I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but the continually growing list of things at work finally pushed me over the edge.

Presenting my (rather creatively named) own to-do manager:
https://github.com/siddarth/todo

It’s a command-line based app that manages tasks from one day to another. Play with it and holler with comments/suggestions/pull requests.

In a conversation at Stanford with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, my friend Stephen Cohen (cofounder of Palantir Technologies) says:

We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay …well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall. So, run your prospective engineering hires through that narrative. Then show them the alternative: working at your startup.”

(via Natalie)

Fucked up.

(via adam)

Seriously? Fucking awful.

socialproofgirls:

Photo by Allison House

We’ve searched long and hard for our next hot tech boy because here at Social Proof, quality is our guiding principle. Amritha hit the jackpot when she creepily approached this stud muffin at a GitHub Drink Up event and asked him to be our hot tech boy of the week….

(Source: socialproofgirls)

Security-based “Capture The Flag”s are really, really fun. I found SmashTheStack I/O, a typical wargame run by some terrific (and very intelligent) people[1]. I wanted to be able to build my own environment for such wargames, and ended up spending a few hours yesterday writing ctf-bootstrap[2]. It sets up users, levels, and any code that you have in a specified directory. I’ll eventually get around to writing longer documentation, but for now, scan the code if you’re interested.

[1] They also run a very welcoming IRC channel over at #io on irc.smashthestack.org.

[2] Open-sourced at https://github.com/siddarth/ctf-bootstrap

Every now and then, I come across something like this that shatters my hope of a GPL-only world.