skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the concern is that there is no provided evidence of Ben behaving as a bad project leader before now. If he's been an ass two to three times, that's a problem. If he's having an off day and makes a small mistake, there are better ways to solve the problem than publicly blogging about how you would have fired him.
Firing someone because he uses "he"? That's really fucked up.

P.S. What's with the trend of obsessively using "she"? Is that a widespread phenomenon or specific to IT community? Am I the only one who finds it awkwardly forced?
As he expands on it later, it was a deliberate choice of gendered pronoun given (a) no particular need for it and (b) a perfectly acceptable alternative being provided. Additional context is that Ben not only rejected the PR, but then reverted it after another dev accepted and merged it.
What do you mean "never heard the back story"?

The post linked to a pull request and commit that are the back story...
US Airspace Timelapse 2013
On the contrary, this is the only acceptable response for a company. To not respond this strongly would invite more intense criticism, potentially at a national scale, as well as a toxic environment for any female engineers internally due to the company being perceived as not doing enough. This would be poisonous for recruiting where good engineering talent is at a premium, and potentially disastrous for the company as a whole if clients decide to protest not having a no tolerance attitude towards this behavior by withdrawing their business.

Whatever the views people may have here, the company was boxed in & was forced to make a strong statement. To do otherwise would be a terrifying mistake for the company itself.
Even if you download it elsewhere first (where elsewhere equals not Google)?
What Ben did seems to be a message to women that they don't belong and aren't welcome. Whether you like it or not, that is how many women (and men as well) interpret the use of gendered pronouns. What joyent did is say Ben is an asshole. They aren't the same thing. Part of creating an inclusionary companies, industries, and associations is removing the default assumption that engineers are male, and language is a critical way that presumption is conveyed.
Digital Ocean: tech articles
nice comments about node but libuv is written in C and its the asynchronous i/o magic sauce for many many projects now, including Ruby.
true, and yes StackExchange is part of my resources. I just thought it would be nice and engaging to post it on HN, as everyone has their surprises everyday when working the CLI.
OP,

Great job. I am not too technical so pardon my question. Can multiple 3G connections be combined or have a 'random selector'/failover.

So where I live (you can make a guess), mobile connectivity is not the most reliable in the world. So for instance, POSs are not reliable since one network will always fail. With this, could we use multiple SIMs thereby making them more reliable?

BTW, have you seen BRCK http://www.brck.com/specifications/? Seems to have the sort of the same concept although I think yours is combining speed vs. having a fail-over system for internet access.
I too am giving Ben the benefit of the doubt here. If the OP of the patch had gone through and consistently changed all He|She -> Them|They im sure Ben would have merged it in as a consistent change.
I'm a backer of Daniel Kehoe's Learn Ruby on Rails ebook on Kickstarter. While I'm certainly not coming from a background of vast experience, I've tried other resources such as Treehouse (which is great by the way), it is VERY approachable and would lend itself to newbies and Product Managers who are learning to become more technical. After a break from Treehouse, I forgot most of the concepts as the stuff I learned had atrophied. When I needed to start fresh, and from a different perspective, his ebook is a great starting point for the absolute beginner.

I think it's awesome that Daniel opened up for people to download the ebook for free. I don't mind the $18 that I ponied up because I believe the value I've received is far beyond that.
This isn't good. The title should be "The Power of Gendered Pronouns" — it's about gendered pronouns and our intentions/perceptions around their use, not about pronouns in general.

Here's my simple argument against pronouns (even gendered ones) in documentation. Too often you hear, which can often be the turning point of a "polite" discussion to a "heated" discussion:

Don't talk about me as if I'm not here. My name is ----.

Refering to someone as "they" or "them" is an even worse offense.

I want to say further that pronouns do a disservice to the "organic conversation" that is Source Code just as pronouns do a disservice to polite discussion. Pronouns may be common in usage, but their use turns a discussion into something informal. Their "power" in general is a question of emotive/suggestive language, as vagueness implies, versus explicit/shareable/re-useable language.
"to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense "

That's great. But that's not what Ben said. He said he rejected it for being too trivial for a pull request.
If you were chosen through a competitive market process, fine. But if it is a government granted monopoly, there is a conflict of interest. The state should give Apple a list of attorneys/firms and let Apple negotiate the details via a public bidding process.
I suppose it depends on the prevailing culture (I'm guessing American). As a European, I would say firing someone over the above would be a deeply intolerant act, and possibly illegal.
Agreed, the revert paints things in a whole new light: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
Interesting that you mention that as that was going to be the next resource I was going to look into beyond using other supplementary resources like Treehouse and Codecademy.
... and now OkCupid is owned by Match.com, and took down said blog post.
I agree. In that scenario, I feel absolutely no need for restraint in attacking someone else's encrypted information. Namely, when that someone else is an uninvited eavesdropper.

I refuse to tolerate the idea of placing a high-powered machine in my living room, if that machine won't tell me what it's doing or who it's talking to. In that moment I feel completely justified in my attempts to break encryption, read the information collected about me, and reverse engineer or destroy the device.

This is an aspect that OP's article doesn't cover: Consumer products bundled with mandated encryption that operates against the interest of the end user, with designs to eavesdrop on the user simply to capture their ambient behavior as a rule, and disinform the user of the information collected about them, whether it be accelerometer information, GPS information, or channel changing habits.

This is the inverse of Phil Zimmerman's goal. Pervasive, continuous observation and telemetry, especially that which occurs without the consent or awareness of the observed.
In deep dives into the literature (in search of other things), I've found rectifier circuits that use transistors (don't remember whether MOSFET or whatever) switched at line frequency to form a bridge rectifier with a lower forward drop. Of course it doesn't mean that anybody ever commercialized it.
They had more than they needed to know to prevent 9/11. They didn't connect the dots. How would one more dot have helped?
Sorry. I hope things work out somehow for you later.

(P.S. You might consider posting this kind of stuff anonymously, as it took me less than 5mins to figure out who you are in real life... if that's a concern for you.)
I'm afraid some will look at this as an issue of the fickle HN crowd never being satisfied, but it really is more about exercising rationality. Firstly, nobody really had to publicize this ridiculously miniscule episode, as it was sorted out responsibly without the attention. It's great for women to see how many people rally to their inclusion in tech, but there's a not-too-fine line between displays of inclusion and Joyent's response. This sort of response is polarizing and inasmuch works against the goal of equality, safety, and comfort of men and women in the industry. Also, has anyone considered language barriers in this discussion, because if that was a factor, it would be an even worse reason to start a public shaming and loss of a contributor.
I think this article has no point other than to make the reader dislike Evan Spiegel.

That said, understanding that he came from an extremely privileged background does make it slightly easier to understand how he could be sufficiently detached from the money to turn down the multi-billion-dollar offers he's received.
Usually the thief gains access to an online wallet, and then sends the coins to one of his addresses. No private keys are usually involved.
Americans don't trust each other anymore
It might if they ever decide that HIV positive folks are too expensive to keep treating.
And how often do hardware engineers have to deal with business logic and workflows.
I clicked the comments to write "Joyent is going to get a lot of hate mail from Hacker News woman-haters", and indeed, with 21 comments so far, that seems to be true.

Good job, Bryan Cantrill and Joyent. One small step forward.

(And now I see this posting getting flagged down the page rapidly, like anything else on the topic of Silicon Valley's disdain for women. Has dropped from #3 to #35 in roughly 3 minutes.)
As someone who works with a lot of people in social justice, I can say for sure this is not what social justice is about.

No True Scotsman there.

It may not be to you, but social justice has been diluted to an insane and incoherent pseudo-academic political correctness that goes to such extreme lengths it becomes equivalent to the very thing it opposes (as per the principle of the horseshoe theory).
It's not so crazy if you put down your pitchfork for a sec.

1) Every employee is an ambassador of your company's brand, and Tech already has a sexism problem to begin with.

2) It's not about the pronoun so much as it's about Ben re-rejecting a patch that Isaac, the project lead, had already accepted, solely on the grounds of pronoun genders.

#2 really has no other explanation than sexism; and when his behaviour is conducted in public on the internet, where the "Joyent employs bigots" meme has potential to go viral, that'd be cause for concern for any employer.

Now, I like to think that had Ben been a Joyent employee the author of this pieces would have had a standard "we have concerns with your conduct" meeting with Ben before reaching for the banhammer but we don't really have any way of knowing.
and then went in and attempted to revert the commit
I just want to state that I think we have an interesting sub-discussion/set of theories here, even if mine is radically false. It's true or false on account of testability, in the end, I genuinely believe.
Unclear Yet If Crucial Overhaul Of Obamacare Website A Success
I imagine the Mint people chop all the Unity libraries out, which means no Dash search or lenses, hence no sending of search terms to remote servers.

I think that they use the Ubuntu repositories for base packages, X server and for installing application software and add their own repositories on top for the MATE specific stuff such as MDM and MATE itself.

Disclaimer: I don't currently use Mint
Did he insist on using a masculine pronoun or was he guilty of being insinsitive to the importance of the commit? those are two very different things. Reasoned discussion could have fixed the latter, which I suspect is the case here.
I say this fully aware that it risks inviting a backlash, but as a female developer I applaud this move.

Misogynist assholes are insidious in that they are often hard to uncover, but brutal to any women in the office. All developers are not misogynist assholes; quite the opposite, the vast majority I've worked with have been pleasant and awesome. But when that one asshole sneaks in, and nobody sees his assholery but you, it becomes an office environment of "me or him, and he has more experience and I don't want to seem to be rocking the boat... nobody else has a problem with him, maybe it's me?", then eventually I left.

I could ramble about this for a while, but it may just not be one of those things which can be easily communicated. Now, as a manager, I look for examples like this which demonstrate a person's biases, and if they don't self-correct (with prodding) I have zero compunctions with letting them go. It keeps the family healthy.
I read some of the comments on the pull request and the commits. This is the worst part of Github, these kinds of public massive flame wars, complete with animated gifs. I think Github should have moderation features for situations like this. Even though they're not common, they're damaging the constructive atmosphere that's usually present.
Quick fix for your Rails app: https://gist.github.com/javan/7725255
What is Snapchat its future anyway? I doubt any sane tech company will raise its bid and I also doubt snapchat has some secret formula to justify saying no to those bids.

Are they hitting at an IPO? Bluffing? Do they have billion dollar revenue stream lining up? What is their deal?
They aren't glamorizing anything. The piece was written to make people dislike the guy. The work? Well, they made it over a weekend, and then somehow got money to hire engineers to scale it up. That's the work, aside from the marketing (which is witchcraft as far as I can tell).
Well taken, and admittedly that line didn't contribute to my post at all. Writing quickly and without precision is something I should avoid.
It up for me. I was just able to register an account. After looking at all the steps to do that

1. This is already too complicated. ( why a username when you know I am going to need to use my SSN )
2. This is not a complicated web app. I am now fully convinced that this could have been done with better results by anyone other then the government.
firing people for immature, nigh-bigoted behavior is not "naked use of economic power to punish thoughtcrime", sorry.
Jolla is a pretty small company so selling relatively overpriced phones just with the appeal of a different OS to a very small market might be profitable. At least it's a saner strategy than them trying to go against Google ":D"
From the comments of the father's blog there seems to be an organization for pairing up people with skills to people with needs: http://www.tetrasociety.org/
There's probably an argument for it, yes. I can't imagine that it's a very good one, but I imagine that it exists. (There's always an argument for the status quo, which is "this is how we've always done it", and there's certainly a tradition of using "he" as a singular pronoun).

In any case, I am contrasting "debate" with "we would fire you for not agreeing with us". Debate does not imply that both sides are equal, but it does mean that people are given the opportunity to hear both sides of an argument and decide what they want to do. If Ben Noordhuis still thinks that gendered pronouns are a good idea after this debate, he's still entitled to his opinion, but if Joyent are the owners of the project he's working on then he'll have to keep his opinion to himself when working on that project.
If you maintain a flagship open source project for you company, you are not just a programmer. You are a public representative of the company.

So as a company representative it seems reasonable to be fired for either directly going against a known view point of the company, or being ignorant of view points you are supposed to representing(after reasonable opportunity to learn what they are.)

It seem reasonable to fired for not representing a company the way it wants to be represented when part of the job is to represent that company.
I'm not from the US. I wonder, isn't this overly dramatic? So it takes a while to fix the web site. People have presumably been waiting for health insurance for decades, what is one more month? Also, really, people get worked up about government processes that are difficult to use?
This should be a reminder to everyone that your public actions on public code repositories can carry consequences.

That said, I personally approve of the work that people like Ashe Dryden, Coda Hale and others have been doing to help the tech industry grow up. We need to move beyond the time when mastering this weeks hot skill entitles you to act like a jerk. And if making it known that acting like a jerk in public will get you fired from the places where you'd like to work is one of the things that it takes to effect that change; that is a positive development.
No. Fuck you and the people like you who've tried to claim OCD like it's some cool thing to have.

Have some respect for the real sufferers of OCD who live in hell on earth and on top of that have to see their condition belittled by all and sundry on the internet.
Just FYI for readers, the term "sequence point" has been deprecated in C++11. There is now a richer notion of operations being sequenced before/after each other or unsequenced. This motivation for this was to improve C++'s memory model in the face of concurrency. (It does not change the results of this discussion, though :) )

More info here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2007/06/04/update-on-... and here http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/eval_order
"""
it's likely that adapting old code to a new context is less work than starting from square one again.
"""

It has been measured that changing more than 25% of software incurs more than 100% of the cost. So your mileage may vary.
email in profile

That field isn't visible...
It's a widespread phenomenon by now. It's been around in written language before, but it has received more adoption recently. I have nothing against it, personally, although I feel as though a lot of people use it to compensate for some sort of guilt they have.
But what if GPG is in fact PG in PGP GP Open G? PGP P¿
> and the unhappy workers will be free to find jobs more to their liking.

At that level, it's not about find a job you like, it's about making enough money to survive.
And I raise you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_Kingdom

To back up my original point.
Ok, semantic point. 'Comparable with the expected market rate'.
It's a hypothetical
It seems like though it was used as gender neutral only for undefined gender. So if one knew for a fact that a given person is female, "he" would not be appropriate anymore.
Oh I didn't mean that to be a browser limitation, but that it is generally a good idea performance wise.
In particular, I don't see Mark Zuckerberg making a second offer, because the two of them now seem to have a sort of feud going on.
Maybe it's being downvoted because it's deliberately antagonistic (and maybe you knew that already).
Is that really true?

If I were a female engineer, I would not get upset about the whole "he/she" controversy, rather I would be concerned that a temperamental manager could fire someone over something so trivial.
> we believe that empathy is a core engineering value

What?? That's pure BS. Is empathy a political value? Or a filmmakers' or writers' value? And what about honesty or team spirit? Are they core engineering values?
What we really need here is some kind of blind poll, with results aggregated into two buckets:
"Female developers who have worked in the valley." and "Everyone else".

I think the HN community might be surprised by the results.

As a female developer, I assert that you haven't a clue what you're talking about, and you don't understand what it's like to work in this industry as a woman.

First, try listening. Then, try observing your workplace and peers. Finally, consider what Ben's actions (particularly his refusal to accept feedback or accept reality) have unveiled about his biases and daily behavior.
The radio buttons label not being linked is a deal breaker for me
"The contract is valid if the woman accepts it; a valid contract doesn't require that the rates be stated upfront so long as the terms are disclosed and consented to by both parties."

Actually, it depends on the type of contract, and where in the world you are.

In the US, UCC contracts don't require a price term, but other contracts do.
Since UCC does not cover services contracts, Picasso's contract would have required a price term, or some other show of consideration.

In the specific case of lawyers, most states require fee agreements that state prices up front in writing.
I see what you mean - you could probably do something like publish your public key and then publish a signed copy of your fingerprint hash. Anyone else could do the same thing, but an imposter wouldn't be able to convincingly produce your fingerprint on demand when physically present. At least, not without a lot of funding and cleverness.
#2 has the alternative explanation of passive aggressive frustration, in addition to sexism. Sort of an irritable "you aren't going to tell me what to do" attitude. Not sure if that is better or worse than sexism, but it is a definite possibility.
Small Drones Deserve Sensible Regulation
P.S. What's with the trend of obsessively using "she"?

Self-consciously overcompensating, and in-group signaling.

You're communicating to other people that you are not one of the Bad, Bad Sexist Men In Tech.
There is no built-in failover mechanism atm. However I guess you could use another program on top of dispatch to implement such a feature.
" I think the Judge needs to be investigated for deciding the case "

The judge did no such thing. This has been gone over before. Judges commonly give opinions on the current strength of a case when asked by parties. This is to encourage parties to settle. IE they will often say "you may have a tough time proving X given the evidence you've submitted so far". This is an opinion on the strength of a case as it exists at the current. Not a decision about the merits.

The judge had mountains of evidence and motions that had been gone through at that point. Heck, I think there were even motions for summary judgement pending (IE for a verdict before trial).

What happened is perfectly normal, and not "deciding a case".
Every luddite fights technological improvement.

The hoe displaced farm workers. Machines replaces lots of farm workers.

Shipping containers destroyed the massive labor requirement and theft of the shipping industry. Several orders of magnitude of jobs destroyed.

People don't just wither and die; the efficiencies offered by technological change turn into new industries and higher quality of life for everyone. Would you really be better off if everyone had to farm or hunt their own food?

But hey, at least everyone would be employed.
Thoughtcrime is a great way to describe this.

I haven't seen any (comprehensive) explanation for why the original patch was rejected, but it might be as simple as that he wasn't interested in his project becoming part of someone else's fight. That doesn't mean he's sexist, it might be as simple as that he isn't interested in feminism's battle to redefine acceptable language. Reasonable people can disagree on that sort of thing without being women haters.
For example, Apple has banned comics from being sold through Comixology that they themselves sell in their store.
Nonsense. You're exaggerating the stakes greatly.

There are people who want to believe in a great conspiracy of "politically correct" social justice warriors, who are using their political influence to bully corporations and individuals, which seems to be compatible with what you're saying. There are also people who want to believe in a great conspiracy of male software developers who think that women are at best unnecessary and at worst inferior contributors to the industry. Both are totally incorrect, but these debates often seem to proceed on the basis that these two sides are real and at war with each other, and the only choice we have is which side we want to be on. I don't think you're deliberately reinforcing this idea, but this is the effect that posts like yours can have.