skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me this kind of article is really illustrating that we are just at the beginning of understanding automated testing. One idea that I think is very interesting is having the test case abstracted into a meta model and then the different kinds of tests derived from that. Think about the difference in registering an new user using mock objects to mock up from the db to the ui versus the same test scenario using something like htmlUnit. Some things have to change but there is something common to both test scenarios so how can that common part be refactored out?

Secondly I think we may see a world where test suites are written by the higher level engineers and the implementation is farmed out to the cheapest bidder. What if there comes a day where we don't even read the actual code any more? Just look at the test report for correctness and that it performs well? In that situation I can imagine the test suite becoming the best design document that software engineering has produced.
Good call sorry about that, it appears I can no longer edit my post. I meant to put quotes around it.
And Masinter's response: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Feb/0874...

Can we all hold hands and sing kumbaya now? The thing I find sad is that in what was really a civil conversation in which various parties raised objections, others responded to objections, and action will (?) be taken, the outcome is that Masinter is now branded as HTML hating corporate a-hole and Berners-Lee will be seen as the white knight that defeated Adobe. When the reality is that respectful adults worked out their differences in an impressively polite manner. But that's not nearly as exciting a story.
There's always a gap between what people tell you over beers and burgers at an HN meetup and what they're actually willing to do...as you found firsthand...
Was it up?
Finally something that looks like an actual scientific stance on the topic.

This is a huge improvement over the original statement by itself.
i whole heartedly agree with your statement that "metrics against a bright and shiny object, even the wrong object, are perceived as more valuable than metrics that bring you closer to building the right object".

That was my experience with showing people "designs" that were moving us in the right direction. I got 0 credit for that. I had to show the designs live (i.e., shiny) and with user traffic data (i.e., metrics) as proof.
Are you suggesting that having a monopoly on a platform isn't good for a company trying to leverage tools to target that platform?
Walk and Code
Making the C&C domain time-dependent is trivial. Making the domain name based on time-dependent keys, steganography and queries across multiple domains as the basis for computing the current or next C&C domain would make the life of the good guys very uncomfortable.
Same here. 37 yrs old w/ 2 kids (3 & 2 yr olds!). Full-time job that I like but don't love. Lots of ideas that need room to breathe in their own skin. I'm preparing to create an LLC to do just that.

I don't know where it will lead in the future (maybe nowhere), but I'm prepared to deal with that. The harder thing to deal with is simply sitting on the sidelines doing nothing while life passes me by.
+1

I'm using it for about half a year now. I was surprised how easy it was. Most software you can get in debian packages and it installs similar like in windows.

For php I use gEdit, very lightweight Gnome editor with plugins. If you want full IDE eclipse PDT is the way to go.

For images I like GIMP.

I've 1GB of ram and Flash seems to be really heavy on the laptop, fan is on max when viewing flash.
Death in the Atlantic: The Last Four Minutes of Air France Flight 447
I posted the story, but actually disagree with the author's assessment. I don't think when people refer to the lack of scientists and engineers in the US, they are referring to a lack of tenure-track faculty. The shortage of technically skilled people is in industry, not academia.
I think we're getting too personal. Both of you make a good point:

Thomas says that there certainly will be companies who will be forced to raise a arbitrary amounts of money at an arbitrary time (in both cases, I mean "arbitrary" in relation to their business), even when they're otherwise doing well. On top of that, the VCs negotiating that round will know that their investment is what determines the fate of the company.

Dave points out that this is the best solution which is politically viable.

Both seem true, in my opinion. Still, and with all due respect, Dave's bio does say he "invests in startups if they let him" (emphasis mine). This law will create a class of startups that are forced to look for investment at a stage that may have make business sense, with the only strategy at a "fair" valuation being to play off investors against each other. This is certainly in the interests of people who invest in startups.

I wonder if bundling the interests of "those who can afford to lobby" into laws is the only way to get laws passed in the US nowadays.
Microsoft got legal approval for this. How many extra-legal, or grey-area "Operations b49" have taken place? I don't imagine Microsoft has done many (if any) extra-legal beheadings, but surely somebody has. All those academic papers about taking control of botnets and measuring the take-up rates on penis pill offers had to come from somewhere.
OpenSolaris is actually good. You should try it.
My first startup: a happy failure story
Just go with Ubuntu, don't even think about it. Most things work right out of the box, there's a ton of help out there and the package management is ace. Installing anything pretty much only takes: sudo apt-get install anything.

(Confession: As far as the desktop experience is concerned, I do miss XP. Ubuntu has come a long way but there are just these little things in the UI...)
Or "See plans & pricing" and "free 30 day trial on all accounts."

People like following blindly.
Why is it that people who are bright and want to do actual work have it astronomically harder than the bullshitting rainmakers and mediocrities who get to run the economy?
Apple makes PCs that run Unix.

There is a huge difference between a glorified PC and a Unix workstation.
It also means all those people trained on Flash are going to have to be retrained. Flash is kind of like Adobe's stake in the web world. Flash ruled the online video and graphics world. Everything else, there's a good enough competitor. But not flash, not really. Not until there is some real competition.

Adobe can make a lot of money on this, but it will be hard work and Steve Jobs called them lazy for a reason.
Are you saying that having a PhD will overqualify you for some positions? I have occasionally heard this claim, but I have found it to be pretty much utterly false. Almost everyone wants the most qualified employees they can get. I think this is becoming even more true as folks have seen Google's success in hiring PhDs.

When a hiring manager specifically excludes overqualified people, this is a pretty big red flag to me. Managers usually only say this when they have a very tedious or low paying job that they think a PhD-type will quickly abandon for something better. I wouldn't exactly call this a "closed door", I'd say it's more of a sign that there are lots of better opportunities for qualified people. If these other opportunities went away, then the tedious jobs would start raising their qualifications too.

PhDs also have many other "open doors" that other people just don't have. All those teaching and research jobs you mention are available to them.
Succeeding With Startup Incubators
Why don't government websites use Https?
For a first timer, probably Ubuntu or Linux Mint.
Welcome Harj
Spam from @gmail.com is increasing nowadays, AFAICT.
In certain domains this applies (and indeed, given the blog's background it's on the mark). But in large segments of the job market I still think it's important to dress reasonably well.

Even if attention is a limited resource, the interview usually is a place where first impressions matter, so I'd say budgeting some attention towards looks is not misguided at all.
Is China a "mini-Dubai" or "the mother of all black swans"?
We've been using a similar approach for Thymer since the beginning and we've always had a really good conversion rate (conversion between visitors and signups):

http://thymer.com/try/

Using a little creativity in the design, even for forms that users fill in only once has been a great way for us to set ourselves apart.
In this "personal web" where everyone hosts their own content on their own web server, how do we as content consumers continue to find the 100 cat videos a day we want to watch? Someone's going to have to aggregate them from around the world, there's too much to aggregate by hand, and then we're in the same position we are now. Merely linking to the wrong material is enough to get you convicted in the USA, so there's no protection in that the files linked to are now on many servers -- the aggregator has the same risk as in the industrial web.
Let's code, exercise and make blended drinks...
Every page is rendered with Haml, layed out on a 12 column grid, has display type rendered with Textorize, and uses custom Sass rules. He's tying it together with Sinatra, but serving them as static pages.

The result: he's managing a different professional design for each of his posts.

Here's what it looks like:

http://blog.peepcode.com/archives

This is pretty impressive.
Investment banking, at least at the analyst level, is for mediocrities willing to do anything to make money. So you're not likely to find those traits in them.

I'm not saying that MBAs don't add value. If technology people went into MBA programs, they would by virtue of exposure to other technical people if nothing else. However, so long as so many MBAs are people who were bankers out of college... most of their graduates are going to be mediocrities.
My new iPhone app - should you walk or take the bus?
Not necessarily on B. I'm more talented than 99% of people in finance, including the major decision makers. However, that doesn't give me an "opportunity to profit". We're talking about VC here, which requires a huge cash base before it converges. I don't have one.
Why do you suppose that the water is deeper than 1 ft?
Oh, I'm not saying you're trying to make me feel bad; I would feel bad if I grossly misread something. I hate it when people do it to me, so I try not to do it to others.

What would make be boggle is that a consensus would develop that unit testing was more trouble than it's worth most of the time; if no such consensus exists then I wouldn't be boggling.
Do You Follow Too Many People On Twitter? Use ManageTwitter.
People can do anything they want. The problem is that they want to be compensated and need to spend money (supplies/facilities etc). In the case of research, they are most likely not developing anything that anyone will want to pay for, or else they'd be doing product development and be a business. So they are left to try and get money from others, some might say charity, so that they can carry out thier work. In the US and throughout the world a lot of them are financed through government taxes.

There are independent research labs and research positions in companies, but in general they are trying to solve business related problems.

"Those mediocrities who get to run the economy" - I'm not sure who you mean exactly, are probably involved in business and thus vvoluntary are interacting with people who value whatever they produce. If you are referring to politicians, well they are adept at spending other peoples money.
Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered
People Don't Hate Change - They Hate You Trying to Change Them
Good point, but don't get me wrong: I don't work at too many things at the same time. Of the two things I'm working on now, one is rather simple, so I don't think I'm dividing my energy over too many things.

(And also, when I get excited about something, I just can't wait to do at least some work on it :-)
1. Because the rainmakers handle the money.

2. Because the scientists are taking little risk compared to the founders and investors who build the institutions that support their research.

3. Because humans are hard-wired to respect rainmaking and distrust science. Social behavior has been humanity's evolutionary killer app for the last 1500 centuries. Science has existed for maybe 5.
It isn't fun to have a do-nothing job, especially for the type of person who would consider doing a Ph.D. in a biotech field.

However much that helps.
See Any Rand, plus criticisms of.
Not a lawyer, but I thought DMCA takedowns only applied to the safe-harbor provisions for ISPs and hosters. Since microsoft likely self-hosts their content, there would be no advantage for them to comply with a takedown request. Takedowns aren't law--- you don't have to comply, but if you do, then you're indemnified from a lawsuit by the copyright holder.
You're right that dressing well matters in large segments of the job market. But I'd argue that this is a pretty good heuristic for deciding which segments of the job market to avoid.
I said "suspect" rather than "suppose", which may be a useful clue: It just happens to look that way to me. I have no particular reason to trust my judgement on this. I'm sure it isn't much deeper than 1ft, in any case. (Nor much shallower, for that matter.)
I found my ad sales person by asking for help on HN. See my post further downthread for the link to that thread.

I've interviewed maybe half a dozen sales people and worked with 2-3 who didn't work out. I have no advice other than to say it's really hard to find someone good. A great ad sales person is someone who wants to make a lot of money. Those people typically steer clear of early stage ventures because there might not be a lot of money to be made. That leaves people who are ok with not making a lot of money. If you hire those people, you won't make a lot of money.

I started selling ads on day one. It's always possible to find someone at some price who will want to advertise on your web site. We see extraordinarily high CPMs on our site because we work very hard to sell them on the quality and uniqueness of our audience. Basic salesmanship stuff.
About your last line: Some people do indeed seem to just be in the right place at the right time and have good things fall in their lap just like that. Even while playing WoW :) But no, I think ultimately only your own hard work is the best possible guarantee for success.
most of us in the developed world don't have to worry about our immediate survival on a day-to-day basis

Neither do hunters and gatherers. Turns out that hunter gatherers (at least the ones surveyed) just sit around most days and rarely worry about their immediate survival either. If you're interested in more information, this is a seminal work for anthropologists studying this topic:

http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

I would agree that, for me, life in modern society is a net positive, but that is a personal decision shaped by my own cultural biases. Is modern society inherently better than a hunter gatherer one? No, I don't think so.
But how much does the Ph.D. glut argument apply to computer science? I've never found a solid answer, and that information is especially relevant to my future career path (and I'm sure many others on HN)
The Data Deluge
1) Spend a week building this app
2) Get an article on TechCrunch
3) Profit! :)

Went through quite a few iterations on the design. Feedback/improvements are certainly welcome.
I'm not sure how hard it would be to create a reliable test for clicks. Depends on the type of click, I suppose. Some would be fairly easy to detect (e.g., "for .1s, all samples output are 0, with loud samples on both sides"). Though I'm guessing that would actually result in plenty of false-positives, and would be a fairly carefully tuned (and thus fragile) test case.

A better approach might be to detect it in the frequency domain, after performing an FFT (that instant drop to 0 will generate a lot of energy on both sides). I suspect you'll still need the careful tuning; after all, a sudden burst of energy on your FFT could be a click, or it could be a cymbal.

Not sure how well this would work, I've never tried it, though it sounds like some fun code to write.
This made me curious, could you expand on what you mean with 2?
What makes a workstation, anyway? Exotic graphics hardware? (I thought you could get Apple to build you a Mac Pro with a stack of Quadros, although I just checked the Apple Store and that doesn't seem to be an option anymore, so maybe you've got a point there.) A RISC processor? (Good luck with that, these days.)

If the Mac Pro is insufficiently workstation-y for you, how about the Cray CX-1 family, which last I checked is still in production?
Nice article Phil. Keep up the good work!

#5 is a big one. A lot of the people I talk to who are raising or have raised money say that you need one investor to take the first dip. No one really wants to be the first guy in. But once you capture that first, the rest fall like domino's and can't wait to join the party. If one reputable investor likes you it's often enough to say there's something here, I don't want to miss out.
nginx front end -> haproxy -> caching engine -> haproxy -> app instances (multiply this stack N times)

haproxy's HTTP feature set is comparatively limited and we simply have too much traffic to put one machine in front of a bunch of web servers.
If it wasn't for Jackson's tit, it would've been... (Read the YouTube story).
This was a horribly written post that was not even spell checked. The bulk of it quoted two articles. If this was an interesting topic that you would like to discuss, please post the link to one of the original articles. Feel free to HT the post and name the other article in the comments.
No it's not. A certification like this is just an expensive piece of paper, the kind of thing that floss developpers don't judge necessary.
The article glosses over a significant part of Google's argument:
"To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed."

Why exactly where these people charged with anything? What kind of ridiculous law is this? I feel this has less to do with free speech and internet freedom than it does with common sense.
Yeah, it would be cool if they could calculate the "expected minutes late" for every carrier, broken down by route.
Our Unethical Financial Elite
Winwinbooks
Book Nostalgia Trip: How a Book Used to Be Made
I'm testing this out (http://thinkcode.tv/english). I know my current conversion rate, so I'll be able to see if there is a difference (I'll do the math with next week's data, or else random subscriptions from this group will taint it). :)
I'm mostly suggesting that Adobe's tools may not be tied to the Flash platform as much as it may seem.
I've been using this in production for the past few months and and it's been solid.

(If you're working in Python, you can use http://github.com/krobertson/python-ernie with the Erlang server. Note that it's not as fast as running a Ruby handler because the BERT serialization is not done natively.)
> (which will necessitate provisioning of backups and failover using...wait for it...third party services that could only exist given safe-harbor provisions.).

The author did mention an appliance that backs things up to 'the cloud.' The author believes that hosting services (e.g. Amazon EC2) do deserve safe-harbor provisions.

> There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster.

But is it easier for the average user? There's also the issue of branding/marketing. There are probably a lot of users that have never heard of Vimeo, but they have heard of YouTube.
Don't Underestimate India's Consumers
Photo copyright and public photography rules may change significantly in UK
I don't think that you read that post very well. He's not advocating the elimination of safe-harbor provisions. He's advocating the limitation of who they apply to. It's debatable whether that's a good or a bad thing, but we have to at least be on the same page to have a decent debate on the issue.
@pg: Uh... that came across as far more negative than I intended. I really do like reading your work and want to read more. The fact that I don't fit into (what I think is) your primary audience does NOT make them any less valuable to me.
I think I understand where you're coming from, and I mostly agree. However, I think it is a mistake to generalize from the idea that most supplementation is misguided, to the idea that all of it is.

For example, consider vitamin D. Humans make this in their skin, using sunlight. Now, what about those of us who live far from the equator and work indoors? For some time, the standard answer to this has been fortified milk. Okay, but most people in the world lack the mutation that lets most northern Europeans, and some Africans, digest milk sugar as adults. With the limited options available, vitamin D supplements start looking like a worthwhile option.

And then there are the non-nutrient supplements. A healthy diet should get you most of your vitamins, etc., but it won't get you the antidepressant found in St. John's wort. And it might not get you the probiotics that can combat H. Pylori infections, or the stuff in cinammon that seems to be effective against some kinds of diabetes.
Somebody posted the original article here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1151369
The key reason that works for you, which is the same conclusion I've come to from my personal experience, is rejecting the "unit" part of the unit testing dogma. My personal catchphrase is "test at the highest level of abstraction possible," i.e. test at the largest aggregation of functionality that is still well-defined and that doesn't have a combinatorial explosion that prevents you from testing it thoroughly enough.

To put it another way, test those invariants that are least likely to change in the future. The "the e-mail sending component should properly construct the headers" test is testing an invariant that's unlikely to change. The "the EmailComposer class will call the EmailHeaderConstructor's constructHeader() function" test is testing an invariant that's much more likely to change.

The problem is that many unit testing dogmatists (and the associated books and conferences) encourage people to write lots of tiny little tests for every little piece of everything, and it's those tests that kill you when you're refactoring.

If you have a logical component that consists of 10 different classes that work together, your main set of tests should be at the component level, and those classes should be treated as implementation details that are only unit tested if they themselves are complicated enough that they likely have errors that aren't caught by the larger test suite. If you go crazy and unit test all the interactions between each class within that component, then when you later decide to re-architect parts of it to improve performance or simplify the code or fix bugs or in preparation for new functionality, you end up with a bunch of tests that you have to either fix or delete.

Tests like that end up discouraging refactoring due to the friction they exert, rather than encouraging refactoring the way less-fragile tests do.
Which differences would those be?