skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OTOH, I had no opinion about Joyent before, and now have a lower'ish opinion of them. This seems like a combination of over-reaction, obsessive "PC" thinking, and an attempt to mask a potential PR gaffe.

If Joyent cares so much about gender equality, I imagine that there are more concrete actions they could take to encourage that, than threatening to fire somebody who isn't even an employee - over a pronoun.
I take it Joyent employees will live in fear of being fired for not being politically correct from now on, if they weren't already.
My heartfelt thanks, Phil, if you happen to be/visit here. Not just for the software, but for the accompanying philosophy and enlightenment, and dedication to same. The impact upon me, personally, has been significant. It is something I in turn attempt to share with those who matter to me, personally and professionally.

Regards
It looks more like an idea for a new StackExchange site. Questions and Answers.
Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

No. I think it's fairly absurd as well, FWIW.
> You're telling me that "it" or "they" riddled more often than otherwise does not negatively affect search results?

Basically. More specifically, I would say that using definite pronouns improves search results.

> Pronouns increase the chance irrelevant results.

No, because there is no reason to search for definite pronouns, you search for the nouns that are the antecedents of definite pronouns (since using a definite pronoun requires using a noun as an antecedent in writing -- this can be substituted by gesture or other non-verbal cues in oral communication.) And if you use pronouns, you get less result clutter for those searches for the same reasons that you get better readability, you have less close-proximity repetition of the key nouns.
This highlights a huge problem of the PGP/GPG web of trust: It mostly solves the wrong problem.

I don't care whether a Linux kernel release is signed by a guy who has government-issued ID that says "Linus Torvalds" on it. I care whether it is signed by the guy who started the whole thing more than 20 years ago.

There would be value in a modified web of trust where, when you receive an e-mail from hipaulshi, you can be certain that it's the same person you replied to on HN. Who cares what her (or his) real name is? In a sense, what you really want for most internet-centric communication is something like certificate pinning.

Of course things are different when you're talking about people who you know in person. But for those you don't have to organize key signing parties.

And even for people I know in the real world, I would be happy with a solution that just pins the very first public key it sees as long as nothing obviously suspicious is happening. This suffices for 99.9% of use cases. [0]

[0] No, this is not sufficient if you know that a government is out to get you. But if it helps to move us into an encryption-by-default setting, it is still a win for the overall ecosystem.
If you can accurately model and estimate a software project, then you can automate it, at which point the project is already done and it is time for another completely different project.
honestly this sounds more like silk road 2.0 is launching a campaign to rune sheep marketplaces image to try to regain customers and vendors. i personally think that sheep marketplaces web design is waay better than SR and BMR. they are probably under attack by SR 2.0
There are no communist nations today because communism failed, utterly and often spectacularly, usually because some asshole came to power who was more interested in furthering his own agenda and increasing the power of himself and his friends than in doing what was actually good for the people.

This always occurs because in order to transfer to communism, an intermediate government is necessary to take power from the evil capitalists, consolidate it, and distribute it throughout the people before volunteering to dissolve. In practice, this never occurs. Where power is centralized, sociopaths will congregate, and the first stage of the transition to communism is nothing if not the centralization of power. Thus, communism has always failed under the weight of despots, and will always do so as long as that is the case. There are no benevolent governments, period.

Meanwhile, though capitalism is surely far from perfect in its implementation, every nation which has embraced it has done remarkably well relative to those which embraced its ideological opposite. No, it's not perfect, but it's obviously preferable to communism. I give those who sided with communism or socialism before 1980 or so the benefit of the doubt, as they were not privy to the vast evidence that we are today of communism's many failures. On the other hand, I immediately write anyone off who still believes communism > capitalism to be a delusional idiot who is almost certainly not worth arguing with.
Being respectful of diverse groups of people and technical ability are not mutually exclusive.
The answer to your question is in your question. While you are interested in the technical details, most of the general public is interested in his personality, his girlfriend, his house etcetc
Please add the headlines that were smashed to make the stupid headline.
I wish they had a branch here.
Ask HN: What physically happens when a Bitcoin is stolen?
I understand the block chain and mining, but what is it the thief takes when we read about bitcoin theft? Is it the private key?
I'm aware that singular they is attested all the way back to the 16th century, but it still doesn't read right to me. Particularly in the case where the pronoun definitely refers to one person, albeit of unknown gender, rather than where it could refer to either a singular or plural antecedent. I'd actually prefer the awkward 'he or she'.

De gustibus non est disputandum, but to claim that preference for the generic he, or even the kind of indifference that could lead one to reject such a patch as a waste of time, can only come from a deep wellspring of misogyny, is absurd.
Interesting, although wouldn't node-webkit work on Mavericks just as well?
Someone or something you insensitive clod. Who says it is human or singular for that matter. :P
We never even heard the back story on that one...

I suspect it's not so much about the gender of pronouns as about being patronizing, which people tend to resent.
Can We Ever Trust Black Market Websites Again?
The thing about a fingerprint or even a dna sample, in this use case is that you send your signature ahead of time and verify yourself phyisically at the party. Does your fingerprint hash match your fingerprint? That is more difficult (but not impossible) to spoof. At the end of the day, this discussion stems from notion that government ids are unreliable as a means of verification. Granted, but for what we are trying to achieve in practice is preservation of privacy and data. I was trying to point out that identification of a person - true identification - can be at conflict with our ultimate goal of privacy, since we have to give up a piece of data to prove we are who we say we are, and contemplated finding a way to technically make it happen (in practice) without sacrificing PII.
You have to decide whether or not the CDC is reliable. If they are, then you can use their schedule as evidence that it's a bad idea to give all vaccines immediately, but you must also accept that giving the Hep B vaccine at birth is safe and not "rushed". If they are not reliable, then you need reasons for why giving vaccines at birth may be unsafe besides the CDC saying so.
I'm worried this does not put usability first. In the example Edit form, I noticed two problems: 1) the radio button labels have not been linked using 'for' to the buttons, so clicking on them does nothing. 2) Hovering my mouse over the first address line text box causes it to move down away from my mouse! Errors like these will cause a lot of entry mistakes.
Let's Talk about the History of Gender and Pronouns in English
Ask HN: Info about a past link
A link was shared here about a year back or so. about a website which had some small-lengthed tunes which one could mix and play. They had an awesome shuffle mode. On adding a tune a sketched cowboy would get added to the screen, who would seem to be playing the tune. (options were like whistling, reggae etc). Can someone please provide the link. They had released a second version of their website.

PS: I know this was idiotic, but the tunes are stuck in my head and I am not able to remember the website.
Apple creates an integrated snapchat. Removes snapchat from the apple store. It's not like they havent done that to other popular apps that they have the ability to replicate (google maps)
IE11 "Emulation" and Conditional Comments
It's mostly the same. It's a different skin / desktop environment. I prefer mint cinnamon, which I think hits the right spots for me. Really a matter of aesthetic preference.
rayiner didn't say they were reasonable, he said they weren't unusual.
Same thing most other Stanford grads study: how to beg rich adults for money. They are very good at that.
Fuck Joyent. Seriously.

This is something that calls for dialogue, discussion and debate. I seriously hope Ben Noordhuis learns from this. But to say that you would fire someone over this is a sign that you are not a fit company for a reasonable person to buy from or work for.
Tom's comments are pretty interesting :)
> There are no communist nations today

I have the People's Republic of China, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Socialist Republic of Vietnam and Republic of Cuba on the line, all of which would like to have a word with you.
I don't know yet. I am putting up a survey to see if people are interested. I posted the link in the same thread and also in the 'new' section.
It is already impossible to prevent saving the image. Snapchat uesrs don't seem to care about that for the most part. What it does is create a whole new class of worthwhile photos. By sending via snapchat you are saying "this is just a throwaway image I wanted to send for a quick chuckle. No big deal." Whether the person takes the time/effort to save that throwaway image isn't really of any concern.

That's how I see it being used anyway. It's not being used with the expectation that there is literally no chance of the image being saved anywhere.
Society has allowed copyright to extend virtually forever, while patents tend to last just 20 years. If you have money to invest in either industry with similar risk, which are you going to take a chance on? The one that will support you for life, and your family until the end of time, naturally. This indicates that we favour entertainment more than other types of intellectual property.

Not really; time is hardly the only factor you should take into account.

Firstly, copyright is limited to a specific work, while patents are usually more generic - I can invent a whole new literary genre, but unless people copy the text or very specific elements of my work, they can do copycats all they like. With patents, a whole class of technologies is often monopolized.

Copyrighted works are also subject to strong novelty effects. While copyright itself lasts for ungodly accounts of time, the vast, vast majority of works will stop producing relevant income in just a couple of years, if that, while a patented invention doesn't usually suffer from those problems.
I completely agree with you. And more to the point: does this hypersensitivity over gender issues ameliorate the problem, or only makes it worse?
Those are solvable problems though. Or are you saying 23andme doesn't work?
Did you read the github issue? It seems to be an angry free-for-all.
Why Agile May Ruin Us All
You find it perfectly reasonable because 1) it's not you and 2) you have no idea if it is or not.

I find it totally unreasonable. I think the Judge needs to be investigated for deciding the case before trial and changing the scope of the investigation.
A poster child for our 1%.
He didn't quote Strunk & White to justify rejecting the patch, nor did he bring up the grammatical argument at all when reverting it. He just said "this is not worth spending time on" and closed the ticket. (And if it was truly not worth spending time on, he wouldn't have contramanded one of his fellow maintainers to revert the patch, then rewrite the repository's history to cover himself.)
So if I am in a residence where I can connect to 3 independant WiFi networks, and have 3 wireless network adapters, I can combine their bandwidth?! because that would be freaking awesome.
I can't be the only one who seriously doesn't even understand this article.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for gender-equality, but say what about languages like Spanish? Do those have to be gender-neutral, too? Should we fire people because their culture dictates that gendered pronouns (which, by themselves, offer little to the conversation except perhaps a passing thought, at best) be used?

Really? Is that what it's come down to?

Of the millions of things that could be argued and put down due to gender inequality, we're firing people over pronouns.

Congratulations. I'll give you that.
I applaud Joyent for their brave stand in theoretically firing someone who does not work for them. The legal issues they would theoretically face are daunting.
I haven't the slightest idea what the commit was over but I'd like to point out that

~(non-gendered pronouns are mandatory) =/= (gendered pronouns are mandatory)

The authors would still be free to use their own choice of pronouns.
> this would be a silly reason to fire something

...this would certainly be mistaken for a threat. Please choose your verbs carefully as well.
b is awesome. White Wolf books used to use "she" everywhere, too. Write a script to change it every month.
(Disclosure: I wrote the linked blog entry.)

Just to be clear, the use of the gendered pronoun isn't the issue -- it was the insistence on it, to the point of attempting to revert @izs's commit fixing the issue. To me, that transcends from rational position to unacceptably inappropriate, and it speaks well beyond a pronoun. You might say that reaction is extreme, but I would be willing to bet that you've fired people for less: I bet you have (or would) fire people for merely being an asshole. Firing someone for being such an asshole on such a small issue that in fact has broader consequences for the hostility of a work environment is actually a no-brainer.
Except Google Maps is still on the App Store.
Honestly the author makes himself look not only immature and unprofessional, but also just as absurd as those they're criticizing.
Sometimes the article isn't that great but the comment threads are amazing. I don't want to up vote the article but I do want people to read the threads. It would be nice to be able to up vote just the comments of a link.
This to me sounds like a company terrorised that the political-correctness police is coming after them, and going way too far in the opposite direction just to prove their PC credentials. While on first read I was as surprised as anyone at the magnitude of the over-reaction, on second read, I'm starting to think how bad things have become, i.e. the environment of fear, to lead companies to react this way.
The main reason I'd prefer they didn't get bought by Facebook or even Google, is because I know those 2 would pretty much eliminate any privacy features Snapchat may have left. However, I fear they will intend to do that, too, in the future in an effort to monetize, especially if they IPO. If anything, I hope they find a very scalable monetization solution before they IPO.
>> How did he get rich? By way of exploitation, there's no other way.

Can you really not see how ridiculous that idea is? You're saying that it's simply impossible for anyone to get rich by producing value to other people? -Steve Jobs, hello?
This has happened across so many countries - its high time the politicians of age old political parties do understand that they need to change or they are gonna bulldozed by the new generation parties like Aam Admi Party..
> On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun -- but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it's not the use of the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that's not an attitude that Joyent tolerates.

They're not opposing the use of the word "he," they're opposing him saying "no, go away, I don't see any reason someone could take offense" when the issue was pointed out instead of "thanks for the patch."
Brain surgeon?
That's a reasonable question. It's a shame this comment gets downvoted instead of the various people falling all over themselves to show off how smart they are by posting incorrect guesses about how undefined behavior doesn't matter.

Here's a good article that addresses the question "Why have undefined behavior?"

http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213

This one linking to the above is also worth reading:

http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...
It's crazy.

The whole event reads to me like Ben was having a bad day and rejected a minimal patch, and then it exploded and he was grumpy. I imagine that on a normal day, a good F/OSS leader would accept patches that improve or make the codebase more consistent, even if they are fairly minimal. That's how code grows.

I'm giving Ben the benefit of the doubt that he was in a mood, which is why he behaved as a bad project leader. If this became a regular occurrence, then there's a problem.

Ben's behavior isn't about the gendered pronouns. I think it's great that the project is committing to using appropriate language. But I don't think this is what made this incident occur.

EDIT: removed some poorly chosen words that didn't reflect the point of my comment.
Amazingly, the website appears to be down again! https://www.healthcare.gov/

Looks like they had planned that downtime, but I wonder how messed up this whole project must be that they can't even manage to have a static maintenance page up!
It's not the pronoun, it's the bad attitude and commit reversal.
Earn Money Online Without Investment - It can be done
I doubt he personally killed it, given that it was instantaneous and happened around 5:00am Pacific time.

The reason it's of interest is that Hacker News has been assigning personal penalties to the posts of people who are critical of venture capital. This is just one episode in an ongoing campaign of nonsense.

I'm not upset about this stuff. It doesn't bother me. In fact, the degree to which I was personally targeted (my posts invariably appear below where they should based on votes and post age, but I still have a 5+ karma average) makes me happy. I just like to draw attention to it because it shows how obsessively PG is working to manicure the reputation of a pseudomeritocracy that apparently can't handle people saying bad things about it.

VCs are passive-aggressive little girls if they can't handle people telling the truth about them.
I'm as capitalist as the day is long, but some of the Can't Get Your Degree Without Learning Applied Marxism memories are getting pinged a bit by the naked use of economic power to punish thoughtcrime. This impression is further strengthened by the not insignificant detail that Capital is here asserting the right to punish Labor even though Capital has negative a billion desire to ever cut Labor a check.

Another thing reminding me of university: "The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small" was originally said about academic infighting but could also be applied to drama over the social functioning of a commit bit.
This insistence on political correctness is harmful to the cause of gender equality, is harmful to the state of our society and harmful to the technology sector.

It is the construction of thought barriers, the creation of solely accepted behaviour and arbitrary creation of anormal behaviour, by redefining what is normal and not discriminating in any way (to use he in a normal sentence) as discriminating and bad and as a cause to lose an existence (i.e. getting fired).

It is morality not for creating good, but for appearing moralic, one of the lowest kinds of behaviour on an ethical level.

Damning someone who seemingly tried to hinder those artificial norms getting a foot into a project is a mistake.
I hate it too, but I didn't start it.

The VCs have basically filled technology with petty high-school drama. By funding people like Jack Dorsey and Evan Speigel, they're directly responsible for the toxic climate.

The fact that Paul Graham goes to extremes to manicure the reputation of the VC-funded ecosystem deserves attention. Why? Because it shows the underlying weakness of this system. Things that are strong can stand to have bad things said about them, because the truth favors them.
I should have said successful communist nations. China isn't communist; it's been capitalist since Deng Xiaopeng opened it up to foreign direct investment in the early 80's. Vietnam is socialist in name only, and is following a similar trajectory to China. The DPRK is a perhaps the only true communist nation on Earth, and we all know what a hellhole it's become. It is the last holdout, and is probably in the final throes of its existence. Something's going to happen there eventually, whether revolution or invasion of a foreign power I don't know, but the world will not tolerate that much longer. Finally, Cuba is socialist, not communist, and even they are trending towards capitalism, not communism, as all nations inevitably do.

Edit: allow me to clarify what I mean by the DPRK being communist. It is not communism as in the endgame of communism on paper; it is the intermediate stage of communism when it is allowed to exist for far too long by a world that is not interested in intervening. The central authority has seized power for itself, but it will never return that power to the people and transition to communism's final stage for obvious reasons. The DPRK is the final stage of communism as it exists in reality.
I don't understand why, if they are footing the bill, that they are required to hire a top tier law firm. This is a government granted monopoly to someone who was not selected via a competitive bidding process. The government should provide Apple a list of acceptable, competent attorneys who can do this work and let Apple work out the details.
Is there seriously an argument to be made for a pro-"he" side? I don't understand how people both say "there should be a debate" and also "it's one word in meaningless documentation".
This is a great response.

Like the article says, it's not that the original author was both sexist and sloppy with language, although they were. The problem is that the sexism was actively reinforced in a public forum, first by a dismissive comment and then by an actual reversion. It would have taken no effort at all to make the correction; it was actually more work to reinforce the sexism. That means it was willful.

If one of my employees was being willfully sexist in public in a way that reflected on my company, I'd fire them too. Node.js is a really important project, closely associated with Joyent, and they've already seen some backlash from this. This kind of behavior could have real implications for the company's bottom line, and potentially even legal liabilities. Being inclusive is good business.

To reiterate: the original sexism, while dumb, is not a fireable offense. To actually go out of your way to be an asshole and practice discrimination while representing a company: totally a fireable offense. I'm not really sure why so many other commenters feel differently.
One example is Bananaphone [0], which is designed to help Tor traffic look more like normal traffic to evade DPI.

[0] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-November...
Billable hours. They cram 'em in.