skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok so I read the first sentence and felt it set the tone of the paper. Continued reading and it pretty much played out exactly as I thought it would.

>"Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like try[ing] to lose weight by weighing yourself more often."

So this is really funny to me because I just read an article that in fact states that weighing yourself more often does help people lost weight.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150617134622.ht...

Just by looking at the page and the style of reading you can tell this is someone who has not progressed in their career skills since the early 90's
I noticed a major difference in the landing sequences of the New Shepard and Falcon 9 first stage.

The Falcon 9 first stage, if I recall correctly, is incapable of either hovering or slowly decending. The engine has simply too much power. A Falcon 9 first stage, stopped mid air has two choices, keep the motor on and go up, or turn the motor off and fall - and I don't think the motor has too many extra restarts available.

Because of this inability to hover the Falcon 9 first stage, SpaceX is attempting to have the rocket's vertical velocity reach zero at the exact moment the rocket reaches the pad. This is why when you watch the grasshopper or other SpaceX landing videos, you always wonder for a split second if the rocket has just smashed into the ground. In order for this to work, all nine axis (three each of position, rotation, and velocity) must be brought to zero at exactly the same fixed time. This is insane level control theory here.

Now this type of landing is theoretically possible - and I think it has been tested on the grasshopper at lower speeds, but it scares the willies out of me. There's almost no room for error nor for the chaos of the universe.

New Shepard on the other hand, comes to a hover about 100? feet above the pad, moves horizontally to be above the pad, stops, then lowers itself down. This is tremendously simpler since the rocket only really cares about one or two set of axis at a time, it does not have to be nearly as precise, and you have time to fix anything that's not lined up.

I'm still curious to see if SpaceX can pull off their landing style, or will instead change so that their first stages will be able to hover.
Never get bore. i explr mself in dance in a year and i keep doing it
Google silicon valley toxic plumes and you get some stories and maps like this- http://whatsdown.terradex.com/#12/37.3674/-121.9649/
The Three Faces of Steve Jobs (1998)
What's wrong with systemd
> It continues to amaze me how people go from being a novice to being an expert. One day they can't code at all. Next day they know everything there is to know about it -- and can go on at length about why process X is a terrible thing, without even trying or understanding it.

The Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
TDD has always looked to me like a good idea taken to ridiculously dogmatic extremes (a very common occurrence in software development, IMHO), but I think many of this author’s indiscriminate potshots miss the most important problems.

In order to write a test for something, you need to know what it is supposed to do, and testing will not tell you that. In order to make something that passes your tests, you have to design it, and a test does not tell you what that design should be - it can tell you if you failed in a specific way, but not what to do about it. There is a whole lot of analytical reasoning and technical judgement to software development that is ignored by TDD, and while thinking about test cases can help with this, it is an insufficiently powerful method to complete the job.

Agile methods have not rescinded this fact. Insofar as they form a complete development methodology (and I am not sure about that), they offer an empirical approach to discovering your requirements (which may or may not be appropriate to your situation), and the use of short-cycle iteration to gauge how you are progressing, but they are largely silent on the issues I raised above.
I hope I never work with the author..
See further discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10620369
The effect that I'm complaining here is visible in "weaker" languages, like Java. People are too afraid to use reflection to instrument the code for testing, so e.g. in a codebase I'm working on right now at $JOB I get to see classes in which you can't really tell what code is there for business purposes and what code was added so that the business code could be tested.

I agree with you that a code that's hard or impossible to test is a code smell. I argue that having to modify a good design to accomodate for more testing is also a code smell. I think the two heuristics narrow down the design space nicely, pointing one towards designs that are easy to test because of their natural boundaries, and not because of additional testing cruft being added.
Russia has other, non-military means of "attacking" Turkey. For example, but cutting off the gas pipelines in the winter ("technical difficulties").
If your query is complex enough to warrant a (non-recursive) CTE, it's probably complex enough to warrant breaking that CTE out into a separate view (or function, if it performs a write). Now you can independently test and reuse that view, which you can't do with a CTE.

(Bonus if you're in Postgres: Postgres optimizes across views, but not across CTEs. Go figure.)
"Secondly, I wouldn't try to fit unit testing into scientific process - because if the test is a hypothesis, then what you're doing is the exact opposite of how science is done. You do not design your experiment to make your hypothesis come out true!"

True, but I think that objection can be trivially fixed by simply... doing that. I write tests that confirm the code does what I designed, but I also write code that tries to break my design, and tests that verify that it errors as expected. I do approach it with a scientific mindset. (And I tend to consider "scientific mindset" to be the more important part of science vs. some overprivileging some checkpoint list of specific techniques, which ought to have come from the scientific mindset in the first place.)

Of course it remains true that you can't do that perfectly, but that's a null objection in the end. Nothing ever can be, but at least I try.

I can't even count how many times I've tested a code's error case, only to discover that it unexpectedly "worked". Usually that's because there's a bug and I need to fix the error case... every once in a while it turns out my code corrects my own understanding when it reveals what I thought was an error case is actually perfectly valid and sensible, though. It's important to try to break the code.
Is this is the first attempt by Blue Origin? The first one turned to be successful?
It can be, I won't entirely disagree. But it depends how highly coupled your unit tests are to the design.

Unit tests are a safety mechanism- you can easily bog yourself down with too many, tying things up in bad ways, or presuming a specific design. But do you really want to live with no safety at all?

The art, as I see it, lies in writing tests in such a way that you get the guarantees you need, the safety of not letting the next guy (or yourself) screw it all up during later changes while simultaneously not preventing you from doing needed refactoring.

It's a fun challenge.
You don't, you chain small generators. Compositions of generators transforming data is the key.
Amazon Prime next-day deliveries to the International Space Station just got one step closer...
Recursive CTE can be very fast in Postgres.
I can create a closure table of 2 Million rows for indirect and direct relations i.e. All paths from 15000 source direct relations in about 12 seconds on my MBPro 1Tb ssd 16 Ram.
The makes it practical to just recreate all paths as a materialzed view refresh instead of worring about complicated incremental graph logic such as moving branches.
With such a closure view - any graph traversal query is lightning fast - no need for neo4j !
How do you feel Oracle's support for "with" is lacking? I use it on a daily basis, and it seems to work fine for me.
This 100x.

By the time you're getting your PhD, the college graduate should have read the classics, done at least 1st year level calculus, biology, physics, ethics, philosophy, and 2-4 years of a foreign language.

High school and undergraduate is the time to be broad-minded. PhD is for very focused work (with the big picture in mind).

Personally, I read the classics and learned Greek and Latin (high school), then in college took 8 courses of philosophy, 2 of Spanish, 2 in economics, 4 in business/entrepreneurship, and a smattering of other interesting things (art, music, etc...) while getting a Physics major.

Then I went and spent 6 years learning more about one thing than anyone in the world.
Fair point. I was more referring to his comment here: I am against writing unit tests in general, since experience shows that they actually prevent high-quality code from emerging from development--a better strategy is to focus on competence and good design.
Scientists baffled after the disappearance of a dozen Quasars
The Challenges of Remote Working: “Distributed Teams Are the Future of Work”
Yes, I'd prefer cat photos and self referential reports on such by CNN, WAPO, NYT et al……
What does the hit Scottish rock band have to do with this? ;)
C-K theory
"Stateful" doesn't mean "bad". I know functional programming is all the rage right now, but being stateless doesn't turn magically something into a better version of something stateful. If the stateful version is better integrated, have a heavier stateless version is not going to make your code better.
When i read launcher i thought i am going to see a a Windows Environment replacement. Damn Android terminology. Anyway, i would definitly try that when i would have Windows.

It is one of the typical missing features that let me wonder how windows people can even talk about productivity. Kudos.
"motivated to react"-like turning away from the Turkish border at full afterburner? Alarmism and freaking out doesn't do anyone any good.
Exactly what you wrote. That's why I am generally for testing, but I don't buy into Test Driven Development.
I meant the opposite - Linux for my Macbook.
If it were a neutral third party I'd agree, but presumably they're competitors.
It might have something to do with half the headlines out there claiming Blue Origin "beat" SpaceX.

http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/24/blue-origin-reusable-rock...
Thinking isn't about jobs. It is about life.

Perverse incentives is a great point.
The same thing is being mentioned in several places elsewhere, but to put some numbers on it:

Orbital velocity is in the vicinity of 7500 to 8000 m/s. At that speed your KE is 1/2.m.v^2 which is about 32e6 Joules/kg.

Orbits are, conveniently, at about 320 km, so your PE is m.g.h, or about about 3.2e6 Joules/kg.

In other words, the energy to get to orbit is ten times the energy to get to the altitude of orbit, and this exercise only got to 1/3 of that. So the energy involved was about 1/30 of that required to put something in orbit.

It's still a fantastic achievement, and an important - nay, critical - step on the way to properly reusable rockets, but it does lend some perspective to it.
Correct. And the USA has a multi billion $$ storage project for oil t

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...
These 3 judges hold the fate of the Internet in their hands
Fair enough.

> art

In stark contrast to what I've said: I also believe this to be true. Software development is a cross section of multiple disciplines: art and mathematics possibly being two of the largest within that cross section. Science, while a smaller component, is still present.

> You do not design your experiment to make your hypothesis come out true!

Indeed, as stated the TDD approach is strange and is only analogous to the formal scientific process.

> driving your design by tests is going a bit too far [...]

I didn't stick to formal TDD for very long for exactly that reason: it takes ages and constrains you to think about the tiny details instead of the grander design of the project. The upshot of formal TDD is that it usually results in low coupling but there are other ways to achieve that.
Researchers Track Tricky Payment Theft Scheme
Bli en del av vårt team o börja som UX/UI-designer hos Blocket
It can be done, but it will take time. My folks, who commute by car every day, loved Waze until it was bought. They ended up feeling the quality went way down and also locked out of the fruits of their labor: My mom was banned for making a few mistakes! Maybe there is a growing group of people who would be ready for an open alternative.
> There's no rulebook when it comes to syntax (grammar), unless you're a prescriptivist.

And no two prescriptivists can agree on which rulebook to use!
Show HN: Graph Commons – a platform for collaborative network mapping
The Road to Release
I agree, but the corollary of that is that if the project specs exist (and they do, at least conceptually), then it is they that are ultimately driving development. This is outside of the scope of TDD, and so TDD is not a complete methodology, a fact that often seems to be forgotten or overlooked.
I'm the skeptical type, but my take is that the West has never been serious about hurting IS, beyond making a show of it, because of its strategic usefulness. There have been indications of this since the bombing campaigns began over a year ago in Iraq, the British flew for weeks without attacking anything, the Kurds reported no help from the air, etc. Add to this all the direct and indirect support IS has been getting in terms of weapon supplies to 'moderates' that end up with them, and particularly the strange ease with which they are able to sell oil and send fighters back and forth across the Turkish border.

So I'm inclined to believe that this incident was staged to further put a spanner in the wheel of real concerted attacks on IS - instead we get Russia and the West staring each other down. Note that the Russian jet did not exactly invade Turkish territory - it crossed a tiny finger of land less than a mile wide extending into Syria - a tiny excuse for such a forceful response.
Fallout 4, being a Bethesda game, has first class modding support on desktop PC. AFAIK, Xbox One should be getting similar capabilities within the next year, and PS4 is rumoured to follow suit.

Mods give you complete access to accomplish anything with the game world or interface, even morph it into a completely different game.
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See the map of the bombings (the post above). There is a huge bombing activity near the Turkish border. "Turning away from the border" would mean stop such operations. It's obvious that Turkey intentionally overreacts. See also honestcoyote's comment here.
The 5 biggest web trends of the year
Second attempt, I believe. Last time they recovered the crew capsule as planned but lost the rocket.
Data Science for Losers – Part 5 – Spark DataFrames
If you can't write good code, then you will not write good code.

But, there is another common case where unit tests (written before or after) also come in tremendously handy: if you can't write good mistake-free code 100% of the time.

Which describes all programmers who have ever existed.
Russian warplane shot down in Syria
> I do approach it with a scientific mindset. (And I tend to consider "scientific mindset" to be the more important part of science vs. some overprivileging some checkpoint list of specific techniques, which ought to have come from the scientific mindset in the first place.)

True. If you just follow the checklist without following the spirit of the scientific method, you end up doing socio^H^H^H^H^Hcargo-cult science.

As for scientific mindset in programming, I think it's a very valuable thing to have on both larger scale - in various forms of testing - and smaller scale. I found that, when running your code, it's good to just ask yourself what exactly do you expect to happen beforehand, and if you see any deviation, immediately go figure it out, or at least note it down. If a program does something unexpected it means you don't understand it.
React+Flux starter kit(ES6,Browserify,Babel,Jest,eslint,stubby srv)
Not just to someone else. Nothing is more pleasant than going in to refactor code you wrote years ago, and find that you wrote comprehensive unit tests. Thank you past-me!
Oh! Okay and sorry.
The Future of Nanotechnology and Computers So Small You Can Swallow Them
I do agree with this, and have felt it from both ends. If you need to change a core class or interface which cascades throughout the system, those unit tests are sure nice to have. I'm not sure I'd be confident enough to change the core class without the unit tests. In that sense, lack of unit tests is momentum against change.
Please explain exactly how you think ISIS is strategically useful to the West.
Lets be more precise. It was shot down over Turkey territory (according to information provided by Turkey military).

Of course one could argue that the plane was just taking a shortcut over the small part of Turkey territory. The problem with this is that Turkey has warned Russians on many occasions to not do that. But in my opinion it does not look like there was any threat to Turkey.

In principle the Russians have become very cocky near all NATO borders, and Turks are the least PC NATO member, so one can say that Russians had it coming and it looks like they finally found their equally crazy nemesis. Anyway, the situation is alarming and it is not yet clear how the following actions would unroll.

The first reaction from Putin does not make it look like Russia would admit their fault, but I think that he is rather reserved.

My condolences go to the parents and relatives of the killed pilot.

Edit: Changed two paragraphs, added one more paragraph.

Edit2: It looks like Russians flew over Turkey territory towards their target zone (see the map provided in this thread) and then began to fly in circles over Turkey territory. They were shot at the second entry.

I do not know why Russians choose this route as it does not seem to be the most optimal one.

The length over Turkey territory is about 1500-1600 meters, SU-24 flies up to 360 m/s so it was about minimum 5 seconds flight, but as it was a second entry, I guess it does not matter that much.

Anyway, I think that both sides acted in a very unwise manner.
Russia's initial reaction was to place the blame on insurgents and not Turkey. Even after Turkey claimed responsibility, Russia essentially said: "Are you sure? We really think it was the rebels. Hint. Hint." [1]

So that's pretty telling. Russia showed a willingness to sweep this under the table but Turkey wouldn't let them.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/nov/24/russian-je...

"President Putin is reportedly readying a statement. On Russian state television, there was little discussion of the Turkish claim they had shot the plane down, with anchors and analysts speculating that the Su-24 could have been shot down by rebels with anti-aircraft weapons. This chimes with the Russian Defence Ministry’s claim that the plane was shot down from the ground, but completely contradicts the Turkish statement that an F-16 from its airforce shot the plane down."
The plane came down in Syria, no info about where it was before then or where the plane was shot as far as I know. Not looking very good for Turkey with info available at this moment, if the plane had come down inside the Turkish borders they'd have a much stronger story.

The conflict is becoming extremely complex, all parties hate IS, but some more than others and some offer clandestine support and quite a few parties hate each other as well. Turkmenes, Assad, Russia, Turkey, the Kurds, IS are fighting there each with their own relationship with all the other parties and that's just one small fragment of the zone, and Turkey is part of NATO to make things even more complex.
The spacecraft did not exit the atmosphere, but this is certainly a prepossessing feat. Congratulations to Bezos and Blue Origin.
Great read!

Complexity is evil evil evil (my take on it: http://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/132.php)

<quote from Conway's article>

Incidentally, today’s automobiles share this problem
of a massive amount of on-board code and the bugginess
that accompanies it. A few years ago, some Mercedes
owners found that when they pushed a certain button on the
navigation system the driver’s seat moved.

</quote>

I have this sinking feeling that my death is going to occur because of some interaction between software/firmware design and an unexpected situation (e.g. stuck in an elevator between floors because the firmware is expecting internet packets from Twitter or something). Hope I'm wrong, but the complexity of electronics seems to be increasing fast enough for system reliability to decrease.
I don't see the same goals. SpaceX never talked about about this sort of suborbital tourism. The problem with "space" tourism as a source of funding is that nobody has ever made a go of it. There are only so many people capable of dropping 200,000$ on an hour-long thrill ride. And only a very few of those are young enough (say under 60?) to enjoy a 5g return to earth. It just isn't a reliable source of funds ... but it does get the press coverage needed to trap naive investors.
Great! Meanwhile his PhD was not particularly "big thinking". So in Einstein's case I think we're both happy?

As for jobs jobs, I think you missed the point. If we lie to PhD candidates about career prospects and train them in things that have a negative effect on their careers, then the best people won't undertake research.
Purchasing a Laptop Computer
This would make a good "Show HN" post.

Start the title with "Show HN :".

Put the URL in the other box.

Don't enter text in the main box.

It might make sense to put add additional information in the README.md for the repository.
Highest altitude followed by a powered landing by SpaceX: 1,000 m

Highest altitude followed by a powered landing by Blue Origin: 100,500 m

Moreover, SpaceX has gotten close to a powered landing from space a half dozen times, but has mostly failed in the last 100m. You could argue that Blue Origin just did the hard part that SpaceX hasn't been able to do. Obviously the difficulty doesn't really scale linearly like that, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this accomplishment.
> It looks like Postgres can do it [1] with its JSON capabilities

Postgres could do it long before its JSON capabilities, array_agg was added in Postgres 8.4 (2009) and hstore in 8.3 (2008)
On one hand I'm dismayed at the fact that start-ups would need to build "good-will" with the political class to ensure existence. On the other hand, I am grateful that, at least now, many speak as a voice for liberalization of markets. I only fear that once the start-ups become larger and more entrenched, they will change tactics and lobby to close off the market to new entrants.
a tiny excuse for such a forceful response

Not exactly. Russian/Syrian jets have been flying sorties in the region for weeks/months. Violating a nation's airspace is a serious offense, even if they just "crossed a tiny finger".

The aircraft has also been previously warned about intrusions.
Could Einstein have justified his course of research as an attempt to incrementally innovate on some existing work?
Highbrow 2.0: Share your knowledge by creating email courses on Highbrow
You mean like

SELECT key, value1,
ARRAY(SELECT value2 FROM bar WHERE bar.key = foo.key)
AS value2_array
FROM foo;

?

(In Postgres; no "JSON capabilities" needed.)
What I remember from the past news Turkey gave few notices to Russia about their planes violating the Turkish airspace. So Russia had it coming for a long time.
Thanks for those links; that Media Matters article in particular was quite informative. Sounds like there really has been a big turnover at the Journal; a shame. I wonder, though, how much of the old Journal's approach would work in this one-screen sound bite era that we live in?