skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree completely except: I now prefer my Kindle. Pictures and code suck, it's true, so sometimes I look at the book file on Calibre (and there's a Windows app as well for it), but I really, really like having everything I need in a small volume that I can take anywhere. I can annotate and search and.... Well, I'll stop gushing now.
Why would you want to use GoogleSites for code-related things instead of GitHub Pages? This sounds like an awfully cumbersome way of doing things.
Yes, Python Essential Reference by David M. Beazley is great. If you already know how to program, this is the one to buy and keep on your desk.
If you know how to program allready I really don't recommend 'Learn Python The Hardway'... it might bore you.
Sure they fell on their earnings in some areas. However, they still managed to produce great results in other areas - for example, in their entertainment division. The article doesn't reveal the whole picture.
you might want to register your new project with http://projectilo.com to get continued feedback from other developers
When we asked this question in the context of the laptops at the big enterprise that I worked for, the response from Absolute was "most of our employees are ex-cops, so that isn't a problem".
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>>>His tone and mentality feel a bit confrontational

Likely that way now because he was fired. If it's true he was going to quit soon, and had he done this all the day before he was leaving to feed his curiosity, maybe the tone would be different?
The author's main gripe seems to be that contractors don't get treated like employees.

Does he realize that it's illegal to treat contractors exactly like employees?

Does he realize that if Google started giving contractors exactly the same treatment, they could get in big trouble with the IRS and other regulatory groups, have the contractors retroactively declared employees, be forced to withhold payroll taxes on their behalf, pay big fines?

He seems to be shocked, shocked that Google acts...the way every other tech firm acts, and for the same reasons.
Argh. Not this shit again. bcrypt, scrypt, or maybe (some clients explicitly require it because it's a Well-Known Name) PB-KDF2.
Thanks - glad to hear it made a good impression. Right now I have a script to generate all the prices. I just run it manually and rsync to my dreamhost server, but soon I'm going to create a cron job so that the prices will stay up to date.

Thanks for the feedback!
>>>What else?

You are expected to STFU and be a "team player" despite what trouble the team is cooking up.
Ok, I'm guessing the purpose of the post is exploring efficient methods of learning quicker.

Personally, I say tons of examples and exercises to test that you understood said examples.

For instance, someone gives you an api, but only gives you an explanation of the parameters. It is left to you now to figure out how exactly this api works(Does it take the full file path?, Is it the printer ip or the printer name? Is the array associative?) Now if I wanted to figure it out, I would draw from my experience how things like this normally works. Normally, it is two or three choices for every parameter and you fiddle with it until you figure out the correct format for what you are doing. So, with 4 parameters that is like 16 combinations, which aint so bad.

Now, if the creator of the api, had given an example of each unique way of using his api, learning the api would be much easier. Since now instead of debating what each parameter means and how to supply the given format, he can simply copy the example format[O(n)vs O(2^n)]. Learning without examples is an exponential function. Learning with examples is a linear function and learning matrix style is constant time.

[Did I just reduce all learning activities to be a function that takes parameters and to efficiently learn is to find an efficient algorithm to figuring out the best parameters?]
All the books recommended so far are good books, but none of them really answer the author's question. In particular, Learn Python the Hard Way is pretty much the exact opposite of what he is looking for.

The closest thing to K&R C for python is Python Essential Reference by Beazley. The structure mirrors K&C. The first chapter is a "tutorial introduction", basically a quick survey of the language, followed by about 150 page explaining the language. It is dense and terse and to the point. The remaining 400 pages are a reference for the python library.
why not get an ugly girlfriend, too? then you don't have to worry about her cheating on you, right?
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I think most smokers start at a young age; if you're not a smoker by age 25, there is little chance of you becoming one after that. This is why a lot of cigarette advertising is subliminally targeted at young folks.
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"Monty"

If you were to find a K&R for Python, then it would be missing an important something which is unique to Python - an acknowledgement and appreciation of absurdity.

[edit: was "good humor"].
Also take your morals out? Changing a contract after its been agreed to, and sending the changed contract out with a check, is underhanded.

No, its not just silly emotion that's in the way. Some of the techniques are wrong, and done by people of little or no integrity. You can't trust these people. Don't do business with them.
Here is my list of recommended online Python tutorials, in order from introductory to more advanced (http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-learn-to-program-in-Python/an...). It also includes my dead-trees recommendation -- "Python Cookbook," by Alex Martelli.
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I agree. I think it's a great choice for experienced programmers: concise and to the point and exhaustive.
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Why, in 2011, are people still selling books with hundreds of pages of reference material in them? Has anyone needed or wanted to consult a printed reference on the Python standard library in the last decade?
More on this theme:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230401740457516...
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/harvardperetz-cont...
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best...
Wait, how do you know they're getting minimum wage? I've done lots of temping in my life. Anyone handling anything that requires some brains never gets minimum wage. Hell, once I counted ballots -- and didn't even get miniwage for that. I really doubt Google is giving them minimum wage.
"Python Pocket Reference, Fourth Edition" (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596158095/)
I think you bring up a good point, and its also worth exploring why "race", "class" and "gender" are such hot button issues in tech. These are issues that many other very large companies (ex: I've worked for large financial corps in NYC that have vibrant & entrenched diversity programs) have dealt with in much more constructive ways.

So why do these topics blow up so big amongst the valley crowd?
I've heard Google accused of having a "caste system" before, always because contractors aren't allowed X Google perk.

They may not realize that Google walks a fine line with the IRS here. Its cheaper to pay contractors (write off the fees vs. payroll tax, for instance), so many companies use contractors like employees. This is illegal, and if the IRS decides your contractor is really an employee, they will force you to pay taxes as such.

So Google must be careful to maintain a clear distinction between employees and contractors. I suspect the badges and tiered privileges are just that.

He did mention "red badge" contractors having more privilidges than "yellow badge." I can't speak to that, and perhaps Google does need to take a hard look at its hiring practices. But it seems more likely to me that the OP is encountering a feature of our tax system, not a deliberate attempt to underpay minorities.
Before jumping off any drugs, I have done more than ten years testing in testing in expanding of consciousness including LSD trips as well. Those were really impressive. You can see sound, hear colors, every surface gets alive. But the best ones happened in the countryside. When you understand the way Universe is build, how things work etc. That was wonderful!! The consciousness was expanded... but it was just a bubble. Because when it ended after 12 hours, I understood that I knew all those things, that I had those strange super-senses. But now I have only some flashbacks and cannot explain others how the Universe is built. So my opinion is that life is like climbing the mountain. We all started climbing up. But on our way we found all kind of interesting things - bars, parties, working, career, family, relationships etc. And climbing made some sideways, making our journey up slower. Some even stopped or even rolled down. But everybody still have that knowledge of being on the top of the mountain. It's deep inside. And then we found that weed, mushrooms, lsd, salvia etc. helps us "opening our minds". But it's just like someone grabs you by your hair, pulls up to the top of mountain, shows you what's over there and ... releases his hand. So you just fall down, luckily to the same place where you've taken, if not lower. I got it only after several years of meditation when you do your consciousness expansion step by step. But the "trip" you can get out of that is the one you cannot compare with any drugs trip you have got before. At least it worked for me. So be careful with all those trips as it's very easy to get on the hook because it's much easier to have one cube either than sitting for hours in meditation. But we all have all choices. And it doesn't matter which you choose as it's your choice.
I love python, I really do, and there is a library for everything you can imagine. So when I see things like this:

c.most_common()[:-n:-1] # n least common elements

For the love of ceiling_cat, how hard is it to implement a least_common method?
This is HN, man. Post the solution here and see if it works or not.
Well, the "JavaScript is the new bytecode" analogy only goes so far. JVM bytecode puts few limits on what your language can do efficiently—Java, Scala, and Clojure, for example, all have great performance, despite having very different idioms. CoffeeScript, on the other hand, was clearly designed around what you can do with JavaScript. Or more precisely, what you can do while 1) producing predictable, readable, 1:1 output, and 2) getting good performance. So I think CoffeeScript is best understood in light of those limitations.

Plus, learning CoffeeScript wouldn't be much use if the docs for every JS library read as gobbledygook, right?
Python doesn't have one. It is too dynamic (especially compared to C), adding new features year after year.

I'd say use the official docs combined with a cookbook or "learning python" book (which is pretty big).

K&R got to be K&R because C really didn't change that much.
Interesting.

My Dad once sued microsoft because they had many "temporary" workers who did not get the full benefit of full time workers. These workers were labelled as contract workers however, he was able to win his case because at the end of the day, they were working full time for Microsoft. Not only that, they were often employed by microsoft for many years, even though the claim was generally that these employees were fulfilling a short term need.

He was able to get them damages for all sorts of things, including the fact that they were not entitled to store discounts while other employees were.

Even though he won, many companies including Microsoft still do the exact same thing with their employees. The only difference is they are trying to keep it under wraps so they don't get sued again.

Very likely, Google is trying to cover it's tracks in the same manner. They are probably less worried about racism than they are about this sort of permatemp law suit.

Let's face it, if they were doing something legal they wouldn't care if they were getting videotaped.

From my dad's firm's website:
http://www.bs-s.com/cases/c-microsoft-vizcaino.html
"The author's main gripe seems to be that contractors don't get treated like employees."

I thought the main point was that they weren't treated like other contractors like the author was (red badges)?
In the EU there are different countries with different cultures and rules. In some countries it is easy to fire people, while in others it's almost impossible. Where it's easy to fire people it's less of a risk to hire people.
actually mid 1990s at Purdue U campus police would regularly investigate 'missing students and missing labware" for this very reason..

Buying out of places and catalogs means someone can track it back to you..people who do illegal stuff do not want it tracked back to them
Python in a Nutshell, O'Reilly Media, written by Alex Martelli
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596100469/

Definitely recommended for learning Python fast&practically. It's the most comprehensive and useful Python reference book for programmers I've ever encountered.
Employment may be at will, but the courts are full of lawsuits against employers for wrongful termination/dismissal. If you've ever dealt with a large HR dept you know that one of their main jobs is to prevent lawsuits brought/caused by employees.
Yes. Beazley's essential reference is the way to go. The docs at the Python website are still essential for some things, though, since newer 2.X versions of Python often have minor changes/additions from previous versions, such as library changes and backports from Python 3.
If Google is still scanning the contents of public and university libraries, the books are probably rare and valuable. Which is also why I doubt those workers are making minimum wage.
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Well, I think when they say 'definitely' they're exaggerating, and I agree that you should concentrate on your paying customers, but that doesn't mean that advice from others is meaningless. And, surely, anybody that has bothered to review your application and pick out things that they don't like is more caring than most strangers...
Why do people keep saying my week-end project?
What value does that add? Who cares if it's a two hours project? Since there is no possibility people would sacrifice a project's performance to just brag about how quick the implementation was, I see a trend where people might start to lie about the actual hours of work.
Maybe you are using Python 3?

make print statement to print() function.
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It's the combination of all these strange rules and Google's reaction in this case that makes me think the issue is slightly larger than bus schedules.

They pride themselves of creative thinking, they hire lots of academics, even economists and sociologists. Some of these people should be able to figure out a reasonably cost effective way of organizing these things without making the place resemble a 19th century cotton plantation.
Okay, so do the standard Google employee badges have the same instructions?
Well now that we know about it, they just pulled a Barbara Streisand. You can be god damned sure someone's going to go sticking their nose into it now.
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I see related Google results for 'rpcnet.exe'. Not sure if they are related yet (spelling error?).

Also, I wonder how quickly they could rename the executable to deter removal, given the nature of their 'Persistence Module' and antivirus industry cooperation.
> Let's face it, if they were doing something legal they wouldn't care if they were getting videotaped.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once said, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." It was a preposterous statement assuming that the only value of privacy is to protect one's self when they do something morally, ethically or legally wrong. It was remarkably incorrect and offensive and everyone (rightly) lambasted him for it.

Your statement is eerily similar. I'm not commenting on what Google has done here. But to say that they wouldn't care about being video taped if they were not doing something illegal does not make complete sense.
This is fucking outrageous. Imagine what would have ensued if new cars were equipped with concealed GPS tracker, which sends location info to some unknown place, along with pictures taken by hidden camera, without any clue given to owners.

I do not give a shit if it actually helps one to recover a stolen laptop, when I am not even told about this, let alone given the possibility to opt out.
Large companies work by inertia. Google is actually more agile for its size, but it's still a big company and ruled by inertia.

In a large company, the majority of people don't know each other, and don't communicate on a daily basis. This means that things of interest get passed from person to person, usually by email, and so the original intent of the message tends to get lost due to the 3rd or 4th reader having no idea what kind of person the original writer is, what his writing style is, whether he's being serious or joking, etc.

As a result, you end up with lots of requests for clarification, especially where it's an event that falls outside of the normal routine. It takes a lot to rile up a company, but Andrew did it expertly, pushing all the buttons his background in sociology and politics gave him a solid understanding of.

Notice how it went through three separate "request for clarification" requests, each more formal than the last. Each time, he responded in a passive-aggressive manner that re-pushed those same buttons.

As it pushed its way through the various departments and echelons of the company, such a message would become more and more threatening as the person became less and less known. People go into CYA mode (better safe than sorry), the company momentum changes and things start rolling.

Let's look at the course of events again:

1: Andrew is intercepted by someone who is probably a manager (notice his description "Agitated Chubby White Male", with the connotations of bourgeoisie).

2: The manager takes Andrew to explain the situation to security (pointing out that the security guard is a black man in a menial job, with "sedate" added for connotations of passively accepting his proletariat fate).

3: Security contacts Transvideo to get clarification from Andrew and find out his intentions (notice his description "so that the issue can be filtered and separated neatly into their bracketed accounts", with the connotations of the soulless bureocratic corporate machine).

At this point, the security department is unsure of Andrew's intentions. Was it just harmless curiosity? Is he a plant, trying to dig up dirt to embarrass Google? They can't know for sure, so they ask him to clarify his position.

What Andrew sends back is a passive-aggressive letter covering class, race, and labor, all hot button topics. His manager asks for even more clarification. People are getting very nervous at this point.

Andrew's response is political dynamite, once again using passive-aggressive techniques to all but accuse Google of racist discriminatory labor practices.

That someone with "backgrounds in sociology and political philosophy" wouldn't understand what panic his second letter would produce is incredibly hard to believe. In fact, Andrew's entire description is so slanted and colored that I'm inclined to suspect that he deliberately set about getting himself fired so that he could trumpet "Google is Evil!" from his blog, Michael Moore style.
My impression was that he's a contractor (under salary) for one contract firm while they're contractors (probably on an hourly wage) for a different contract firm. Why would he expect the two to have the exact same benefits package?
I guess it does not necessarily means 1 weekend project. A week-end project could be the one I have been working on for past 3 weekends :).

Week days are usually busy with normal work, so weekend is for leisure development anyway :)
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The difficulty with an "assassination market" is that markets facilitate the transmission of information to everyone.

Suppose an assassin wishes to purchase futures for, e.g., Obama dead on 5/15. If she purchases more than the normal amount of Dead Obama 5/15 Futures (DO515F), there will be a price impact. All of a sudden, the price of DO515F will spike and an observer will conclude there is an elevated probability of assassination on 5/15.

A system designed to disseminate information as widely as possible is not that useful for conspiracies.
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Not anymore. After the lawsuit about including the web browser with the system they are no longer allowed to include undocumented features in their software. (citation needed)
It sure seems like the new South Park episode got people to read terms and conditions ;-)
Just have it delived to an empty house in the other end of town.
It's poetic but does make a lot of sense. Nice one.
I believe its more a question about risk and availability. Anyone can buy Pyrex from Walmart, but finding lab equipment could be slightly harder for your average crack producer.
As far as i understand, the prediction date is encrypted, until you want to cache-out and send the decryption key.
The best, and maybe only reason to buy an iPad is that sitting is bad for your spine. Lying on your front in bed, surfing, or in a very reclined chair with your legs bunched up and the ipad on your thighs is much better for you, if standing is not possible for long.
I am glad to finally see this story told in all of its gory detail. As a witness to this story, I was frustrated to see how Arlo and AJ never had a chance to win on the merits of their case, let alone on the merits of their technology. I can only hope that this story inspires others and drive needed software patent reform. And that Arlo and AJ both go on to do great things -- as I am sure they are doing already.
I think the cops have white gloves in case they need to corrall people by pushing them, if there had been any crown trouble. I don't think it is part of police Dress Uniform.
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I was excited by the title and bought the book, but have been quite disappointed. Nothing especially fancy in there; things like function dispatch tables.
Thanks, angrycoder, this sounds like the closest thing to what I'm looking for.
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Car theft has been largely eradicated. There are some European organized crime groups that switch out the PCM on cars where this is possible, but the days of teenagers hot-wiring cars has long since been over. If you were to call the police and say your car has been stolen, they will tell you to call your bank and find out why your car was repo'd.
You need to relax a little there, Mr. Privileged Google Employee.
good thread here http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-learn-to-program-in-Python and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2456994
hey Andrew, I'm not aware of specific HN meetups in the area but I'll be glad to join you for a meal or drink, I have updated my contact info and going to reach you over email, I'm not in Santiago because I love Viña del Mar ;) but we are just a bus ride away and I do have go hit Santiago in 2 weeks anyway :)