skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Hillel Wayne (Author), I love your writing style and that you are so carefully articulate about what people say, and reading their arguments charitably! The world needs a lot more of that. This article has an inspirational writing style that I will try to leverage in my own writings. PS maybe put your name at the top of your posts :)
This Exploding USB Stick Could Prevent Leaks
Silicon Valley is an extreme example, but I don't think it's bucking the general trend.
Are you replying to me? So, you are suggesting my story is lies? I guess you should study stats to know that there are more than 60 people in this world.
The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women
>Do you plan to sunset HipChat Cloud?

>For now, HipChat Cloud will continue to be supported, but eventually we will encourage all HipChat Cloud customers to upgrade to Stride.

This seems like business speak for "get converted to Stride sooner rather than later because HipChat won't be around for much longer".

https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-st...
Because for the average user, the features and power of a "Good" IDE are at best a nuisance and at worst a barrier to entry.

I've tried using some, such as a brief stint with Atmel Studio some years ago, Eclipse, and a couple others I can hardly remember. My biggest complaint was how tedious it was to start a project. They start asking you questions that a hobbyist isn't going to have enough background to answer.

Arduino takes those and hides them. Yeah, it means you might have less flexibility, but by the time those important hardware details actually become relevant, the user has probably amassed enough experience and knowledge on micros and AVR chips that they'll now be able to use those fancy IDEs.

Arduino isn't about being the final product, or for becoming the next best IDE, it's about teaching, learning, and prototyping. It's about teaching a generation that programming, hacking, and technology isn't out of their reach or understanding. I've taught middle schoolers from rural areas in Puerto Rico how to control things with an Arduino.

One of them build a timer/thermostat for their house using scavanged IR leds from a broken TV remote, a few passives, and a temperature sensor that costs about $0.50USD. He now has a system that will turn on and adjust the Mini-split AC unit in his room, so it cools his room down slightly before he gets home. His unit was an older, cheaper model that did not have a built in thermostat (or the thermo died, I'm not completely sure). That student now wants to go into Electrical Engineering in college, and now thinks he stands a chance at getting into college, where he didn't before.

That is why Arduino is so popular.
This sounds great! I'll read up more about it and consider it further. Thanks for letting me know.
> The normal practice for large scale codebases in complex domains is "the code is the spec".

”The code is the spec” is just a way of saying “we don't know what the code is supposed to do, and the intent was never, even initially, properly validated by domain experts, or, if it was, we tossed the knowledge generated in that process.”

This is especially the case if that phrase is used about a large system in a complex domain.
I'm not sure that blaming St. Patricks is constructive. After all, the whole Europe was christian and there wasn't any available second option. You could definitely have it worse when done by entirely outside forces.

The question is what to do with the heritage here and now.

And yes, you can have paganism back, individually.
Show HN: VXL Marketplace, a marketplace for game developers and creatives
Meh, being told over and over again that I'm a good developer but not a cultural fit isn't particularly helpful. It sounds like a polite way to say: "You have the skills but, uh, we hated you." I'm not sure what to do with that feedback, but it has been pretty consistent.
Weed (THC) can trigger mental episodes in those with a propensity for it. Sorry to hear that.
> An Electric Car, is a kind of Car, which is a kind of Vehicle

And then you have a hybrid car with a drilling attachment.
Not true. I've got a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, am very math heavy, created a number of algos for my work over the last 25+ years (in physics sim, bioinformatics, systems management/orchestration, etc.), run sessions at an ACM conference, yadda yadda yadda.

Two google interviews, and nothing. From what I hear from other people I consider way smarter than I, they also got nothing.

Google has a much copied process, but as a creator of something of huge value notes:

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

Mebbe their filter isn't quite as good as they think it is. Talking to a number of absolutely brilliant engineers who didn't get hired, it likely has nothing whatsoever to do with talent, algo knowledge, mathematics, etc. There are other factors.

Being an above 40 guy probably didn't help me, google and others seem to have lots of trouble with ageism.

Dan's article was not specifically about being the "top", rather, what does the "top" mean in context, and how do people judge. What is the opportunity cost of doing this? As he points out, as I point out, it can be very high.

The smartest programmer I met in my first decade of work, was a person who had a high school diploma. No college degree. The guy was brilliant, personable, humble. He is quite successful now, and still doesn't have degrees. Chances are, he doesn't have formal education around the math/algos, but has picked up everything he knows.

At the end of the day, hiring is something of a crap-shoot. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance, either negative or positive. You are after passion, intelligence, fit, experience if it exists (re-inventing wheels can be time consuming/expensive if you are forced to do it, and getting a guide who has been down that path can save you making some mistakes/time/money).

I know people are telling themselves that google has a good process, but honestly, it looks like it enforces homogeneity more than it brings in needed talent. I am not sure this is a good thing. Poor replication of their processes is rampant throughout the industry. I am not convinced this leads to positive outcomes.
Inside HelloWorld, the Fyre Festival of YouTubers
Effective Programs: 10 Years of Clojure
Japan's Yakuza Won't Be Celebrating Halloween This Year
> I agree, but I would say that for personal projects, I find the difference in price quite irrelevant

Yes, of course, but it just doesn't look good when the price almost doubled in twelve months, specially when you have better and more powerful micros like the STM32 for less money.
For a nice minesweeper variant, try Mamono Sweeper.

It has the same mechanic as minesweeper, but instead of bombs you are sweeping for monsters, which have a level (1 to 9).

A clue in a cell is the sum of the monster's levels surrounding it.

You can kill monsters of level 1, and eventually you level up and are able to kill bigger monsters.
State machines are a great place to start, but are pretty confining for users. If you've asked a user for some info, they may reasonably want to ask you a question rather than provide that info.

You can often get away with a state machine, but it is definitely not the path to natural conversations.
Hi, cool project, really. As a backend developer I often feel stranded when going about web app frontends. And it's so hard to find WYSIWYG editors that don't suck. What about supporting Java for the coding, though? Is this going to happen at some point?
I refer to Godel's second incompleteness theorem. That is, no system of axioms can prove itself to be consistent.

Thus, all provable statements rest on an unproveable statement.
But there are plenty of fish in the sea and one man's trash is another man's treasure. On the other hand, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Really great stuff. Thanks!
Yeah yeah. Everything is exactly the same, nothing could ever be better or worse than anything else in some particular regard.
Aren't foreign exchange fees calculated by %?
> you’ll need a bunch of servers and a hug if you have microservices

I laughed out loud
"Published by Americans for a Safer Tomorrow, inc."
CME Group Announces Launch of Bitcoin Futures
Your unit tests check the architecture of the code and the implementation is maintainable? I say that cause that's what I use code reviews for :P
> Bell believes the amount of cobalt being used in electric cars could easily double in the next eight to 15 years

that's a bit of an understatement...
If it only doubles we're in trouble, I'd say it's going to go 10 to 20x
Where there's money to be had, there's someone willing to exploit it.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/ultrasound-clinic-blames-identi...
<joke> Oh, Solution. Phones with stretchy backs and a balloon battery. </joke>
I really wanted to use wal-g, but they had NO support for any backend storage besides S3, and did not appear to have any interest in developing more backends.. (We use GCP)
His second incompleteness theorem implies we can never rigorously know our axioms are consistent. Thus, no proof is 'truly' rigorous. We have to depend on the prose of 'these axioms are so self evident that it is obvious they are consistent'.

This is what originally made people suspicious of the axiom of choice. It is much less self evident than the other axioms of ZF.
But unlike the other plans the pricing is not transparent.. even non enterprise customers may want this option.
> there is so much content out there that any individual piece of it has essentially no value

Zero multiplied by anything is zero, so if all individual pieces of content are worthless, so is content as a whole.

But of course that's not true because content isn't fungible. There's an infinity of content, but, unless you think a cat meme listicle is equivalent to War and Peace, it doesn't matter. The best content will always be worth paying for to people who care about what they put into their brain.
As gruesome as it is, it's more logical to separate the body for certain purposes than keep it all whole, so a podiatrist can practice her/his/their art.

If it's worth more that way, so be it.

I'd hope most people who agree to donate their bodies to science understand science specialty is fragmented.

I'd recommend that someone who wants to donate their body but is repulsed to these gruesome acts; instead donates their organs.
I concur. I was expecting way more that a paltry few paragraphs barely talking about the chip's impact.
>itll tear a hole in your stomach. Ive made that mistake once a decade ago.

I know somone suffering from this mistake right now. Did this resolve on its own for you?
OP, if you are the developer of the page, can you make it that users can select the number of books to be displayed on each topic? That would be pretty useful.
oh no! that consultant who I paid $100K to tell me that unit testing would solve all my problems didn't tell me that. maybe its because they have never written a line of code in their life let alone delivered a successful large scale software project, but who knows.
Or even worse you put the microphone on the epigastric vessels and hear moms heartbeat instead of the babies.
Go doesn't allow you to switch off the GC on critical code sections. The switch-off is only for debug/dev purpose.
Show HN: Frappe Charts – GitHub inspired JavaScript charting with zero dependencies
Maybe it's a matter of being in the south Dublin bubble, but I can't think of anyone I know that is religious (aside from a vague cultural identity sense). For the most part I hear the church regarded with scorn.

Things like this may help - https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/school-baptism-bar... - though for all that I just added my daughter to an educate together waitlist. She's two months old.
I've been leaning towards intuitionism for exactly this reason.
Sadly, it makes a lot of results harder to proof (and iirc it even makes some results impossible). I've been toying with the idea that these results are simply 'not useful'.
I have a strong suspicion that Renaissance has some (illegal) advantage that almost nobody else is aware of. They are notorious for isolating information within their own organization, and that could help them keep secrets regarding their edge.

Nobody produces results like they do over such a long period, and it's exceedingly unlikely that they are so much smarter than everyone else. Whether from insider information or market manipulation, their success smells too strongly.
Yeah, agreed. JavaScript doesn't really have any impressive redeeming features. I like it because it's kind of minimally viable and accidentally really useful for dealing with APIs full of duck typed nested records.

It's really hard to be both minimally viable and have a sound and expressive static type system.

Simply typed lambda calculus isn't even Turing complete, and the fate of Haskell's endless extensions indicates an inherent rabbit hole...

Haskell itself has somewhat horrible issues dealing with extensible records, and the solutions are all complex and hard to understand.

Dealing with JSON in Haskell in a quick and easy way is nowadays quite nice, but it took the invention of van Laarhoven lenses and the aeson-lens module...

I greatly prefer JavaScript to Java because I prefer no static type checking over inexpressive static type checking! And expressive type systems are hard to get right, so it's a very classic "worse is better" situation.
Or people who care enough to take an aspirin a day probably also take care of themselves better in other ways, which might be what keeps the cancer away?
My journey with TDD started with hater, moved to skeptic, and is currently on cautionary-supporter.

It's a design methodology, not some new way of unit testing. In fact, I think the more you think of TDD as being testing, the more you're probably missing the point.

Modern OO languages are full of hidden dependencies and perverse side effects. The only sane way to write clear and maintainable code is to write the spec first, that is, you code by writing tests, then writing the code to make the tests pass. In this manner your code is always up-to-date with your spec.

Where is it a bad idea? Exploratory or academic code, for one. Startup code where there's no clear benefit to maintainability or even knowledge of what the app is supposed to do.

Pure functional code is another case entirely. Lately, I've switched to writing small pure FP in microservices, usually with less than 200 lines of code. Writing code like this creates very simple and small pieces of functionality with little hidden state or adverse side effects and a limited cyclomatic complexity factor. I don't see any reason to use TDD here, because there's nothing happening that isn't obvious. (It's a horse of a different color with larger pure FP projects, however. Having said that, one should pay careful attention to whether or not you need to build out huge pure FP execution units in the first place)
I’ve been viewing tests as writing the logic twice. That might sound like a waste but it’s kinda like a form asking you to type your new password twice; you may make a mistake the first time, but making the same mistake twice has much lower odds.

And really, we’re playing a probability game with ourselves, trying to reduce the probability of typing the wrong thing. Writing it twice is one way to do that.
It's fine for any website to choose who it wants to serve. I don't imagine most JavaScript-dependent services are sad about losing a fraction of a percent of their potential users. It's not for them in the first place.
I forgot who said it but it goes something like, "any code without unit tests is legacy code."
TensorRec: A Recommendation Engine Framework in TensorFlow
Earlier fully-integrated boards often used BASIC (e.g. BASIC Stamp and PICAXE). With an Arduino you're already closer to the metal, and you can easily "graduate" to avr-gcc.

Maybe there was another board that could do this, but if even I didn't learn about it, they sucked at promotion.
Google’s Dominance in Washington Faces a Reckoning
This whole thread is a response to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591190

Your points are directly addressed in the pdf. One of his general points being, in practice, the tests become the legacy system instead. And I'd add to that. Given that you've at minimum doubled the code (and doubled the bugs), it seems like a really bad long-term trade off.

Also DI does not reduce coupling. I've seen plenty of code with DI that's just injecting like 30 things, which is obviously therefore coupled. It just makes it really obvious, but DI itself has massive downsides.

If you've ever worked with bad programmers and seen it in the wild now, I'm sure we can agree DI and TDD doesn't stop bad programmers writing bad code. In fact, all it seems to do is make even more of a mess.

Not only do you have to pick apart the bad code, you have to start dealing with carefully moving methods to the right places because DI can make it hard to figure out what's being used where, and then on top of that tests break all over the place because they're entirely dependant on the implementation instead of the functionality.
Suffering from endless “Screenshot.Annotate.Email” in design reviews? Read it
They settled.

The post I linked to is from March, when this circus was just getting started, and the post is by none other than the VMPSoft founder himself.
Getting to market faster than your competitors is more important than having test coverage, in most industries.
The kind of refactor that you are talking about will require a rewrite of the unit tests. Unit Tests are a burden in restoring. They only stay the same if liskov substitution holds. Which is rare in any significant change.
Can I safely say that it's like Chatfuel ("a bot platform", instead of Api.ai which is more NLU) but text-only?
Yeah this kind of nullifies the pull quote

> If Newton had known about such functions, he would have never created calculus.

since Newton did use infinitesimals in his reasoning.
>, if bad programmers write bad code that needs unit tests, they're also going to write bad unit tests that don't test the code correctly. So what's the point?

I don't think one necessarily follows the other. Consider the examples of test pseudo-code:

EXPECT[image_to_text("photo1.jpg") == "cat"]
EXPECT[image_to_text("photo2.jpg") == "dog"]
EXPECT[image_to_text("photo3.jpg") == "apple"]
EXPECT[image_to_text("photo4.jpg") == "Barack Obama"]

A novice bootcamp graduate could write that test harness code.
However, it requires an experienced programmer with a PhD in Machine Learning to write the actual neural net code for image_to_text(). (Relevant XKCD[1])

(Yes, there's also variability of skill in writing test code. An experienced programmer will think of extra edge cases that a novice will not and therefore, write more comprehensive tests.)

That still doesn't change the fact that writing code that tests to check for correct results is often easier than writing the algorithm itself.

It also contradicts the notion that refactoring code requires that the test code be refactored. That's not always true. Since the jpg file format came out in 1992, that test code could have been written in that same year and it would still be valid today, 25 years later. We still want to ensure the image_to_text() function will return "cat" for "photo1.jpg" even if we refactor the low-level code to use the latest A.I. algorithms.

Another example of a regression test to test performance:

TIMING[EXPECT[image_to_text("photo1.jpg") == "cat"] < 500 milleseconds]

Again, it's easy for a novice programmer to write a "performance timing specification executes in less than 500ms". It's much harder to refactor the code from slow code O(n^2) to faster code O(n log n).

To do a meta-analysis of the debate with Coplien: a big reason we're arguing his conclusion is that he complains about this abstract thing he called "unit tests". If he had copy-pasted concrete examples of the bad unit testing code into his pdf, maybe more of us would agree with him? In other words, I'd like to see and judge for myself if Coplien's "unit tests" look like the regression tests that SQLite and NASA use to improve quality -- or -- if they are frivolous tests that truly wastes developers' time. Since he didn't do that, we're all in the dark as to the "test code waste" he's actually complaining about.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1425/
Dnsnd
Show HN: Lab Spend – Pricing Search Engine for Research Chemicals and Supplies
Scientists pay radically different prices for the exact chemicals and supplies. We've seen a greater than 10x difference and commonly 3-4x difference in prices for the exact same product.

Complex pricing, rebates, discounting and limited transparency have made it difficult for scientists to determine a fair price. The pricing does not follow a simple trend based on purchasing volume. We've created a community and gathered pricing details from public sources to build a pricing search engine.

The search engine is called Open Pricing and accepts catalog numbers of chemicals and supplies then returns the range, mean, median and histogram of prices.

If you're background is not as scientific researcher, we're solving a similar problem, which exists in other industries such as used cars by Kelley Blue Book, new cars by TrueCar or home values by Zillow.
Building Better Test Suites
How to change a computer DNS address
Pros and cons. Also I'd take any non too toxic place if I have the freedom to turn it into a beautiful forest / garden.
Getting good at TDD requires being bad at TDD for a while, which requires someone to write bad test code at some point.

But if the entire population as a whole is still having problems with TDD for as long as TDD has been around, then it needs to be a niche methodology.

Our decisions to adopt methodologies/technologies can't revolve around the perfect case of a crack A-team of developers who are good at everything they do.

Think of the mediocre developers!
How to connect with you?
Clickable Link: https://labspend.com/openpricing
> You have never worked with someone from Oracle. They do not try to hire remotely the best, they hire cheap. Anyone that can churn out barely functional code, use their customers to functional test it, and take often half a fiscal year to provide a bug fix for you.

They have a huge services division and that's the same formula used by all the big players. It's a numbers game for billing and they shoot to make it work by having a few highly competent people cover up for the C- players.

> Oracle is now more of a technical holding company than a software company, aside from their db, they merely pickup/purchase new companies and wring them out for revenue. Anything Oracle writes themselves is usually terrible.

Spot on. The database is incredible though the use cases I'd recommend it for over open source alternatives has shrunk to nearly nothing. Outside of that, the Oracle App landscape (Financials, HR, ...) are hilariously terrible, especially factoring in the prices paid for it.
Optimize Images to Reduce Page Weight: File Formats, Tools and RWD
Oh, that's bad. Unsubscribe blindly sends any arbitrary email address a summary of the internal-only, unpatched vulnerability.
Problem is that if you've ever had an ultrasound, it's not really something you can just tell someone how to do. They manipulate the transducer in real time, angling it just right, giving it just the right amount of pressure on the skin. Even if you did it in real time I can't imagine the frustration of a physician over the phone going "No move it to your right, now up, now back further, ok less pressure, now more pressure."
Why in the hell would you write a unit test in your contrived example? I mean look at it!