skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a similar feeling towards TDD. I use test driven developments for those parts of my code that needs it. I recently had to create a function that did some complex calculation. TDD was great for that, because I had a set of known inputs and a set of known outputs. It made sense to write the test before the code.

But I will not write trivial tests just to make the unit test coverage increase. I've seen tests written for simple getters/setters that just sets "this.birthday = date". If we do contact an alien civilization that have multiple birthdays, we will probably have to change the code anyway and the unit tests will have to be rewritten.

I may get some negative votes for saying this, but whenever I see a project with 100% unit coverage it's a red flag for me. This means they have wasted a lot of development time while writing trivial unit tests for trivial code.

Unit tests are great for parts of the code that needs them. But if your only reason for writing a unit test is to see the statistics "improve", you are wasting effort.
...as long as the article is interesting, this can be quite successful.

If the article's interesting you don't need to game the system - people will vote on it naturally.
> does a browser with pipelining on require the requests are returned in order?

Yes.
Don't think I'll be buying the book. In any given week I have about about four stretches of continuous motion, either running or walking, last between 50 and 90 minutes. It is very seldom that I get the "can run forever" feeling that I sometimes got as younger, leaner, fitter man.
It nicely lays out a number of questions/issues some people fail to consider at the outset and seems like a nice, lightweight tool for refining both your focus and your pitch.

That said, I'm not going to be a fan of anything that leads with "why you are different and worth buying." That's a very different question than the (un-asked) "why are you worth paying for?" Being bought should not be a startup's primary goal. Proof of value is in revenue.
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Is pipelining a well-defined behaviour now? I thought it was still pretty browser dependent.

Obviously you need keep-alive for pipelining to work at all - but are you saying you could actually dump responses down a keep-alive connection without corresponding requests and popular modern browsers will just deal with it?
Except of course when the scientist is paid by a government agency and concludes that the government needs more power - then the funding or employment situation is irrelevant.
Fun, fun.

Some characters aren't displaying properly: try entering fahrvergnugen. (The u-umlaut gets escaped.)
Next Gen IPad Launching Soon
To be honest, I don't think that would be all that hard if you use the bowling pin strategy (naming credit goes to Chris Dixon.

Open up the system for only one congressional district at a time. Opening it up countrywide could kill it due to perceived inactivity. Instead you start with the congressional district where Silicon Valley is located. There's a lot of very smart people there, who typically have strong political views and are active about them. Those are prime early adopters.

Those early adopters will also include many of the best and brightest tech and product minds who will give the best feedback early in the life of the product (just like with Quora, Forrst and Dribbble).

Once it has a high level of adoption there, it should be making national news already. You then roll it out slowly over the most politically active congressional districts one by one until it's used all over the country. I would also choose strategic "trend setting" cities with high levels of political activism such as NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc. shortly after the congressional district where Silicon Valley is located.
Interesting.... I may be the edge case, but in my experience, the tendency is usually for the boss to be more comfortable spending money for a solution that will solve the money than burning developer time on a project that may or may not fix the problem and mare or may not be on time.
Good point. Even if you do sell for lots of money, and even if Google keeps your startup running, from Google's standpoint it still might be a talent acquisition. Lots of folks dream of selling out to Google. Little do they realize that once they flip the startup, they're usually Google employees. Not exactly the end-state they might have had in mind when they began.
That works great if your application was designed to scale horizontally, or if there is always a bigger server available.
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I've used it since (don't laugh) IE 3 came out because that was the only way to get decent performance out of it.

Pipelining is a thing that is actually harder to guard against than to implement because as soon as keep-alive is on you can start sending multiple requests down the wire.

The other side will presumably respond to the first request by scanning the input up and until the end of the request, then send back the result via the same connection. As soon as it has done that it will look for more input.

Both sides can 'cheat', in other words, you don't actually need to look at the input requests when you're a server, and you don't actually need to wait for that first response to arrive before sending the next if your'e a client.

The socket layer doesn't care one bit, to it it is all data, and the application layer presumably would have a hard time telling when certain bytes were sent if it is not explicitly polling the other side of the connection while generating another answer or reading a new request.

So, typically the sequence on a keepalive connection looks like this:

request - answer - request - answer - request - answer - etc

But you could do this: (the google bot situation):

request - request - request - answer - answer - answer - etc

or even this (which is how my old webcam software worked):

request - answer - answer - answer - request - request - etc

So as soon as you switch on keep-alive you give the other side the opportunity to start pipe-lining requests or answers.

The problem with the way the google bot works here is that they seem to log all the pipelined but as yet unanswered requests as 'failed' whereas they should only log the request that was next up for answering as failed.

The obvious solutions are either keep alive 'off' for google or speed things up to the point where it will simply work.
> dumping answers in to the pipe pre-emptively

That's a very interesting hack, but I hope no one decides to deploy it today. You really can't predict what the next request will be - the browser can reuse the connection for some other request at a whim.

And I'm sure there's some proxy around that will panic if it gets a response before getting a request.

> Keep-alive on pretty much implies that pipelining is ok.

Well, sure, in theory. But since nearly every browser keeps it off (edit: doesn't pipeline requests), obviously a ton of servers are broken. Even Flickr was broken for many years with pipelining on (image downloads would abort randomly). Chrome is planning to eventually enable it with a bunch of heuristics; hopefully that will improve the situation.

Edit: "Making HTTP Pipelining Usable on the Open Web": http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http-pipeline-00
Since the Internet is not as widespread in Mexico, I'm pretty sure most of the population have somewhat different priorities.
A good reason to write tests for seemingly trivial code like that is if you're implementing an API that others will use. I've re-factored a class that implemented a public API and been saved by trivial tests that pretty much just tested getters/setters.

But there's a time and place for everything. I rarely pass 95% test coverage, the remaining 5% are usually not worth pursuing.
The legal framework in this case would be a conversation along the lines:

FF: "Hello there, seems your house is a bit on fire sir."

HO: "Indeed, it would appear so. Would you be a good sport and point your enormous hose into my burning pile of rubble for a while, my dear lad?"

FF: "Of course, no problem. I do, however, see that you didn't pay into our 'unfortunate happenstance insurance', which means you'll have to pay our regular fees. That'll be a fantastilllion dollars and the blood of your firstborn please."

HO: "Here you go."

I grew up in Germany, which is without a doubt the most unhelpful and mean-spirited country in the whole world, and even they would not hesitate to help someone in need. The whole point of the "Good Samaritan" thing is that you don't do it for something in exchange, by the way. But in this case that doesn't even apply. The fire department would of course get something in exchange if they billed for their time and materials.

It should not matter how "evil" the family with the burning house is. It's simply morally wrong to not help them. This whole procedure highlights how deeply immoral some parts of society still are, especially in cases like this where it is apparently still seen as acceptable behavior.

By the way, not even in the dark ages, when there was no such thing as a professional fire brigade, ordinary people performed those duties without question for any member of the community. And those were the days when women were cattle and the church owned everything, mind you. But even they knew how absurd it was to only help some people in emergencies while leaving others with a self-righteous lie such as "there is nothing I can do, you deserve this".
Her method worked with CRTs, IIRC.
How funny. Twenty years ago I worked for a summer for that guy at the University of Montana grinding up bees and writing data collection/analysis software.

edit: One of the projects I worked on looked at to what extent bees aggregated environmental pollutants into the hive. To prepare the bee samples for mass spectrometer, we ground them up, mixed them with aqua regia (mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids) in a nonreactive teflon container (a teflon bombs) and then microwaved them! Science is awesome. One of the bombs exploded once and the acid gutted the inside of the microwave.
I knew this purple-haired superheroine who did this to a certain "Zone" which is famous for vapid and incoherent blog postings written in broken English.

She made about 1000 fake accounts and used Tor to make them appear to come from multiple IP addresses. The fake accounts were made with a statistical model that generated plausible usernames, real names, profile pictures and everything -- it could even pair up the gender of the first name and of the picture... most of the time.

Once she wrote a blog post she'd just set the sequencer and her posting would hit the front page in about two hours. She found it was a very consistent way to get 5k page views, sometimes better if the blog posting was good and it got picked up on other social media sites like proggit.

She'd gotten a few of her blog posts to be "all time favorites" on this site, but then another project eclipsed her blogging and she lost the credentials for the fake accounts in a hard drive crash.

Today, this "Zone" is dominated by other people doing the same thing. If you know what to look for, there's a quite unmistakable signature.

She thought about doing the same for reddit, but it was clear at the start that reddit had much better defenses -- it would have been a bigger project, and she probably would have burned some of her proxies before getting it right.

Note that you can get around the IP address problem in several ways. One of them is that you can rent SOCKS5 proxies for $3/month/IP address. Supervillians use bot nets.
Rosling's presentation style is fantastic. I became intrigued if he has written any books (apparently not), but then realized that his visualization ideas are truly made for web (and live presentations) instead of dead trees.
Networked World: All this has happened before and all of it will happen again
The one thing we are good at is SIGINT.

We may have a stifling bureaucracy and an overstretched military, but at least the British Foreign Office actually has local knowledge and people who speak the language.
You probably haven't heard of any Japanese startups because there haven't really been any who have been successful abroad.

Here's a good presentation that can give you an overview of the web startup space:

http://www.slideshare.net/araipiyo/situation-and-recent-tren...
Yeah yeah. I hope it wasn't a technical acquisition, because then obviously this guy was a failure and no where near as cool as rockstar dot com bazillionaires like you. Following HN rules, if we were face to face, I would say this to you.

That said, either way, congratulations to the guy. It takes a lot of work to develop something that interests anyone (whether it's our users, Google, or someone else). Maybe his next one will be worthy of your appreciation and congratulations.

Then again, entrepreneurs learn early on that they can't and should not try to please everyone.
Drill breaks through to trapped Chilean miners
To be honest, I think one of the hottest spaces today is social sharing in the real world. There are so many possibilities it's mind-boggling. In this case and the dog one I posted below, you are sharing personal responsibilities. However, I think most of the potential is in sharing personal capital expenditures that are almost always at a low-level of utilization for most of the population. For example:

-- Sharing cars/bikes

-- Sharing toolboxes (in an apartment building for example)

In fact, I think the apartment building is the perfect size unit of sharing for a lot of goods. The key challenge is developing the interfaces and mechanism that prevent the tragedy of the commons.
As a rule I have it 'off' because I have seen more bugs related to keep-alive than that I've seen benefits from it but in some special cases the speedup can be dramatic so you should always at least test to see what it does for you.

For instance, a gallery page with lots of small thumbnails could benefit from keep-alive being on.
Beautiful analysis, thank you.

To take your analysis one more step, I would like to break out the "I" component of your model a bit further. The "I" could comprise of "N" (inner nature/general intelligence) and "B" behavior, as I believe behavior can fluctuate independently of inner nature/intelligence and so should perhaps not be grouped.

Most behavior (B) early on arises out of primary influences. These influences are mostly people who one idolizes or looks up to, which depends some on one's inner nature (N). For some, the family (F) is the main influence and role model, other times friends/peers (P) are, and other times other societal influences (movies, media, community, etc.) are the leading influencers. Within schools, where a large part of a child's life is spent, teachers (T) are the primary influencers.

Given this, and given that influencing children is easier than influencing parents/adults/community/media, reeducating or focusing on teacher quality sounds like a good option. The "T" improvement would then improve the "B", the "B" improve the "P" and "F", and life would be very hypothetically good.

S = ?F + ?P + ?B + ?T + ?N

So here I'm not saying that teachers are a primary fault for the problems, however my main point is that I do believe they can supply massive positive influence (just like the P and F can), which in most cases they aren't doing. Perhaps this shows that the role of a teacher needs to be rethought from authoritative instructor focusing on knowledge transfer; to friend, mentor, care-taker, and personal guide to each individual in hopes of supplying inspiration.
Yes. It is much better. Better to simply disable them and leave them alive and breathing than killing them. Much cleaner -- not only does it remove them from productivity, it also forces society to drag them along. It's like those weapons that leave folks alive but just blinded or disabled -- they are much more humane.
as the author of the article in question, SEO and geek i must say: i deliberately overspinned the wording of the article, as - as a matter of fact - the mystery was so mysterious that nobody in the so called SEO "community" ever noticed that there was something rotten going on in their beloved google webmaster reports.

and (i'm not sure why, it was a friday afternoon when i wrote that thing) i thought it would be funny to take the typical over-the-the-top-linkbait-kind-of-writing-style and ...... did something nobody has ever done before ... put some real information in it.
> I believe it's supposed to be good news-article-writing style to put the most important facts and overview first.

The way I read the article, the most important fact was that he was paid by Bayer.
I'm not congratulating them because there is no information that will make it plain if this is a real acquisition or if these guys just got a job. If and when that comes out it will be time enough (and if they just got a job, then, of course, congratulations are still in order, but if that results in their start up being shut down then somewhat less so).

> I hope it wasn't a technical acquisition, because then obviously this guy was a failure and no where near as cool as rockstar dot com bazillionaires like you.

You seem to have a completely wrong impression of me, if you feel like discussing that further feel free to email me, address in my profile.
Not necessarily.

Most people find success on social media sites is capricious; not a lot of people read the "new" queue, so your first few organic votes are a matter of luck. Downvotes on reddit make this go double. Even great content can get buried if it doesn't get noticed.

For instance, there's a certain blog on a three letter domain name for which I'll sometimes see two or three posting on the front page at HN. That guy's got a voting ring. You might call it something else, like "I have a twitter account with a lot of followers who use HN", but that's what it is. This sort of practice takes some of the chance and variation out.

An advanced method is to recognize the role of "social proof" in social media. My informant has collected behavioral data sets from certain social media sites and discovered that the C.T.R. on articles increases as the number to the left increases: even if the headline is uninteresting, the high number makes people think that it "has to be good;" in experiments where the number of "ringer" votes was varied, she discovered that the ratio of "organic" to "ringer" votes got better the more "ringers" there were.
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How Ray Suarez Really Caught the Global Health Bug (Gates Foundation)
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Sounds like a great strategy, and trying to target the early adopter crowd would definitely be the best way to get buzz going early. With it being 2 years before the next presidential election now, it'd be a great time to start getting it going. When are you releasing it? :)
Ruby-Processing
That could be a very cool ideal. Might even end up being a way to meet like-minded people in your age range ... slight side bonus. As with any social project involving people, it could backfire, but definitely should be something that could scale big over time.
Bringhurst's book is advanced and heavy. It's good. But I'd start with 'Thinking with Type'.
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It boggles my mind that an article from barely over a year ago counts as "very ancient", that people clamor to add "(2006)" to article titles, etc.

If more programmers actually read stuff that was published longer than (gasp!) five years ago, perhaps there would be less naive noise about how New Methodology X is going to finally fix all these nagging issues in software development once and for all.
am i being an idiot? I can't see a way to change slides :s
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been spending $3 billion annually on "global health" since its foundation in 1994 and there's been quite a bit of concern about how this money translates into influence.

E.g. it richly funds malaria research, dollars which are hard to come by otherwise, and I remember speculation that this could be or has been used to curtail FOSS deployments at universities where some of their researchers are receiving such funding.
Ask HN: Anyone in Rome interested in a Hacker News Meetup?
I have been living in Rome, Italy for about 3 months and the startup scene here seems nonexistent. Any HNers in Rome interested in a meetup?
If you're using tests to check your API integrity, ok, but writing tests by hand for getters and setters written by hand would be disgusting. Hopefully a very minor declaration in the code can automatically create all the tests.
More info on the technical side would have been far more interesting, ihmo.

command control system implementation, software stack, coupling the capta with a captcha filling service...

(I do not support this kind of scheme)
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What visualization program was used to generate this graph?
I really don't see the point any more, almost everyone who uses these sites can pretty much automatically tune themselves out from spam now. Give up.
Click inside the content, then use the keyboard arrow keys to move around.
If bl2seq gets the longest common subsequence I did exactly the same thing. In haskell it just seems the right thing to do. Actually it would be damn interesting to see if there are patterns in the solutions for every programming language.
You say you have a HM chair but if you didn't try the embody then you might be missing out. Reduced fatigue when sitting in the chair for 12+ hours means more productivity -- this chair has already paid for itself.

http://www.hermanmiller.com/Products/Embody-Chairs

Also, depending on the source of your pain, you may want to consult a chiropractor. Not sure what the views of this profession are on HN but it works wonders for me.
Spolsky seems to be a less fashionable idol than he was when I started to become interested in startups. In the context of programming AND startups, his opinions have much more weight to me than XP proponents'.

Joel has created a successful company that is apparently fun to work in, have shipped several working and commercially successful products and made a service for human-kind by designing and successfully launching programming Q&A site that doesn't suck. Plus his writings inspired a generation of programmers to start companies, just like PG's writings did later.

Contrast this with Extreme Programming that OP embraces as a third option compared to duct tape programming vs analysis-paralysis. I was very excited about XP when I was young and inexperienced programmer, but nowadays XP sounds much more snake-oil salesmanship to me than Joel's opinions. Did original XP gang work in startup like environments, or were they actually solving problems (payroll systems) that they and many others had already solved? And Kent Beck seems to be still working on jUnit (and trying to find a way to monetize it), not shipping new products.

My kudos goes to Joel and duct tape programmers around the world.
Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy
Wait, why is that clear?