skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How you got that from the essay, I don't know, if you see that quote in context he is not saying that at all, he is saying that the low level stuff is neccessary to allow the high level stuff to get built:

You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.

Denying the existence of pointers is like living in ancient Greece and denying the existence of Krackens and then being confused about why none of your ships ever make it to Morocco, or Ur-Morocco, or whatever Morocco was called back then. Pointers are like Krackens—real, living things that must be dealt with so that polite society can exist.

Make no mistake, I don’t want to write systems software in a language like C++. Similar to the Necronomicon, a C++ source code file is a wicked, obscure document that’s filled with cryptic incantations and forbidden knowledge. When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging for 12 hours, and you encounter a virtual static friend protected volatile templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation and awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love.

The C++ STL, with its dyslexia-inducing syntax blizzard of colons and angle brackets, guarantees that if you try to declare any reasonable data structure, your first seven attempts will result in compiler errors of Wagnerian fierceness:

Syntax error: unmatched thing in thing from std::nonstd::__ map<_Cyrillic, _$$$dollars>const basic_string< epic_ mystery,mongoose_traits &lt; char>, __default_alloc_<casual_ Fridays = maybe>>

One time I tried to create a list<map<int>>, and my syntax errors caused the dead to walk among the living. Such things are clearly unfortunate. Thus, I fully support high-level languages in which pointers are hidden and types are strong and the declaration of data structures does not require you to solve a syntactical puzzle generated by a malevolent extraterrestrial species.

That being said, if you find yourself drinking a martini and writing programs in garbage-collected, object-oriented Esperanto, be aware that the only reason that the Esperanto runtime works is because there are systems people who have exchanged any hope of losing their virginity for the exciting opportunity to think about hex numbers and their relationships with the operating system, the hardware, and ancient blood rituals that Bjarne Stroustrup performed at Stonehenge.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thenightw...
The point I made was that workers can't opt out of it because that would be illegal. There are, I'm certainly, many who are starving that would otherwise be thrilled to earn $4 an hour, but they can't. There are also a myriad of scenarios wherein paying someone less than the minimum wage doesn't mean that they starve and die. The minimum wage prevents those earners from finding a place in the market. Even further, there are a myriad of people who are thriving while currently sell their work for less than minimum wage, but they simply disguise the tasks as 'firm fixed bids' or 'flat rate bids' against a projected contract.

I acknowledge that there are bad actors in the system, namely Wal-Mart, who I'm guessing would be happy to pay workers as little as they possibly could, regardless of the burdens it imposed on them (I say because I believe their union-busting activities were unethical, not because I in any way despise their pay practices as they currently exist), but for the most part, a free exchange helps small business compete against bigger business.

In summation, hamstringing employers and employees is unnecessary. It's a shame, because in the tech community, we've already seen the value of a less-regulated workforce with things like oDesk and such. Companies who just need a Wordpress site are free to hire from oDesk, and will likely receive bids in the sub-$50 range which, in a more traditional arrangement, would violate labor laws. Similarly, we've seen it illustrated that those bottom-end producers aren't necessarily cannibalizing sales from up-market producers, as they're able to better distinguish themselves through marketability, experience and references. The artificial pay barrier we've imposed prevents many of the existing low-skill earners from getting experience and/or transitioning into higher-skill earners.
good idea. Can you add a forum to the site for people to discuss particulars of the project they're working on? It would be nice to see other people working on the same thing and how they go about it. This feature works great on Coursera.
"the only bright side is you get stock options"

Didn't Google stop giving out stock options something like five years ago? Sounds like "ex-googler1", an account created an hour ago, isn't actually one.
They don't go to the same place - they go to different annotations within the same song which then link back into the full song page.
Google, of all companies, have developed some of the finest talent recognition software in the valley.

Maybe they have, but we won't know without hard evidence. Your assertion doesn't make it so.

I like Google, I've eaten in their cafeterias (many friends work there), and I use several of their products.

And ... I'm aware that essentially all of their revenue comes from AdWords and AdSense. Everything else is subsidized by those two products. No other major Google product has had to compete in the marketplace on its own merits. So, objectively, it's hard to measure how talented their people are. (You're not going to convince me that Google has the world's most talented UI designers.)
"Are you under the impression their culture is the same as the South's?"

Korean culture is at least 2,000 years old, and yes, it's quite homogeneous.

"They would probably notice the impoverished, the starving, the homeless, the unjustly imprisoned"

What in the world are you talking about? Their entire country is an impoverished prison/slave-state, and it's estimated that 2-3 million North Korean people starved to death as recently as the 1990s.

So, yeah, I'm pretty sure they'd see the outside world as superior.

Too bad they're not given the chance to make that decision for themselves, isn't it?

A good rule of thumb on whether people actually want to live in a country: go to the border and check to see how many of the guns are pointed inward.
Being infantile means that you are an adult that behaves regressively. People with kids, and in their mid-thirties, can be infantile. I think that Aaron knew what he was saying. The problem is how do you judge whether someone is infantile, because you must either judge relative to yourself, or relative to a role model. If we are to believe Aaron, then we must believe that he could distinguish between a mature adult and regressive behavior --- and if we are to believe you, then we must believe the same of you. And if I'm to play the judge, then I need to know this myself, and I've found it to be a complex topic, and since it involves growth, it is a lifelong pursuit. Perhaps the one objective statement we can make is that we eventually must become independent of our parents and the safety of the parental home.
I enjoy the open floor plan as well. The ease in which I can have conversations with my manager (assuming they are sitting near to me) is probably the biggest benefit. I feel this makes me more productive since more impromptu conversations can take place. Being able to listen in on any random coworker conversations and nerf gun battles is nice as well. However, on the few occasions when private space in necessary, then an office would be preferred. Of course, many others prefer individual offices to an open floor plan. Similar to living in a city or the suburbs (SF vs. Silicon Valley here in the Bay area), it is a personal preference that never ceases to divide people.
I think it's pretty clear he meant RSUs. "Stock option" is still the colloquial term.
Outing all your competition is extremely lame, stop snitching.
Programming may be the wrong profession. Ed Witten says he has the greatest job in the world.

Now there are sinecures, but I certainly would not admit to having one, now or in the past...
Merry Christmas, all.
Creatives (designers, engineers, etc.) with optionality (at the caliber that Google would hire) pine for freelance-like working conditions (not referring to pay, but rather creative control, flexible hours, and amenities). These tech firms try to absorb as many of those benefits as possible to woo over employees. In Google's early days, maybe employees had greater creative control over their projects-- hence creating more autonomous and creative working conditions. However, as a company scales, you inevitably lose your creative control and become a cog in the larger machine. No perks can veil this, hence the changing of Googlers' mentalities.

Unless you're at the top of one of these large firms, I have a really hard time imagining any creative and truly autonomous person willing to work for more than a year at any of these institutions before breaking free and either founding a startup, joining an early stage startup, or freelancing.
If that were the case Russia wouldn't have a problem.
I believe you can scroll up and down to zoom in and out so that the world and the units appear bigger and smaller. I am not sure about this, but it had worked when I had played the game a few months ago.
TIL: You like the people you are in pictures with?

How is ground-breaking!!!
So does the Pentagon but you never see them punished for blowing up a wedding. US does not act within international law if they did CIS/Russia wouldn't be complaining about these kidnappings
Quote: "Restrictive GPL Licence that is less about sharing and more about control"

If that aint an old flamewar statement, I don't know what is. Everybody here knows what the alternative is (BSD, and BSD-like licenses). We weren't born yesterday and we're nerdy enough to know what is being argued for.
Basically it works like this:

On amazon up they put an image or other code on their page that generates a random id and stores it in a cookie.

When you're on Facebook the id is passed back to Amazon which can generate an ad based on your history.

It works because the resource loaded on fb and amazon originates from the same domain. Eg. 3rdpartyretargettingadnetwork.com
Read books out loud. My English, both speech and vocabulary, improved dramatically after I spent weeks sitting outside on the balcony reading Lord of the Rings out loud to myself.
And thank you mackwic. I appreciate seeing "thank you" comments, especially when they specify what they liked/disliked about the parent post. HN could use some more of the civility and appreciation that you exemplify. =)
I think the real factor is not open space vs private office, but the ideal working environment is a healthy mix of communication (face to face preferably) to exchange ideas/knowledge/status updates and private space for tasks that requires concentration and focus. Clearly the former would be easier in an open space office, and the latter in a dedicated office. And of course, the right mix differs from one person to another depending on the roles and personal characters.

In my experience, I think I am most productive in an open space environment with flexible hours / work from home policy. Availability of conference/quiet rooms is another option.
True. It seems that when you're far out, scrolling is kind of slow. It's like watching Robbie Robot play NES. :) Zooming in scales up the speed because you're closer to the ground

But it's fun. It seems like it's kind of complicated but not in a way that is overwhelming.
I see a flaw in this, as being surrounded by fairly incompetent people will have an effect on you by osmosis. It will slowly erode your skills/happyness/motivation.
I guess on some level this is true. Is there some place where you can work and get money for doing whatever you want, and defying authority whenever you want? If so, sign me up!

Over in the real world, working for an employer like Google is a risk hedge. If your idea for a project this quarter turns out to not be useful, you don't run out of money and end up living in a cardboard box. You learn from your experience, try again, and your family gets food on the table. You can say it's childish to hedge risk, but you can also say it's very adult to hedge risk. Maybe you are a super genius that can code up a solution to a really hard problem all by yourself. But what if the market doesn't like it? Too bad, you're in the same place as the guy who sits at home all day, smokes pot, and watches daytime TV. The market decided: you suck.

I agree with Aaron that we could always use more computers. Sometimes during peak hours, the batch scheduler will only give me a few hundred machines to run my MapReduce on. What am I, a farmer?

Ultimately, I like working at Google and I like having toys in the office. I have Nerf guns. I use Hakase from Nichijou as my profile picture. At the same time, I feel like I'm doing impactful work, with some very smart people. And I feel that I'm evaluated (and compensated) fairly. Does that make me infantile? Maybe so. But I like it.

My real fear of leaving Google is the time I'll have to spend writing all the infrastructure from scratch. And finding someone else that can afford my hourly rate.
Even though I had my personal interest to learn English, back when internet was not common, or not very accessible due to dialup, i would buy English newspapers and study them, and always keep a dictionary with them.

However, that was bit silly and a lot more time consuming.

The best to improve English is to be part of a community (an online forum). it's up to you which you want to join. Only join the one which interests you. Get involved in lengthy debates and discussiona, I know it's not cool, but just for the sake of learning and improving your English.

If you follow up above advice, your English skills will skyrocket in a very short time compared to traditional methods.
Presumably one that is somewhere between those two extremes...
I think the word for that is "trolling." And you're right: the article does make more sense when looked at that way.
Doesn't matter. Italy is not a sovereign state, and has no legal control over inter-EU commerce any more than a US state has. They have signed over the right to make laws like this to the EU, which seems unlikely in the extreme to concur with their decision.

So despite being a law, it's (probably) not legal. I find it very hard to believe that there is anyone in the Italian parliament, which is filled with lawyers, that doesn't know this. They are merely voting in this law to appease constituents, and of course the targets of this law (not just Google, but any internet seller. It's just as much apple or microsoft or kickstarter.com) have zero incentives to point this out : they simply don't pay, knowing full well they can't be sued for this.

So constituents are "happy", lawyers get re-elected and nothing changes. There are no implications, everything will simply remain status-quo.
This one doesn't look gray: http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-mozillas-amazing-offic...
As a qualified, practising teacher of English as a foreign language, I guess I should be able to help.

For competence, once you've got past the basics of grammar, it's mostly about memory. Create a database of words, phrases, and example sentences, and use some kind of Spaced Repetition System (e.g. Anki) to keep reviewing them.

Fluency is harder. First, what does it mean to be fluent?

Last time you were in a shop and the shopkeeper handed you your change, what did you say?

Thank you.

Did you plan ahead? Did you think, "Oh heck. The shop keeper's just given me some change. What should I say now?" Of course not. The words just came to your lips. You were following a script that you'd internalised at a subconscious level. That's fluency.

So you need to internalise more scripts. How are you going to do that? Learn them. Seriously ... that's all there is to it. Just memorise huge chunks of text. Songs, movies, passages from your English textbook, and so on.

In particular, try shadowing. (I.e. speaking in synchrony with the audio version.) At first, do it with the printed version in front of you. Then do it purely from memory. Try exaggerating the accent when you do it, too. It may sound ridiculous, but to native speakers it will sound better than your normal Italian accent.

You'll see the benefits of all this hard work when you're in conversation. Fragments of memorised dialogue will pop into your head exactly when you need them, just like when you said Thank you. to the cashier.

By the way, children do this instinctively. That's why they love to watch the same movie, or hear the same story, over and over again.
Hey, you too man.
What I did in a previous situation like that went:

Phase 1: Get angry at people being slow.
Phase 2: Write tool to make slow people incapable of being slow.
Phase 3: Profit.

Phase 2 keeps you busy in while the slow people are slow, so you don't get as angry. Then in phase 3, the slow people become irrelevant so they don't frustrate you anymore. Plus you get recognition for improving the efficiency of the office.
You can identify "welfare moms"?

Women using EBT cards at the grocery store with their kids? Not sure what is so difficult to identify.

check your goddamn privilege

These kinds of hackneyed ad-hominem classist catchprases really do not contribute to the conversation.
It's nice to hear this from a professional. I am an English speaker who speaks a couple foreign languages. When I am alone in my car, I talk to myself in foreign languages or have mock conversations. I repeat them over and over again. Then in a real conversation, I mix and match large phrases from my vault of mock conversations rather than translate word for word.
This, incidentally, is the same building that Google San Francisco is in.
This is already a problem with namecoin. If you grep through the blockchain there's all sorts of dubious stuff in plain text.
Happy holidays to you! I am still on ops duty right now :)
Some teams at Google sit in enclosed offices. You can choose. (I prefer some walls to keep the noise level down, and I had the opportunity to pick once. But everyone else on the team wanted to sit in the open area. So I guess it's really one of those things that depends on the individual.)

The signs are the names of printers.
Wow, the guy in the comments section of the article just nonstop trolling for Rockstar/Apple is unbelievable.
I have to think his head was wired differently than most of us.
"Stock options? Who needs stock options when you have beanbag chairs?"

If I want a beanbag chair at my desk, I'll buy myself a beanbag chair, thankyouverymuch. :)
Talent recognition? They miss strong talent just like other companies do.
Who maintains/pays for the site now? I tried going to the top page, expecting some kind of obituary or explanation as to why the site is still up, but the blurb there makes it sound like Aaron stepped out for a week and will be updating again soon, except for the last updated note in the corner.

I did a whois lookup out of curiosity, but the contact information all refers to contactprivacy.com, which is apparently set up to allow people to register domains privately.
Rockstar is not a consortium. It's a separate entity. It does not "consist of other companies".
There's a difference between hyperbole and sensationalism.

And this is a blog, for fuck's sake. They can use whatever tone they want. The people wasting time complaining about "sensationalism" should go back to Reddit, where you get more fake Internet points for it.
Free money, free money, free money, I repeat, free money!

There is no margin there, just buzz.
Never has a company without a profit margin sustained for a long term once the buzz wears off. Never!
Buyer beware.
It's extremely stupid and disappointing that this jailbreak was released before iOS 7.1.
not merge mined
> This is not correct. You're thinking of the Novell patents. Google did make a bid on the Nortel patents, but was not offered a place within Rockstar.

This is not correct. See http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/google-had-opport...
You don't know if it will pay off or someone new will come a long and wipe the floor with AMZN. It happens to all big companies that let the temporary superiority get to them.
Those past actions would be backing Motorola's abuse of FRAND patents to 'pre-emptively' attack competitors?
It's basically the 386 generation (just like Intel 386!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386_Generation in Korea, now holding the jobs as professors, teachers, politicians, lawyers and judges that arouse a lot of suspicion from the previous generation which were right wing unlike the 386 who are left wing. The 386 were largely responsible for electing a left wing government from 1998 to 2003, and 2003 to 2008. That's 10 years of anti-American, pro-sunshine policy (billions of slush funds sent to North Korea used to build their ICBM today) which has largely turned into a gun pointed at South Korea. Because of the naive blinding trust that South Korean left wings placed in Nouth Korea, it has resulted in an increasingly dangerous standoff with North Korea (supposedly has mini nukes now thanks to the 1998~2008 administration), much of South Korea understandably has growing animosity towards left-wing supporters. I admit, there is a blanket identification with left-wing being pro-North Korea which is simply not true, but this is unfortunately the case with South Korea, where herd mentality is still rampant.

The fear of North Korean support within South Korea from the left leaning group is well founded. Recently, a member of the national assembly was found to have been part of a group called RO (Revolutionary Organization, how original) and evidence of coordinated sabotage on sensitive infrasturcture in case a war breaks out with the North. RO was found to have been in contact with North Korean agents in the United States.

It's no wonder the 'red scare' is very real in Korea. The list of spies currently operating in South Korea is in the unknown figure but widely suspected to be hiding in plain sights (if a national assemblyman was actively promoting terrorism, imagine where else they could be).

Various professors and educational board in South Korea have been caught attempting to change the history of Korean War by putting North Korea in a favorable light.

The list goes on and on.

However, I would agree Chosun Ilbo is the most right wing out of all.

I think that there is even more chance of collapse in Korea because of the recent purge (Jang was China's go-to-guy, practical and a moderate), Kim Jong Un would be unbridled and trigger happy and that their revenue streams have taken a toll. All the more reasons to build
Are you really comparing the Amish to the north korean? Are you insane?
" Rockstar was created not to make money but to suppress competition."

Is that not the point of patents?

Suppress copycats and or extract monies for their copying/profiting from your novel works?
I loved songmeanings back in the day. A lot of cool insider info on bands I liked, explaining stuff in a way line-by-line annotation doesn't, but they never took advantage of that and stagnated IMO.
I was there in 2006. It wasn't accurate then either.
Breaking News 
Check out How a Secretary turns into A Dancing girl ! With Bruno Mars lookalike and Red panties !!!!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=c4-feed-u&v=pDyZ_nqj2Gc
In these situations, where it's pretty black and white, writing or emailing a senior executive, such as the EVP of Customer Relations (contact into on company website) typically will get the result you want.