gatordan

It's strange how convenient and accepted unchecked anecdotal evidence can be around here under certain circumstances . If this was a strictly tech article I would hope more people would be saying your sample size here is two or three, that's clearly not the best predictor of the future. But you're talking about race and gender from the majority white male centered perspective so your comment is at the top.

According to you a couple black people got farther than they should have because of affirmative action and because of that you wouldn't blame an employer for considering all black people "risky" hires. Doesn't that sound a bit ridiculous? Put another way, has anyone ever said "a couple white people screwed over the team a few years back so we think twice nowadays before hiring white people". Or "we found that guys seem to slack more during work hours and now we shy away from hiring men". Of course not, because white and male are normal when it comes to jobs in tech and so they enjoy the privilege of being treated as individuals. To drive the point home your bias is obvious in your comment - "you're going to naturally think 2 and 3 times before making a similar hire" - "similar" applies to black or female because it's understandable to aggregate those individuals, their actions easy fit into a narrative that already exists in your mind. Pick two white men at your work who consistently perform poorly and I don't think you would be as comfortable attributing their behavior to their race or gender.

It's overly negative and hyperbolic comments like this on HN that make me think "They thought THAT was bad, I can't imagine posting my own work on here". This a high quality 360 degree view of a path along a coral reef - no it's not particularly practical but are you genuinely scratching your head trying to come up with ONE thing it does well? Do you really find the navigation to be "brutal"? I feel like you're being unnecessarily negative about something that is pretty well executed and at least in part meant to be fun.

I personally have never seen anything like this and thoroughly enjoyed it for a few minutes. As someone else pointed out I was blow away by how well it worked from the google maps app on my phone. And I'm not convinced something like Planet Earth on blu-ray or "HD video on youtube" gives you the same experience unless you could pause it at any point and look around in any direction.

For a community that is usually quick to dismiss anecdotal evidence and fear, uncertainty, and doubt there seems to be quite a bit of all of the above going around in these comments.

Given the update on the Tech Crunch article, and the fact this is regarding wall posts from three years ago (which people probably don't have the best recollection of) my two cents is for those that believe that this is affecting them to temporarily deactivate their FB account, and the rest of us wait until we see some follow up blog/news posts with hard evidence before we start yelling that the sky is falling.

This is a pet peeve of mine and I think the problem extends past "You're Doing it Wrong" titles. I haven't been reading HN long enough to know the trend but I will say the current state of blog titles is pretty bad. Taking a quick look at the front page one may be surprised to find out that: Hardware is Dead, You're Not Listening, Actually YOU Don't Understand Lexical Scope, and Everything's Broken and Nobody's Upset. Give me a break.

I will say that the premise is really interesting, "Everyone Should be Upper Class". That idea alone is probably why it made it to the front page of HN. But ultimately this is not well written. There were no citations or strong evidence besides a figure in the last paragraph. The writing meanders and doesn't support the argument well. And the argument isn't really made clearer until half way through - upper class means business owning and it is in our best interest to own or start businesses.

I'm going to make a anecdotal generalization of my own and say that I see these problems in a number of blog posts that make it onto HN. My two cents: If you're going take on a tough or controversial premise then take the time to argue it well, don't gloss over details, please revise, revise, then revise some more, and finally have other people read it before it gets released to a wide audience like HN.

This is a community that upvoted a story about wearing the same outfit every day to the front page last week. I say we leave the fashion critiques to them and they leave the technology analogies ("they're an iPhone you can wear on your face") to us.

Does anyone know the actual percentage of users that access Twitter through third party client applications? And what users are currently getting out of these apps that would make them annoyed enough to quit the service if they were forced to switch to Twitter's app/web interface?

My gut reaction is to agree with you that the Hacker community is overreacting to getting screwed over and that Twitter will go on fine without us. But without any facts about how popular and widely used these third party apps are, my opinion is really just a guess.

I dislike when an author titles and formats their post in this way. The title is an overstatement about why something that is common practice is wrong ("hey! i use relative dates, what am i doing wrong?"), leading to an article with a couple interesting points, ending with a concession that common practice is actually OK but could be better.

I agree with others that the argument is pretty weak considering twitter screenshots are one of three reasons why we should avoid relative dates. But i would have felt it genuine if the thesis was his last sentence: "Avoid displaying relative dates, but if you feel like you absolutely need to, follow these best practices: ..."

They aren't less worthy as human beings, they aren't "sluts" or whatever you thought i meant. In my experience women who are attracted to assholes simply aren't worthwhile in the context of being pursuing romantically - i dont have much to offer them. They are adults and can do what they please. But someone who responds positively to being treated like shit is going to be a waste of time and effort for me. In my experience, it was always because of immaturity or a lack of self esteem that they allowed themselves to be treated poorly.

Yes this is all anecdotal, you caught me, i don't have any studies on the dating habits of women and assholes. I think saying my comments are worse than sexual assault is tad bit hyperbolic.

I think you should realize your comment - in a thread about counteracting sexual harassment towards women at conferences - is about how incredibly difficult it is to be a man. Nevermind how difficult it must feel to try to fit in as a minority group at a conference only to find yourself sexually harassed by a stranger.

Appreciate how privileged you are when your worry isn't "i hope some random man doesn't try to grab my ass" but instead "how am i supposed to know if this random woman wants me to grab her ass?". Is it really that difficult to be a guy? Is the line of sexual harassment (especially in the context of the articles examples) really that hard to figure out?

I commented heavily in the original HN thread because of comments like this. You're not defending the behavior... you're just saying women are literally asking for it.

Theres this myth that men who are assholes succeed with women. I suppose they do technically succeed - in getting women with low self esteem to sleep with them through manipulation and "pickup artist" techniques. But how successful do you think they are at finding a truly fulfilling and meaningful relationships? How successful do you think they are with bright, intelligent, worthwhile women who have their act together. You really think those women are walking away from defcon wishing they met some guy who "negged" them, and physically forced himself on them?

As someone said already, theres a huge difference between being an aggressive asshole and being assertive. The asshole licks a random womans tattoo to start a conversation. The asshole grabs a womans crotch and hides in a crowd. The assertive guy decides to start a conversation with a woman he thinks is interesting, and if hes at all socially aware he knows when shes uninterested in continuing to talk and he moves on.

The line that shouldn't be crossed is being an asshole that sexually assaults women, its really not that blurry.

I have to agree with everyone here that this doesn't make sense. I'm currently working on integrating Stripe into my application to create a subscription system. By far the easiest part has been payment form. In their tutorial they have a basic form that you can plug into a .html file and create test customers within minutes. It's laid out in 3 well documented steps in that link he calls "daunting".

The angst in this post is really off putting. It reads like a series of observations by someone having a bad day after reading a book about existentialism (Mark Cuban is more likely to answer my emails than my friends?). He hints that caring can make you more successful as a business. But ultimately decides that we should care more simply to seperate ourselves from an uncaring world... because nobody cares. I don't find this particularly relevant.

I agree. If nothing else its always refreshing to read a piece on HN written by someone with a command of language and writing. Sometimes it gets tiring reading bullet pointed articles about how to design an engaging landing page, or poorly written and thinly veiled link-bait blog posts meant to get free marketing ("Dear Mark Zuckerberg", or "If You're Doing X, You're Doing it Wrong").

I think there were two big points made by the author, and he argued them fairly well: be aware of how powerful language is, and if you're a "hacker" - which by definition is someone who thinks out if the box - look around once in a while and realize if you've become a member of just another Herd. Sure he made his points through pointed satire and ridicule, but i think we all benefit from laughing at ourselves once in a while.

I don't have a blog and I don't know the proper convention for those "Show/Ask HN" posts so I suppose a comment here is the next best thing because my question is related.

After reading the "Yes, I was Hacked. Hard." post I updated several of my passwords and found that Netflix enforces a 10 character limit on their passwords. Does anyone have an idea why or how this could be the case? I would find it very ironic if they did this to save a few bits per user in their database considering they're a media streaming company.

This reminds of a news story I distinctly remember about Circuit City from a few years back. They fired their senior sales associates and hired cheaper presumably less knowledgeable workers to cut costs. They were already on the way out at the time but I have no doubt this sped up the process as it signaled to their customers that experience and knowledge aren't a priority so much as the bottom line.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2007-03-28-c...

I'm not at all convinced that popular sentiment in the world we currently live is that "programming is shit".

There was no About page on this blog so I couldn't tell if the author is just very young or if this is dated. Either way the post was half baked, with the author ultimately coming to the thoughtless conclusion: "That’s a crock of shit! ... It’s not programmers that are wasting life , it’s the non-programers!"

I did not say the proposed colored card system was the end all solution and that everyone here should shut up and take it. Absolutely we should question and propose different solutions. But I'm not sure that I saw any comments on alternative fixes besides the general theme "women should know what they're getting into".

I think you're saying that i need to understand this is a scientific crowd and they are of course going to question and apply logic. To which i would respond, why then did we end up with a majority of comments applying unchecked anecdotal evidence (which this community is usually very quick to dismiss) to subtly undermine the authors point?

This is flat out ignorant. Is it "impossible" to google for credible studies about sexual assault. Like this popular one from 2010 by the CDC that interviewed 16,000 people (including 7,400 men) and found that 18% of women and 1% of men had been raped or had someone attempt to rape them. So to take the point home, you don't have to believe in a "rape culture", but just know that if you have a wife, mom, grandmother, daughter, and aunt chances are (according the CDC) that one of them will be raped or have to fight off an attempted rape in their lifetime.

http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/NISVS/index.html

I really appreciate you being open to discussion - its the biggest reason why I value the HN community and why I even bother to comment. I read your original comment many times and think that it needed clarity, eventually you did get to your point about education but that did not come off as your main point.

I assume the Ada Initiative's goal, at least in part, is education. Even through this post alone they have educated part of the HN community that women get harassed at conferences. But I don't think the problem here is that men need to be educated about these behaviors - every decent human being knows its not okay to grab a womans crotch and hide in a crowd. This article wasn't about borderline cases where it wasn't clear what acceptable behavior was. It was about blatant disrespect like telling a female peer at a conference to "show her tits".

I think the men who are doing the harassment need to be made to feel this is not tolerated behavior in this community. If a few perpetrators get embarrassed about being called out and being given a colored card, thats acceptable if it helps prevent sexual assaults/harassment and alters their behavior.

This article is about a call to action to end sexual assault and harassment against women. It's really disappointing that the majority of comments that have followed are about how things really aren't THAT bad (as a man), or that women should expect this from a bunch of lonely guys, or that hey it happens to men too. I know some of these commenters are are well meaning, but this article isn't about you. The comments miss the point and completely undermine the author with their male centered narrative.

So next time you read about a minority group creating something exclusive to their gender, race (like Black Girls Code), or religion, remember this thread of comments. Because I bet you're first instinct will be to say "the solution is not to divide us into separate groups!". But until you start listening, internalizing, and cultivating those minority voices rather than dismissing them or displacing them with your own, those people are going to keep dropping out, showing up small numbers, or start making their own exclusive conferences/coding groups/fill-in-the-blank.

The blame the victim mentality sprinkled throughout this comment and a few others is the problem have with them.

"Not at all to excuse the behavior, but..." "I'm not excusing inappropriate or damaging behavior. It is important, though..."

Those sentences should end before you go on to give the impression that we just have to accept that sexual assault/harassment is going to happen when a room is dominated by men. There is no good reason why grown men who happen to be some of the brightest minds in computer security should be excused from treating their female peers with the same respect that they would want for themselves or their own daughters, wives, mothers, and aunts.

Your comment seems to suggest otherwise, because "In a conference of mostly lonely males..." hey what do those women expect? Apparently, they should have had more "situation awareness". It reminded me of the common victim blaming argument "she shouldn't have dressed like that if she didn't want the (bad) attention".

Affective - causing emotion or feeling.

I was conscious of my usage although ill be the first to admit i make typos all the time. To elaborate, writing can evoke feelings good or bad, feelings of familiarity or confusion, and these feelings can lend to a more persuasive writing. This was my point in the second paragraph.

I can accept bad metaphors and analogies in HN comments;  this a technically focused community and the comments are so far above above most online forums that nitpicking about literary devices would be ridiculous. But I can't forgive the hotdog/hamburger/caviar analogy in this full length blog post. It does not convey his message well and really does the article a disservice. This writing should have been more thought out considering it is a follow up to his previous posts on this subject that got quite a bit of attention.

I realize this is somewhat off topic. But as an entrepreneur I feel this is worth noting because I can't overstate how affective a good metaphor (or good, well revised writing in general) can be in persuading others. And as a reader how easily a bad one can turn me off especially when woven throughout your entire piece.

Not so subtly the author is telling the reader if you program with Vim you'll be just like "all the really great programmers" who can write 4 line solutions to problems that take ordinary programmers 10 pages. You'll produce "impossible patterns of code and text manipulation", and be able to "fill dozens of registers" (admittedly I don't know what that means). This is all bit silly and reminds me of "hacking" in the Hollywood films.

I understand that this post was tongue in cheek. I also understand that not all text editors are equal, if you see someone writing their first hello world program in Notepad yes you should tell them about much better alternatives. But this post confuses ability to program with ability to use Vim.

Being really good at using Vim will definitely let you say you're part of the club of people who are really good at using Vim. It just might make you more efficient at manipulating code. But let's not perpetuate the elitism that is pervasive enough in hacking, it's a text editor. It doesn't make you more intelligent, better at problem solving, or writing more efficient code.

Exactly. This reminds me of facebook and every site with "login with facebook" implemented. For example, I choose not to log into hulu with facebook because I'm sure its great for facebook to know what bad shows I watch to serve me better ads. But i don't need all of my friends and family seeing that information on their news feed. I believe Spotify forces this on their users and as a result i get the joy of seeing every song my friends listen to on Spotify.

Thanks for they reply! I'm using a Droid Bionic, android version 2.3.4 and this is on the default virtual keyboard. Ampersand is the only character affected as far as i can tell.

As an ed-tech cofounder at a company that needs data like this, this is exciting. You guys are YC backed and from all appearances you'll be in direct competition with the Imagine K12 backed LearnSprout http://learnsprout.com/ . It's exciting in that clearly smart people are working on this problem and I hope the competition pushes both companies to make great products.

I was excited to try this out then I encountered a strange issue: in every website I visit when I type an & symbol into an input element it is replaced with a 7 (e.g. I type "password&" the input shows "password7"). It's happening across all sites for both text and more importantly password inputs so I can't login to many of sites I regularly visit and really try the app. Anyone have any ideas?