skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ouch. What a terrible situation. I'm holding out for the other side of the story, but unless you're willing to assume the entire thing is invented this is a major fuckup for GitHub.

I think this is a classic problem with companies making the transition from small startup to regular business. Break down the barriers! Flat management! Kill bureaucracy and embrace no-politics DIY organisation!

The article reads like an HR air crash investigation. Nebulous semi-employee with unspecified responsibilities related to a founder? Check. Unclear or absent grievance chain? Check. HR alternately over- and under-involved in disputes with no clear policy? Check. Off-the-record disciplinary meetings? Check. Founder adjudicates his own grievances? Check.

And it seems like every single one of these problems could have been solved by a halfway competent manager. I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? Is that not like, a 5 minute conversation? "Hey, Jo, Dave's being an asshole and reverting my commits for no reason." "Oh, okay, I'll talk to him and make sure it stops."

I read a great article a while back that I unfortunately can't find now, but it talked about a CEO who thought he was having a casual "hey, I'm interested in developing my skills, can you mentor me a bit?" conversation with another exec. A week later the office was ablaze with "so-and-so being groomed as successor" rumours. At a certain point you stop being able to just act like a regular person and have everything turn out fine. Red tape isn't always a straitjacket. Sometimes it's a crash harness.
Is there any value in commenting on the severity of the issue in such a manner?
Lego Robot Crushes Rubik's Cube World Record With Superhuman Speed
There shouldn't be a key baked into the app. Each user gets their own unique key. so the worst you could do reverse engineering the app is to steal your own key. There should never be any "master" key used for all users.
He's alluding to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy#Race

Historically, in countries such as the U.S. and South Africa, "boy" was not only a 'neutral' term for domestics but also used as a disparaging racist insult towards men of colour (especially of African descent), recalling their subservient status even after the 20th century legal emancipation (from slavery, evolved to race segregation, viz. Apartheid) and alleged infantility, and many still consider it offensive in that context to this day since it denotes that men of colour (especially of African descent) are less than men.
This is the sort of fucked up attitude that's turning the public increasingly against the tech industry. The attitude seems to be "we can do anything that we want, because we're smart and we know the loopholes"
I'm working on locale stuff for a Rails app right now (just updated the i18n_data in fact).

The assumption will be that country is mostly orthognal to language b/c people are übermobile. Further, that the dialect of the language should not force assumptions of other preferences... only autodiscover initial settings as close to desired as possible. (Fuck, why isn't there a standard for this common, hard-to-manage shit the OS already knows.)

i18n is taking up tons of time to get (mostly) right, but I believe it's one of those things not to botch because it's such a huge signal to everything else about your app.

If I want to be the most obscure hipster paying in Lesotho Loti, read Catalonian, have a "," for thousands separator and use UTC tz, by Flying Spaghetti Monster that's what it's gonna allow.
How does the payout of ad revenue work legally? Normally you can't just write checks to people without either employing them or requiring them to have a company.
Spotting a fuckwit during a best-behaviour interview is difficult.
Nice!! What's your reddit username so I can read more of your high quality posts?
It unbelievable to think about how much synchronization must have gone into this project for all the pieces to come together successfully. Just some more evidence that goes to show facebook has some of the best engineering teams in the world.
In my experience they usually settle pre-trial. They did in my case. Especially if the litigant has a strong case. Better to pay out than to risk a negative judgement.

The point is that questions get asked at a high level and internal changes can be triggered by a pre-trial settlement. As I said, it's the only thing people like that understand. They won't take you seriously unless you take their money.
Google is^H^Hwas* really bloody annoying when it comes to this. English (en-us and en) is the only language in my accept header. When I lived in Geneva though, Google always used to serve me pages in German (presumably Swiss-German). Gee, that's logical. (Geneva is a mainly French speaking city, though over 40% of the population is non-Swiss.)

Where I live now is another French speaking area. I just checked and it seems they are no longer serving French pages to me. But they were even just one year ago. (I don't use Google by default, so I don't know when they changed.)

Admittedly, that was an issue with geo-detecting rather than the website having bad language detection.

* They seemed to have stopped.

Air France is (though they have many faults) actually alright at detecting my language. And mostly gives me English pages...
Crimea through a game theory lens
Project Cyber: Get to Influence the Outcome of the Game
After all that drama she should've been in a very bad mindset (Any human being would be). She probably wanted some last straw to break it.
Is there really the need to use 80 people for this feature? Why it seems to me that is just because of excessive programming hours in total available at Facebook rather than the real need for this new feature. Just curious.
The nature of power is that the person who sets the ball rolling is the one in power. That's why a sculptor is the one with the power, not the chisel. The fact that there's some appearance of backlash doesn't alter that. And as to which chain of events, how could I be any clearer? The chain of events starting with her deciding to go public. The rest of your comment is just shallow moralizing that doesn't tell us anything about who has the power. I suppose you're the one to always side with the crying woman, because that's as deep as your understanding of power goes. It doesn't occur to you that tears themselves have power.
This guy may need therapy. That's not her problem.

It's terrible that anyone should experience what he put her through. (Regardless of the founder's wife stuff, he produced an exceptionally hostile work environment by actively undoing her work, plus likely made her fear for her safety when he did not immediately respect her requests to leave after professing his love.) It's problematic that women in tech are much more likely to experience this than men (because of gender ratios and men tending to be more forward), and that the power dynamics and implicit threat of violence will also tend to be worse when women are the recipients of the attention.

Given this, having your first response be to ask her to be empathetic is ridiculous. Do we ask the victims of shootings to empathize with the perpetrators who had mental illness, had absentee parents, grew up poor, etc? Sometimes these issues come up in the wake of tragedies, and they are an important part of understanding the problem.

But the victim is the absolute last person to ask the be empathetic. She has an unquestionable right to feel personally safe and to do her work without others hostilely inhibiting her. When someone infringes on that, she's already being unfairly burdened. It's completely unfair to further burden her with an imperative to be understanding of what lead him to be the kind of person that would do that, rather than take every measure to remedy the situation, and to call out GitHub for failing to adequately do so.

Yes, it would be great if everyone empathized with those who wrong them. But until it becomes commonplace for people to show understanding toward people who mug them on the street because anyone willing to risk their safety and freedom for a few hundred dollars has likely hard a very hard life rather than reporting it to the police and seeking their imprisonment, let's focus on big, clear concerns: What he did to her was completely unacceptable, and if GitHub failed to quickly take action to end it and ensure it would not happen again, they deserve to be publicly shamed.
> I've certainly never heard feminists advocate greater freedom for men to clearly say "sorry, you aren't smart enough for me to work with. But damn girl what an ass - wanna go out?" Can you link to some who feel differently?

Do you believe men and women should have equal rights? If so then you are a feminist. Did you say in your first post that men should have the right to be rude and honest about the people they interact with? If so then I use you as my example of a feminist advocate for greater freedom for men.

Feminism is an incredibly misused and misunderstood word. By dismissing all feminists are overly sensitive PC females dismiss those of us who genuinely believe in equal rights.
It is legally relevant, whether you like it or not. There's a lot of bluster in the rest of your response. I sure as hell don't support the hotel lobby and I'm not a fan of "hotel taxes" either. But that's special interest politics and its quite removed from the broad structuring of risk that legitimate regulation facilitates. Fire-codes, health-codes, and fundamental liability for willful corporate malfeasance/negligence are not so easily dismissed.
That's nice. I don't feel like you're talking to me; I feel like you're talking to a person in your head.
Greggman wrote: "Put a password on it."

Well, why didn't the password managers in several browsers do that by default?

Also, not all attacks are about "pwning" a computer. If an attacker can gather data, such as competitive corporate data, without being detected, that is much better in many ways. In practical terms, it would also be much faster (and unntraceable) to look at 2-3 key passwords in someone's open Firefox than to infect their computer with malware.
So diabetes should be the easiest one to attack.
Because nobody else would put up with it in sufficient numbers, and then spend ages discussing it in places equivalent to HN afterwards.

It would make it impossible for them to hire. A large segment of potential tech hires salivates at the prospect of being hired by Google as some sort of intelligence test or proof of their self worth, and the convoluted hiring process serves to reinforce that impression. While it puts some people off, it draws others in.

For higher level management positions, marketing and other types of roles, Google does not have nearly the same draw. And for higher level positions the pool of potential candidates is much smaller too.
Don't ever work in a small company, or a startup unless you are prepared for close combat.

Remember that in a small company, especially startups, everyone around you including the bosses wife, has something to prove. Through whatever means, work or socially. Usually both.

Unfortunately having something to prove is basically the instinct of a prepubescent teen and has nothing to do with getting work done.

Mix that with sexual tension and you have a problem. A big big problem.

In college my gf worked for an unnamed insurance company where her boss would repeatedly invite her into his office to harrass her and show her naked pictures of himself until she finally quit.

And this was a BIG company, so you can imagine how a small company run by social misfits would treat you.

We have a long way to go folks...a long way to go.
I'm surprised the blogger in question isn't asking for AirBNB's help finding David and suing him for damages directly. Wouldn't such actions be fraud?
Well, yeah. I was commenting on the low key remark that the founder "dropped the ball," which IMO is a massive understatement.
If you want to argue that the "gray zone" doesn't exist, be my guest. You don't need to wildly misinterpret my proposed solution in order to suggest I'm a villain.

Just in case you honestly misunderstood, let me spell things out.

1. This is what you do when you don't want to work with them and they don't want you grabbing their ass. Be honest about this and end the relationship if necessary.

2. This is what you do when you both want to work together but also you both want to sex it up. Or you can pretend you don't and then let things get weird after a late night makeout session at the office.

3. Huh?

4. Not being a whiny bitch is what you do when someone doesn't want to go out with you, work with you, or whatever. For example the "other employee" who confessed "love" for Horvath needed to grow a pair (assuming the Techcrunch article is accurate). In situation (1), you probably both need to.

The fact is that sometimes in a professional setting, people move on to having nonprofessional relations. Sometimes desires are not aligned. When humans are involved, life gets complicated.
To clarify for many of you, you don't need someone shouting "I HATE WOMEN" for sexism to be occurring. The sexism in this scenario is subtle and persistent, something that likely tainted all of the workplace interactions at github, allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored. This eventually built up to the issue most people are focusing on, a founders spouse being allowed to harass an employee, which is not so much the main issue but a major symptom of a larger issue at github and in the tech industry as a whole, that issue being the downplaying of women's concerns, opinions and needs.

The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
Thanks, that makes a bit more sense.

I'm still not sure why he mentions race when the topic at hand is age, gender, and language, though.
Somehow, furtive glances doesn't come across much better.
And I, as a male, try not to stare at anybody because I'm not a fucking asshole.
What should Github do?

My take:
The founder leaves, at least for six months, and his wife has no further involvement ever.
The clueless spurned programmer leaves, at very least works from home for six months or more but is preferably publicly fired. His behaviour is unacceptably unprofessional and as good as he might be it's not good enough to destroy a culture.
The entire team (and many commenters here need this too) get coached on why its rude to stare at people, even if they are hula hooping or different.
And of course a public apology (and hurry), financial support for an appropriate cause and make Ms Horvath financially happy.

It will be interesting to see the actual response. The immediate one should be to stand all the protagonists down.
Does it seem like it's not the whole story? It seems like there's a piece of the story missing from before the wife's chat over beers.

It doesn't seem like the wife of a boss would ask a specific employee to one-on-one beers, unless she had a specific topic in mind. And boasting about pulling strings at Github seems like an unlikely purpose.

To me, it sounds like something happened that was unmentioned. And the wife was asked to talk to her, in order to help settle the aftermath, and make sure she was happy there. (I'm not sure why the wife was deployed instead of HR) Seen another way, it sounds like the wife was trying to help make her happy at work, and not trying to boast.

However, something went awry at the chat, and they seemed to end up not liking each other.

Anyone else feel like the whole story's not being told here?
I'd be more worried about lying in the contract, but that's just me. If I sub lease you a real-estate parcel for non-commercial use and then you charge money, that's you using my property for a (unauthorized) commercial transaction. Not to mention the provision of alcohol (commercially) which is seperately regulated. Etc.

Not only does this demonstrate lack of integrity in the direct relationship, it creates problems with thrid-party contracts and service providers. Ie, insurance claims etc. So, yeah I would be making you sign an open ended imdeniication for any breech such as this. And you're lawyers wouldn't like that.

Also, there is repuataional damage to my brand. Again, if you did this in breech of my contract, I would put you on the hook for this via the terms of the contract.

Of course, we might never sign a deal If I was this well protected and your intentions were not above board.
> This is, sadly, the best thing to do because you don't know who is going to take offense.

Then excessive avoidance gets reinterpreted as snobbishness, sexism, not wanting to be inclusive, and so on. "Men actively avoid me and sit father away during meetings, they don't invite me for beers after works, it is a hostile environment". Anyway it is a fine line. And one can interpret a lot of behaviors as stemming from sexism or misogynism even if they are not.
The chain of events that begins with her going public is part of a larger chain of events, which includes her employment at GitHub and the events she has described. That was not clear for your comment, and has large ramifications about who started what.

My position is simply that defending GitHub and dissecting her story is unnecessary at best and harmful at worst. GitHub will respond, and presumably more information will be brought forward by other parties. I will reserve judgement (not that it's really my place to judge at all!) until more of the story has emerged.

Your characterisation of my position betrays your sexist bias. Of course anyone with a voice has power. But why would someone quit their job and ignite a shitstorm of drama unless something really bad had happened to them? Some benefit of the doubt and empathy for Horvath seems appropriate at this junction.
>While the founder is right about avoiding dating someone in your own company

This is one of my pet peeves. This is a professional setting and the employees are not 13. They should be mature enough to be able to handle their personal lives without bans or frown upons. Someone can't handle rejection? Who says he/she can handle criticism? What about disagreements?

To me this is a personality problem that should be dealt with accordingly. Company-wide bans or silent rules can hide bigger problems.
Well I am sorry for the OP. But posts like this make it clear: I will not use AirBnB.

It isn't worth the cost. Even if AirBnB pays the (no doubt depreciated) cost of the damage; I don't want my prized possessions trashed. (or worse).

Thank god there wasn't a fire!
IIRC google also "detects" language based on DNS geolocation, i.e. doing a dig google.com may reveal different IP addresses in every country (depending on the language).

There are some IP addresses which, when viewed "raw" like http://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd/ will return a localized Google.
You might enjoy https://github.com/jcasimir/locale_setter
Everyone says this because it sounds obviously simple.

It's complete BS though. You spend 2/3'rds of your working life at work. The people you socialize, interact with and share common challenges are at work.

Unless you meet your partner in college, or high school or happen to have enough time in a shared extra-curricular (which a lot of us don't) then where exactly are you going to meet people at all.

Moreover, no part of this problem was a result of her relationship with another GitHub employee, except when people wanted some ammunition to use against her.
It is possible to check someone out without staring at them and without looking like a creep.
As a fun exercise, you should checkout the Gitit README[0], which is a cool VCS-managed wiki that renders everything via Pandoc, using this Gitprint service. Or not. I see you or someone else constantly retorting with "Why not Pandoc?" and I agree with you. I started to get interest in Haskell again just because Pandoc, and Gitit, and some other very impressive stuff, is written in Haskell and seems to do some stuff very powerfully.

However, a caveat. It is not mentioned in the documentation, but Gitit does not enable PDF export by default, when Pandoc is more than capable of doing so? Why? Because, in all fairness, it can add significant load. According to the conf file comments.

> pdf-export: yes

> # if yes, PDF will appear in export options. PDF will be created using

> # pdflatex, which must be installed and in the path. Note
that PDF

> # exports create significant additional server load.

How much load, I am not sure. I would love to see a similar Happstack app like this program that runs gitit or the new fork gitit2, rewritten for Happstack updates now that the API has matured. This makes me think performance is an issue.

As an aside, I know ShareLatex opened up their code. I have not had time to check, but I was curious if they do use standard Latex for generating files and if they do, how they make it performant (I know they have a couple layers, I watched their old Node/JS London talk, I mean hear Latex in particular) so fast for potentially thousands of people at once.

[0] https://gitprint.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/README.markdown
Wouldn't that be the point of amazon buying competitor to deter future competitors by acquiring patents and then suing anyone to shut them down, with legal justifications for doing so? (owning a patent for example)...
In other countries this is often dealth with through zoning. You can buy land but you can't do whatever you want with it. I assume you have that in the US too, but maybe not as restrictive?
It might not be a crime, but if I were a woman, I could easily see myself feeling uncomfortable in a situation that were to remind me of our gender-imbalanced culture(s).
try also Geospot which is geolocalized neaby chat. http://geospot.meteor.com
Hello there, I blogged about this quite some time back

http://tarunanand.com/2012/04/26/plus-addressing.aspx

Though it doesnt answer your question specifically. Please email me and I will provide you some tips and also blog about an answer.

Thanks,

Tarun
I alway love Github as a company because Tom Preston-werner's storytelling of how Github is a company that optimize for employees' happniess. I hope Github can state something positive for this issue, otherwise it is a big hit to the company not only because of sexism, but also more importantly the losing of the culture of optimizing for happiness.
They call it confirmation bias for a reason.
"To be 100% honest, I have that thought every single time I read any article or newspaper report about a shootout or burglary in the community. If people with a white bloodline are statistically less likely to either rob us or get us labelled racists jerks in the press, than that's who we're hirig." -- do you now see what's wrong with this kind of thinking ?
'Stare' is not the best word. I have to agree.
I had 6 on site interviews when I joined Yahoo Europe back in 2003 for an engineering manager position. Developers back then would usually go through fewer, but still 3-4 wouldn't have been unusual depending on team - when I hired for my team at Yahoo, typical process would've been phone screen, then 3-4 on site interviews with a selection of people including my manager, someone from the product team, one of my developers, and me.

It's a function of size, frankly - companies above a certain size tends to tack on more interviews largely because they can, and it doesn't hurt to get feedback from one more person. They also have the luxury (and problem) of a much larger pool of interested candidates to hire from.
Hate to say it but this is why I said "thanks but no thanks" to google, and amazon. You can learn a lot more about a person and their skills from a few conversations than from a grilling against a white board.
We bow to your perfection.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman
Why fish?