skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course you shouldn't just write the whole thing out and then start to think about the errors. And these days most code is developed incrementally.

However, not all code is developed incrementally, testing miniscule details on the way. Some code is written perhaps 20 lines at a time before testing. Binary search is only about 20 lines, my implementation is significantly less.

So there are cases where 20 lines are written, then tested. The thought experiment here is to assume that this is one of those cases, one instance of which there are probably 5 or 10 in a moderate sized project. Places where people perhaps got a little lazy, it was obviously easy, or didn't bother following the full TDD.

And as I say in a comment elsewhere, only 1 in 3 of the people who tested passed my test suite.

Your point is valid, but misses some of the point of the article, and the exercise.
Friend or follow: do social networks help us make friends?
If you have people working off-site, make damn sure they have a separate dev box, set up their way, locked up in a server room, preferably with a way to reset it when needed.

Laptops do not cut it for development for big corporate C++/C# batch type apps.

I managed to snaffle a decent desktop box and sweet-talk IT into burying it in a corner of the server room. And yes, good devs are 'special'!

It was worth a lot to me to have a fast dev machine on the other end of a VPN, the crucial thing being that numskulls and nincompoops couldn't reassign it so some bozo could check his email and surf facebook on it.
Interesting that frequentist A/B software packages let you essentially break the test without telling you. Are there bayesian A/B testers that give you a likelihood ratio instead?
What Sucks About Erlang
It feels like a totally made up problem:

"Here's a binary search algo description, implement it perfectly without testing".

That's not even close to how developers work, and he amplifies the disconnect with the real world by choosing a problem known for it's boundary and off-by-one risks.
You can see a problem that the Google convention handles better than 'degrade to simple pages with distinct URLs' with the 'Noloh' site touted elsewhere in this thread.

Consider one of their AJAXy-#fragment pages:

http://www.noloh.com/#/features/

Search for a phrase on that page: ["NOLOH generates only the absolutely necessary concise"]

Google finds and sends you to their 'simplified' version of the same page:

http://www.noloh.com/?features/

...which upon visit "grows" itself with a fragment to...

http://www.noloh.com/?features/#/features/

Ugh! Does the site really want people on that URL, possibly bookmarking and sharing it? Probably not; they could be using a redirect on first Google-visit.

Try clicking to another page from the double-feature page, like FAQs. You wind up at:

http://www.noloh.com/?features/#/features/&faqs%2F=

Ugh, it just keeps getting worse.

Using the Google #!fragment convention, the initial URL appearing in the index could be the simple/direct:

http://www.noloh.com/#/features/

Some sites will want that. One canonical #fragment-filled URL collects all the inbound traffic/linkjuice.
I'm wondering whether the outcomes for the Techcrunch 40 are statistically different from the outcomes for a group of 40 randomly selected startups.

4 companies went out of business, 4 were acquired (with only one being a major success), several more are doing OK for themselves - which to me is not significantly different from the usual startup survival rates.

And these companies were supposed to be the cream of the crop! It shows how fundamentally difficult it is to make credible business forecasts in technology.
Thanks, good point on the binary ...
This is why I travel with a netbook that has full-disk encryption. If the government wants my laptop, they can have it for as long as they want. $300, whatever. If they want to compel disclosure of the passphrase, though, that's not as easy. Then judges and the Constitution get involved.

What I've learned from reading cases (and watching Law & Order, heh) is that if the police have evidence against you, it's easier for them to get what they want from the courts. "We already saw the child porn, we just want to check for more."

If all they have is a disk they can't read, it's going to be hard to get any judge to compel you to produce the key, especially if they can't prove you have the key. (And, in the US anyway, there is some precedent that you can't be compelled to produce the key anyway.)

The government wants more power, but the people have the power to take it away. It's just a checkbox away in your favorite OS's installer. (Well, in Debian anyway.)

With talk of 20 year prison sentences for ordering manga from Japan or talking to people on Myspace, I think it's pretty insane to not encrypt your disks. Who knows what someone else will think is illegal? I would rather not find out.
Why are we still using p<0.05 for web A/B testing? p<0.05 made sense when each individual data point cost real money to generate: grad students interviewing participants or geologists making individual measurements. p < 0.05 was a good tradeoff between certainty and cost.

Now, in the world of the web where measurement has an upfront cost but 0 incremental cost, why not move to p < 0.001 or p < 0.0001? Sure, you need to increase the magnitude of data you're gathering by 2 or 3 but that's so much easier than delving into the epistemological complexities of p < 0.05
KETAWA.COM » Humor Umum » Asuransi Rumah
> Beware the advice from those with vested interest.

Be aware that there are many kinds of vested interest. Money is the least worrisome interest because those folks can be bought off - "true believers" are far worse.
Starbucks is not great, but they are consistent and not awful. When I'm traveling in most of the US, coffee from an unknown shop is likely to be awful. I'll grab a latte from Starbucks just because I know what I'm getting and that it'll be drinkable, if not up to my usual Portland coffee-snob standards.
Well I wouldn't say the point of the exercise and my point are entirely disconnected, perhaps the point of the exercise is to remind people that the size of their increments is really driven by the complexity of the test suite and not by the expected length of the code.

It's an idea I explored very poorly in an old blog post:

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-06-0...
What if You Forced Apple into the App Store?
Is your career making you infertile? lifestyle affect hormones
Starting with No
Modern research into children's behaviours suggests that even completely exposed to both elements, generally, boys tend to be attracted to functions and objects, girls to personal interaction and representations thereof.

This is pretty evolutionary and to suggest that it doesn't play a role in the overall representation of the sexes in careers is choosing a conclusion before reviewing all the evidence at hand.
As a former tech lead, if you are really mentoring and helping people, bet on allocating 20% of your time per person. Of course this leaves you with a LOT less time to do your own job, but with luck, your team's goal should be to do a better job than you yourself could have done.

Which was always my target. The team did it, and did it better than I could have expected.

This 20% ties in great with many modest management types who are out of their comfort zone above about 3 people. There a quote somewhere in Programmers at Work that the best team is one that will still fit in a VW Bug.
Well-done meat doubles bladder cancer risk
> If you can't trust your law makers to understand technology, why trust them to understand any other complex subject? You could use the exact same argument against legislating against global warming.

I'll bite - name three politicians who you would trust to make medical decisions for you.

> It's complex, let's just give up with laws. Not a good stance.

The desirability of a solution with certain properties does not imply that a solution with those properties exists.
Or alternately, "Don't let accountants determine your policies."
The problem with the soundbite summary is that the analysis presented is incomplete. On the one side, 10% of customers might have noticed the drop in quality, but we have no idea how many of them would actually go somewhere else to get their coffee. On the other, while 100% would notice the higher price, we again don't know what the demand curve looks like so we don't know how many sales they would lose.
The person driving the Google's developer relations is Vic Gundotra who was responsible for Microsoft developer relations and development tools for close to 10+ years(I think from 96-06). He is using all the strategies that worked for Microsoft plus new ideas which would never have been possible at Microsoft due its closed nature.
I think that writing a binary search algorithm without tests is evidence of a poor programmer (or, at the very least, poor programming practice; there are talented programmers out there that can just sling code). This is a difficult and, as the sibling comment noted, error prone algorithm.

These types of problems are poster children for TDD and testing. There is under 20 lines of code but several ways to make logical errors. If we test drive the code, we can ensure that the algorithm performs exactly how we want it to.
From the article: [4th amendment] protections do not disappear merely because one happens to be at a real - or imaginary - border.

Ah, but they do. It's called the 'border search exception' and it has been consistently upheld by courts, based largely on the 5th act of Congress passed in 1789 which set up the US Customs Service. Not only are searches of laptops and storage devices considered reasonable in this context, but so is opening mail and just about anything short of a strip search.

This has been argued over on a variety of grounds quite recently but the courts have stood firm on it. So like it or not, it's better to avoid carrying any storage device containing data that might be construed as suspicious.
I still get the message "Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your country or region" on google.com/phone. I can buy a Nexus1 for 500€ on eBay, compared to 139€ for an iPhone 3G with a data contract. I'm still holding out for a decent Android option though.
12 reasons why you should become an entrepreneur at a young age
A Look At The Next iPhone, As It Leaks Across The Internet
I think that'd be neat. And even neater if you could explain why you chose Haskell for your example over other languages.

One advantage of us doing this as a multilanguage book is we get to show how different languages solve different problems.

One disadvantage of that is it's a lot to absorb.
It looks like a table. Maybe it is a "tablegraphic".
that's kind of comparing apples to oranges. an unlocked iphone is about $1000, but an unlocked nexus one is $529. a t-mobile locked nexus one is only $179, and an at&t locked iphone is $199.
In the conditions under which humans evolved I'm pretty sure there was no such thing as "doing the laundry. I do concede, though, that I was overly facetious in describing what men do as "actual stuff".

Still, men and women are under greatly different selection pressures. Men place a greater emphasis on appearance when choosing their mates, women place a greater emphasis on power and status.

Perhaps this is because traditionally-female skills are such that there's not a great deal of benefit in being especially good at them. A man gains a small benefit from having as a wife the best basket-weaver in the tribe, but a woman and her children gain a huge benefit from having as a husband the tribe's chief or its best hunter.
I think you're partially right, but I think some of that quality is just because the platform puts UX as a top priority. I'm speaking very generally, of course, but there is a reason OSX apps have a reputation for looking very polished vs other platforms.
> that the government hasn't designed an entity specifically for web based companies.

What recent experience with govt have you had that suggests that such a thing would be a good thing?

General rule: The desirability of a solution with certain properties has nothing to do with whether a solution with those properties is possible, let alone likely.

In other words, the benefits that we'd get from govt doing {whatever} well have nothing to do with whether govt is likely to do said {whatever} well.
All of your exit numbers seem crazy high. I'm left wondering if it's just wishful thinking, or if I'm way underestimating how much companies will shell out in talent acquisitions.
It's worth nothing that CBP cannot compel you to give them your password(s), and can't really refuse entry to a US citizen, so as long as you encrypt everything your laptop should be secure. They can of course confiscate the machine to image it - and you may not get it back while it's still worth anything - but, what can you do.

The iPhone is trickier, mAdvLock is the only thing I know of that would most likely work even if it was confiscated.
I just wish there was a "main" android phone, or one that was a clear leader. So far, it's felt like "the" android phone to have is whatever is next in the pipeline.

I understand that the Nexus One is probably the nicest piece of hardware out there right now; but it's hard to decide to jump to it when it constantly sounds like there's going to be something even better just around the corner.

I guess my complaint is that I feel like the Android ecosystem is still too volatile to want to spend money on a phone.
So if your app does well in the iPhone app store, you may get an email from Google evangelists. OTH if your app does well in any other app store, you don't get emails from any evangelists.

This seems to speak to the strength of the iPhone app store and this strength also explains why most developers seem to prefer the iPhone app store :)

Note: I wrote a prototype Android app (with their beta SDK) long before the first Android phone was in the market (and before the iPhone app store was launched). I have successful apps in the iPhone app store, no apps in the Android app store/market.
But what ace could they possibly have left up their sleeve?

OLED screen? Their competitors are already there and userland's reaction has been decidedly mixed.

I honestly can't think of anything else. Pony?
Nope you weren't going crazy, you were just reading The Register.
It's a kneejerk anti-MS site where all headlines must sufficiently glib before being accepted for publication. Blech.
first of all, congratulations having build this site!

A couple of remarks (take them with a grain of salt, just my personal opinion):
1/ as you say correctly yourself, the name could be improved to something more explicit :-)
2/ when I got to your site, I did not instantly catch, what it was all about. Perhaps it s just me, but still, it might be worth making it somewhat more explicit. E.g. a explicit tag-line would probably help. Could be put where you display today the 'updated' information.
3/ Did not quite understand the 'row', 'column' links in the top15 part?

so far, cheers
Sure, but right now my only two options are a bad apple and an expensive orange.
There was a time when it was important to know how to use interpolating polynomials. Rationalizing the denominator was only useful before calculator became ubiquitous. Being able to make fire was without use of matches or flint used to be essential.

There are plenty of ways to teach algorithms without using arithmetic. Maybe a knowledge of doing basic arithmetic by hand is essential to understanding higher math. I don't know. It's worth exploring though.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1276732

Some comments, and much scepticism.
I only recognized Mint and Xobni, also products I've never used.
But the motivation for solving complicated rational equations does not come from word problems. The word problems for this topic involve very simple rational functions. My point has been that the motivation for studying and doing much of mathematics ought not come, solely, from practical word problems.
Except that a Purchase Order and Invoice aren't interchangeable in accounting terms.

A Purchase Order is the customer saying "I want to order the Big Mac Meal". An Invoice is you saying "That will be $5.95 please".

A cash accounting system is essentially giving the option back to the customer (from your perspective at least) of being able to walk out the door. An accrual system does not, as the inference is there that you will chase them to pay.

You would usually use the former if there is the ability to dispute the invoice (i.e. it is linked to a delivery of a specific product) because you don't want to be paying taxes on income that you may or may not receive.

You can use the latter more effectively if there is an expectation of payment, (like a SasS contract) because it is simpler overall.
I'm amazed how many interviewees can't even properly explain binary search, down to saying "linked list" as the base data structure.
Anyone want to try guessing a date when the Android Market passes the Apple App Store in raw application count? (I know ultimately quality is more important, but it could be a symbolically important day... and might prompt a lighter touch towards developers from Apple.)

My wild guess: November 15.
A Universal Package Manager for Javascript
This is What a Tweet Looks Like
Apple's historical appreciation is nearly irrelevant when you consider whether you want to own it today at its present price.
free is actually a problem for apple, as the money goes directly to the developer/google for the banners. no cut for apple

hence. iAds

but they face an uphill battle against the monetization of mobile adsense
Hipster time-traveler caught in museum photo?
Do you use http://www.truecrypt.org/ ?
Resources for bonding with your customers: tools of mass engagement
Link emulation and packet scheduling (talk by Luigi Rizzo, FreeBSD)
Indeed. Just send it via the Internet, where packets are not opened and inspected before entering the country.

Sometimes I think that government policies are implemented only to make people feel powerful. We can search your laptop!

OK, but I can just send the data to my home computer via the Internet, and just carry my wiped laptop across the border.
Book Review: Rework (from 37signals)
Gizmodo paid $10,000 for "lost" iPhone 4G
Oh, it's definitely just as much an issue for women's studies. And I don't claim to have a solution.

I was taking issue with the assertion that there is no concrete evidence that CS presents an inhospitable environment for women. Yes, it bears more study, but there's clearly an inhospitable environment.
What do you expect engineers to do while code compiles? And flipping to a browser could also mean checking e-mail, filling out expense reports, or scheduling a design meeting. The problem is: even if those things are a productive use of an employee's time, they still interrupt your flow.
No, dm_mapper/LUKS.

But actually, I do have a Windows 7 machine, and am TrueCrypt-ing that right now. (I had forgotten about that until you mentioned it, and BitLocker is $200 I don't want to pay.)

So far, seems pretty nice. You can never be 100% sure about encryption software, but since I haven't read about the government breaking any crypto implementations and sending anyone to prison, it is probably Good Enough.

I don't worry too much because I don't think I am doing anything illegal. But it's still nice to avoid people rummaging through your stuff.
Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating
In a similar story, I have been ignoring the entire mobile phone app craze until now. Something about Google's message really resonates with me and I'm thinking of writing my first phone app for Android. Gonna go buy one soon and make apps!

You can probably just apt-get everything you need to get started with android dev, no?
Recentness of roasting is key for coffee not tasting like gasoline.

Basically, I've heard that Starbucks does way over-roast their beans, but the main problem with them, and with most coffee places, is that they don't use freshly roasted beans. Beans go rancid within 7-10 days of roasting, and after that almost invariably produce that overpowering gasoline flavor.

Using freshly roasted beans is terrible for inventory and horribly inconvenient (transportation, etc), and people don't understand that straight coffee isn't supposed to taste like gasoline, so they do fine.

Use http://espressomap.com to find places with coffee that actually tastes good (as opposed to milk and sugar that tastes good).

(On top of this, brewing espresso is really tricky, and requires constant readjustment of grind, brew time, brew temperature, brew pressure, and brew volume (these are coupled, so not quite that many degrees of freedom) based on flavor, texture, and volume of the resulting shot. Baristas at good espresso places pull shots and taste them regularly throughout the day to recalibrate.)
Accrual methods make sense when you don't have a physical product and invoice at regular intervals, especially if you have any type of retroactive invoicing and/or charge any type of interest or are remitting to a third party.

Cash methods would be nightmarish in this circumstance.
Nope and can't say it ever came up in the 20 years I've been programming for myself and others.
and if developer sentiment is an early indicator

Be careful: what you see on HN can be a very bad indicator of the real situation. All that was kind of blown out of proportion. There was kind of poll on HN asking iPhone developers how they feel about 3.3.1 and most of those who do develop for iPhone said more or less along the lines "I don't care much". The biggest outcry was probably from those who never did nor were going to develop for iPhone. At least they found some justification for that now.

It's easy to get scared by rejection stores, but: App Store has close to 200 000 apps now. What are the real chances to get your app rejected?
The Lisp Machine was not 'integrated with an industrial-strength framework and toolset' like F# is integrated into .net and Visual Studio.

The Lisp Machine was the opposite of that. The frameworks and the toolsets were integrated INTO the Lisp Machine.
Good point. If I were in their position, the first thing I would have done was to pull the SIM card to stop Apple from killing the device. You'd think that Apple would have these constantly sending their GPS coordinates out so you could have tracked it the moment it left the Apple campus.

However, in this case I think Apple has a pretty clear idea of where the device currently is :).
> "linked list" as the base data structure.

I would enjoy reading a logically correct implementation of a binary search on a linked list. Discussing the performance complexity would be an obvious next question in the interview.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlemiel_the_Painters_algorith...
I think you learn something by typing it in that you don't by scanning code on the screen. I learned a lot by typing in Applesoft Basic programs when I was 10. It's like the difference between learning a language by actively trying to speak it, vs. just reading.
Buy one that has the features you want today. This is technology; there is always something better just around the corner.

(Personally I rather like the fact Android affords some choice in prices, features, and form factors, rather than locking you into /the/ one.)
JSConf 2010: Harder Better Faster Stronger
As much as I hate to agree with him ( http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/19/tsa-pays-blogger-to-mock-p... ), in this case "Blogger Bob" has a point. It was customs, and not DHS who actually searched the laptop.

The court case: http://fourthamendment.com/blog/index.php?blog=1&title=s...
Setting up a high performance wordpress server (FreeBSD + nginx)