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mtoddhon Our approach to gender diversity

I can tell you this: anyone who thinks that artificially shrinking the pool of experts which you can pick to speak at a conference won't affect the quality of the presentations is deluding themselves.

Whether this is true or not, the parent commenter is right - quotas seem to be the direction that Westernized societies are heading for in the 21st century. I remember last year reading that the European Commission put forth a proposal requiring that publicly traded companies must have 40% of their non-executive board posts filled by women by 2020 [1]. Whether that ends up getting approved or not, it seems like a bellwether for how these issues are going to be framed.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/european-commissi...

mtoddhon A collection of small study projects which teach basic systems coding in Python

This is the sort of approach that the 'Understanding Unix/Linux Programming' [1] book takes - building common unix utilities in order to introduce systems programming concepts. IMO, it's a good starter for meatier material in Richard Stevens books.

For those interested in this sort of thing, Harvard Extension School offers a course based off of the 'Understanding Unix/Linux Programming' text taught by the author (http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~lib215/). I took it a few years ago and found it worthwhile...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-UNIX-LINUX-Programming-P...

mtoddhon Passive Income Hacker vs Startup Guy

It is apparent from the comments here that many don`t realize that the author is being sarcastic.

From Wikipedia's page on Asperger Syndrome, under Speech and Language: traits include "literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance". Makes me wonder when I see threads like this...

mtoddhon “NASDAQ is owned.” Five men charged in largest financial hack ever

Interesting, I remember reading that the hacker (jsz) who helped Kevin Mitnick back in the day with the IP spoofing attack against Shimomura's computer was from Israel as well.

mtoddhon Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

And where the money to pay for that will come from?

Apparently corporations will be subsidizing this:

"How would we pay for it? We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes. As I mentioned above, corporate profit margins have hit an all time high, and that money will circulate far faster if it’s placed in the hands of consumers."

mtoddhon Texas teen makes violent joke during video game, is jailed

Secret prisons. Guantanamo Bay.

As someone born in the 70s it's ironic to think that we now talk about "sending people to Gitmo" the way we used to joke as kids about people being "sent to Siberia" back when Russia was the bad guy. Funny how much things can change in your own country.

mtoddhon Yahoo's 'Dirty Old Man' Shareholders Remind Marissa Mayer She's a Woman

Well if it makes you feel any better, here's a quote from Mayer herself that seems to echo some of the sentiments you've expressed:

I don’t think that I would consider myself a feminist. I think that, I certainly believe in equal rights. I believe that women are just as capable, if not more so, in a lot of different dimensions. But I don’t, I think, have sort of the militant drive and sort of the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that. And I think it’s too bad, but I do think feminism has become, in many ways, a more negative word. [1]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-criticizes-femi...

mtoddhon Yahoo's 'Dirty Old Man' Shareholders Remind Marissa Mayer She's a Woman

I thought this was ironic too. This assumption that only a man would be interested in football, is like a woman going to buy a car and only being shown the vanity mirror, because clearly only a man would interested in the rest of car.

mtoddhon Yahoo's 'Dirty Old Man' Shareholders Remind Marissa Mayer She's a Woman

cis male

cis male? Am I the only one who has no idea what this is?

mtoddhon A sustainable start-up

I've seen this come up before and I wonder, why do lifestyle businesses have such a negative connotation? It seems like building these sort of sustainable businesses would be a lot more appealing to most people (or at least to me) rather than the VC-funded/start-up lottery approach you refer to in the US.

mtoddhon Stanford's new course on building a startup

Anyone know if there's a list of the project ideas (some of which it sounds like became startups) from previous classes? I've looked around on Google but didn't find any such list. It would be interesting just to see what some of the ideas have been and which ones got traction...

mtoddhon Bradley Manning leaked Granai Airstrike "~86-147, mostly women and children"

"I'm in the desert, with a bunch of hyper-masculine trigger-happy ignorant rednecks as neighbors..."

Funny how averse most HNers are when it comes to perpetuating stereotypes and making negative generalizations based on race or gender, but when it comes to the military or people from "flyover states", it suddenly becomes acceptable.

mtoddhon Obama: Can't Have 100% Security, and Also Have 100% Privacy and 0 Inconvenience

"In a press conference just now, President Obama addressed the NSA surveillance programs, saying "we're gonna have to make some choices as a society" to examine how we deal with privacy issues and terrorism."

Right. And just how is society going to make informed choices about things they don't even know exist?

mtoddhon US intelligence mining data from 9 US Internet companies in broad secret program

And my guess is the following video is an example of why the NYT is now saying that Obama no longer has any credibility on this issue:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6fnfVJzZT4

mtoddhon President Obama’s Dragnet

From the article:

"The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future."

That second sentence is the one that really caught my eye:

She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future.

Wow. Just wow.

mtoddhon Sell HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?

I don't have an API, but since you're not the first person to ask about this perhaps I'll look into adding one.

mtoddhon Sell HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?

You're right - I should make it clearer for companies that wish to be included in the listings. I saw your company listed in your profile - I'll work on adding it. Thanks for the feedback!

mtoddhon Sell HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?

Neekanee (http://www.neekanee.com) - it's a job search engine that scrapes jobs directly from company websites. Everything is written in Python/Django. Right now it scrapes jobs from around 1100 different companies and has features I had always wished were available in other job search engines: ability to filter by company size, type of company (.org, .gov, ...), vacation time, etc.

mtoddhon Sell HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?

This looks useful and has a nice clean interface - how does it make money? via Amazon's affiliate program?

mtoddhon Obfuscated C Code Contest 2006. Please explain sykes2.c

Neither are recent, but the following are both good:

"Obfuscated C and Other Mysteries" by Don Libes

"C Companion" by Allen Holub

Don Libes' book actually uses Obfuscated C code entries as interesting instructional examples and Holub's book is a nice intermediate book between K&R and "Expert C Programming".

I never see Holub mentioned much by other C programmers but I think his books are awesome. He actually also has a really good compiler book called "Compiler Design in C" that showed how to build a C compiler from the ground up - with a lot of practical details I never really see in other books in that area. He even had a cool curses implementation to go along with it where you could watch the parsing occur visually, and wrote a curses-like library in assembly so you could run it all on DOS too. He used to write the C Chest columns for Dr Dobbs back in the day and the book "C Chest and Other C Treasures" contains a collection of those articles and other code that C programmers would find interesting. But that book is harder to find these days.

mtoddhon Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

Wow, sad to hear that - ironic that cancer was what got Siskel too back when the two of them were doing reviews together - remember "two thumbs up"?

mtoddhon Back when not every question had an answer

This article reminds of me of Chris Goggans' closing editorial in Phrack 48 [1] where he made a similar point about how much things had changed with regards to being able to access and learn about computers:

  "In this day and age, you really don't have to do anything illegal to be
   a hacker.  It is well within the reach of everyone to learn more, and use
   more powerful computers legally than any of us from the late 70's and early
   80's ever dreamed.  Way back then, it was ALL about learning how to use these
   crazy things called computers.  There were hundreds of different types of
   systems, hundreds of different networks, and everyone was starting from ground
   zero.  There were no public means of access; there were no books in stores or
   library shelves espousing arcane command syntaxes; there were no classes
   available to the layperson.  We were locked out."

[1] http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=48&id=2#article

mtoddhon Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

The few I've talked to were far too knowledgeable to be some sort of incognito booth babes.

Perhaps it's because of the negative stereotype that the more attractive a women is, the less intelligent she is, or at least less likely that she's a technical person. And perhaps it's not just men that make this assumption.

mtoddhon Yahoo's Mayer gets internal flak for more rigorous hiring

Funny, from the title, I thought I'd read the article and end up wanting to defend all of Mayer's policy (the intent of which seems right), but then you see quotes like:

Job applicants often go through the interview process, then "wait and wait," said one executive who recently left Yahoo. "One person we wanted waited eight weeks, then they inevitably got another offer."

It seems like at this point, Yahoo would want to streamline their hiring process as much as possible to bring good engineers on as quickly (and painlessly) as possible. And have that be an asset in terms of recruiting. I've had friends complain about this "wait and no response" sort of thing when interviewing with Google, but they're more willing to put up with it, because hey, it's Google.

mtoddhon The Summly deal makes no sense

From the article,

Let's ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have about making a 17 year-old a millionaire.

The price tag for this company aside, am I the only one that detects a hint of jealousy in some of the comments that seem to imply "but he's too young to be a millionaire!"?

mtoddhon Expect – automates programs that expose a text terminal interface

Rockville, MD - but they axed the office here after the AXI-540 was discontinued.

mtoddhon Expect – automates programs that expose a text terminal interface

Interesting that nobody has mentioned yet how useful Expect can be as an automated testing tool- my first gig out of college was at Ericsson where we were developing at an edge router (the AXI-540) that was going to be competitive with Cisco (this was during the first dot-com). One of my first projects was using Expect to develop a series of smoketests - basically we'd connect two routers (pc1-rtr1-rtr2-pc2) and then use Expect to automatically configure RIP/OSPF/ISIS/etc. and then verify that the routes showed up, that you could ping from pc1 to pc2 using the new route, etc. Simple stuff like that but it gradually grew more comprehensive..

Expect made it really easy to automate this sort of testing - where the only way you can configure something is via the CLI and you want to be able to do this even when the only connection is via a serial console (for router reboots). We used to run it daily and as an engineer just out of school it was an eye-opening experience: because of the daily runs you got to see just how often people's commits could break simple functionality in other parts of the system.

mtoddhon Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

you're being an idiot

Says the guy who resorts to name-calling.

White male is the most privileged thing to be

No, being an upper middle-class white male is the most privileged thing to be.

not some down trodden, exploited minority

Think positive, maybe one day a minority might become president.

mtoddhon Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

Anyway, whatever, her reputation is kinda ruined now

Right, like Joan of Arc's [1] was, after she got burned at the stake.

[1] http://imgur.com/JnZLsju

mtoddhon SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

That's the rub these days- don't talk to her and you run the risk of making her feel "excluded", do talk her to and you run the risk of being seen as "flirting".