skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree in principle but note that even if it to "our" (society's, the individual's) long term benefit it may nevertheless very much result in quite dramatic short-term pains.

Anybody who has worked at a fortune 500 tech company knows how much security (physical, IP, etc.) tends to be a joke. To the degree that such security works its often due to the lack of serious threats and the ubiquity of individual discretion. As more institutions with serious resources and an anti-secrecy agenda come into existence and grow in stature and capability this comfy situation will likely devolve. In the near term that might lead to a lot of very unhealthy reactionary responses. More NDAs, more security, police state tactics being deployed throughout the tech industry (as an example). We can look to the responses of the RIAA/MPAA to modern communication technology as a yard stick for the way the typical corporate mind might react to the onslaught of "openness" that wikileaks and its ilk will cause.

Similarly, how will government respond? We see the sort of ridiculousness that we already have to put up with (TSA pat-downs, porno-scanners, liquid limitations, other security theater), what new travails will the public have to put up with?
The Trabi used to be a pretty good and modern car. In the 1960s.
I may be opening myself up to attack, but I find that the best programmers around are the ones who started at the lowest levels and then progressed up the abstraction levels. It's quite easy to move up in levels of abstraction, but not the other way around.
Hacker News Plunges Forward - Into Print
"Californians are so productive that every year they send billions of dollars in surplus dollars to the rest of America. Year after year they have sent vastly more in federal taxes than they ever get back in federal spending."

So many seemingly educated Americans can't tell - or artfully avoid telling - the difference between state and federal taxation and spending. Also, here's the dirty secret: people in other states don't really "get back" any of that federal money unless they work at federal facilities, including military bases, common in the states accused of getting more federal money than they give. If they're really lucky, they might get that money at a remove or two if they work in lower-end service jobs near a military base.

But then, that whole thing is a strawman. Some random idiot might be saying Californians are all lazy good-fer-nuthin's, but everyone else isn't talking about Californians, but an unsustainable state government.

"California’s a basket case? The state has one of the highest living standards in the country..."

I'm rather horribly reminded of global warming "skeptics" who hoot every time it snows.
Is it easy to enumerate all the potential attack points in a system?
We already have more than enough information to know that BP is guilty of gross negligence (in regards to the Deepwater Horizons disaster) up to and including negligent homicide.
Interactive Musical Painting
Since ICE is seizing domains who infringe copyright, wouldn't it make sense for all companies to copyright all internal documents and communication immediately, and then claim copyright infringement if wikileaks publishes them?

Even if wikileaks.org can't be seized [I'm not advocating that] wouldn't it give corporations more legal power via the DMCA to be able to claim copyright infringement?
As for nobody: Cadence SKILL is Lisp/Scheme that uses syntax that reasonably looks like M-expressions (+ some infix hacks). And I think that that counts as pretty substantial body of Lisp code.
Perhaps a good moment to re-read this:

Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing: http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf

tl;dr: "Because it means life is not incredibly unlikely (after all, it occurred on two planets in our own solar system); ergo what must instead be incredibly unlikely is the ability for life to progress to the point where it can spread across the galaxy (after all, no other life form has contacted us); ergo we are doomed."
Inside the labs at Microsoft, HP and IBM - Computerworld
Alright. I'm impressed with the rewind.
30 minute build gets 20+K page views in first day
The smaller the pendulum the harder it is to balance, so I'm sure a human could be trained to do this if the setup is large enough.
Finding the Right Startup Attorney by Process of Elimination
"Also, here's the dirty secret: people in other states don't really "get back" any of that federal money unless they work at federal facilities,..."

People in these states don't drive on federally-funded roads, or have anything to do with anything else that receives federal dollars? Right-wingers are keen on talking about trickle-down when it comes to tax cuts, but mention nothing of the multiplier effect of the spending habits of the people who earn money which comes directly from the federal government. So yes, people in those states "get back" big from federal spending!
The "Learn More" button and this whole page are spammy. I remember being annoyed by this splash page, I just wanted to get to the main site. When users saw the "Sign Up" or "Join Us" buttons they probably realized it was an email phishing form and then searched for the hidden "Continue to Website" link. The "Learn More" button otoh seems to be what you are looking for, an escape, but when the button complained about the missing email some users probably went ahead and entered it even though they didn't want to because it seemed like the only way into the site.
> I apologise for going on about it ...

Not at all. Thank you for the discussion. I hope I haven't bent your ear too much, but I think it was productive.
This might a good thing. Most roguelikes are fairly similar. This person's lack of experience in the field may lead to innovations that would be lost in the sea of familiarity.
Maybe, I'm not so sure. The citizens of Oceania in 1984 were very much the victim of "involuntary transparency", and it didn't seem to be a good thing.

The problem with "involuntary transparency" as practiced by wikileaks is that there are inherent limitations of scope and thus inherent discrimination in application.
My sister and parents recommended this to me:

http://www.mistakesweremadebutnotbyme.com/

Time to go get it I guess.
Earning graduate degrees on Facebook
As I understand it there is no "Learn More" page just a button: you give your e-mail, zip code and press the button.

After that they send you the e-mail with the suggestion to volunteer. So 10% look impressive.
It's probably generated. Here's a one-liner in Groovy to generate the class body:

(0..249).each { println "public static Object[] createArray(${(0..it).collect{'Object arg'+it}.join(', ')}) {\n\treturn new Object[]{\n\t\t${(0..it).collect{'arg'+it}.join(', ')}};\n}\n" }

Sorry it's not the most readable thing ;)
> my email address, is shared with a famous (in a bad way) world leader

Kim Jong Il?

Brute forcing gmail is not really feasible, especially not if you have a decent password in place. I suspect that they would just put up a captcha and maybe slow down the login process if you fail too many times.

If your computer is compromised and you keep using the system to either login or change your password then that password will continue to get compromised.

In many ways you are also best off to reimage your PC and create a completely new gmail account. If the account was sending too many nasty things then it may be on various blacklists already, which will just affect your ongoing usage of it.
Considering your existence, that possibility should already be taken seriously.

What's interesting though, is that if they actually find evidence for microbial life on another planet far away, then it's mighty likely that said planet already has far more complex life on it (taking into account the time it takes for light to travel through space, we'd be viewing outdated information).
Everyone prefers to sell on value. Everyone prefers to buy on cost. Which end it falls on reflects who has the stronger negotiating position. More money can be extracted from the video bandwidth in a world where the person buying the bandwidth doesn't have another option.
I must admit to hating interviews and especially these sort of questions. I'll happily sit down and chat to people about any of the areas I know about, but these sort of gotcha questions just make me think 'why I am here justifying myself to these people'?

Watch me juggle! Watch me somersault! Watch me do and say pointless things to impress you with how smart I am!
"People in these states don't drive on federally-funded roads"

They don't pay federal gas taxes, either? You might do better picking something better than federal road spending when trying to defend California, incidentally.

But that's the problem you face when you try to reduce distinctly different things like federal and state spending to "But California really has a surplus, honest!"

"Right-wingers are keen on talking about trickle-down"

So? They're also big on "starve the beast" deficit spending, but that hasn't worked in California, either.

ETA: Suggestion - disengage from your partisan reflexes. Think. Remember than the Republican Party in California has been as much of a contributor to the problem as the Democratic one, at least in proportion to how much power they have had, if that helps.

California's in trouble. It'll certainly survive and improve, but the spending cuts and tax hikes that they'll have to have this time (or if they sweat and bluff it through a few more years, the next time there's an economic downturn) will be far from fun.
He's a lot more relaxed--he doesn't have to watch what he says anymore, since pundits aren't analyzing his every word.

Though I didn't like him as a president, Bush always seemed to me like a guy you'd want to hang out with and have a couple of beers.
Dang, shouldn't have baited the "skeptics".

Oh, well.
Python IDE with Django support : JetBrains PyCharm
It also passes first year German with flying colours:

http://translate.google.com/#de|en|Der%20himmel%20ist%20blau....
Uses an invisible Flash object, so if you're using ClickToFlash or other Flash-blocking plugin you'll have to manually load the object.
I launched http://publiclog.com

(The original post is here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891808)

It's a fun way to "log" every activity that you do (eating, drinking, working, playing, ...).

You can also see the "history" of all of your activities (Past, Present and Future)
hey, tnx bro.. im from Visayas too.. cebu :-)
NASA holds press conference to discuss finding that impacts search for life
you may want to change your DNS to 8.8.8.8 .. thats google's default DNS..
That worked! Thanks. Strange that autoloading of invisible Flash objects was enabled.
So you think it's fine that when I open IE on my mom's computer there are so many toolbars that there is barely enough space for webpages?
Um, back in the day when the "life skills" grade was incorporated into the actual grade, it was also non-standardized and meaningless for just about anything. Splitting apart the knowledge assessment from the life skills assessment seems to be a big win.

I don't see any indication that there is not a comments section.
Curious how this will play out in the stock market

When the leak is out, will the bank's stock tank?

If the leak is leaked, will some short it?
I asked a question and you prefer to snub and mock me than answer it. There's clearly no value for me in continuing this thread.
Because they train it with EU documents, which are required by law to be translated into all the languages of the member countries. Since the documents are made available for public use, machine translation between European languages has become significantly better in recent years because the EU documents are being used to train the software.
Rex Ryan waits hours outside...
i had this submitted at reddit but they turned it down.. i guess they support more on whats goin on on their contenent (West) and less on the 3rd world countries.. :-(
I wanted to reply to anthonyb's comment about macro use changing the language in the clojure example but couldn't, I guess because it's too deeply nested.

Anyway, ataggart didn't write a macro he just used one that's already part of the language. Using a macro does not count as changing the language.
Export Variables in Bash
He has a legitimate concern, but calling it evil is a bit trollish.

I’ve been ignoring Dotzler since his blog post on the IE7 beta, way back, which was essentially “Microsoft sucks, Microsoft sucks and can’t innovate, nothing of value in IE7, hmm here are some IE7 features I hope we clone at Mozilla.”

I guess a nice way to put it is, he’s rabidly devoted.
1) All those documents are protected by copyright the moment they're produced.

2) The DMCA is a US law, and wikileaks.org's IP is in France. As with Assange, they'll move the operation wherever in the world they need to find favorable laws.

If the force of US law was enough to stop wikileaks it would have been gone long ago. Publishing national secrets is a much more intimidating crime than civil copyright infringement, no?
Theft Aware 2.0 - Android Security app for rooted phones
I applaud WikiLeaks and Assange for disseminating the classified information to the public. That disseminated information keeps politicians honest to their constituents, which in turn, makes for better, transparent governments.
I never got that analogy considering Bush said he doesn't drink alcohol.
Running Pure Django Projects on Google App Engine
WP7 Developers Complain of Missing Payments, Broken Reporting Tools
As I understand it there is no "Learn More" page just a button: you give your e-mail, zip code and press the button.

You are correct. All of the variations would redirect to the home page regardless of what the button said.

So 10% look impressive.

Keep in mind that this is the percentage of people who volunteered at some point during the campaign after signing up on our splash page-- not the percentage of people who immediately decided to volunteer after signing up.
On quick glance, I don't see a command line tool (ala the gitx command) for opening the current directory's repo.

Any chance it's in the queue?
http://samjshah.com/2010/09/09/first-day-of-201011-introduci...

This is a great post describing the mechanics of SBG. You'll get a sense of how it can work in a rigorous high school classroom.
Yeah, that's a good thing you can rationalize your lack of knowledge and experience. No one likes to be depressed.
George Orwell was a left-communist who fought with the POUM, a Libertarian Marxist group, in the 1936 Spanish Civil War.

When Stalinism came to power, he was extraordinarily critical of it's centralization of power and of what he saw as a tyrannical subversion of democratic socialist principles.

If ever there was a man in history who left a clear blueprint on where he would side in a struggle between multinational corporations and governments, and an idealistic whistleblower organization, it's Eric Blair.

It's important to point out that the citizens of 1984 had their actions monitored at all times, yet the government operated in total secrecy. What we're discussing here is a situation in reverse.

And on that note, if you have not read it, no matter your politics, I cannot recommend "Homage To Catalonia" enough. Orwell was truly one of the most gifted writers of the 20th century.
So, why don't the Groovy runtime programmers just write `new Object[]{arg1, arg2...}` ?
Sorry, I meant "inference for overloaded literals."
Interesting, I didn't know that.
For positions as product managers, I found these to be fair questions:

If you are Product Manager for Google's Adwords, how do you plan to market this?

What would you say during an AdWords or AdSense product seminar?

Who are Google's competitors, and how does Google compete with them?

What's a creative way of marketing Google's brand name and product?

If you are the product marketing manager for Google's Gmail product, how do you plan to market it so as to achieve 100 million customers in 6 months?

Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

so-so questions:

Why do you want to join Google?

What do you know about Google's product and technology?

Have you ever used Google's products? Gmail?

Bad questions:

What is the most efficient way to sort a million integers?

How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

Overall, I still favor my approach of doing the job, rather than jumping through hoops: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/11/10/how-to-land-a-job-at...
For businesses / governments? Yes. They are not people. They have very few of the rights people have.
How is it in the public interest for a teacher to be fired for giving a failing grade to the school administrator's, mayor's, or influential businessman's son/daughter/nephew/niece who goofed off in class, didn't do their homework, failed the tests, etc.? If you have no objective criteria for what constitutes a firing offense, you will have good teachers being fired for political reasons rather than educationally valid ones. If you eliminate the protections of tenure, you also destroy the teacher's ability to apply their professional judgment on educational matters in a uniform manner.
The other theory being that galaxy-spanning life is incredibly common, it's just that we're too immature/uninteresting to bother coming to visit.

How often do you stop and try to communicate with the queen of a particular anthill?
Not at all. I make http://ninite.com to help people avoid garbage like that.

I'm saying that defaults matter a lot in technology and that offering an opt out is a cop out. Normal people won't even see the option.
Would a SLIME-like frontend for vim have kept you on vim, or is it the extensibility of EMACS in general that caused you to switch?
The experiment showed that video was a poor choice for Obama. Images worked better for him. However, I do not think anyone should generalize from this example. Obama was supported by specific demographics. The poor and working classes favored Obama to a disproportionate degree. These are the people most likely to still be on dial-up Internet connections. There are the people with the least access to broad band. Therefore, these are the people for whom video would be a poor choice.
I think your comment is right on the money. The devil is undoubtedly in the details here. We know netflix just switched away from akamai for video cdn to l3. Aside from scale, it's easy to guess one of the major reasons was price - akamai is one of the highest cost providers and L3 has been aggressively bidding on work. We also know that akamai has way more POPs or at least caching locations (2000+ is the pr) and is very well positioned to locally deliver on comcast. L3 video CDN in contrast is more in the dozen or two POP range, and several of those may not yet be up to the weight of netflix traffic. If comcast is going to have to handle a ton more national traffic themselves because netflix is saving money by switching to L3 it only makes sense for comcast to try to offset those costs by charging for transit.

What if I started CheapoStreamCo and started undercutting everyone in the business, but the only place I was on net was NYIIX. Think I'd be getting settlement free deals? Hell no.
But it gets more interesting. He adds:

"goal is p2p dns, not root-servers. We need root-servers for transition fast."

http://twitter.com/brokep/status/8857561784651777
here in our country this is the very big problem. seems like the industry's demand doesn't meet what the school's offer. even if they do offer the courses, the teachers are not that well equipped..
This is totally a service I've discussed building recently. With 3rd party payment aggregation, you could totally take payment and dispurse funds to restaurants fairly easily.

Could do native iOS/droid apps or even SMS ordering with twilio
He covers the Alien/Robot/Zombie/Steampunk market, so I feel fairly secure.
>How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

I can't see how there would be a correlation between answering this question well and being a good Product Manager.

What's most upsetting about this style of question is the 'holier than thou' attitude that comes along with them. If you're not willing to play the game, don't expect to be seen as a good candidate.
Exactly.

The more I read supporters of wikileaks in this event the more evident it is that it all depends on who you think "deserves it" As long as its somebody you don't like who's ox is getting gored, life is good.

If this is truly the "age of involuntary transparency", then this problem will solve itself. Sooner or later we'll get around to dumping in public something you find precious. At that point, you'll be up in arms about cyber criminals.

Perspective and context are wondrous things. Many times instead of trying to find the general rule we're just happy that one group we like is leveling the score with another group we don't like. Once that is accomplished, we all can be quite nimble with the details of which principles we're upholding and the rationalization for our positions.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. —George Orwell (1946)
Almost every interview I've ever been on that consisted of these kinds of questions, I've gotten an offer. I agree it's a mostly useless exercise in trying to determine someone's technical skill, but as an interviewee, ultimately it makes more sense to just "play the game" and memorize the mostly-exhaustive list of questions.

Conversely, one interview I do remember where I didn't end up getting an offer, was going swimmingly talking about pirates splitting gold and manhole covers. And then one interviewer asked me with so much Perl experience, why hadn't I published anything on CPAN? Boom, done.

I still haven't published anything on CPAN, but could I interest you in this scale and 8 balls I have here?
Just to clarify, according to http://baywords.com/about/ , Baywords is free of charge. I presume agentcris was saying that PRQ.SE is "really costly".
i launched http://www.adobocode.com

it's my way of sharing back to the community what i learned from it. a set of tutorials. hoping this will help some of my people here in the Philippines but sad to know that most people browsing it are from India and US. but still im hoping they'll learn from my site..
Flickr Hack Makes 3D Model of Any City in a Day
I look at our minds and bodies like a formula 1 car, you may not like it, but at some point you need to replenish. You can either do it in intelligent intervals that allow not to live with that lingering sense that you might blow up at any given moment. Or, you can push until everything starts to fail and you're forced to recover.

The question isn't whether we need to pause and recover, it's whether we'll choose to integrate that time into intelligent intervals that let you feel good along the way or hold out for one big boom the also happens to leave you feeling increasingly like garbage as you approach your limit.

Just look to the structure of ycombinator. It isn't 6, 9 or 12 months. Because nobody can sanely keep that level of intensity or pace for that long.

Plus, once you're far enough into life to have people and activities that allow you to come alive outside of work (even if you love your work), you do a disservice to both your professional and personal vision by ignoring those people over long periods of time.
Demand Media Case Study
I just turned thirty and approve this message. It'll certainly be interesting what cultural changes the next several decades bring.
I find it hard to believe they really ask devs the manhole cover question, that's been making the rounds for well over a decade now.