skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm my first thought was ... well ... WTF
Then I thought - man I'd like to work for this corp. but alas I think I'm to stupid for that.
Some moments of reflection later I'm now convinced that I don't want to work there at all.

The question is somewhat similiar to
"give me the fastest sorting algorithm and prove that it is"
Everyone with a CS-degree or something similar will know this prove and Qsort from his very first years and I claim almost everyone will have forgotten the prove.
(I can remember that you can prove this by looking at the "descision" tree passed on the 1on1 comparision which will have depth of about the needet size ;) - but this is it)
I think most people will get the prove (even without google or wiki) in a resonable time (some hours?) but within interview-time and in this situation? In my case no way.
I can give you my experience with TDD:

You generally don't need to change directions very much. TDD will expose bad interfaces or interfaces that aren't abstract enough early on because you can't test them easily. And if you do decide to change directions you sit down and write the tests and then make the changes until your code works and the tests pass.

Generally you want to write tests before code and make your code pass the tests. How many tests and how much coverage is up to you. It's important that the tests are small and brittle so you can pick out as many breakages as early as possible.

You use the API in your tests. When the tests start to fail you know your API has changed. It gets a bit more difficult with web APIs if they don't provide a test environment.
I take the definition (proposed, usually, by BDD people like David Chelimsky and the like) that BDD is not fundamentally different from TDD. BDD is just TDD done right.

As such, it makes little sense to propose using BDD "instead of" TDD. If you're doing TDD right, there's no benefit to "switching to BDD", other than a monstrous task of rewriting your tests using another set of sub-frameworks...
Oh, OK. I think I got the joke and then thought 'oh, that can't be it'. It did give a nice break to the pacing of the story, though.
I'm sorry you misunderstood what I said. I'm going to start programing a game, just before that I'll need to do some simple programs like hello world, tell me your name and tic tac toe. To get the hang of a new language.
Then I'll dive in in my game
Its a bit of an insult to all the independent filmmakers out there who "build" from passion in a different art medium (especially documentarians) who hope to "change the world", with little chance of fat paydays. The editing process is "hacking" together reams of footage and there have long been "hackwriters" in Hollywood.
They ended up reverting and undoing revert due to non-verification. Also, paper calculations to be certain about the effects, are not supposed to take a lot of time.
> Trying to discuss this with him really isn't working. Any advice?

My guess is that you not so unemployable as you seem to think. I'd look for another job in a company/industry where you're not just a 'cost'.
Anecdotal counterpoint: I know of at least 2 instances of people who have met on eHarmony, via paid accounts, and have proceeded to end up in very solid relationships.

I know no such success stories with OKCupid.
> the shameful secret of the welfare state is that it makes irresponsible slaves out of previously free and responsible people

> The actual producers of wealth are a very small group

So in the absence of the welfare state, what happens to the vast majority who are allegedly not producers of wealth?

> the free market tends to consistently lower the prices of goods and services over time

Not only is this a recipe for deflation (which the article doesn't address at all), but I don't see how it could be true with growing population and diminishing resources allocated through competition.
Agreed, my comment above was not GUI/frontend-centric and that is a different case.

To me there is another slippery slope for TDD in getting bogged down. I'm usually interested in TDD in as much as it can be a competitive advantage. The point where I feel like the returns drop off and I'm burning my man-hours and paying too much for the TDD insurance on very predictable parts is where my tests get sparser.

Keep in mind, the degree of TDD insurance I'd pay for is different for every project--for a Mars Rover you bet I'll test my accessors.
Offer HN: Advice on how to increase sales and conversions on your website
I'm the founder of Visual Website Optimizer and since last year have had the privileged of studying and analyzing 100s of A/B split tests to learn what makes a particular website convert visitors into customers. If you have website (or a landing page) and you have traffic but are struggling with your conversion rate, contact me. Would love to advice how you can go about increasing sales and conversions.

My contact details: paras@wingify.com

PS: I'm loving the new phenomenon of Offer HN and in past few days actually contacted some amazing HNers for advice so thought of giving back to this awesome community. As a bonus, I expect to learn about many great HNers.
This is based on my own experience at our startup. We looked at a number of NoSQL databases for our backend storage. While others may "be made to", MongoDB was the only one that advertised it as a feature and was by far the easiest to use for that feature.
I posted this a week ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1810619

Glad to see it on the front page, it's an entertaining read and a good example of persistence.
7 Unbelievable 3D Murals Painted on Buildings
That's really how I feel here. Just a cost. He tells me he has to justify our "team"'s existance to his dad whenever he sees him.

The graphic designer does all print and web graphic design,

The Marketing manager does all copy, liaises with the print firms and manages marketing targets and plans with all the dealerships group wide,

I do all the web stuff.

If there's a car dealership that doesn't need to market or advertise to people to sell cars, I haven't seen it.
Good Thesis Statements Writing 
The steps to writing good thesis statements begin with the selection of good topics. Once the topic is selected it needs to be narrowed down to a manageable level. A good thesis statement is one which is specific and concise. Read on to find out the characteristics of a good thesis statement.
Ask HN: Recommended ways to get capital for a "non-startup" IT consultancy
I've run a consulting business for a little bit over a year now. We have 3-5 solid, repeat clients, so we have some cashflow history (though we are by no means "raking it in" -- still only make barely enough to support myself and my family). and I am getting to the point where some capital would be really helpful in both handling what we have now and in growing to handle more.

What's the recommended way to get capital in this situation?

Banks are sketchy and questionable, I don't trust them at all. And I don't really want a loan because if things turn south I'd rather not be walking around with a huge debt over my head.

I also don't really want to deal with a bunch of financial formalities like stock, mainly because I don't have time to study or set up all of that.

I understand that I will probably have to do at least one of these anyway. Which is better? I am not an accountant or lawyer and have limited experience in loan-getting, corporate registration, private stock transactions, etc., and would like this to proceed with as little interruption or distraction as possible.

Where can I find some benevolent businessmen who would be interested in investing something, so I don't have to try for a loan right away? I live in Utah and my marketing materials are very Utah-centric. I know an investor here but I think he is a bad dude and want to stay as far away from him as possible.

Again, this isn't really a startup in the HN sense; this is a normal IT consultancy, we mainly do custom development but have some IT/admin stuff too. I do have plans for product-based startups, but I am trying to bootstrap with consulting because it is a much more straightforward endeavor. Once I have this sufficiently established that it is generating a good, relatively-passive salary for me, I will be interested in expanding into other businesses.

In my opinion this should be a pretty straightforward, typical business development deal. We have a cashflow history and have existed for a short while (slightly over one year) and the business could expand significantly if I had a bit of capital to hire some more contractors, etc.

All advice appreciated.

EDIT: This post is meant to be exploratory and help catalog options available for people in similar situations -- a small business that is starting to get pretty busy and would like to expand and have some additional cash-on-hand so that we can take better care of our current customers and garner up some new ones.

The two replies thus far seem to have read in a much more self-entitled tone. Sorry, my intention was not to sound self-entitled or naive; I am fully intent on compensating any investors either via stock or interest, I just want to know what the experienced business community here at HN suggests as the best resources to find interested parties, whether it's a bank, investment group, incubator, whatever, and how to go about the deal in a way that is least likely to disrupt or distract from the primary business.
Can someone tell Reddit about this offer?
This was great. Especially the end. Definitely worth making it all the way through.
There's a lot of talk about line editors in this thread. From a quick scan of Wikipedia, it seems that 40 cells is about the biggest braille display you can buy.

WTF? Why has nobody invented a full-screen braille display? Is there some reason it's massively more complicated than it seems?
why is it only for people who are here for atleast for 6 months or 50+ karma ?

Could you just change it to everyone ?
We don't have major traffic, around 25% of visitors signup for a free alert. We would love to hear your thoughts. www.gobuzz.com.
I am a big fan of Redis, but I have mostly used it for smaller databases. With Redis VM and upcoming Redis Cluster I simply can't imagine why one would not use Redis as a more central database, since it will offer great features, great perfomance and great scalability.
I'm one. Been together 14 months, today. Recently, I joked "we should film a 'success story' commercial for OkCupid." :)
What is your point? The fact that it is trivial was the point of the article.
This guy is taking a lot of heat for bad interviewing technique, and this may or may not be the case - but it's hard to say, given that we don't know what kind of a position he's interviewing for. Given the job requirements of the position, this may be a perfectly reasonable question - i.e. if the job requires someone to build and maintain large custom data stores, it's pretty acceptable practice to ask questions that reveal how much they know about large custom data stores. Personally I wouldn't be over the moon crazy about this question, but it's still a hell of a lot better than being peppered with random "what is X?" type questions that test nothing about your ability as a developer, and only what you currently directly know. That is to say, those questions where you end up looking like an idiot if you didn't happen to read the same man pages as the interviewer. In the types of questions this guy is asking, you have to basically guess what they're looking for - so it can end up being a bit of a mind reading exercise, which is why I wouldn't be terribly crazy about it - but it's still by far the lesser of several evils, simply because it's a direct demonstration of how a developer thinks about development, instead of how much rote minutae they've mastered or whether they can find a way to stick eight kittens into six holes without any broken legs of flying fur, etc....
I don't know APL and I'm not currently smart enough for Haskell. My current infatuation for learning is with Scala. When I first started programming in the mid-80's, I was hacking on a COBOL stock-control system on VMS; the braille display I was using at the time didn't do terminal emulation, and this software built screens by outputting VT52 escape sequences. Although I learnt to decode them so that I could check my screens for alignment and spacing etc. I discovered that I could log an interactive session using SET HOST/LOG; I wrote a TECO program to translate these sessions back into a 2-dimensional layout that was much easier to read on my braille display. So, yes I generally like dense languages.
I should mention that the book primarily uses Common Lisp.
I'm not able to take you up on your offer (I'm a Linux/OSX user), but what you've got sounds pretty cool. Good luck with it
Top solutions of the IEEE ICDM Contest revealed.
You write

> "I love my job...I even love my boss"

then go on to describe a nightmare. Read it! It sounds like Stockholm Syndrome!

Well done for getting it off your chest, now you need to go find something else. The situation probably can't be fixed. Sounds like you've made a lot of decent things as evidence of your skills. You could probably come back as a contractor/consultant for twice your current wage.

Oh, and if/when you do quit - no recriminations. You were offered an amazing opportunity that was too good to turn down. You really want to work in this new field. It's not you it's me, etc. Start documenting things for the next guy. Best of luck.

Edit: Also make sure to read Patrick's advice here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829577

Edit2: Sorry, was wrong about Statury Sick Pay, thanks for the correction. 20 days holiday is definitely not right though.
> Do you find it hard to change directions with a feature or component, because your tests have sort of "locked you in" to the structure you were working on?

Do you mean changing the direction of the implementation, or the outcome of the feature? If it's just the implementation we usually throw away the unit tests along with the code we don't like and restart. The system test is ultimately responsible for making sure the feature itself is working. The unit tests just allow you to test different parameters without having to write a system test for each of those.

I have never felt "locked in" so far. Generally I feel very good about the stability of the Software and my ability to change it as needed.

> How religiously do you follow TDD? Do you literally not write a single line of code unless it's in furtherance of passing a failing unit test, or do you just worry about the system test you put in place at the start and unit test aspects as you need to

Very religiously with almost no exceptions. When I make an exception it is usually a sign of problems in the code, and I'll revisit it later on / improve my tools.

I think it is difficult to do anything but full TDD, it's just to easy to drop the ball once you make compromises.

> Also, you mentioned changes to the API of third-party libraries. How do go about catching how those changes impact your code? (I would assume you are mocking these in your unit tests.)

System tests are the only line of defense here. That's why we make sure that all mission critical code paths are covered by them. There are no 100% guarantees, but 95% certainty beats 20% certainty after a big library upgrade by a lot : ).

> Seriously though, thanks for posting this article. It's so rare to be able to read an article about unit testing that isn't just some guy demonstrating how he'd use TDD to determine if a number is in the Fibonacci sequence or something.

I never saw the benefits from these articles either. It took the node.js API to break our app in about 100 different parts for me to see the value in TDD. I guess it's just like backups ... ; )
Because it rewards people who are actively engaged in the HN community and contributing something, rather than someone reading this today, then signing up to HN and claiming the offer
I defrag my laundry. ;-)
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200308/df20030814.jpg
How to Design a Great User Interface
When designing a web app, functionality is often placed above everything else. For the most part, this is a good thing.
"It has come to the point where whenever he starts his rant, I put my headphones on, or I shout at him, or I get very angry and walk off for a while. I really cannot work under these conditions for very much longer, and to be honest I am really ashamed with how I am handling his rants and outbursts."

On the one hand I totally understand your reaction. On the other hand, I'm inclined to think it is probably counterproductive. Remaining cool and collected seems like a better idea.

"Therein lies the problem. Where I live, there are no jobs. Some statistics recently suggested that a snowball had a better chance of opening an ice cream shop in the deepest layer of hell than I have of getting another job."

If it is, in fact, true that there are no jobs available in your current location, can you move? I'm originally from a rural state that has very few technical positions available. Living in a major metropolitan area has definitely opened up my options.

Even if you can't, it is entirely possible that you can make a living by doing contract work. This may take time to build up to, but if you are capable of demonstrating quality work you will eventually be able to sustain yourself. Working a part-time non-programming job might fill the gap if you feel the need to quit right now.

"Does anyone else browse the net in work when they are having a hard time focusing, but not blatantly trying to hide it and yet get rebuked even when the only other option is to sit, knuckles dragging drooling on the keyboard whilst staring at the screen because your brain no longer works?"

I don't have the boss problem since I work from my home office. But when I am unable to focus I try getting up and walking outside for five minutes. The sunshine and fresh air helps give me some perspective.

I hope this helps!
The money is a rationalization. Its approval that many of us seek. Otherwise why tell people about it? Even evangelize about the pet project? Its a social need.
Hint: sometimes a private email or even just asking nicely goes a long way ;)
I wouldn't be able to work like that personally, code I write comes out in bursts and then I have a little bit of time where I'm just formulating my next move. I often check HN during the day just to look at something else then code.

It's never going to be easy to work in a non tech place and have them understand what you do. You seem to have been there for a while and are getting tired of the place, it might be time even if you don't think so to look around.

The last thing I can think off is that you are building interesting stuff. Stuff that seems to have real value, have you though of building products and selling them yourself? You could even try to get your current employer as a first customer (by keeping the relationship good ;p)

EDIT: One thing I forgot, do you think he might be on your case because he also gets crap from his boss? Sometimes it could be that simple.
I've always imagined myself quite good at this sort of thing but this is the first time I've ever tested it. I got 18/20 and the 2 I missed were 1st and 3rd, so it was before I really got into it, I think. By the 4th or 5th one my brain had remember what to look for and the rest were pretty easy.
Your memories will be rewritten - Aza Raskin
Viggity - I see you've been writing your apps in WPF. Did you see the news about Evernote switching from WPF to native code. What are your thoughts on that and do you find WPF to be a pain?
Were I in that hypotetical interview I would _think_ "a terabyte of data and 5000 lookups per second? what fucked-up examples, do these guys have too much iddle time here?", but I never would _say_ anything and just proceed with solving the problem.
I park first-fit; my wife parks best-fit. We drive each other crazy.
If you are concerned about 'pissing' people off don't do it.

If you want to reward them for signing up you can try a couple of things:

1. Thank them by letting them on before you go live. Let them know that you will go live later on but that you wanted to give them early access.

2. Let them know that they can have early access if they want to help beta test it.

3. Let them know pre-launch that you are offering free accounts via an affiliate/recommendation program. Dropbox does this well.
I don't know about iPhone-anything, but Flex offers a lot of the UI niceties you describe.
Sounds great, except for the fact that every inch of this stuff will be in a landfill after 10 years of use, where it will essentially never break down, and likely leach whatever exotic compounds it uses into the soil/water, trading one form of pollution for another.

It seems like a "disposable society" solution to solar power, and I'm not convinced unless it comes with a clear recycling program.
I can identify with you on boring stuff, even a few hours of work can be draining there. Not all parts of coding are equally interesting.

I should probably work on my sleep schedule. I get about 5-6 hours a night on a weeknight and 10 on the weekend. I have a seriously difficult problem going to bed before 2am, but fortunately my job doesn't expect me in until 9 or so.
Has anybody out there who's not blind tried doing a "blind for a day" thing? Just wear a blindfold for 24 hours and see how much of your life it affects. I haven't tried it but after reading all this I kind of want to.
Multiple monitor support for Vim
A helpful reference to identify some of the personalities he mentions: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0521143/
Your page is well-built and has an informative headline too. However, I think following changes may increase conversions:

a) Removing examples and (centering) and increasing size of the main dropdowns
b) Selecting an option in dropdowns by default
c) Removing 'preview' link
d) Changing the color of button to red (yes, this can really work)

Essentially, try to highlight the dropdown section in the middle of the page. You can have all "extra" stuff as a separate section below it.

PS: You can also test a headline like "Google Alerts on Steroids" -- I am assuming most of your visitors would know what Google Alerts is
Pushing Fat Free CRM to Heroku Help
Even though I only started doing this on the past 2 weeks...
Maybe I can help you with your problems.. BUT it's only limited because,
I'm using,
Windows XP, Git-1.7.3.1-preview20101002, rubyinstaller-1.8.7-p302

Feel free to reply in this tread. :)
(Don't forget to Push michaeldv/fat_free_crm in GitHub)
Thank you!
Interesting. How much caffeine do you get through in a day, and when is your last caffeinated drink?
Regardless of the scarcity of jobs in your area, you need to find a better one. What you describe are his problems, not your own.

Do everything you can distinguish yourself from the competition, i.e. other jobseekers. Build a stunning personal/portfolio site if you don't have one already, work on side-projects in your spare time and share the source on github, write a blog, consider relocating if that is an option for you.

But definitely don't simply settle for what you have now. You are right that it is an abusive environment and you owe it to yourself to move on.
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I was in a very similar situation. I was 21, studying mechanical engineering, not sure what to do with my life, but had high expectations. One book that helped me a lot was "I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was": http://www.amazon.com/Could-Anything-Only-Knew-What/dp/04405...

The book sounds corny, but it can help you get a better perspective on your life. Make sure to actually do the exercises.
Stop Before You Have To