skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In proposing this more complex test with simulated telemetry, Smeds "had to argue with those who didn't think it was necessary," recalled JPL's Mitchell. Smeds was persistent and continued championing the test even after it was initially rejected. In the end, with the backing of Sollazzo and Huygens's project scientist, Jean-Pierre Lebreton, Smeds's plan was accepted because it was easy to do, even though hardly anybody seemed to think it was worth doing. On such seeming trivia US $300 million missions can turn: the simpler carrier-signal-only test, Mitchell noted, would never have uncovered any problems.

Is there any place you can go to escape the forces of willful ignorance?
Building a persistent Notes app for Firefox OS
Was the agreement between the employers or between the employees? In some jurisdictions it is completely fine to have non-compete agreements and they very often are used to prevent vendor/customer poaching.
None of the language in the emails seems that shocking or "brutal" (as the article says) to me. I guess the smiley face is a little strange, but I don't think it was particularly malicious.
Tech giants, are they above human people? Because your comment makes them look so.

'Was at fault' for going rogue... I wonder what she will think once the current investigation ends.

Sometimes the right thing to do is to go 'rogue' against tech giants who ask of you things they should not.
To me that's almost as sickening as the dismissal - the obsequiousness of the HR department
Everything is free in The Democratic Republic of Korea. Glorious Eternal Leader pays for everything. This is why everyone votes for socialism every time. Free healthcare, food, education, transportation.
Very much agree. Taken to the extreme, complete suppression of tribalism would not only be extremely difficult but also extremely harmful to society, as even the love between children and parents will be destroyed in favor of egalitarian love. Our biological nature causes children to prefer their parents more than any other parents, and in doing so, prefer their siblings (their parent's other children), more than any other children, and prefer their parents' siblings and parents more than any other elderly persons and adults. It is this nature, as it radiates outwards, that causes one to feel greater love to those who are similar than those who are different.

I don't want to live in a world where children are taught to betray their parents in favor of their state, where children are taught to report on their parents for their crimes, where brothers treat each other as strangers, where husband betrays wife and vice versa, at the same time. I've already read about it in 1984.

The harm in suppressing this aspect of humanity comes from having to involve the state. It takes the state to educate children to report on their parents crimes. It takes the state to force children to attend schools to study the same subjects. It takes the state to extract wealth from parents to distribute it to other children. It takes the state to enact taxes on children to distribute their income amongst other parents. Taken to the extreme - you'll get a very big, very powerful state, because it must involve itself in everyone's personal relationships, to ensure equality amongst all. And with a big state, you get corruption, you get misallocations of capital, you get a concentration of power, all of which would lead to a state that would monitor its citizens every communication, to protect its power in actuality, and to maintain equality and protect its citizens in name. And, as you reduce every person's natural relationships, people will form relationships with others, leading to divisions not amongst genetic or even geographic lines, but amongst other arbitrary lines such as class and wealth, government and private. As a group of people gain control of state, the actions of the state will begin to benefit some, but not others, arbitrarily, so that in actuality equality (in wealth, status, whatever) will always only be an illusion, and inequality will always manifest itself in other ways, so that all those resources supporting a very big state to maintain equality, are mostly wasted, except in so far as it provides an illusion of equality, which it can maintain for only so long.

Oh, wait.
I previously had a lot of respect for the Google founders, and figured they were decent human beings.

That behaviour from Steve Jobs I can kind of expect - he's fairly consistently shown that he's basically just a bad seed.

However, the behaviour from Brin also sounds like pretty a*sehole behaviour.

Curious is anybody can confirm if they're actually like this?

Or was this all taken out of context?

Surely he's actually nicer than this in person?
JavaScript: are we missing out?
Yes. I believe it's WHOLLY unreasonable.

Veterans who go to war come back bearing terrible scars. They are routinely subjected to horrific conditions that would make you cringe. They are asked to do terrible things to terrible people and still maintain a standard of professional conduct that civilians cannot maintain.

SO I do believe it's unreasonable to treat war veterans, who volunteered to sacrifice themselves and their lives to defend our way of life, just like any other citizen who needs some governmental support.

Veterans who have no obligation to serve but do so anyway deserve our utmost respect and admiration. And on the list of people who contribute to the safety, security, and greatness of this country, they are at the very top.
Yes. The smiley seems like a response to the almost humorous over-reaction and display of subservience on Google's part.
If I can do Excel, can I program?
You might want to look at how people are approaching components now. Instead of components containing logic, components only contain data.

You then have systems that operate on the components. This solves the problem of needing components to interact with each other, since a system can look at as many components as it wants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system
http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/11/11/entity-systems-are...
http://piemaster.net/2011/07/entity-component-artemis/
How To Take Your Own Professional Headshot With An iPhone
Ceramics can be 3D-printed [1]. The printed product is a paste of ceramic powder + binder that must be sintered (heated so the organic binder burns away and the ceramic particles fuse together into a strong, dense body). The as-printed part shrinks a bit during sintering, so you've got to account for that as well.

[1] http://robocasting.net/index.html
>So only now that FB is on board it is real? Sony, Valve, Microsoft and god knows what other big companies, who were working hard on VR, wasn't real?

In a word, yes. Why? Because tech innovation is different from social change.

As of GDC 2013, it was obvious to early adopters that VR was closer than had been believed, and that there was a realistic road-map to getting there thanks to Oculus and Valve. However, there was no way to know whether mass market adoption would happen because the Rift DK1 still made lots of people nauseous, and non VR-o-philes could legitimately claim that it was just a bunch of dorks with ugly boxes on their heads. I mean, how pathetic is that? It could be mocked in the same way that the Segway was mocked, but that the Z-Board is not. Segway == loser dork. Z-Board == cool(ish). To be fair, I have a Rift DK1, and it's a great first step -- much better than any consumer level VR device I've seen in the last 15 years.

I didn't go to GDC 2014 last week, but this was also a huge tipping point. Two of my co-workers who had been debilitated by DK1 nausea just bought DK2's on the spot. That points to Oculus having removed a big obstacle to adoption. People aren't going to adopt something that makes them barf.

Sony has been working on headsets for over a decade, but has failed to deliver on the promise of VR until just now -- after being goaded by Oculus. So, yeah, competition's good, but these guys failed and failed in part because the world still wasn't ready for VR and they didn't want to commit the resources to this.

This move by Facebook signals that the world is or will soon be ready for VR. People who don't "get" VR will be like people who don't see the benefit in texting. Entitled to their opinion, but a diminishing fringe.

VR is poised to cross the chasm.
Conspiring to keep wages down is. Non-solicitation agreements are an action that, while not illegal in themselves, in some circumstances would constitute the larger offence.
Man plugs RPi into small monitor in car! Wow, such techno! So hip! Very inno!
Notes about the development of a xmpp client
How To Kick Your Business Legacy Up A Notch
Google was probably more worried about the potential consequences of breaking the non-solicitation agreement than about Jobs. Breaking it would have meant Apple starting to hire Google engineers as well. And even if they didn't care about this then why start a fight over such a trivial thing?
"Make a public example of this termination" was written by by Google's VP of HR, not Jobs.
So why don't you introduce yourself as a "programmer" or a "computer wizard" or a "tinkerer" or a "developer" or any other term and opt to use a term that's been synonymous with breaking into computing systems for 3-4 decades?
I've looked at a lot of Node, Sinatra, and Compojure web apps and the vast majority of them are vulnerable to a variety of attacks. CSRF protection in particular is almost never handled and when it is it's often not done properly.
So anyone ever defending any company ever is an irrational apologist? He at least gave some points. You just sounded like an angry teenager. And I'm not even a Facebook user, let alone fan.
"the employee really was at fault for going rogue."

None of the details surrounding the contact are included. For all we know that person didn't know they were contacting an Apple employee until after the fact.
Agreed but that could be confused with other definitions used in the derogatory.
Well, the article doesn't try to hide that it's trying to instigate an emotional response.

In the big scheme of the moral calamity that this whole thing is, this particular exchange feels oddly trivial to get its own article. But I think it's just the sort of thing that people can and will latch on to easily.
People always doubt this, and then new languages always come along that improve developer efficiency. It was a lot easier to write a program in C than assembler, Perl than C, and Python than Perl, at least for me. I've seen some amazingly sweet code in some of the functional languages like Clojure and Haskell. My current main language is Ruby, and while it is not perfect, I would never trade it as a general-purpose language for assembly. I'm sure I'm well over 10x more effective than I would be if it was all assembly, all the time -- assuming I wasn't allowed to invent a new language as part of the solution.

So why doubt this same thing can happen again? It's like doubting that MD5 will ever be broken, or questioning whether something like Roman numerals can be improved upon. Of course it can, and will.
If you're trying to make us feel sorry for a tech recruiter, you may have come to the wrong place.
Candy Crush Maker Opens At $20.50, Already Down 10%
Just to clarify, I was quoting a message board. I'm not personally intending to do anything ridiculous like that... especially not over a VR helmet.

I have seen waves of VR come and go. I'm not under the impression that Oculus Rift is much better than others.

IMO, the dreams of VR were not about helmets, but about 3-d graphics. 3d is here now and it's having its effect. Helmets are a niche product.

I think Jeri Ellsworth's CastAR will be stronger product.
Love the reference!
I was indifferent towards all the hate/worship Jobs got. But seeing that smiley in response to some one getting fired makes me think he was a douche. He could simply have said that Google handled it the way he wanted. No need to take such pleasure in this matter.
Job's simply asked that Google's recruitment department please stop.

By emailing the CEO of Google. Jobs knew exactly what he was doing, and what the outcome would be. And boy, what an absolutely embarrassing response by Google.
Indeed : https://twitter.com/RayMalifalitiko/status/44882213645584793...
>But there are no quick and easy solutions to the problem of the North Korean totalitarian regime, especially not military ones. Starting a war in the Korean peninsula is a recipe for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, in South Korea as well as in the North.

My point is, sometimes, that's not considered a barrier to regime change. Mass civilian deaths were apparently worth it in the cases of iraq and afghanistan. Those deaths were, and are, "justified" by the moral good of the removal of evil dictators.

So no, I don't think we should invade NK, for the obvious reasons you state. I'm saying that the impunity with which NK oppresses its people exposes the nonsense that is the "liberal intervention" narrative of recent geopolitics.
He knowingly participated in a scheme that suppressed the wages of every engineer in the Valley. That should tell you enough.
Although I get that these sorts of agreements may well have been illegal and unethical, all this outrage over the attitudes of the executives seems overblown to me.

Try putting yourself in Eric Schmidt's shoes: from his perspective, the greed of an individual employee to generate recruiting commissions by violating a strict policy endangered a key strategic relationship. This could obviously not be tolerated and the lack of a strong response would make enforcing the whole landscape of mission critical policies harder. These guys HAVE TO think of the system before the individual or the system will not work.

And in general, in any industry and any role, if you start a fire that the senior management team 10 levels up has to put out... you will expect harsh treatment.
Wall Street is, in general, much more employee-friendly than your typical F500. It's the result of most of the big investment banks having been partnerships rather than corporations until relatively recently.
Wildly successful people exposed as utterly ruthless shock

</sarcasm>
I can't help but wonder who the recruiter was. I was going through Google's interview process right around this time, knew the recruiter that I was working with had connections to folks at Apple, and one day she was mysteriously no longer with Google. It makes me wonder if it was the same person...
Facebook bug prevents you deleting comments on a post (Arabic - English video)
This is not by me, I just found this post on Facebook.
Are we sure she knew about it?

>violating the secret and illegal non-solicitation compact

It doesn't say anywhere whether she actually knew about this. That would change my reaction from completely horrified to just utterly disgusted.

And 'rogue' is a... unique way to put it. It's not like she disclosed it to the press so it's a pretty tame rogue.
I agree there is a "chester Bennin" listed on CUFP, there is also a person named "Chester Bennington" who was the lead singer of Linkin Park. What I disagree with is your claim that these people with different last names are the same person.
WebStorm 8.0 released: AngularJS support, spy-js, multiple selections, Grunt
In plenty of companies I've seen people get off with warnings for at least their first few offenses of sexual harassment, being drunk or stoned on the job, and abusive language towards others. Yet here is something the execs should have known is clearly illegal and they're firing employees on the first offense. Supposedly recruiters were given a briefing about it but you have to wonder how much it was emphasized or written down, especially if their supervisors realized it was illegal.
The Modern Icebreaker – Show me your… Home screen
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but to me, an application server is something that you write programs for in a general-purpose programming language - that's how databases (where code is written in sql or something similar) don't qualify. Programs that run within application servers are written in langauges like Java and C#.

To my knowledge, there are no app servers designed to run code written in C++. Certainly, none that are mainstream.
A rule that apparently was seldom written down given that it was highly illegal.
Stop using the removal of dictators as a justification for invading countries you're strategically interested in, because it looks really fucking stupid when NK is allowed to ban haircuts and starve people.

Similar things apply to zimbabwe etc.

EDIT: "you" used here in a general sense.
I used to think there were two separate uses of the word, and one was less correct than the other. I used to insist people distinguish between a good "hacker" and an evil "cracker". Now I understand the essence of the term, there is no distinction between the two. Its all the same. Central to the essence is this notion that good and bad are subjective, and anything characterised as hacking should probably be both good (for someone or something) and evil (for someone or something) combined. Destruction and creation are both equally implied. I think if something is purely 100% good for everyone, I don't think the word hacker applies.
I believe the illegality is centered around conspiring to lower wages, the guys suing are claiming that this was achieved through the non-solicitation agreement.

I can see how this could be the case, especially when it looks like the biggest tech employers in silicon valley were all in on it. A few companies or companies in different areas agreeing not to poach won't affect the average wage, but when the majority of positions aren't being contested the incentive to offer larger wages drops.
I assume this wouldn't be your reaction if you were at the receiving end of this reaction for an "illegal" deal in the first place.
I admire and despise Jobs completely.
Verizon owns the router and the configuration, presumably, even though you're allowed to change it. This seems perfectly legitimate to me, particularly given how tech-incompetent most of their customers are. Only real concern is security, but it's a minimal one. (Remember back in the day when you could figure out the default passwords for Verizon routers by SSID alone?)

If this concerns you, roll your own access point (you probably have anyway if you're reading this).
These companies are run by cutthroat persons. I'm not too surprised this stuff happens. They all want to compete and dominate their market, and that requires working together at times (even though its still competition...so maybe oligopoly).

But Steve's response is great :)
So were we, but we stuck with it, and I'm glad.

App Engine is absolutely second to none as a PaaS. Fact is I sleep better at night on App Engine that I ever could on AWS.
Google Could Greatly Improve Weather Forecasts. Will It?
He didn't demand the termination

He didn't have to. And learning of the consequence, he didn't seem to care.

a power play by the heads of HR who seem to be the real bad guys here

Really? Blame the minions? They offered someone's head to save their own.
"Do no evil."

When will geeks learn there are no good or bad corporations?
So what is the other type of hacker then? And is the difference really substantial enough to warrant a separate word?
Latency might not be great in SE Asia or Africa. The blog post linked elsewhere in these comments indicates that this is currently served up only from Virginia and Oregon.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465150
nice: "@oyyokhirsiza's account has been withheld in: Turkey". It's not censorship, it's just withholding
Any why would you want to introduce yourself to a business partner as a hacker anyway? If they understand what you mean, you're telling them that you're going to give them a product that works, but only because of magic and duct tape, not because it's a professional product. If they don't understand what you mean, they'll think you're a criminal.

Either way, in the business world, hacker has only negative connotations. Only within hacker circles does the term become a positive.
I agree. I get an amazing thrill from learning even some small new fact about our solar system. However, I'd argue that you don't have to wait until you have kids to get current on science. Maintaining general knowledge about the world around us is beneficial to everyone, and I believe that recognizing how much of a universe there is beyond our existence can help keep things in perspective.

And with all the Internet, Wikipedia, and several prominent science-oriented television shows today, keeping up is easier than ever.
Epic Ride Through Monument Valley – Surprise Ending
In multi-cultural countries people have significantly different hair. In North Korea hair is somewhat harmonised, i.e. black and straight. Length is the only variable available to play with when it comes to style of cut. From their perspective this edict may be no more of a big deal than having to have your fingernails trimmed.
The behavior is not acceptable. This is a cartel to "fix" the wages of workers - esp. when these tech companies claim their workers are the most important resource.

Now, I am not surprised the book price fixing Apple did with the publishers.

But both Apple and Google get a pass - think if it is done by Oracle or MSFT, well we would be talking about Evil Empire and Death-star
Practical Advice for the Obsessive Compulsive Traveler
Right, but it doesn't follow that a purchase by Facebook is the right choice. You take investment, you're choosing your partners and your owners. It matters to me that Facebook was the one they chose.
Winning Strategies from Series Seed to Series A
It was between the employers, who were also working together on business projects. They asked us to help enforce it, by telling them if a recruiter reached out to us from one of our partners.

Felt questionable to me.
Mark Cuban-backed HourlyNerd raises $ from Highland and Greylock
The startup time that makes Clojure unsuitable for utility scripts and such is really Clojure's, not the JVM's! JVM start up time is actually quite small these days. See for example, http://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/03/19/solving-clojur...
I don't think we should pile on these tech execs. It happens elsewhere. I'd speculate it's rather widespread.

I worked for a Fortune 500 market research / consumer data company and I know for a fact that the Senior VP of our office would call Fortune 500 clients and kindly request they not "poach" our employees.

Most of it is done casually and "innocently". I doubt most execs even thought they were breaking the law before this came to light.
>it shows how drunk on power on he is.

Read the article properly.
The system works just fine without using peoples' livelihoods as a mechanism to "make a public example." At the companies I have worked, firings happen, of course, but it's something people talk about in hushed tones because frankly people are embarrassed to have to do it. This shame is virtuous.
Qualify it then. "I'm a computer hacker, I take <tools> and apply them to <domains> to create <solutions>." Or use it as a weed-out phrase, to find the potentials that are more familiar with computer culture and able to distinguish your meaning from society's meaning.
Scrolling the samples on my desktop is painfully slow as well (at least with Chrome and Safari). With Firefox it has proper scroll behavior.
This is the first time I've ever seen the written word "sewer" in reference to "one who sews" rather than "a sewage system". Perfectly correct of course, I just had to re-read that sentence!
My understanding of the No True Scotsman fallacy involves changing a definition during an argument in order to hold on to some assertion.

This is not the same thing as a person feeling that a particular word should have a particular meaning.
VP of HR so the over-promoted clerical assistant who gets the coffee and biscuits at meetings then :-)