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mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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...

mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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...

mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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...

mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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."

mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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.

mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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...

mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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.

mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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...

mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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.

mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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.

mtoddh | 12 years ago | on: 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.

mtoddh | 13 years ago | on: 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.

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