skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think corporatism (the same corporatism as was the precursor to Italian fascism) is the most likely threat.

Most Americans want affordable, high-quality healthcare, but they're unlikely to get it in this political environment, since most of our politicians (e.g. Joe Liebermann) are owned by insurance companies. This, and the continuation of an unpopular war, are signs that our democracy is starting to falter.
I think he nailed it right here:

In my boyhood, there were signs on English buses that declared, in bold letters, "No Spitting." At a tender age, I was able to work out that most people don't need to be told this, while those who do feel a desire to expectorate on public transport will require more discouragement than a mere sign. But I'd be wasting my time pointing this out to our majestic and sleepless protectors, who now boldly propose to prevent airline passengers from getting out of their seats for the last hour of any flight. Abdulmutallab made his bid in the last hour of his flight, after all. Yes, that ought to do it.
I have to admit that I'm astonished by the Kindle's alleged success also.

Apparently "working back from the customer," Mr. Bezos found that people were masochists and needed an inferior way of reading text.

Want to find something in a print book? Flip the pages back and forth as fast as you like, or go to the index. On the Kindle? Flip a page and wait.

Have lots of PDF files on your computer and want to read them somewhere else? With the Kindle, don't bother, for numerous reasons.

Want to buy a book? Sorry, no such luck. You can rent a book that Amazon can take away from you whenever they feel like it, but that's it. Oh, of course, Amazon would never, ever take away something for which you paid. They promise. Until they decide otherwise.

And how about the price? If I accidentally drop a paperback novel in the toilet or leave it on an airplane, what have I lost? Less than $10, usually. If I do the same with a Kindle, I'm really hurting. Maybe you have that kind of money to waste, but I don't.

The end of print books? Mr. Bezos, I'll believe you when you show us how to end poverty. For everyone but yourself, that is.
I think this is a great insight. I know that I prefer test-first because I haven't been testing for very long, and if I don't test first, I don't get around to testing.
President Obama, It's Time To Fire the TSA
He primarily relies on Y!BOSS, which uses a $300M infrastructure.
> And in any paradigm I've ever heard of, real testing of the bottom layers of DB interaction is darned near impossible.

Is it that because the code is written in an untestable way? A pretty standard mocking approach should be able to test this.
This also works extremely well on the iPhone. The on problem is you can't zoom in on a photo. Doesn't respond to touching the photo.
The Big Zero
Eight trends to look for in 2010
That's great, if it works for you. I certainly never discouraged my employees from using test-first, if that was what helped them write good code.

But it's a long way from there to a categorical imperative.
Is HTML that hard to write?
That's it. Thanks for finding it! I'm going to bookmark this for the future.
actual demo page - http://benradler.com/flickr/
The Scientific Scandal of Antismoking
Wittgenstein isn't the only one who owns a ladder, and there are many boats and even bridges one can use to cross a river. Some rivers you can even wade or swim across. Testing is not a treacherous expanse of water crossed solely by own's own efforts. But that's just a quippy response.

More seriously, TDD doesn't really have nudge #2. I showed examples where TDD-based solutions weren't thought through well enough to be declared done, and I showed that in the prime factor case that the tests aren't sufficient to be good tests for the implemented algorithm. Specifically, tests should help others verify that the code works (which is not a goal of TDD), and the lack of tests with prime factors greater than 3 is a warning flag that should have been addressed during the development iterations. That the code happens to works (for sufficiently small numbers) is not the issue - the issue is that the tests aren't good enough to remove reasonable doubt.
If you ask Bush, Iran is responsible for Katrina. They've found hurricane factories 40 km west of Tehran.
系统下载-Ylmf OS-雨林木风Linux操作系统  
Looking for XP on Linux, a Rip of XP GUI on Linux
1) As an HN submission, it's certainly better than most. Anything with code in it beats "Startup lessons from J-Lo".

2) Beauty is a matter of taste. It might not be the Bar Rafaeli of languages, but I wouldn't think it's so ugly as to require "forceful contradiction".
In my experience, problems "at the bottom" usually occur because underlying third-party components like the database (or the filesystem or the network stack or the remote server) don't behave the way you thought they did. They're buggy or undocumented, or you just misunderstood their specs. When you mock them away for testing, the mock objects act like you expect and don't have the same quirks as their real-life counterparts. If you don't mock them away, then you have hard-to-run or hard-to-reproduce tests, or tests that give different results with different instances of the external dependencies.
Very interested. I am in Eindhoven.
Acacia plant controls ants with chemical
Strange I could have sworn I replied to this yesterday but obviously I didn't.

Bazaar is a fork of arch. The last time i truly looked at it it was only recently forked from arch. So you experience may vary.

At that time Bazaar was dog slow. Depending on who I ask it is either no longer slow or it's still slow just not as slow. Since Git and HG both suite my needs perfectly I've never bothered to check myself.

Bazaar uses multiple repository and wire formats none of which are completely compatible with each other. For an application whose focus is distributed collaboration this seems very much wrong.

It also from what I've heard is fragile when it comes to interrupted writes. I've had stories of folks losing the whole repository because of this. This is hearsay though so you can take it or leave it.

The sense I get is that both Git and Hg have a well exposed and understandable theory of operation while Bazaar does not seem to have this and instead just gives you a set of best practices. Again this is subjective and you may very well find that its quite useable and understandable.
Hard to argue with this:

So here’s what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.

What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.
Maybe it's looking in /usr/local?
Here is a dutch article:

http://nos.nl/artikel/125693-60000-ebooks-verkocht-in-nederl...

And the translated version:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...
I like what I see of the DSL, but I don't believe meritorious beauty is a matter of taste.

Coke vs. Pepsi - taste

Python vs. PHP - not-taste

For a better explanation, see: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
Bazaar is a fork of arch so you are correct in your initial assumption. It has however been actively developed by Canonical for several years so it's probably not as bad as it was then.
Not knowing the details of the judgement, a shut down seems a bit heavy handed and only more likely to bring scorn/attention to Apex (this despite the fact, I disagree with what these opposition groups are advocating).

On one hand I sympathize with Apex in that it seems fundamentally wrong that there are those who can attack you with impunity and anonymously online - particularly if they're lying about it. On the other, pursuing court action especially since it is unlikely that those running these sites have deep pockets seems like a PR disaster in the making (not to mention the fact that I think most readers take anonymous postings with a big grain of salt anyway - the legal suit for some will lend legitimacy to those false claims with many suspecting that 'the lady doth protest too much' and that their point may just be about revealing who those posters are to take retribution).
I have to admit I've always been puzzled by the opposition to TDD. I don't see it as a novice thing, or a dogmatic thing. Yet many in this community see it as such, so I'm wondering what they're seeing that I'm not.

To me, the fundamental benefit of TDD is that it proves that the code is in the state I think it's in before I make a change, and it proves that the change I made did what I expect. I'm not aware of any other technique that does that. And I find that to be compelling enough to use the technique routinely.

It seems to me the article author's basic point is that TDD alone isn't sufficient to prove all the requirements are met. I agree with that, but I also don't think that's sufficient to dismiss the practice.
But what if you're providing a service that's built on top of the YouTube API and provides value in that it helps people find interesting videos for their children to watch?

What might constitute "sufficient value" in that case?
The problem is that this is a trivial problem. Why add an abstraction on top of something that is already so simple?
In New Way to Edit DNA, Hope for Treating Disease
Is it just cuter if it means less typing?
Fascinating aspect: which tool we want to work with? - Ok, let's build a business around that tool.
I prefer XML Builder templates (in Rails or Groovy) to this approach. It's similar, but SHPAML just drops enough stuff to have to be learned. You basically already know how to write Builder, it's that simple.
Wait. This is a libel lawsuit in the U.S., which means that they're suing because someone said something about them which is false. They then also want the legal contract that started this whole thing taken down because they own the copyright on it.

Either this is atrociously bad reporting, or the judge is an idiot. Even though we're talking about New Jersey here, I'll put my weight on the first.
Very cool. This looks like a real version of the Ruby fusefs I wrote to grok all of the s3organizer vs. s3sync vs. whatever schemes for differentiating files vs. directories in S3:

http://github.com/stephenh/s3fsr

Given I used Ruby's fusefs, nothing is streamed, and its single threaded, limitations I assume this C++ implementation doesn't have to deal with.
If you don't use something like TextMate snippets (or some other auto-completion), then it's definitely overly-time-consuming IMHO.
OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch takes back reigns as CEO
I absolutely agree that TDD does not guarantee well-thought-out code. (If you find something that does, let me know.)

However, for some people, I do think it does give them a nudge in the right direction. Over the years, I've been amazed at the quantity of code I've seen written by programmers who had only the vaguest notion of what the code they were writing was supposed to do. Any ritual, no matter how silly, that helps the novice (or lazy) coder to stop and think before coding is ok by me.

But, as I said, there's a long way from that to insisting on TDD as "the one true way".
I feel like the way the TSA is responding to all of this should be familiar to anybody that has ever worked in IT.

It's a lot like the people who refuse to use OSS software (with some exceptions like redhat) because it doesn't come with a service contract; when something goes wrong, there is nothing to point at and go "See! We did everything we should have to prevent this!"

The TSA doesn't want to look like a bunch of idiots if something like this happens again because they did nothing to prevent it.

With this, they're doing something and people, on some level, like it or are at least comforted by it.
A common trait in the Smalltalk community. "The right job for the right tool". Not kidding.
When you release code, there's an implicit commitment of improving and maintaining it, or at least finding someone who will when you can't anymore, unless you say otherwise from the start.

The attention and effort others invest in your project needs to be respected. You do have an ethical obligation to follow through on the project, at least in my view.

Feeling no obligation towards your user base just because one of the price dimensions (money) happens to be 0 is an irresponsible attitude.
Ah. That makes sense. I guess I've had the luxury of only working with MySQL, Postres, and sqlite, and have never run into bugs with them.
"A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage."

Hear hear.
Stutters a bit when it’s still loading (current 64GB iPod touch, so should as fast or faster than current iPhones), but even scrolls like butter after that. More fun than in the normal browser.
"Zinc fingers may also make technically possible a morally fraught procedure that has been merely a theoretical possibility--the alteration of the human germ line, meaning the egg or sperm cells. Genetic changes made in current gene therapy are to body cells, and they would die with the individual. But changes made to the germ line would be inherited. Many ethicists and others say this is a bridge that should not be crossed, since altering the germ line, even if justifiable for medical reasons, would lower the barrier to other kinds of change."

That would be a very interesting development in gene therapy if it occurred. The article goes on to mention pros and cons of gene therapy on germ line cells, as contrasted with gene therapy on somatic cells, and mentions a likely candidate disease for a first trial of germ line therapy in human beings.
Introduction to MGL (part 3)
The Coolest Data Center Video Tours
> To me, the fundamental benefit of TDD is that it proves that the code is in the state I think it's in before I make a change, and it proves that the change I made did what I expect.

That's called unit testing, and it's gets you to the same place. It's just TTD says when you must write the unit tests: before the code.

As an experienced engineer, I love unit tests for the freedom it give me later when changing things, but TDD just feels all wrong during the early phases. It prevents me from seeing the larger picture and adds "inertia" to internal APIs that maybe later turn out to be inelegant. But that's just me, others are helped greatly by TDD in their coding.

So my opposition to TDD is strictly personal. It's just not for me, but feel free to do it all you like.
Furniture porn always reminds me of the scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton is cataloging the furniture in his apartment. Still, I want that chair.
I'm not dismissing the practice, nor am I opposed to TDD. But your experience and mine are very different if you haven't encountered TDD zealots. In fact, as much as I hate to say it, I think zealotry is the hallmark of the TDD community, such as it is.
I don't see why I would use that over this: http://lab.xms.pl/markup-generator/
Not only does it have the same syntax (with some improvements), but it also gives me the CSS to work with. AND I don't have to install python. Hooray.
Evolve Neural Controllers for Mutating 3D Bodies with Physics
Yes, that may be possible.
Also they can see
They have cameras or retinas

Here are some to try

http://ansistego.sf.net/foodotropes.tgz
http://ansistego.sf.net/knightotropes.tgz

Also see the sourceforge forums for critterding, good luck.
"Except for my first two years at Oxford, I have been spared the so-called 'negative symptoms': apathy, withdrawal, inability to work or make friends."

The article is a good illustration of an unappreciated fact about most complex behavioral disorders: the disorders are so polygenic and multifactorial in origin that two patients can have the same diagnosed disorder, based on the most current diagnostic criteria, and still have very different courses of disease progression. It appears some difference in Professor Saks's genes or childhood environment (or, most likely, both) spared her from some of the most debilitating effects of schizophrenia and gave her the opportunity to practice introspection on a mental disorder rarely looked at from the inside.

"COOK: Have you ever been treated against your will, and, if so, can you explain the circumstances and the effect this had on you?

"SAKS: I have been subjected to the use of force on numerous occasions. In the first instance, I was hospitalized against my will. I was said to be dangerous to myself and dangerous to others. I was also said to be 'gravely disabled,' and the reason given was I couldn’t do my Yale Law School homework!"

I'd like to know more details about who petitioned for her involuntary treatment in that instance, and the legal procedures followed then. It seems like a big leap to go from "the patient can't do law school homework" (many high-functioning normal people can't do Yale Law School homework successfully) to "the patient is a danger to self or to others," the legal standard for involuntary treatment in most states. A lot of persons with mental illness are chronically unemployed or underemployed but their relatives cannot successfully get them treated.
The idea that since markdown hasn't done anything in years its somehow being stewarded improperly is a bit foolish. Look at Gruber's vision statement, he wanted to make an easy-to-read easy-to-write markup.

He did it, it is done, it's called markdown. If Atwood had his way Gruber would have spent the last 4 years filling it up with features and today we would be reading a post about how Markdown went from slim and sleek to fat and bloated.
That sounds really great: however, how much percent of the books have a Kindle edition?

I have heard this question asked rhetorically approximately 15 times and nobody ever seems to be willing to get their hands dirty.

The New York Times bestseller lists both identify and anoint winners in the publishing markets, which are winners-take-most games where the head vastly outsells the tail. You can read them online. You can also search for books on Amazon. Combining these two processes in a revolutionary way produces the following:

Fiction:
The Lost Symbol (Dan Brown): KINDLE
I, ALEX CROSS, by James Patterson: KINDLE
UNDER THE DOME, by Stephen King -- no kindle
THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett: KINDLE
U IS FOR UNDERTOW, by Sue Grafton: KINDLE
PIRATE LATITUDES, by Michael Crichton: KINDLE
FORD COUNTY, by John Grisham -- no kindle
THE LAST SONG, by Nicholas Sparks -- KINDLE
THE CHRISTMAS SWEATER, by Glenn Beck et al -- no kindle
THE LACUNA, by Barbara Kingsolver -- no kindle

So, to a first approximation, I'm going to guess that in excess of 60% of titles sold in the United States weighted by sales have a Kindle edition available.

Feel free to do the gruntwork for non-fiction. I think you will find pretty much the same,
The netbook, which is expected to launch in the holiday season of 2010, will reportedly also come with preinstalled Google apps such as Google Map, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calender and Google Search by Voice.

What does this even mean? There will be "preinstalled" bookmarks to those apps I guess?
I think this is a troubling attack on free speech. If there is a lawyer here who could comment it, or if someone reading this can provide helpful links, please do!

At the same time, I feel the article does not present sufficient information so I could make a personal judgment on the texts that caused the judge to make such a drastic decision -- does anyone know if copies or excerpts are available? Thank you!
This seems like more-or-less the standard feature set of other products. See, for example, products mentioned in the post:
http://www.wuala.com/en/learn/features
https://spideroak.com/engineering_matters#storage_savings
http://jungledisk.com/personal/desktop/features/

tarsnap offers a unique mix of these features, but so does any other product.
How do tests written after you've changed the code prove the state of the system prior to the change? Or put another way, what technique do you use to ensure the test is exercising what you think it is?

I understand what you mean about inertia. If I'm not sure what I want an API to look like, I'll sometimes mess around with it without tests, then discard the work and rewrite with tests. I suppose post-hoc testing could be equivalent, but I find I usually write the code better the second time.
A fascinating story about thievery but so very long and so difficult to read due to the layout, colors and styling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

I didn't even know Apex existed.
Great article. I enjoyed how well the author builds his case and argues for it rather reasonably. While I do disagree with his article on the whole, I do agree that TDD is not the end all be all. There is good TDD and there is bad TDD. TDD is a very general practice and what really defines your tests as good or bad is really your OOD skills.

One thing (really two things that work hand in hand) that I've found to augment my OOD skills so that I write better tests and better software is domain driven design and behavior driven testing. Using these techniques together has helped me to learn to ask better questions of my domain experts, create more decoupled and flexible software, as well as solve that age old how do I test the UI when it isn't already in an MVC framework (the correct answer is to treat it or portions of it as their own domains imo).

This is the kind of article that provokes thoughtful discussions by having a well thought out opinion and not just blabbering the first idea that comes to mind.

Thanks and keep it up!