fooandbarify

Interesting point. I currently do some work for a different federal government which involves some security clearance. I may need US security clearance in the future, and the conflict is something I hadn't considered until now. However (and I usually try to avoid ideological soapboxes, but), I believe that government should exist for the people, and not the other way around. I'll take my chances.

Sincerely though, thanks for pointing that out. It may have more immediate/drastic consequences for others and should certainly be taken into consideration.

Good call. I am not usually into the sort of activism that involves boycotts because I find them counter-productive, but I'd rather support my local bookstores anyways so I might as well be vocal about it.

I like this idea and will begin seeding their torrents post-haste. However, how do we make sure that the people who need to see the information find the torrents?

Hmmm. I'm frustrated, because I think the author is making a very important point in a very, very poor way.

Gender issues are important. They are important everywhere and they are especially important in industries like ours where the gender ratios are so unbalanced.

That being said, I find it extremely difficult to take this author seriously. I don't think I can critique her writing in a way that doesn't either come off as mean or completely expose me as the curmudgeonly bastard that I am, so I will just say that I found her style distracting. It's her blog and she should by all means write however she wishes - and to be fair she may not have expected the attention she is getting - but it's disappointing to me to see this issue represented in this way.

Hopefully, though, people will be able to see past that and realize that it's pathetic and rude to collect someone's personal contact information under the guise of business networking with the intent of calling them later for a date.

I'm fairly new around here (lurked for a couple months, finally made an account last week) but one of the things that I really like about HN is the no frills approach. It would be extremely easy for a community of hackers to get carried away with adding features to a site (as the plethora of HN-based "Hello Worlds" demonstrate) but I enjoy that the site itself has remained "raw". I don't think either of your ideas are bad, but I personally would vote for the "if it ain't broke..." approach in this case.

EDIT:typos

I agree with what others have said - if I were you, I would go for #2, and if that fails, #4. If you like your co-workers and the other non-codebase related aspects of the job, it is worth trying to make it work, but only if you can get the CTO on board :)

I'm really interested in startup marketing for hackers and have been considering a similar writing project... I don't want to step on your toes at all but I'd love to bounce some ideas around. My e-mail is foobar at fooandbar.net :)