skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The wiki on the Big Bang is probably a good place to start:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang

It seems fairly well-developed with lots of interesting references.
Ask HN: too late to join Facebook as an engineer?
Is it too late to join Facebook now as an engineer, in term of equity package, and work impact? FB's recent valuation is $33 billion with stock priced at $76 on private market.
Traveling salesman problem for art
> It is in effect like having a party and making everyone wear headphones.

Now I know what I'm doing tomorrow night. Thanks!
Summary: ``I don't get it.''

The parts of my code bases that are the most trouble and the hardest to work with and the parts that have the least testing have the greatest overlap.

I have some bad tests that fail sporadically, but I also have some tests that fail that indicate something is actually wrong and will show up in a production environment in a really, really bad way some day (speaking from experience).

If you're _why, I think you've got a good case for why not to write unit tests. Unfortunately, nobody is _why
Hey, it's an old story:

Boy meets girl.

Boy loses girl.

Boy makes girl.
FrostWire for Android is real and it gives your phone super powers
Why You Should Read "The Four Hour Work-Week" Again
don't know until you apply.
The only real way there has ever been to make sure the computer is following your instructions, is to tell those instructions to it twice. (Non-inferential) static typing is about telling the computer the input and output types of your functions twice. Unit tests are about telling the computer the algorithm (or an equivalent, such as a direct mapping function from a subset of example inputs to pre-calculated outputs), twice. These are both just protoforms of Reliable Computing—the name for the actual software engineering that NASA and friends do, where they make the whole system twice (or more) and then run those systems in parallel to ensure they're always "voting" the same way.

But sometimes you don't need engineering; sometimes you just need a dirty hack. Hacking is basically the opposite of engineering: it espouses DSLs and macros that encode everything exactly once, it prides elegance and other aesthetic factors of code above engineering tolerances. And, of course, it's a lot more fun to do—so it gets people interested in your code, which can actually be the best thing, even more so than engineering it. Linux is a big hack, and because of that all sorts of people enjoy working with it. _why was an eminent hacker, and because of that his code (and tutorials) are still used when getting people interested in coding. None of this code is guaranteed to work, unlike code that has been engineered—but that's okay, in 99% of cases.
Why did you get downvoted to 0 with this comment? This place is getting ridiculous with the down voting now.
Ah, I had missed that part. Nicely nefarious: the reason we need to mandate trackable internet IDs is to protect your privacy.
The entire point of writing software is to automate processes that can be done manually, but are too time-consuming and/or hard to do so. Testing is a great example: yes, I could run through my entire application and hand-test it every time I make a change, or I could automate the process and save myself a ton of time and work.

Viewpoints like these are the reason we have a long way to go before software is truly reliable.
We've hired two in about the last 300 days and continue to look for more. Your question does make it clear that the copy in the job posting is weird. I'll get it updated with something that doesn't make it seem like we've had no luck for over a year.

In terms of the scarcity, to me it seems like there is but I've only done hiring in this area so I don't have anything to compare it to.
Even with the photograph I thought it was just a metaphor until the end. I assumed he had just photoshopped the horse in to make the article more amusing.
Found this link: http://www.quora.com/Is-now-a-good-time-to-join-Facebook-as-...
Is this article satire? His "reasons" are completely invalid.

>>> “Examples” of unit tests suck donkey balls every time.

So lack of good examples imply that the whole system is useless? Yes, an example of "assert True" is useless, but just download any of the thousands of open source projects that use unit tests and look at the code.

>>> They seem to be a great way to spend some extra time doing time consuming, not very hard work.

It's not that time consuming, really. And it being easy work is a good thing. A lot of benefit for easy work!

>>> You have to think about the “evil” business side too.

Running away from your problems is never a good idea. Face the "evil" (whatever that means) side like a man.

>>> Unit tests=more code

OK, there is a difference between useless code and good code. Unit tests doesn't make your system any more complicated or harder to read. In fact, it makes your system more stable and easier to read.

>>> That is mostly because I’m a lazy-ass bastard.

Ah, so we get to the bottom of the problem.
Just launched our web app
Or good old last.fm. Funny story: all that talk about Ping [+] got me to resurrect my old last.fm account and to start scrobbling again.

[+] I tested it and it was awful. I actually like iTunes and buy all my music there but Ping is just an abomination.
A good way to think about this is to replace the man with a fourth weight, fixed to the rope (as opposed to a pulley). Now it should be clear that the weights would not rest in that configuration unless they were supported by a floor.
Fonts looks much better here on ubuntu then on the macbook air I have around. To each his own.
> I just personally haven’t found any use for them in any of my projects or my clients’ projects.

I wonder how that person makes sure that what they deliver actually works. Testing by hand can only get you so far. And when the client calls a year later with some change requests, tests are a great way to know that you haven't fucked up something that used to work because you forgot a small implementation detail.
Actions have consequences. Could Germany be even more prosperous if it hadn’t started a war? Possible. But if that’s what they wanted then they shouldn’t have started a war with the explicit goal of, well, world domination.

Germans today are just as rich as the French or Britains, much richer than Poles or Russians. Germany has the fourth largest economy in the world (behind China, Japan and the US). The world owes us nothing, we owe the world.
I'm ambivalent about testing. I've no fear of not writing tests for something small or scrappy. But.. when I've persevered, weeks into a project they've saved my ass more than once and I've been able to recognize situations where a bug would have previously forced me to spend hours debugging or to release broken software.

TDD isn't a one size fits all technique. But just because it takes time, doesn't always yield immediate benefits, and can leave a bad taste in the mouth at first, it doesn't mean you wouldn't ultimately benefit (even beer shares these negatives ;-)).

The great thing, though, is that there are so many ways to practice testing. If you don't want to go with full on "test first" TDD practices, even rolling out a handful of automatic integration tests could cover your most onerous painpoints (this is my strategy on old projects that have no tests - something's better than nothing). Though TDD's proponents foam at the mouth about always testing, it's not a binary option - you can wade in the shallow end and get into deeper waters over time as it begins to click.
It would be neat to see some of these places (tomb of the forbidden ladder, bricked in showers at the library, etc), if anyone knows where to find pictures.
To elaborate: you tell the computer a specification ("what to do"), you tell the computer an implementation ("how to do it"), and then you get the computer to check that the implementation conforms to the specification.
I think it's only okay in certain circumstances. Many governments participate directly in their healthcare markets, which affects the prices at which pharmaceuticals can be sold in such a country. If goods with manipulated prices are allowed to be traded freely, the prices in other countries will be affected as well. Companies that produce the goods in question will either have to accept lower profit margins or refuse to sell their goods in manipulated markets. Regardless, such a policy would lower the expected value of future technological advances in the field, which would result in less effort being directed to such advances.

It is undesirable for technology to advance at a slower pace than would be possible if people were expected to pay market prices for the products the technology would help to improve or create. If you value future advances in technology, you should want your government to minimize manipulation of the markets for such technologies. If, on the other hand, you'd like as many people to benefit from current technology as cheaply as possible, you should want your government to force prices down as much as possible.
>>> Face the "evil" (whatever that means) side like a man.

What? It's not a battle or a problem. Sometimes you need to get something out, or you're writing a little throwaway bit of code. Sometimes that involves a tradeoff in future maintainability/pain. It shouldn't justify never testing, but I think it's a valid reason to not religiously follow TDD.
The article is weak, there is no real reasoning to follow. This is at best a teaser at his book, for a real discussion we'd have to get and read that.

But even beyond that, I heavily disagree with the whole discussion. If I haven't missed some important new advance, the whole parallel universes theory and much of the theories of what happened before or during the beginning of the Universe are not really science. Most of it is based on some speculative interpretation of the mathematical formulas of quantum physics and/or string theory.

But there is no reason those formulas have to be an accurate description of the physical laws in those boundary conditions, where they are known to break hard. So basically they make assertions based on a mathematical theory (which is not bad per se), but those assertions cannot be falsified, as they all operate outside the boundaries of the Universe itself. Non-falsifiable theories are just not science.

The same goes for the strong anthropic principle. This is again making statements that are inherently not testable. That might be philosophical speculation, but it's not hard science.

This is particularly strange as Hawking uses those borderline scientific theories to discount a religious speculation; but both theories are non-falsifiable by definition, so what's the point? I'm not religious, but I don't see the big difference between two non-falsifiable cosmologies there.
You are anthropomorphizing "Capitalism," as a sort of aggregate of all capitalist behavior, but with a single goal. That's not accurate. Individuals certainly try to accumulate wealth, but the best way to make a lot of money is to find a better or cheaper way to do something--a side effect of which is the impoverishment of somebody else. Just look at, e.g., the way Sun nearly killed IBM in the late 80's and early 90's. Sun never made as much as IBM did, but the people who founded Sun made more than they otherwise would have.

That, I think, is why you see internal contradictions. You're pointing out that the best capitalists do stuff that harms the average capitalist; if Myspace is making money, there's always a Zuckerberg waiting to ruin things. But of course, there is no "Capitalism" that encompasses all of the goals of Myspace's owners and Facebook's.

That also takes care of the apparent contradiction of outsourcing. The capitalists who lose to outsourcing don't like it; the outsourcers do. There's less money made (since the outsourcers charge less), but the economy is more efficient. That's capitalism--the net result of lots of self-interested people, who often act against one another's interests. It's not the vision of capitalism in which the rich, as a group, make consensus decisions to advance their collective interests.

Thus, that version of capitalism is wrong.

Oh, and slavery and colonialism are much, much older than capitalism as we understand it today. In fact, one can make the case that slaves are the oldest form of property. Certainly, I've never heard of a civilization that advanced at all and never had slaves.
It's slightly foolish to think about such an idealized scenario, but I believe that the answer is no, until mass A rises fully, the rope can still slide around masses B and C without needing to apply its tension to moving them upward.
On small projects where one has complete ownership and knowledge of the code, one can get by without testing. When you have a large project with tens to hundreds of developers, automated testing gives the developers the confidence and comfort to make large or deep changes with an accurate measure as to the overall stability of the product, even the areas where an individual developer may have little domain knowledge of.
Does Thiel address that point, or argue that there should be exceptions for American pharma companies?

Our healthcare industry is psuedo-nationalized, in the sense that we have an inefficient domestic market in order to subsidize our ridiculously expensive regulatory approval process, all of which provides enough excess cash flow to fund lots of good research. Things would be different with fewer trade barriers, but the main result is that either a) the FDA would get weaker, or b) our domestic pharma industry would look a lot like that of e.g. India (cheap stuff derived from other people's research, not as much new stuff). I guess we'd buy the next generation of Lipitor, Prozac, and Viagra from the Swiss.
Yeah, that's lame. It should be more like "Image->Save", enter a name (and optional additional tags), and hit "OK."

How am I supposed to continue working on the image later, or on a different PC or tablet, if the only way I can save it is by sending it to GMail?
Agreed! He's been sitting there.all penguiny for years!
Except, not necessarily, no. Sorry, my grandparent post should have been clearer that using a public-key method is only one of the ways to do authentication in SSL/TLS. Either way, some symmetric cipher is used for all the content.

See: http://www.ipa.go.jp/security/rfc/RFC2246-AFEN.html

Search down for Diffie-Hellman.

The Wikipedia article might also be useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie-Hellman_key_exchange
We found it merely OK. The service not particularly friendly, the food so-so. But it was nice to visit as we were just playing tech-tourist. I suspect it'd be a lot better going with other techies or investors rather than when on vacation with the wife.. :-)
What OS are you using that has infinite sized TCP send buffers?
Estonia was certainly unusual in that the occupying Soviets even managed to kill almost as many Jews as the occupying Germans. The reprehensible behaviour of Soviet armies in their sphere of influence nevertheless isn't enough to make me disappointed the Axis didn't win...
Greg Mankiw: A Course Load for the Game of Life
So the one "small" hole in the merging infrastructure in subversion is what makes git "shine" above subversion?

This issue is well documented and accepted as a deficiency - http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.branchmerge.advanced....

Personally I have found subversions merging support to be good enough for the past few years and when you are introducing a modern VCS into a shop which has used VSS, CVS or PVCS for the past age it is a much easier transition for the users than git would be and provides much better merging support that VSS or PVCS users ever had!
No, it's not free. It's paid for by the taxpayers.
On the last one, what's likely to be confusing from an American point of view is that it isn't actually Catholic and Protestant groups, but Catholic and non-Catholic, with a large part of the latter being Eastern Orthodox (Ukraine, Greece, Serbia, Romania).
NES Hack – DIY Android NES Controller
I tried the Samsung products in the store, and they were perfect. I ended up buying a cheaper Samsung model (one that wasn't on display) and the ghosting is really bad.

Is it the TV? Is it my environment? I dunno. But I wasn't willing to pay twice the price to go up to the next set, and I really, really like 3D, so I kept mine. When the next generation comes out, and they've got things worked out a little better, I'll likely buy one of the better sets.

I enjoy the 3D on it, but it could be better.
Why I Love Photoshop
boring ...
J. Craig Venter’s Corporate Strategy? The Scientific Method
Less tersely, I will simply quote Tim Sweeney:

LISP: This is the apex of untyped programming with nested scoping and metadata manipulation. It's at the end of the line, not because of lack of potential, but it's so simple and powerful than any improvements to it can be implemented in LISP itself without affecting the core language. In 100 years, after the last C and C++ programmers are long gone, there will still be LISP enthusiasts. But don't expect large-scale software development to happen this way.

So yes, Lisp has a future in that it epitomizes a certain programming paradigm, but as a language with real production significance it has a very hard road ahead, and will need all the advantages that a single-implementation JVM/CLR dialect like Clojure can provide.

You'll notice that hardly any of the companies spawned by Y-Combinator, the ultimate Lisp cult, actually built their systems in Lisp.
> Also, did you know that the Eastern provinces have some crazy tax and startup capital advantages for starting your own tech / net related business?

Care to elaborate? I'm just starting a CS degree in the east, and I'm interested in starting a business in my free time.
I like it when people write blogs like this. One question to determine if it was bad satire or not and often times, the interview is over. Makes hiring so much easier.
"Globalization" is a great newspeak kind of word.

It's meaning in the propaganda domain means breaking down of boundaries between nations, free trade, exchange of knowledge, culture, the world becomes a more connected, and of course, a better place for everyone.

It's actual meaning is that large corporate entities only get to freely move across national boundaries in order to exploit market (consumer or labor) inefficiencies. China was a boom for a cheap labor market. It will become less so as the standards of living rise. So some companies are eying Vietnam. If Africa stabilizes, it might be next.

In fact, in the real sense globalization usually means anti-globalization. In its best form it is using governments in order to set tariffs, international trade restrictions, copyright agreements, immigration policy and so on. The "free trade" is usually the free trade imposed on other, weaker, countries by the corporate of the stronger countries.

The propaganda meaning of globalization is very useful in discrediting any of its opponents. The "antiglobalization" protesters are apparently "anti" friendship among nations, "anti" free trade, "anti" cooperation, how silly of them.
The issue isn't about testing, it's about unit testing. And really more specifically about BDD/TDD.

And I must admit that I've struggled with TDD myself. And I've generally hit a couple of issues:

1) Bug rates in test code for some reason seem to be higher than that in production code. Not sure why. But the end result is a LOT more test bugs than product bugs. I've sat in meetings where people wanted to block shipping the product because of test bugs. No evidence there were any blocking issues in production code.

2) The opportunity cost of TDD style unit tests are rather high. Given the choice I think I'd rather a more in-depth design and code review.

While I think unit tests are valuable, I take a more sparse notion of them. Based on code review and design, unit test the code that you have worries about. Where you think there's a greater chance of a seemingly innocuous change breaking the code.

I've seen little value, in the projects I've been a part of, with the BDD/TDD approach. It does seem like a lot of busy work and not a lot thought put into where the value is. And there's actually pretty good industry data (and I suspect open source data as well) that its actually not hard to determine what parts of a program are going to be the buggiest in production. I'd really love to see a test approach that is density driven...

But with that said, if you're writing a 20,000 line web app, TDD/BDD is probably fine. You can generally kick out the code and get full test coverage in very short order.
Here's my take on testing:

I'm the kind of guy who likes to get things working as fast as possible. When I'm excited about an app or feature idea, I can't be bothered with writing tests along the way, much less before I write my code. I get much more satisfaction out of writing code, running it in the browser, and testing it the old fashioned way. I build apps and features quickly and this usually makes me (or the client I'm building it for) very happy in the process.

I do, however, understand the value of testing. Unlike the OP I have seen real world cases where testing has been a godsend. I often feel guilty for not writing tests, even if it's just a toy app I'm developing for my own curiosity.

To balance these opposing tendencies of mine, I have taken a ATDD approach to testing, or "Adaptive Test Driven Development". That is, write tests for the most critical components of the site, such as anything dealing with money or sensitive information, and write tests for the parts of the app that get used the most, both by me when I'm developing them, and the users once it's deployed.

When I've gone to the browser for the 5th time to test a feature I'm developing, it's a pretty good sign that an automated test would be more efficient than my manual testing, so I set aside the time to write it. If I know there's a part of the app that errors will be completely detrimental to, I will write tests for that, if only for my own psyche.

To be completely honest, TDD/BDD and some of the rhetoric surrounding it seems a bit ivory-towerish - a way for the templars of hacking to distinguish themselves from the proletariat developers. If I had been told TDD is the only way I could develop a rails app when I first started doing it I probably would have given up pretty early on. So if TDD is getting in the way of your being productive, it kind of defeats the purpose of it even existing.

The important thing is to strike a balance that works for you, and keep an open mind about other developer's habits and tendencies.
She tried 960 times
You should probably add the row Diploma to the Degree row since in Australia it is very common to get a trade certification rather than attend a typical 4 year school, where most Americans would get a Bachelor's degree for something like communications Aussies will do a shorter certification. If you do that, the totals for brothel workers and private (callgirl) prostitutes are not that bad at all.

The main problem is enforcement though, the illegal brothels are the ones that cause problems. Making the industry illegal would just put more women at risk as it would remove regulation and oversight. There's not a country in the world where you can't find a prostitute, despite it being illegal in most places.
The UK Defence Research Agency also produced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten15 - Ten15 served as an intermediate language for various compilers, but with several unique features, some of which have still to see the light of day in everyday systems.

UK Defence Research Agency's ALGOL 68RS (algol68toc) is available from sourceforge, It now generates C.

The interpreter Algol68G is also available, is easier to use, and a list snippets can be found at http://rosettacode.org/wiki/User:NevilleDNZ

To download Linux's Algol68 Compiler & Interpreter:
* http://sourceforge.net/projects/algol68