skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really?

I think that transcript essentially proves that it wasn't Google. Everything he says about the program is completely wrong. I'll just pick out the things that are indisputably wrong, there is more that I would argue is wrong but may be viewed differently by others. You've already mentioned the false information about Mocality that the caller uses, so I don't need to repeat that.

"[The domain will be] ww.your business.CO.KE"
No, it will be www.your business.kbo.co.ke. This is something very important, you get a subdomain of Google's Kenyan Business Online site kbo.co.ke.

"Twenty one days. We’re going to develop the website within	twenty one days"
No. Google's KBO does not develop the websites themselves, they provide a "Business Sitebuilder tool" that allows you to do it yourself.

"XXXXX dot XXXXX at gmail dot com."
This should be @google.com not @gmail.com.

"and also we go on facebook. People who log into facebook can see the clothes you are selling."
No. Google's KBO does not do anything with Facebook.

"When someone is on facebook, they’ll see your ad there."
Again, no. Google is not giving you advertising space on Facebook.

"Ok, there’s a small fee for hosting of Ksh. 200 per month. [...] Only that for hosting. You know	hosting	is	different from developing."
No, there is no hosting fee. The only possible fee is an optional one if you want your own domain and it isn't 200 per month.

There's more but I think that should give you the general idea. Given just this transcript and comparing it to the details of Google's program at kbo.co.ke I would say that this caller is definitely not working for Google but is rather a scammer. In fact, in this transcript the caller basically walks through the steps needed to use the Business Sitebuilder tool. This explains how the business who didn't agree to the thing would end up with a site anyway, the scammer did it while on the phone.
Now, I haven't considered the IP logs, but my best guess for that is that it is coming from Google Translate as discussed elsewhere.

Edit: I should clarify. I am not certain that Google was not involved with this, it's more that I am convinced that that particular caller wasn't working for Google. While I am unconvinced that these callers worked for Google, there is some rather damning evidence.
Judge: No Date for Android Trial Until Oracle Fixes Damages Theory
I'm in, of course!
Here's the coolest thing about this project:

When I opened the Mac app and I believed its a native Cocoa app.

And that's where web applications are going.
Passion comes from the Latin deponent verb patior: to suffer, undergo, endure. (Whence the phrase 'Passion of Christ,' which doesn't mean 'Jesus was passionate about stuff.')

Anyway, there are a whole host of value assumptions built into that "healthy" word you're waving around. If I'm passionate about painting and don't care about having a family, then I'm going to paint. I'm not obligated to have a family just because it's a social norm.
URL redirection Vulnerability in Google | The Hacker News (THN)
In no particular order:

The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki

The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - Al Ries & Jack Trout

Positioning - Al Ries & Jack Trout

Repositioning - Jack Trout (with Steve Rivkin)

Differentiate or Die - Jack Trout (with Steve Rivkin)
Great chating and meeting site
I don't understand how terminology could ever lead you to such differening conclusions.

Maybe I own a cat. It's a great cat. But this morning, I decided that it is actually a fish, and as such, is a failed fish, because it can't breathe underwater. Or maybe it can breathe underwater, because it was a fish all along.

In any case, expecting a change in behaviour just because I changed the name... bewildering.
Ha! "take your pick" sounds like a cruel joke... I gave up on the games industry after 15 years in the majors. Kept hoping to find ethical behavior somewhere, never did and left for film VFX. But I never looked outside the US...
Every time I read about 37signals and how they work I get a wave of jealousy and impatience. Its refreshing to know that there are some companies out there that treat their employees like humans and not cogs in the machine. Its also refreshing to know you can run a business at the scale of 37signals without huge bureaucracies.

I know they aren't the only ones who do this but they are vocal about it, and when your living/working in enterprise land (MKE/Midwest) its good to remember it doesn't need to be this way.
This is true, but they're usually local angels, not VCs.
One of the cool things about continuous deployment is that rush of, "Here's a new feature, right now! You don't have to wait! It doesn't break any specs, so it must work and be a good idea!"

One of the downsides is that bugs like this creep in, because there's no QA step. (and code review is not QA). So, push something that accidentally breaks the app? Oops.

The good thing about a continuous deployment strategy is that the engineer can turn around right away and push a fix. Low ceremony helps here, "Oops, forgot to add this file to the source repo" can be fixed fast.

I've been with clients where a "continuous deployment" strategy would have meant, "continuously putting out fires, throwing any idea of development process out the window". But, Nick said his job was essentially dev support of QA, where you might not want to wait for the next two week iteration to schedule a ticket to fix a bug in production.
In the state of Washington, it's actually unconstitutional for any state bill, referendum, or voter initiative to have more than one topic. Our state courts have thrown out laws for this reason.
Which glue should I use?
I've been switching between 2 and 4 spaces through my whole programming career. Even now I'm switching daily between different languages and projects with different amount of indentation. And I for one have noticed no correlation between bugs and amount of indentation. But I might be wrong - I have done no actual measurements.

What I can say though, is that there is a correlation between a lousily indented code and bugs. Consistency is the key in indentation. Reading non-consistently indented code, that's what drives you insane... but two instead of four spaces... hardly.
There's an enormous middle ground between the two extremes you're portraying, though.
It can be worse than that.

Unfortunately adding issue 124,436 into the tracker puts the manager responsible for $SYSTEM over quota for exceptions. Most likely that item or one similar will be placed on a completed project just to get back under quota. Nobody needs issue 98,402 fixed if issue 124,436 prevents you from reaching it, right?

I wish this wasn't the world we lived in, but such management tactics will never really die.
that wasn't the bigger point I was trying to raise. I don't care a penny about semantics and the engrish language.
Thats a great word! I'll be sure to use it from now on.
"Why is that anymore dangerous than knowing how rm, rmdir, and chmod work on the commandline?"

To screw up is human. To screw up a million times per second takes a computer.

In absolute terms, the two are equivalent. But the capacity for your Python program using os.whatever to unpleasantly surprise you is much greater.
Foursquare May Have Deleted All of its Users Accounts
The problem is when those getters and setters have other effects (maybe invalidating a cache?). In Java, it's considered best to just go ahead and add the getters and setters first, so that when you need to add these side effects later you don't have to modify lots of code using your library (if that is even possible). Languages like Python make this unnecessary since they have first class properties:

# Old
class Foo(object):
def __init__(self):
self.x = 0
foo = Foo()
foo.x = 1

# New
class Foo(object):
def __init__(self):
self.__x = 0
@property
def x(self):
return self.__x
@x.setter
def x(self, val):
self.__x = val
do_other_stuff()
That's a pretty brutal stance. :|

I can't say I know the average shelf life of a software component in various languages, but I can say that at least things like Java have managed to justify their use of accessors by that metric. Maybe the focus should be on writing less throwaway code than deciding whether to "invest" a few extra minutes or not on accessors.
Whenever I see the word "pecuniary" I'm reminded of this inspirational quote from David Copperfield: http://books.google.ca/books?id=8GAXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA380...
> So how many lives have garbagemen changed in the way OP talks about?

Let's start with yours. Have you ever been in a city (e.g., New York) that was experiencing a sanitation worker strike? Garbage-men are easily some of the most important people in a modern society. The guys that empty my building's dumpster change the lives of hundreds of people every day. I can think of quite a few scientists and doctors who would love to have that level of impact.

Ditto for building maintenance and cleaning. At one point, my university decided that it could save money by cutting back on cleaning staff. Going forward, they would only come by to empty the trash and vacuum our offices once per month; the bathrooms would get cleaned every week or two, but other than that we were to be entirely on our own. We thought that this would be mildly inconvenient- it was worse. Oh, your office-mate had a banana with their lunch? That peel's gonna be in the trash can for a long time...

It turns out that the cleaning people had been changing our lives in numerous significant ways, every day, and when that change stopped happening, we sure as heck noticed. After far too many months, the administration decided that there were better places to cut back, and reinstated more regular cleaning services. And there was much rejoicing.

Your life is the way it is because a very large number of people are doing very unpleasant and/or difficult jobs, often for surprisingly small amounts of money. These people are to be honored and thanked at every opportunity, IMHO, and personally I try to as mindful as I can about the numerous and concrete ways that they change my life.
Being able to hand of code to someone else is always going to be useful in any non trivial program. Very rarely are successful projects handled by one person in a vacuum.

I think the issue is in designing the initial structure you have to make decisions about which parts of the code will be important and how the relationships of objects etc will work. Sometimes if you have something that differs massively from your initial assumptions then you are in for an enormous refactoring job (as well as often a big data wrangling job if your app is already in production).

When I have done work for clients I have had fairly simple feature requests which I had not anticipated which have required fairly fundamental re-structuring of the codebase, if I had known these in advance I would have designed it differently.

Even if I had not known the specific changes in advance but I knew how much it would be likely to change then there are places where I would have also altered the design , but of course having said that there were areas where I spent allot of time creating code that allowed for flexibility where it was simply not required.
Ask HN: Moving from Heroku to service Asia suggestions?
We have been working on an iPhone app that uses node.js backend running on Heroku. For release we decided to try and release on one of the Asian markets first (Singapore) to make sure everything is good. Just today I realized that requests that take 600ms in US and about 900ms in Europe take almost 2+sec from Asia. Anyone have suggestions as to what to do? I could just ignore it and release anyway but that experience in the app will be bad, move our deployment from Heroku to something like Linode (data center in Tokyo) but I am not really that capable as a sysadmin (understatement since I picked Heroku to avoid managing anything myself) or maybe there are node.js hosting solutions that are in Asia that also supply Redis hosting?
Favorite Web Apps of 2011
There is much knowledge than you can learn. Try to focus your learning on what help you solve your clients problems. You'll become an expert only in a thing or two, and you'll be able to talk about it like the people here on HN.

Also the smart comment writer is not a representative of the average HN visitor/population. There are always people who are expert in their niches.
"The upsell is the part that makes me suspicious, because that doesn't sound like the type of thing that Google would do."

You haven't worked with their sales team then. Sales people (Commissionus Salesdroidicus :-) live and breath to win, and winning means creating leads, converting leads, and booking business.

Hopefully the folks inside Google who believe in transparency and doing business competitively but honestly, will be able to pressure the teams who endorse this sort of activity.

The next step will be the more interesting one. Do they they stop scraping Mocality? Do they enter into a dialog to actually partner with them? Or do they start using Tor nodes to scrape the site and stop telling people they are from Google?

When that next chapter plays out the true nature of the business is revealed.
I hope Google isn't that tone deaf. Jobs got a lot right, and one of them is at the VP-level you don't have excuses. The janitor can have excuses, but if this is under your watch -- it's under your watch.

I felt like Google played dumb with the drug ads thing and didn't really hold people accountable (Page was hardly rebuked) -- here they need to come down hard to show that they're serious about "Don't be evil" -- or is that just a useful motto when you're the young underdog.
With SimpleGeo’s Shutdown Imminent, Parse Swoops In With A Life Preserver
"Censoring illegal content" is weasel terminology and a huge red herring. If a government chooses to censor content, that content is considered illegal by definition: if it wasn't considered illegal, the government would have no grounds to censor it.

The problem is not that they want to censor things. Almost everyone agrees that some things need to be censored (e.g. publications found to be defamatory, publications of stolen trade secrets, etc.). The problem is what content they want to be able to declare illegal at little more than a whim.
loved reading the last comment: point is SOPA sucks.
I have similar issues. For most of my adult life I've had so many interests that it is just impossible to keep up with all of them to the level I want. Even within computing as a field I am overloaded. I read a lot of stuff on HN and elsewhere I find interesting and I agree that it makes me feel like I should understand it all. First time I've came to that realization.

My current solution to the problem of overwhelming interests is starting grad school in CS; by going through a program, I am forced to focus on certain things by outside forces, thus saving my sanity.
As far as legal action, Google employees violated Mocality 's Terms & Condition so maybe legal action is possible.
This also reminds me of what AirBnB did with CraigsList. You're right - it's done everyday. And let's face it... will anyone remember a month from now?
I have a Netflix streaming account, and still find myself buying media on iTunes, Amazon, and (very rarely) whatever independent setup a show will be running.

It's trivially easy to get ahold of pretty much any TV shows/movies I want to see, and compared to $100+/month on cable it still comes out cheaper.
Sure thing. jay [.dot.] neely [@at@] SocialStrategist [.dot.] com
Cool story, bro.

(Mime aside, do we get to hear what the argument was?)
I'm sure that this divide exists somewhere if people still talk abou tit, but genuinely confused by it. "Programmer" and "Software Engineer" are different job categories for the purposes of filing taxes (in the US), and I've read articles projecting job prospects that give a sunny outlook to "software engineers" and poor prospects to "computer programmers." The idea is always that "software engineers" design a system and provide technical expertise, and "programmers" implement.

Thing is, I've called myself a "programmer" for well over a decade now, and I just don't see it. Where are these programmers who just "implement"? I guess if someone had wireframes and made all the technology decisions and handed it over to a programmer, maybe that would count?

A company I worked for tried this, they made me an "Architect" and gave me an offshore team, and it was a disaster. It could be that I wasn't good at providing precise instructions, but to me, precise instructions are hard to distinguish from code. Well, maybe that's why "programmers" have poor job prospects - all programming work is now done by "software engineers"...

Does google, or facebook use "programmers" who are distinct from "software engineers?" Any startups out there that do this?
I don't really care that Unity is forcing this ridiculous vertical toolbar onto us since I don't use it anyway. What worries me more is the fact Gnome seems to follow this distasteful trend. As if my 27" high-resolution workstation display needs a bunch of massive icons on it.
Apple audits unveil child labor, slave labor and more at Apple supplier plants
True. If, for example, you're a consulting company, you could have an intermediate developer sit down and watch every junior developer as he codes. The intermediate developer could then say "Oh, dude, nice try but stripping all HTML will probably bork at least some customers' sites. Here, let me open a console on prod and fire a quick SQL query that would get me fired at TPS Reports Inc. Ahh yes, it appears customers do indeed embed HTML. OK, let's do this the long way."

This would allow you to bill, ballpark, $10,000 for "Enhancement: forgetting to close a tag in a todo no longer borks site."

But, while not being TPS Reports Inc, that is still a pretty different environment than what 37Signals operates in.
I need to add that it was a private school (sadly, public school here is going down the tubes). And that CS subjects were additional to the standard subjects (maths, literature, geography, history, foreign language, philosofy, sports, etc).
Of course, you can have an intermediary staging system set up so you continuously deploy to it first, and if everything looks good, then deploy to production.
Isn't that a bit like saying your refactoring IDE which generates some high-level language which in turn generates machine code is over-engineered?
Not sure why people ever believed that Don't be evil propaganda. You can hand out all those cute Google t-shirts, pens, give free lunches, give free massages, give mom's good maternity, etc.. doesn't really matter..

You're a business and a public one at that... that means you'll do anything for profit, just like every other company.
Very nicely done, PG. I'm amazed at how ahead of its time Viaweb was... 3 years before IE6! I agree with the other comments here that it's quite good even by today's standards. To withstand the test of time (14 years!) of web design/technologies is seriously impressive.

I do wish the test drive worked though. It'd be great to be able to really test it out in its original form!

PG, if you don't mind me asking a couple of questions (or point me to the answers if they are already available elsewhere)... how many man hours do you think went into the project (MVP and maintenance)? And how did you come to start developing it? Was it an original idea at the time or were you aware of other online store builders and decided you could do a better job? When did it all start?
I guess the new color scheme must be their secret way of pointing us to the color customization page. And also an underhanded way to get us to accept their cookies :)
Thanks - Plus links that are talking about Google are really confusing, it's impossible to tell from the post if the person is affiliated with Google or not, but it always leaves that impression in my mind, and that impression is often wrong.
Wait... why wasn't the sprite responsible for rendering itself from the beginning?

sprite.render(context);

or some such...
ACM Queue Programming Challenge starts soon
> Still required all the time if you develop drivers for physical hardware.

Thankfully, this is not quite true. Most Linux drivers are implemented as kernel modules, which can be loaded and unloaded at runtime. No rebooting necessary.

The guys who develop drivers for hardware that cannot be implemented as a kernel module (like some motherboard chipsets) probably have another machine for debugging or have some kind of dev boards to make their workflow more efficient.
Not just deleting, they're general-purpose selection, after the mails are selected you can delete them but also move them (to an other inbox), flag them or mark them (as read/unread)
A comment on the G+ post from Joshua Mwaniki:

Richard Champling...I couldnt hold back from commenting on your accusations that we may have ochestrated this deliberately. I head the Mocality team in Kenya...and we did not 'Ochestrate' this. Building a directory in Africa isnt as easy as just going around and knocking on doors. Our success was largely based on our ability to build and maintain a large agent network (15,000+ strong). These agents collect information that forms the bulk of our directory. However, for the agents...work isnt as simple as going around and knocking on doors. A lot of the population is still very suspicious about the internet and new technologies. People have fallen prey to scams for merely giving out their cell phone numbers...people are kidnapped etc.

Agents have the task of building trust with business owners in many cases just to extract their correct business details. Convincing them of the 'need' to be online, is not as easy as it seems. To facilitate this, the Mocality team in Kenya spends a lot of time travelling around, holding agent and business seminars and slowly turning our name and mission into something the local business person can trust.
Therefore...when google launch a new product like KBO into the market, it is quite clear to us in the country, that they would have similar hurdles to climb when recruiting businesses. These hurdles are in some way a competitive advantage to us, as we've already spent tons of man hours going past them. Google would still need to build the trust...and the business owner would need to be comfortable working with them.

For Mocality, the businesses trust our agents and we use our agents to introduce products to them.
Therefore, when google employees/agents call and say that we are working together, they are taking advantage of the relationship of trust we have worked so hard to build...in order to release their product easily into the market.
How does this look for us? It's a domino effect...
Our agents have no idea about the sites business owners call to ask them about, and their confusion makes the business owners suspicious about working with them further...the agents get upset with us for not informing them of new products or partnerships with google, as they are losing livelihoods...and we are left perplexed that a company of the stature like google is blatantly telling lies. Perhaps worse for us here are the allegations being made that we plan to charge Kshs 20,000 for some services...which is way more than an average business would be willing to spend. So...did we orchestrate this? we clearly did not. And as my CEO Stefan said in his blog...we have always been keen to form viable partnerships within Kenya, and google is a company we have looked at working with. So we dont understand why we werent asked about partnership possibilities if they really wanted to use our information. Really encouraged by the massive support we've seen online from so many people so far though. Very encouraging.
IT jobs are coming back to the States