mtoddh's comments

  "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."

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.

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.

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!"?

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.

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.

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

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

Well if it makes you feel any better, I'm willing to bet that going forward more male developers will in fact be "shutting their mouths" when there's a female around.

That's not vacation, that's telecommuting.

Co-worker makes racist remarks towards you: "sticks and stones" speech

Co-worker sexually harasses you: "sticks and stones" speech

Co-worker physically assaults you: "sticks and stones" speech, with added punishment if the victim defends himself

And in each case, tell the adult victim how they should be more empathetic to the bully's lot in life.

I agree. Part of the problem is that adults tend to hold kids to a much different standard than they hold themselves. For instance, as an adult, if I'm working in a company where verbal bullying and harassment is a problem, and HR does nothing to address the situation, then I'll just give my two-week notice and move on to another company. Kids on the other hand don't have the option of giving their two-week notice and moving on to another school because of a 'hostile work environment'.

How many adults do you think would stick around at a company if they had to put up with the level of violence and harassment we subject our kids to in schools? And if the only response they got back from management and HR was a "sticks and stones" speech? Forget about it! Which highlights another difference- it's also in a company's own self interest to address these issues seriously, because if they don't, it's gonna effect their bottom line when good employees start leaving. But, what motivation do schools really have- it's not as if their "employees" (students) get to quit if they don't like the way they are being treated.

What does this teach kids? That there is no justice in the world except that which you take by violence?

My son is only two and a half right now. When he gets older my advice to him will be to first go through all of the proper channels in case bullying comes up. Give the system a chance to work, and get some documentation that you did so. And if it does work great. And if it doesn't, a right-cross to the bully's nose is what worked for me when I was a kid. Will this stop the bully from picking on people? Probably not - but it will likely make him stop picking on you. He'll move on to the next victim - one who won't fight back.

It's a great point, and I hated Perl for this very reason. And I'm sure some of it is my defensiveness since this is how I program. But some of it is also my concern that it might signal, during an interview say, that the candidate might not really have a good grasp of pointers. For instance, given the following snippet of code, candidates that didn't really seem to grok pointers wouldn't see that the append() function could not be modifying the list in main():

  struct node {
    int val;
    struct node *next;
  };

  static void append(struct node *list, int val);

  int main(int argc, char **argv)
  {
    struct node *list = NULL;

    append(list, 4);
    ...
  }

  static void append(struct node **list,  int val);

  static void
  append(struct node **list, int val)
  {
    struct node **ppn, *pn;

    if ( (pn = malloc(sizeof *pn)) == NULL) {
        perror("malloc");
        exit(1);
    }

    pn->val = val;
    pn->next = NULL;

    for (ppn = list; *ppn; ppn = &(*ppn)->next)
        /* find tail */;

    *ppn = pn;
  }

But as I said, you make a good point, and I agree that your method is the safer of the two options from a maintainability point of view.

I agree - and as someone who makes his living as a C programmer, I'm sure someone could easily come up with a terse piece of Ruby code that I would view as too clever, and therefore confusing, but which the vast majority of programmers on here would look at and think, "a beginner may be confused by this, but a competent Ruby programmer would not be."

I know some of this comes down to stylistic preferences, and likely some have had bad experiences maintaining code that went overboard with this sort of thing. But I also think that if these snippets of code were being discussed in a forum with a bias towards low-level development, rather than HN, which seems biased towards web development, you'd be seeing some very different responses.

This was actually one of the very first questions we used to ask during interviews at Tenable. I'm honestly kind of amazed it's now seen as some sort of tricky technique. I would think (or hope) most C programmers would see it as basic competence with pointers.