skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seconded. The lead designer of Rise of Nations was Brian Reynolds, who also designed "Sid Meier's" Civilization II and Alpha Centauri, and it shows.

Just make sure you don't have anything important planned for the next six months.
Much of it depends on the mindset of people around you.

I have to admit that I wrote unit-tests so that when other (lazy) developers change code that he/she didn't test, my unit-test will fail on his/her code. I like to view unit-tests (or integration, or whatnot) as a trap for these developers.

The thing is... this is the kind of people that I had to deal with: lazy to test their code completely, write premature optimize code, have a bad taste in designing classes, don't understand OOP (write code in procedural style), and think that their code is "better". It's hard to reason with someone who thinks that Singleton is great because it saves memory even if you told the person that it's negligible. Or lazy instantiation of a meaningless member variable is great because it shaves 40% of object construction when the actual number of creating object is meaningless. At the end of the day they would say "but it's better... here's some numbers".

I don't think I will change my mindset anytime soon. Especially when a couple days ago there were discussions on Reddit regarding "bad code", "bad programmers", and etc. I don't know how bad the situation in our industry as of right now because I'm seeing people writing more blogs/articles in favor of unit-tests (TDD or not) but from my personal experience and point-of-view, I saw a few good (and humble) developers out there and too many cocky ones.

PS: It's worth to mention that based on my personal experience, good developers are usually the ones that have a family, e.g.: Paul Buchheit, Joshua Bloch, etc. They seem to be wiser and more patience.
Why can't people who insist on traveling around on big mechanical contrivances figure out a way to share the road with cars?
I'm not speaking one way or the other about Flash, but I'm so sick of Adobe/Flash being so pitifully defensive about Flash on mobile devices and the iPad.

Someone in the community is going to be a Flash hater. Someone is going to cry about battery life. Flash is on the N1, you win, now start talking about the awesomeness it DOES bring!

What kind of company spends this amount of time talking about the crappiest part of their product?

An explanation is fine, but to go on and get weird about by talking about potential percentage levels in a few Vimeo videos. That just seems so odd to me. How many of their users actually saw this video?
> 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.

I'm not sure I understand this. How do you deal with things that write files out or communicate with other processes? That's where I've found mocks to be of the biggest advantage.
I agree that some groups need to have higher prioritization. That is what EB-1 and EB-2 are for. I disagree that the "EB-6" people should be prioritized higher than the EB-3 people.

Also, I think you didn't consider the backlog problem with EB-6. If EB-6 was added, lots of people would immediately begin the process of becoming qualified investors, and lots of EB-3 workers would start the EB-6 process. Then the EB-6s would get exhausted very quickly and a backlog would start, even if they were given a queue separate from EB-3. That is exactly because EB-6 would be so much easier than EB-1, EB-2, and EB-5 to qualify for.

Even if my friend's EB-3 petition wasn't backlogged, I would still object to the idea that rich investors can hand-pick immigrants that they think will make them money, and practically just hand them permanent residency. If you were advocating a new temporary visa program for these people I'd be a lot more supportive of it. But, they don't deserve permanent residency more than the people already waiting in the various lines.
I'm not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd have to disagree. There is potentially more information that is contained in a tweet than Twitter republishes.

For example, if I was posting a tweet using SMS the original publishing platform is my phone (it's saved onto it first) and then passed onto Twitter.

Twitter then chooses to disregard the additional information contained within the entirity of a text message (the first 20 characters if memory serves me right, its been awhile since I looked up the specs). However, I'd argue those additional characters that Twitter disregards are copywritable as per the definition in the linked document.

Listings of ingredients, as in recipes, labels, or formulas. When a recipe or formula is accompanied by an explanation or directions, the text directions
may be copyrightable, but the recipe or formula itself remains uncopyrightable.

The additional information contained in an SMS wold be akin to directions.
What an ironic title.
Music on iTunes exploding with over 10 billion song downloads
Why there is no Jewish Narnia
Live telecast of HealthCare Summit - Youtube.
While I like the concept of simplifying to increase productivity, I am not sure the source code of Coffeescript is any better than the original source code of JavaScript itself. The idea should be to simplify the languages, but as far as simplification is concerned, I think JavaScript is incredibly easy to learn and needs little simplification to its core syntax. There have been other projects, such as Dojo that make the complex tasks of JavaScript easier, and these I find incredibly useful, but to change the syntax of the language without significantly reducing the code size and complexity does not present a lot of value for the project. If this is expanded with one line AJAX scripts, the potential would be vastly improved for acceptance of this type of syntax replacement scheme.
Yup.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687267
A good point. In my experience, if you're going to do anything more than AdSense, it will require a decent time and effort investment. Building the infrastructure to allow people to give you money is surprisingly difficult. If you're only trying to get a couple bucks a month, then the ROI may be worthwhile for learning, but horrible otherwise.

Browsing and clipping coupons takes maybe 20 minutes. If you can get a monetization scheme set up for your site in that time, then it's totally a great idea. I'd kill for something that could be monetized that fast.

That might make a good article: How to monetize in less than 1 hour. I'd definitely read it if someone were to write that up.
here's one of these polls: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687267
Which do find yourself using the most often?
I imagine the browser/server conversation goes something like this:

B: Hey man, can I get /foobar.html, please?

S: Sorry bro, I can't seem to find that resource.

B: ...

S: Hey, speaking of things I can't find, here are some missing kids!

I think the intentions behind the idea - trying to do some societal good with your web site - are great. It's just seems odd to me that the way you handle not being able to find what the user wants is by showing them something unrelated that is guaranteed to be not what they were looking for. What is the attraction to doing this on a 404 page, vs say a banner ad (as suggested elsewhere in the thread)?

[edit formatting]
I learned a lot of similar lessons. I like his point about how they're too busy because investing isn't their primary focus. I actually found this infuriating at first because they promised to be really helpful, but because they were so hard to reach they actually became really expensive.

He's dead on about the momentum. I had 4 angels lingering around, and it wasn't until I was like "ok, everyone else is investing, act now or you'll miss your chance" that I got 2 of them to close.

And for seeing measurable goals... they don't care at all about business metrics, they see your progress as being measured by bright and shiny objects. Just crank out code and get users, don't dither on marketing plans or building competencies because that's not something they see as valuable, nor as progress.

Hope that my testimonial adds something to the reading experience of the article. :-)
"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."

This. I read Jay's post as elucidating what worked for him (and no more). I didn't get a "preach the One True Way to the great unwashed" vibe from his post. Just as you have practices that work for you, he has practices that work for him. They are different from yours.

So? Why should it "boggle" your mind? It is not as if building software is a hard science. Different things work for different people and projects.
> How so? They're not doing anything in that direction as far as I know.

http://www.looptmix.com/

Perhaps my impression is skewed coming from gayworld, but I thought this is all anybody used them for.
I'm 50-50 on TDD. But I suppose that's because of the people around me examples I mentioned somewhere in this thread.

On one side, TDD made sure that your code is designed to be testable at maximum level. That means: developers have no excuses to design their code to be testable (whether it uses DI, less coupling, or whatnot).

One thing about developers is that they're too self-confident that their code is not buggy. When bugs found, they just fixed it and didn't bother to analyze and learn from mistakes.

So what happened when they wrote untestable code and suddenly 2 weeks later there were bugs manifest due to whatever reasons? If the untestable code is easy to refactor, management probably won't mind a bit of hickup in their schedule. But if it takes a wee bit more time?

I think TDD is good when the developers are inexperienced. But at the same time, it's human nature to be lazy and made mistakes (or underestimate things).

I don't know the best answer whether TDD is good or not.
I hope it gets passed. I also hope they simplify the visa system. It's a friggin mess already. If you've ever seen the US visa page it's an alphabet soup of letters and numbers. Tourists need a D, I have a hard time distinguishing between an H1 and L1 visa. Performers need an O, family gets K, and students get a F/J/H?.

Instead of adding yet another Visa classification pair it down to 5 or 6, and make the terms reasonable. Currently, the easiest visas require you to be either really rich, or really poor and willing to do manual labor. The educated middle wants you to jump through ridiculous hoops (a lottery? really!)
You could find alternative ways to cover your hosting costs. I'm covering all hosting for http://wasitup.com with referrals (245 pending at the moment) I've gotten for people signing up to Linode after I wrote this performance comparison of VPS providers: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
Totally generic article, does not really say anything.
This article is hijacking my time
Facebook Games, the unexpected, and psychological tricks.
Tried FreeCiv? You can even send them patches that enable "lightening-mode" or something :)
spam account
Even with very moderate traffic, if your website has the right audience you can use Google Adsense to cover your hosting costs quite easily, without ruining the experience. I have a _single page_ web site (driven by a Rails service) where I am able to cover all of my hosting costs, across several providers, because AdSense returns a $3 CPM for me.

Could I afford to keep the site up without it? Yes. But why? Having AdSense on the site takes zero incremental work after the initial setup.
I asked someone to look at it on the iPhone. Works great.
Some Startup Advice from WooThemes
That makes perfect sense for wasitup (which I use and like, by the way). Good idea.
Calculating Speed of Antelope in an image
I would argue that this type of code in most cases isn't a good candidate for unit testing. Typically, dependency-heavy code is better tested via integration tests.

The problem with mocking that I've run into is that you're not really testing expected functionality. You're testing that code calls an API. This sounds good in theory until you need to change the API. Then, you have a whole bunch of tests to clean up.
Heck, I probably only get 4 hours of solid Robo Defense play (a native android app that doesn't access the internet).

Keeping that backlight lit is going to use up the battery no matter what you're doing.
If microsoft did not publish the document, or they did not register and establish it as copyrighted material, then I say Cryptome should claim copyright of the document.

Furthermore, the CALEA requires ISPs to coperate with "LAW Enforcement" of which Microsoft is NOT. What Law enforcement agency told network solutions to block the domain?
In the UK almost all professional level visas (tier 1, old HSMP) are person based rather than employer based, so you're free to change jobs
I haven't read any detailed descriptions of what passport the assassination victim used to enter Dubai, but I think there is no doubt that it wasn't a passport in his real name. Is it really news that people who cross borders to engage in illegal activity tend not to use the names on their birth certificates as they cross those borders?
Furthermore, it's corroborated by the CEO on his blog here:

http://blog.fabulis.com/post/409789428/citibank-is-so-not-fa...

Which is linked to from the post.
Patently (heh) false.

Given that the Tweet is already attached to an identity (individual or corporate account) and assuming one may claim even a reasonable semblance of creativity and originality on the content of said Tweet, it's technically Copywritable, but a mere "status" update, link, or factual listing is not.

- Think of all the copywritten corporate and government slogans (Just Do It, Army of One, What can brown do for you, Aim Higher, etc.) which could quite easily fit into a Tweet with room to spare.

- Think of all the haikus (see @MJ), other short poems, and unicode/ascii-art #twitterart (see @l_I__I_l) posts.

That being said, I can't think of any rational (e.g. economic) reason which would support registration of the Tweet as the "fixed medium".

Mostly, I can envision defensive sorts of legal actions such as blatant plagiarism or abuse/mis-use of a pre-existing logo, unattributed passage, or slogan.

As the multitudes of "sampling" lawsuit precedents in the music industry has shown, authorship rights of even nano-sized digital content can be successfully asserted.
decent post, but the smart investors sincerely care about your product. if you're an early stage startup, it's actually the validation to me that your team can walk the walk. I think fred wilson said something at fowa like: "we try products for a bit first and if they're within our investment thesis/we like them, we invite the founders to come pitch us".
ABC News to Cut Hundreds of Staff Members
PZ's response:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/stop_patting_your...
Priceless Quote:

I'm an optimist. I want to find a way to really work within the Chinese system and provide more and better information. So, I think a lot of people think I'm naive, and that may well be true, but I wouldn't have started a search engine in 1998 if I wasn't naive in that way.
see: http://twitter.com/devinjames/status/1420799605
I started doing polyphasic sleep, so I work in the mornings from 3am to 9am, and then dayjob afterward. It's been working ok-ish so far.
Ninja Coders and Despot Designers: Game Over
Good on you Microsoft. How's that for a little bit of social responsibility.
Step-by-Step Guide to Rooting and Tethering a Nexus One
Mobile carriers defend their right to make mutually binding contracts with their client, just like any other business.

http://techliberation.com/2010/01/26/what-is-all-this-nonsen...
"How do you deal with things that write files out or communicate with other processes?"

I have the tested code write the files out, then I have the test code examine the files. I have the tested code communicate with the other processes, then examine the results, possibly querying the other processes to see whether they got what they should get and did what they should do. I make it so it's easy to put the files in a temporary location, easy to start up test processes for the test to communicate with, and then test the system at this higher level.

I am aware that this is counter to the unit testing dogma. I am aware this requires certain amounts of access to the code of all parts of the system, but I usually either have it or make it a priority to get it. So far, the predictions of doom if I do this have failed to manifest.

And I've learned that when someone predicts doom that fails to manifest, that's usually because the predictions are based on untested theories and not actual experience. This happens to an absolutely shocking degree in our industry; the amount of software design dogma that is basically just one guy with a PhD's opinion he stated in a paper once 20 years ago, followed by a huge game of telephone, can hardly be understated.

(Your homework exercise, if you don't believe this, is to find the published, peer-reviewed paper in which it was determined that unit tests work best if they only test the smallest possible units. Good luck. If that doesn't float your boat, pick your favorite bit of OO-design dogma, like the Law of Demeter, and trace back where it came from. Even good ideas generally don't have the sort of actual support you might think from how far the ideas tend to spread. My take-away from that is that not only is it OK to question, it is a necessity.)

Everywhere your test code tests something other than the actual code is a place where bugs can hide. Mock objects are basically a systematic way for providing those places for bugs to hide. I agree with silentbicycle that they have a small place, but IMHO systematic use of them is wrong.
Great, Adobe, so you are able to code something properly. So now maybe you'll think about addressing the Mac and Linux plugins? Which are still horrible?
Tools to Analyze Twitter Profile
The classic game Snake in 3D using stereograms
Instead of blogging about it, they need to release it so we can see what it's like for ourselves.
Exploring the Limits of GPUs With Parallel Graph Algorithms [pdf]
Nice to see ScreenSketcher users here! I'll post details about upgrades tomorrow.
Google for "EB-5 spillover", and/or have the lawyers that wrote the proposed legislation post their professional opinion.
Are you saying "Just Do It" is copyrighted? Are you sure you don't mean trademarked? Because if "Just Do It" is a copyrightable work, then things are far more f...ed up than I thought.

See, I committed prima facie infringement twice here. Hopefully I can argue fair use when I get sued, but I'm not sure I can affort the lawyer. You should worry, too, bonsaitree, as you infringed on at least 4 works in your post.
And you have made the very mistake he references in the article: Confusing copyright with trademark. Slogans are trademarks. Trademarks cost money to register. Copyright can simply be claimed.
The key is now effectively '1,2,3' in the case [1,2,3] . You can iterate using that string and even pass in the array using bracket notation. But when you iterate using for..in the key will be a string not the original array, and you lose that data. The string is now indistinguishable from the subset of strings with comma delimkted data. May that is inconsequential in your app but for some apps it dampens the effectiveness of the construct.

Ain't JavaScript a riot? [I just found an excuse to use snowclone in an HN comment. Pats self on back]

Functions on the other hand work very well because the key is the function definition (call toString on a function). There is no reason for two functions to have the exact same definition in JavaScript.
Moreover, fixed-width font was probably a pretty easy lab feature to write, and was already written. The other dropped features were also already written. Why then, prune the list of lab features? Was the list of features getting too long and no one wanted to put in the effort of categorizing them? Or was this some market-droid idiot's idea of justifying their existence? (I was (also) a fan of fixed-width...) Alternately, is it possible that there is a front end 'overhaul' coming down the pipes, and the abandoned lab features weren't worth updating?
I can understand going with a Mac if you want better support for the latest hardware or you need to run some commercial software like Photoshop. But if you're running a text editor and a compiler and developing unix software, what advantage is there to using a Mac over a unix box like Linux?
Stopped reading at gratuitous religious reference to "God-given" gifts.
I would also like to point out another example: @arjunbasu who writes micro-fiction.
"Econ 101 for the single, educated black woman"
"I read Jay's post as elucidating what worked for him (and no more)."

I read it as his reporting a consensus between some significant number of people.

"At speakerconf 2010 discussion repeatedly arose around the idea that unit tests hinder your ability to refactor and add new features.... Should I write Unit Tests? The answer at speakerconf was: Probably, but I'm interested in hearing other options."

It is the consensus that surprises me. No one person's opinion surprises me; you can find someone to believe anything.
Facebook is opening an office in Austin.
Ok, guys, time to stop please.
What's "true" physics and what's just a computational technique is a distinction which seems rather philosophical, and I don't mean it as a positive thing.

In any case, there's more to Feynman diagrams than your comment implies. For example, think of the optical theorem. You can take a diagram with a loop in the middle and cut it in half, and get two diagrams of a lower order, say originally you had A + B -> C + D and you get A + B -> X and X -> C + D (where X can be any number of particles), and the amplitude for the former is the integral over all momenta of the amplitudes for the sequence of the latter. What it means is you can think of a "true" physical sequence of events, A + B -> X followed by X -> C + D, which contributes to the cross-section for A + B -> C + D and the math behind it is the same as used for the A + B -> C + D scattering with a not-"true" X (i.e., X with non-physical momenta) in the middle of the Feynman diagram.
I am confused. What are the relevant US laws that allow banks to freeze accounts? Does Citi's accountholder agreement make provisions for such a freeze? If, as some here have conjectured, the issue was with an attached merchant account, why not just cut off the ability to accept plastic?

If AdultFriendFinder can exist and take credit cards, then there must not be any [Edit: at least sex-related] business "content"-based laws which allow freezing assets.
Yeah, the lack of CDE and X (and the addition of Quartz and Aqua) definitely make a Mac feel like a different sort of thing than "a UNIX workstation".

Though on the other hand, were I the "Spirit of UNIX", I'd prefer CDE (and to some degree, X) not to be thought of as my defining characteristics... :)
Ahhh, I still have fond memories of the Sun Ultra Enterprise server we ran back in the late 90s.

The computer so fast (for its day) that it came with it's own spoiler (e.g. a separate bit of snap-on plastic for its top fan ducting). It was affectionately known around the lab as the "Purple Monster".

I won't miss Solaris's "pkg-add" installer though--what a kludge.

<voice actor="Phil Hartman" role="Bill McNeil" show="News Radio">
Good times...good times.
</voice>