skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be a lot less gung-ho about unit tests if all the tests I wrote always passed the first time I expected them to pass, and always stayed passing regardless of what changes people make to the code (including people who are not me). As neither of these things happens, I'm pretty gung-ho.
Hovering wastes energy though. The most efficient (theoretical) landing would be an instantaneous impulse that brings your velocity to whatever your landing gear can support. The Falcon economics might not support anything less efficient (than the hover-slam technique).
I get your point, but it's frankly a bit silly. We're nowhere near the political tension and arms-race that enabled WWI. This is decontextualization ad absurdum.
You're probably only using 20% of Slack's features
I think this article mixes together and perhaps confuses a few different things.

Stated problems:

- scientists are not equipped by their training to be able to tackle "big" challenges such as meteorites and pandemics.

- "hyper-competitiveness" for grants

- extreme specialisation means that people can't communicate.

And the solution is to learn about:

1. epistemology
2. quantitative skills
3. ethics

I certainly don't disagree with the value of learning about these things. But while epistemology and quantitative skills might help make the scientific process more rigorous, I don't see that it will change competitiveness or the inability to tackle big challenges or deter specialisation.

And while ethics is always a valuable thing to think about, I don't think it helps scientific rigor or any of the author's stated problems.

Overall I found the piece a bit muddled.
Probably too late for anyone to see this, but I like "archipelago programming"; a whole bunch of islands of individual functionality tied together by clear message-passing boat lines.
I don't know. Clearly SpaceX was gunning for a 'first' here and they simply lost that to BO. I like Elon Musk a lot and especially because they are competitors I'd be nice if he was gracious about this and not use it as an opportunity to toot his own horn.

If they wanted to make a valid criticism then they could have simply said 'but we could already do this with Grasshopper' and left it at that.
Here's the full paper:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4336192/
I disagree about that with the author too. I think testing and TDD should be clearly separated as two different things.
And even more so by Levy and Young's 2004 paper: http://www.biu.ac.il/soc/ec/d_levy/publications/jmcb4.pdf
The benefit is that I can then take my phone with a navigation app with real time traffic updates that works in the US and use it in Aus without changing anything (mobile data costs aside).
Sure. "I'm trying to figure out a more consistent way of applying the Lorentz contraction" or something on those lines.
When you think of recent Turkey, you must think of this weeks:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cBRSfdAvsDQ

to help put the context.
Well it is not a great rant but ultimately if you just read the conclusion he does have some good points. There really is no substitute for competence, the process can and does hinder good design, it is used as a false crutch against incompetence. And I do think that test first and in general a large overburden of existing tests does subconsciously limit refactoring and better design.

Thats not to say all testing is bad. I do some unit test and some functional/integration tests but by no means do I strive for some arbitrary % of coverage as if that means anything. You can have 100% coverage with completely brainless useless tests that are testing lots of simple low risk code. Any sense of security from that is beside the point if your team is incompetent, the overall design calcifies and becomes a mess and nobody fully understands how it all works.

Targeted testing I guess is how I think of it, very targeted. I work on a small project in a small team, in a much larger project with lots of devs I would have to rethink maybe but then again with properly sized teams (two pizzas) that don’t even come into existence.
Prospects+Pay+YOU+$1.25+So+You+Can+Advertise+To+Them
> Philosophy (asking questions) and science (testing questions) are depending on each other.

Only in the instances where philosophy asks questions science can test.

Questions like "What is The Good?" and "Is it morally right to do this thing?" are not those kinds of questions.
> Lets be correct. It was shot down over Turkey territory.

How could you possible know enough to admonish people over this? We barely know the facts.

Perhaps the plane never entered Turkish territory. Perhaps only for a few seconds. Maybe it was fired upon when it was already over Syria. Or maybe the rocket hit over Syria.
I don't think it's immediately obvious for the lay person not familiar with space flight of the differences between the achievements of the two companies.
Hovering is also an insane balancing act for a rocket. At speed a rocket can use aerodynamic forces to keep everything lined up. In a hover everything literally turns on the engine gimbals. So there is something to be said for coming to an abrupt halt and landing immediately, before things start getting tipsy.
Evernote sinking ship – Centrallo life raft
I was once an avid Evernote user and had similar issues. Lost data and awful customer service. They are a slowly sinking ship. I've switched to Centrallo and never looked back.
Looks like they'll be taking passengers soon. Expected ticket price? Waiting list time?
Techniques like dependency injection can be really useful -- see Angular -- but too often I see a perfectly understandable piece of code expand into a mess of multiple constructors (only one ever called in production) and helper methods all so that strict unit testing can be done. The post's commit story was unsurprising. If TDD is being done this mangling often just happens upfront. DI is great in the same way interfaces are great, but if your code actually just cares about a particular implemention you instantiate wherever, or even better is built-in to the language, it's easiest to reason with that implementation. Taken to the extreme, you get Enterprise FizzBuzz.
I've been thinking about this lately. It would be difficult, but I think legislation against this scenario should be an immediate concern.

It's like Snapchat; the whole premise of security disappears when the user realizes they can take a screenshot.

A company can go bankrupt and sell off all user data, in raw form or otherwise, regardless of the agreement under which they collected it.

Huh.
Can you point me to the rule disallowing arbitrary nesting? I'm not aware of a rule existing in either direction, besides vague guidelines to write clearly.

Also, which example is 1 level of nesting? I think "That's the woman the house Jack built fell on." is 2 levels nesting, and I frequently hear constructs like that – in speaking. I agree it's rarer in writing though.

For example:
What server is that?
That's the server the consultant Jack brought in set up.

I'd never write that, because it's confusing. But I will naturally say things like that, without any problem in clarity, because you have more granular control over grouping and pausing, etc. If I said a sentence like that, you might hear it more as "That's the server the-consultant-Jack-brought-in set up."

Anyway, sorry if I misread your tone. It just came across very much as "I know what's right, and you're wrong." That might have been me projecting though. :)
I'm sorry, I assumed this to be apparent. Well the West is fighting Assad, that is what this whole mess has been about from the beginning. IS is one of the pieces in that fight (in fact probably the most effective one, despite their unsavory character but that has never been a problem for the West in choosing allies).

I think the only real drawback to IS, in strategic terms, is if their violence spills over too much, like it happened recently, but that hasn't been, and probably still isn't, much of a real concern.
By and large, the rules I learned in various English and grammar classes, beyond the initial sentence structure, were prohibitive rather than permissive; there's no rule explicitly _allowing_ arbitrary nesting, because why would need a rule to specify that, but there's also no rule that I'm aware of that _prohibits_ arbitrary nesting.

In fact, the "rule" that matters here is general sentence structure. It's fine to embed a single secondary clause inside a primary clause:

That's the woman [the house Jack built] fell on.

The structure of the inner clause has no further restrictions on it than the structure of the outer clause. Thus, the entire above sentence is perfectly valid as an inner clause to a new outer clause:

That's the lawyer [the woman <the house Jack built> fell on] hired.

There's nothing in any grammar book that I'm aware of explicitly prohibiting infinite nesting of this sort; it's just silly and quickly becomes unintelligible. Though I definitely take Tenhundfeld's point that this sort of structure is a lot more common in spoken language, and in fact it's a lot more easily comprehensible with the aid of vocal cues and tones.
I very much doubt it's in the Russian rules of engagement to fire on NATO aircraft over third-party territory.
A bit of context here.

The aircraft, according to the radar tracks the Turks are providing, was only over Turkish airspace for a few minutes at best. So we're not talking about an egregious violation here (egregious being up for interpretation.) The Turks say they warned the craft numerous times including points prior to crossing the border, so they were prepared to shoot it down after seeing it would cross if no course change was taken.

Some might ask what the harm is to Turkey in this case, and my guesses are this:

1. If Turkey didn't take action, then they could set a dangerous precedent by which aircraft were tolerated to violate their airspace, but Turkey would then find it difficult to then crack down after the fact. How deep is a real incursion? At what point do they say "ok, we're really gonna shoot you down now!"

2. The BBC brought up the fact that there are ethnic Turks (Turkmen) living inside Syria, and some of them have been targets of Russian/Syrian bombs. The Turks have been notably irritated at this, and so one could imagine that this gave Turkey an excuse to hit back.

I saw the initial Russian comments as insisting that their plane was downed by a SAM as a real desire to downplay the incident. But now that they're acknowledging it was downed by a Turkish aircraft, it seems they're at least wanting to object harshly. (Edit: That, and Turkish insistence that they did it. Maybe they didn't see the wink?)

I agree with some of the other comments, it's far too early, and even alarmist, to assume that much worse will come up this. A larger conflict is in no one's interests and is in no one's intent.
According to the radar image released by Turkey, the aircraft passed over a strip of Turkey airspace around 2km wide.

Apparently they gave the russian 10 warnings. That doesn't add up.
The turkey finally gets his revenge just before Thanksgiving.
Finding the Right Color Palettes for Data Visualizations
Thank you Intel for disabling ECC capabilities on consumer grade CPUs.

With smaller and more dense DRAM chips every year, it takes an even smaller amount of disturbance to flip a bit. ECC needs to go mainsteam yesterday.
I think the real news is this :

"Sentient has already invented an AI nurse that was tested out with Massachusetts Institute of Technology to detect sepsis [...] it was then able to predict sepsis infection 30 minutes ahead of time, to an accuracy of 91 pc. “This is very meaningful, because it actually saves lives..."

A shop assistant does not have that impact, looks like a PR gimmick and some extra shoes sold.
Eat some piece of this cake
s/worst/best/
Also, ARRAY(), since 7.4 in 2003.
But it is in NATO rules of engagement to fire on Russian aircraft over third-party territory? Obviously there is some kind of willfulness for the escalation and the tolerance levels are never infinite.
HashBackup supports Backblaze B2
But I thought we all got realistic when we all died of ebola after dying in the oil-filled Gulf of Mexico after that avian swine flu that was doing the rounds after the entire economic system fell of the rails a decade after comedy died on 9/11.
When theseatoms says the specs already exist and the tests help, then you talk as if the test was the spec, it sounds like you're replying before you read.
“The black hole's interior is protected by an armour of computational complexity.”

“Things fall because there is a tendency toward complexity.”

"...the black hole's degree of entanglement, a purely quantum phenomenon, will determine the wormhole's width, a matter of pure geometry."

Even if these ideas are not all perfectly correct, the "complexity-geometry connections" do seem to be the "tip of the iceberg".

The most exciting work that I've seen that puts a "physics wrapper" around complexity theory is called "evolvability" by Leslie Valiant. Then in terms of new physics models based on pure geometry, Nima Arkani-Hamed is another on the frontier. I hope all of these geniuses get a drink one night! :)

Thanks for the cool physics / comp sci article.
Ethereum Blockchain Total Return Swaps on Microsoft
Up next, on 2003's hottest takes...
I imagine that doesn't matter. I can't imagine that people who would actually buy their services would not actually know the difference, so I don't see this as a big marketing/PR hit. It's not like the people who would buy these services are clueless managers who make bad IT investments. The people who'd buy these services or make investments (e.g. NASA) would know the difference as to what's what.
Actually, only the inspector says

> "inspected target disconnected"

The page provides a somewhat more informative message:

> "... Closing the apps and tabs that you don't need may help by making more memory available"
Pretty sure nobody would enjoy a 5g return to earth...
Honestly this doesn't belong on the front of HN. There is no discussion value, or sense of professionalism. It's just a rant riddled with misplaced anger.

There are valid reasons to be against TDD, but it is not stupid. To call a methodology "stupid" is needlessly judgmental and really has NO place in the pragmatism and trade offs that so often go along with writing software. Anyone that calls a software methodology "stupid" so casually has no business writing software at all, nor blog posts about software.

I don't care how smart you are, or how right you are. If you want people to listen to you and consider your ideas, don't write posts like this, in this tone, at this length, with so little actual substance.
Date: 2008.
That landing was pretty amazing! I was expecting parachutes.
Diverting resources sounds good, but obviously should come first.

The research itself could and should have value. But a PhD must go all the way to the bottom, in terms of detail. It's not a pop science book or a funding programme, which can delegate the details to someone else. Therefore, asking the PhD student to be a big thinker as well as taking care of the experimental details is just raising the bar -- it's not changing the focus, it's raising the bar. Fewer people will be able to start PhDs and fewer will be able to complete them. The article doesn't suggest that this has been recognised.

Instead, I suggest that a PhD is not a great vehicle for "big thinking", and instead serves as a training-ground for planning, executing and describing ordinary research. Maybe the big thinking should be done -- as it is currently -- by people who have already demonstrated that they can do all that very well.
In my oppinion maybe it's too harsh to dismiss TDD. It's certainly good in some cases. But if you start using it everywhere everything will look like a nail when all you have is hammer. Clearly not everything is easily unit testable.

What I like about unit testing that it's forcing you to separate irrelevant code and prevents you from writing spagetti code.

In my personal oppinion you should test core functions as someone already said, which validates 90% code with 10% of time. And leave parts which can fail gracefully in case of a bug. It's not practical/impossible to test 100% of use cases of a big codebase. But you can test critical parts.
To me the BO launch-and-landing is very much like what SpaceX already did with Grasshopper, only from a lot higher up.

Anyway, let's hope that SpaceX manages to land the next time they put something in orbit, that would be a big step forward, I'm seeing a lot more practical value in SpaceX than in BO.
Do you have any sources for this? You don't sound so much like the "skeptical" type as the "pre-drawn anti-west conclusions" type.

It's important to clear up what "making a show of it" means. If you want to look like you're doing something big and important to the layperson, you distribute dozens of videos of air-launched cruise missiles and massive volleys of dumb bombs from high altitude, like the Russians have.

If you want to actually degrade ISIS's capabilities, you make literally thousands of precision airstrikes over the course of months.
But that's a general counterargument for criticism against anything - "if it doesn't work for you, you're doing it wrong"!

Ultimately, we're too young a field to be able to replace common sense with a process.
I am not afraid of escalation between Nato and Russia, but the future of Syria will need a full cooperation of all parties involved, and today we took a step in the wrong direction.

EU needs the help of Turkey to host refugee camp on its territory, and at the same time, could be helped by Russian air force.

However,Turkey and Russia have totally opposite goals regarding Assad. So this is likely going to get worse, before getting better.
My guess is when the parse tree exhausts short term memory. I have no problem reading the sentence with a single nested clause ("the cat the mouse..."), but the one with a doubly nested clause is unreadable ("the dog the cat the mouse..."). Greater nesting levels might be grammatical in an abstract sense but is extremely difficult for people to understand, much like how it's possible to come up with legal C code that results in indeterminate behavior.
Generally, the industry benchmarks dependency parsing using gold standard POS tags. However, your point is well taken. Personally, I have little doubt that it would still yield the same level of improvement, but fortunately a bit of experimentation can settle it for sure :)

Perhaps also relevant to this conversation, the disambiguation for pre-training did in fact use "real-world" tags (not gold standard). Thus, sense2vec as an algorithm was able to sort through the noise generated by mistakes in the part-of-speech tagger to still generate meaningful embeddings.
The loaded page is destroyed, this is not the expected behavior.
When object-orientation works (a rule of thumb)
There is an important truth here, but be aware that the popular history of science and technology over-emphasizes the 'lone genius' narrative (it is the 'lone' part that is exaggerated.)
Quite muddled.
This is a bad article, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of TDD, as virtually all the comments on the blog post itself and here on HN attest.

People don't spend weeks writing tests for all the functionality and then write the tests. That's not what even the most die-hard TDD advocates do.

I think many people here (like me) clicked through to read a well-reasoned article about how TDD enthusiasm may have gone too far, but sadly, this isn't that.

HN readers would do well to just move on, and the author would probably be well served by the advice of some of the commenters on his blog to take this post offline.
> I can realistically have a much greater impact on politics by contributing reasonable amounts of money to a campaign, by hiring a lobbyist, or by forming a vocal special interest group

I think that's pretty unambiguously true, but voting is free and relatively easy.
With all due respect, nothing except our own opinions are "obvious" at this time.
As I usually have to point out, Ctrl-Z sends SIGTSTP, which can be caught by a signal handler – unlike SIGSTOP, which is not sent by any key in the terminal driver, and which can not be caught by a signal handler.
My hypothesis is that launching the app twice actually means it's crashing the app.

When the app is running, and you do an instant run from Android Studio, it will try doing the hot swap. The app crashes and immediately relaunches (and it's the same build). All the while Android Studio is monitoring the app task and waiting for the hot swap to take place. It keeps checking, times out after a few seconds (realizing it didn't update successfully), and then it deploys and launches the new APK, as a last resort.

My point is to be careful when testing if you're getting the double launches, because the first time it is launched, it's still the old APK.
my take is that the West has never been serious about hurting IS, beyond making a show of it, because of its strategic usefulness.

I agree with the first half of that, but not the second. I think the more likely reason is that there is simply not the political will to pay the necessary price it would cost (mainly in political capital).
Earlier this year, when I realized that all of the old Infocom games were in the public domain, I spent some time playing Zork I, Border Zone, and HHGTTG -- the ones I played most often when I was younger.

There was some sentimental fun to be had, but these games take a tremendous amount of time to play and are difficult in a way that modern games are not. Their puzzles are almost unsolvable in some cases, or can only be solved by combining every permutation of every verb with every noun in every place to get the right answer.

Relative to what's available in the modern gaming realm as well as conventional fiction, I've also been pretty underwhelmed by what the Interactive Fiction community is putting out, especially the games that are purely web-based. There are some authors, Andrew Plotkin comes to mind, that have picked up the Infocom torch, but the feeling that you are using 0.1% of what your computer can do at about 5% of the rate your mind can work is difficult to shake for me in our modern era.
What Kerbal does teach users is that altitude is irrelevant for space travel. Speed is what matters. The "hard part" is pushing something to a useful velocity before attempting a landing. Returning a booster from to near-zero velocity from a near-orbital velocity is far more of an accomplishment than returning from altitude.
What the author describes, writing the tests for an entire program before writing any of the program, may actually be stupid. But it is not TDD. According to Wikipedia it's a feature at a time, not a program at a time. I usually see it done one class or function at a time.

If the author had bad results writing tests for an entire program before writing any of the program, I'm not terribly suprised. But since doing so isn't TDD, it doesn't add even a single data point to the TDD discussion.
This is also a central theme in the popular book Willpower, which draws on a high number of psychology studies.
> the aircraft passed over a strip of Turkey airspace around 2km wide.

As in, it flew over 2km of Turkish airspace?

At 2000 km/h ground speed, that would take 3.6 seconds. Perhaps 5 times as much if it was going as slow as possible.