skeptical

__Probably because he/she recognizes that any such discussion will not lead to any possibly productive output and instead be a pointless match of tilting at windmills.__

Yet he/she takes the effort to right that down? I love it when people take part in a discussion, then, when a reply is on it's way they say "let's not discuss this more". If it's not worth discussing why bother dropping such useless statements? Ever considering not enter the discussion in the first place? It's not rocket science.

__For what it's worth, I'm getting the same vibe from you. Your first contribution to this thread was basically taking a big steaming dump over this young lady's accomplishments. Why would you do that? It didn't add anything to the discussion, and instead makes you look like a colossal jerk. If this were not HN, I'd think you were just plain trolling.__ I strongly disagree. andreadallera didn't took 'a big steaming dump' over this young lady's achievements. He/she simply question them. I have no idea if this young lady accomplished much or not, but how is questioning the same as denying?

No, the opposite. By 'photographers' we're refering to those who take advantage of their copyright. This excludes for example wedding photographers which are only payed to press the shutter but end up giving away their 'artwork'.

I'd give you a strait answer, but do you realize that the Free Software Movement is much more widespread than royalty free photography or music? Furthermore, among the crafts you mentioned, being a programmer is by far the less profitable one. I'll untwist your twisted question. Honestly, why are you so worried about 'artists' and not worried about programmers?

I find this kind of rant rather silly. Whatever, he should be paid for his work, it's his artistic value etc.

Just like he (or any photograph with a reputation) is able to set a very high price because of his quality seal, he doesn't have the right to bitch about how much he thinks the picture worths. If you go out in the market then play by the rules. And the rules are: any product is worth whatever amount the consumer is willing to pay for it. That's what an open market is about. If you don't like it, don't get into it. Simple as that.

Ok, using it without permission is a simple legal matter. Bitching about how much he thinks he should be paid... honestly that is no one else's problem.

Really? Did he really expect wordpress would ship those specific features out of the box? Come on. That is not even a mater of feature richness, it's simply keeping it bloat free to some extent.

I can agree with him on things like lack of a fancy wysiwyg, but workflows? Multi side admin? Pay someone to implement that for you if you don't want to do it yourself.

There are more important issues with wordpres that should be solved: built in support for syntax highlight, a fancier javascript image gallery browser, etc. A simpler more effective plugin system (current one is an unmitigated mess). Others cool stuff have been added lately such as drag and drop uploads.

This guy is expecting to have someone coding a custom software for him just because it's available with GPL license. Non-sense.

I'm not stating I am Iranian (I'm not) just trying to point out that you jump into quick conclusions about others' judgements on Iran. And that you would most likely not do it if you knew in advance that the person you're talking to is an iranian citizen.

""" Really? Sorry, but I don't find the "let's demonize them, force them to our own way of living, and basically use it as a pretext for invading their country and steering their natural resources / political personnel our way" any more modern or wiser... """ 1. For the record I do think 'their way of living' is rather barbarian. Not that all of them would choose to live the way they do if they had the choice. But stoning a women to death because of showing a leg is a rather barbarian thing to do, just my opinion I guess. But where did I call to 'force our own way of living' or 'invading their country'? I don't recall I defended that.

""" You are probably talking to the wrong persons from those countries. Maybe mainly people that immigrated because they wanted to live differently, i.e huge selection bias? """

Maybe that's the case, I won't deny that. But heck, that they had to run away from their country for such reasons, doesn't that tell a bigger story per se? I recall you saying that they have the right to live their lives the way they want. But then you point out people that didn't haven't that right. I'm starting to get confused about your opinion, no irony nor sarcasm intended.

"objective/subjective etc, I said that you don't liking how people in Iran live just means Iran is subjectively bad for you. I added that if the majority of Iranians didn't like how they live, then Iran would be objectively bad." Which is pretty obviously the case. Don't expect very informative surveys where saying "I'm not religious anymore" might be enough to get you killed.

I'm sorry, if I'm Iranian myself does your reply still applies? Just wondering.

I'm tired of this political correctness, it's so 90's. But it will take more than a couple of downvotes to shut me up. This "everybody has the right to their way of living" is getting old and stupid. Have you ever visited Iran? I find it interesting that when I talk about this subject with people from muslim countries, they understand me very well and mostly agree with me, while most westerns prefer to paint everything with fairy-tale colors and say that they are 'tolerant' to every culture.

Anyway, your comment is almost semantically null. Why wouldn't it be obvious that anyone's judgement has whatever credibility you want to give it? Furthermore, By assuming that everything is subjective you're basically stating that you won't dare to stand for any opinion of yours.

While I agree with you, your last paragraph is just non sense. What's specifically bad? Honestly, if you ask this question you're shouting out that you have no idea what today's iran (or most of the muslim countries) are like.

Quite frankly, visit iran and see for yourself. A word of advice though: if you happen to be a woman, I would recommend taking my word for granted instead. Just my advice.

Good to see people getting into dangerous (read 'political incorrect') discussions. But we still have a long way to go. It's rather obvious that articles authors of articles like this still walk on eggshells.

On the flip side,a mantra is a very powerful marketing trick.

_Wait a minute now. Are those really a user's basic rights? Who is Stallmam to decide for both users and developers what our rights are? If users get those rights then developers have theirs taken from them._

He didn't decide anything, he simply presents his view on such matters and backs it up with solid logic. Anyone is free to disagree with him and to make oneself heard.

Well, I don't know if you're aware of it, but you just repeated what I replied to you with a different phrasing.

If you've seen other interviews with RMS, this is pretty much one more, a good one to be fair.

Spoiler alert!

Best part of the interview: Journalist: Are you married? RMS: No, I'm not. Journalist: Well, I am, I don't want to be free.

Why would you expect to do one thing once and then resource to virtually cost-free copying to get money from it? If people won't pay for it is because they feel is not worth to pay. Indeed if I can get something for free I'm not so much inclined to pay for it.

If you keep developing it and charge for access to a privileged access to updates, I'm sure you're sales will keep up. If you're updates are worth it, that is.

Err... no.

He associates evil with charging money for software but not letting the buyer having his basic owner rights. Being that the right to modify, use and redistribute.

Read this on the gnu website and understand how wrong you are: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

When asked that question he usually replies "if you can't make money by doing free software, maybe you can look for another job". One cannot blame him for putting his ethical principles in front of his professional interests. I, for one, think that's the way it should be.

In 2011 in hacker news we still have to clarify this... oh well...

How would you evoke such code? Squeezing it into an http reply? Calling it from PHP CLI?

If doing it on your webapp, don't! You're doing it wrong. Otherwise why would you need php specifically? I mean I guess you could, but what advantage does it poses comparing to other languages available in pretty much every *nix system nowadays (perl, python)?

For the record, I have a nice collection of downvotes for defending PHP on point-and-laugh-at-PHP threads here at HN. I just don't see how the use case you're presnting is realistic.

Am I the only one to think that is nothing but free advertising?

Come on, a link to 'click here to buy' page? I don't understand how this got to the first page. This is not so honest because the title is totally misleading. The link does not point to recipes with backbone.js. A more honest title would be "buy recipes to backbone.js", which is what the link actually point to.

Might be a great book, but this kind of marketing totally puts me off, I will not buy a product that is advertised with such techniques.

Considering PHP's scope and its limitations (lacks things like threads for example) I would say that is an extremely rare scenario. If you're storing 100.000 integers on a PHP data structure you're most likely doing it wrong.

I don't know if you visited the countries you mentioned nor if you have any idea of their academic standards for example.

Many people in here are used to american technological society and have no idea what it's like in other parts of the world. In countries like Iran the huge majority of the population never red a book, can't really read and write much more than the very basics, most of the people haven't assimilated the concept of multiplication, just to give you an example. I'm from a country way more developed than iran in technological/scientific terms and I always have trouble to explain to Americans, Canadians, British, Germans, etc. how non tech-savy other parts of the world are.

I wouldn't downplay _the lack of_ technological capability. That's more like it.

I don't know what happen with that drone, but so far I've seen zero evidence and 100% speculation. That is a fact. I might be wrong, but there's no single bit of proof of anything.

Yes you are. Because others use the same openid in every openid enabled site where you open yet another openid account.

It doesn't aim to solve that issue. It aims to solve the issue of maintaining multiple passwords on multiple sites.

Such neatness is contrary to Microsoft philosophy, but hey, I see microsoft making wise thought through moves more and more often. Maybe they will slowly become an interesting company again. They're still enjoying the aftermath of the great brainwash of the 90s. But to be fair, there have always been interesting things coming from microsoft. So we'll see.

You seem to try to debunk some [imaginary] point about women being somehow 'inferior'. I never said such thing. Women and men are different, that's all I said. I even started by stating that girls outperform boys in school to a very large extent. Boys appear to have their advantage among the tiny narrow peak only, that affects a tiny minority of people.

I've lived in societies that took radically different approaches on this. Whenever I talk about this I'm called 'fascist' or 'marxist' depending where I am. I think that's hilarious to say the least.

Mmm... I don't want to sound arrogant, but have you red the source you linked beyond the abstract? If you follow the links, one of them will take you here: http://pps.sagepub.com/content/6/2/134.full

and that clearly states that opinions like mine cannot be disregarded, it even acknowledges that such possibilities are less studied.

But there's one important thing to note. If you're a biologist and write a paper where you go through an hypothesis similar to my views, you can still expect an avalanche of cheap offenses.

The link of this thread is called "STFU about what women want". Why is the author so pissed of? Why resourcing to such heavy language right on the title? Sorry, but if you have a clear solid opinion you don't reply an inoffensive opinion with 'STFU'. If you do so it's because of some other reason. I'd say taboo, or at least she has no strong valid point so she resources to a violent response.

It's the only implementation almost everybody knows of. I've never heard of any other, don't know if there is other.

In defense of the author, he does explain why it will most likely always be a language that will be implemented in a compile-to-js fashion.

Do we check compiled code when we code in C? Do we look at the Bytecode when we write Java? This is exactly what he is complaining about.

Also, he does makes a few points about CS syntax, that can't be the implementation's fault.

I tell what you could do of that point. You could admit that you deliberately picked a sensitive topic (black people being oppressed in the past) as a counterexample to push the discussion in a dead end because race is a 'dangerous' topic for anyone to touch. I do not want to discuss such topic here because it will inevitably take over the original one as it always do.

If you claim your opinion is too taboo to discuss, that's pretty much just blowing smoke; people who disagree (and explain why) aren't shying away from a taboo; they're disagreeing. If you have "inconvenient truths" that seem to contradict common opinions, that's far more interesting (and yes, is worth discussing), though if you don't entertain the possibility that you're misinterpreting the data (because you're already crystal clear...), it's all a waste of breath.

I don't have inconvenient trues, only an inconvenient opinion, and that is: women and men won't reach a 50/50 share in many roles of society simply because women and men are significantly different both physically and psychologically. Furthermore, I think the trend of forcing men and women to be equal in all aspects doesn't help improve women rights, but rather degrades them.

Many ask for scientific proof. I don't have such thing, but if you understand what 'scientific proof' really means you'll agree that is not much more than a consensus on a matter that will prevail until we find a better explanation for it, a better 'scientific proof' that will render the previous one obsolete.

But on to the subject, from the age of ten if you look at people's performances in school, it's pretty much obvious that girls do consistently better across the board. On the other hand if you pick the top students of a specific subject you'll find many more boys than girls, specially in exact sciences and the like. I've live in a few european countries and this pattern is pretty obvious. Honestly I can't find an active social setup that would enforce this outcome. Sure there might be some residual gender segregation that still affects it, but in my opinion this pattern is too consistent to be solely explained by social constraints. Specially since it's observed since very young age. This is an example, one of the simplest, but there are more evidence.

Do you think that this is not relevant? Why?

If any of this is "crystal clear", then you need to revisit your username choice.

Well observed, but no. What makes me skeptical about many things is having a clear opinion/view about other things. For me that's the true essence of skepticism.

I'm not sure what to make of your "average black person is less intelligent" point. Are you seriously arguing that a debatable genetic difference was the principle reason antebellum blacks were picking cotton?

I didn't make any such point. And no, I'm not arguing that. But the phrasing of your question does prove my point about how afraid people is about some debates. That is particularly ironic because they seem to be so certain about it, why should they be afraid to debate it?

You can, and most people could discuss it, but it's an extremely weak point.

I don't think you really mean it, sorry.

(E.g., individual != average, and in-population range is very large, so you'd expect to see the appropriate percentage of black landowners, successful business owners, etc.). Hmm.

Yep, I really don't think you mean it. Starting by the 'individual != average' is a common symptom of such taboos. By doing so you try to nullify any consideration about a group of people, but you go on and do just that to prove your point whenever necessary. For the record, I share the same opinion as you about the topic.

I might be wrong here, of course, but I'm getting the feeling that you are assuming I'm 'white' and that that is strongly affecting your reasoning. You might stop to re-think for a little while. Just saying.

The examples you pick and the way you present them are very relevant. your observations are also very well made and in my opinion very reasonable. In fact i agree with you. I just think your conclusion is undermined by your unwillingness to question yourself, even if you state that everybody should do just that.

To pick up on your example, castration. I recently red about swedish history and found out that some decades ago the Swedish government forced castration on a rather high amount of people through criminal law. Sure, the reason was supposedly not the same as in North Carolina, but if 1 to 3 percent of the population got the penalty, one may ask if the criteria were really all that well defined and legit. Personally, I also consider this horrific. The truth is, the developed and tolerant swedish society we all know basically started after the castration trend. I will not say it's a consequence of it, I sincerely hope it's not. But will I disregard that possibility just because I don't like it? No, never. I dare to look at those facts and try to understand them. I don't like that possibility, it is brutal, but I will not censor my critical thinking.

We have gender distinction in sports because it's obvious that men and women are physically different. No one objects that. But no one dares to admit the possibility of man being different than women intellectually/psychologically/mentally, because that's a taboo. It's not obvious, there is no scientific evidence, etc. but why does everybody gets so angry if that possibility is even talked about? I'm tired of this fake morals. You are not more respectful towards woman rights simply by staying away from sensitive topics. Most importantly, I don't mind if you think I respect women rights less than you because of my opinions. I know I how much I respect women rights, I could care less about proving it.

well, that depends on where you live.

I just made a simple observation yes. Whatever reason we find will fallback to men being different than women. That is in fact the only think we can say for sure. The outcome might not be fair, but it's not by denying this fact that we will make things better.

As for you example, it's flawed. 200 years ago doctors played a very different role in society of those of today's doctors. If you look carefully at today's society and try to find a social role more like that of a 1800's doctor, you'll probably find a job that is still done mostly by men. Is it fair? Indeed no. But it is in fact a good example how we can improve women rights by going to the root of the problem without fear of being political incorrect. I might not have any evidence, but nor have you.

For me it is crystal clear. I have no problem stating that because I am not disrespecting nor discriminating anyone based on gender. What you mean by "it's not clear" is "there's no scientific proof", which is a totally different thing. You may argue that it's just something I believe in, but I'm ok everyone else's skepticism, I don't want to convince anybody of anything, but heck, don't disregard my opinion because of your taboos. Either way, even it wouldn't be clear, it wouldn't be clear that I'm wrong either.

I agree with you that culture matters, and indeed people have been victim of discrimination countless times throughout mankind history. But you are afraid to admit that other aspects might matter too, because it touches your taboos.

You pick the example of black people being thrown to the bottom of the social structure of north american society because you know that arguing with that is unethical by pretty much any current standard. But just recently James Watson stated precisely that the average black person is less intelligent than the average white. Now, quite frankly, I don't care about that subject, but would dare to discuss it or would you just claim that discussion is out of your ethical boundaries? It's not a nice topic to discuss, but because of that you can't just pretend there's nothing to discuss.

I'm just saying: If your arguments are limited by taboos then your opinion can't be of much value.