Sexism in Tech: A Good Apology is Better than No Mistakes - <AUTHOR> https://keen.io/blog/42031860734/sexism-in-tech-a-good-apology-is-better-than-no <comment><USER2> Did the fact that all of the models are, in fact, the apparently objectified and degraded women pass everyone up?

Look, I am totally against misogyny and sexism as much as the next guy, but I have a hard time taking these posts seriously on a few counts:

1- A large portion of the marketing industry is based around the "objectifying of women." Women should go out in droves and write long screeds against marketers (pigs?) instead of flooding the marketing companies with their resumes.

2- Stop buying clothes from the long list of fashion companies that are clearly objectifying women to an unrealistic standard of beauty. Oh, right, fashion schools aren't male dominated either.

I love women and I have a lot of female (and male) friends, and I am just as bent out of shape about the way marketing is done as many other marketers (which I am), but you have to call out double-standards when you see them if you are ever going to have an intelligent debate about it. It's very easy to point out a male-dominated industry and call it all sexism, but please look at the very culture you not only built with your sisters-in-arms, but the culture you implicitly support with your dollars.

As for the picture in question. Yeah, I don't see how it sells hard-drives either.

<comment><USER3> Re: your point 2. There is a huuuuuuge difference between women dressed _in the clothes being marketed_ sending the message, "You could look like this," to other women, and women _placed on pedestals like the product being marketed_ sending the message, "Buying this hard drive is like _buying_ hot sexy naked me," to a group mainly comprised of men. Huuuuge difference.

Maybe the former is not completely kosher, but the degree is so different that it makes zero sense to accuse someone of not calling out double standards when they mention the one and not the other. Also, it is really silly to tell activists that they aren't allowed to bother you until they have sufficiently bothered everyone else to your satisfaction. Basically all you've done is ask them to go away. It is morally equivalent to saying that people are not allowed to worry about healthcare or the homeless in their own country until the Africa problem is fixed. It's dumb.

Also, plenty of feminists are complaining about the representation of women in fashion. So on top of being bad rhetoric, your objection is wrong on the facts.

> I love women and I have a lot of female (and male) friends

If there was a website called "x-ist-tropes.com", "I have X friends, my mom is an X" would be the #1 trope for almost any value of X. Just don't say it.

<comment><USER2> I can write about sexism in female-dominated industries all day, and there are most certainly sexists pigs of all stripes and all genders. The fact is that the tech industry is a super-easy target for people to jump on, and this is wrong on so many levels it is barely worth writing about anymore. I could write long screeds about being a male in marketing and other industries, but what does it accomplish but upping my view-count?

Honestly, I'm not sure what the Africa thing is about.

<comment><USER4> > Honestly, I'm not sure what the Africa thing is about.

There is an argument that people make that you're not allowed to complain about first world problems (for example, the NDAA) until we've fixed things like world hunger.

<comment><USER2> Conversely, how come America feels like it can fix the world's problems when it has so many of its own that it can't fix?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cue the usual slew of comments stating "I have a hard time seeing how this is sexism."

Really, there's no need to post these types of stories on HN anymore. The discussion always goes the same way - lots of heated argument, no open discussion, no admission of vulnerability.

Very few men are willing to question the power structure they've been brought up in. If you're born at the top, why bother to question the system?

[EDIT: yeah, I'm grumpy about this today.] [Further edit: when I first posted this my karma was 1129 - let's see where it stands at the end of the day.]

<comment><USER6> I'm new around here, and I've got to say, this thread has really let me down. All these definitions of feminism and sexism that seem to have been taught by straight white fathers to their straight white sons.

<comment><USER7> Welcome Crindy!

HN is great for some topics, but on the issue of women, get ready to cringe. In the same thread where I said I didn't want kids I was told that I would live a miserable life where I would always wonder what I was missing on top of being told that I shouldn't have a problem with not getting a certain job or making less money because the potential for maternity leave is a liability to the team (I don't disagree with the latter in theory, but I'm an individual, not a gender, so if something doesn't apply to me, I shouldn't be reprimanded for it).

There's also at least one member (with a decently large karma score) that goes around downvoting (and often times insulting) every female-looking username in these types of threads. For this reason, many women use gender-neutral names and don't bother engaging in these conversations.

Very embarrassing for the community, we need to do better.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the warm welcome, Nicole!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting here is the automatic assumption that the company should agree with the criticism and apologize. Except for the gratuitous accusation of bad faith, the response is what one might expect from someone who did not agree with the offended's characterization of the situation.

Rather than explain exactly why the display was sexist, this is mostly a combination of condescending hectoring and whining. You have no right not to be offended. If you think that the display was sexist, it is incumbent on you to explain why and not act as though it is obvious to everyone under the sun.

<comment><USER9> > If you think that the display was sexist, it is incumbent on you to explain > why and not act as though it is obvious to everyone under the sun.

Uh, when someone does something wrong, its not up to the oppressed to explain everything. This is classic victim blaming mentality that seeks to take the blame off of the company putting out sexist messaging and advertising and to place it on women at large. People have a right to be upset at this company and if you feel that people don't you are implicitly endorsing sexism.

EDIT: If you are occupying the position of privilege, you have a duty to go read about why this is sexist and to listen to the perspectives of the people affected (in this case women). You can Google, so don't sit there and demand an explanation before you are satisfied.

<comment><USER10> One of the key facts I hear about privilidge over and over, is that it is so ingrained in those who benefit from it, that they don't even realize it. So how else are they supposed to understand if you don't explain it to them? Essentially your message then becomes "You're bad but I can't tell you why, you should just know" which just seems like you're wasting their time. If it's worth their time to care, it's worth your time to explain it.

<comment><USER11> The point is that it's not the _responsibility_ of the oppressed to educate their oppressors. Obviously, it can be useful, and education is a big part of it.

But it's perfectly legitimate to say "Listen, I cannot explain this to you, but understand that what you say hurt me, and if that matters to you, you should take the time to figure that out."

It's about the asymmetry: for the privileged, this is a situation, an unusual part of their day, something that needs to be dealt with. For those who aren't, it's an ingrained part of everyday life. Your entire life could be devoted to education and there still wouldn't be enough hours in the day.

<comment><USER12> It might not be the responsibility of the oppressed to educate their oppressors, but who else is going to do it?

I agree that the "booth babe" situation is sexist (and I also happen to think it's incredibly stupid - semi-naked women are not going to make me buy your product, and I'd feel insulted by any brand that used that as a marketing tactic). But we also live in a society and, as hackers, in a sub-culture where we generally prize reason and debate over emotion. When we're debating other topics here, this reason-over-emotion thing doesn't seem to be a problem.

If someone says "I want you to do, believe or refrain from doing or believing something, and I can't explain why" then we generally ignore it. In no other context would this be seen as a reasonable line of argument.

The thing is, I don't often see people saying "this makes me feel bad ergo it's a bad thing". Most feminists have well-worked-out arguments for their positions and it's not hard for any reasonable person to accept them. I've been persuaded of many feminist arguments and this has contributed to changing how I see the world. Sure, when we're talking about arguments on Twitter then there's not a lot of space to cite references or bring in supporting arguments, but to pretend that they don't exist or aren't necessary isn't helping.

tl;dr I think the hacker community prizes rationalism and if you want to persuade them of anything you should use rational and not emotional arguments. This may be annoying but demanding that the hacker community _abandons rationalism_ isn't going to work.

<comment><USER11> > we also live in a society and, as hackers, in a sub-culture where we > generally prize reason and debate over emotion.

This is an ideal, but it's not true at all. Look at all the 'dramas' posted all over HN, does that seem like reason to you, or emotion?

Hackers are people too, as much as they try to deny it.

> who else is going to do it?

Either them themselves, or someone else. I think maybe this comes from a slight misunderstanding of what the saying means. Let's say that Bob makes a joke about rape around Alice, a survivor. Alice says "yo, that is not cool, and you're making light of a trauma I experienced in the past." Bob says "Why?" Alice says, "I don't want to explain it to you, I'm really upset right now." The saying is trying to explain that it's not _Alice_'s responsibility to make Bob see exactly where he went wrong; he can either look at the numerous resources online to explain why, think about it and puzzle it out himself, or maybe, ask Eve or someone else about it. But forcing Alice to confront something in her moment of pain is just not right.

> I think the hacker community prizes rationalism and if you want to persuade > them of anything you should use rational and not emotional arguments.

This is _exactly_ why there's so much sexism here. The rhetoric around this is extremely frustrating, especially with your charge of 'abandons rationalism.'

<comment><USER12> Do you want to be righteous or do you want to be persuasive?

If you want to be persuasive, you appeal to people's better nature. You don't tell them that their cherished ideals of rationalism and no-bullshit, all- about-the-code ethos are a crock of shit, you tell them that you believe in this too, and you want it to be this way for everyone. The people who are undermining this are the misogynist minority, who are putting their irrational hatred of women ahead of all other things. The reason we keep having to have this tedious discussion is because these people are consistently attacking and undermining our fellow female hackers, and it's about time we told them where to go with that kind of behaviour.

The problem is, you've become convinced that the community at large is full of sexism, when it really isn't. It's just that nobody has figured out how to talk about this in a way that makes sense, and unfortunately arguments like yours are counter-productive (which is why people are arguing with you, which has the depressing effect of making you think that the community must be full of sexism, and the cycle goes on).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One point nobody seems to have touched on: men should be just as pissed off about the "booth babe" thing as women. A company using this tactic is basically telling the straight men at a conference to think with their dicks, not their brains.

It's taking a product that could only exist through cultivating the higher functions of the human mind, and selling it by appealing to our basest lizard- brain instincts. It'd be like marketing a product by having two gladiators fighting to death in front of the booth. Impressive, but a step backwards for the species.

And yes, it's totally degrading to women as well. Even if the models involved were willing/wanted to participate.

</comment><comment><USER14> Aaaand, cue the throng of straight, white, upper middle class males, who'll post a hundred aggressive comments like "stop being oversensitive".

<comment><USER15> As opposed to these types of comments that attempt to preempt and invalidate the viewpoints of straight, white, upper middle class males because every single one of them obviously can't think objectively.

<comment><USER14> As one of those people myself, I certainly didn't mean to suggest that all straight white males are oppressors, but rather quite the opposite: that all or most oppressors of civil rights in this country appear to be straight white males.

<comment><USER15> Understood. Like you, I'm sure, I think I'm in the non-oppressor group. I often want to share my opinion in many of the posts about examples of tech industry sexism, but I never click the reply button. Even after taking a few minutes and thinking as logically and objectively as I can about the situation, I know that disagreeing that there was sexism involved will trigger an equally irrational mob response of downvoting my comment and accusing me of being sexist or being too privileged to even be able to recognize sexism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a great synopsis. There are so many examples of how companies have handles sexist snafus well, compounding the gaffe like this is inexcusable.

<comment><USER17> It's inexcusable from a PR standpoint. It's sad to think how much more love they could have received from the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not to say that this is not an issue, but is this sexism in tech... or sexism in marketing?

<comment><USER7> My issue here - and why I am glad it's on HN - is because we have this problem in our industry a lot. We question why more women aren't interested in it while we parade them around our conferences or include photos of them in slides barely-clothed. We make very vivid implications that they are just visual stimuli for the taking.

We can go back to that whole Violet Blue Twitter/article debacle wherein she criticized a woman legitimately working at her company's spot on the floor for being a boring-looking booth babe.

In my opinion, the only people that should be doing your advertising for you are your employees. There's no reason to bring human eye-candy to these events in the hopes that it will get a few more customers. I do like PAX's stance where if the "babe" isn't educated on your product as much as you are, she shouldn't be there. At the same time, those are "models" of the characters for your games at a gaming convention, not male or female bodies just standing in a warehouse being ogled to sell unrelated product.

<comment><USER18> I think we would be remiss if we did not consider this in a more bayesian fashion.

Say 90% of all tech companies are using sexist advertising. Big problem; clearly something wrong with tech.

But that is only part of the picture. We have to consider what companies that are not "tech companies" are doing as well. If we see similar levels of sexist nonsense from them, then we should consider the possibility that the "techiness" of tech companies is not to blame and the problem has another cause.

I think it is very likely that this incident is a manifestation of something that is wrong with marketing and corporations in general. This stuff isn't popping up because tech is involved, it is popping up because advertisers are involved and executives okay it.

I feel I should say _explicitly_ that I am _not_ saying this behavior should be permitted _"because everyone else is doing it"_. The behavior is not acceptable, but we should find the _real_ cause.

<comment><USER7> Totally agree with you there. VS is a brand almost exclusively for women, and yet all of their marketing is clearly for men. That said, lingerie/fashion do have a [sometimes scantily-clad] human component that should be represented in _some_ way (more tastefully..), whereas tech generally does not. That's my problem with this situation; there's no excuse for this company that could fall into the "but we make x, so it's kinda sorta okay" category.

<comment><USER18> Fair point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The women don't exactly look degraded. I can understand how people would be offended by this, but I don't see it being sexist. As they pointed out, both men and women were involved in putting together the booth, so it's not like this is universally offensive to women.

<comment><USER6> The problem isn't that women are being degraded. The problem is that women are being presented as bodies that can help sell laptop batteries.

<comment><USER19> Women are bodies, _among other things_. They can pose for a display for tech junk without giving up other aspects of their humanity. In other words they are not _reduced_ to being bodies, they are just choosing to express that facet of themselves. Tomorrow they'll show off some other aspect.

Edited to add: I'm good friends with a model. She does stuff like this for fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there. I wrote the post and just wanted to let you and the models know that I fully support them and their right to do whatever kind of work they want to do. I don't see them as victims and I didn't write the article to be a voice for them. I wrote it for myself, as a woman in tech. It's awkward when women are used at a tech trade show to attract men to the booth. And it's offensive when a company like HyperMac calls us crazy for pointing it out.

<comment><USER19> That's not what I got from your article. I saw HyperMac responding to the people who said the display was degrading and dehumanizing, not to the ones who "passed it around the twitter-verse, rolling our eyes and having a good laugh." This part especially seemed odd: "What HyperMac failed to realize was that all the community wanted from them was acknowledgment and support." Really? Then why did the community boycott and attack them instead of asking for acknowledgement and support?

<comment><USER20> Because they got an apathetic, arrogant, selfish, shitty response, that's why. You respond to people like shit, you get shit back. It's not rocket science.

<comment><USER19> That is exactly my point. People started jumping all over HyperMac, and HyperMac dismissed the twitter pile-on as an uninformed mob.

<comment><USER20> Which was exactly the wrong way to go about things. You don't dismiss a large demographic's concerns by trying to throw it back at them.

<comment><USER21> The alternative being... what, sitting down, listening to what they want to say, and then giving them what they want?

Bear in mind that there's nothing more frustrating that someone apparently taking you seriously and listening to you and then flat-out refusing to give you any of what you want from them. It makes you feel like you were tricked by someone who never took you seriously at all.

Fundamentally, this is about a company facing off against an angry group of people who want to force the company to action that pleases them. No CEO is going to enjoy that.

Also, if the demographic in question isn't your customer base you're likely to treat them somewhat less seriously.

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I can tell, HyperMac's customer base is people who own macs.

Miss Rep is a bay area non-profit so I'm sure they have a very large base here. And a lot of macs.

Not to mention all the techies, not at all affiliated with Miss Rep, who were tweeting about this event.

Many tweeters and posters stated specifically that they were former or potential customers who will now look elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a transparent promotion for the nonprofit mentioned in the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not, but even if it was that wouldn't be a bad thing. They need as much support as they can get because they are doing very good work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised no-one has taken note of the assertion in the title and at the end of the article, that "a good apology is better than no mistakes". Yes sure not making stupid, sexist decisions and never get all the publicity. However when a [person/group/company (delete as appropriate)] does something bigoted, even the best apology still leaves them several notches below where they started beforehand.

</comment><comment><USER24> HyperMac's response was certainly accusatory, which is probably not good for anyone.

But what if they had just said "We believe our display was not sexist, and we won't be changing anything." Is that any better than "We acknowledge that you think our booth was sexist, and we support anti-sexism in tech, but our display was not sexist and we're not going to change anything" ?

The former at least seems honest, the latter condescending.

<comment><USER17> I think both of those would be better than their actual response, which was accusatory and hostile.

<comment><USER24> Totally agree. But the article seems to say that you should always acknowledge and support, even if you disagree. And I think that could come off as dishonest in some cases.

<comment><USER17> That's a fair point. I think the article is assuming that, in these cases, the companies are in the wrong.

This is actually interesting. I think there's probably a huge opportunity to communicate with your customers in this case. There's got to be a way to engage while respectfully disagreeing.

<comment><USER21> That would depend greatly on who you are engaging with. If you're dealing with your customer base, there absolutely is. They can and should be engaged as customers.

If you're dealing with a number of people who aren't your customers and were never likely to be, then you have a different problem as the presumed customer relationship isn't there. In this scenario you're dealing with people who don't care about your product and wouldn't buy anyway but mostly want to see you knuckle under. Engaging them as customers is a fundamentally misguided decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anybody know why this post instantly dropped from page 1 to page 4?

Is it a bot or does someone really not want this conversation on the front page?

<comment><USER19> If a story gets flagged a few times it drops off the front page. If it gets flagged more it's killed. I think this is all automated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25>
      GitHub is an exceptionally popular open-source community
      where any developer can find code for pretty much
      anything. But there's a problem—some of that code contains
      extremely offensive racist, sexist, and homophobic,
      language.

      A word of caution before you proceed, because these search
      results are very NSFW.

      You don't have to look hard for to find hundreds of
      results for controversial terms of every stripe. Simply
      inputting racial slurs, misogynistic words turns up code
      in several languages—Java, HTML, Python, Ruby, and so on
      —casually riddled with things like bitch, slut, whore, and
      worse.

Source: [http://gizmodo.com/5980842/there-is-blatant-racist-and- sexis...](http://gizmodo.com/5980842/there-is-blatant-racist-and-sexist- language-in-github-code)

      GitHub is a platform geeks and techies love because it not
      only lets you manage projects but allows you to share your
      code and your projects with the outside world. This kind
      of transparency obviously has its perks as well as its
      downsides—among the biggest is the fact that now we can
      see who's coding what. And we can see exactly how mundane
      racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other kinds of prejudice
      are in the coding world on a granular level.

      GitHub sits in the center of an Open Source community that
      has been dealing with heated ongoing controversy over its
      lack of diversity. In November, BritRuby, a Manchester
      conference of Ruby on Rails coders, was canceled after
      outrage broke out online at its all-male lineup of
      panelists. Ruby coder Sean Handley took to GitHub to
      criticize the online community for bringing down the well
      -intentioned conference with "careless words."

      "Turns out, a lot of the prominent Rubyists are white guys
      and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were,
      indeed, white guys," he stated. "Making an issue out of
      that is, frankly, misguided."

      Is it an overreaction to make an issue, likewise, out of
      the words being used by GitHub coders? Perhaps. But if
      anything, Morris argues that the issue strikes at the
      heart of nerd culture itself:

      The reason we're seeing such vicious anti-equality
      bullshit in the geek community over the BritRuby situation
      and other conference type stuff is because the very
      existence of societal inequalities (against women, racial
      minorities, gender/sexual minorities) threatens the whole
      idea that hackers got where they are because they are
      super-fucking-smart.… A lot of what we call luck boils
      down to us being in groups that don't face discrimination
      and other problems.

Source: [http://www.dailydot.com/society/github-code-search-racism- se...](http://www.dailydot.com/society/github-code-search-racism-sexism- bigotry/)

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for sharing this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is a very thin line between being a feminist and being an asshole. The problem with these women, who claim to be angered by women being treated as objects is that they don't identify the real problem.

Women are attracted to men and men are attracted to women. This is basic nature and no one can change it. Using either to sell a product is not exactly sexism. For example, many deodorants use both male and female models to promote their products.

Sexism in my definition would be when given the same opportunity, when one gender is being paid or treated better than another gender, that would be sexism, because someone is being treated _unfair_.

What hypermac (the company in question) did was not wrong. They hired models who were for god's sake ready to do it. They were ready to accept money and stand nude on their product exhibit. It would have been unfair if they were treated unfair, or against their will, none of which had happened.

The real problem about women being objectified is that women are ready to be objectified - either for money or for some other form of compromise. This is the real problem. As long as such women exist, the product makers and corporations would obviously use them. So, if you want this to stop, you have to revolt when someone from your own gender (male/female) is ready to represent your gender infront of a public audience and accept to be objectified for money. Don't go after the corporation that hired them, instead ask these people why they let them objectify you, on behalf of you/your gender in the first place. This is the real problem.

I love the way that these rogue women go after men (and vice versa) only because they want an apology to feel superior and write a blog post about it.

I think it must have been a great marketing campaign for HyperMac and the guy was right - These people deserved no apology for this particular event and this particular event alone (please don't generalize this conclusion).

There's a great saying - _Any publicity is good publicity_. I hope these feminists realize this and stop fucking themselves up like this, publicly.

<comment><USER27> > The real problem about women being objectified is that women are ready to be > objectified - either for money or for some other form of compromise. This is > the real problem. As long as such women exist, the product makers and > corporations would obviously use them. So, if you want this to stop, you > have to revolt when someone from your own gender (male/female) is ready to > represent your gender infront of a public audience and accept to be > objectified for money. Don't go after the corporation that hired them, > instead ask these people why they let them objectify you, on behalf of > you/your gender in the first place. This is the real problem

Either you think objectifying women is wrong, or you don't. If you do, then it's absolutely logical to go after the people deciding to run their marketing campaign this way. You will always find people ready to do whatever if you put enough money on the table. It doesn't mean it's not wrong.

<comment><USER28> What I fail to understand is why objectification of the body is wrong, but objectification of the mind is normal, if not encouraged.

We spend _a lot_ of time trying to make individual thought into an interchangeable machine. You don't even have to dig very deep in HN to see people boasting about the benefits of a college education, or why you should drop out, in order to make yourself like just like everyone else, creating an "us vs them" mentality. Then we put the most attractive minds on display for all to see. _"Buy this and you can be smart and successful just like me!"_

Exploiting a woman to display her body to sell a laptop battery is no more wrong than exploiting a woman to use her mind to create the battery in the first place. In either case, we are not appreciating the person for being a person, just an object that gets the job done.

Women are not free of problems because of their gender, but this case seems entirely about a non-sensical shame of the human body.

<comment><USER27> Interesting analogy. This actually made me pause and think for a while.

However, I think it is ultimately flawed. The message here is clearly targeted at the reptilian part of heterosexual male brains: buying this battery is like buying this woman to bed her. Straightforward and effective.

Saying "do this and be smart just like me" works in a completely different way. It does reduce people to one dimension: their success, while ignoring their appreciation for the finer points of Zoroastrianism. But I would not call it exploitative. You put forward a positive quality (business skill, programming chops, whatever) and you encourage people to take action and _work_ to acquire it. This is a fairly positive message.

I would say also that paying a woman to create a battery (provided the compensation is fair) is not exploitation. In this context, we are not talking about economic exploitation, but exploitation of heterosexual male lust in ways which send out the message that women are nothing better than sex toys.

To every straight, at least moderately attractive male who have trouble understanding how this can be an issue, I suggest to challenge yourselves and go out to a gay night club on a Friday night. If anything, this should be an interesting experience, and may help you understand some things which can make women uncomfortable.

<comment><USER28> You definitely make some great points. I do, however, wonder why you consider business skills a positive quality, but being a sex toy a negative quality? Neither is inherently good or inherently bad.

I expect it is because the woman is viewed as a sex toy without getting to choose to be one? However, the stereotype about a man's wallet seems to play into the same idea. A man who looks wealthy is going to be assumed to be a smart businessman, even if he wishes to not be seen that way.

I admit that I still don't fully understand, and maybe it is impossible for me to fully do so, but I'm glad we can talk openly about it to learn more.

\- " _I suggest to challenge yourselves and go out to a gay night club on a Friday night._ "

I have actually done this and found it to be a fun and positive experience. Nothing creepy or uncomfortable about it. I guess I am, perhaps, too ugly to have experienced what you are talking about?

<comment><USER27> > You definitely make some great points. I do, however, wonder why you > consider business skills a positive quality, but being a sex toy a negative > quality? Neither is inherently good or inherently bad. > > I expect it is > because the woman is viewed as a sex toy without getting to choose to be > one? However, the stereotype about a man's wallet seems to play into the > same idea. A man who looks wealthy is going to be assumed to be a smart > businessman, even if he wishes to not be seen that way.

But society does not see businessmen in the same light as sex toys. At all.

The problem is that we've been living in a patriarcal society for a long, long while. Sending the message "women are sex toys" also means "women are sex toys, _nothing more_ \- they are here for _your_ enjoyment". It's a message that they are not in a position of power, contrary to the businessman. They are not equal.

> I have actually done this and found it to be a fun and positive experience. > Nothing creepy or uncomfortable about it. I guess I am, perhaps, too ugly to > have experienced what you are talking about?

It's a bit difficult to explain. Imagine suddenly that somebody sees you as just a piece of meat, ready to be consumed and thrown out afterward. This is not a pleasant feeling. And congrats for challenging yourself!

<comment><USER28> So would you say the root problem is our puritan shame of sex, as I suggested earlier? If a sexual person was held in the same regard as a business person, wouldn't that be something to strive towards, not shy away from?

" _It's a bit difficult to explain. Imagine suddenly that somebody sees you as just a piece of meat, ready to be consumed and thrown out afterward. This is not a pleasant feeling._ "

See, I wish people would value me for my body in that way. It is the constant having to prove myself with my mind, instead, that made me think of the original comparison. Without being able to fully understand what you are feeling, it seems like it could be the same thing in many ways – ultimately rejecting what you have and seeking what you don't have.

<comment><USER27> > So would you say the root problem is our puritan shame of sex, as I > suggested earlier? If a sexual person was held in the same regard as a > business person, wouldn't that be something to strive towards, not shy away > from?

Well, it already is... for men. A man with many sexual partners is looked favourably upon. A woman doing the same is called a slut. There is a gender imbalance built into our society, and until such time as a majority of men recognize it, it will keep being there. But it is a question of equality and power more than sexuality. Just as if you systematically represented male CEOs and female secretaries in the media. This wouldn't be about sex, but would be equally problematic.

> See, I wish people would value me for my body in that way. It is the > constant having to prove myself with my mind that made me think of the > original comparison. Without being able to fully understand what you are > feeling, it seems like it could be the same thing in many ways – ultimately > rejecting what you have and seeking what you don't have.

You have a point here. I'd say the problem is treating people as the means to an end - whether as sex toys, problem-solving machines or plain old cannon fodder.

<comment><USER28> " _I'd say the problem is treating people as the means to an end - whether as sex toys, problem-solving machines or plain old cannon fodder._ "

I don't know if I can speak for all men, but personally, having someone to want you to do something for them is where self-worth is derived. Whether someone wants to have sex, or a business wants to hire you for you services, it feels good to be wanted. That seems like the exact opposite of a problem, from my unique perspective. And maybe it is foolish to have those feelings, but it largely outside of my control. Assuming you represent the prevailing views of most women, and the gender divide on this is real, it is clear to see how we got here.

Interestingly, I've noticed this pattern even outside of gender differences. People generally push on other people what they want for themselves, male and female. Even my aforementioned college example is a great one here. Someone who wants to go to college will think everyone should go to college and push that idea upon them, even if it is not the wishes of someone else. I don't know where you even begin to fix that; it seems to be the human condition.

<comment><USER27> > I don't know if I can speak for all men, but personally, having someone to > want you to do something for them is where self-worth is derived. Whether > someone wants to have sex, or a business wants to hire you for you services, > it feels good to be wanted. That seems like the exact opposite of a problem, > from my unique perspective. And maybe it is foolish to have those feelings, > but it largely outside of my control. Assuming you represent the prevailing > views of most women, and the gender divide on this is real, it is clear to > see how we got here.

The difference is whether you are treated as valueable or as a commodity. In both cases, you can be made to feel "wanted" but completely different ways.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google is killing another chat service - pi-squared https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/12446824 <comment><AUTHOR> Yeah not surprised. Google - trillion dollar company can't seem to field a coherent chat solution full stop.

Corporate side - google will always provide something that is vaguely functional under whatever name/brand they call it this month

Personal side - I'll use whatsapp/fb messenger cause that's stable. Everyone's on it too...because surprise it's not a complete shitshow.

As a whole I've given up on google fielding usable chat. Even sending a screenshot over hangouts doesn't work depending on which of the 4 clients (browser extension, cell, browser separate and gmail integrated) you're on to this day. At one point the official corporate solution rolled out to 10s of thousands of people - I kid you not - was a hacked together save it on drive, share folder silently & send link over hangouts, click on link & open in google drive to display picture.

How does a company manage to ship something as sophisticated as GCP but can't get this right? Clearly they're not incompetent so wtf is going on there?

</comment><comment><USER2> Interestingly, this feature is only two years old.

Can you think of another major social networking service without Direct Messaging of some kind?

Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Flickr, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pintrest, and the list goes on, they all have DM functionality.

That sort of choice is disappointing because it's always nice to be able to contact content creators. Without direct messaging it's more like cable television where you're just there to watch and feedback isn't welcome.

Perhaps that's the idea here - YouTube will be the cable television of the Internet era. Obscure channels aren't recommended by the algorithm and the channels YouTube deems most profitable will be suggested.

<comment><USER3> Spotify used to have a direct message feature, but discontinued it.

<comment><USER4> I really dislike the absence of DMs on Spotify. It makes the whole social aspect of Spotify seem so lacking, while music is an inherently social thing for me. I would love to use Spotify chat to work on playlists, chat about albums, etc.

<comment><USER5> I don't use Spotify, and maybe I'm just old, but I hate every platform having their own way to communicate. Especially when I want to look up something later I have to search in 4 different places and hope their search isn't terrible. There was one short period of time where Gaim/Pidgin/Adium worked.

I understand the benefits, but I feel like the main reason these are viable is because email was ruined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As I've said many times before, I only use Google services without alternatives. Fortunate, most of their stuff has even better alternatives today. For example, video chat is times worse than Microsoft Teams. Outlook is better than Gmail already. Airtable and Coda - better than Google Sheets. And so on. Their cloud computing offering is also lagging behind. In general, does Google do anything decently outside of hardware and spying on people and selling them out?!</comment>


PingCAP Talent Plan: Courses on writing distributed systems in Go and Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pingcap/talent-plan <comment><USER2> On a related topic, what are other's favorite learning resources for applied distributed systems?

<comment> dis-sys [https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/)

<comment><USER3> How is one expected to use this site? Are there video lectures to follow along?

<comment><USER4> The schedule page has links to the lectures and assignments. [https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html) A quick look didn't didn't reveal any links to videos of lectures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> just use Erlang/BEAM[0]. I love Go but it's a poor[1] tool for building truly resilient distributed systems. the workaround suggested by F Campoy seems to be to wrap K8 around go to make it more like BEAM (see second video below ...)

[0] Erik Stenman - BEAM: What Makes Erlang BEAM - Code Mesh 2017 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FonRzASOkZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FonRzASOkZE)

[1] GOTO 2018 • The Robustness of Go • Francesc Campoy [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScE9TnoWltA&t=1437s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScE9TnoWltA&t=1437s)

</comment><comment><USER6> So many languages to learn and so little time

<comment><USER7> FOMO is hard to avoid, but try to go easy on yourself. Ultimately, they're just programming languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really fascinated that this material and my book--well one chapter of it--both cover implementing the Bitcast storage backend. It looks like I picked my example projects well :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I would be curious to know if this is the best way to learn a technical skill using a course in github?

Are there other variations of using github for a course?

</comment><comment><USER9> Links in README of the go repo are broken, is rust your primary language?

</comment><comment><USER10> I've only looked at the first project in test-plan/rust, but it clearly contradicts the description in project.md. It should be virtually empty, with only tests and the student is supposed to write all the code needed for the tests to pass. But it actually contains all the needed code, it compiles and all tests are green. I don't quite get it, what's the "learning" part? Just looking at the code and trying to understand it?</comment>


Was Gmail a solution in search of a problem? - <AUTHOR> I was listening to Paul Buchheit about the origin of Gmail. He mentioned that he built the initial version by indexing his emails using Google's search engine and gave it to his colleagues. This seems to contradict 2 advice that YC partners often give:
1. Looks like, Gmail was built to see where all the Google's search engine could be useful i.e. solution in search of a problem.
2. He tested it with his colleagues, whose feedback might be biased, because they already believed in their search engine.
Seems like a terrible way to validate a product idea. How did he succeed? <comment><USER2> I registered GMail immediately, because it offered 1GB storage, way more than other venders at the time. I seldom use its search, even today. Today, the biggest value of gmail for me is its spam filter. similarly, I immediately switched from yahoo to google when google came out, but it wasn't because I felt google's results were more relevant. I have never compared the results. it was because google's ui was very clean and fast. I also couldn't understand the value of dropbox given box.com, but again, I registered for the free storage.

I think the intention of the "find a problem" suggestion is to avoid no demand, but I too think it might be too conservative and I can't map many successful startups to it well, like instagram, Minecraft and twitter. And I doubt their founders thought about solving a problem when they started their project.

A while back, I read on HN an article saying that there are 2 types of good ideas, one solves a problem, the other creates new opportunities. I kinda agree. Imagine we went back to an ancient time and asked people if they need anything like TV for entertainment, I guess the answer would be no, because TV hadn't been part of their life. Without it, they had other forms of entertainment to kill the time. If we went to 1900 and asked if people need personal cars. They would probably say no because their work and social network were local. But personal cars enabled new opportunities, people can now commute farther for better job and extend their network.

I guess if someone asks us today if we have a problem with not being able to do space travel. We would say no. But future people may think otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER3> The world apparently has a demand for an email service that is free, easy to use, secure, or whatever other attribute that makes hundreds of millions of people choose to use Gmail compared to any other client (SquirrelMail) or service (Yahoo).

I'm sure Google's market influence had something to do with Gmail's success though.

</comment><comment><USER4> Huh? I don't even understand this question on its face.

There was huge demand at the time Gmail was released for easy email with large quotas. Good text search was nice, but it was the easy email interface and large quotas that made a real impact.</comment>


15B More Reasons to Worry About Facebook (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20070925/15-billion-more-reasons-to-worry-about-facebook/ <comment><USER2> In 2007, I was just graduating from Stanford and vividly remember how my classmates perceived Facebook: they pretty much echoed Swisher's sentiment in the article. With the exception of a couple of really smart folks who wanted to "own" a significant part of yet-to-be-built Facebook, the most accomplished CS grads were joining Google in droves (Google was hot and on a hiring binge). Problems are Google seemed grander and more challenging and less toy-ish.

Microsoft was another popular destination at Stanford at the time. If Facebook was toy-ish and Google was cool, Microsoft was "respected". Many deemed Microsoft to be the McKinsey of tech: spend a couple of years there, build their resume and join or start a start-up. I even knew someone who took a job at Yahoo! over one at Facebook (Needless to say, most everyone who had offers from either Google or Microsoft chose them over Facebook).

Hindsight is 20/20 =)

<comment><USER3> Someone once told me that he joined Facebook before it surpassed MySpace. Had he stayed and waited for his stocks to vest, he would make serious bank. Like, life changing amount of money. Instead, he joined another company before any of it vested and well...

Hindsight is 20/20 but missing out on that would haunt me.

<comment><USER4> Every other day there's a stock somewhere around the world going up 1000%, because of a miraculous biomedical or geological discovery, or invention, and life changing amounts of money could be missed by not borrowing a personal loan from the bank and putting it all on that stock. If someone had the foresight to know what was going to happen, they would make bank, and occasionally someone did.

Everyday we're missing out.

If your friend stayed and Facebook had fallen through and your friend missed three pay checks it would haunt him against working at startups too...

<comment><USER5> > life changing amounts of money could be missed by not borrowing a personal > loan from the bank and putting it all on that stock

But this is different from already being employed at that company and not seeing the potential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm going to withhold my judgment on the matter until after the next market crash. I think it's impossible to judge the value of anything in this messed up 0%-interest economy. Crazy money is going around and inflating not just valuations, but revenue, profit margins, etc.

Everyone is looking at Price/Earnings (P/E) ratios (which are currently quite bad, but not horrible) and are completely ignoring the fact that earnings themselves might be inflated by the low interest environment. Maybe if interest rates were higher, companies wouldn't spend anywhere near as much on Facebook advertising.

With that said, I think the current economic environment is more like 'froth' than a 'bubble'. A bubble can only get so big before it pops - Froth can keep building up to a considerable volume before it starts to deflate.

Economy is a bit like ecology - If you raise the temperature (interest rates) by 5 degrees (5%), you could end up wiping out many species (companies) because of their complex interdependencies.

<comment><USER7> I agree with this, but for one thing. What makes you think interest rates will rise?

Governments set interest rates to combat inflation, caused by wage or price increase. However, we've had 0 rates for 7 years, and QE to combat deflation.

If you believe (as I do) that the value of the worker is decreasing with time (due to substitutability with technology), it kind of stands to reason that we're not going to see much wage inflation anymore.. doesn't it?

Or, is there another kind of inflation I haven't considered?

<comment><USER6> I think the economic value of people overall will decrease (a lot will lose their jobs) but the value of workers (increasingly specialized ones which cannot be replaced by machines) will keep increasing (until they too become replaceable).

I think the value of all physical assets will decrease dramatically (due to constant increases in economic productivity). So in effect, those who manage to hold on to their jobs for the longest will be able to accumulate the most wealth in the end.

...Then in an effort to optimize energy consumption, machines will genetically engineer us to require fewer and fewer resources. Until we become amoeba.

<comment><USER7> Yeah I think I basically agree. I'm not sure about physical assets though. The way to price those is to PV the future cash flows. However, if interest rates are zero, PVs are infinite.. so we need a different approach. Or, if we continue to use PV, then as rates get lower, physical assets increase in price.

But yeah, I'm pretty sure the amoeba will have zero-rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love reading these old articles. Here's another fun one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719975)

<comment><USER9> that was a good one - at some point in that thread someone bet him 10K he was wrong - and offered to put the money in escrow - i wonder if it ever happened

<comment><USER10> it would have ended 2 months ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember telling people only a few years ago that I felt Facebook was over- valued.

It's made it's way to the top, and that still bothers me. The lack of decent federated social networking protocols has left the world in the hands of mega- sites.

<comment><USER12> What's an example of a half decent federated social networking protocol? Basically, I don't know what you mean . . .

<comment><USER13> There isn't one because it doesn't make sense. As facebook has proven, people generally want one place that gives them the stuff they indicate they want to see. A federated system means more work for the average person.

I think federated systems generally (even governmental) aren't sustainable because they require too much effort from individual users for them to remain good - so they trend toward single or few "owners."

<comment><USER14> How about Wordpress? Powers 20% of websites.

<comment><USER15> It might power 20% of all domains, but that doesn't equate to 20% of mindshare. Individual Facebook pages should be counted individually in this context.

Wordpress also is not really a federated system, because the individual sites are not interconnected.

<comment><USER16> I want to be very snarky with an unnecessary description of a hyperlink... another day.

Wordpress sites _are_ to a degree a federated protocol beyond hypertext: [https://make.wordpress.org/support/user-manual/building- your...](https://make.wordpress.org/support/user-manual/building-your- wordpress-community/trackbacks-and-pingbacks/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In fact it was allthingsD that failed in 2013. This type of news is just hyperbole... The media companies strive on conflict and will create it to get eyeballs. Now that's a Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER18> I recently tried to go to their site. It auto-corrected to allthongsd.com, which thankfully is still unregistered ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hindsight is 20/20\. I vividly remember how surprised I was when Yurii Milner's DST invested in it on then-giant valuation; I just thought that Facebook has run out of local fools and had to find a sucker from across the ocean.

The magnitude of my stupidity at that moment is something I never want to forget.

<comment><USER20> ...and Kim Kardashian has more followers on Twitter than Bill Gates and all the Presidential Candidates from both sides of the aisle put together.

So what? What does that say about society or the exec\brands that prop her up? There is no dearth of misguided smart people in the world doing dumb shit.

Facebook was stupid in 2007. Imho it is stupid today. People worry about AI causing unpredictable damage to society. I worry about Facebook doing it much before AI does.

It is a social experiment that should have been run inside the safe confines of a social science lab. Running social experiments on the real world, at this scale just because the tech makes it possible, and advertisers fund it is like watching the plot of Jurassic Park play out.

Maybe a quote from there is apt - "Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought."

Kara Swisher's advice still stands.

<comment><USER19> Whether it's stupid or not is irrelevant. People don't give their money to funds to do intellectual things with it. People (including you and me) give their money to funds to turn a profit.

DST's investment in Facebook turned out a great profit. The general rant about the "state of society" and Kim Kardashian is kinda irrelevant to this conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ah, 2007, when casually mocking nerds was still cool, before they became the new billionaire class. How quickly pundits forget how they were bullies.

</comment><comment><USER14> I joined Facebook back in 2005 or 2006 I think. Was in the first million people. I remember thinking in 2006 what I will record for YouTube. But that was too much hassle. In 2008 the F8 conference the Platform was launched and I was hooked. Then in 2008 the iPhone came out and the newly formed Andreessen Horowitz offered money to anyone with an app. Remember those days?

</comment><comment><USER22> It's the easiest thing in the world to shake your head and laugh at "crazy" valuations. It's incredibly tired at this point, maybe it was less so in 2007, but it's not an interesting activity in my opinion. And of course there's never any pressure to walk any of it back, this is the Internet, down the memory hole it goes.

Talking about the structural reasons for the crazy valuations may be slightly more stimulating.</comment>


Book giveaway on Amazon only today: Startupedia (please review if you can) - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O98EIFW

<comment><USER2> Seems a little lite-on, but it's a good start =) Maybe you can grow it (by using continuous deployment perhaps ;)

Good job getting something out there!</comment>


The technology side of AOL's HuffPo purchase - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20030861-36.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheSocial

<comment><USER2> Hahaha, she gives huffpo guff for misleading headlines, in an article with a misleading headline.</comment>


Amazon has eaten our beloved Book Depository - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/09/amazon-book-depository-takeover

<comment><USER2> I have been buying books online for pretty much as long as it has been possible to do so, and I have never even heard of Book Depository.

That'll be why Amazon is buying them and not the other way 'round. And presumably, the founders who worked hard to build up the business are delighted with the pay out. The only people not to be happy it seems are journos with an overblown sense of paranoia about "corporations".</comment>


Inside the Googleplex - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9719610

<comment><USER2> Jeremy Allison wrote something similar last year:

 _I do worry about how things will be at Google when the money gets tight. And the money always gets tight. I've played the role of Banquo's ghost at enough Silicon Valley startup feasts to know how these stories can end._

(<http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/193>)

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't know if anyone has seen this, but this was one of my favorite blogs for awhile: <http://xooglers.blogspot.com/>

A lot of illuminating stories from the early days of Google.

If this link ever starts working, it should display posts chronologically (which I strongly recommend): <http://sitereservation.com/xooglers/>

</comment><comment><USER4> scary.</comment>


The Holy Crap Reaction to Competition - <AUTHOR> http://www.instigatorblog.com/the-holy-crap-reaction-to-competition/2007/06/25/ <comment><USER2> Haven't seen a lot written on this. It's so true. I also agree competition can help you focus yourself. It can provide a valuable reference for drawing lines in the sand.

Above all, what always comforts me is knowing that most companies half-ass a lot of stuff or get screwed up in some way. Bill Gates remarked how refreshing Steve Jobs is as competition: at least he sticks around, unlike the hordes of competitors he's faced.

Companies that really are ready to fight to the death are extremely rare. If you're one of them it doesn't matter how smart or rich the competition is, they should be scared of you.

</comment><comment><USER3> An interesting essay on competition - <http://software.ericsink.com/Choose_Your_Competition.html>

All of Eric Sink's essays are valuable to a founder, at least as food for thought.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great entry. I know this "holy crap" feeling. --Ultimately, every company has competition --Here's my take: what's good about competition is knowing there are customers demanding the product or service I offer. The exciting _gasp_ I feel is trusting in my intention to serve and satisfy all those customers to become number one.</comment>


JSON5 – JSON for the ES5 Era - <AUTHOR> http://json5.org/ <comment><USER2> This may be a bit too late. I hope people adopt it, but really, after avoiding other formats for a while I have to admit - json is not human read/write-able. It's a serialisation format, a bit more friendly and simpler than xml.

I'll take yaml for config files any day instead. Json being a valid yaml is also good, because it makes migration trivial.

</comment><comment><USER3> > escape sequences aren't yet supported

Does this mean you can't even include a quote character in a string? If so this is kind of useless so far.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In my view, better than Hjson [0] as any JSON is a valid JSON5 unlike with Hjson [0], CSON [1], and the likes.

[0]: [http://hjson.org/](http://hjson.org/)

[1]: [https://github.com/bevry/cson](https://github.com/bevry/cson)

<comment> chris-at You got that wrong. Any JSON is also valid Hjson.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure how I got that wrong, but, yeah, you're right! I still prefer JSON5 for being ECMAScript-compliant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I've never been bothered by any of the issues solved here. On the other hand, I miss dates and datetimes everyday...

<comment><AUTHOR> There's another format by googlers - Jsonnet [0], but it's really too much, and it's a further departure from common sense - they picked "local" vs "let" and came up with their own Standard Library instead of using a subset of ECMAScript.

[0]: [http://jsonnet.org/](http://jsonnet.org/)</comment></comment>


Why bots won't replace apps anytime soon - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/25/why-bots-wont-replace-apps-better-apps-will-replace-apps/ <comment><USER2> It's a venturebeat repost of [http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont- replace-apps....](http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace- apps.html)

Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11557166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11557166)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Apps like MailTime even promise to save us from our emails by turning them > into chats.

I've been wondering why this wasn't done sooner.</comment>


Disney+ may not be the Netflix killer everyone thought it would be - <AUTHOR> https://bgr.com/2020/02/26/disney-plus-vs-netflix-subscribers-declining/ <comment><USER2> Nothing on Disney+ from the extensive catalog they own of any movies rated over PG-13. (think 20th Century Fox and Touchstone pictures - Alien, Die Hard, Exorcist, Highlander, The Omen... and even of those that are PG, many also not available, like original Planet of the Apes series, etc.) I have a free 1-yr promo tie-in membership and it's ok, but I will not be continuing when it expires. If they had all those other films from the catalogs they own I would much more likely pay them.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a subscriber of Disney+, I can say that it would be much more attractive if it included past and current content of ABC.</comment>


Announcing iOS and Android App Testing on Sauce - <AUTHOR> http://sauceio.com/index.php/2013/05/announcing-native-ios-and-android-mobile-testing-on-sauce/

<comment><USER2> Google Test Automation Conference talk on Appium if you're interested:

[https://developers.google.com/google-test-automation- confere...](https://developers.google.com/google-test-automation- conference/2013/presentations#Day2Presentation4)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sooo..what's new?</comment>


Sweden's Self-Inflicted Nightmare - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.com/2015/11/14/opinion/swedens-self-inflicted-nightmare.html <comment><USER2> It's pretty natural to argue that there are "no limits" to the number of refugees/asylum seekers we can accept. After all we are obliged by international conventions to process asylum applications for people on our doorstep. A country that argues that their borders are closed, or that only X thousand refugees will be allowed to seek asylum, are most likely breaching international conventions, or never signed them in the first place.

What the authorities are saying now is basically that we'll honor our obligations but if you come here now the queue for processing will be many months and you have to sleep outside and it's _Sweden_ so you don't sleep outside in winter. Essentially they are trying to achieve two things: raise awareness in surrounding countries that they too need to help, and also signal to refugees that Sweden might not be the best idea this winter.

I'm not sure what "self inflicted" refers to, I think more countries than us have signed these conventions. What we have had is a pretty liberal non- refugee immigration. Naturally that has to be cut back now, to accomodate refugees.

I heard the US were debating 10k Syrian refugees. To put that in perspective, 10k came to Sweden this week.

<comment><USER3> The US has absorbed tens of millions of immigrants since 1980 (ten million from Mexico alone since then). While it's a perfectly fine point you're making regarding Syrian refugees, that has to rationally be balanced in the context of the vast scale of immigration the US is already handling.

By comparison, Sweden's total population has increased by less than two million in 50 years. The US takes in that many legal immigrants every two years.

<comment><USER2> I think we need to compare at the correct scales: At the current rate Sweden is seeing 1 refugee per 1000 inhabitants per week. To put that in US terms would be 1.5 million _per month_.

Also I'm only talking about refugees, not immigration in general. Sweden has a lot of immigration from neighboring countries, but that doesn't really strain the system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For once a reasonable article about Sweden.

I doubt many of my fellow Swedes will agree, but those to blame in all this are the Sweden Democrats.

By having a party of thuggish clowns (a point that cannot be argued) monopolize a single issue like immigration and making it impossible for real political parties to take steps in a more restrictive direction they have achieved exactly the opposite of what they wanted.

The only joy from all this is that they now have to live in their own mess.

<comment><USER5> From what I have read it used to be very difficult to have a reasonable debate about restrictions without being labeled as a right wing racist.

It seems to me that when moderates didn't dare to speak in public, the voters had only one choice. They may not agree with everything, but when it is the only major party that wants restrictions they have no choice.

<comment><USER4> Had the Sweden Democrats not existed the proper parties would have had the full spectrum of positions to chose from.

By being so reprehensible the Sweden Democrats gave the other parties no choice but to dismiss them entirely.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure your position is logically sound. The Sweden Democrats used not to exist once, and evidently the existing political parties didn't cater to the right-wing spectrum of the popultion, which is why an ultra-right-wing party has been able to emerge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Significant immigration is inherently in conflict with a big welfare state. You can't have both, unless you're willing to lower the standard of living of everyone to do it, or you have fast economic growth. Citizens of Europe's big welfare states are going to continue to disapprove accordingly, as witnessed by the way Germans are turning on Merkel or Denmark's move right, or Sweden taking action to stop the inflow. Or, say you're Finland, and you're teetering on a slight economic depression [1][2], with zero growth for a decade, bad unemployment, and rapidly rising poverty to go with inbound austerity measures to control the budget deficit - do you take in huge numbers of immigrants? How do you pay for it?

Germany is supposed to be Europe's economic engine - their GDP is at 2008 levels, they're struggling to just show any positive growth, while their poverty levels are the highest since re-unification. How do you convince your citizens to take in a million or more refugees at a time like that? It's a tough sell.

[1] [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/35c8560c-c62f-11e4-add0-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/35c8560c-c62f-11e4-add0-00144feab7de.html)

[2] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/12001895/Finlands- depress...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/12001895/Finlands-depression- is-the-final-indictment-of-Europes-monetary-union.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> If "neo-fascist" continues to be used to describe people who are willing to help foreigners but are not happy to see their own countries completely transformed at the societal level, more and more of us will become comfortable with that label.

<comment><USER8> Even if Swedish Democrat politicians (like the article states) claim that "it's better to help people where they are than to bring them here", their budget proposition included a 47 billion SEK (about 470 million USD) reduction of international aid under a 4 year period. For reference, the total international aids budget for 2015 is 29.5 billion SEK. Nothing they have proposed have made any indications that they have any intentions to provide help to those in need who happen to be far away.

It's still true that the debate here is extremely infected and polarized, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is what happens when you just let anyone with an asylum claim into your country and don't have a plan for how to handle the actual numbers of people.

What ticks me off the most is that at least the german gov't has known about this problem since 2012 ([https://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Anlagen/DE/Downloads/Infothek...](https://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Anlagen/DE/Downloads/Infothek/Statistik/Asyl/statistik- anlage-teil-4-aktuelle-zahlen-zu-asyl.pdf?__blob=publicationFile)) and have sat around doing nothing to prepare. We could have actually had a system in place to integrate these people, get them jobs, quickly process those with/without ligitimate claims, etc, but no.

I live in germany and listen to a lot of sveriges radio news, so I feel I have a pretty good view of how things are in sweden and germany right now. In sweden, its so bad some refugees had to sleep outside a couple of days ago, and this is with many already sleeping inside immigrations offices, or buses driving in to let them sleep in, etc. Due to germanys size and relative economic prosperty I think it will take significantly longer to weigh as heavily on the system, but estimated costs for this year for 800k refugees were about 6 billion a while back (roughly 1/6 of anual Hartz IV costs) [http://www.br.de/nachrichten/fluechtlinge-asylbewerber- koste...](http://www.br.de/nachrichten/fluechtlinge-asylbewerber- kosten-100.html).

Bottom line, if there is not an EU wide solution to this problem it will break Germany and Sweden unless they change policy - for sweden it needs to be ASAP. Since A) there is no end of warfare and legitimate asylum claims in sight in the near east and africa which means the current influx will undoubtedly continue over the next decade B) Integration will be near impossible with these kinds of numbers producing even more socio-economic problems which you'd think germany would have learned from with its turkish workers problems ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turks_in_Germany#Integration_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turks_in_Germany#Integration_issues)) ...

Practicaly speaking, it doesn't look like any other eu countries want to buckle up and take the economic weight of all these people who will burden their welfare systems so basically Germany and Sweden will be forced to change policy, its just a question of how bad the situation gets before they enact a change in policy.

<comment><USER6> > Bottom line, if there is not an EU wide solution to this problem it will > break Germany and Sweden unless they change policy

I think it's plausibly that by pursuing their open-door policies, Germany and Sweeden also encouraged the flow of immigrants into the EU. Assuming this is true, isn't it a bit unfair now to unload that burden to other EU countries that were more realistic from the start? Basically, Germany and Sweden were to only ones to accumulate moral capital, but now they expect other countries to share the financial burden.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The further away a country is from the Southern/Eastern border of the EU the better the whole 'refugees should stay in the country where they arrive' deal looked to them when they signed up for it.

The problem is that the 'edge' countries where refugees tend to arrive are in no way capable of dealing with the flood and at the same time don't have the funds, the manpower, the will or the organization in place to deliver on this promise. These countries also tend to have the most porous borders.

Germany is in much the same situation by the way.

</comment><comment><USER11> The thing is that EU countries would be fine if they all imposed "no limits". But selfishness has lead most EU countries to simply reject taking migrants entirely, leaving the few that _do_ have "no limits" overwhelmed.

<comment><USER6> The alternative explanation is, selfishness has led Sweden and Germany to proclaim their "no limits" policies in order to accumulate "moral capital". This resulted in a huge increase in the flow of asylium seekers, but now these countries want the rest of the EU to share the burden of their failed policies.</comment></comment>


Microsoft Teams Available for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads <comment><USER2> Not invented here syndrome at it again, this time induced by Slack. I don't even use this thing at work on Windows machines.</comment>


Australian Gag Order Stokes Global Debate on Secrecy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/world/australia/australia-gag-order-court.html <comment><USER2> Australian newspapers are actually getting a bit creative in relation to this case due to the profile of the person.

On the day of the conviction, they released online articles about "suppression orders".

\-----

* [https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/why-the-media-is...](https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/why-the-media-is-unable-to-report-on-a-case-that-has-generated-huge-interest-online-20181212-p50lta.html)

* [https://outline.com/jVdYJr](https://outline.com/jVdYJr)

# Why the media is unable to report on a case that has generated huge interest online #

> A very high-profile figure was convicted on Tuesday of a serious crime, but > we are unable to report their identity due to a suppression order.

> The person, whose case has attracted significant media attention, was > convicted on the second attempt, after the jury in an earlier trial was > unable to reach a verdict. They will be remanded when they return to court > in February for sentencing.

\-----

The article then goes on about suppression orders and how Google Trends for the person's name increased on the day of the trial.

So anyone who is internet-savvy would be able to figure out who it was.

<comment><USER3> >> _A very high-profile figure was convicted on Tuesday of a serious crime, but we are unable to report their identity due to a suppression order._

Pell Online has the name, I think :) .

So stupid these orders, trying to change the truth.

<comment><USER4> > So stupid these orders, trying to change the truth.

These euphemisms are getting ridiculous. The person is cardinal George Pell, who has been convicted of sexual abuse (after an unanimous guilty verdict by the jury). He is the highest ranking member of the Catholic Church ever to be convicted as a sex offender.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pell is involved in two separate trials. Until the second trial is completed, the gag suppresses news on the verdict in the first trial.

Without the gag, it's very unlikely that it would possible to obtain a conviction against Pell in the second trial.

Once the second trial is over, both verdicts are able to be discussed and circulated as news.

<comment><USER6> Something I'm clueless about, but why aren't jurors allowed to know prior convictions? That seems like highly relevant information. If a person has robbed ten banks before why not tell the jury in the trial for the eleventh?

Sure if a person had a multitude of driving convictions in a child abuse case I can understand the court denying it as irrelevant, but that isn't what's happening here.

<comment><USER7> This question gets asked a lot.

Prior criminal history isn't relevant at all to a criminal trial. Just because he robbed 10 banks before doesn't mean he robbed _this_ one. It's prejudicial and really problematic any time a repeat offender is on trial-- the mentality becomes "well, the evidence is weak and nobody saw him do it, but he must be guilty...he's a criminal!"

Convictions are supposed to be made after considering the facts of the case as presented, not speculation based on past behavior.

<comment><USER8> I totally agree with your point and I'm setting a dangerous precedent by arguing the point I'm going to argue for in a second. Please note that I am fully against what I'm going to argue now but I'm going to argue it for the sake of playing the devil's advocate.

That being said ...

>Convictions are supposed to be made after considering the facts of the case as presente

The fact that someone robbed 10 banks is a fact. You're literally witholding (relevant) facts from the case.

How is a person's history not a fact? I mean, the robbery happened in the past, which is also a fact. How are the two different.

So we rob a bank at T=10, Imagine that person robbed a bank at T=1, not relevant, what if person robbed a bank at T=2, T=3, .. etc. Even if we rob a bank at T=9.999... it is suddenly not relevant anyore?

I realize the absurdity of the point I'm making but how is previous crime not a valid feature? If we train a machine learning algorithm to predict guilty/not guilty (I'm going into dangerous territory here, I realize this) and the training set contains criminals that are repeat offenders, wouldn't "repeat offender" get a high feature weight in say a random forest?

<comment><USER9> Indeed, a prior conviction raises the Bayesian probability of a given suspect having committed a similar crime. In probability terms, the prior probability of suspect S having committed crime Cn, given that they committed crime C0, C1, etc., is certainly higher than without that information.

But how much higher? Given 8 billion people in the world, the priors are quite low for any given person P having committed any particular crime Cn. On the other hand, humans (including jurors) are liable to bias, and without other alternatives they can very easily be fooled. By the time someone has been dragged in front of you, and you're told that they committed C0, C1, etc., then you're asked if they committed crime C and to you it looks very plausible because it's hard to take into account the (still) very low prior, especially if you lack other alternative hypotheses.

So while you're right that it is a valid inference, we choose not to allow that inference in order to counter the much higher magnitude of bias caused by the representativeness heuristic and the like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah... look, with our Government passing far reaching anti-encryption laws (that impact the _entire world_ ) without the need for judicial oversight[1] and planning to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem after officially recognising the latter as the capital of Israel[2], and the general Australian population paying no bloody attention at all; gag orders are pretty low down on the list of stupid shit going on.

It's getting down-right depressing to be an Australian citizen.

[1] [https://www.itnews.com.au/news/australias-encryption-bill- fa...](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/australias-encryption-bill- faces-17-changes-to-pass-parliament-516547) [2] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/14/australian- gov...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/14/australian-government- to-recognise-jerusalem-as-israels-capital)

<comment><USER11> > planning to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem after officially > recognising the latter as the capital of Israel

Note that your source says that they are not moving the embassy until after a peace deal is reached.

<comment><USER10> Scott Morrison said:

> _And we look forward to moving our embassy to West Jerusalem when practical, > in support of, and after, final-status determination_

So he is indeed already _planning_ to move the embassy, and chose to make this decision public.

<comment><USER11> You offered this as an example of Australian government stupidity. My point is that their planned move is to take place after the issues that make moving it stupid will no longer be applicable.

Moving it before the status of Jerusalem is settled, like the US plans to, is stupid.

Saying you'll move it, but only after the city's status is settled by a two state peace deal, does not seem to be stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A few days ago I, an Australian, got an Apple News alert on my laptop about a Washington Post article that discussed Pell's conviction. When I clicked the alert, Apple News opened and displayed the article in full, uncensored.

I'm curious to know if Apple would therefore be in breach of the suppression order even though they're not the publisher, and if they are in breach, if anything is likely to happen to them as a result. I haven't seen any mention of it anywhere else, but I can't imagine I'm the only person to have received the alert.

<comment><USER13> That's part of the question on how gag orders can possibly work in a global information economy. How is Apple supposed to know that they have to pick out articles about this particular case and ensure that no Australian sees them? How is Australia supposed to send a gag order to the transitive closure of every content aggregator which might include the case?

<comment><USER14> They don't need to work 100%, they just need to work enough so that a jury can be empanelled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This week there have also been very similar issues raised around a gag order issued by a court in New Zealand, which is intended to keep the identity of a murder accused secret. The victim in this case was a British tourist, so the media in England has been reporting heavily on the case.

<comment><USER16> To make it worse Google auto-emailed a whole bunch of people breaking the gag order ....

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Media the world over do withhold names: rape victims, underage defendants, so it isn't impossible for them to control themselves if there was a clear risk of a miscarriage of justice (which may or may not be the case in this instance).

Slightly off-topic, but the picture in the article of a (recently demolished) newsstand neatly represents the international portrayal of Australia...laid back people in flip-flops lounging about without a care in the world. The reality is that, given the location, those were far more likely to have been tourists.

<comment><USER18> > _The reality is that, given the location, those were far more likely to have > been tourists_

That's my hometown and I doubt they're far more likely to be tourists. I think it's more likely they're University students (from QUT).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So who is it?

<comment><USER20> Cardinal George Pell, 77, was convicted Tuesday on five counts of child sexual abuse in Melbourne. [1]

1: [http://outline.com/https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/...](http://outline.com/https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/an- australian-courts-gag-order-is-no-match-for-the-internet-as-word-gets-out- about-prominent-cardinals- conviction/2018/12/13/5137005c-fef5-11e8-83c0-b06139e540e5_story.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The first thing I recalled after learning about this case, was the case of Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton [0].

I have heard arguments in the past for this kind of censorship. In my country (Panama) the closest thing is called "reserva del sumario," (secrecy of the proceedings) but there is no way enforce it legally against parties not involved in the trial afaiu. The most the former chief prosecutor (of a very corrupt governement) was able to call on the main journalistic association to remind journalists of their dury to respect the secrecy of the proceedings.

I stand in favor of not limiting freedom of expression. We should not limit ourselves to framing the issue as one of free expression vs a free trial (or a free election, since I just mentioned a Latin American country). Risking being too optimistic, I think that instead of framing the issue as one overexposed potentially false suspicions or opinions, one should see it as one of underexposed relevant opinions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_Chamberlain- Creighton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_Chamberlain-Creighton)

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone knows how such trials work? What evidence can there be from 30 or more years ago? Is it two parties saying the opposite and the jury choosing who to believe?

</comment><comment><USER23> But what about social media? Can't see how these gag orders work anymore when you can see results on your FB wall or Twitter etc.

<comment><USER24> Interestingly, the mods of /r/australia were mostly adhering to the order, which surprised me.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the Hacker News guidelines [1]: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." (IIRC, this particular guideline dates back to when Hacker News was called Startup News).

The linked article, from the New York Times, elliptically discusses a topic that the New York Times itself cannot report on in its online edition, due to a gag order by an Australian judge. So it is not covered, and cannot be covered, by the modern-day equivalent of TV news.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER25> Admittedly, the guideline says "probably". In this case, I'd suggest that the global reach of online media and the fact (as you point out) that the New York Times, an American media company, is effectively banned (not really banned, but more "erring on the side of caution" I imagine) from reporting it, is of interest.

As an Australian, I read an article stating that George Pell had been removed from the Pope's "council of nine (cardinals)", and then almost immediately after, read an article on the suppression order. A bit of quick searching, and I found out what the news was. Which begs the question, if the NYT (and presumably other international online media orgs) self-censored in the way described above, why would Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, not do the same?

EDIT: I'm not suggesting that the search engines should self-censor (or that they shouldn't), I'm just wondering why they'd come to a different conclusion than, say, the NYT.

<comment><USER26> They aren't publishing it, just indexing what others have published.

The aggregation of information should never be censored; it is telling you where things are out there in the world.

As a loosely related topic; the conveyance of truthful or believed to be truthful information should never be suppressed. However polity asking someone to be quiet for a time or for some other reason might be. This is why I believe 'state secrets' and secrets of all other types should only be for a specific limited time, and that all official records MUST receive re- classification on a regular interval (say once every 10 years, but a new review party who must also agree that it's worth keeping secret for another 10 years). Failure to review should result in publishing ~1 year after the expiration period.

<comment><USER25> Good points.

On indexing, I'd question if that's all that search engines do. They used to "only index" (in reality, "simple" index), but doesn't the complexity of current promotion/demotion algorithms go beyond that (given the biases those algorithms encode)? Might that cross the line? Do these algorithms encode a sort-of editorial policy?

Also, agree in principle re: classification timeouts and mandatory review, though the sheer number of state/corporate secrets might make that impractical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just yet another reason for common law countries to adopt constitutions that are explicitly not open to interpretation

You can see how easy even a body without executive power per se can mop the floor with weakly defined common law freedom of speech statues

<comment><USER28> Australia does need constitutional human rights protections (currently we are in violation of a few international agreements, since we don't even have statutory protections).

But having a constitution that is not open to interpretation would be unprecedented and would be an awful decision. Without constitutional interpretation by the High Court, we wouldn't have the Mabo decision (an interpretation of the "on just terms" wording) nor would we have the right to freedom of political speech (an interpretation of the definition of representative government). And almost every country in the world has constitutions that are interpreted by their Supreme Courts -- not doing so would make the Constitution unusable as a supreme law of the land.

<comment><USER27> You substantiation for your position are weak.

The degree that separates a constitutional state vs. inconstitutional ones is the firm definition of its legal state – a source of truth in the system, and not an amorphous interpretation existing in heads of demented supreme court justices.

<comment><USER28> Can you give an example of a constitutional state which does not have "amorphous interpretation existing in heads of demented supreme court justices"? None come to mind.

<comment><USER27> I can give you both, an extreme example of a country whose judiciary champions the trollishly named concept of "legal realism" (better to be called legal surrealism,) and a number that continue to uphold the rationality that law was written to a rule to follow.

The first one is USA, whose judiciary gladly swallowed the executive order 6102, and the entirety of nonsense surrounding domestic surveillance programs. One whose supreme court said that a man has "in fact gained" wealth from surrendering his gold for less than half of its price, and managed to validate FISA courts whose very existence goes prima fascie against the word of 10+ constitutional statutes.

The second, the best example I know of is Pakistan, and to some extend India. British legal process, as well as German empire's one was textualist for quite long time. A very famous case of late British empire law, if not the most known one was when a man sentenced to hanging was pulled out of the noose in the very last moment, when a lawyer argued that "a sentence of hanging, gives no permission for murder." Even today, a supreme justice of Pakistan, a man known for the thunderous legal activism, _is_ bound by hands and legs by the word of constitution, and hits the stone wall of SJC's opposition when his actions diverge even by a single letter from his formal legal mandate.

<comment><USER28> > The second, the best example I know of is Pakistan, and to some extend > India.

I cannot speak about Pakistan, but I will comment on India.

India has a concept of the "basic structure" of the constitution[1], and that no constitutional amendment may violate the fundamental rights that the constitution's "basic structure" grants. Now, it should be clear that politically this has been overturned a few times by different leaders, but conceptually the Indian constitution is very much interpretive -- and in fact the "basic structure" doctrine is a Supreme Court decision.

So India most definitely does not fit the mould you describe. I couldn't find any information about literalism in Pakistan's constitution, so I really cannot comment on that.

> when a lawyer argued that "a sentence of hanging, gives no permission for > murder."

This is not an example of interpretation -- in fact it's actually a wilful ignorance of the law. The sentence in British law has been (since its inception), "to be hung by the neck until dead". In any case, I have serious doubts that such a story is true (it's also clearly embellished).

> The first one is USA [...]

I disagree with domestic surveillance as well as many of things you mentioned, but you haven't given an example of how these things were allowed under constitutional interpretation. There in fact is a lot of evidence that shows that PRISM violated the constitutional rights of US citizens. I don't think there's any Supreme Court decisions about it though, so there isn't really a good argument in saying it's an interpretation problem if the constitution has never been interpreted for this particular case.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_structure_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_structure_doctrine)

<comment><USER27> Both FISA court and executive order 6102 went through the supreme court, don't feign ignorance. Googling both quickly reveals a number of supreme court cases.

> concept of the "basic structure" of the constitution

Which comes out of its plain text meaning, requiring no legal creativity to devise it. Were legal decisions of pre-independence India public. I would've put tons and tons examples for you. Out of all edge cases, you picked the biggest one.

Please fully accept that constitution is the source of truth of the legal system. The very purpose, and the literal meaning of the word stand for constitutions being the mechanism establishing reason for any legal action.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>