skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two things:

1. T-Mobile was just offered $39B. I don't think Google wants to spend that kind of money on a wireless carrier. Moreover, Google doesn't have it. If the Motorola Mobility sale goes through, their $42B will dwindle to $30B. Do you want to offer new debt to finance a purchase of the smallest US national carrier?

2. Google hasn't shown itself to create utilities to the consumer. They're testing out the waters with Google Fiber, but that's hit delays. Just because a company is good at one thing doesn't make it good at all things. Google has proven itself to be very good at software and DevOps. However, running a consumer utility like a phone company is a bit of a different beast. One specific example is the ability to pivot. With software (especially web software), Google can change direction pretty quickly and freely. By contrast, a wireless company has to make decisions often years in advance because consumers will have the devices for years. They get locked into supporting certain technologies and frequencies for years before they can migrate and refarm those assets for something new.

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think Google has the desire or the money and we've yet to see Google offering a service that is more like a utility (electric, gas, phone, internet). How Google handles its Google Fiber project, whether they expand it quickly to new cities, whether it's profitable for them, etc. will give us a better indication of whether Google is the kind of company that would do well in this space. It is interesting. It would be awesome to see Google do to wireless what they've done to search, email, etc. However, people have also thought this about Apple. Entering the utility business puts one in the unenviable position of being a company to potentially be hated. Right now, Google plays the "we think bandwidth should be unlimited" person that everyone loves. Judging by wholesale rates from Clearwire and LightSquared, wireless data transmission currently costs (at a wholesale rate) $7-10/GB. That's a bit of a harsh reality that makes you less loved when you try to pass that on to consumers. Maybe Google could do better, but it's far from risk free and the gains might not be worth it.
I've done the same - keeping on pushing until the candidate is on uncertain ground. (I interview for consulting/ analytic /business/ senior management roles.)

As most of a job is about doing things that haven't been done before, getting the candidate into unknown territory is when you really find out how effective they will be. Some people just stop, others switch seamlessly into problem solving mode and come up with an answer that may or may not work, and also with a plan to test whether it does.
Tell me about it. I have nearly 20 years of experience in CS, and hold an advanced degree. I have 5 years of experience in a very niche field which is relatively hot. I was approached by Facebook for this specific purpose. They invited me in for just a "chat", asked me if I'd be interested in working with them.

Obviously I said yeah, I'd be willing to talk. They set up an in-person interview. Just 45 minutes they said.

So I show up, fully expecting a discussion about that area, my background, etc.

Instead, I get a random coder who wasn't even making eye contact when asking questions. And the questions? Elementary CS stuff that any undergrad would know.

Now, obviously I know them too; heck, I taught Algorithms courses in grad school.

But why waste my time with this crap? You can hire almost any fresh graduate from a top-40 school who would do a halfway decent job at answering those questions. What does asking a PhD "how to print the levels of a binary tree, one per line" tell you about his work? (That wasn't the question, but that was the level of questioning).

The sad part is: I can waste a couple of weeks of my life, go to Glassdoor etc. and basically memorize these questions. I'll probably stand a good chance of blowing the interviewer away by pretending to solve them on the spot. But what does that tell you about how I am at real-life problems?
This is one of the grayer areas. After your experience writing this decoder ... would you prefer CoffeeScript to keep its loops that can go in either direction, or would you prefer loops to always iterate upwards, and have to be explicit if you'd like to count from "[100..1] by -1" ?
The article was not titled 'Can you learn to speak to coders in one day'. It was titled 'Can you learn to code in one day'. And the conclusion seemed to be yes.

He didn't learn to code (as in solve problems) was my point. In fact someone like that may end up making problems.
First of all, a hate component is not a component of fascism, per se. Go look it up.[1] Hate, however, is a very useful motivation for an uninformed populace, and hence it shows up all the time during regime change. The Russian Revolution, for example, involved hate, but resulted in communism.

Secondly, are you claiming with a straight face that there is not a systematic demonization of a particular group in this country? We're at the point where its so successful that "concerned citizens" are now pointing the finger [6].

So that elephant of yours.

"Homeland" Security. Privatization of Prisons. Government checkpoints at all airports. Corporations are Persons (except when it comes to taxes). Money is Speech.

From [1]:

Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood.

In this case "Homeland" serves the same purpose as "Fatherland".

Fascism promotes political violence and war as actions that create national regeneration

ref: "Mission Accomplished".

Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations for violent attacks on opponents or to overthrow a political system

Mayor Bloomberg: "I have my own army in the NYPD". Of particular interest is that if you google that quote on reuters or CNN [2], you wont find it. And yet, here he is on tape: [3]. Can you justify pepper spraying US Citizens in the face [4]? Likewise the paramilitarization of police in the name of stopping the drug war and gangs.

These things don't happen over night. But so far, the trend is entirely one way. Attempts to justify them are just part of the process. Don't get hung up on "fascism". There are plenty of authoritarian regimes that don't fit that label but are equally unfortunate. But they all start the same way. [5]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

[2] https://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&...

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ULbo9SDQv4&feature=relat...

[4] http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-meme-2-2011-11

[5] http://www.endofamericamovie.com/about-film/10-steps-that-cl...

[6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/14/shoshana-hebshi-...
Just installed Gaug.es on my sites - I'm impressed. I've previously used Chartbeat and Reinvigorate (in addition to Google Analytics), and Gaug.es is my favorite so far. The interface is simple and clear, and the iPhone app is nice.

The only thing I miss is the heatmap feature on Reinvigorate.
Oh, absolutely.

I personally think the UNIX security model is broken for multiuser, so I basically run systems in dedicated security mode (as does ~everyone else; single-user laptop/desktops under OSX or Linux, and servers dedicated to a single user/task/application, or at least VMs dedicated to a single user/task).

UNIX local system security is still nice as a belt-and-suspenders thing, but once someone's on a box, assume they own it. The only exception is some special magic stuff like Hardware Security Modules.
How does Sprint's "Network Vision" impact the MHz/million figures? Can we expect to see improvements there? (Excluding challenges due to backhaul off the towers....)
This looks like a great project. From what I can glean from a quick scan of the PDF is that CryptDB acts as a proxy encrypting/decrypting information as it flows to and from the database. It would be great not to have to worry about enforcing encryption on the application end.

Does anyone have any experience with this? I wonder what kind of performance hit you take by running everything through this.
Google buying them would be even worse for competition than AT&T. It'd be a total closed loop: Google OS, Google handsets, Google network, Google services. John Rockefeller could only dream of that sort of integration.
Google+ should and will succeed as Information discovery Platform
Getting a Mindful from Gartner's Data Center Summit
There's always a downside to every approach though. Some people get flustered if they have to say "I don't know" too often, so instead of bouncing from tough to easy, I'd probably prefer to progress from easy to tough.

People will feel confident until they hit their limits. Their limits are what you are looking for (presumably), not their ability to think clearly when they are scared they just blew the interview on a question you didn't really expect them to answer.
It should be possible to create the exact same classes dynamically, without using exec. The only advantage I can see of the exec is that the class template string makes it a little clearer what the equivalent "normal" class definition would look like.

There are other drawbacks to exec though, some people have disabled exec for security reasons and it's opaque to things like pypy.
A TIC TAC TOE game in GWBASIC. I figured out how to make it never lose.(I was 10-11, so this was a big deal). My parents thought the game cheated somehow.
I don't agree with the "tottering on the edge of oblivion" line, but ComputerGuru does make an excellent point about targeting runtimes beyond 2.0. When working on the server/ASP.Net, you are fairly safe using 3.5/4.0, but when doing Windows applications its very painful. The 2.0 runtime was fairly compact and easy to redistribute. 3.5 was a beast in comparison! Even the newer "client profile" versions of the runtime are still painful when you want to build a compact installer for non-technical end users.

I really wish the latest runtime was aggressively pushed by Windows Update, but since it is not you are always in a position where you choose between a painful install process or a giant bloated installer. Not fun. Glad to be back in the web facing + internal tools side of .Net at my job now for this exact reason.
Doom has 26 items? Well, let's see

10 weapons, all of which are really the same weapon with different settings of damage, range, aim, reload, energy so in comparison with Zelda that's really 1 item.

Stimpack, Medkit, Security Armor, Combat Armor, Health Potion, Spiritual Armor, Soul Sphere, Mega Sphere are pretty much all variations of the same thing. At most those would count as 2 items in Zelda. The article didn't include Zelda's hearts, or faeries in it's count.

Blur Artifact
Invulnerability Artifact

Ammo (something not counted in the article)

That was part of the point of the article. In Zelda that 26 items actually open new and varied game play. They are not just stats variations of the same basic items.
This is such an annoying problem now, especially in video/audio production on location, or conferences. In the past you've been stuck setting up on-site infrastructure to share things, and then training/debugging/supporting everyone who needs to use it, or recording email or postal addresses and figuring out how to exchange stuff afterward.

A mobile solution from Kicksend is great, and I'm really looking forward to using it next time I'm at a conference.
At first I thought it was an eggcorn (look it up), but it turns out that both hairbrained and harebrained have long histories, so if it is an eggcorn, it is an old one.
Yes, I work with 12 other people, 6 check-in all the time-everywhere, and 2 others say they use to read reviews.

Majority in a minority? Maybe... but still used.
My startup, mezz, is focused on the local businesses he was talking about. It's a mobile app and platform that allows people to discover and share what's happening nearby. http://www.mezz.com
There is a spectrum. The elite companies have all-day interviews (Google). Middle-tier tech companies have half-day interviews (Amazon). Big non-tech companies have a couple-hour interview (Bank of America). Small companies can vary, but I've gotten hired off a quick IRC chat. I have no idea what the average startup's culture is like, but they probably don't have 5 hours of developer time to waste on each candidate. So instead, they have a short interview instead of a long one.
"Greetings, Professor Falken."

"Hello, Joshua."

"Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
This is like asking: Can You Learn To Play a Musical Instrument In One Day? and then sending someone who can't even read sheet music.

Suzuki said, "Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is skill." In other words, you need to do a lot of coding (including debugging) to become proficient at it.
Link-bait title. It argues CoffeeScript is not a "language".

The obvious rejoinder is that new languages often evolve from design patterns: a pattern or technique is recognized and subsumed into a language: structured programming; object oriented etc.
This is explicit in lisp DSLs, and even C++ at one stage was a bunch of C macros.

- True, the design patterns that CoffeeScript encapsulates aren't revolutionary - but few mainstream languages are.

- And also, the design patterns are local (unlike, say, garbage collection) - but so is structured programming.

There is a question of leakiness of abstraction. Ideally in a high-level language, you are insulated from lower-level details: C is (mostly) independent of the assembly language; VMs provide even more insulation for Java, C#, Ruby, Python; SQL is independent of physical storage. A problem with implementing a language with code-generation is that errors are stated in terms of the target language instead of the source language, making them confusing and hard to debug. But this is an implementation issue, not a language issue. For example, errors can be stated in terms of the source language, by including line numbers (this is also necessary for VMs).

I think the complaint is that because CoffeeScript is explicitly a JavaScript generator that is meant to be human-readable, it doesn't make sense to clutter it with line-numbers. It is trying to target two human user-interfaces; and it can't be a clean abstraction for both. This is a problem with the goal of the present project, not with the language itself.

The CoffeeScript project includes a language, with syntax and semantics (which happen to be defined in terms of JavaScript); it also includes a mapping to JavaScript. One might therefore say "The CoffeeScript project is not a language". But the CoffeeScript language is a language.
Hmmm, well I think it's better if they can go in any direction by default otherwise people will be confused. The `by 1` should be considered an optimization IMO.
> Don't invade my privacy

To varying extents, saying you don't do this is really hard for any third party application integrated into a website. Unfortunately, we can't pull up contextual search results about a text selection without consulting a third party service like Bing or Duck Duck Go, so I doubt that we'll be able to do much better than offering an "opt out" feature in our UI.

> Don't insert text into my cut and paste buffers

We don't currently do this, but if our users ask for it, there is a good chance we will add it. Since it does sound like a frustrating thing, we can push to make it an "opt in" feature on the site owner's side, as opposed to the default behavior. At least that way, it'll only happen when the site owner really wants it to.

> Don't steal my search abilities

I don't believe we currently inhibit your ability to search with your engine of choice. If you find that we do, please let me know!

> Don't steal my mouse clicks

We don't "steal" your mouse clicks (though we do listen to them ;), and we do try to make sure the window only pops up when you have selected text. This experience will hopefully improve over time. Unfortunately, not doing this prevents the app from working in the first place (unless you have a better way to implement it)

> Don't pop up windows

Again, not doing this makes it difficult to have the app in the first place. I know its not for everyone, but a lot of our users really enjoy this functionality.

> Don't break my browser

That's something I can definitely do. Please let me know if you notice us breaking your browser in any way :) us not breaking your browser is one of my highest concerns.
how many CEOs or CTOs of silicon valley success stories are cornell grads? how many many startups that get funding are headed by grads from cornell? and since when does US News and World Report know anything about technology? i've been paying my dues in silicon alley since the late 80s and this isn't what i've been waiting for my entire life...
Apple's Siri can now shop for electronics by voice using Wolfram Alpha
What you're calling "class inheritance" and what other folks call "the prototype chain" are one and the same thing. It's not built-in to CoffeeScript ... it's fundamentally built-in to JavaScript.

CoffeeScript is just making it three words:

A extends B

... instead of the usual JavaScript hoop jumping:

function ctor(){
this.constructor = A;
}
ctor.prototype = B.prototype;
A.prototype = new ctor;
This is really, really cool. I have been hoping to see green tech startups, hopefully we will start to see a lot more.
The interesting thing here is that this appears to be done with intents. So it's quite possible the web re-direct is a side effect of a system wide re-direct that sends you to the Amazon app store whenever you would normally go to the Android Market.

The author casts this as amazon re-writing web request when what probably happening is that web request is turned into an android market intent, which is in turn sent to the Amazon app store because the Android market is not supported on the Kindle Fire. I don't think it's as evil as people are making it out to be.

Most likely amazon never even wrote the code that turns the web request into an intent in the first place.
So the Fidesz party of Hungary has passed changes to the Hungarian constitution that will solidify their power even in the face of future electoral defeats. They have done all of this above the table, using the procedures and process of the current constitution. If this is okay, then it means that limitations on democracy are legitimate.

If this is not okay, then such power-solidifying measures must be disallowed, even if they are passed above the table using democratically agreed-upon processes and procedures. Therefore, limitations on democracy are legitimate.

What Krugman and his friend object to, then, is not the limitation of democracy, but who is doing the limiting. Note that they have no trouble contemplating that the Jobbik party could be outlawed by these new laws, but they are crestfallen that this could happen to the Socialists.

Quote: "According to a proposed constitutional amendment, the crimes of the former communist party will be listed in the constitution and the statute of limitations for prosecuting crimes committed during the communist period will be lifted. The former communist party is branded a criminal organization and the current opposition Socialist Party is designated as their legal successor. It is still unclear, legally speaking, what this amendment means. But it is probably not good for the major opposition party."

So the Reds may finally face justice for running the secret police, the concentration camps, the brainwashing, and other forms of oppression? Democracy or no democracy, that's payback.
Besides the apparent mismatch between hours in a day and hours necessary for all that to happen in 1.5 weeks (well, it's technically possible), what surprised me was just even that 40 companies out of 50 were responsive enough to schedule phone interviews in that time. And next stage interviews after that. And make a decision to hire him. Especially for a self-proclaimed bad coder.

So, I agree with you, but this is not really the point of the post. The point is that interviewing is a game that you can master with practice.
Humans don't live their lives as an exercise in exploring the rational consequences of consciously held principles. And actually, a lot of people don't go in for cancer treatment, because cancer treatment is fucking miserable and doesn't always extend your lifespan as much as you'd hope.
Here's a link to this article without the anchor to the comment:
http://dannorth.net/2011/12/19/the-rise-and-rise-of-javascri...
My knee-jerk, emotional, response is to agree with you because from my perspective: they aren't working to win consumers by building the best product, they either buy-out the technology they want or stomp competing technology with patents. The biggest players cost each other billions hoping to cripple each others ability to compete, or eradicate the competing product altogether.

Yes, we get a phone out of it, but that phone is so we can buy apps, pay providers for service (fine, except we pay out the nose for things that aren't even really necessary like text message plans on smart phones that don't need them), they sell us the device, or the apps, and then track us, monitor us, and sell that information so that they can better target and sell us more stuff.

We're not just the consumer, our habits are a product.

But that's my knee jerk doom and gloom response, something I keep in the back of my mind when I work on more rational reactions.
There are some neat advances in Programming Language research, relating to restricting languages (or sub-languages) to a terminating subset. This is typically done in a functional context, and then you can do this by restricting recursion.

These non-turing-complete languages can be used for some useful things, besides the compiler's proof that they terminate. The main use is getting totality (knowledge that for all valid inputs, you will get a valid output) and then writing programs that generate proofs. The fact a valid, total program that generates the proof exists, means that the proof exists, and we don't have to run the program! Thus, in this terminating-language context, a valid program that generates a proof, is itself a proof.

This is very useful for compiler-verified proofs of correctness about various aspects of your program.

tl;dr: Turing Completeness is taken for granted, but for many kinds of programming, it appears it may be useful to have less.

See also: Agda, Epigram, Coq.
The key to understanding languages whose runtimes interpret an optree is to realize that all performance depends on the number of ops. When you implement a linked list in pure Ruby, that's a lot of operations that the runtime has to keep track of. When you insert into an array, the actual work is done (in C) in a single operation. Less bookkeeping, less overhead. If you implement both arrays and linked lists in pure Ruby, you'll see the performance you expect. If you implement arrays in C and linked lists in Ruby, the array will probably be faster for any workload. (But implement the linked list in C, and you'll see the performance you expect again. It's computer science, not magic.)
It seems like an easy way to disable it outright and permanently is a feature people would like to have. While noscript (and similar tools) would certainly solve this on a per-visitor basis, if we (CloudFlare) could provide a novel way to present an opt-out in the UI we could then report to our users how many of their visitors ultimately disabled the feature completely. This is just me musing about the possibilities, but overall that seems like it would be more constructive than our users thinking "Oh awesome, another one of those Apture things!" while their users silently grumble and block scripts..