skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fun fact: Chris Pine's children are called Ruby, Apl and..C! :)
When I read that phrase, I was thinking he MUST have known it was going to get him fired.
Worked for me, but too buggy to be considered more convenient than using the phone itself.
Basic Concepts | Digg Developers
Am I the only guy who thinks the guy (Andrew?) was way out of line here. You put yourself in the firing line for absolutely no reason relevant to you.
You missed the part where he kept talking about race and unequal treatment and the ScanOps people of being mostly 'people of color'. He said these things explicitly in his letter that Google Legal reviewed.

That is exactly why he was fired. Google did the absolutely correct thing. They don't want to deal with that shit. There's no conspiracy.
I think the title was poorly chosen.

Is the technical book dead? Well, it's declining but I wouldn't say dead yet. The problem with the market for technical books is that there are tons of them. Everywhere. Some are good, many are bad and there are a few 'classics' (Knuth, Stephens etc.). I think the problem with technical books (in our spheres) is that they don't integrate with the reader's workflow. The reader is often at a computer when reading a programming book. Switching between the computer screen and book page can be mentally expensive compared to having it open on the screen next to you. The pirated versions of books (particularly epubs) tend to be better indexed, can be copied and pasted and more easily integrated into your daily life. These are the challenges that technical books face. The pirated versions often provide a better user experience. It's the same (or rather similar) with DVDs.

Now taking that a little further to the title. The book (in general) is not dead, very far from it. I took an ereader on holiday last year and read through about 12 books in 4 days. It was the only piece of tech that I took (I like to unplug). It doesn't feel the same, but as with comparing FLACs to Vinyl the experience makes up for it in it's accessibility. Having said that, I still prefer to read books where I can. Having a Star Trek TNG style reading experience is great, but having the paperware feels an irrationally superior experience.
At least they have the money...
I haven't spent that much time on n-back training either, though I am planning on doing a before-and-after comparison with a run of at least a month doing it daily, I'll start that in a couple weeks once things settle down here. I do think what I've done sporadically though helped with a recent C design involving lots of linked lists.

http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ.html is the best reference/about I know of for the subject. Some people report improvements in daily life like grokking math better, others report nothing even after months of training.
I think that many commenters are missing the point.

The question isn't whether Google is goind anything strictly illegal.

The question is whether Google is doing something what would be considered shady by a big part of Google employees; If so, how would Google acknowlege the situation; And then, how would they live thru this, with Googlers knowing that their own standards are in a serious mismatch with the actual behavior of the business body, Google.

Public reaction is another interesting thing. People's passion or neglect isn't regulated by law; instead it's regulated by their own feeling of right and wrong. It may be both legal and a PR disaster at the same time.

Of course, it might turn out that people in general and Googlers dominantly don't see any problem and don't care. It doesn't seem to be this case yet.
Definitely colours.

Work != play and it's nice to see the difference at a glance.
There is a "Who's hiring" thread here on Hacker News every month so you might want to give it a try. This is the link to the account that's posting them: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring

Also, I don't know where you are based or whether you are interested in graduates but I am finishing my exams in 3 weeks and I am looking for an internship for the summer as a junior developer. My email is on my profile, I'd love to hear from you.
No accusations were leveled and, as far as I can tell, at best, Google overreacted. To make an analogy: the guy points out the sky is blue and he's promptly fired. Wtf?
AFAIK, segregation was physical separation, not forbidding people to talk to each other.

On a large corporate campus, you can't just randomly walk around in the buildings. Your access card doesn't even work everywhere. So segregation (physical separation) is pretty standard.
So if I work at a company where the CEO gets a corporate jet, that jet becomes a "human right"?
I agree. It's not like the yellow badge people were complaining and needed someone to stand up for them.
Yes, if you classify slave labor as someone voluntarily doing work for which they get paid.
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That is incorrect. He was not given permission by his supervisor to record conversations with other employees.

He only asked for permission to videotape yellow-badges leaving the building. Nothing more. Unless someone wants to show me where I am missing a statement, I don't see any point at which he even claims that he was given permission to film and interview employees - much less about the issues he has taken it upon himself to "investigate".

That it was done on his own lunch break and supposedly using his own tape doesn't seem very relevant. My free time is my own, but my company wouldn't appreciate it if I was using my lunch time to bother my employer or one of their clients.

From the video/transcript: "Eventually I asked a superior on my team if I could borrow a camera to go out in the parking lot and videotape the yellow-badged workers leaving the 3.1459~ factory."

If he had asked permission to take a camera out and videotape interviews with people leaving the building so he could investigate the socio-economic aspects of Google employment of Google's ScanOps team, I think it is safe to say that his employer would have told him to STFU and get back to his actual work and there would have been no problems. He took advantage of the situation to push an issue his employers were not aware that he was pursuing which then put them and all of their other employees and their contract with Google in a tenuous position. Not necessarily because "ooh no, he's going to find out we have lots of people of a certain race working in that building", but most likely because they hired some guys to get a job done and not be a thorn in someone's side.
Why wouldn't Google want them talking to other employees? Could it be b/c they are working on a confidential project?
This will be good promotion for his art in general. I agree with your assessment of self-righteousness. I do think some of the concepts he's exploring are interesting, though. In my opinion, FlowSpot is too critical. I find Mental Tootscapes charming.

http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/portfolios/84941-flowspot
http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/portfolios/61101-mental-to...
I do recommend some books:
http://www.cssmastery.com/
http://handcraftedcss.com/
http://simplebits.com/notebook/2009/06/09/wssse/
> No accusations were leveled

It doesn't matter. That's exactly what was being implied. Google wants to prevent any legal disputes or inquiries into their operations which can be very costly. The guy is a low-level low-importance asset so they had him terminated. It makes perfect sense.
A study I would like to see would be one that asks successful people who have scored badly on an IQ as kids to take the test again 20 years later.
That's hilarious.

His letter to Ralph was so passive–aggressive. I would have left out these nuggets:

1)... now that I know it's so super-secret

2)... are mostly people of color and cannot eat Google meals

3)... I wasn’t approaching this as an act of muckraking

4)... nice way to meet people who work right next to me but are very clearly not the same class as me
I've been locking my bike up at Temple Meads for years without any problems - I (cynically) always try to lock it up next to a much more expensive looking one, or one with a weaker lock. Failing that, as deep into the centre of the mass as possible.
IANAL, but I think there are some things you can't fire people for, like race, age, being pregnant, etc. But other than that, I'd think you're free to 'fire at will'.
There probably is a number on the back of the badge to call. There is a lot of ongoing litigation dealing with Google's book scanning.

The simple explanation is that Google doesn't want these workers talking about the work they are doing. The easiest way to keep them from talking is to limit social interactions with other employees, by sequestering them.
To put it bluntly, he was the employee of a company that Google hired to do some work for them and he was bothering employees and then he become someone else's problem up the chain and it then become his direct employer's problem who value their contract and the employment of their other employees over the personal project and whims of someone who was hired to do some film work and not to conduct an investigation into the socio-economic makeup of the campus.

Now that he's no longer employed, he can go ahead with his pursuit without doing it under the advantage of his employment or his employer and I'm sure that if his insinuations are remotely true, then there are sure to be a bunch of people beating down his door for the opportunity to speak with him about their work at Google, under journalistic protection.
No, but if you work at a company where even the janitors get free lunch, you should get free lunch.
The solution to having components stolen is being made by a British company at the moment in co-operation with Royce:
http://atomic22.co.uk/

They have a Pitlock solution, but it works for everything from Saddle down to chain rings. With 1 key doing the whole bike.
We use Parenscript heavily. It's great. The full power of Lisp macros on top of efficient JS.
"Almost surreal, it's so silly."

The ominous monotone voiceover in the video reminded me of 9/11 conspiracy theory videos.
Fokken' Prawns.
Make A Game (maga) is a node.js framework for multiplayer games
Demo: http://stagas.com:8555
As an FYI, and as a founder of a fashion shopping site (aggregator) I can tell you that people do not like shopping like that - as in, find me something that looks like x - you have to factor in what we refer to as "Store DNA".

Your not comparing hoovers here, people don't just buy a "look" - they buy (from store x) because of the quality, the brands values etc.
I was responding to the suggestion that it "deserves exploration" simply because some disgruntled contracted employee was trying to cut his teeth on what he tried desperately to make into a juicy expose.

Simply making an accusation or insinuation doesn't in itself warrant exploration of something. Insinuations about anyone can be made by anyone and they don't all deserve a response or an investigation. This guy has no particular credibility and with is particular attitude, under the particular circumstances and with the distinct lack of . . . anything . . . that he has to back up his concerns . . . falls into the category of "not worth the time".

Now, if some employees come out tomorrow -- even under anonymity -- and start sharing the tales of terrible treatment to some SF Chronicle reporter or something, then you might have something.
I'm not sure whether you are serious, cynical or tongue-in-cheek, so I feel it necessary to point out that they are not actually explaining monads. They provide an answer to the question that everyone will ask: "how do you do I/O in a language in which all computations are supposed to be free of side-effects, when I/O is obviously a side-effect?" The answer to that question is 'monads', but that's as far as they go. They don't actually explain anything about monads.
Their revenue grew 13% yoy and earnings include 5 cents one off tax benefit. Without that earnings still grew about 24% coming out of a recession. What caused Microsoft's share price to fall massively yesterday was that Windows revenues actually decreased, which is rather surprising.
Garbage collection isn't implemented; we're relying on reference counting for now. The self-hosted compiler has no cyclic data structures, so we're fine.

Stack growth was implemented at one point, but we disabled it because the way it was implemented was a proof-of-concept hack (it just rewrote anything that looked like a pointer on the stack). I suspect we're going to switch to a more Go-like model, in which stack growth happens by calling through a stack-switching thunk.
The only reason I kept watching the video, was because I expected him to drop some huge bomb. It definitely had the "surveilance footage obtained during one afternoon of filming clearly shows two yellow badgers being violently sodomized by the white badged employees, behind the building - viewers of a weaker disposition may want to turn away, now" vibe.
His importance to the Google machinery is irrelevant. According to the post, he was fired for using Google video equipment during working hours. Even though he'd been given explicit permission to do so. At worst he should have been given a warning. I hope, for the sake of consistency, "Carl" was also fired.
Of course! What kind of traction would his insinuations have if he hadn't baited them for termination and he had to end the "expose" with "we had a sit down where I explained my intentions and we sorted it all out and had a beer and a laugh". The "and they fired me!" that is intended to add to the suspicion. It causes most viewers to ask "wait, if there was nothing to hide, then why'd they fire him?".
Lots of people are commenting that maybe the yellow badges might be working on something secretive that Google does not want them to share with others. But this does not make sense for 2 reasons -
1) I am pretty sure there will be some software engineers in Google who are currently working on something secretive but they will not be under these draconian restrictions of not to talk to others or call the security immediately if a fellow Googler approaches them.

2) These ppl can go home and can talk to their spouses, their friends etc. and let them know what they are working on. So making sure that they don't talk to anyone in Google during their office hours is not going to help keep their projects secretive.

So there has to be some other angle to this story which does not involve secretiveness of their projects.
Thank you for trying to sort it out.

> I assume you're looking at the non-dev PSGI specification

yes.

> PSGI specification on CPAN

Not really sure it is a good idea to put a spec on CPAN(I know you can find books on CPAN but I really do not think this is the right place for such matters but especially when PSGI/Plack confusion certainly exists.well, that just my view of things)...

Regarding your additions:

>You can stop writing code to support many web server
environments.

As your slide shows, CGI.pm handles quite well many of the environment you list. It has been in development for more than 10years, updated very regularly to fix bugs, even browser based one, the doc is easy to read.
The perl based server you list were built for PSGI in mind so you sell me some candies and the toothbrush that goes with it.

> Your framework can now use all of Plack middleware components.

session, caching,etc. All of these "middleware" already exists since a very long time. so it is just yet an other addition,an other way of doing it.
Some of these PSGI middleware were extracted from Catalyst. Catalyst authors decided to create their own set of engine instead of choosing to use CGI.pm (unlike CGI::Application/Jifty building upon it), linking to your "gross." conclusion- in your slide.

> You can test the application using the consistent L<Plack::Test> interface.

WWW::Mechanize works like a charm for such matters.
(perhaps your Plack::Test differs though, did not look into it so this might be a valid point)

Regarding your slide:

The diagram you show is at best simplistic, at worst wrong
(factcgi->lighttpd).
It deviates from reality to get to your point.

I find the "CGI.pm? meh" slide very disrespectful
and all by itself shows the ambient snobbish attitude towards this very useful module(inherited from the Catalyst community mindset?)

so all in all, I still don't get the problem it is trying
to solve(stealing from python you wrote. an other language, an other culture, an other context)
I still don't get the benefit out of it and why I should use it.

I think I am a lost cause^^; I am sorry.
It's not that I am against new things but here,
I really don't get the advantage of this spec and everything
that goes around.
I have a bootstrap package that launches the FastCGI run loop
then delegates to modules that do there job and print the resulting body at the very end (it's a MVC like framework,nothing fancy) so I don't think it would hurt much to add support for this but I won't do so as long
as I don't get a real + in doing so.

Using Nginx is not much of a matter.
(Nginx+FastCGI should be fine)
Did they run out of taco money?
Can the latency be improved ?

Reminds me of http://holiday2010.ogilvy.com

The game-engine, collision and logic run on
the server in JavaScript running on Node.js.
The clients are simply rendering information
sent from the server, and sending off keyboard input.

https://github.com/hyperandroid/CAAT/

https://github.com/BonsaiDen/BiSON.js

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_N...
One of the sayings I find amusing is that "Your lock gets heavier as your bike gets lighter", an acknowledgement that lighter bikes cost more and require heavier locks.

I lock my (very expensive) bikes out on the street fairly often, though never overnight. I only ever use 1 lock and a component protection system.

I use the Kryptonite New York Fahgettaboudit it secure the frame to some fixed street object of equal strength (newish iron railings are good, otherwise some London lamp-posts will fill this lock so perfectly that there's no leftover space for a leverage tool).

https://www.kryptonitelock.com/OutletProducts/Products/Produ...

I pair that with Pitlock to protect the wheels, though will be moving to Atomic 22 when that system is fully released.

http://www.pitlock.com/

http://atomic22.co.uk/

And my saddle is secured by a chain that goes through the rails and chain stays.

http://www.lfgss.com/thread52914.html#post1705205
> he was fired for using Google video equipment during working hours. Even though he'd been given explicit permission to do so.

Yes they used that as a reason to fire him but that's not why they fired him.
You have to chain your bike to something immobile, though.
Show HN: How Many Days
any date i put in doesn't work. need to accept more formats
Yeah, you're not kidding. I took shrooms, A (LSD), E, smoked some marijuana (not much), tried cat a few times and generally partied it up for maybe a decade. At some point I found out that my mother had suffered from schizophrenia, which would explain why I got my money's worth out of marijuana, shrooms and A. I had a pretty hard time working out what was real.

Bad trips were something else. We're talking about seeing everything bad about myself and humanity, which considering the basically selfish nature of a human is quite something. Very black-and-white, good-and-evil thinking, alternating between extremes. Synthesizing sounds, colors, physical things around me. When I read about people going nuts or harming themselves, I'm not surprised. Very black-and-white thinking can lead to some alarming thoughts.

I'd find that if I spent a few hours spiralling on that I could lose the ego totally and emerge with a very objective sense of the world. A world in balance, things as they should be, personal and friends' faults accepted, insights into myself and others. I definitely made some amazing self-discoveries, but at significant risk.
By the way, I see that you've decided to go with Nginx as the primary server for all languages and this is not really a problem in fact. I don't think switching to Nginx would be much of a hassle.
Modern investors are a lot more sophisticated than they were a few years ago in regards to where a startup is incorporated and where it operates from. Angel investing and earlier rounds take place anywhere, it is only when larger funds get involved do VCs only tend to invest within a few zipcodes of their own location.

Fred Wilson has blogged about this extensively - he considers his fund to be global, as do many other angel and super-seed investors.
Thanks for that link....I had come across Alex many years ago but the name and link got lost, I was attracted to his work as soon as I saw it.
Am I just sensitive today, or was that a really poorly written article?
Kinetic cruise missiles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
sweet little command to dump your delicious bookmarks (copied/stolen from the Scrumptious setup guide):

curl -u <user>[:<pass>] -o mine.xml https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all

That's now running hourly on my computer. I'll write myself a "loss check" too, to see if any of my "questionable" (private) bookmarks start disappearing.
SmartMovie video player
Thanks! I fleshed this out a little more for Ubuntu: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/ubuntu_itch_scratch.html
Google is not a branch of government in any way whatsoever and, like any other business or private organization, can tell you how to speak and how to dress and how to behave without it being censorship.

My company requires that employees not speak with the press unless they are granted direct permission to do so and that they should, instead, refer them to an internal rep who will speak with them. That is not censorship. That is my company looking out for their best interests so that some dumb ass like me doesn't say something stupid that misrepresents them. My company also has the right to tell me to watch my crude language while working for them and not to dress like I'm attending a beach party.

There are already whistle-blower laws and protections to address what you are referring to, which is the exposition of unethical or illegal business practices by an employee.
Sigh, that example from Perldocs is (as I dimly remember), a translation of old C idioms.

I don't know what you try to prove by bringing up some trivially bad code examples.

(I am not certain about the order the shifts would be evaluated, if I wrote code like that. An attitude from my old C days, since you can trust Perl's eval order. But I got what the pos code did.)
You're splitting hairs. He was given permission to film the yellow badge people. On his lunch break. Using Google equipment. The latter two are the reasons given for his termination and not, as you imply, because he was "bothering people" or not doing "actual work".

The whole affair seems to me a severe overreaction considering they could have just sat the guy down and talked the issue through.
Certainly can be improved.
You cannot export your "friends" to import them in another network, that is right. Still the "download your data" function in Facebook is the best I've ever seen. Produces a zip with plain HTML, it's just so easy to navigate, review, print, copy, etc.
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