Gratsby
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.
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 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.
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)
It's run by Argus (the sometimes good, sometimes bad company from Arrow) near San Bernadino.
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.
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.
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)
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.
What you are suggesting is a system that over and over again has proven to create poverty and destroy innovation.
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.
There's nepotism all over silicon valley, but there's also a strong respect for brains and the ability to get things done.
If you want your kids to have a better life than you did, a free market capitalist economy is where you want to be. If you want to maintain your family's position of power and wealth, you want to be somewhere else.
You're acting like they just hired Paris Hilton off the street, when the reality is that she busted her ass her entire career in a field that few women have had major success in.
The last CEO to hold onto the job at Yahoo as long as Mayer has is Terry Semel, and he got booted in 2007.
Add to that the fact that Yahoo had a recent serial history of hiring then firing CEOs before they brought in Mayer, and the pool of potential people to fill the spot shrinks again.
Yahoo had no pathway to success and was likely to fail spectacularly - especially given the way the board was behaving - which signified to any potential hire that it might be their last job. The pool of potential CEOs shrinks again.
Of course the incoming CEO would negotiate a well-beyond-market severance package. They shouldn't even want to hire someone who didn't have the foresight to do so.
Years and years ago, I worked as a blackjack dealer. We had 20 minute breaks every hour. It seemed ludicrous to me at first, but the job has essentially two main components - solving a lot of very simple math problems quickly and without errors, and customer service. By keeping all of the dealers fresh, the casino was able to ensure that problems were minimized. Adding cards up to 21 isn't exactly mental gymnastics, but do that at a rate of up to 280 times in an hour and it's actually kind of surprising that more mistakes aren't made.
I've often wondered about how that kind of schedule would play in software development. I find that my own code is better when well rested, but even after all these years I've never been able to force myself to take breaks that frequently.
The side effect of frequent and scheduled breaks was social interaction that was usually work-focused.
Do software sales reps get told to "sell me this shampoo" during an interview? Do they have to whiteboard the structure of an e-mail campaign? No. Because it's no indication of whether or not they can identify and build a relationship with a person at an enterprise that has purchasing power.
If you are putting someone through a coding exercise, it should be simply to query the basics - does this person write readable code. Does this person make comments or use logging?
Anything beyond that and you are looking for good candidates to fail, especially if you are trying to make them do it on the spot in front of an audience.
"Read this file, reverse the strings, and output the results to another file" - people can go months without reading/writing files in a given language and how many times in your professional life did you ever have to reverse a string?
"Explain the difference between a quick sort and a merge sort?" Who cares except when you are reviewing existing code and you look it up to see if there's an optimization to be made for your particular use case?
Being a good software developer takes a lot more than can be determined from a white boarding or code writing exercise. It takes good critical thinking. It takes the ability to work on a detail item while maintaining a view of the big picture pragmatically. It takes the ability to teach and communicate across technical boundaries. It takes the ability to identify, estimate LOE of, and prioritize tasks. It takes so much more than you can glean from an exercise flawed at the outset.
Look at the code bases for just about any existing software project public or private and you'll see code that was written by someone who would have done things differently if given a chance. Even when given autonomy over a project and an endless timeline we don't do things perfectly. Why should anybody be expected to write something perfect during an interview?
Developer interviews should be friendly and curious. You have to get along with the new hire, and that developer will have to succeed in your environment. Find the best person who meets those two basic requirements and who knows about the specific area where your existing shortcomings are, and you have a winner.
The justice system isn't a science system and never has been.
It's nice to know how and where your software is being used, but in many environments call-home functionality and auto-update functionality are non-starters.
Any non-user initiated network activity should be explicitly agreed to and available to be easily stripped.
We can and should do a better job with open source software than closed source would-be competition. Even if you aren't a privacy advocate, privacy is a priority of a significant amount of the technical community. It's significant enough that it should be addressed as a forethought to features like this, not an afterthought.
Things like this pop up as negative news entries that people gloss over. The guy who makes the snap decision "don't use brew, it phones home" today could be a CTO who never had that opinion changed three years from now.
* "The best evuh"
* "hell yeah"
* "Speechless, it's F*cking beautiful"
It might be a more positive site, but it doesn't look like they are going for high quality discussion.
Negativity begets negativity, but thinking positive and thinking big is just as contagious.