dos1

What's his email address?

Yeah, because body count is the only comparator that matters. Extremism is extremism. RMS is an extremist. I want nothing to do with someone who is incapable of empathizing with the other side.

Edit: Fuck you HN. RMS is an extremist. I should hope that most of you have the critical thinking skills to realize that his extremism is just as dangerous as Timothy McVeigh's.

Edit 2: Honest question, how can I delete my account on HN? I've come to realize (sadly) how many hours I've wasted on this bullshit. PG, please ban this account.

Dude is so strange. I mean seriously, who knows that much about that many kinds of esoteric music? It's like he wants to be contrary to the rest of the population on purpose.

As an independent contractor, one thing I feel I need to point out is that the hourly rate that the consultant gets, and the hourly rate the company gets charged for the consultant's time, are two VERY different things.

For example, my rate is between 90 and 110 dollars per hour for long term work. I would like to think I could charge more, but this is what the market will bear where I live. HOWEVER - there's almost always a vendor, and sometimes several vendors, between myself and the company. To the company I work for, my hourly rate looks about 10-40 dollars higher depending on the layers I go through. So for me to make 100/hr, it's likely the client is being charged 130/hr.

+1 for Minneapolis. I pay pretty close attention to the start up scene here and things are starting to move. The Minne* Organization (http://minnestar.org/) does some nice events.

It's always interesting to hear how people go about solving math problems. You mention a pie chart visualization and then the much more labor intensive (but maybe "correct"?) method. I used a third way, which was thinking that 13/13 would be one, so 12/13 is pretty close, so that's ~1. And 8/8 would be 1, so 7/8 is pretty close and also ~1. 1 + 1 = 2 :)

I imagine there are myriad other ways people approach estimation problems like this. In response to the rest of your post, I was never taught how to "think" about math. I was educated in a decent school system, but it was all rote memorization of multiplication tables. I think most people who are interested in learning will come up with their own tricks regardless of curriculum. Of course, imagine how much better I'd be at this stuff if I had math teacher's who were competent :)

Hippy :) I kid of course. I've never been able to get in to the jam bands. Many of my friends love Phish, the Dead, Umphrey's McGee, The Big Wu etc etc. I've tried to get in to their music, but every time they do those long jams I get bored.

What's interesting though is that I love a good solid 20 minute epic trance tune. It's basically the same thing, so I'm not really sure why I prefer electronic "jam" music over more traditional jam bands.

I'm genuinely curious, how are standups not status meetings?

From the article:

- Make sure everyone is working on the right thing

- Help out other team members by taking work off their plate or helping them by sharing domain-specific knowledge

- Keeping everyone informed

How is that different from a status meeting? I've heard "standups are not status meetings" over and over from the agile community, but I don't get it. They sure seem to be quick status meetings that allow everyone to get a handle on the current status of the iteration?

This is somewhat meta, sorry.

What concerns me is that even in the face blistering internet rage, she dug in her heels and stood by her actions. Just apologize. Why is it so bloody hard for people these days to just admit they made a mistake? Being fired, harassed on twitter, etc etc could not possibly be better than writing "I'm really sorry I publicly outed those guys, I should not have done that, and will refrain from doing that in the future".

Here's another thread where I argue that an apology could have fixed things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5415524

Some of the responses were indignant, and people said she shouldn't have to apologize for her actions. I agree, she doesn't need to apologize. But look where it got her! This is indicative of a much broader trend I see. People today would rather lose a finger than say they're sorry. I just cannot understand it.

Sure, she didn't need to apologize (and hasn't). Look how good that's worked out for her and SendGrid.

Yes, thank you very much! I constantly make this mistake. I've edited :)

Totally agree. The employer owns absolutely all responsibility for terminating the employee. However, I do not believe it would have been out of line for Adria to have said something like "I heard one of the guys in the photo I posted on Twitter yesterday was fired. I just wanted to say that I'm terribly sorry to hear that and my intent was never to cause harm! I'm very sorry!" I believe contrition on her part would have nipped this whole thing in the bud.

I also know that had I posted that picture which resulted in someone losing their job, I would feel great remorse and WANT to make amends. Especially given the relatively minor infraction (private, but overheard, joke).

One of the reasons I've taken an interest in this whole fiasco is that I occasionally make "colorful" jokes. Not dissimilar from the two guys at PyCon. I make every attempt to keep these jokes private between my friends and I, but I'm sure others have heard me make them. Some people might find them funny, others may be offended. It scares me to think that making an offhand penis joke could result in being publicly outed on Twitter with no opportunity to defend myself.

I believe that Adria Richards did not handle the situation appropriately. I believe she's being a hypocrite by taking offense one day, and making her own penis joke on Twitter the next. I believe that she's further stoking the internet's rage by refusing to admit any fault. I think the other women that are jumping to her defense are doing themselves, and women in technology a disservice. They are not thinking critically or putting themselves in the conference attendee's shoes. I'm quite sure they would not like to be publicly outed for a private conversation.

Public shaming was not the right way to handle the situation. An apology from Adria would have gone a long way in defusing the situation. She chose not to go this route. I'm sad that a silly penis joke turned in to this.

Preemptive Edit: I do NOT believe that ANYONE should suffer the wrath of the Internet. I do NOT believe that ANY conference attendees should have to sit idly by and listen to penis jokes. I'm only saying that publicly shaming these guys was a mistake, and that an apology for the mistake could have basically fixed the problem before it got this far.

Yes! This is my overarching goal currently. I'm trying to make as much money as possible building line of business apps so I can work on something I think is more important. I would still write software, even if I was filthy rich, but the difference would be the resources I'd have at my disposal. I currently volunteer doing web sites for charities and schools from time to time. If I were rich, I could spend more time doing that, as well as paying other people to do that. I would love to build software for under served philanthropic organizations.

> Second, as the work of economists Esther Boserups and Julian Simon demonstrated, growing populations lead to increased innovation and conservation.

Well I'll just bet that a shrinking population could also lead to innovation! It may mean innovation in different areas, but when pushed to their limits, humans seem to respond more often than not with a solution.

>That's the point of an event-based system, it's a decoupling. De-coupling is an abstraction. It works on pages that are based on components or modules.

Right, we're on the same page. I agree that in certain scenarios these decoupled event based systems make sense. However, Twitter's example app is an email client. That to me is not a use case I would typically envision as being free of coupling. Thus it's more work to maintain in the long run.

On the plus side, if they're willing to share, I bet this will be a very interesting postmortem. Presumably Amazon.com is one of the more bulletproof web properties in the world. Whatever could have occurred to take it down for nearly an hour (at this point) can only be interesting!

So a component subscribes to some event somewhere. Who's triggering the event? When you're debugging in Firebug or someplace, what does your call stack look like? How hard is it to find the source of the event? All you know is it bubbled up from somewhere.

Say I want to add a component to a page. Which events do I need to trigger to make it do the kind of things I want? What do I need to pass as a payload to those events? How do I know if there's a consumer for my event or not? If there isn't a consumer that's probably an issue.

The eventing bus adds an additional layer of indirection. If your app can be truly decoupled, then this would be great. But I just don't see that use case being very common. I have never worked on an application where the broadcast model was more benefit than pain in the long run.

>When you create a component you don't get a handle to it. Consequently, components cannot be referenced by other components and cannot become properties of the global object tree. This is by design. Components do not engage each other directly; instead, they broadcast their actions as events which are subscribed to by other components.

This is a maintainability nightmare. I've gone down this route on hand rolled JS frameworks before and it leads to untold headaches. Sometimes a little coupling is the right solution. Many times it is better for components to have knowledge of their environment. In most applications (other than iGoogle maybe) one thing on a page depends on another. I feel it's far better to explicitly call out those dependencies by having a reference to the other components and directly invoking methods on them with known arguments of a known type.

Edit: Also, what kind of memory allocation implications are there with event subscriptions and no references to the components themselves?

Wouldn't whitelisting conforming input be a better approach? I realize it may be more difficult, but wouldn't that be more secure?

Edit: I'm genuinely interested - I always try and whitelist things when I'm building software. Although I have next to no background when it comes to security in particular.

Client side rendering and single page applications are not the best solution for most applications. I posit that a partial page refresh approach using PJAX (or something like it) where the server always sends back HTML is a more efficient and rapid approach to development.

There was an article yesterday about how Airbnb was going through some serious gymnastics to get a fully rendered HTML page on initial request and then keep it interactive and client side rendered after that. Why bother? Just send back HTML all the time.

I worked on a very large (100+ developer) application that was fully bought in on Backbone + JSON api consumption. In the few cases where there was a lot of client interactivity (editable grids and drag and drop, most notably) the client side rendering approach made sense. For 90 percent of the application though, partial rendering of HTML from the server would have made things easier and less complicated (and faster!) The initial time to usable page is MUCH longer when you render static content, then make an ajax call to get the data.

I agree with you to an extent. It's why I would choose different problems to solve than what Mr. Gates feels are important. However, I don't think the Gates Foundation and its efforts are in any way a net negative.

Perhaps the poacher from your story would not need to kill more elephants to feed his children if the general condition of his country were better, and the economy supported other endeavors more readily (and prosperously) than poaching. In fact, if you believe the Rand think-tank, "first world" inhabitants produce less offspring, and much of the developed world is facing a looming underpopulation crisis.

I know many Western European countries have a birthrate that is lower than the replacement rate. This may be the case for America as well, but last I heard our population was still rising, with immigration also being a contributing factor.

In any event, you're right in that the answers don't come easy. I think the fact that Mr. Gates is willing to make the attempt, and is showing some signs of success (whether it's the right success metric is certainly up for debate) is to be commended. More people should aspire to philanthropy and there are certainly worse role models than him.

I don't get the negativity in this thread. Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining. Sure, they may not be the problems that you think are most important, and I'm sure the foundation is making missteps along the way and wasting some money. But his message in this article is a good one I think:

> The process I have described—setting clear goals, choosing an approach, measuring results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach

This sounds like a pretty pragmatic plan to me. I know that I don't necessarily agree with the direction he's going (I would personally pick other problems to tackle), so I just hope someday I'm in a position to do something along the same vein and learn from the lessons he's willing to share.

I'll take a page from the book of the guys you're defending and make a pithy comment to add some "levity" to the situation, as you called it.

"At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. " - Billy Madison

Man I love your version of tolerance.

Dude, I don't know what to say to you. You're going to argue for the sake of it, even though you're objectively wrong. Maybe you can shed some light on why people do that?

The man HIMSELF admits he is intrinsically an asshole, and that even when he uses his real identity he can't help himself. Yes, he's trying to be better. But an alcoholic trying to fight the bottle is still an alcoholic.

How can you begrudge me my opinion when the only facts I have corroborate it?

http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2010-09-24-trolling-is-a-...

This post was from 2010 where he admits he's a jerk and can't help it. I think that pretty clearly is a victory for my thesis.

> Dial down your indignation, friend: help us get rid of this reek.

I agree with you and gave you an upvote. Maybe my comments do make me look like a "tosser" - but these people were behaving like bullies, plain and simple. And man, I can't stand that shit. I see it every day. People will go out of their way to make others feel miserable. Or they use their power/standing/influence to pick a fight with someone weaker just because they can.

Oh sure, I've made plenty of stupid comments, but that's not what these guys did.

They picked a repo on Github that they thought was duplicating functionality in Unix (oh the horror!) and engaged in classic schoolyard bullying. Publicly shaming the code and the author, apparently to make themselves feel better and show the world how smart they were. And at the end of it, the apologies they issued after the internet turned against them were poor.

So yes, I do occasionally say dumb things, but I'm never a bully. If I say something mean it's because it was provoked. And if I need to apologize for something, I do it with real contrition.

> A snarky comment and a bad apology may be an instance of the second thing. But they don't imply the first.

Sorry chief, I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. The snarky comment can be forgiven. (although I've since read other tweets/posts from David Cramer and it appears as though he really is that abrasive all the time)

By contrast, a bad apology is a clear indication of someone's true nature. If the apology is backhanded or otherwise poor, it implies a lot. If you issue an apology but don't really feel sorry, then you're just doing it to placate others, and you really are a jerk.