skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For all these points, the real answer is "you're doing it wrong." TDD is supposed to, over the course of the project, allow faster development, allow easier and safer refactoring, and overall allow you to feel confident in the system you've built.

My personal experiences have shown the following:

* If you're not allowing yourself to write prototyping / exploratory code without tests, you're doing it wrong.

* If the first thought when writing tests for a method / class / etc is "What do I need to mock", you're doing it wrong (mock over-usage is the worst TDD mistake I've ever seen).

* If the tests take too long to run, you're definitely doing something wrong.

I've run the full gamut of extreme white-box testing to full black-box testing. There are merits to both, and there's a time and place for both, but anyone who adheres to strict ideals isn't developing good software, they're doing Agile masturbation.

That said, anyone writing production code without a test suite is making an even bigger mistake than doing any of the above. Building a good test suite is a very hard problem, and you really need to tailor what you build and how you test with your team and your product.
I would advise you to reconsider the design of the site.

As someone in your target market when I landed on that page I simply didn't know what you were offering me. Further, I was overwhelmed by links and pictures which had almost nothing to do with why this site exists in the first place.

I really think that you need to answer these questions to your users;

--> What are you going to do for me?
--> How are you different from the million other sites out there?
--> How reliable are your sources?
--> Is your advice reliable and honest, or is this just another content farm?
Other good building blocks to use are Hadoop (map/reduce) and Lucene/Solr (search).

P.S. Great post.
An unexpected benefit of HN's noprocrast option
BTW I'm unlikely to be able to take part in any conversation stemming from this post as noprocrast is going to kick in shortly :-)
Scientists say it is 'just not true' that most of the BP spill oil has gone
side-note: very few people know turtle is built-in to Python

>>> import turtle
Would you put Hadoop under scaleable to billions?
I'll pay $1400 a month, but I'm not sharing an apartment with any Iphone users
Here's Why You Need A Liquidation Preference
I've ridden a fixed gear bike exclusively for the past 15 years. (alright, that's not exactly true... I have a dutch bike for groceries and recently bought a Brompton for traveling) It was built for me by the patron saint of internet cyclists, Sheldon Brown (RIP).

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/fixed.html

You just need a front brake to dump speed, and ride a gearing suitable for your environment. For instance, in NYC this is about 42/16.
Wweim - chat dedicado a la wwe
It's hard to commit treason against the United States when you're not a citizen of the United States.
> I just don't want to see some zealot telling me I can't have a car, and that I am some sort of evil person for having one.

Not everybody thinks about you when choosing the people they want to live with. You argue like a conservative asshole berating a bunch of hippies for choosing their own way of life.

> What I'm saying : there should be no laws against this type of thing, and no laws saying you should do it. Entirely personal choice all round.

That is entirely upto the people living in those subuebs. If they decide that you should drive your car around rather than through their suburb, then I don't see how it violates your personal freedom. Next you will be bitching about congestion charges.
Ask HN: Is UML the best option design documentation?
For design documentation, is there something better than UML?
maybe you can center on temporary social networks, a kind of throw-away account system for social networking when you need it...

Like, I meet some people somewhere and we want to engage more, so someone creates an identity just for that and mails friends to do the same and link.
> There's no such equivalent thing going on at Reddit.

As far as we know.
Thanks for confirming my prime suspicion.
- It is very crowded
- It doesn't tell what it is for!

BTW, it is not a content farm. As far as I know, all content is original.
Ask HN: Feedback on my idea : web startup validation service
Problem to be solved:
Entrepreneurs generally have multiple ideas at any given time that they would like to execute. In order to focus their energies on the best ideas, they need to filter out ideas based on market size, market demand, pricing and revenue forecasting (assuming they are equally passionate about all the ideas). In a business plan these are generally assumed or collated from historical data. However, this data may not be effective in helping validate the potential of the business idea.

Target Market/Customer:
Start ups toying with ideas for online web applications.

Value Proposition:
Provide a service to validate the idea based on metrics generated from real data. The earlier a startup can generate this data, the faster it can pivot.

How it works:
1.Create a web application giving information on the product/service. This is a set of pages detailing what the product/service would do, benefits, pricing etc.
2.Generate traffic for site through advertising (adwords, facebook ads etc).
3.A/B test with different pricing.
4.From analytics data, produce reports for market size, market demand based on pricing, optimum price for product and estimated revenue.

The idea is not new. However, I have not come across any service that currently delivers this. The need for this comes from personal failures in estimating market size and can potentially save months of wasteful effort.
Six Keys to Increasing Startup Change Readiness
YouTube is actually interesting. They attribute their rise to a few building blocks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssfmTo7SZg

I wouldn't put all of these as some sort of future stack building blocks, but there were enough things there that made something possible, that wasn't possible before: easy video sharing.

1- broadband in the home 2- emergence of flash, so no codecs required 3- proliferation of digital cameras 4- cheap hosting 5- one click upload 6- ability to share embed
1106 :-)

My productivity, on the other hand, seems to have gone firmly into negative territory...
I hear you. I remember when I lived in Manhattan on the Upper East Side coming back from a party somewhere in deepest darkest Queens, getting off the subway and biking up the path along the East River. Middle of the night and bucketing with rain. My roomie and I were riding mountain bikes and played all the way home, jumping off every little bump in sight and charging through all the puddles. We got back to our apartment soaking wet, grinning from ear to ear like little boys.
And yup, it's one of my favourite memories from living in Manhattan.
Facebook sucks because it is careless about my privacy.
You could imagine twitter not crashing and burning itself after an event like that?
Those people can upvote other stories they think are more relevant or interesting. The "newest" page at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest always has interesting submissions waiting to be upvoted.
> I just don't want to see some zealot telling me I can't have a car,
> and that I am some sort of evil person for having one.

I am not saying you are a bad person, but giving a car to everyone - like we do right now - is a terrible idea.

I'm hoping for legislation that will ban private persons from buying cars. No one (...) needs half a ton of metal and 70PS to move his 70kg ass.
I wonder, why do people write such useless stuff?
> They aren't patenting Where To, just showing how their patent could improve it.

Most people just file a feature request.
Q: Should I run an antivirus on my iPhone?
A: You should, yes. But you can't.

Seriously. It says that.
Yeah, Hadoop is parallelizable by design, so it's just a matter of renting out EC2 clusters. In any case, I'm not talking about competing with Cloudera, but using Hadoop in some new specific vertical. For instance, an ad network that uses Hadoop could mine user/user-clickstream data better and get more clicks. That would be using Hadoop as a building block. You could also use Hadoop to power awesome analytics on, say, an e-commerce platform.
Back when HTML was invented, it was based on SGML. In retrospect, this was a fundamental design flaw. SGML has all sorts of fillips that were intended to make documents easy to type (back in the pre-GUI era) but which in practice make them hard to parse. SGML parsers, even parsers built into expensive commercial software, were famous for not reliably interoperating. The HTML5 spec abandons SGML entirely because, as it turned out, even those fillips of SGML did not make it possible for browsers to consistently agree on how to parse HTML in the wild.

It would have been better for everyone if HTML had used a bog-simple Lisp-like format from day one, but without a time machine we’re stuck with these kludges of history.
Well ... this is what I view as the biggest problem with the current US funding situation.

"Pioneering", the stuff that truly breaks new ground---I use FPGAs as my major example---tends to need a lot of money. Much more than the typical angel pattern of 5-6 figures. E.g. SpaceX, it was initially funded by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, $100 million out of his own pocket.

(And even then there are limits to their pioneering, what they're seriously focused on is driving down the costs, something that hasn't really been seriously done before.)

Except for unusual angels like him, as far as I can tell we aren't "inventing the future" anymore.

Don't know about biotech though. How much of what they're doing is truly pioneering?
The best advice I've ever heard regarding scaling is to only worry about one level of magnitude. If you have 20 users, make sure you can scale to 200 - any farther than that and you're likely wasting your time.
It seems really odd to me that there are such gaps in logic in this.

"Sorry mom, my phone died"
This will actually happen because obviously your child will play with it all day and we all know what an iphone battery is like

But if they wanted to hide something, do you really think they won't figure out how to turn this app off/spoof their location?
100 b is based on the fall of the stock price, not actual money spent or lost. Stock will bounce back ( it has somewhat already I think )
Fair is an agreement between two people who like each other. Of course life isn't fair, but it's not unfair either. The function just won't evaluate with life as an argument.
Congrats! Definitely use this as an opportunity to get feedback/do market research/attract beta customers. Don't be shy!
In case I'm reading too much into this, am I right in think that you believe startups are _not_ risky?

If so, then that changes nearly everything that people understand about startups.
Theoretically you would hope it stays up, but past data shows that is iffy. FB might be sluggish, but it would be fine.
How is this relevant content for HN?

If you want relevant content, write it and submit it.
On street parking kind of rough, there are a few garages. Best off using the Metro if possible.
Oh, I wasn't talking about welfare dependency, but about the public sector. New Labour added a million people to the payroll; they aren't all nurses and firemen. Similarly vastly expanded higher education with degree courses that proved to be useless in the job market.
Peter Norvig is certainly quite the young upstart.
New Techstars companies posted to pikk- come vote on them.
I've never understood the obsession with scale when there are so many challenging problems left in user interface technology are relatively ignored. The room for innovation is staggering, yet we obsess over nosql.
although is old (nov 2009) this is the best NOSQL blog post that I ever read.
I got the URL via IBM/developerworks http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-javadev2-10...
Agreed. Additionally, most sysadmin work in first-world countries these days is infrastructure programming - first and second line support is inevitably handled offshore.

Writing a 20 line Perl script to do 'date -I' or not wishing to learn a new language to simplify sharing of code because it's been 15 years since you last learnt a new language isn't conservatism, it's fear of the unknown.
"Every team coming out of Startup Weekend should have this as a goal: A SALE"
I'm afraid I don't see where you have successfully linked service-reliant economies with debt. There may be a correlation - I haven't looked at the data, but is A a cause of B?
Did the NY Times Get the Google-Verizon Story Wrong?
Upcoming Interview: Chris Hopen, co-founder of HomePipe
Chris Hopen is perhaps most known for his networks and security expertise. With over 20 years of industry experience, knowledge and expertise, Chris is looking forward to make his next venture, HomePipe a success. As he does that, he managed to take some time out to let us know more about his current projects and share his thoughts on becoming successful entrepreneurs. Do let us know if you have any questions in mind.
Going fast and having just a front brake can easily cause you to do a forward flip. 80% of your stopping power is in the front brake, but if you're going very fast engaging the front brake for an emergency stop can make a bad situation worse.

That's a pretty sad story there, I read a bit on his site and he seems to have been a very nice and knowledgeable guy. I'm pretty sure he would have smiled at the way you characterised him, there are worse things that people could say about you after you die.

For an analogue, you can drive in traffic with a car and never touch the brakes, if you're a really good driver and you plan ahead. So, in theory you could remove your brakes and still be safe.

So, now for the obligatory 'think of the children' argument, but it could just as easy be the think of other people in traffic that do unexpected stuff or the mistakes that you yourself might make (nobody is infallible):

Until the day that that toddler walks out in front of you. And then, whether you're in a car or on a bike doing a good clip you're going to be very happy that you have all the stopping power that you could possibly want.

Now a clever counter argument would be that a freewheel cycle with discs on front and rear wheels would offer less stopping power than a fixed gear cycle similarly equipped.

As for bike styles, I have a recumbent (a Zephyr) for fast touring on bike trails but I'd never ever take it in to traffic with vehicles around me (too low), also it has a very large bell on it (and I don't care if people think it's gay), because people are simply not used to bikes doing that sort of speed.
And "e" Appears from Nowhere: Quick Numerical Experiment with Clojure
Fantastic article. Hits the nail on the head.

Shortly after the announcement of Google Wave I flew out to the Bay Area for the introductory hackathon. I was intrigued, in fact fascinated by the idea of a federated protocol layer to replace email, something that could empower collaboration and community building by distributing power across multiple nodes, instead of the overly centralized and unsecure model of Facebook or the defunct mode of email. A new form of communication was desperately needed and Wave seemed to bring together all the missing pieces for what could be a new era in computing and collaboration.

While most people talk about the product when they speak of Google Wave (as at the Harvard Business Review ), they show their lack of appreciation for what Google Wave was below the surface. Fundamentally, ultimately, Google Wave was a new way of looking at the world. It was in many ways a protocol with no particularly good interfaces, largely because it was so ambitious and because efforts were made to popularize Wave rather than finish promised work on core functionality.

This is unfortunate. While I was upset when I first read of the decision to “kill” Google Wave, I now feel that there is, in fact, even more potential. Approximately a month ago the Google Wave Developers blog promoted a new independent attempt to create a Google Wave powered online forum. Despite the recent announcement of Google Wave’s death, it seems that many people were inspired by Google Wave and will keep development moving forward.

What will they create? Surely, some concepts (like online facebooks) require time to be appreciated and understood, but this is all the more reason for persistence, not giving up when there is no immediate response to an unfinished product. Sadly, it seems Google’s CEO never understood Wave. It was not a clever product, it was a vision in search of a product. And this unmaterialized vision that required more than a keynote speech, bit of marketing, and hope for rapid mass adoption.

Hopefully Google will remain true to its original promise to open source the “lion’s share” of its code, including a working server and client. It is understandable that Google would take the great innovation started with Wave and roll it into its own products, but how can they say the problem is “user adoption” if they never delivered the tools originally promised?
Complexity does not increase linearly with number of lines of code. 110k lines can easly be 5x as complex as 100k lines of code.
OMG Turtles! I seem to recall the cursor actually being a turtle. I'd re-skin them as buildings and spaceships, and crash them into each other with scripted animation commands. Is that the same thing?
check out my tangentially related project: http://abogo.cnt.org/ tells you how much the average household in your neighborhood spends on transportation. Let me know what you think!
The web was still pretty grown up in 2001 - admittedly no facebook or twitter; the idea of immediate spread of information through non-traditional routes was not widespread.

I checked cnn and bbc news for information (both of which went down several times that day I might add)

But I really doubt twitter would stay up if a 9/11-scale event happened today. Even facebook I'm not sure about. If the CNN site couldn't handle the traffic I can only imagine what that spike looked like.

"It wasn't possible to broadcast to all of your friends in a matter of seconds if you were okay in 2001."

well, there was - cell phones and SMS. Those networks went down too (source: http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0153.htm )
Potentially. Fair use has no safe harbors, but I don't know of anything that would outright ban an appropriate use of someone else's copyright protected material in a patent application.
You have to understand, we've lived and worked on the web our entire adult lives. We don't necessarily know what href stands for any more than we know what 'goodbye' is a contraction of. But we know what it means.
Someone else further down on this thread posted the same "fake review" thing with this link:

http://appcomments.com/user/42248226?country=143441

Don't know if MickMountainView is the same person as Mick Johnson but he sure likes their apps.
Just removing the clutter won't make it a better design. You need to sit down with the owner and create a workflow of how the user should interact with your site.

You need to answer a lot of questions on what you are trying to do and just exactly how you are going to do it. After you've understood that from the owner's mouth then do extensive testing until you come up with a finished product.

I am sure that if you will surf HN a lot then you'll find better advice.
I can submit 100 stories that'll get people riled up about politics / amazing pics / funny-hah-hah! in the time you can write one article about monads.
My favorite parts:

I am currently working in Java to re-implement an algorithm I
prototyped in lisp. If I replace all of the required curly-braces
and semicolons in Java with parens it turns out that the Java
program has more parens than the lisp program. The lisp program
is 20 lines, the Java program has crossed 100 lines and is still
growing.

In Java I need "factory objects", "visitors", and other such pieces
of "design patterns". In lisp, I have never needed to write a "factory".
The whole "visitor" pattern becomes a 1-line (map...) call. To a lisper
"design patterns" are like dress patterns in sewing. If you can't sew
(program) you can still make something to use by copying a pattern.
But you can hardly consider yourself a Taylor (programmer).
SMS was certainly there, but nowhere near the usage that it has today.
I have no idea why this comment is here....total accident, think I was shooting at something else.
This is the most interesting bit: "Select a random number between 0 and 1. Now select another and add it to the first. Keep doing this, piling on random numbers. How many random numbers, on average, do you need to make the total greater than 1? The answer is e."

The proof appears right at the bottom.
7 secrets of writing a book tha sells
Upcoming Interview: Adam Kalsy, co-founder IMIfied, Pheedo and Pirillo
If you have heard of IMIfied or Pheedo, then I am sure you would have also heard of its founder, Adam Kalsy. With experience well over a decade, Adam holds expertise in strategic planning, web start-ups, project management, and software management. We managed to convince Adam to share his experience with us from working on IMIfied, Pheedo and his other project including an Open Source CRM, Pirillo. We are still doing the pre-requisites research for the interview; in the meanwhile, if you have any questions that you want us to ask him, feel free to pass it across.
Agreed: coupled with CNAMEs (so you can map www.mydomain.com to the Cloudfront servers), this is an excitingly scalable new hosting option.

But: Cloudfront still won't gzip transparently, which for a static site means you're stuck either with excess load times or with hacky JS workarounds. If and when they sort this out I'll switch from Rackspace's Cloudfiles in an instant.
What to say to "Perl 6 isn't Perl any more"
I have to say a big AMEN here.

There are many startups that should just buy a dual-quad core Nehalem (or AMD Magny-Cours) system with redundant power supplies, 32GB or more of RAM, and fast disks (or even spend on a RAID5 of SSDs) and stop worrying about scaling for the meantime.
And the proof is simpler than it would appear from reading the enunciate (at least that's what I think, of course!)
James, I agree with you point, but I don't feel the answer is in just saying that "you're doing it wrong". I think we need to figure out the main cases of such failing TDD instances, document it, and raise awareness so that we can be vigilant - if only to make sure that an inexperienced developer does not make these mistakes.
Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"
Oh, I think you're right.
Twenty rules for good graphics
How To Start A Company And Achieve That Coveted Work/Life Balance
How many politics-related stories can you submit in the time it takes "island in a lake in an island in a lake in an island" to become the #1 story?
The reason you're getting this feedback is because they don't know what it really means!

What you think you're hearing: Kids don't mind being monitored.

What you're really hearing: Kids want an iPhone.

You're creating an illusion of personal choice that just doesn't exist.