skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a management graduate looking to work with a technical person. My contact information is in my profile. Particularly interested in mobile, marketplaces and merchantry.
Yeah, that was my guess. The fact that it was the fourth comment makes the parody angle more likely still.
"Don't rename files on a branch" isn't a small hole.
Dont you think a few days is cutting it a bit short? Have you worked with a lot of graphic designers? Do you understand that a good design isn't an overnight thing? That it requires work?

I have always thought that coming to someone with just a couple days to do something that you don't know how to do and assuming that it is simple and easy and can be done in a couple days is just about the most insulting thing you can do professionally.

I assume you wouldn't mean any insult by it but leaving something that you can't do til the last minute and assuming it is simple is well... think back to a time ( assuming you have been through this ) where your non-coding boss came to you with a 'simple request' that had to be done 'right away to complete a deal' which wasn't actually simple at all. It might appear simple to someone without any knowledge of the problem domain but you as 'the expert' know that isn't the case.

Perhaps you have already talked to a graphic designer who gave you a general timeline for what you want and I'm totally off base, but it doesn't sound like you have.
Capitalism doesn't work because of accumulation of capital - in fact it might be argued that the more capital is transferred around the better in capitalism, which is why free markets and trade are advocated.

Capitalism works because of increasing productivity and because it is a more efficient method of allocating resources than a planned economy.
Shit My Dad Says put it a lot more succinctly:

“That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don’t do it for them.”

http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays/status/4811790555
#11 FTA:

> Try to think of every visitor as an honored guest. If you think of “web traffic,” 15 visitors is disappointing. If you think of 15 people deciding to spend time with you they could spend anywhere, and they’re choosing to spend it with you – they’re choosing to spend their life energy reading your thoughts – that’s very cool and humbling, and suddenly chugging along with 15 readers feels pretty good.

That really resonates well with me. Blogging feels--at least to me--like an isolated platform. It's me writing, and people may or may not read. But the idea that the author presents here is almost like sitting in a room with friends and telling them a story. It's a nice image.
Really it's "don't rename files if you use branches at all" (because renaming a file in trunk will cause merges of outstanding branches to fail)
But the article isn't about not religiously following TDD. It's about why "I don’t write any unit tests or specs". Testing isn't discontinuously one or the other. There's a huge, continuous spectrum in between the two extremes.
Like.fm != Last.fm

I have no idea about Like.fm since I've never used it, but I agree that Last.fm is better than Ping for now. However, I think that since Ping just comes with iTunes it will be able to garner a much larger userbase, which could make it much more valuable as Ping itself improves. Last.fm is just a little bit too nerdy/difficult for a lot of people to deal with.
One caveat: I come from the Ruby world, which has top-notch testing support. So maybe it's horrible in other-platform-land.

I think that it is slow going, at first. Testing is a different skill than regular coding, and at first it goes slow. But now, I spend much less time writing tests because I already know how to properly write them.

It's hard to properly evaluate the amount of time tests save you because it's an up-front investment. But I can't count the number of times I've wanted to change something fairly large in my codebase, and did so fearlessly, because then all my tests broke and I was able to quickly fix things where they were broken. In one recent project I decided to completely re-do the authentication system, and it only took me about an hour, because I already had an exact list of every place that needed attention, due to having great test coverage.

> It does seem like a lot of busy work and not a lot thought put into where the value is.

I see it the other way: if code has to be written, it should also be tested. If it's valuable enough to have spend the time to implement, it's worth making sure that it works correctly.
Quick Ref for Clojure Core
When's your next prime birthday (in days)
The equal-odds rule is simply wrong. A few examples: Andrew Wiles, Charles Darwin, John Forbes Nash. These people produced a small amount of work, but they shook the earth. Some people are geniuses, and some are not. It appears rather that some geniuses are prolific while others are not. Examples of some prolific ones: Einstein, Serge Lang.

Edit: A commenter pointed out that Charles Darwin goes in the second list.
I remember flying in the copilot seat with a laptop on my lap in a six seater. I think this was... four weeks ago? Didn't seem to compromise any kind of safety. Do you really think if someone wanted to electronically tamper with the plane they would be as obvious as opening a laptop and working on an email?
Amsterdam allows pimps (I believe someone mentioned this below) which contributes directly to their particular woes.

Prostitution is illegal in Japan.

It's not really a question if legalizing it will end exploitation, it's a question of legalizing activity between two consenting parties, and with it being legal, better affording protection from exploitation. In other words, licensed and regulated prostitution is a better tool to fight human trafficking and exploitation than keeping it illegal.
4 Funny Social Media Videos (and a Challenge)
This content is inappropriate to hackerne.ws being celebrity drama and not startup, business, or tech/programming news.

(Or intellectually inspiring for that matter)

Try to make your future submissions more relevant to the tone and focus on the community. If you have any questions there is a FAQ that can be found here:

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In particular read the news guidelines page.

Cheers and good luck on your next submission.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Mix :

The Essential Mix is a weekly radio show on BBC Radio 1
currently broadcast between 03:00 and 05:00 Saturday morning.
Originally broadcast on 30 October 1993, The Essential
Mix features contemporary DJs and music producers of
electronic dance music.
Not sure I disagree overall, but Darwin isn't a very good example. He produced quite a lot of writing throughout a long career, and his most famous book, On the Origin of Species, came somewhat late (he was 50, and it was something like his tenth or eleventh published book).
Well, yes. Which is better: options, plugins and experimentation; or only one way to do it?
Ha, tell that to the Fortran 77 dudes. There is a forest behind those trees.
I've waited 15 years for this link. Thank you.

My personal favourite, from 1997: http://thenine.ca/essential/1997/1997.03.02%20-%20Essential%...
Introduction to Data Compression
I think we are talking about different things. What I mean is: there are people living in squalor right now. Therefore it follows that "we" do not automatically always find a solution if people live in squalor. Therefore "resourcefulness will solve all our problems" has been refuted in my opinion.

I know that the definition of poverty is subjective, hence my use of the term squalor. In my country (Germany) poverty is defined as having less than a percentage of the average income. So most people "below the poverty line" are actually rich - they have health insurance and everything. It is indeed rather meaningless to use the term "poverty" in that way.
Use automated tests for any software where the probability of you working on it in the future is > 0.

Any testing is better than none.

Good testing is better than bad.

Good tests;

* Are relatively simple to write if the design is decent

* Make clear what is being tested

* Do not break if something unrelated changes

* Run quickly

Understand the difference between unit testing, and integration testing. Chances are, you're doing the latter, thinking you're doing the former, and wondering why it's so much work.

Lastly, know when TDD and BDD is appropriate.

For me, it is around the 25% mark; earlier, and I spend too much time fixing the tests as the design goalposts change, later, and I spend too much time fixing bugs that could have been prevented by tests.
I think it is difficult to actually assess the veracity of the equal-odds hypothesis. You don't know how much Darwin or Einstein threw away, or how much of their stuff was irrelevant and forgotten.

I was just reading this: http://matt.might.net/articles/ways-to-fail-a-phd/ which notes that Einstein's phd thesis is both obscure and forgotten, and inaccurate compared to his later greatness.

I should add however, that the equal-odds thing is the way that i learned to be a better photographer. Shoot as much as you can, figure out what you did to take the good ones (I guess it's like the monte carlo method for artistic improvement).
Agreed. I submitted a couple of patches to Rails recently and I would have been far more reluctant to try to make fixes if I hadn't been able to verify them with a fairly extensive test suite.

People get too dogmatic about testing and particular testing methodologies but testing in general is a very powerful and useful tool when used wisely.
If they dislike the price controls and monopsonies that exist in other countries, they can avoid those markets entirely. Once they agree to participate and begin exporting their drugs, we should have every right to import them back at a discount. As large corporations have shown in the past, they have no issue with planned economies, as long as the planning is done in their favor (China, Dubai).

It is horribly unjust for Americans, many of whom have no or poor health insurance, to be forced to pay more money than anyone else on earth for prescription drugs. If Big Pharma, which spends disproportionate amounts of money on direct marketing to consumers, can't produce the medications we need cheaply and efficiently, that represents a market failure, and the government should step in and take the lead role in drug development. Research could be done through the NIH grant system and the results could be given away, unpatented, to the entire world. We could get the same results for less money, as the NIH doesn't need to make a profit and has no stock holders to answer to. It could even serve to improve our global reputation, showing the US to be a force for good in the world.
Yea that was my reason for making Like.fm. I didn't like all the fragmented 3rd party clients. After you sign up for Last.fm it doesn't even take you to the client download page. It really made it hard for someone not really into it all.

I wanted Like.fm to be dead simple install and forget. You don't need to "love" tracks, you can just rate directly from iTunes like you normally do (if you do). And since my user base would be small, I bring Like.fm to the user base via the Facebook tab.

I think someone commented before that the trick is to get the average non-enthusiast user to install a program to monitor your music. Well if tech can't be made easier to use then mother's and grandma's wouldn't be using iPads today! So Like.fm is your less nerdy, easier to setup social music site.
It is very much dependent on the kind of code you write. If you write UI code then automated testing might not help you much. But for algorithmic code you can usually write short tests that test very comprehensively and catch nearly all bugs.

For example if you are writing a sorting function you write some code to generate a random array, sort it, and test whether it is sorted.

n = random int;
A = int[n];
for(i in 0..n) A[i] = random int;
sort(A);
for(i in 0..n-1) assert(A[i] <= A[i+1]);

Running this kind of test saves you a heck of a lot of time manually testing scenarios, and it tests much more comprehensively too. Tools like QuickCheck make this style of testing even easier by providing ways to randomly generate things and if it finds a bug it tries to get a small example that produces buggy behavior.

I do not see much value in the kind of testing a lot of people seem to do though, for example in a web application putting something in the database and then testing that it's there. If the test is about as complicated or more complicated than the thing it's testing that is a good sign the test is not very useful.
The driving philosophy of these engines is that your presentation layer should not contain any logic that goes beyond the rendering of data, and your templating should be an aid to outputting HTML, not merely a medium.

Take Django templates, for example: you output data using tags and filters, with support for defining commonly-used blocks of HTML to reduce redundancy.
Take Haml, which uses CSS selector syntax to reduce the amount of HTML boileplate to a bare minimum.

The common factor of these engines is that your end up writing less code than plain HTML, and unlike this new engine for ASP, the mixing of code and presentation doesn't look completely horrendous.
I may regret posting this ....

But this is what you probably want to do:

user@host:/path/to/EssentialMixRip09.04.10$ wget -rl 0 -np -A .mp3 http://thenine.ca/essential/
"But I can't count the number of times I've wanted to change something fairly large in my codebase, and did so fearlessly, because then all my tests broke and I was able to quickly fix things where they were broken "

To me that is a bit scary. Tests don't prove the absence of bugs. They can only prove the presence of them.

I never make big changes, even in the most tested pieces of code that have unit, integration, UI, and manual testing without some trepidation. Because the fact of the matter is that these code paths get the reputation they get because a customer comes back and says this doesn't work and we're like, "oh... that's how you use it?"

"I see it the other way: if code has to be written, it should also be tested. If it's valuable enough to have spend the time to implement, it's worth making sure that it works correctly."

I don't disagree. It should be tested. I think our disagreement is if TDD/BDD style unit testing is the best way to do so.
Quite right - he goes in the second list.
Telnet to a Superboard II using Python and the cassette ports
Google agrees to pay $8.5 million to make Buzz privacy lawsuits go away
Validate your code by testing it in the three major layout engines. Force it to degrade by disabling flash, stylesheets, javascript, etc and fix what you feel you can. Get as much content on-screen as quickly as you can, whether by using CDNs or backend caching or local storage, and know exactly what happens on your page in the first few seconds after onLoad. If you're feeling particularly generous, annotate the code for screen readers and hide jump links around your page.

But don't validate your code on the W3C validator and be done with it. If you have to run the validator at all - and I haven't in years - take the validation errors as suggestions and not as gospel.
Can we eat to starve cancer? (Ted Talk, William Li)
Disney's Nine Old Men
Does anyone else have fond memories of the Oakenfold mixes?

http://thenine.ca/essential/2000/2000.02.13%20-%20Essential%...

http://thenine.ca/essential/2000/2000.05.21%20-%20Essential%...
It looks very tablet-friendly, actually. How is Ubuntu's touch input system, if any?
I wish more people would bold various parts of the article and break it up into sections like this - makes skimming much easier. I have been doing this on my blog for sometime and it's really the best thing for my readers. You can write the longest post ever but as long as it's well broken up and important parts highlighted/bolded you'll still get people commenting etc
I realise that other people's musical taste is not necessarily interesting, but http://thenine.ca/essential/1995/1995.11.11%20-%20Essential%... is what got me really into dance music, is what opened my ears to the musical possibilities of stringing records together, and made me think "I've got to learn how to do this".
This is the same Peter Thiel that was recently complaining about women being able to vote.

http://gawker.com/5231390/facebook-backer-wishes-women-could...
640x720 PER EYE; you still get a 720p amount of pixels, your brain just has to combine them; which it does in spades.
I agree - there is a vagueness issue with the rule, and it is not obviously falsifiable. But as stated, the rule does not discuss unpublished works - it is a statement about published work, and the statement is that each scientist is throwing the dice when they publish, and there is nothing the scientist can do to increase his chances.
I think that sometimes people lose sight of the fact that other people are different. You may not care for sports cars while someone else might. Doesn't make one of you superior to the other. Neither one of you can say that the other is wrong and should have made the choice you did.

It is the same thing with many programming methedologies, including unit tests. Maybe unit tests work well for large companies, and I would think they might be ideal for parts of certain types of server applications.

But I have tried the methodology, and found that it slows me down and produces lower quality code. For me, it produces a lot of false positives as the some number of unit tests become out of date each sprint, and the significantly increased overhead slows down development significantly which means less quality functionality per unit time gets developed. I've tested this theory with a real product written %100 solely by me, and found that the actual results in production where there were no unit tests and no design documents (but lots of design "notes") resulted in a shocking result: Not a single exception over a large deployment among thousands of customers and many months and only one reported bug which at the end of the day is actually working correctly but the design decision was not clearly thought out and the software does something the user doesn't expect in a corner case.

Here I see people talking about refusing to hire people who don't believe in Unit tests, and everywhere else on the planet I see people talking about Unit tests as if they are a religion, and as if nobody could write competent code without using them.

But realize this, every programmer is different, and the path to the highest quality code per unit time may not be via unit tests.
YouTube is full of Frozen Bubble movies. See for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nUkly7AkFs , someone completing level 70.
Perhaps she didn't realize that she could study for the test and then pass it after one try. According to the article she has almost no formal education, so that seems possible: "It was not until she turned 15 that she joined a formal school as a fourth grader. But her schooling ended there a few years later."
Is it Time for You to Earn or to Learn?
You keep quoting numbers, but you never talk about why those numbers exist.

In Queensland, the reason that number is so high is because the government has made it very hard and very expensive for brothels to go legal, and the majority that do go broke. It is more profitable to run an illegal one, than it is to operate a legal one. So though you are statistically correct, your reasoning is not.

Additionally, your own myth about strippers is demonstrably false. I know this because I used to be married to one and was involved in that scene on a personal level for many, many years. Here in NYC, some girls pull six figures. My ex-wife did. At one point she was making more than I was. While prostitution of some variety does exist in the legal strip clubs in NYC, it still was a relatively small number of women. Most of the girls that I've met and interacted with, which probably numbers in the 100's, fell into four broad categories: college students, party girls, single mothers and poorly educated immigrants. I would call none of them victims, nor would I ever call them exploited. Most of them are very shrewd, very business minded and are capitalizing on the only resources really afforded to them given their individual situations. In fact, the only sadness I feel about the entire thing is for the lonely men lining up to swallow whole the illusion that within the walls of these places they are wanted, sexually attractive, etc. It is pretty depressing to watch.
Really? Really? Come on, keep this on Reddit please.
Brooklyn's Finest (Movie) Download
The opposition between wealth and spirituality is well known and ancient. In a Christian context, you see it in such biblical remarks as "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:25) and "You cannot serve both God and money." (Matt. 6:24). Vows of poverty are widely practiced throughout Christendom, from the severe vows taken by monks to the more lax popular view that the heavy pursuit of wealth is sinful or at least misguided. I don't know how other religions view wealth, but I would be surprised if the opposition was uniquely Christian.

The wealthy tend to reject religion. That's well-known among the religious.

Why do the poor tend to embrace it? Well, I can give one answer. Apparently . . . it helps. http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13369

This paper examines whether participation in religious
or other social organizations can help offset the
negative effects of growing up in a disadvantaged
environment. . . . Overall, we find strong evidence
that youth with religiously active parents are less
affected later in life by childhood disadvantage than
youth whose parents did not frequently attend religious
services.
Sadly, you are only as good as your last piece of work - not your best piece of work.
> Tests don't prove the absence of bugs. They can only prove the presence of them.

Absolutely, and having a list of where they were (now) present was a real productivity boon.

It's true, I think we're arguing over something very small. I don't think automated testing is the end-all be-all. But I do think it's much much better than not doing it.
I spoke too soon. On the second page, the article says she did study, but did so "phonetically" and thus didn't understand what she was studying.
yes, fair point, the domain is published works. The observation about Einstein still stands though yeh? :)
Or install extension.fm :)
Oh wow, overload. Tempted to leach, but...

Anyway, here is a recommendation:

2006.03.26 - This is a good long mix I listened to many times.
But the author wasn't arguing religiosity makes the country worse. More the other way around, actually.
Forgiven, yes. Used as a thesis about the merits of simplicity, not so much.
North Dakota in 2008 had 2 murders (both by stabbing) and has a pretty high percentage of the population owning guns. People who look at the "how" in political matter instead of the "why" really bug me and do not serve society well. People who want to kill others will find a means.

// I have a cousin who would not be alive today if he didn't have a gun in his youth (damn city people dropping off dogs after they are no longer cute)