skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The RAZR was a fashion phone. There's nothing, featurewise, that the RAZR did that contemporary phones didn't also do (aside from being really thin). And it became less special upon release by other networks because it became more commonplace. Something that everyone can get isn't fashionable anymore.

But the iPhone is more than a pretty face.
No, I am not. Not by far.

I know you did not ask, but I am a Vodouisant, as in, the Vodou (oftentimes spelled "Voodoo") religion is my religion. I am also - at the same time as if often the case - Roman Catholic (no relation to my username either BTW :-) ) as I was raised Roman Catholic.

Am I militant about my religion? No.

Do we aim to "convert" people? No! Newcomers are a PITA if you ask me.

Am I tolerant of all other religions other than Islam? Yes.

Is my life dominated by religion? Not at all. I keep things in perspective.

Are there reliable and accurate sources of information for Vodou? Hardly. I can count the online sources in one hand.

The whole thing with Wikipedia was just horrid, I truly do think it was partially motivated by plain racism, as Vodou is basically a black people's religion, although it is open to all races and sexual orientations.
Most people go out to change the world to improve their own situation, it just so happens usually that helping their ownsituation also benefits the rest of society.

Try telling Kate Sheppard, Myra Bradwell or Jeannette Rankin that the culture shouldn't change to accommodate them
I have created a startup that attempts to break this model of selling your information without your knowledge. It’s called MyInfoTrader [www.MyInfoTrader.com]. The service is fully voluntary and pays back the users when a user’s address is sold for a mailing list.

Please check it out; I am very interested in your comments.
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Really, I would have been very, very dubious about the speaker if he'd shown pictures of war dead in that context. Actually, I think I would have been more upset than the pornographic imagery situation.
But it's not really about the degree of nudity, but the degree of uncomfortableness felt by the audience. That's what DHH, the presenter, and you are getting wrong. You are arguing about the wrong thing. It's not so much about the content of the slides, but how that content made that lone woman feel in a room full of men.
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For python: http://docs.python.org/dev/library/ttk.html
Totally off topic. But 500 photos in a day!! I just don't understand why people's reaction to going to beautiful places is to spend the day looking down the view finder of a camera.
Why is there so much drama in the Ruby community?
This strikes me a lot like noting "Michael Jordan should never miss free throws. Heck, I can make free throws. Well, guess you can't trust NBA players at basketball."

All programmers cause memory management issues, even the folks who write garbage collectors. Those folks have typically forgotten more about memory management than you or I will ever know. If you do not have a compelling reason to believe that you will be better than them quite literally all of the time, then you might want to learn to love the GC.

(See also: trying to out-optimize both gcc and the processor pipelining which you don't really understand anyhow, reimplementing core features of your web stack to "do them right this time", etc etc.)
Garbage collection, like any other feature, is a tradeoff. For me the benefits of using a GC language like Python or Ruby far outweigh the edge cases where things go wonky. I certainly wouldn't reject a language just because it uses GC.
Where would I go nowadays for similar, but more up-to-date, materials?
Link please...
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No.

I'm claiming that the argument "As an X, I dislike the culture surrounding Y, therefore it should change" is arrogant and flawed. I then illustrated with a non-gendered example of a culture in which I fit poorly.

There are many valid criticisms one can make about either ROR culture (see Zed's rant) or academic culture. But "As an X, I don't like the culture surrounding Y" is not a valid criticism. That's just a selfish demand that the world change to make your life easier.
By and large, aptitude or apt-get just work.

That's the difference. On OSX they don't. And fink is a poor substitute.
I don't envy women for the rape risk, but that is a result of the way nature set up things (I don't mean that as a justification of rape) women have a higher biological value than men, so they are more likely to be stalked. For the same reason, some women get away with spending time in front of the mirror in their big house and commanding the cleaning maid around, while their husbands sweat in their jobs to finance the luxury life.

On the other hand you will find that if you register with a dating web site, you will receive 200 messages without doing anything. If you are a guy (and not Brad Pitt), you would have to write 200 messages to get one or two replies.

So while driving home alone at night would be less fun for you than for men, online dating might be more fun than for men (not saying that is the way things should be, but they are like that, and I don't think discrimination is the right word for that).

If I was a manager I would probably give job applications by female programmers special consideration, because they are so rare. It might even be worth hiring some female programmers with not the greatest skills, just to make the work place more attractive (that would be the cynical point of view).

Also I have to say it would bother me, too, to work in a sexist environment (like having to listen to tasteless jokes about women at lunch or something). The thing to do then is to quit and look for another job.

Too bad you did not give many details about the unpleasant things that happened to you. I generally found a lot of things unpleasant in the IT jobs I had, so I wonder how many of the things you experienced were actual common to men and women, and not just to women. For example, I think most coders thing they are the best coders, you can hardly ever get two coders to agree on the best way to solve a problem. I could imagine that a woman could attribute such criticisms to her being a woman, when it is really just general IT suckiness. (I don't want to belittle your experiences, it would be very interesting to hear more details, because as I said, I have not actually experienced working with many women in IT).
I launched my career at Acxiom... it's a fascinating company that deals in HUGE database problems.

It's also terrifying to know just how much information they have, and how aggressive they are in using it.
If "networking" means talking to headhunters then I feel better about not doing it. I've never understood the concept of "networking" as just talking to somebody socially and giving an elevator talk or whatever. It reduces the entire process to schmooze, and lots of people talk a good line of bullshit. (Yeah, I'm shocked and disillusioned by the fact that people are shocked and disillusioned by the fact that some of their favorite bloggers are crap programmers.) Schmooze is a valuable talent, but it has very little to do with programming, so it would seem foolish to let your hiring practices be influenced by it. I assume that anyone considering hiring me won't care whether I'm referred by a headhunter or submit my resume directly, since it tells them nothing about how good a developer or coworker I am.

The only network I value is the network of people I've actually worked with, plus their friends. How would anybody know whether I'm a good developer and a good coworker without working with me, or talking to somebody they trust who did work with me, or (much less accurate, but better than "networking") actually interviewing me and asking me hard questions?
Without photos you haven't been there.
I think it goes just a bit further than this, but not a lot. He tried to play off of the "rock star" persona that surrounds the Rails community in an over the top and humorous way. He failed, miserably.

Those he was satirizing thought it was great, and those who should have appreciated the satire were offended. It showed a complete lapse of judgment, and frankly professional taste.

But the amount of hype this whole drama has received is yet another mark against the Rails community. Maybe Zed was more right than everyone thought.
"sex does not belong in the workplace."

Well who said a tech conference is a "workplace"? I thought it was just a place where people who code hung out and discussed stuff.

What is "professional" and what is not depends on what you are trying to do. I guess I just don't think of a tech conference as equivalent to another day in the company cube farm, unless of course I am representing the company is some official capacity.
I, for one, have a really bad memory. Photos help remind me of the places I've been, and bring up memories of being there.

Plus, that way I can help share a part of my memory with others, at their leisure, instead of telling people about details of my trip a dozen times.
Miro Adoption Center (clever fundraising technique, adopt a line of code)
sometimes, a Mark and Sweep GC is good enough. In this case, it wasn't.
No bluffing: State trying to pull plug on online gambling
Where are all the comments about evolution, biology and women as programmers? This group of HN commenters really bothers me -- the armchair biologists who declare that women keep away from programming and startups because evolution rather than socialization tells them to.

I have a pretty strong opinion that runs counter to that one, so I want to see a response from this group! Here we have a lot of women talking about how macho-ism and the locker room mentality makes them less comfortable. How does this fit in with the question, "Why are there so few women developing software?"
No. Using malloc/free will break if your code is broken -- but you look at your code and prove that you're not using memory after it has been freed, not accessing memory locations outside of the allocated regions, and not allocating unbounded amounts of memory, then you have a guarantee that memory management won't cause new problems for you.

With garbage collection it's possible to have perfectly correct code which nonetheless breaks horribly as a result of the garbage collector being "smart" in very stupid ways.
This misses the point of the debate though. The original blogger didn't whine about it or leave, she just mentioned it was a little out of place to see in a conference presentation. That's nothing like the Danish Cartoon controversy, what upset a few folks however was the response of the Rails leadership in jumping to defend the presenter and implying that presentations that offend more people should be the order of the day at Rails conferences.

How the hell do you build a community by fostering a culture that goes out of its way to try and alienate people to gain a few high fives and back pats by the leaders?
"Do you intend to imply that women shouldn't feel welcome as Ruby/RoR hackers?"

No that isn't what yummyfajitas said. What he said was " Culture of X should change because I, as a Y feel it should" is not a convincing argument.

EDIT: ok I just saw yummy fajitas response and he said it better.
In this community, everyone is an oddity. Get used to it or GTFO.
That's exactly the same idea that I was getting from this guy. He's annoyed by people who make broad claims, yet he seems to have done this himself.

As a Python/ Django developer who's tinkering around with Objective-C I couldn't be more happy with OS X. But maybe that's because I used FreeBSD exclusively before OS X? Which he seems to think isn't comfortable.
I'm with you -- I'm a developer who switched from Windows to OS X last fall, and Macports has worked wonderfully well for me.

As to the overall article, I don't know, maybe I'm just never given Linux a proper chance as my main development machine (I do have three headless Linux boxes in the basement that get heavy use), but OS X seems to have 99% of the power of Linux while being drastically more user-friendly. It's like Emacs versus TextMate -- sure, Emacs may be marginally more powerful, but TextMate has more than enough power for anything I've actually tried to do, and incorporates the last 20 years of user interface design and practice, too.
You could run a test with Adwords:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=357674
And I think you're doing a very good job of missing the point, because the issue here is gender. What the hell else would it be?

"As a woman, I feel unwelcome in the Ruby community" is the gist of the criticism. If you don't read it that way, fair enough. But I did, and in that context, your response came across as, "It's selfish of you to expect the Ruby community to be welcoming of women."

I shouldn't have to explain to you why that's just plain wrong, and not at all analogous to your experience in academia.
I did evaluations of all the Wowza Media streaming providers including SimpleCDN and also FLV hosting.

When we tried their $15 trail and had a problem with their control panel, we were worried that we would be charged massive fees because of the type of downloading we were testing.

SimpleCDN was contacted in November and December 08, and a majority of the time they did not answer their sales line. No call back. No answer on tech support line. So we called their "24 X 7" Network Operations Center and got no answer, no call-back for several days.

We called them weeks later and reported the above "no answers" and apparent empty offices and NOC. The tech became very defensive and hung up the phone. When we sent a customer to SimpleCDN, they rejected his request for an upgrade and said they would refund his money because they were referred by me -- whome they had apparently blacklisted. Why? Apparently SimpleCDN has a provision in their agreement that if you ask them an embarassing question, they will not accept business from people you send. Wonder if Frank Wilson, Chief Engineer, SimpleCDN is aware that his company's phone sometimes rings off the wall 24 X 7, and that his techs penalize folks that report problems with SimpleCDN?

I would expect horrible service by what appears to be an inexperienced and very hostile set of untrained employees in sales, customer service and support. If you have plenty of time to prepare, and if you are able to sustain prolonged outages without the ability to contact the CDN in a timely manor, this is the hoster for you. In our opinion, they appear to have major internal personnel and operational problems.

We will be publishing the results of our tests and evaluations of over 30 Wowza Media streaming hosters.
I initially voted you up because I think I know what you mean, but in thinking about it I would change my vote if I could.

Point being, your argument applies just as well to any sort of discrimination, and it basically boils down to "you don't like it? Tough, you're not in charge". At least that's how it sounds to me.
You could estimate this by comparing it to the dev teams behind all Windows OSes. I don't know the share of MSFT's many tens of thousands of employees that contribute to the OS. Let's say it's just 2000 FTE. I'm told a good startup estimate for FTEs is $15K/mo. 2K * 15K * 12 = $360M. Windows XP had 40M sloc, making for $9 / line.

That makes this at least within the right order of magnitude. Then again, this is an application, not an OS. Also, the linux kernel isn't everything, and XP isn't the only OS to consider, i.e. maybe Windows Mobile should be included too.
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I think your demographic is desensitized to that sort of thing, I would not imply that most people are though. Are you in the 18-34 Male demographic by any chance?

You wouldn't need the gore, just show a few hundred coffins in a airport hanger draped with the US flag and that tagline, and you will have people forming a lynch mob.

Right you are with that last statement, but its how you react when you do offend people that counts, its easy to forgive after all.

Its not the imagery thats upsetting people here, its the fostering of a Macho culture that not everyone wants to opt into that is difficult to accept. And it suggests that if you don't want to constantly get involved in a dick measuring contest to see who can be the most edgy or offensive there is no other alternative than to leave the community (And the community leaders are more than happy to show you the door)
My main point is that most men (particularly most hacker men) would probably not have chosen to be offended under the same circumstances. I certainly would not have. I believe the mainstream of hacker man is simply very tolerant of differences.

Several people here and elsewhere have come up with "what if the shoe were on the other foot" examples (stacks of penises, breastfeeding, images of surgery, etc). In each case, I had varying reactions from "clever" to "confusing" to "meh" (1). In no case would I choose to be offended.

(1) I laughed at "Deliver like a Birth Mother." I'd probably be confused by images of good and bad breastfeeding technique.
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Badger's Laws of Mac/PC conflict:

1) If you like Macs, use a Mac.
2) If you like PCs, use a PC.
3) If you think one is better than the other, keep it to your damned self you obnoxious bastard
"Macs are the best computers for a lot of people, but not for software developers."

That is just plain false. Installing packages (that either don't come with OS X or just override the installed version) is a piece of cake. Without Ports.
"she just mentioned it was a little out of place"

I have the impression the reaction was much more that "it was a little out of place". Anyway I am not objecting to people's feeling whatever they felt. I am objecting to demands that the presenter apologize, and claims that DHH (and others) did something morally wrong/unspeakably evil. I hate one set of people demanding another set of people behave in pre approved ways just because someone "felt offended".

"How the hell do you build a community by fostering a culture that goes out of its way to try and alienate people to gain a few high fives and back pats by the leaders?"

I guess the assumption here is that either the presenter or the "leaders" see any value in "building a community by fostering a culture" through political correctness and "inclusiveness".

DHH has mentioned very clearly he writes Rails for himself and could care less if any one else used Rails.
Given that, why should he confine his thought and speech to "what builds community" (however that is defined) ?

I have no objections if people are offended. That is their choice. Just don't tell other people that they should change their views or speak or not speak in specific fashion
hmm... I usually have 300+ tabs open (6-8 windows, 2-3 processes) with FF3 with no slowdown... (XP/C2D/4G)
Blah blah blah. It's 'viruses', unless you're being pretentious. Next?
The root of the problem? Broken funny bone.

This is something that sounded funny in the head of the presenter, but he didn't have the comedic chops to carry it off. Just like that Giles Bowkett "lynch him" brouhaha.

Matt is a good man, but a very bad comedian.

I left a lengthier comment on _why's post.

I get away with off-color humor in my talks in the "Ruby Community" all the time and nobody's bitched. Maybe it's cuz I've got breasts! Or, more likely, it's because I know how to gauge the audience & carry it off.

Alas.

The true problem will never get addressed.
The pictures were mostly of scantily clad women. I think one involved oral sex.

He flipped through the images rather quickly, so it wasn't exactly clear what was going on in them, which actually made them seem a bit more risqué than they probably were.

My judgment that the talk was over the line comes from how I felt quite certain that women in the audience would be uncomfortable.
But some of us like being pretentious! :-)
"my netbook came with a XP license, so, in essence, it came for free"

Another one drinks the koolaid.
That's nothing, I quit before I even started using it.
The real question is, why does Ruby still use a mark-and-sweep GC?
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"I also liked math in college because I've always enjoyed solving puzzles"

Is this not learning for learning's sake?
Yeah, it's a US thing and it happens exactly as quoted. And it actually gets the same reaction from both men and women.

The exceptions are men and women who have realized that it isn't easy to control infants and a good mother will do what has to be done. Not so disgusting from my point of view (and I'm a guy in my 20's with no kids).
A lot of the "OMG Scala <3" stuff being written recently comes from people who have written Scala books and therefore kind of have an agenda.

The essential idea behind the post is this: using a language like Scala can make you use a mainstream language like C# or Java differently. By using a language that makes immutability the default it teaches you when mutable state is actually necessary and when it isn't. This will lead you to write code in whatever normal language that also has less mutable state, and fewer side effects. It will therefore be easier to test and have fewer bugs.

And, no, I have not written any Scala books and have no Scala-related products/services to sell you.
I love how he says "I find it utterly annoying when any fanboy makes broad claims such as 'Developers are Switching to Mac'"

then goes on to say..

"Windows sucks. Period."

I've played with Macs, and have given Linux an honest shot, using it as my only OS for about 2 months. I am simply more productive developing PHP/MySQL on windows.
My argument doesn't apply to all discrimination. If women were being actively discriminated against, I'd object.

That isn't the complaint. The complaint is that "ROR culture is tolerant of edgy material I dislike, and they should change to make me more comfortable."

The latter argument is the one I'm claiming is flawed. It's an argument about culture which some people may dislike, not specific actions which directly harm another person.
The fact that AT&T isn't pulling in as many subscribers does not mean VZW doesn't stand to gain a lot from carrying the iPhone. It can steal existing AT&T subscribers that have iPhones, steal some of the future iPhone owners that would have went to AT&T instead, and also attract people to VZW that want an iPhone but really don't want to be on AT&T.

The kind of growth VZW would see from carrying iPhones should be much bigger than what AT&T is experiencing at the moment, since most of the people that want an iPhone AND are willing to switch to AT&T have already done so.
I think both parties have a good understanding of the other's product well before hand. "Competitive intelligence" (aka industrial espionage) is business as usual in the technology and pharmaceutical industries.
And this, kids and kid-ettes, is why having someone who knows their way around your C compiler, assembler, and debugger on your team can be worthwhile, even if you're working in a high-level language like Ruby.
Haven't had the chance to play around with it too long but by the looks of it, it's a nice release.
Alone that you can turn off the "Use a CDN"-check is worth upgrading. You can of course also turn off any other check to create different custom profiles.
None yet AFAIK, this is inside information. But there will be a press release. That's part of the deal.
That is not the issue at hand. The issue is conservative scanning of the stack.
Even if you're working in a high-level language like a C extension to Ruby?
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the tricky bit is that pen and paper proofs break down when managing software level of complexity of that sort, and mechanized theorem proving is tough even with toy examples