skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Exotic tech" is the most amusing ad-hominem insult I've heard in a while. Erlang has more users than Go, at least, and more companies you could name off the top of your head have Erlang deployed somewhere (Github and Heroku, for just two.)

Also, Google doesn't have "unique requirements." They have a unique set of overlapping, pretty common requirements.

Some requirements in that set (e.g. serving data on dl.google.com) could be solved perfectly well by Erlang, and could have been for years, but can also now be solved perfectly well by Go. That they are now being solved by Go is likely an effect of the "Golang advocacy group" that has formed at Google.

Others can't be solved by Erlang, but can be solved by Go (e.g. CPU-bound matrix-multiplications for PageRank index calculation), or vice-versa (e.g. deploying new Google Talk daemon code without dropping the XMPP connection.)

I'm not saying Google could have used Erlang for everything. I'm not even saying there's not a place for Go. Just that Erlang has been around for a long time filling nearly the same niche as Go, and if Google are really rewriting all this software for the sake of switching to a language that is more apt for the problem-domain, then they could have done that years ago, without having to develop their own little language to do it with first.
Anyone else remember these from Amazon Trail (in the final scoring process)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazon_Trail
You're assuming IO-bound highly-concurrent C++ server don't have other requirements besides those two. Maybe it's IO-bound highly concurrent text processing. Erlang will suck at this despite the two pieces it's excellent at. Go is pretty fast at processing text and google does a lot of text processing.
you might want to take off that tinfoil at some point, let your brain breathe
No. If you read the ruling at [0], you will find you are quite mistaken.

This decision was not about changing IPs; it was about "whether Craigslist had the power to revoke, on a case-by-case basis, the general permission it granted to the public to access the information on its website" (in the analogy, whether the store can revoke my individual permission to enter.) The court agreed that CL has the power to revoke authorization to access its site.

The decision does not reference the IP ban for its own sake, but always as a part of a multi-step argument, best articulated on page 10. "3-Taps (1) received a personally-addressed cease-and-desist letter stating that it could not access Craigslist’s website “for any reason”; (2) discovered that it could no longer access the website at all from its IP addresses; and (3) was sued for continuing to access that website after circumventing the IP restrictions. A person of ordinary intelligence would understand Craigslist’s actions to be a revocation of authorization to access the website, and thus have
fair notice that further access was “without authorization.”" The decision is quite clear in its focus on the access being "without authorization".

In the analogy, the court would not reference shaving my beard in isolation, but in the context of my being personally told not to come back, discovering that security turned me away after recognizing my photograph, and then making a "deliberate decision" to enter the store through the mechanism of shaving my beard and changing my clothes in order to avoid being denied entry. The court would make it quite clear that the problem was my re-entry to the store.

[0] http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denyi...
I assume they were encrypted. All the same, it seems like it would've been far easier & less risky to mail them. Postal service is pretty near anonymous & tamper-evident with a minimum of effort.
I don't understand what you're getting at. If a US citizen broke my window (i live in the UK), i'd report it to the police and the criminal would be subject to UK law at all times while here (unless he has diplomatic immunity or something). What does that have to do anything with your 2nd point? Do you mean "sue", or do you really mean "use" like you wrote? If you meant sue, then of course we can, Google has a presence in the UK and thus is subject to UK law (not saying all of Google might be subject to UK law, but at least its UK arm).
I'm not sure anyone is asking you to "validate the claims". If you'd like some reassurance that OP knows what he's talking about, you might consider that Harvard tends not to hire stupid professors and then give them tenure.
It's plain simple corporativism. The guy escalated the issue to their boss and they are not happy. Since this is probably a failure at multiple levels, they will fight back. It really sucks but it's all very unexpected.
Well, they wrote their own infringing java VM for mobile, tried to fix Python (but it didn't work out), essentially run Google Linux internally with various levels of contribution back upstream, and their C++ is (I'm just guessing here) nigh unreadable by non-übernerds.
I guess I learned Erlang as my 15th or 16th programming language, so "syntax" wasn't really a concern; I really was oblivious to it. What's that Matrix quote?--all I see is the AST :)

Still, when I say "Erlang", I don't mean the syntax, I mean mostly the VM and stdlib (the platform semantics, in other words.) You can get those with Elixir or LFE or any number of growing projects, just like you can get Java's platform semantics with Scala or Clojure. Everyone agrees Erlang's syntax is hideous, after all--even its developers.
Sorry to go OT, but does anyone have any tips for making Medium tolerable? It can't be just me. Half the time nothing shows up. When it does, it takes 10 seconds. What is so tricky about black text on a white background? I'm genuinely interested.
Exactly! I agree.

However, all the current system does is penalize people who follow the submission rules (since their content doesn't get up-voted), and generate annoying comments about the "original topic" for the rest of us to sift through.

I've now clicked on this link twice because the title changed and I thought it was about something else. Then, having not looked at the comments last time because the subject matter didn't seem interesting, I saw "12 comments" I went and looked to see if I had missed something. Nope, just a lot of unnecessary meta-discussion caused by mods changing the title.

To the mods: it's annoying. Enforce the rules at submission, or knock it off and let the community decide what's interesting.
mere copying: i called theft.
Not one picture of a cricket anywhere. Good idea.
Well, it depends what you use them for.
Learning process and test, if you're smart, can be done in 4h total for Technician. There are lots of programs to do it in 8h, but IMO a tech person should be able to do it in less time. I used http://www.baears.com/ to do tech (and then studied for General during the rest breaks and got General at the same time!); it's a good choice in the Bay Area.

I should be an Extra and a Volunteer Examiner myself in a month or so, so along with 2 friends with Extra/VE could run classes. I'm planning to do crypto meetups/keysignings/etc on the Peninsula on the first friday of the month anyway (5-10pm somewhere in MV or PA, probably near Google, nominally a 2600 meeting), so doing ham exams during that would be fine, if people studied before that.
The Go module system for sure. Also I really like Go's interface model (as opposed to Java or C++ classes) as it is more flexible and in some ways more precise. Note that I don't know Ruby so I can't compare Go to that...
So, on a shared internet connection, where many people might well use that one IP address, does this mean banning one person bans all?
Vietnamese grade 11 problem equivalent to Google interview problem
Go doesn't have strong type safety either; I remember a recent story about a Go stdlib function "accidentally" calling an interface it shouldn't.
even if they hadn't changed their prices to reflect their beta status, it doesn't mean their prices won't change to one which you no longer like. Having an open source alternative means you are not locked into the vendor, and they cannot charge you an exorbitant price.
Drawing on browser canvas with Lua
It says encrypted thumb drives.
I would love to open source this system, but even if we did I'm not sure we'd be able to convince you that using Go was better than some other language in terms of developer productivity. How would having access to the source help?
I think that's not true, due to the presence of the word "unlawfully". An employer or restaurant patron receiving the services that they paid for is not unlawful. However, taking money from your neighbor that he doesn't want to give you is unlawful.
A minor correction. Erlang was inspired by actors while Go is inspired by CSP. Both models share a lot but have a few distinguishing factors in how they handle communication. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proces..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model_and_process_calculi
I am not sure how often Greenwald himself and the likes of the Wikileaks team travel. But if this is the first time any of them is grabbed and have data taken from them under this given law. Then I think the most interesting question will be how did the authorities know that they should grab Miranda in particular and on this particular day?
VHF (2m) is going to be vastly more useful for emergency communications than HF in most urban areas, and for people who live in apartment buildings, etc., VHF is going to be a lot easier to actually use. I'm using a Yaesu 8800 mobile in my car now so I can cross-band repeat UHF to VHF as well, which would probably work pretty well for disaster communications.

(I'm personally most interested in UHF/EHF, myself, mainly satellite and point to point. I ran an iDirect TCP/IP Ku-band commercial/government/military network for a few years, and would love to buy some space segment on Ka band or possibly X and get back into it at some point. But I don't have a home/office with space for a dish farm right now, nor the $1-5k/MHz to lease transponders.)

If I had the ability to put up a tower or even a patio for antennas, I'd probably get a home HF station, true.
Collectively, google believes they are right and the world is wrong. Anything pre-existing is dirty and unworthy of their genius if they didn't invent it themselves.

Someone a bit more objective might say "Google believes that it's quite hard to integrate third-party software into their huge existing infrastructure and make it work at their enormous scale."

They might also say "Google believes the infrastructure they use is the right choice for their business needs, and Googlers like to tell the world about some of it, in case it's the right choice for them, too."

But I'm a Googler and you clearly have an axe to grind, so it's unlikely we're going to agree.
Has the Guardian reported that Snowden docs were taken?
In amateur radio, the characteristics of someone's CW (morse code) is called their "fist". I used to be able to do 5 WPM and one year I participated in field day (the annual ham competition to contact as many people as you can, etc) with it -- that year was magical because I used morse code for my first time to talk to someone. The feeling of dits and dahs coming across the airwaves actually being communication from somewhere far away? It was brilliant.

So: kudos for learning an aging and mostly deprecated form of communication. Some folks still do it for hobby (I've lost all skill by this point), and I highly recommend the experience.

If nothing else, find a local ham group and go poke around in late June and see if they're doing anything for field day. It's worth checking out.
Or send it with someone who is NOT the partner of the journalist who's been credited with the Snowden leaks.
Interesting, thanks for the information. The meetup sounds cool. You should post it here if you get it going.
This is the headline that I am getting, "Britain Detains the Partner of a Reporter Tied to Leaks", and I can't say that I can see any "suggestive" wording.

Edit: Since the parent was deleted (sigh), it essentially called the New York Times a source of propaganda and stated that the article headline suggested that the US was somehow involved in the detention. I failed to see this, thus my response. Also, about deleting your own statements. Do think before you type and quite frankly, show some good character and have the balls to comment further below and retract your statements when you are proven wrong.
J - "You robbed a house."
V - "I broke a windowpane."

The law isn't some nomic built out of analogies. Suppose a free weekly paper sent someone a C&D and told them to quit taking one copy of the paper. Should that demand be enforced?

Edit: wrote quine, meant nomic.
My biggest issue is that it looks pretty high in saturated fat for something I'd treat as a snack.
Interesting, thanks for that; it's pretty much what I guessed (especially the bit about the supervision tree and hot-code-upgrade advantages being mooted by your infrastructure.)

On a tangent, though:

> What it does not have is type safety

I've tried to work this out before (I'm designing a new language for Erlang's VM), but as far as I can tell, type safety is in practice incompatible with VM-supported hot code upgrade.

If you have two services, A and B, and you need to upgrade them both, but you can't "stop the world" to do an atomic upgrade of both A and B together (because you're running a distributed soft real-time system, after all), then you need to switch out A, and then switch out B.

So, at some point, on some nodes, A will be running a version with an ABI incompatible with B. In a strongly-typed system, the VM wouldn't allow A's new code to load, since it refers to functions in B with type signatures that don't exist.

On the other hand, in a system with pattern-matching and a "let it crash" philosophy, you just let A's new code start up and repeatedly try-and-fail to communicate with B for a while, until B's code gets upgraded as well--and now the types are compatible again.

It's an interesting problem.
“quipu” is worth 16 points given no extra bonuses (according to http://www.thekatespanos.com/scrabble-score-calculator/?word...).
Please. Woz's answer to the top thing wrong with the movie was that it overglorified Jobs as too much of a personality. But later he says Jobs was the best technology leader of our time.

This may not be a good movie and I believe that Woz believes what he says, but like any eyewitness I also believe his memory is colored heavily by his own POV.

Keep your mind clear and don't worship Jobs or Woz.
I would say Google has a couple of fairly uncommon requirements: ridiculous scale and the fact that even a brief outage is world news.

In terms of "rewriting all this software", I wouldn't say it's at all for the sake of switching to Go. It would be more accurate to say "well, we need to rewrite this thing anyway because it's no longer scalable or maintainable. Let's give Go a shot instead of C++/Java)"
Deconstructing Twisted's Deferred
Was the article changed, because it doesn't seem to mention anything about transporting documents.
So you're saying that when my IP changes and I visit a website I was banned from I should be in prison?
It does mention exactly this.

"Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said."
Interesting. It's nice to see other ideas like Gridbeam flourish -- lets just hope this one doesn't go away. For a quick overview of similar ideas, see:

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/12/how-to-make-everythin...
Yes, it's obvious why archiving is a good idea. I'm interested in knowing why someone thinks that extinguishing a living language is a good idea.
I found the part about massive structural and cultural opposition to CS education in America pretty interesting (if not depressing).

I guess even Google's "education department" feeling stymied by the crushing force of American public education is not really surprising.
What is your fascination with Hindi. Why only Hindi?

Every language in India has roots in Sanskrit. In which case any language should do right?

Which in case I propose why not the entire India say learn Tulu?
What about throughput and latency, how does your Go version compare to the C++ version?
What exactly does "text processing" mean, by the way? Erlang is very good at processing streams of bytes--you can pattern match on binaries to get new sub-binaries (which are basically equivalent to Go's array slices) to pass around, etc. It just gets awkward when you have to convert those streams into codepoints to do case-insensitive comparisons and such.

But to reply more directly, "IO-bound" means something specific--that the problem will be using a negligible amount of CPU, no matter what constant coefficient of overhead the language adds, and so scaling will never be a problem of "oops it's using too much CPU to do the text processing" but rather "oops the gigabit links are saturated we need to add more boxes."
Chesscademy, a free chess learning site
Would you insert a USB drive into your "secure" non-Internet connected machine if it came via the mail? I wouldn't.

Part of the security is trusting the chain-of-possession. Once you no longer have that, you have lost the trust.
I'm very confused: they're already encrypted... why not email?
I understand that, but by making a Kickstarter in English, they are targeting exactly my culture, which isn't keen on eating insects. And yes, everyone knows they slip into our food supply and there's a non-zero chance that we've all eaten them unintentionally, but that doesn't logically mean I'm going to think, "well, I may as well just start going whole hog now!"

This is a novelty and will never make it big in our market because the "ick factor" is just too high (for our cultural norms).
We host MIT App Inventor on Google App Engine. However we have some folks who want to use App Inventor in locations that have difficulty reaching GAE. Either because they are located on a poor internet connection, or don't have one at all!
Cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:k4Sga1Z...

This is a really intriguing view of an achievable CS course in schools. The Vietnamese government really pushed hard when they implemented CS in the curriculum - very farsighted of them.

What I find a little frustrating personally is that in my own high school class in Singapore we were doing problems of probably similar difficulty, only in math. Now ten years later moving into coding I have to learn all this stuff from scratch, not having realised how much (financial and personal) benefit a focus on CS would have brought me if I had gotten into it earlier.

And even today we still haven't brought CS into our education system, not as a full subject. The traditional sciences of physics, chemistry and biology still hold pride of academic place, even though it would be more useful to diversify what students learn (and help them get jobs in tech or start businesses). In the age of the computer, that's a real shame.

edit: Is this story appearing on the front page? It doesn't seem to be for me - was it flagged?
I wish I could downvote this comment. Regardless of the merit of your argument, you are reducing HN to the level of YouTube comments with your angry diatribe.

You may want to make your points without making personal attacks or bad generalizations.
A spreadsheet that builds software
I don't know. The quality of this FAQ entry is in my opinion narrowed by their inclusion of FileNotFoundException, which it seems they did not understand. The use case for this exception is not to allow lazy programmers to use it instead of checking that a file exists, but to signal to a programmer that his world view of the state of his program may be wrong despite his best efforts, e.g.

if(file.exists())
{
//do something
}

There's a race condition between the if and do something which invalidates the programmers world view (someone can delete the file between these two statements). And this is an exceptional situation the program has to deal with. Error codes may tell the programmer this, but it is quite likely that the programmer will just ignore it, because "I've already checked that it exists - what could possibly go wrong?". Exceptions, especially checked exceptions (in my opinion the only good exceptions for "normal" program code)(1), force the programmer to deal with this problem. Or to say - deliberately - "Hey, program, I don't care for the stability of my software. Just explode if this happens!".

(1) Languages which have only unchecked exceptions do, in my opinion, cave in to the laziness of programmers: "but, but, it is so much WORK to deal with all of this. Can't it just go away? Please?" - the result is code which can explode everywhere. This is even worse than no exceptions. With return codes you know at least that you have to check the code yourself very, very carefully all the time.
> How do you legally notify someone if all you know is their IP? (serious question, IANAL)

I don't know about legally, but Wikipedia keeps informing me that I have a new message. When I look, it's an IP-based user talk page and the message is from 2008. I'd naively consider that sufficient, but maybe a better-informed legal scholar with technical chops wouldn't.

I mean... I wasn't even living at this address or subscribed to this internet provider in 2008.
This reminds me of when Google was still in Beta and I was a 20-year-old at my first programming job.

Very few people in my office used Google and even fewer were aware of the cache. I wrote a quick little proxy server in Python that would serve requests from Google's cache after stripping out the 'this page is a copy of...' header. I called this proxy server Doctor Who. It was quite a hit. I kept it running until people forgot to turn off proxy settings in their browser and I started seeing plaintext passwords for Yahoo mail in my logs (at the time they were plaintext).

I had specifically asked people not to access web mail while using the proxy, though, so I did take the opportunity to yell out one guy's password in the stairwell: "Hey badboy1, how's it going?"
This one, and yesterday's Google one. Honestly, I'm not sure I understand these posts...

* "I'm leaving my job because I'm underpaid." = I get it

* "I'm leaving my job because my boss is an ass." = I get it

* "I'm leaving my job for a more prestigious company." = I get it

* "I'm leaving my job because I lost passion and am not learning." = ???

If you want passion, try volunteering or get a hobby. If you want to learn, there are plenty of opportunities to do so outside of work. These are problems that can be solved without jeopardizing your ability to put food on the table.

Introspection is great for its own sake, but to me it's a little weird to mix it all up with your employment. Work is a financial transaction/relationship. You trade your labor for compensation. When did it become something we have to love and wrap up so much of our self-image into?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you need to have actus reus (guilty act) and mens rea (guilty mind) to prosecute. Therefore, in addition to intent, the prosecution would have to show that throwing bubble gum on the sidewalk was an act that could lead to murder / lead to accessing a computer system without authorization. In that case, all this talk about what is/isn't authorized access still complies with the basics of common law because it defines what is an actus reus.

Disclaimer: IANAL either.
Re: figuring out the signature of functions or the definition of structs, I've found godef useful: http://godoc.org/code.google.com/p/rog-go/exp/cmd/godef

The Go emacs mode has godef-jump (C-c C-j) and godef-describe (C-c C-d): http://golang.org/misc/emacs/go-mode.el