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Microsoft and HackerRank Add a Live Code Editor Into Bing

Posted by EditorDavid on from the i-can-has-code-sample? dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft's Bing search engine now includes a live code editor, allowing programmers to edit and execute snippets of example code and see the results in real-time. HackerRank announced the new educational tool on their blog, calling it "a streamlined alternative" to Stack Overflow's sites and programming sites, and sharing a video of the new feature providing results for the search "quick sort Java". "In addition to learning how a certain algorithm/code is written in a given language, users will also be able to check how the same solution is constructed in a range of other programming languages too," says Bing's Group Engineering Manager for UX Features, "providing a Rosetta-stone model for programming languages."

34 comments

  1. Free Money! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yay! Now you can mine bitcoins right in your search box*! But I'm not the type of person who exploits others for personal gain. No, instead I think I'll help society by discovering the next prime number.

    So much for copying code off Stackoverflow. Now you only need to learn one language and let the search engines convert it for you. Though personally I can't wait for the next browser in a search box. You can already do browser in a browser.

    *And all the other code example sites that do similar things.

  2. Great.. by Cyphase · · Score: 0

    Yes, let's make it even easier for people to find badly-written code on the Internet.

    This is an interesting idea, but at least put a bit more effort into showing some good code.

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    by Cyphase ( 907627 )
  3. Corporate data grab by NotInHere · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Rosetta code does http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Ro... exactly this. It is freely licensed under the GNU FDL.

    Microsoft just wants you to hand over your code, train their AI, and then live from the results of the AI. Similar to how google's "map creator", where your "creation" (the google map) is owned by google, all rights reserved.

    I'm okay with the statistics based stuff google is doing for its search results, but if these companies want people to work for them, they should hire them, or they should release the results for free as well.

    Otherwise its the same kind of arrogance where nestle goes into some indian community that lives perfectly fine, builds a well that's deeper than any other wells, and which dries up all already existing wells, and now starts selling the inhabitants their own water.

    1. Re:Corporate data grab by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah. It's exactly the same as Nestle selling American Indians bottled water. EXACTLY! That was my first thought too. Hey, what about Nestle drilling wells on Indian land? That is JUST LIKE what Microsoft is doing! How does Microsofts lawyers not see this injustice?

    2. Re:Corporate data grab by bfpierce · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Holy shit drop the tin foil man.

      If they wanted to do this they could just scrub the actual internet for code.

    3. Re:Corporate data grab by istartedi · · Score: 1

      Not tin foily at all. If they scrub the Internet, they could be in violation of a bunch of ToSs on the sites they scrub. You can be sure that if anybody with lawyers found out MS was violating a ToS they'd be all in to those deep pockets. I think the well analogy is apt.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    4. Re:Corporate data grab by meet+the+squirrel · · Score: 1

      Not tin foily at all. If they scrub the Internet, they could be in violation of a bunch of ToSs on the sites they scrub. You can be sure that if anybody with lawyers found out MS was violating a ToS they'd be all in to those deep pockets. I think the well analogy is apt.

      Interesting point. I hope everyone will be anonymously (via tor; from an isolated virtual machine; in your secret bunker; under your monther's basement) submitting random bits of AGPLv3 protected code for evaluation by this service. This could be fun.

    5. Re:Corporate data grab by Darinbob · · Score: 0

      And they should. Their internally created code is crap.

    6. Re:Corporate data grab by istartedi · · Score: 1

      It's snippets. I don't think that's much of an issue. The owners of the GPL'd code might argue, rightly or wrongly that the snippets aren't fair use; but if they get complaints about a piece of code they'll probably just yank it. If you're going to disrupt their service, you might as well just DDoS it; not that I support that kind of thing.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    7. Re:Corporate data grab by toonces33 · · Score: 2

      The thought comes to mind that people could "seed" the their AI with really bad (or even non-sequitor code) - kind of like what people did with Tay.

    8. Re:Corporate data grab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Not tin foily at all. If they scrub the Internet, they could be in violation of a bunch of ToSs on the sites they scrub. You can be sure that if anybody with lawyers found out MS was violating a ToS they'd be all in to those deep pockets. I think the well analogy is apt.

      I find this hilarious. When it's hundreds of millions of Linux users including some of the most wealthy corporations in the world apparently they simply can't afford a legal dispute over patents with Microsoft and just pay out over these supposedly invalid patents, yet at the same time you postulate that this whole development is a big elaborate scam to get source code because they are worried that if they scraped the net for it then some random website is going to sue Microsoft over a violation of their terms of service.

      If you like tin foil hats then that's ok, just wear one. You don't have to come up with some ridiculous, contradictory theory that makes no sense at all to justify it.

    9. Re:Corporate data grab by istartedi · · Score: 1

      Sorry I'm still not seeing the tin foil. Microsoft wants to data mine. If I'm in the development side of MS, and I go to the legal team and say, "what if we scrape a bunch of sites for code?", they'll push back and say, "No. We'd have to square that with all the individual sites you want to scrape.". That's all I'm thinking. Nothing more. Show me the tin foil, and I'll wear it proudly; but there's none to wear.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    10. Re:Corporate data grab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "what if we scrape a bunch of sites for code?", they'll push back and say, "No. We'd have to square that with all the individual sites you want to scrape."

      Well no they wouldnt because that would not make sense. Web crawlers do exactly that all the time and more to the point there is no precedent that says you (human or machine) are not allowed to learn from the content presented on a website, there is no reason they would have to "square that" with anybody. A legal department would not respond in the way that you say because there is no legal reason to do so. In a legal sense, what exactly are you saying they would be worried about? What "terms of service" that have a legal basis could they be violating?

    11. Re:Corporate data grab by tomp · · Score: 4, Informative

      Have you looked at the service agrement? It says exacly this:

      To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content,

    12. Re:Corporate data grab by exomondo · · Score: 2

      Microsoft just wants you to hand over your code, train their AI, and then live from the results of the AI.

      Yes, what a terrible thing information aggregation and sharing is. Just look at Slashdot, taking your comments, populating their website and living from the results!

    13. Re:Corporate data grab by NotInHere · · Score: 1

      Almost every search engine, or other public API facing service like google search, microsoft Bing, etc, all deny you to use the API's answers to train a bot. Its in their TOS. Don't know whether its legal, but they put it in there, so I guess if you did use the API to train a bot, and now have a huge commercial success with that bot, you will get contacted by microsoft's/google's/etc lawyers.

    14. Re:Corporate data grab by istartedi · · Score: 1

      Well, let's take a look at an example: http://stackexchange.com/legal and you'll see that first off MS would be mis-representing itself as a real person. They could access some data under Creative Commons. If there were no legal point to be made, why would Stack Exchange even have that in the ToS? Maybe that's a loaded question.

      I know what you're getting at with crawlers--if certain types of scraping weren't allowed, then we couldn't even have Google. OTOH, I think there's a difference between presenting search results that obey robots.txt as opposed to snarfing down an entire web site's contents in violation of their ToS.

      The legal basis isn't for me to decide; it's for lawyers, which I'm not. I'm just guessing how I think they'd respond so I guess my guess is as good as yours.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    15. Re:Corporate data grab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, let's take a look at an example: http://stackexchange.com/legal and you'll see that first off MS would be mis-representing itself as a real person.

      Any web crawler does exactly the same thing.

      They could access some data under Creative Commons.

      Creative Commons is irrelevant in this case, you understand we are talking about reading a site and learning from it which has nothing to do with creative commons, right? You seem to be falling into that same "on a computer" trap that these false patent "innovations" do. The fact that it is a computer learning from it makes no difference.

      If there were no legal point to be made, why would Stack Exchange even have that in the ToS?

      There is a legal point to be made, it just isnt relevant in this case. What part of creative commons (license) do you think applies here?

      I know what you're getting at with crawlers--if certain types of scraping weren't allowed, then we couldn't even have Google.

      What do you mean by "certain types of scraping" being "allowed"? I dont think i have seen any distinction in terms of what elements of a public website a machine is and is not allowed to look at.

      OTOH, I think there's a difference between presenting search results that obey robots.txt as opposed to snarfing down an entire web site's contents in violation of their ToS.

      How is it in violation of their ToS compared to a search engine? You say they would be "snarfing down an entire web site's contents in violation of their ToS" but this an odd and ambiguous statement, it doesn't seem to be in violation of their ToS and certainly I can instruct my machine to visit a whole bunch of websites and "snarf down their entire contents" if I want, in fact I often do that for offline viewing so I can read and learn from them later.

    16. Re:Corporate data grab by istartedi · · Score: 1

      This is becoming one of "those discussions" that doesn't play out too well on line, so I'm just going to evoke the standard escape clause here--there isn't a reasonable amount of time to bring this to a conclusion that we could both find satisfying.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    17. Re:Corporate data grab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It really is not that difficult.

      If you know what creative commons is then you know it is irrelevant here so you can disregard that, not sure why you brought it up in the first place. There is no problem, in a legal sense, with having a program seach the web and study websites to train an AI (if you think there is then by all means link to it, and no we are not talking about APIs, we are talking about websites).

      I am trying to understand what your point of view is but you dont seem to be able to explain it.

    18. Re:Corporate data grab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Crawling websites is not the same as using a search API.

    19. Re:Corporate data grab by istartedi · · Score: 1

      NotInHere actually seemed to have the best, succinct explanation of what I'm going for here: https://slashdot.org/comments....

      I don't know if it was the same AC who objected that crawling != API access. Technically true, but legally they might regard them in the same way for the purpose of a lawsuit against undesirable use of what they regard as their intellectual property.

      I mentioned Creative Commons because it was in the ToS I linked, under a paragraph describing how you were permitted to use dumps of their content. If their content were public domain, they could not apply Creative Commons (or any other license) to their content.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  4. works about like I expected. by danda · · Score: 2

    I tried the example search: string concat c#. worked as expected.

    So then I tried a very common operation in any programming language these days: json encode c#

    To my complete lack of surprise, no example was given. only blue links, as always.

    In other words, the examples seem limited to trivial things only. The remote code execution is cool... i guess.

    1. Re:works about like I expected. by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      Well the answer is Json.Encode so I dont think that really needs an example.

  5. hahaha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    hahahha, /. : only complete retards here ! :))))))))

  6. Boring weekend on slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What's wrong with mods today... promoted old news... mozila vulnerability was from last week, ESET's spam botnet takedown was from last week, 135 million routers was from the end of march, now this from last monday....this site is becoming stupid since XBiz took over

  7. Guiltee by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Because "hackers". Lock'em up before they corrupt the children!

  8. Don't see no code by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Looks the same as it always did.

    Oh, you mean I have to disable security in order to see it?

    Fuck you.

    I don't trust you enough to let you run (execute) code in iframe's on my computer.

  9. Pulled down? by paskie · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't see it. Nothing comes up for "quick sort java", "string concat c#" or a plenty of other stuff - just blue links. With Chromium or Iceweasel; do I need Edge or something to see it? Or did they pull it down already?

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    It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
    1. Re:Pulled down? by theskipper · · Score: 1

      Bing's neural nets were trained by Twitter girlfriends with long memories. When you entered "java" it folded its virtual arms and went into grudge mode.

    2. Re:Pulled down? by sr180 · · Score: 2

      I'm guessing that you are outside the US. This is most likely US only.

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      In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
    3. Re:Pulled down? by paskie · · Score: 1

      Heh, what a faux-pas...

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      It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
  10. Code snippet - code completion via search by whh3 · · Score: 1

    They have this great program accessible at http://codesnippet.research.microsoft.com/ that allows you to do context-sensitive code completion directly from the q/a coding sites. Pretty neat stuff.

    There are researchers are UVa doing similar things: Report.

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    remove nospam. to email!
  11. Great! Another way to hack your browser. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Need anything else been said? One month? One Week? or even quicker before it is exploited.