skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That first example is better written as:

sub f {
my ($self, $foo, $bar) = @_;
return $self->do_something($foo, $bar);
}

The shifts all occur in order (at least in those examples). Another confusing example:

open(FOO, '-|') or exec 'cat', '-n', $file or die "Could not open 'cat -n $file'";
while(<FOO>) {
do_something();
}

There are similar example in the Perl docs ('perldoc -f open'). "open(FOO, '-|')" forks and the parent opens a pipe to the child. The open() call returns 1 for the parent, and 0 for the child, so the child executes the 'exec' while the parent drops down to the while loop. The child then dies after the exec command.
Nice Joint Ethan! There are many times when I want synchronous communications. This is a perfect compliment to Twitter.
I knew Python and Ruby before I started with CoffeeScript, so perhaps that colored my experience. CoffeeScript is basically a minimalized blend of js, Ruby, and Python syntax-wise. But I still think someone who understands js will pretty much automatically get CoffeeScript concept-wise, at least to the level they get js concept-wise, because the central concepts of programming in CoffeeScript aren't different than js, just the syntax.
This whole thing about not speaking about something wrong ultimately leads to right stuff being lost. Enterprise vendors like IBM are always in the hunt of giving the industry something that forces volumes of people to use it, and then design tools around it that make people addicted to it.

Just put a auto completion feature in a couple famous IDE's to enable this happen, and see how many people use it without caring what, why and how of it.

Then one fine day there is situation that most of the programmers in the market are trained to use it and if you have to run a project you to hire them and let them to what they want. And then the technology adoption grows.

Its not OK just to remain silent. Proper criticism is needed often, it helps things evolve in the right direction.
Louis Vuitton Watches - Fashion Louis Vuitton Watches
I got an invite a few months ago and tried it out. It was pretty amazingly rough for how long they'd been working on it. I did check out the source and was... not impressed.
Shure E500 or SE530/535's are probably the best in ear headphones you can buy that aren't custom fitted.
Warning: slightly off-topic.

Is the book really dead? The post's title is poorly chosen. Until e-books come anywhere near the experience of reading a physical copy of say À la recherche du temps perdu, the book isn't dead.

Clearly the post isn't about Proust, and I hope I don't come off as an ass for being picky about the title.

The post is about technical (especially computer-related) literature, and I think it's inevitable that this genre will suffer greatly. I think it will be supplanted by more interactive alternatives, which is great. There is something strange about a paper book full of source code, isn't there?

And let's be honest: 90% of the books on software engineering (and perhaps on computer-related subjects in general) that should never have gone through a printer.
I agree with you. Actually I'm not too much in favor of XML either. Somebody high up in the hierarchy attends a few conferences here and there, reads the IBM journal. All along the word 'XML' gets repeated some 1000 times.

So the impression he gets is, XML is going to add value to everything it touches. Most developers like me have no say in that at all, we have to just use it.

I prefer the hack to get it just done. But agree with you, none of that is a permanent solution.
Hire Web Developers For E-commerce Web Development
An ecommerce website is more valuable than developing a standard static website because of the security features it may provide to your monetary transactions and that is the reason why, not every web developer can design an ecommerce store.
I honestly can't tell if you're presenting the 2nd story as a good thing or a bad thing. I doubt that LSD made your friend transgendered (especially since it's been 10 years).

Given that your friend is transgendered, it's probably a lot better that she figured it out while in school instead of when she was 40 and had a wife and kids, even though dropping out of school and getting one's sex reassignment surgery in Thailand are pretty bad ideas.
Interesting. I thought they were supposed to clean that up :)
It looks a LOT better, it requires a LOT less typing, and it saves you a LOT of stupid syntax errors and typos compared to brace-semicolon-comma-parentheses stew.
Hence the need for a fully encrypted Internet. Turn the Internet into a 100% secure and wire-proof network. That's the only way to deal with these thugs.
My advice is take jQuery Mobile, extract the parts you care about and build your web app your own way. You don't have to use the whole thing. I agree with not trying to emulate native apps.
Worst. Font. Ever.
Apple already competes with Readability with Safari Reader, so I guess that would make sense.
مشاهدة مباراة تشيلسي وتوتنهام بث مباشر|عواطلى
"There are perceptions and there are facts."

Do you dispute that facts are also perceptions?
It is is a lessons learnt.
Implicitly-parallelizing programming - Flow Manifesto
Why should we change? They're the ones that suck.
Hm...does your boss and your company know what market rates are? Don't assume that your company is purposefully underpaying you; it may very well be that they don't know enough of the market. In that case, esp. if you're on good terms with your boss, it'd be a simple matter of educating them in your research.

Startups usually don't have a ton of cash, so if you feel like you're still being shortchanged and the company simply can't afford to pay you more (from the company's perspective, increasing your salary may mean increasing everybody else's as well), you can ask for other things: more options, more days off, better benefits, and as you mentioned working remotely.

You're in a good position, and have built up good will over the years, so I'm sure they wouldn't want to lose you. It might be just a simple matter of bringing it up, so do that first.
The thing about Bangalore IBM'ers I'm from Bangalore myself and can say that you are 100% correct. The whole thing is IBM Bangalore is actually composed of IBM services, and most of them service projects. I have many friends working there, and its just another Indian company. Its your usual job hoppers who know nothing but keep moving from one company to another just for hikes.

To more about the state of affairs here, read my comment on another thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2480368
Note to young videographers: When a company asks whether you're working on an expose, the phrase "I’m interested in issues of class, race, and labor" will not defuse the situation.
The issue is control and safety. I expect my bookmarks to be complete, to not disappear silently and randomly.

I'd rather build my own little bookmarking system on a LAMP server (I will probably do that) than subject my digital life to a company that threatens to cut holes in it.
Big companies divide their company internally into many units. Things like research, services or even on basis of Industry verticals like Banking, Communication and Entertainment.

The units in IBM that work on Mainframes and Supercomputers et al, are totally different than the ones that execute maintenance and service projects. The people, the culture everything is different.
Right. Its a very interesting technical project but I`m at a loss for who your customers would be. I suppose the same people that use BOINC...? Because most companies that would need that level of power already have the infrastructure (then there is security...)

This is one market that would require some research. Again though, very attractive technically...you just need to find people willing to pay.

Could you build a reliable, fast enough web server on this? So that your master receives a request and hands it off to a node in the network which parses and responds to the client? THAT would work and could actually compete with Google Apps and AWS without their costs!
My feature request is to bind touch swipe events. I tried this from my ipad and it didn't work. I know jQuery mobile ships with a swipe event - http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a4.1/#docs/api/events.html
> I'm pretty sure point 2 is incorrect. The compiler doesn't worry about multithreaded access to properties/variables when optimizing.

This is not about optimizing, it's about static verifications. And that's very much the point: you can't statically verify this piece of knowledge if the code can be used in a multithreaded context.
The term "rite of passage" is very fitting.

I've been thinking about this stuff all day, and trying to figure out how to reconcile the potential rewards with the dire risks involved; should I recommend dabbling with this crazy mojo, or should I tell people to leave it the hell alone and not to risk it?

I suspect some of the appeal for those of us who've been down this path, especially when young, was the risk itself; because "we are a generation of men raised by women," and we wanted to test ourselves against every boundary we could find - even the borders of reality itself, if we could find them - and to be tested ourselves.

I suppose the socially accepted alternative is to get as drunk as you can and pick a fight.
Good post.

As someone interested in HTML and CSS, the books available are so unfathomably meagre with useful, new content - the newest books are basically even worse. There's this culture of making CSS books that largely repeat themselves with very random compositions. Often, they make a site and slap on some CSS3. I don't recommend learning HTML and CSS from anywhere else than HTML Dog, CSS Pivot, and just playing around with your own experiments. It boggles the mind that this can really be the case - CSS hasn't changed a lot in many years, and the big difference is mainly that there's a larger chance that a browser will support your code.

Having said that, there still are purposes for some books. Just look at the Python debate. Getting into Python is a pain in the ass compared to HTML/CSS. I am currently annoyed that I can't find an up-to-date Django book, and DjangoBook.com is not a very good resource - it seems to suffer from the wiki syndrome where a lot of co-editors have removed any sense of style and red thread to follow.
Interesting paper (even if it has gratuitous references), perhaps a suggestion to make IQ tests higher-stakes without changing the tests is to make the results publicly announced in front of a peer group.

Nevertheless IQ isn't useless and I'm still skeptical that the underlying g-factor, crystallized intelligence, and fluid intelligence can be changed very much--N-back training is always fun to read about. To quote Dr. Rob: "There are countless criticisms of I.Q. testing, some valid and some asinine, and it’s more important to think of I.Q. as a scoring range rather than a specific number. That said, few could reasonably argue against the notion that a score of 51 suggests severe intellectual impairment." http://shrinktalk.net/?p=515
A corporation is considered a person, and that person is separate and distinct from its employees, officers, and directors.

So for the corporation to appear pro se, it must actually appear in court, but there is no way for a corporation to do that because it really isn't a person.

So any officer arguing on behalf of the corporation is actually engaging in the unlawful practice of law without a license by representing the "person" corporation.

Your (a) is the common public policy reason given why lawyers need to be licensed. I offer no opinion on its wisdom.

Regarding (b), to get a new trial it is more difficult. You need to prove dereliction of duty (every state varies here) by the attorney AND that the errors caused you to lose and you would have won otherwise. Very difficult standard to meet. This rule protects lawyers greatly, to the detriment of their clients.
mind blown. where's the don't be evil thing ?
C# (values) or Nice don't use a full, explicit nullable generic type, and instead tag the original type (`int?` for C#, `?String` for Nice).

This means some_field could be a type tagged as nullable (e.g. `some_field` would be defined as ?Foo).

An alternative would be `@NotNull` opt-in anotations, where `some_field` would not be tagged, therefore nullable, therefore could hold the value `null`.

Thus, if you have to check it for null then `some_field` is a nullable reference, in a language which may have nullable and non-nullable references.
What do you gain by not giving an answer? What do you stand to lose?

What do we lose by not hearing your answer? What might we gain?

Your call, of course.
> I understand the logic behind it, but it still seems sort of weak to not stick your neck out when it really matters, and then turn around and write a blog post about how awful it all was after the fact.

Most likely he has limited partners who have given him money to invest, so it's not just his own money.

The company is almost certainly less likely to make it now - they could lose the suit, and then it's over. But even if they win, that's a massive mental beatdown and stress and such for quite a while. Not to mention costs.

It sucks all the way around, but an investor with limited partners can't back something that doesn't fit with the goals/metrics/risk that they promised when their LP's signed up.
>"Write once, parallelize anywhere" -- With very little modification, the same Flow code should be able to target hadoop / Google's MapReduce, the JVM using Java Threads, C using pthreads, MPI or a GPU using CUDA. By understanding the big-Oh complexity of computations in Flow programs, The compiler will produce code that optimally partitions the workload in systems with nonuniform computing speeds and/or communication costs, e.g. CPU/GPU combinations.

That's a big promise.
"the first girl I had spoken to had followed the instructions on the back of her yellow badge – which is to call a certain manager if anyone asks about the work of the yellow badge class"

This scarely reminds of "Jedem das Seine" and "Arbeit macht frei"

Both phrases actually match the described situation perfectly
Wow. This sounds like some kind of sweatshop operating within the Google campus and they are afraid of this getting exposed. Still not able to reconcile the public image of Google and what is described in this post.
Where by "competes with" you mean "bundles"
They should have found a recent law grad that is unemployed. That guy would work for free to make his name on a big case.

Any competent law grad who passed the bar can answer motions, reply with his own, and get this case on the court docket 2 years out to buy these guys some time.

I would have taken the case for free.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that this company can restart operations? Who owns the IP now?

The argument that the patent climate hasn't changed should not deter investors in a restart of this company, most startups would die if they are sued for patent infringement and in this case the aggressor has been pacified.
India/Bangalore/Rest of India situation has become a joke to say at the least. Words like 'Architect', 'Consultant' , 'Tech lead' are all dangerous words here, generally a person who has that designation is useless, hasn't done any work at all.

During 90's and early 2000's most people got rapidly promoted regardless of whether they deserve it or not. They have hardly coded, spent most of the times at on site locations made good money and are now just relaxing and pushing time. Managers have no frigging clue how projects need to run, architects don't even have basic technical skills.

The assumption is that you can just give orders to juniors and get the job done. That is how most of the so called seniors work here. Good hackers/programmers are never rewarded due to many reasons. The horrible ones hop jobs to get good hikes and ultimately end up earning more than the good guys.

The general attitude of the guys joining the industry is not be technically good, never code, just get promoted quickly, go to onsite, earn money in USD, purchanse a flat, car, marry and settle down. And these sort of guys were actually rewarded during 90's and 2000's. So now everybody wants to be like that.

The actual good guys are there, but are lost in the crowd.
> Instapaper can't hold a candle to it.

Wishful thinking?
Theres probably more to it than just that. Given Google's history, I have to account for other factors - maybe these are temporary employees being hired to a special program (as in a remedial or 'second chance' program).

Or maybe this is Google's new way of boosting revenue!

Lets not jump to conclusions, this will definitely get picked by major news outlets and then Google will have to respond
Wow, so these yellow badges are sort of the plantation slave labor then?

Amazing to hear that Google has a strict caste system.

edit: wow, at 1:05PST dozens of people suddenly hit this thread and started attacking the premise.
On Writers and the Beer Diet
sad as it is, i guess this just means the web software industry is growing up. in the high tech devices industry (consumer electronics, advanced machinery, etc), this has been the status quo for decades.
this made me sad. anyone still got illusion that google left china because of human rights?
New order of animals discovered?
exploit? i'm sorry...not having access to free meals, shuttle buses, smartphones, etc isn't exploitation. There's nothing in this that says anything close to exploitation.
How seriously should I be concerned as a Linux user. (Who uses likely lots of binary blobs)
This sounds an awful lot like the movie 'The Antitrust'.
true - my mistake.
Although you should also know that 2.6.38 and 11.04 has a mysterious power management bug that increases laptop battery usage significantly.

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?48656-Mobile-Users...

All said and done, IMHO it's not worth upgrading to 11.04 right now.
Interesting idea moving to another country; since they were looking to raise funds it's probably tough to convince the same investors to invest in the new foreign startup.
It's not that it's not worth it, it's more if he's constrained by price he could get a perfectly functional self-built pc for a fraction of the price of a mac.
This is literally one of the craziest things I have ever seen. Google is doing absolutely nothing wrong or unethical at all. The guy got fired because he started accusing Google of racism.

Wow. Just wow. The sense of entitlement and self-righteousness is just mind blowing.
Its really nothing new. Impressive fact is that corruption is finally being shown in news the way it should be have been decades ago
Spying on someone with Cell Phone Spy Software
Cell Phone Spy Software is the perfect solution for an employer who needs to monitor employees during business hours. It also enables you to keep an eye on your partner, children's without them knowing. Some people even use this technology in case they lose their mobile phone they can use the GPS capabilities built into most mobile phone spy apps to find their phone.
Honestly, I'm not sure this is a big deal. They're hiring unskilled labor and giving them a role at an extraordinary company. A rational management team wanting to generate profits for risk taking investors and generate new growth, cuts costs by eliminating benefits when possible.

They could easily get this done in India or China. If they are really doing book scanning, I'm shocked this isn't being done in the far east. With that perspective, this isn't far from "don't be evil".

It's not the best practice in the world but this isn't exploitation.

Perhaps it should inspire some investigative journalism.
Perhaps Google could fund a program and give these data entry people the opportunity to innovate, rewarding them accordingly with a small scale founders' award?

Despite the assumed background of these employees, they're at Google inspiring their kids. With so few benefits outside of their salary, they can always work elsewhere. But why would they take fast food or something of the sort over this?

I imagine the cleaning crew that vacuum at Goldman Sachs at night get treated way worse.
Just a few days ago I submitted a link to The Algorithm Visualization Portal:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2488994

Direct link to the portal: http://algoviz.org/
I'm glad to see that somebody finds these to be useful.
I think his point was not "why is Lisp not popular", but if it is so powerful, why has it not become more mainstream based upon that? If a language is truly as powerful as its advocates assert, should it need a marketing budget? Ruby, via Ruby on Rails, is famous, and has been used on lots of highly visible (successful?) projects, with no traditional marketing budget.

I think he's asking, if Lisp is so awesome, why doesn't someone ever do something awesome with it? It seems like a fair question.
So if he handed off all the copies of the video he had to google, where did the video in the post come from? Is it a totally different video?
Actually, this comparison is way out of place. Not giving people benefits (but still paying them!) is completely different from imprisoning and torturing people for their race, opinions, or beliefs.
We have emailed Joyent in regards to this new 'policy'. Also, the fellas at NodeJitsu are in the same boat.
But then how do you explain the overreaction from Google which led to the firing of this guy. There has to be something which Google was trying desperately to keep secret.
> Hm...does your boss and your company know what market rates are?

I am sure he does not. (He moved back recently, after working in the US for around last 20 years). I brought up this issue indirectly several times, when we tried to recruit people, conducted campus drives. Recently, a colleague of mine (who used to get the same salary as myself), left for over 70% salary hike. I intend to present more data points when talking to him.

How do I say "I think you are out of touch of the market rates for my skillset", without hurting his feelings/implying the company is cheap?

I actually prefer benefit (of possibly remote work, from a less expensive/better city), than hike. I just dont know how to bring it up. (ie, how to word it, without feeling/sounding awkward/needy.)
To me the most interesting part is that these are not the only unskilled labor being employed by Google. As the video points out, the janitors at google are given access to the many perks. It seem strange that this one group is singled out.

At the same time, this guy was fired, so lets take his testimony with a grain of salt.
I'd really like to follow up on this recommendation: I used Perl first as a kind of sed and awk on steroids in the dark days on a VAX running BSD 4.3, wrote simple CGI in it in the early 90's then later recoded a fax gateway in Perl 4 on Solaris 2.4. Like many people, Perl for me was a useful tool, but regularly unreadable, and admitting of very few good practices. In the end, I moved across to other domain-specific languages and only dived into Perl infrequently for data analysis tasks during the last 10-15 years. Writing the same old unmaintainable, unreusable, script-like code, and hating it.

Modern Perl is a revelation! While the first hundred pages are a crystal-clear recap of the basic language (and I found at least a couple of things there that I didn't really know about), the chapters on modern object-orientation (using Moose), exception handling, testing, maintainability, and what features in Perl 5 to avoid are all pithy, to the point and well-argued.

If you're a (self-exiled) Perl coder like I was, give this (e)book a read and see if you might jump back in. I have - and would second frameworks like Perl Dancer as fantastic examples of what the Perl community is up to these days.