Hacker News Reader

Moschopson My First Hand Experience With Sexism

Yeah, so the blogger can't deal with CEOs and other authority figures

You've mistaken "hyper-competitive dickhead" for "CEO" and "authority figure".

"Sometimes you should be free to call a spade a spade."

Could you not say "black" instead? I think "spade" carries unnecessarily derogatory baggage.

Moschopson Olympics 2012: A Bruce Schneier Moment

I was there on holiday last week; whilst I saw lots of military hardware in the parades, I must say that I didn't see any SAM batteries in Pyongyang (and we did a lot of driving around, and had a good look at it from the top of the Juche Tower and the revolving restaurant on top of the Yanggakdo).

Moschopson Why I'm working for the man and not doing a startup

Not here in the UK. Fired on the spot? That'd be a dream scenario to take to an industrial tribunal.

Moschopson Why did Objective-C never catch on? (Ask Slashdot, Aug 2000)

By request, more information.

We never ran any NeXT machines. There was no (and frequently continues to be, thankfully - we've got some good negotiators who manage to convince the customer that picking the language themselves is often not smart) customer requirement on language. As I recall, a number of candidate languages were examined as a replacement for C (which was what we were mostly using at the time) and the lightness of Obj-C, its Smalltalk-like object model and the ease of training newcomers to go from C to Obj-C, were amongst the reasons.

Moschopson Why did Objective-C never catch on? (Ask Slashdot, Aug 2000)

We've been using it for over a decade (small part of a major defense company). We do not (and have never) targeted any Apple operating systems.

Moschopson Driving Girls Out of Computer Science

The fashion industry is heaving with straight men already.

Moschopson After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

Hopefully the electronic edition will keep going for the foreseeable future; replacing its effect ourselves would be a real pain. Wikipedia just does not replace it; Wikipedia aims to presents consensus of sources on the web (even when it is broadly acknowledged that consensus is wrong), EB aims to present correctness.

Moschopson TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

That already exists in so many variations.

Moschopson Linus Torvalds on C++

For all his skills, there are no two ways about it. Torvalds is a jerk. The kind of jerk who leads a technical rebuttal with a personal insult.

Moschopson Twenty-year-old Alex Rawlings speaks 11 languages

Hanging out here making comments is of course not at all a waste of time.

Moschopson The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

"Who cares?"

The guy who wrote it clearly does.

Please do not assume that your personal opinion is shared by everyone.

Moschopson Kids are the future; teach them how to code

Sounds like maths taught properly. Why not just do that instead?

As an aside, it is a watershed moment in any profession when the practitioners find themselves believing that their profession is so fundamental it should be taught to all children. Bravo, coders of the world :)

Moschopson Jailbreaking Is Not A Crime

In many countries, the law states that many things cannot be signed away or agreed to, no matter how much you want to.

Moschopson Jailbreaking Is Not A Crime

The saying is also "preaching to the quire"[0]. :)

_________

[0]http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quire#Noun_2

Moschopson Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?

It should change in the regions of the world that will be affected by SOPA; rather than going dark, display a pseudo government notice about the site being closed to citizens, and below that give instructions on how you can circumvent it and see HN, in exactly the way people will circumvent SOPA when it arrives. People get to see HN, and awareness is raised, and everyone gets to learn how to circumvent it.

Moschopson Smallest x86 ELF Hello World

Practice and understanding for when you've got to work on something that comes with 4k of RAM in total, if you're lucky.

Moschopson Sergey Brin's relief mission to Haiti

He didn't say "death toll" or "long term economic effects", he said "effort". The question posed is about the U.S. effort. Has the U.S. effort in Haiti been significantly more impressive than it was in New Orleans? If so,is it just because different authorities are involved? Presumably FEMA has no involvement in this one? Maybe lessons have been learnt from New Orleans?

Moschopson How MIT Didn't Prepare Me For a Startup, Part 1

In other news, eating bananas doesn't cure cancer, learning Arabic won't prepare you for a job as a SCUBA diver, and numerous other things don't do something they're not at all meant to do.

Moschopson Putting your life on the line for a 50% chance to fail

"Nor did he ever claim it to be"

He totally did. He said he put his life on the line. What really got put on the line was his lifestyle.

Moschopson Death of the American Empire...

So perhaps it's time for the East to take charge again.

Moschopson Sublime Text

Aye, *nix port, please.

Moschopson Ask HN: What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of?

"I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....

and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang."

In The Beginning Was The Command Line, Neal Stephenson.

Moschopson Ask HN: Review our elevator pitch (Stormpulse)

Sp., "effects" -> "affects"

Moschopson Why are networks so hard to build?

Al! You're famous!

P.S. My web mail interface still getting worse :)

Moschopson Really Useful Tutorials You Should Have Read in August 2009

I expect whoever posted the title didn't even realise that it was a niche set of tutorials - if all you code is web, it's easy to forget that not everyone else does the same. Can it be relabelled?