skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's consider what it means for this GitHub hula hoop party to be "unsafe."

What is the dangerous thing that Horvath thought would happen?

Do we really consider the suggestion plausible that GitHub's allowance of hula-hooping-watching will result in a gang rape in its offices?
In my observation, when opposite-sex dating occurs between coworkers in all but the largest enterprises where contact cannot be avoided after a breakup, one or the other employee will end up leaving -- usually the person with lower status or value. Even if they tie the knot, you may find one or the other partner wanting to work "somewhere else."

As a manager, you should be prepared for this eventuality once you become aware of the activity. It is unreasonable to forbid all dating since many happy marriages were established between people who met in the workplace. It is reasonable to let people know that they may face dismissal if their dating issues enter the workplace and prove a distraction for themselves or others.

On a practical level managers wish to avoid unnecessary turnover or drama in the workplace. Knowing that employee dating will almost inevitably lead to one or both of these things, I understand the "frown upon" aspect. The employees themselves should be adult enough to know that they are gambling with their jobs.
Jony Ive: Competitors steal Apple's work
This is not true. If you have a good predictor, you only need a few bits to store a piece of information. One way is just to record the places where your prediction is wrong. The ideal way would be to split all the possibilities so exactly half of possible sequences are on one side, and exactly half the probability is on the other. Every bit tells you what path to go down.

So instead of using 64 bits to specify the x y coordinates of every point on the plot, you could just use a much smaller number to represent how far it diverges from it's predicted location. You could narrow down the possible locations the point could be in by half, and then you just bits to specify only those possibilities, not all of them.
I have to agree with watwut. This is a bit unnuanced and oversimplifying things.
Wholeheartedly agree here, but it requires your support staff to have strong reading comprehension and writing skills - something I've not seen in various "live chat" support options that I've used.
So it's not sexism as long as it is against a non-employee? What kind of sense does that make?
The Cold, Hard Lessons of Mobile Home U.
> This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposition to the healthy growth of the company. Surely they don't want them back?

The individuals, while allegedly shitlords in terms of their behaviour, being gone may eliminate 2 problems, but honestly they're products of an overall culture. In a healthy company you wouldn't have a guy (allegedly) reverting commits or shittalking individuals in comments because they wouldn't fuck him for very long after the first few efforts, because their peers or line manager would have said, "dude, not cool".

[Edited for clarity]
Sounds like you're so desperate to out the guy that you have to make a weird, nonsensical post.

If you really want to out him that badly just man up an post his name rather than trying to weasel around with "Easier to put a president on leave than a CEO".
One thing, it's impossible to see the footer on your website with the infinite scrolling.
Climbi respects privacy
>Surely they don't want them back?

People make mistakes; they seem to get a lot of other things right, so maybe the relationship is salvageable - and all he needs is some time off.

>Doesn't appear so. They did get an HR person, but an experienced one? Not a chance. No experienced HR person would have let any of that get as far as it got. That HR person should probably be put on leave or be fired as well.

Jeez. They hired HR in January; the company has 240 employees many of whom remote. Based on her story, Julie Horvath's relationship was already poisoned by the time they hired this HR person.

The screwups were bad but I doubt GH culture is unfixable.
Sound's like Russian Bill O'Reilly.
as one if the most important corrective actions, Github needs to bring back cubicles or better even offices, so that a lot of the "increased collaboration and communication" between Julie and the founder's wife ( like when the wife would sit near Julie and stare at her) just wouldn't be able to happen.

edit: another thing that would help - it is to have some older, like in the their 40s, people in the workforce. I mean it may be useful to have old farts like us, who've been through sterile no-harassment environment of BigCo's, and who would be able to spot inappropriate behavior even from a couple floors away, and whose mere presence would calm the hormones at least a couple notches down :)
Sorry, maybe I miscommunicated something. They don't need to be centralized. Although I do think TRANSPARENT centralization can play a benefit part of the ecosystem.

I just meant in other aspects of government, everything is very centralized in Scandinavia, and it seems to be work very well there. However, that should not be translated to US, where we have much larger and diverse population.

I hope that make sense?
Was on the front page for a while, and yet, only 0.47 BTC donated: (unless they used more than one address since then)

https://blockchain.info/address/1Ec6onfsQmoP9kkL3zkpB6c5sA4P...

That's no more than a day of income for a so-so developer (in the US, at least), so I'd hardly call that "a lot of donations". You could earn more on a low-grade task on Freelancer.com or eLance, and I consider 2048 a quality piece of work. The popularity has probably peaked, so I doubt it'll ever even get to 1.0 BTC.
> GitHub is known to have a dubstep and IPA culture.

What point are you trying to make here? Are you a classical music and hefeweizen type of employee typically? Or maybe based out of Seattle, in which case you'd prefer a more grunge/PBR culture?
Yep. I think raging at people having fun does not support gender equality at all, it does the quite opposite.
They definitely have many stores in large urban centers. Click around on the store list, the majority are mall based.

If your city has a freestanding, non-outlet Gap, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel or Williams Sonoma, you are probably worthy of a freestanding Apple store. Otherwise, it will be in an upscale mall near those stores.
>>> This narrows down the choices: the "founder" who is the cause for all this drama is either PJ Hyett or Tom Preston-Werner.

Any guess?
Women can't like dubstep or IPAs?

Come on now...
It's good to see a straight-up apology, not a mealy-mouthed "I'm sorry if our engineer's sexual harrassment offended you" type response.

Of course, it would have been better if Julie had felt like she could have taken this up while she still worked there and got something done at the time.
I wonder how much effort it'd take to get git+ssh:// transport working with that server.
If Bill O'Reilly was put in his position within a government run media conglomerate pumping out government propaganda and if that government was run by the whims of one man, Putin.
Co-Founders. In my opinion, the titles CEO and CTO are only important in the context of large companies where you need to designate separate sectors and have a figurehead for each of those.

At this stage, you're both going to be working so closely together that making such a rigid distinction is kind of pointless.
I didn't quite read the statement as saying the founder's wife had access to private repos. I just read it as saying that the founder's wife claimed to have access to private company communication, specifically chat logs only intended for github employees. But a statement clearing the concerns up would be nice.
This article only thinks about what the caller's experience is, and doesn't consider at all what it would take to implement this on the call center side.

How would you guarantee responsiveness? With a voice call, the representative is on the line with you until your problem is resolved. With a text message, the rep would have to start helping somebody else if you took too long to reply, and may not be able to get back to you for a long time. Since they have no way of knowing how soon you'll reply, or if you'll reply at all, they can't just sit there idly waiting for your reply for a couple of minutes. And if a rep gets a large number of slow repliers queued up at once, he'd have to mentally juggle several different conversations and couldn't give any of them his full attention. Which caller gets priority? The one who you're currently texting with or the one who just came back after five minutes? What if a caller hasn't replied for a while and it's the end of the rep's shift?

Also, is there any way to route text messages through a call center so that a caller could text a single customer support number instead of having to know the number of the next available service representative?

One more thing: SMS messages get lost at a rate of 1 to 5%[1], so you're going to have a lot of irate customers wondering why they never received a reply. If a voice call drops, both sides know about it immediately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability
OpenBSD does not support UEFI, and probably never will.
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/196288

Please note that OpenBSD has no problem handling large disks, greater than 2 TB. The problem is with the horrible Restricted Boot (UEFI) system.

The Asus model 1015E is in violation of the requirement that UEFI (Restricted Boot) can be disabled, and that Legacy Boot can be enabled. I am boycotting all future Asus products, because I had to deal with this problem after I had already purchased one. It was difficult and painful to get my money back.

If any manufacturer purposely builds systems without Restricted Boot, I will patronize them (even for non-Arm products). I am hoping that some manufacturer will build a line of Arm-based devices without Restricted Boot. (Yes, I know about BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi, etc. But these are not full-featured laptops. They are embedded machines aimed at embedded uses. I do use them for that purpose. Also note that the Raspberry Pi has the craptastic Broadcom chip, and it is anything but free [as in liberty] and open. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/192942 Also, the recent release of source code from Broadcom is only open source wrappers that call proprietary binary blobs. Fsck Broadcom.)
Startups Aim to Conquer Space Market
To respond only after the issue was brought public? No, that is no leadership. It's the best possible response he could give under the present circumstances, but on the flipside, he had no choice but to make this statement. I wouldn't be surprised if it was crafted for him by a PR person or firm.
I think that the wife's actions would have been even less acceptable if she were male. The stigma is caused by the repeated unprofessional actions she did, and made worse by the fact that she was not even an employee.
Sure, people can do what they want, but in a workplace there are (or should be) standards and codes of conduct that help inform employees how to behave in a way that doesn't poison the environment for others.

So sure, if people want to watch that at home, then I guess that is their prerogative, but doing so at work doesn't seem productive or healthy for their (or any company's) community and culture.
Again, we should remember that it's how she perceives situation. Removing somebody's code is completely normal if you rewrite something for reason (changing interfaces, fixing properly something in other place so that piece of code becomes unused, implementing some complex mechanism which doesn't play well with that feature so that's easier to rewrite it — there are many such situations). We all like our code, but caring about it too much is unprofessional. I removed my colleagues' code hundreds of times, they removed mine. Solution seemed nice few months ago turns out to be horrible in today's light. It's just how the life goes.
Off topic, but there is not always "two sides". There is a tendency to try to frame and reduce everything to binary questions... but the world is just not binary.
Just out of curiosity (not interested in joining the debate)—do you mind if I ask whereabouts do you live? Bay area, east coast, somewhere else?
Smug bullshit like this that focuses on things that truly aren't important is killing our economy. I'd rather take someone smart who has "broken" some or even all of these rules than someone who knows how to follow these rules and couldn't complete a simple task. These are, after all, recent college graduates. Yes, it's terrible that they don't have the interview experience that they've never had a chance to accrue. Give me a fucking break. No wonder our economy has turned to shit.
Here, I edited my post so I don't hurt your peculiar sensitivities.

I wasn't outing anyone, the founder who shall not be named is the only married one as plenty of people pointed out from the start.

Also, for context to the original comment, the founder we are discussing here used to be CEO but switched roles a while back.
No, they're only allowed to like top-40s and cosmos.

/s
And their line manager would have followed up with "if I even hear a rumor of this happening again, you'll be fired for cause". Because such harassment is, per my understanding, illegal, and can create enormous problems for the individual, manager, and company. Not to mention incredibly unethical.
Simple theoretical basis for Hyperbolic Discounting
You don't normally use <color> on black? Get off my damn lawn, kid.
Yeah, rage against feminism... the radical notion that women are people.
I think the stigma is based on alleged bad behaviour. As this behaviour has nothing to do with gender I don't think it's accurate to say this is sexism. I could be wrong.
> > We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer.

> Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.

Hardly. It just says they are paying attention to the accusations and taking things seriously. I think they responded in a very positive way, and more transparently than I would have expected. But "we're looking into it" in no way validates or admits any fault on their behalf at this point.

> This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice.

So they should just fire them based on one person's complaints? If everything Julie accused them of is true, I think they should be fired, but that doesn't mean they should go off half-cocked, firing everyone involved until they can investigate and determine exactly what happened.

And that doesn't happen over night.
Oh please, I've worked in open office spaces were being harassed by a founders wife could have never happened. The presence or absence of chest-high modular walls has nothing to do with this story.
Same exact situation for me, definitely don't want to be reading anyone else's chats or for there to be any concern that someone might be listening in.
I think everyone agrees that government work should be rewarded. To my (developing) understanding, the gov't is dragged down by good intentions & conflict.
Copyright needs to be abolished.
Rails 4.1 includes something similar to dotenv:

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/guides/source/4_1...

A secrets.yml which is globally accessible via Rails.application.secrets, and should be in the default .gitignore from Github for Rails projects
Quite the stretch you've outlined. But maybe "unsafe" could mean the exact things Horvath mentions happened to her like coworkers visiting her at her home to make advances.
>Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.

No, it isn't. It's standard operating procedure pretty much everywhere to put employees on leave while an investigation is conducted. It shouldn't be construed as an admission at all.
i guess no one sees the irony that validation in their mind comes in the form of the co-founder 'owning up'.

if he had been silent or refuted the statements (maybe on advice from their lawyers), would that undermine Julie's credibility?

if so, why?
Perhaps subscriptions would be a better way to get reliable revenue?
Of course competitors will try to copy and emulate and steal great ideas.
The solution is not to cry about it. Not to distract yourself by chasing them and making lawyers on both sides rich.

It's always been to invent something even more amazing.
Thank god you're here. This topic is saddening enough without people making grammar errors too.
Why should gender affect the acceptability of one's behavior?
Tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product
>What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them.

and what would be an alternative? "A man mustn't look at a hula-hooping woman. " (what would be a punishment for the violation? - something from middle ages Arab world comes to mind, a definite cure for the desire to watch hula-hooping women :)
I have to say, I'm really disappointed. Unless the allegations are somehow made up -- which seems incredibly unlikely -- this is an enormous lapse from a company I use and admire. Not only did the founders, at least in public appearances, all seem like decent people, but they had one hell of a success story. I also liked their seeming tolerance for remote work and support for people like Julie who tried to make our industry more welcome to women by doing instead of just talking.

All in all, I'm really saddened.
They stopped serving torrents, so I decided to pick up where they left off.
There is a trick business schools like to play on students, where you are given a test with 10 - 15 scenarios where an employee has allegedly done something wrong and you need to write the proper response from the company.

The correct answer to every single scenario is "suspend pending investigation."
The plan is the outcome of the investigation. The point is to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.
Who is the "relevant GitHub engineer"? The one Horvath rejected?
I want to make this very clear:

Dual-booting with UEFI is entirely possible, provided that your hardware allows entering EFI vars manually, in a SIGNED OS ENVIRONMENT. Every comment I've seen thus far doesn't seem to grasp that this is MANDATORY before you have the ability to finish installing a new bootloader. This is how UEFI protects itself from unauthorized OS signing!

I have my own custom EFI vars set up with grub2 running on a GPT partition table, all booting beside windows, as purely as the air you breathe, and I'm loading custom Linux kernels daily and haven't ran into an issue since I originally set it up. Grub2 itself is my primary boot partition, which can then jump into the windows boot manager on the other disk.

Grub2 itself has the capacity to act as a custom-signed EFI boot partition (Not sure if I've got the wording on that correct -- but the gist is there!). This means grub can be what your bios looks for the signature from. You don't absolutely need your kernel to be signed, provided you can get a signature produced from grub, OR you have the ability to write one while in a signed O/S.

IF you want the easiest approach, look no further than any Linux distribution that purchased a key to find such a signed environment that permits the further writing of EFI variables.

Or, even easier -- just write then boot grub 2's EFI-signed bootloader to a usb key to get started. After that, writing a new OS entry to UEFI should be the most straightforward thing to do in the world!

*(You can even boot any kernel in the world with such a signed grub2 USB disk!)
google.com appears to use a google.com email address in its DNS record.
> As far as I can tell, the main argument against an import function is aesthetic. Compare: "from random import bar" to "bar = __import__('random').bar"

I agree.

A stronger pro-aesthetic example might be:

>>> from xml.sax.saxutils import escape -vs-
>>> escape = __import__("xml.sax.saxutils").sax.saxutils.escape

As another aesthetic, this is much more complicated with __import__:

>>> from itertools import repeat as _repeat, chain as _chain, starmap as _starmap

and requires an intermediate variable to reduce import resolution overhead.

(That example is from itertools/__init__.py . The ctypes/__init__.py also has a similarly complicated import-as .)
Well that pretty much confirms what Julie said was true. Kudos to GitHub for not trying to sweep things under the rug.
It used to be the case that Linux just ran on everything, until Microsoft started throwing their monopoly weight around again, and insisting upon UEFI (better called "Restricted Boot").
http://www.FSF.org/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted-boot
http://TechRights.org/wiki/index.php/UEFI
It's nice to see you can make use of stock quotes that are completely distant from reality.
I wasn't aware of the whole story. Here is the link to better understand the context: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...
People are so supportive of the CEO for a standup response, but some still dis Julie for coming forward and exposing the problems. Strange.
> This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposition to the healthy growth of the company. Surely they don't want them back?

I'm strongly inclined to believe that what Horvath said is true and that these two people should be laid off, but that shouldn't happen before an investigation. If they're not guilty, they should be exonerated; if they are, they should be dismissed with the full weight of evidence, so they can't paint themselves as innocent martyrs.
Presto is indeed a subsidiary of Foxtel
Creating an "infinite" website sounds kind of cool. You could generate all the content with a good language model. Then have humans correct where it makes mistakes. Maybe upvote or downvote pages that they like.
I work for a non-federal US govt.

The key issue is that the economy exploded in 2008 and the PC refresh cycle ended. The other issue is that Microsoft shipped a stinker with Vista, and took the liberty of breaking lots of legacy Microsoft tech in 7.

Few big organizations actually upgrade zone rating systems... They replace the devices. Because the upgrade cycles of PCs were stopped like 5-6 years ago, getting the budget for PC replacement was very difficult. Government bean-counters like slow growth in budget lines. Going from $10M/year to $0 to $30M for a bug refresh results in poor results.
I sold four pieces of non-existing product, gave refunds, apologized to buyers and stamped idea as "perfectly valid"
I think the follow up will be more critical, especially the public explanation. That will have the potential to either strengthen GH's credibility or destroy it.
>It's pretty standard practice to place employees on paid leave while serious complaints are investigated.

Employees? Sure. Founders? I've not heard of that before.
> Doesn't appear so. They did get an HR person, but an experienced one? Not a chance. No experienced HR person would have let any of that get as far as it got. That HR person should probably be put on leave or be fired as well.

The HR person has been on the job for a minimum of 31 business days and a maximum of 53. Horvath joined two years ago. Unless you are a GitHub insider, you currently are working off knowledge from a single source in which the information was provided by a person with a specific agenda. It is malicious to call for the HR person's job given your almost complete dearth of information.
Tom is married. Is PJ?
Microsoft deserves the blame. They require UEFI (more accurately called Restricted Boot) for Windows 8.