skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think not. Your day to day work involves sitting in front of an editor of your choice and writing code that may or may not compile or interpret properly, may or may not contain bugs, and may or may not have the correct logic. Simply having a computer at your disposal with the Internet handy, a step debugger, or the ability to run a shell or interpreter in an interactive mode puts you light years ahead of someone struggling in front of a white board trying to remember the arguments and proper order for some obscure function they haven't used in months.

How many people actually solve problems in their day to day jobs without every looking anything up online? Or at least checking to make sure they are correct. Just having a syntax highlighting editor is light years ahead of a white board and dry erase marker.

edit: Sorry, my sarcasm detector doesn't work. I think we're agreeing.
You actually can't buy a non-industrial device from anyone but Verizon with their branding and firmware that they will allow on their network. They fought FCC regulations that forced them to open up and lost (http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2007/11/verizon_open.h...), but instead just made their device approval process more public — they never actually got rid of it: http://opennetwork.verizonwireless.com/
To be honest I think this is linkbaity - it's the same quotes that have been acknowledged more or less openly since spring. Maybe he's a bad person, maybe he was just a typical shit-talking 19 year old. It's kind of meaningless without the context of their other conversations; for all I know it's some running joke that went between them, or a movie reference or whatever.

What significance will this have? The lawsuit from the twins is parked in the courts, and the breach of contract one launched recently is entertaining but not very likely to succeed. When the movie comes out next month everyone can hate on the socially awkward guy and argue about whether he deserves his millions or not, probably on Facebook. I think the only consequences are to boost movie ticket sales a little and make Zuckerberg even more of social recluse. Even if he is an arrogant jerk and every bad thing about him is true, so what? Has he killed anyone? Was anyone forced to use Facebook? I wasn't, I logged in 6 months ago and set my account to have minimal sharing permissions, and I don't think there was ever much that could be called scandalous there anyway. He doesn't seem any worse ethically speaking than the YouTube guys.

The only thing I have a problem with is the idea that once you get anywhere, everything you ever said on the internet is going to be dug up by someone because now there's a market in discussing your personal details, and digging them up requires almost zero effort. There's a big difference between standing in the metaphorical public square shouting your opinion to the world (which you expect to have recorded forever, for good or ill), and saying something random in some dimly lit restaurant booth to a friend, only to have it analyzed worldwide as if it were the crystallized essence of your personality many years later.
How effective is pair programming when there is a skill and/or experience disparity between the two programmers? Will the worse/newer programming only hold back the better/more experienced programmer? Note: I'm not suggesting such was the case here.
Agree , I like the new layout and features.. I really don't think it detracts from simplicity.. realistically I think it makes it simpler so its a more integrated experience, and not taking users away from the site, and relying on 3rd parties like twitpic or twitvid. At the same time more proof to stay away from them as a platform. Can't blame them for what they did.
The Evolution of Viruses ( History Overview & 10 Security Tips )
As with most Agile claims, I'd like to see that proven first. Even then I might wonder whether it's the right thing for me, but at least we could have some numbers how this works out in general.

If you've got a high fault rate, two people working things out might improve things enough to be worth the while. Especially in a case were uncaught bugs are really band and/or your daily coding is an exercise in tedious input checking, c.f. some web sites and conventional GUIs.

And even then I'd say that the occasional meeting plus a decent code review process would probably be as effective, without the hit in performance. Never mind the sheer annoyance a lot of people would feel having to "couple" all the time.
This is pretty serious and the fact it's turned into a story is one of the more damaging things you could expect to see about Google w.r.t. privacy. SREs are indeed very privileged and in many cases have carte blanche on their associated products. It's saddening one of them used his rights for nefarious purposes and broke some of the trust around Google's handling of personal data. I hope this leads to better auditing at least internally - seems like something that better transparency of access would have brought to light earlier.
If you want to get better, build more things.

And don't use the terms "code ninja" or "rockstar" to describe engineers. Those terms are self aggrandizing crap that inadequate engineers use to stroke their own egos. At best using those terms marks you as being naive.
Microsoft is 'on the record' for targeting Google with BING, in fact they specified during the launch that BING was specifically created to challenge google.
I used SproutCore heavily from February until the start of the summer, when we pivoted to focus on server-side features for a while. So my information is a bit out of date, and some of the problems described below may have been fixed.

The good: 1) SproutCore's MVC controller support is very nice, and a joy to use. You can wire up a view to an underlying data model, and you get bidirectional data propagation. 2) The SproutCore list view feels like a native widget, with excellent keyboard and mouse integration. 3) SproutCore gets a lot of fundamental architectural decisions correct. It's highly declarative, and you get an enormous amount of functionality for a tiny amount of code.

The bad: 1) SproutCore scrolling is choppy, and two-finger scrolling on the Mac is a mess. This is easy to fix—just use native scrolling—but the core team hasn't gotten around to fixing it. 2) As of this spring, SproutCore had no internal error-checking, which meant that I would spend literally 90% of my programming time in debugging hell. Once I finally figured things out, the answer was always 5 lines of beautiful, undocumented code. 4) The SproutCore testing situation was really shoddy—no Steak/Cucumber-style integration framework, and a dodgy unit test runner.

I _really_ want SproutCore to work. It's a gorgeous framework in so many ways, and as far beyond jQuery as Rails is beyond PHP. But as of early this summer, SproutCore wasn't ready for prime time. Fortunately, there's nothing wrong with SproutCore that a year of Yehuda Katz's time couldn't fix. So I'm really excited about this announcement, and seriously considering returning to SproutCore.
Your argument holds weight in general but Google is a special case.

I'm sure they knowingly turn away bright & competent engineers simply due to the large size of the applicant pool.

Smaller companies would be wise to heed your advise though.
For some entertainment, I like to visit http://www.shorpy.com/

It is just an old-time picture site. They add new "old-time" pics a couple of times a day, and they have tons of content to browse through.

It gives a snapshot of life BC (before computers).
And by virtue of 42 comments and counting, 37signals wins again...
This won't work for two reasons:

1) Legacy: URLs are fundamental to the way the the web is architected at too low of a level to change. We could change the browser to not display them, or display something else, but trying to make a web-wide change to put the prettiness in the URL isn't going to happen.

2) Security: There are already many attacks involving using unicode strings to allow an evil website masquerade as a good one. The URL is the one way a user knows whether they are on mybank.com or evilbank.com
While its not a sufficient security system, its the best we've got so far; and its taken too long to train users to this level to just throw it away.

If we were starting again from scratch, bundling better navigational metadata would be worth doing - but thats just wishful thinking, and only the tip of the iceberg for what we might change.
Then you are a double-agent -- for both sides.
Well, the animating idea of modern democracies is that we do have input into governance. (Whether that's a foundational truism or a useful myth is a separate issue -- people are supposed to believe they have input, and most do believe that.) At least some of the difference between the governance of Portland versus Houston, or California versus Texas, or the USA versus the UK or Finland, is due to different preferences of the governed.

And, even ignoring formal political 'input' (or the simulacrum of same), we all make the culture and economy as neighbors and workers. When a smart, productive, and freedom-loving person with many options chooses to live closer to me, under the same standing rules, it's a positive indicator about my desirability as a neighbor and an external validator of choices I've made previously. Hence, 'pride'.
A map of where in San Francisco people succeed in catching taxis in practice, if you want it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4956860071/in/set-721...
Gack.

I throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I hear "Code Ninja" or "Rockstar". Whoever coined those terms should be forced to patch legacy cobol code for all eternity.

To better answer your question, you become great through practice and application of skill. All the reading of material in the world won't act as a fill-in for doing.

So do.

Write a webapp. It doesn't have to be a "startup", it doesn't have to be great, you don't need 5000 users and a techcrunch article about it. You just need to pick a point on the horizon and code towards it. And when you reach that point you pick another, and so on. Forever. In 30 years you will be halfway to greatness.
I don't think there's a software solution for the issues someone with 150 tabs open must have.
Indeed, although they're surprisingly inconsistent (at least as regards telephonic conversation): http://www.callcorder.com/phone-recording-law-america.htm

I don't really see any qualitative difference between that and logging IMs, it's just that the latter is technically much easier to do. But as a record of a private conversation between two people, I feel it ought to be subject to the same evaluations of admissibility.
Right. I interviewed for SRE at Google. It's basically a sysadmin job. You're expected to be proficient at scripting in some language (Python, Perl, bash, etc), but I would assume you're not expected to write code for most Google applications.

I would think the senior SRE engineers know enough about the code base to poke around and make suggestions ("found a bug in module.py at line XYZ that causes bad performance when thousands of users hit it"), but I got the impression that most of their top developers probably would be bored in SRE.

The thing that is ironic is that most of the people interviewing me were not in SRE, but were pure developers. How many companies do you know that let the developers interview sysadmins? I had guys asking me CompSci questions I hadn't heard since college. If the tables were turned, do you think I'd be asking a prospective developer a question about how to configure DRBD replication and heartbeat from one Linux server to another? Even though some devs might know these things from hobby-like experimentation in their free time, they are not going to be doing it on a day to day basis.

It just strikes me as a very broken interviewing system when you have developers interviewing sysadmins.
The sarcasm was obvious but i chose to ignore it because it is poison to forums and rarely done well.
Spend less time worring about how to be a ninja or doing puzzle books and spend more time coding real projects.

In other words, get to work noob.

Also, most people who call themselves ninjas are full of shit.
Heh. Sorry for all the downvotes, I thought it was funny...
How to Write a Descriptive Essay?
Different types of essays are assigned to students. This will enable them to enhance their critical thinking abilities and writing skills. One of the essays which are assigned is the writing of the descriptive essay. Considered the easiest essays to write, it will be beneficial if you knew how to write one.
I favour this a lot. Looks promising!

I have never been a fan of twitter desktop clients. Majority of my usage is done on the Web UI or through the newly released bookmarket (this was a godsend). The reason for that is simple, I have Photoshop and Illustrator open 99% of time and every twitter client I have tried has severely clogged my cpu/memory usage. So much so that I stopped tweeting for a while.

I can definitely see my usage going up if the Web interface is more intuitive and interactive.
Hard call. They offer great free services and have changed the landscape of email, phone, and document communication. Yet they are one entity with all the information of DeJa News, Keyhole Maps, YouTube, DoubleClick, GrandCentral, Gizmo5, DocVerse, and their own email and app offerings. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google)

So yes, it is refreshing to see transparency of "Engineer fired for snooping where they shouldnt". But we keep using them as a service, so it's a hard problem to combat. After all, the price is right. Just costs your privacy.
I see the problem,

Javascript programmers are Ninjas

CSS experts are Wizards

PHP Developers are Rockstars

I think you are looking to be more of a Java or C Guru, Perl Hacker, or Python Developer.

Not sure why Python experts don't get a "cool" name, that just seems to be the way it is.
What's the breakdown on browser usage for visitors to your site?

Every site attracts a different demographic of visitors, so you'd expect the browser usage and search engine usage patterns to change accordingly. Younger and more technologically adept users tend to use firefox/chrome/safari more than average and tend to use google more than average, that might explain what you see with your site.
Yahoo, within the last five years especially, seemed to fall victim to the economics of the search engine space. That is, they failed to properly differentiate their product in any meaningful way and never once had a very strong focus on the experience of search. Web search just became too important and they were relegated to continually play catch-up while Microsoft crafted their strategy which, from this bit of news, seemed to have been fairly effective.
Why do you want to be good at programming? You'll only get there if you are driven by your intrinsic interest in the problems you are trying to solve. Becoming a 'rock star' is a side effect, not an end goal.
The way you've phrased your question suggests you don't truly have that intrinsic interest in problem solving or building. Ask yourself what your true motivation is and carefully consider whether sitting at a desk coding is really what you want to do every day.
>>Perhaps he subconsciously doesn't believe in his success?

Maybe the guy watching movies is trying to relax?

I used to have bad self insight into how worn out I was. Now I try to listen to my body and take it easy when needed.

Sooo... Today I exercised. Tomorrow I'll watch Pan's Labyrinth, which I just bought on Bluray. And I won't read up on a few class libraries I want to learn more than seeing that movie again... :-)

Edit: I should write out the point simpler: Maybe the guy has a bad year/decade for some reason beyond his control (family, health, stress, etc).
As a bartender and a valet, I've easily averaged $15-25 an hour. Right now I'm making $25 an hour when I'm billing, and once I get home I'm not in the mood to do much computer work. Additionally, you can find service jobs anywhere, and start up very quickly.

I'd rather have the flexibility to move anywhere, the stimulation of constantly meeting new people, and some leftover desire for personal projects when I get home than to have a programming job I don't like.
A New Threat to Generativity (Bellovin on Intel-McAffee/Apple)
I don't see the connection (and I don't think there is one) between large eyes and white people.

If you look at anime, people of all colors have pretty much similarly sized eyes, white characters or Japanese characters. If the Japanese really perceive white people to have large eyes, then you would expect to see white people in anime to have larger eyes than Asian characters. That's not the case.

Large eyes is a style in anime in general (as Sukotto explained) and has nothing to do with race.
1) Learn some languages that force you to think differently, even if they aren't of an immediate use in the industry. I'd suggest starting with Scheme (Little Schemer + SICP) and then learning an ML family language (Haskell or OCaml). A language that incorporates elements of logic programming (Erlang or Prolog) would be useful too. You may not be lucky enough to use these languages in your day-to-day work, but there are lessons you can take home with you e.g., minimizing mutable state.

2) Remember to work on projects that are something more than algorithmic puzzles. Algorithmic puzzles are fun, great and are brain gymnastics, but you should also learn how to write low-level socket code (Richard Steven's "UNIX Network Programming" books are excellent in that respect), deal with concurrency (switching languages again, Java Concurrency in Practice is a great introduction).

3) Participate in open source projects. Dan Kegel has an excellent guide on how to contribute:

http://kegel.com/academy/opensource.html

Even if your contribution to an open source project is small, it will require reading and understanding a great deal of non-trivial code.

Finally, as moonpolysoft said, don't call yourself a ninja or a rockstar.
E-mail to Barack Obama Gets UK Teen Banned from U.S.
If you want greater variance, why stick to a single subgroup when humanity as a whole will always be more variable?
Can anyone explain the context and relevance of the IMs? Is he being sued for privacy violations or some such, so is it just a random/in general smear?
The Jackass Effect
Is anyone else stunned at how thorough and complete the documentation and support materials are for this launch?

I was blown away. Great job guys!
We are a little far from facing citigroup-like scaling issues - they have 100,000x more employees than we do.
Thanks! As a developer looking to get into web programming, this is <em>exactly</em> what I was looking for!
Not really, since IMs are expected to be logged they can even be subpoenaed, but a recording made outside of a warranted wiretap would not be admissible evidence.

Ditto email, log files and so on, basically any textual communication is subject to subpoena, but the 'spoken word' is expected to be transient unless you have a microphone stuck in your face or have been warned very explicitly that one is present.
I'm having a hard time understanding the significance of this news given the Bing / Yahoo.com partnership (Bing started powering Yahoo.com search in late August). Going forward Bing's success will be measured in terms of its performance vis-a-vis Google, so what's the relevance that it overtook Yahoo in market share?
@alf: thanks for the kind words! Another great resource for web programming is w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com/), on the off chance you haven't already found it.
I'm not a big fan of Gawker, but why not link to the original story instead of the meta-story?

http://gawker.com/5637234/
While it is no guarantee of any change I like that they are not attempting to sweep this under the rug. There are a lot of companies where people have access to a lot of sensitive data. All you can do is screen the employees, limit their access where possible and audit their use of the security.

But then someone needs to audit the auditors. Just before I started here we used to have an employee who would look in the Oracle database used by Lawson to check payroll data. Nobody knew for a long time since he was the UNIX admin and DBA.
I'm curious to know who "small fry" is. DuckDuckGo? ISPs?
That's significant traffic share even if it's split between several second tier search engines.

How many of them are powered by Google/Yahoo?
"Skill to do comes of doing"

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Also, as others have said, please do not aspire to "rock star" or "ninja."

Constantly test yourself and keep reaching.
Hah. Love that low quality is "not available" in Oregon.
Intersex Photos
Wall Plug Concept Warns of Wasted Watts
While I enjoy bashing big corporations as the next guy, this isn't really a Google problem.

If you're on the internet, your information will always be available to someone. On the internets, as in real life, this power can be abused.

Appreciate the fact that they're open about it.
Because HN auto-banned it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692807
Practical web programming with PLT Scheme
The point is that both of those responses, as well as the original remark, are completely inane and boring. If a person reads this anecdote and the only thing he has to say about it is a commentary on bathroom breaks, then I wish that person would resist the urge to post his thoughts.
Funny, I got called out yesterday for being paranoid that a google employee could snoop on your data.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1689025

Good to see google is taking a hard stance on this.
Not just that, I know the CEO and founder of Facebook through a legacy and record of actions. Actions speak louder than articles on the internet, and perhaps even louder than personal impressions based on having a beer with someone or a conference, or whatever you're talking about.

Nobody in the public eye such as this is ever going to 'spend meaningful time' with an equal amount of people as the number whom will choose to cast a judgement on their character. So, this will have to suffice. If he has a problem with that, please ask him to sell out and go away.

Or maybe not. code duck is sorry if he was mean.
They certainly built a great product, but it's easier to gain market share when you have a $300 million marketing budget.

Aside from heavy branding, they also built an absolutely brilliant, perfectly executed long-tail SEM campaign.

According to my internal data, Bing is one of the largest advertisers on both Yahoo and Google, approaching eBay and Amazon in volume.

SEMRush shows 50,000 paid keywords for Bing- but that's a tiny fraction of their actual ad spend.
This Is The Second Time A Google Engineer Has Been Fired For Accessing User Data
And Samsung. Because I hear they are indeed coming out with a phone-less version of Android... but they would have to wait atleast a few months, since current android 2.2 requires phone functionality to be present (from what I hear), and 3.0 will remove that restriction. And hence true competitors to ipad and iphone touch will happen then (around end of year). Current android tablets like Samsung Galaxy Tab have a phone built-in, which is unnatural. Anyway, with 3.0 release I think you can expect several ipod touch competitors by first quarter of next year -- beginning from a device by Samsung and probably expanding to other mfgrs like HTC, Motorola, Dell, etc. -- all using android.
More inane or less inane than meta-talk?

If all a person has to say about an article is about how badly HN sucks, then I wish that person would resist the urge to post his thoughts.

As GlaDOS says: "We both know that isn't going to happen."