Before I came on board at my company, they outsourced a small project to a freelancer who had taken a short intro to Rails course. Before I saw his code (it was running on heroku, and we didn't have access yet), I called him up just to talk to him about how he did it. It was clear that he didn't understand some very basic questions I was asking him to the point of giving me answers that were just plain wrong. Also, this was a light-weight web scraper, so Rails is about as wrong an approach as you can get. I junked his code, rewrote it in Python, and removed his number from my contacts.

Again, this isn't a bad thing, but getting somebody to bash out 30-odd lines doesn't make them a programmer, or even given them a taste a programming. That's enough for maybe some basic flow control.

Hour of code is not a bad thing, but this didn't create 12M programmers, much less 12M people who know computer science. They averaged 32.4 lines each.

Which is why he won't ever get there. Sadly, supreme court nominations are more about appealing to one's political base and creating a "legacy" than actually appointing intelligent, insightful jurists.

Postgres 9.3 has a native json type which should go a long way here allowing one the flexibility of strict relational data where that helps (linking people to families, employers, plans, etc.) and free-form json where that's the way to go.

Because Postgres exists.

A little googling turns up that MarkLogic's offering is NoSQL. Without getting into the whole SQL/NoSQL debate, I can't help but noting that this is clearly relational data with a fairly limited number of records (clearly there can't be more than 300M people listed) and for which ACID is (or should be) a major concern.

It may be only one year since he fled Belize, but it's been many, many years since anybody cared. Please cut out the front-page spam.

Traditional $10K? I'm not a traffic cop, but this tradition of paying $10K to shut down 2,200 miles of interstate is new to me. Also, why should we encourage people to take risks just to take risks? Having a bankruptcy system encourages the risk taking involved in entrepreneurship, which is generally a good thing. This, however, is just taking risks to look cool while shutting down roads for his stunt would inconvenience many others.

Many years ago, I used to have a program on my TI-81 that did this exact same thing.

Besides the many, many stretches of the imagination required for his story (e.g., it infects the firmware on all major brands of USB drives, he never extracted a binary blob or sent the infected device to the manufacturer, the audio communication silliness, the fact that he apparently thinks infection could spread through the power cable, and so on...) the biggest issue to my mind is that if this is so communicable, why in all the time he's had it under observation has it never spread anywhere else? Also, why has he not shown it to a colleague. This is the sort of thing that goes over huge at conferences.

Explaining why the whole thing is probably a hoax.

From the arxiv: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.4706.pdf

This was interesting...in August.