skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "I'm happy to say that we're recommending you for immediate hiring into our marketing department."

It was worth reading this just for the Feynman anecdote at the end.
A hurdle in contributing to this site is that I can't do anything right now. I will need to take photos in a slightly different way. I'd love to take part, but can't right away.

Edit: scratch that, I was able to contribute to Piazza di San Pietro, Rome.
One of the most important things I focus on is how easy it is to modify the original app once you get user feedback that indicates some of your original assumptions are wrong--that is, you need new features or to change the way implemented features work.

So I am very interested in how the test suite will help or hurt this. Will having the tests allow quick reworking with confidence? Or will changing the features break the tests so badly that the tests are effectively broken, causing more work rather than less?
Mirror?

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.aleydasolis.com :(
This is a problem I envisage for a new project I'm working on. I don't trust the blogsphere enough to rely on editorial. Nor do I see any way to win in the search engines for specific terms as its an original concept. Normally I just seo my sites to hell and rely purely on organic search traffic. But what to do when that wont work and the blogsphere is so fickle. It's a good question and when you find the solution let me know as I'm going to face the same.
Pageflakes has always been a lot flakier(ha) than, say, Netvibes. Good for them they still managed to have it sold.
Round ones are easier to screw on ;-)

Short answer: They're not. At least, they're not round everywhere in the world. There are plenty of square and square-like covers in the UK/Ireland, some of which split in half diagonally. Perhaps a better question is why should they be round or what advantages do round covers have?
This is Enbrel

Safety
After a number of studies and reports of adverse reactions in patients receiving anti-TNF alpha therapy (including serious and sometimes fatal blood disorders, infections, rare reports of lymphoma and solid tissue cancers, rare reports of serious liver injury, and rare reports of demyelinating central nervous system disorders), rare reports of congestive heart failure, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to doctors appearing in the respective product labeling of these drugs instructing them to screen and monitor potential patients more carefully. [7]
I'd do it on a case by case basis. I think you can probably get a good idea in a lot of cases whether people will recommend you without any incentive.
TwitLinks: The Techmeme of Twitter?
Ha, I think this is great. People actually being expected to produce instead of just warming the chair from 9-5. I find the part of this video amusing where they are talking about how they encourage everyone to use a different desk everyday so that managers have a hard time monitoring them. I suspect this makes the manager focus on the important thing. That being the quality of the employee's actual work. Unfortunately so often people default to using a persons work schedule to determine performance because it is easier to look up from your game of solitaire every morning at 9 and check a desk than it is to actually understand what each individual does and it's value (or lack there of) to the organization.
Itis not introvert, it is Asperger Syndrome, ie strange genes, this is what makes PG special!

Why such a Syndrome exists is probably related to the nature of evolution, where diversity is a desirable feature to increase the overall complexity, evolution's apparent goal.

Unconventional thinkers are a blessing.
The linking of images is fairly tricky. I would love a way to move around the whole image I am trying to link to. Also, I'd love to be able to browse other existing 'albums'.
1: OK, it's the third time I'm asked that, will implement. 2: a list of public albums is on the left, it's still pretty short and I'm updating it by hand. Private stuff is private ;-)
The website is for some product for web development. My application is not even remotely related to web-development. Should have clarified I guess. I am generating C source code from a DSL.
Hmm. If you're right, I feel like a bit of a doofus. That's not as I remember it, but I don't have evidence to back up my point except my (probably flawed) memory. I will, however, stand by the weaker statement of being one of the first few from MIT.

And don't worry, that's not much of a parade to rain on. ;)
because manholes are round
Maybe visit their site? There's a book mentioned above also. Its platform independent (kind of) so you can use PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby........
The Young Man's Business Model
My personal approach to tests combines few ideas.

First of all, it doesn't make too much sense to test everything, every single method, every single LOC etc. Your time's so valuable you should focus on things that are critical to the application, or pretty complicated. Testing whether 1.equal?(1) is not.

As you noticed, tests can limit your ability to incorporate changes quickly. I believe that more tests you have, less free you're to modify the code without a risk of breaking the tests set. This is about finding the gold equilibrium.

In case of Rails, I fanatically follow Fat Model approach, so most of the hard code is in the models. As they change less often than the views or the controllers, their tests tend to live longer, delivering better return on investment.

Personally I believe that writing tests is oftenly a very good excuse for not writing the real code, or improving the existing one, especially in case of web applications that are technically mostly trivial.
these sorts of questions are common all over the place. at bare minimum it's for the interviewer's entertainment
By far the best source I've had is to build real-life applications.

Two applications that I built in about a weekend each have netted me around 5 gigs around release time, plus about one per month.

People are much more likely to want to hire you based on seeing your work in action than anything else.
Complete Feynman interview - http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/#Feynman
That's one way for people to like your product, release a successor that sucks;-)
I remember that and I think it is interesting. I have bookmarked it, but somehow I did not check back often. For one thing, I am busy keeping up with Hacker News. But maybe there are other things at work - perhaps you just need to improve the design a bit, and give it more of a community feel (ie make it clear what it is all about)?
I don't think it sounds healthy. But maybe writing tests is primarily a way to kill time? Like when I am not fully awake, I may not be able to concentrate hard enough to write some real code, but test code is less difficult.
I totally agree with everything you've said here. I've built many, many web apps, and I've found that code coverage is NOTHING like code quality.
I think they're using the EFI V8 emulator, which runs stock Apple kernels with zero modifications, and allows you to use Software Update without any mucking about before or afterwards.

You still need kernel extensions for hardware OS X won't recognize (often just modified Apple drivers to recognize different device IDs for sound/ethernet/graphics), but those can be maintained between OS updates, and so aren't affected by OS X updates.
I think it would really have to depend on what the tests were doing. If the tests were just goldbricking code testing random crap, yeah, 1:4 C:T is crazy. If you really are validating functionality and business logic, is 1:4 C:T so crazy? I would feel a little more fearless about changing a system if the tests were that comprehensive.
True. We were chugging along, growing about 20% a month, 4 months in, when that story appeared on digg and then got indexed by yahoo (we were no.1 and no.3 for the search "paris hilton phone"). Traffic doubled instantly. That should underline the importance of SEO. Get your friends to link to your site.
... lack of sense for a good cost-benefit ratio?
Given that test code also needs to be maintained, blowing up the whole code base will make maintenance probably more expensive that needed.
OpenMac Brand Offers Non-Apple Macs
My first impression of the site is that no big value jumps out at me when I look at it -- nothing makes me think, "Hey, this is really a lot better than trawling Google News and the Yahoo! Most Popular page, plus a few niche sites I find interesting."

Also, "Interesting things to read" is a little ambiguous, and could use clarification to emphasize that the site _does_ cover both news and reference texts. (Or is it even more than that?) With so much flat-looking text, people are going to read one link and think, "This is just another less-attractive version of Google News," or, "This is just another link aggregator site, but without arrows for some reason."

Somehow, you've got to make your front-page impression for non-logged-in users both provide a little bit of value (but not the many links you're putting up right now), _and_ immediately and visually demonstrate what makes your site uniquely valuable.

The list format feels a little oppressive, for some reason. I can't put my finger on it, but it just isn't ... fun.

Finally, all the links I see initially are about equally interesting to me -- they're all fairly heady math/computer geek stuff. So I don't even get the initial reward of trimming away (or the fun of condemning) the really trivial stuff I wish wasn't in the news. I wonder if someone in the 99% of the U.S. population that doesn't care about Boltzmann machines would even try to push past that.
yeah you're right. Didn't notice it until too late...
The coolest stealth mode startup ever?
The benefits are ridiculous...

- major ownership delivering the product to market
- generous equity package
- competitive salary
- 30" Monitor
- top-of-the-line macbook pro
- catered meals twice a day
- gym membership to work off the tasty food
- private office
- free caltrain pass
- covered cell phone plan
- substantial technical book budget
Heh psystar's site is down, also thanks to your post :))
careful with 'do anything' - in certain cases if found out it will badly burn you and your organisation - e.g. Holden Karnofsky getting badly burnt after astroturfing MetaFilter over Xmas and the fallout that GiveWell then had to deal with. That won't apply to a lot of HN readers and their startups, but be careful - if trust is going to be a big part of your identity, don't be evil (there are always digital traces to come bite you in the ass)
Get involved in organizing some geek events (dinners, hackathons, BarCamps, small conferences on specific technologies or industries) in your city. Figure out who you'd like to work with and make events that will interest them. Develop the ability to learn about someone's project and offer a constructive suggestion within 5 minutes, and you'll quickly earn a reputation as someone who can listen and respond constructively. People hire consultants who make them feel awesome, and you should be able to do this at a personal as well as an organizational level.

Find some other consultants in related areas and meet them for lunch so you can learn from them. Established consultants have a lot of extra leads and will often be happy to help you get started.

Finally, if you're the kind of person who doesn't already have a great answer for how to do lead generation, you probably won't do a great job of reselling consulting hours. A good referring consultant has one or more of (1) an incredibly network for lead generation and (2) enough of a bureaucracy to eliminate some of the paperwork hassle of dealing directly with clients. If you don't have either of these, the sort of consultants who will cost you <10h/week to manage will probably prefer to work on their own rather than cut you a percentage.
I'm thinking about trying out starting a social site soon... I've got a big chunk of it coded already. My tack was going to be to first create a site with aggregated content, a la popurls, try to get some regular visitors, then introduce social aspects to it if/when that gets any traction.

I think this is the approach that original signal took. I have no idea whether it will work, the aggregated content will have to be damned compelling to make it better than a plain on RSS feed. Chances are I'll ever even finish the damned thing anyway. :/ But I figured it'd be worth a shot, if for no other reason than to learn some new stuff and to have a hobby!
Sleep is cyclic; it comes in phases of varying depth. (http://www.helpguide.org/life/sleeping.htm) I find the difference between seven and a half hours of sleep and six hours isn't bad, but the difference between six hours of sleep and four hours of sleep is much more difficult to deal with. Looking at the diagram on the linked page, it's obvious why: sleep stages three and four are important and if you sleep less than six hours they get screwed up. More REM sleep gets messed up too, which is also important.

Day-to-day energy levels are cyclic too. Every day I want to take a nap at 3:00 in the afternoon. I'm also most energized from around 10:00 to 11:00 in the morning. It's a pattern.

A boost of energy at a certain time at night happens likely for the same reason it does during the day: levels of consciousness are cyclic.

As far as nighttime being more productive: there are fewer interruptions which means you can concentrate. It's easier when your cell phone/RSS/Twitter/blog/text/email isn't blowing up.
Meh. Good points. I and probably a lot of other people are probably feeling pretty stupid right now for falling for this. I think I have a certain combination of gullibility and skepticism that makes me a perfect target for these things. I'm a skeptic in that I am quick to consider that someone could be just wrong, but I'm gullible in that I'm slow to consider the possibility that someone is lying.
How to write 200,000 books, with a computer's help - International Herald Tribune
Short version:

Logic errors are much trickier than type errors, so I focus tests on parts with tricky logic.

Long version:

I really like the BDD approach of thinking about tests as executable specs. Before I write any code, I need to think through how exactly I want my code to behave. While I'm doing this, I might as well capture it in a list of (empty) specs, so that I and others have a clear and concise summary of the code's declared behavior.

A lot of web app code is fairly trivial / non-mission-critical, so I don't spend too much time testing it. Instead I focus my effort on the parts where it really matters (e.g. a permissions system that could expose private user information or lead to data loss if a bad code tweak goes unnoticed).

Some things I couldn't imagine writing without tests. Right now, I'm building a somewhat complex grammar using a parser generator library, and the only way to stay sane in this process is by building a test suite that alerts me whenever a subtle logic mistake in one of my rules breaks something somewhere else.
Javascript: Introducing "Using" for Declaring Dependency Scripts
Good idea. Open source work is a great way of getting involved and showing off, and you meet lots of people through it too.
Wikipedia breeds 'unwitting trust', says IT professor
Google Search API is back
It really depends on the quality of people you have. This is a really nice way to run a company. But for it to work, you need to get employees that care and are willing to do their fair share for the company.
Sure startups can work well remotely but they work even better in person.
Branding’s Impact on Raising Capital
It does both.

It hurts in that the tests add inertia to your codebase. Radical changes may require you to cut out portions of tests, for better or worse.

It helps in that, by writing tests first, your code is more testable. And thus less tightly coupled to the rest of your code and easier to change without trashing the whole system. This is the real reason to do TDD: it forces you into doing good design. This is less painful than you might expect in languages that are not Java.
Satellite IDs Ships That Cut Cables in Mideast
Its always garbage collection.
Seen in SF: http://flickr.com/photos/ojbyrne/224171975/ :-)
I've been tinkering with operating system programming for a few years now (yikes, has it really been 5?) in my spare time. It's an interesting hobby, and I actually got a job partly because of it. :)

I'm interested in hearing more about this project of yours, and possibly contributing to it.
Mash Ruby Gem - Mocking Hash for total poser objects
When is What Users Want Not Enough for a Business?
Custom PuTTY color themes (for us lucky, Win devs)
Build what they need, not what they want.

Then marketing becomes helping them to want what they already need.
Myspace started out spending big on advertising in mainstream media.
This is sweet. Doing some hardcore JSON stuff and this should make things a lot prettier.
oh yeah it's a great book, the parts I've skimmed over so far.
Is commentary like this really necessary? Can't we save these for Reddit?
Yes, Ubuntu took I think less than an hour to install on my machine. Remember, Gentoo is not the only Linux distro.
How to get over the fear and start your own business
Let's consider a more extreme version of the question. Do startups work well when all development is outsourced?

Assume you have a very capable outsourced team. You will naturally have more difficulty communicating with the external team, both in terms of expressing requirements to them and in getting feedback from them. On the other hand, you might get better people and be able to work with them on a more flexible basis. If you can understand and communicate your requirements in written form, and they don't change very rapidly, this may be a worthwhile trade-off. If you underestimate your product's rate of change, or overestimate your ability to communicate requirements, your life will suck. This is extensively documented in the lore of outsourcing.

Distributed teams are incrementally better than outsourced. You get better people, there is less turnover, and the team members are focused on your project. You might get decent communication if everyone uses chat and a wiki. But you'll still have to work hard to communicate, and you'll probably misjudge your difficulty/capability ratio. You're essentially copying the model of open source software development, and should take note of where that model has been successful.

Remote work is great because developers can focus for hours at a time without interruption. If you are at a stage where most people are working on big chunks of implementation or fixing bugs, this is a huge productivity boost. The other major benefit is that you can hire great people who are blocked from most tech jobs by their location and/or family obligations.

Remote work sucks because communication is more difficult. A group brainstorming session conducted by phone is, optimistically, one fifth as productive as an in-person session. If you are trying to generate ideas or generate a specification, you should expect this to be very difficult to do by phone.

As far as I can tell, having worked for about 2.5 years in a distributed tech company, the determining criterion of success in distributed work environments is specialization. If you have separate people in charge of design, marketing, and coding, it works well. But this often isn't the case in startups; sometimes your best design ideas come from some hacker with an offhand interest in usability, or you decide you can't find a good marketing person and you'll just have everyone pitch in a bit. Those sorts of group-work decisions imply a communication cost, and if you don't realize that your team will feel strangely hobbled and directionless.
Yes, s/reddit/digg/ and you're done.
I disagree for one simple reason. Use of "continue" is a violation of "single entry single exit". I know, I know, some will debate whether this principle is still applicable, or whether it's worth the trouble.

I believe that enforcing "single entry single exit" is one of the best ways to reduce long term maintenance costs. I understand that many don't agree with me. But if you do, you can't use "continue".

Another explanation of my philosophy can be found here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Eiffel_Programming/Unfeatures
Amazon is enabling startups to be Google killers.
Dealing with problem clients: Maybe the problem is you
I often find that the line not covered by any tests is the line with 2 bugs in it. While I rarely get 100% test coverage, it is something I strive for. A line of code that never gets executed is useless.
Bash Git prompt without Ruby
On a 386.
"You realize that the only way to do what you want to do is to start your own thing."

I never heard it said quite this way. It perfectly describes my situation.

Thank you, Melissa!
-- Find some other consultants in related areas and meet
-- them for lunch so you can learn from them

Already in progress with some consultants that I've worked with in the past :)

-- Finally, if you're the kind of person who doesn't already have a great answer for how to do lead generation (etc.)

I think that you are spot on here and this is why I feel a bit "touchy" on the subject. I have enough sales prowess and skill to keep myself with work, but I'm not sure if I'm "there" yet enough to keep other people busy with work.
This is definitely something that I'm working on, it's just one of those "long time to get there" type things and I need to have a bit of patience (or code faster!)
I second the high-level plan and the brief daily calls.

I'll add that if you're working from home, put your shoes on when you start working and don't forget to spend time outside.
What's your site url?
-- I would also say to be careful though. If you're looking to increase your clientele on the consulting side, that can quickly turn into a full-time thing you're left managing, with little time to pursue your startup. And there is a big difference between a consulting business and a startup - one has its revenue directly tied to someone's billable hours and the other creates some sort of recurring revenue stream with the goal of exponential growth.

This is definitely something that I'm worried about. On the other hand, a decent consulting business (that would be a full time job) gives me enough money to live really comfortably, which has it's benefits!

I had a couple interviews a year or so ago at a consulting shop that used to make people "bench" for a couple weeks between clients and work on internal projects for the company. These were either used for sales to clients or spun off into their own company. I kind of liked this model since many times when I go to a company I build the exact same application (there are a couple applications that I've built no less than 3 times -- all basically the same).

What's funny is the consulting shop I used to do some work for a couple years ago sold for a valuation that was 2-3x multiple. The startup that I last worked for got a round 1 (were self funded up to there) got a much higher valuation because their dollar cost for each dollar of revenue was much higher and they could lock clients into 2 year contracts. In either case, the owners of each company were all doing quite well financially!
The open source projects I've contributed to have not really helped me in real life (other than helping what I use to be better :))

Maybe it's because they are niche applications (mythtv & xbmc) that don't lend themselves well to what I specialize in...
"But the good thing with AWS is that it's easy to port your apps to run on their platform."

Once you have mountable volumes, you can pretty much run the LAMP-style stack of your choice unmodified, right?
I think the point is that you need to start with what users want, otherwise all that other stuff is irrelevant anyway.
Love Him Or Leave Him, Some Solid Advice From Guy Kawasaki