skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This discussion boggles my mind, though I'm willing to assume there's something to it. The reason I love my unit tests so much is that they free me to refactor endlessly. In fact, given that I'm working in an old code base that has no testing, the only thing letting me refactor to the extent I need to accomplish my current task is the unit tests I'm adding.

And I'm not spouting propaganda here, as I know this is a talking point, this is my personal experience. Take away this benefit and my desire to write the tests would be much less.

Before unit tests, I would do design one, build a bit, discover I need design two, build a bit more, discover I need design three, build a bit more, discover I need design four but now design three is really embedded too deeply into the system to know whether I can safely change things, and then the hacks start going in because otherwise the subtle bugs start popping up faster than I can catch or fix them. Unit tests don't eliminate the bugs popping up unexpectedly after a design change, but in my experience it brings them down far enough that the cost/benefit of the design change is positive again, which in the long term pays off when we actually end up with the rather well-tuned, powerful-yet-simple design thirteen. (Someday I hope to learn enough to get there sooner, like, design six or something.)

Am I just lucky, or are they doing something wrong?

On the front of what I do differently than some, I actually reject the "unit testing must test as small a unit as possible" dogma and the vast bulk of my unit tests are actually what some people would call integration tests, though, usually, rather low level integration tests; they don't take 20 minutes to run, either. I also avoid mock objects like the plague, aggressively preferring to either build the interface to be testable in the first place, or failing that, adding some hooks in the tested code itself, rather than trying to push it onto the code from the outside. Perhaps that's the difference... basically I tend to run my testing one level above the bottom layer on the real-as-possible code, rather than right on the bottom layer of the code with various fake bits attached. Despite what intuition (and dogma) might be telling you, this usually means I can change that bottom layer quite significantly with little to no test code changes.

(I don't follow this religiously, there is some bottom-layer code that gets tested on-the-spot, like raw validators or the output of a parser, but typically the code I test on the bottom layer never subsequently changes much because it is so simple that there's simply no reason for it to change.)
It's bbPress (http://bbpress.org/).
Anybody that wants to can add themselves as an employee of Weebly on LinkedIn, so no, we don't have 18 employees :)

We actually have 7 full-time.
Lots of interesting facts and tidbits in there.

I'm guessing we all know that Google was misspelling of the number Googol, however, I wonder how many of you know that the Googol was inspired by a cartoon character from the 1930's named Barney Google

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7c/090636google.j...

So it seems to have come full circle in that regard.
In gentoo, I think it's part of the plan9port package. Is there something like that for debian/ubuntu?
You want people to use FTP? I haven't run any sort of FTP service in close to a decade. Whenever someone asks me to "FTP" something for them, or fetch a file via FTP it feels like I've just been set back a dozen years.

You could do what you describe with a procmail recipe, and/or about a dozen different mechanisms on a mail server. This would make more sense then asking your email client to process the message as you described, this is much more of a "server" task than a "client" task.
As mentioned by yummyfajitas you can try

plan9port http://swtch.com/plan9port or

9vx http://swtch.com/9vx

and try to get sam running on top of your linux box.
Streaming Bipartisan Meeting on Health Reform
Yeah, but it doesn't include acme. :-(
Yep, maybe a timescale would help. However, I still have some beef with the chart and the mindset it perpetuates.

I just don't like the idea of hiring "managers" before profitability is reached. Seems crazy to me.
Yeah, I can see your point. Covering costs is definitely a milestone that I look toward when monetizing, but only as a first step on the climb toward profitability.
Cool - thanks a lot!
He was 6'2" and weighed around 225 pounds. So he was chubby, but I have never met a woman who would admit to finding him ugly.

"Helpful assets" is one way to put it. But I'm advocating a stronger hypothesis: when lots of people can vote, and they can watch candidates on TV, we will not have an ugly President. We'll have very charismatic average-looking presidents, or really stupid great-looking presidents. But we won't have ugly, brilliant ones.
I submitted this mainly because of the quality of the streaming flash. I've seen many people support Silverlight for its great quality. I think this video shows that Flash can do nearly as good as Silverlight.

I've yet to see anyone do streaming with HTML5 video. Anyone know of any examples? If its even possible right now?
Well, Chase isn't exactly fast at taking money for a payment either. Car loan payments made on the website from another bank's checking account don't seem to hit for 3 to 4 days.
When I program "because I love it", I want to be programming on projects that I actually love. That typically means "not the ones at work". Getting out of programming as a career doesn't mean I'm not going to stop programming. On the contrary, it means I'll probably end up doing more of the type of programming that I love because I'm not burned out on programming by the end of the day.
Android Inc. a company co-founded by Andy Rubin (ex-CEO of Danger Inc. that built the Sidekick).
I guess it depends on how you define Unix. While Apple provides both software and hardware, and is a certified Unix (I still haven't met anyone who actually cares about this), there are a lot of older Unix admins who think CDE and X constitutes a Unix workstation, for right or wrong.

A pity Sun was so acquisition happy as Apple might have been interested in buying the server part of the company - older versions of OS X had partial ZFS support, and there's still pretty good support for dtrace. Buying the server-only part could have been a good play if Apple decided to re-enter the server market (ask Apple staff about OS X server - the company doesn't want to pursue the server market right now).
Likewise, I don't disagree with your point that some things should remain non-monetized side-projects.
Most Passports Used by Dubai Hit Squad Members Appear to Have Been Counterfeit
Flash 10.1 on Nexus One is not a battery hog
Good and even-tempered response, JG. Nothing is sadder to me than an internet mob with torches and pitchforks attacking a company because of the actions of one stupid individual (or even a few).

My guess (and hope!) is that senior folks at Citi come down on these individuals like a ten ton hammer and apologize profusely to you guys. G'luck!
Next Extinction Coming Soon
Practically anything can be dangerous to anything. I almost got poked in the eye by an umbrella yesterday - perhaps those should be banned as well?

Instead of yet another regulation on the books, why not just punish those individuals that actually cause injury to others, using the already existing mechanisms for doing so? That way the individuals who can navigate down a sidewalk without harming others can be left in peace.
Should you take advice on avoiding distraction from someone who punctuates their post with "You should follow me on Twitter"?
Committer Models of Unladen Swallow, PyPy, and Django
TradeShift launches to disrupt the financial system, Morten Lund is advising
What Lean Startups are Not
She is trying to find a way to "upgrade" to EB-2 or to get a National Interest Waiver. Although she has a master's degree from a US university, her profession (high school foreign language teacher) doesn't usually get job postings requiring more than a BA. Also, at the college level, they generally make you wait a long time before they even start the green card process (or even H1-B).

However, besides her, I've met others in similar or worse situations, stuck in the EB-3 queue. Even if my friend got her green card under EB-2, I'd still be advocating for the EB-3 workers.
Capital FM Logos, 1999-2009
Mozart/Oz does not implement actors though, they are data flow threads.
There is a distinction between monetary rewards and the kind of peer-recognition the author is discussing here.

"A raise is only a raise for three months, then it's just your salary."

The argument here is that there are many, many other game mechanics besides simply giving out "tokens" that have been demonstrated to be compelling motivators.
The site already caters to people who are hetero- or homosexual. Catering to people who are both should be a minimal effort to change, if it is coded right.
Ok, thanks. I guess it's not the project I'm looking for :)

(no, I don't know what I'm doing with game development, so it'd be years for me then)
Nope. The blogger worked with the CEO in question for 6 months and they still keep in touch (I did too FWIW). I'm not sure where "he admits is based on unsubstantiated rumors" comes from. He says he got the information from the person whose account was blocked. The CEO. That's about as ironclad as you can get, short of standing over his shoulder at an ATM.

I agree with your reaction against internet mobs and think it's ridiculous to attack a company for the act of an individual manager... Citi should get a chance to fix this.

But I think your hatred of internet mobs is clouding your judgment a bit... Because you're wrong on this front.
Access control lists the graph database way
Of course you can. Are you suggesting that you can't copyright a haiku? Zeldman reads too much into the word "phrase". Even if Zeldman were correct--and he's not--the focus should be on originality and not copying someone's thoughts.
A co-owner can be sponsored for an H1-B. I have seen it done. But you have all the normal H1-B issues e.g., prevailing wage. Also the word from immigration lawyers is to expect it to be much harder for small startups to get H1-Bs for any of their employees this year ... very bad news.
Yeah it was called "It" during the pre-unveiling hype, while, everyone wondering what "It" was... I think Steve Jobs said something like "they are going to design cities around this thing."

And now Boston says "This is a walkable city, not a Segway city."
I thought it was because they were too obese to walk from one end of the mall to the other.
Acme is also quite interesting. Very strongly influenced by Oberon. There's a Unix port called Wily (http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/), among others.
I was pretty much turned off by "At the very least it needs a de-facto standard way of doing object-oriented programming, having the choice between classical, prototypal, or, sure, why not lazy inheritance is not doing it for me." Javascript has one way of doing oop. It's prototypal. You can fake classical if you want but that doesn't negate the fact that the language itself is still prototypal.
The U.S. already has investor visas. The only difference between the investor visa and the start-up visa is that the latter dispenses with the capital requirement. I don't see what entrepreneurs are gaining by locating new businesses in the U.S.--people forget that the U.S. taxes the worldwide income of its residents. That's not the case with the U.K. or Canada. You can do all kinds of business without living in the U.S. and subjecting yourself and your company to U.S. laws. Where's the advantage?
The Principles of Great Design
Argus III – The Artificial Retina is Near
Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent
The O-1 class of visa is also an option, no prevailing wage requirement. So that is more attractive for a startup employee/founder. But you have to meet the "outstanding" requirement. H1B and O1 apps cost the company applying approx $5000.
I'm finding that the same things that make good regular code, make good testing code as well. Regardless of which layer you are testing(unit, integration, functional), it is important to write a testing API. If you have a bunch of copy, paste, change one line unit tests, it is going to be very difficult to change an API. However, if you have one API call, "go and do this thing high level thing", then when the underlying API changes, you just change the implementation of that one API level function. The tests end up more readable as well because they read like english. "Setup a basic environment that looks like this." "Change the behavior of the one thing I am testing." "Validate the response".

If you are writing functional tests, the same thing applies. For a UI, you might have an API that reads like. "Go to the home page." "Create a User". "Login". "Go to the page I want". "validate this one behavior".

Since all tests are using an API, you just change the implementation of the API call. For example, if I change the number of fields required to login, I only have to change the login API call. For all the tests that used it, they don't care about how you login, because that wasn't the thing they were trying to test. It was just a pre-req.
"In any sufficiently large group of people, most are idiots".

Take the subway in Boston. You'd be baffled at the ingress/egress difficulties encountered. People block the doors. Passengers boarding don't wait for passengers departing to exit the cars before they attempt to force their way in. People are reluctant to take a seat between other people (especially women when the seat is between two men), reducing standing space. Standing passengers do not move towards the ends or center of the cars to allow more passengers to board.

This is usually accompanied by at least 30 seconds of announcements from the on-board spotter over the train's intercom system. Per stop. I've seen this take as long as 90 seconds.
I'd like to see a survey of what OS people of HN are using. Has someone submitted this before?
Here's a much more thorough discussion from an actual IP lawyer:

http://canyoucopyrightatweet.com/

The skinny:

"The question is not: Are Tweets Copyrightable. The question is: Is This Tweet Copyrightable. The copyrightability of Tweets is not dependent on the fact that they are Tweets. Rather, it’s dependent on the analysis of the Tweet in question. The all-encompassing response that all Tweets are either protected or not protected is misguided. The real response is that it depends. However, when you analyze most Tweets, they would never individually pass copyright muster.

I read an interesting post in the thread I’ve discussed throughout this article, and the post mentioned a Haiku. To me, that’s smart thinking. Finding a possible protectable Tweet among the hordes of non-possibility. Maybe a Haiku is your ticket to Tweet monopolization. Otherwise, you probably won’t be able to protect anything."
Hot swapping binaries
Google has certainly set the bar high for the "Next Google"
Actors are threads with state that communicate by message passing. Mozart allows you to create 'active objects' very easily that also can use OO inheritance. Check out the documentation and ctm book.
I purchased this program way back when you did the promotion post to the Business of Software forum and I've been using it regularly ever since. It's so much more responsive than Balsamiq and I absolutely LOVE it.

EDIT: I just read your blog post, and it looks like you took over this product from the original creator of whom I purchased it from. I hope you allow us to upgrade if you'll be maintaining it better.
You are correct about prioritization.

The question is what happens to those "extra" 9,000 visa numbers that are pre-reserved for EB-5. Everything I've been told says that whatever numbers aren't used by EB-5s gets "spilled over," starting at the top (EB-1), instead of going unused.

Also, I am not a lawyer either.
This is part of the argument which states: "immigrant labor and skills are vital to new business development". That might be a fact, just as "pervasive outsourcing of U.S. jobs harms the U.S. economy". If legislation is to be meaningful, it should be more complete.

I'd be willing to support legislation such as that proposed, if it included dis-incentives (i.e. significant tariffs and fees) for companies who outsource. If it's really all about developing business and jobs _in_ America, then make it complete. I vote against half-measures and one-sided legislation, though.
Scaling Your Cloud Server Monitoring With Scout
Dr. Richard Hipp (the main author of SQLite) once said in a tech talk that one of the big advantages of having thorough automated testing is that you can freely optimize or replace individual components without being held back by worrying about unknowingly breaking something. (I think he said they've replaced the query optimizer several times.) This fits my experience, and I think it's what Michael Feathers is getting at when he defines legacy code as "code without tests".

I'm not convinced that letting testing drive the design process is always a good idea (though the benefits of test-informed development are harder to argue), but having thorough tests is usually a huge win. Having thorough tests isn't free, particularly with good coverage, but it usually pays for itself in the long run.

> I also avoid mock objects like the plague, aggressively preferring to either build the interface to be testable in the first place, or failing that, adding some hooks in the tested code itself, rather than trying to push it onto the code from the outside.

Same here. Mock objects can be useful when trying to retrofit tests onto existing code, but that's just a concession to practicality. Reworking a huge, untested code base to make it testable can be a great way to introduce bugs unless done with extreme caution. (That's the main topic of Feathers's book, FWIW.)
Reminder: Y Combinator Meetup Tonight in Seattle
7 hours of rated battery life down to 3 hours with flash? Not a battery hog at all.
"Am I just lucky, or are they doing something wrong?"

No, you've just found the workflow that works best for you. The problem is that it doesn't work best for everyone else.
Zoolander on stealth mode
I am on the cable national broadband for sure - def not ADSL. My bill tells me I am on the XL 20MB package.

I am still running one of the really old grey modems though. They sent me a new black one ages ago, but I have not activated it as yet. Maybe I should give that a try (have held back for fear of it knocking out my broadband for a few days if things go wrong!) and see if things get better.

My speed is pretty good, but I have never been able to push it toward even 10Mbps no matter how many downloads I have going.
It's in the "sam" package.
You should read the "Capabilities for Uniqueness and Borrowing" paper. There is a compiler extension to support them. It should make actors much faster (no need to synchronize on messages).

http://lamp.epfl.ch/~phaller/capabilities.html
much fewer parens :) Seriously, though- no macros here.
A long essay on why the good don't associate: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/
I agree and hadn't really noticed the "Hire managers" text till now... Then again Steve is painting a picture for any type of business from a web startup to biotech.

My interpretation of this process for a Web startup is getting to transition using just the founders (plus advisors).
Why would the bug reporting mechanism be in a subsystem? Unless every subsystem had its own bug reporting mechanism, which makes zero sense.

[Edit]

Oh ok, I think I see what you mean. Well, firstly, if a subsystem weren't integral to the app, why develop it in the first place? Secondly, you could always track the usage of the subsystem and provide additional incentives for its success. Lastly, who says subsystems have to be directly accessible to the user? If tasked to write a module that runs in the background, one can hardly make it deliberately obtuse.
"I'm not convinced that letting testing drive the design process is always a good idea"

Yeah, I gave full-on TDD the college try and did not like it. IMHO it might not be a bad crutch for those who are still new to code design issues, but it just involved too much closing my eyes to issues that I knew would be a problem in the future and willfully blundering into design traps I knew about in advance. Using it to learn about those issues is probably a good thing, but it must eventually be discarded.

I still do sometimes write the tests in advance when it makes sense (usually those same low-level things I referenced in my first post) but as a general principle I don't find it gives me the best APIs in the end.
Exactly, because in a highly competitive market (like software) prices always drop to marginal cost of production. Since copy/paste of software is free, the price inevitably drops to zero. The only way to charge a penny for the kernel would be to create artificial scarcity, or to create artificial legal restrictions to copy and paste... basically to override the free market.
Scumbag Animal Rights Villains Harass Children for Father's Speech
It's a good essay, and while I totally agree with "don't just slap adsense on there," for some people monetization is the hobby, or at least part of it, and even if it isn't there's nothing inherently wrong with putting up ads.

Being prescriptive and saying "don't try to cover your costs" is a little like saying "don't click coupons" or "don't shop at sales" if you're buying stuff you like but don't need. To go back to your baseball analogy, sure, you won't put ads on your jersey, but you very well might agree to store the bats and helmets at your place in exchange for the team waiving your fee. Why is it wrong for people to take a generally accepted method and save a few bucks if they want?
I downvoted you, but I shouldn't have, I should have just responded with why I disagree. So I apologize for that. Here's my thoughts:

> I'd be willing to support legislation such as that proposed, if it included dis-incentives (i.e. significant tariffs and fees) for companies who outsource.

In the modern economy, setting tariffs is akin to declaring trade warfare. A few years ago, then-President Bush was advocating a tariff on steel to protect U.S. businesses, and the EU responded that they'd counteract with a broad set of tariffs on American exports. The plan fell through.

The only countries you can get away with placing tariffs on are countries you hurt tremendously by doing so. Things like the tariff on sugar which really hurts Caribbean countries while making American High Fructose Corn Syrup the #1 alternative. The Chinese and Indian markets are already and will continue to become more important to American companies. It might even be impossible to place a tariff/tax/penalty on companies who outsource due to Most Favored Nation terms in treaties, but even if it was - you really don't want to mess around with two countries that have a combined population over 2 billion, who are growing rapidly, and who are very important to the USA. Never mind the economics of how it'd change prices - setting a tariff creates a nasty domino effect of hostility in international relations and isn't really feasible in the modern world. So, count me firmly against that idea, but I do apologize for downvoting you. You expressed an idea you had that I disagree with, and I should've responded without voting.
The rated "7 hours of video" is for video stored on the device rather than streamed over the internet; note that the same Nexus One specs[1] claim only 5 to 6.5 hours of internet usage (5hr for 3G and 6.5hr for wifi).

It's not surprising that doing both at once will run down the battery about twice as fast.

[1]: http://www.google.com/phone/static/en_US-nexusone_tech_specs...
I agree (I actually commented on the linked site before coming here), Apple became the largest seller of "real" UNIX workstations a while ago.

CDE does not UNIX make.
Flying pixel copters
I hate Google Reader!