time writing the post, 20% setting it up ;)

The people using it are .tel domain owners, performing searches to figure out how Google is indexing and ranking them. It will eventually grow into a real .tel search engine.
"'Technology' is what we call whatever didn't exist when we were born." --Alan Kay
I believe the sudden appearance of this link here owes a hattip to James Andrix:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/cn/instrumental_vs_epistemic_a_bardi...

(note that the times on LW are advanced ahead of Bay Area times, so yes, this was posted more than 4 hours ago)
More, with good comments:

http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/04/swine_flu_whil...
James: seriously, listen to yourself. Maybe nobody explicitly says, "Tits or GTFO" but that presentation said the exact same thing in visual form. As did the conference organizers and audience that apparently had no problem with it.
What's questionable about the article is that it portrays entrepreneurship being so extreme and anti-social. It's about running a business. Bill doesn't do a good job here.

He's great at marketing and raising money but that's not what a company survives on and continues to pay people's paychecks and paying back his investors. Summary: the company founder did a poor job at taking care of employees, investors and his own family. Is this considered desirable behavior these days?

I thought we learned something from two market crashes after 2000. This is basically a typical reckless Gen-Xer dot-com story risking it all and going broke. I'm amazed his investors (which got screwed) even gave him money.
Well yeah. For a plain old CGI script it's not terribly difficult. But that just doesn't scale well nor is the script easy to write. Consider the instructions for setting up django on the other hand: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Django

This is much more complicated than it needs to be. Especially when I can just log into my account with webfaction, click "install django application" and be done with it.
Relationships are two way streets.

If we wish to see more equal participation, we need to foster more equal participation. The existence of opportunity does not always guarantee participation, particularly if there are cultural or institutional biases against participation (this i would argue is a feature of tech communities writ large, not a problem specifically with Ruby, since i think the majority of the rubyists i talk to would welcome greater participation from women [but that is a fact that is hard to know without explicitly talking about the subject with them]).

We promote Ruby. We look for people to advocate our programming language to. We already recruit. Why aren't we doing a better job of recruiting women? What can we do to be better about it?
I'd be more concerned about the government stockpiles of antivirals going to the big investment banks and car companies.