Gratsby

You forget when Herc went and grabbed the portable mic from the spy store and stuck it in a tennis ball. Or when they stuck the video camera in the park and got it stolen.

It's pretty much the same thing that happened here. They knew the discussions were happening, they knew where the discussions were happening, and since it was in a public space they didn't need a warrant. It's not like they are running around town putting microphones in all the bus stops hoping to catch anybody saying something. They were looking for a specific type of criminal activity and they placed the mics accordingly.

Haven't you guys ever seen The Wire? Is this seriously a surprise to anyone?

At some point every piece of technology that we use was impossible. It's very easy to sit on the hilltop and say "it's not possible". What's not easy is climbing the hill anyways and figuring out a way to make the impossible happen.

I'm not here to defend this company. I don't know a thing about them or their technology. I'm just saying... "what kind of world would we live in if we never looked past what we thought was possible?"

EDIT: I think that a few of you have missed an important piece of this post, so once again...

I'm not here to defend this company. I don't know a thing about them or their technology.

I think it's a little naive to "give up" on a language early on, but on the same note, I've walked away from several for periods of time because they lacked the maturity I needed.

I did enjoy the article and the linked article that spelled out ways to increase performance with Python. With any environment there are dramatic performance improvements to be had with a little bit of engineering and knowledge.

I've seen a bit of an odd shift towards Julia - People seem to be adopting it in droves from my perspective. That means that the development team is doing something very right. Given some of the people I've heard talking about Julia, I don't think it's going away any time soon.

This kind of feedback is good for the team. If you are going in another direction for the time being, stating why is always helpful. Glad to see a developer here in this thread.

This thread makes it seem like the general opinion is that an automatically generated news feed would be better.

It wouldn't. Not for end users anyways. It would be a marketer's dream.

If you feel like that's the way things should be, write one. Make it popular. Sell it to Facebook. (And use the money to buy stock in your roommate's new online marketing firm)

Per the article there is one coal power plant still active.

It's run by Argus (the sometimes good, sometimes bad company from Arrow) near San Bernadino.

Pulling the plane out of a stall used to be a part of basic training required for your license. That doesn't go on anymore?

I second this sentiment. Especially someone in a biz-dev role. Can you imagine if he crossed the line like this with a customer? It's not something a budding business wants to ever deal with.

Someone who feels casually about this kind of misconduct with another employee - in my mind is someone who would feel casually about lying on an expense report and other things you just don't expect people to do.

I suspect the lawyers would have you fire for no cause, give a good reference, support unemployment benefits, and potentially offer a small departure package. None of that is really necessary - when confronted with the facts, nobody in their right mind is going to say "I didn't deserve to be fired. I'm going to sue!" But in the end, protecting your business is your highest priority.

I also get the sense that this is your real desire.

I'm an emacs evangelist and I'll use Eclipse or IntelliJ for Java. I have half a mind to just use a windows VM for visual studio because I think it's a great Python IDE.

But then there's everything else.

I've looked a great deal for a decent javascript IDE and I have yet to find one outside of Emacs. For a lot of languages I end up using in short spurts, I appreciate having a text editor that can do what I need it to do, and can do it consistently regardless of what I throw at it.

If I have boilerplate that I need to set up, building a yasnippet template is a piece of cake. If I need syntax highlighting, it's almost guaranteed that someone has gone down that road and has a mode already set up. If I need to migrate to a new machine, I pull in my .emacs from my git repo.

Little things that might be a challenge - like opening a file over SSH or needing kerberos authentication in order to edit a file - are challenges that have long since been dealt with.

There were two videos that brought me back to Emacs after years of using other editors - one was about python development in Emacs when I was looking for a python IDE, the other was a video about org-mode.

It took me two weeks of forcing myself to use Emacs before the muscle memory came back and I started preferring Emacs over vi again.

I wouldn't be too concerned about whether or not you should migrate to it. Use what you know. When you have a need for the power of emacs, you can safely ignore it the first five or ten times it pops up.

Eventually, you'll wander into a video how-to like I did and turn to the dark side. Or not.

I would agree that the free exchange of ideas is the great promise of the internet, but I disagree that Facebook or any high traffic website has any responsibility to blindly post what is popular.

That kind of thing is relegated to smaller and active communities that can decide for themselves what content to exchange.

A highly trafficked global community has to be managed differently, and a system that is completely democratic will be gamed because of the eyeballs it has in front of it.

Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. are all sites that have been heavily targeted by astroturfing campaigns. They've all attacked that problem in their own ways, and they all have failed spectacularly.

One way of attacking the problem is curating popular content. It works but it doesn't. Show me the website that has more than a few million daily visitors that has democratized information, and I'll show you a website that is being gamed by marketers. (Seriously... because if it isn't already, I'd love to make a quick buck)

This seems like a story built specifically for a segment on Fox News where the newscasters feign shock and horror that their news topics aren't being covered by "mainstream media".

Of course trending news is curated. All hell would break loose otherwise.

There is no shortage of rabid political content conservative or otherwise on Facebook. A good part of the end user community would rather not deal with it.

As a middle aged computer scientist and emacs evangelist, I had to laugh pretty hard at this one. I hadn't actually heard that one before.

The odds are better than 1 in 6.

What you are suggesting is a system that over and over again has proven to create poverty and destroy innovation.

Don't forget cut and sed.

I thought it was pretty clear from the beginning.

But I have to say it's pretty cool to see this response. Shouldering responsibility and admitting fault is something that most people avoid and most businesses don't even think about.