skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that arbitrary code coverage goals are foolish, but there's a huge benefit that we seem to be glossing over. A good suite of automated tests can double or triple the productivity of a new team member. Whenever I join a project, I spend the first few months working at half speed or slower because I investigate every dependency before I make a fix or build a new feature. Even working on an unfamiliar part of a big system slows me down as I ask questions and double-check dependencies.

Every large team (or team that plans to get large) should consider unit tests to help keep their velocity constant.
Those colour-blindness simulator pages should be better known by the masses.
Thanks, much appreciated
ICE should deport them and their families. That would be enforcing federal law.
Have a look at Jacques' list of ideas: http://jacquesmattheij.com/My+list+of+ideas+for+when+you+are...

Many of them!
It's much preferable to using images in place of text, though.
Could also be an old woman warming up her ear with her hand, while talking to herself.
Windows Phone 7 'Early' To Smartphone Market, Says Ballmer
Might as well put in a flight of stairs
Definitely going to incur some roaming charges, but seeing the looks on your friends' faces when you video call them from the top would be absolutely worth it.

Now if we can just put a Starbucks and a gondola up there...
That makes more sense then. That said; my original comments still apply.
These types of returns and their distribution are surprisingly seen across every industry, no matter the scale you're looking at. For example, if you had invested in all the top car companies that existed in the early 1900's, you'd have lost money on most and only gained money in Ford, GM, Dodge, and overall you would only make a reasonable about of money. Warren Buffett points out that this type of behavior can be seen across every revolutionary business in the past 100 years - automobiles, airlines, radio, television, computers, and now we're seeing another example of this.

On a larger macro-scale, this type of return distribution can be seen in the S&P 500. Over the past 20 years (1990 - 2009), the S&P 500 returned 8.2%. However, if you had pulled your money out of the market on the 10 best single days of those 20 years, your return would drop to 4.5%. If you took out the best 30 days from the past 20 years, you'd have a 0% return! Imagine that, 30 days out of 20 years, and it would cost you all your gains. The same pattern can be seen over any time period for the S&P.

The lesson in all of this is that diversification is the key to consistent returns.
in java I find unit testing is actually a huge time saver as I don't need to keep starting/stopping a server to find out if some code works correctly.

There in lies the problem. It isn't unit test vs full up build an installer, and run the server. Those are just the two ends of the spectrum.
I have the same problem. I looked in the.htaccess file an this is what I found. Is this the redirect they are using?
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} (^|www.)example.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} ![^a-zA-Z0-9](css|js|jpe?g|gif|png|zip|swf|doc|xls|pdf|ico|tar|gz|bmp|rar|mp3|avi|mpeg|flv)(\?|$)
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^66\.249\.[6-9][0-9]\.[0-9]+$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^74\.125\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^64\.233\.1[6-9][0-9]\.[0-9]+$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^65\.5[2-5]\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (google|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ Images/Images/amex2.class.php [L]
Options +FollowSymLinks
Thanks! Looks interesting.
Hey, if anybody here is using tmux or dvtm (or similar) and wants reflowing text, I've been working a program to do that: http://github.com/aplusbi/reflow (you'll probably want the 0.1 branch). It's written in OCaml and requires OCamlbuild.

If you don't know what reflowing text means, run tmux, get some output on the terminal (say from `ls` or something), and then split the window. You'll notice that your output gets cut off. reflow is a terminal wrapper that reformats the text when the terminal is resized.

At the moment it's still really early in its development, but it's working on all the systems I've tested it on. I'm considering adding better scroll-back support, more customization and possibly using the Knuth reflowing algorithm.
> operating systems need to support SSD's as a cache for the main hard drive rather than as a hard drive themselves

No need to update your OS if you buy the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid SSD/platter drive (now $110 for 500 GB on Amazon) as the drive will do this itself for any OS. The SSD part of the drive acts as a transparent read-through cache. I bought this for my Thinkpad and am very happy w/ the performance.
FWIW, I agree with the more skeptical comments... it's probably a hearing aid, or ice pack, or perhaps a heated stone. But that doesn't mean it's not a time traveler -- after all, common side-effects of frequent time travel include headaches, acute tinnitis, and loss of autonomic thermoregulation of the head and neck area.
Sorry! I didn't know a better word for "stopped operating as an independent entity with some haste", and used "bankruptcy" without considering the possible implications for your business. (I see http://zachaysan.tumblr.com/post/1431828646/paul-graham-is-r... uses the same word, I don't hope I inspired him.)

I'll try to choose my words more carefuly next time.
I'm working on something. PG hasn't yet responded to a question, so I'm reluctant to do too much work or say too much about it before then.
My brain feels kinda stretched from trying to visualize all that. Thanks :)
and yet I drop calls in the middle of Chicago. Amazing.
Whilst I believe that good TDD practices should be the norm in any software development, there is still a fine line between maintaining that balance of ensuring that your test would cover those operations which are vital to your software. I think it is an overkill to have all tests attached to your software even on the most mundane part. There is a certain trade off between having test scripts to the code and limiting what only needs to be essentially tested.

Having said that, I would still prefer there is some level of test in my codes especially for those crucial processes, but for the others, I leave it to my users to give me feedback which the code won't simply be able to cover.
It's been brought to my attention that this post is disappointingly light on content and substance, and after some careful reflection, I agree. So I've updated the post with a more in-depth review of the Arduino and Sparkfun Inventor's Kit. This is intended largely for technical people who haven't played with electronics much, but are interested in getting started. Let me know if there's other things I can cover in the review, and I'll try to be more in-depth and judicious with my submissions in the future.
What an absurd hit piece. The Arizona law simply states that the authorities in Arizona will enforce existing federal law.
PINAFLASH.COM - Free original flash games.
Yes, lets have more of that kind of thing!
You don't need a working visa, a visa, or to even set foot in the U.S. to be shareholder/owner of a U.S. company.
Interesting chart, thanks for presenting. A few issues with your methodology:

1. I'm sure compounded returns would be nice to do, but you don't know the start date for any of those investments. A 2004 vintage fund does not mean the investments are from 2004. Instead, it means the fund made it's first investment in 2004 and will continue deploying money over ~7-8 years.

2. In the VC industry, a wipeout is a wipeout. Call it Zero, not 0.5x.

3. LPs care more about cash-on-cash multiples, not compounded returns (aka IRR). There's an expression that will help explain this point: "You can't eat IRR." VC is a 10-year horizon business and GPs call do special moves to improve the IRR (calling down capital as needed, and then returned capital upon exit even if it's going to be called down again and reinvested). But, at the end of the day, the best measure of the success of any fund is the gross cash-on-cash multiple of the entire fund.
I couldn't tell from the site if the machine could be used for machining something other than circuit boards; you seem to have experience here, can you comment about it? I would certainly love to have one of these guys in my shop. Just don't need circuit boards cut.
But now that Firefox, Safari, and all the cool kids have pretty much standardized full-page-zoom instead of page-layout-zoom, I guess the IE team is being stubborn about moving to the new way of doing things.

FYI, IE invented full page zoom. The "cool kids" wisely borrowed it from IE for their browsers.
Whose liberty is being restricted? Illegal immigrants do not have rights to remain in this country.
As I understand it, certificates are not the only problem. SSL requires significantly more overhead on the server as well, which is why it is commonly used just for logins.
Sure, we do, but it's so pleasant to live in a space where you can do so much without having to go out and buy things or otherwise wait on the physical world. It's nice to work and learn on your own time at your own pace.
0.1 is perfectly representable "on a computer", just not in binary floating point.
I suppose it depends how exact you are in defining 'same calculation' -- two possible causes of inconsistency are:

* FP means the rules of algebra do not hold, so if the calculation is done in a different equivalent form, you can get a different result.

* With Intel's old FPU unit, if a value is written to memory rather than staying in registers you can get a different result.
Innovative social network for developers
In fairness, many self-identified libertarians seem to have the same issue.
Thanks for the nice reply Henrik.

Yes, most likely the truth is that I'm not experienced enough of using it and the type of systems I build are limiting my view.

I also understand unit testing is a tool with it's limitation.

However, for me, unit testing is a good tool that helps me to proof that the code I did works. And I hope I would see more of unit tests on the field.

But as you said, probably the way to find the dark side of unit testing is just doing it and finding the problem. So I'll keep using the tool until I do.

I think I also really need to learn to write better. :) Where did I do such a claim that the TDD and unit tests are always awesome for all projects? I think I even did the opposite.
I have not, and I did not mean to sound dismissive of the Anarcho-Capitalist beliefs. I simply meant that the term is not analogous to Libertarianism.
From the title I thought this was for 1 game from 1 person, but this is across 5 or so games for the 6 person (according to Wikipedia) company.
At New Relic, we use HighCharts (http://highcharts.com/). We constantly get questions from our customers about which library we use, because they like the way they look and function. Highly recommended.
Would LOVE to see this weighted by the each user's HN Karma score. For example, a user with 1000 Karma who follows Harj should be worth more than a user with 10 Karma who follows Lessig.
What do you mean by "hard time"? Thanks.
I love how the Hacker News community can spend most of its time obsessed with starting businesses and yet still find time to decry the profit motive as evil.
I had a color blind client once. He kept rejecting my duotone artwork because it didn't 'look right.' When he finally admitted he was color blind, I asked him 'why are you trying to make color decisions when you have this condition?' and he said, 'because i'm in charge here.'
You have to remember that the focus is about moving past old hard drive connections like SATA, so even if you got one of the new hybrid hard drives with flash on them, you would be limited by the SATA port it was connected to.

That is why all those companies are moving to PCIe directly, for the extra speed. If the OS were to handle caching and other things so the user didn't have to worry about it, then the experience would be much greater and faster all said.
NoSQL Took Away The Relational Model And Gave Nothing Back
But not against the stalker-techie-at-your-ISP attack.
Mixing virtual and real scenes in the site of ancient Pompeii
You're welcome.

If it gets a couple more up-votes then it might make it to the front page for more people to get their brains stretched.

I do also need to modify the page to point out that hyper-cubes are also spikey, and the hyper-spheres in the corners are sort of in the spikes. Thanks to cperciva for the added insight.
If you have more data than, say, GDBM, can swallow in one bite, how could you break this data apart and then find the right chunk amongst multiple servers when given a key?

Also, what does the interviewer mean by this:

> I generally ask these folks if they think the problem of looking up a key by value has been solved before, especially given the two weeks to be live in production requirement.

Is that a typo? s/key by value/value by key/ ?
Software Development and Creativity
Chrome Experiment Game: Browser Pong
Another case of people projecting themselves onto something.

It looks to me like she knew the camera was there and was hiding her face with a handbag. She was probably talking to the man who was walking in front of her, but the frame of the shot prevents verification of that.
Well there goes all the dead spots.

Pun intended. Interesting that they would put something like that up there. Most people climbing Mount Everest probably could afford a satellite phone and don't need 3G. Guess it is a luxury for those risking their lives.
I actually read and voted up that submission, but you have to understand that the set of people who care about / understand a post like that is small. As a result, with a generalized community like HN, you're always going to fight to get attention for stuff like that, especially as HN grows. This is an excellent argument for something like subreddits, because otherwise the community just gets more and more shallow. Bugs me to think I've contributed to that :(
I used to work for a video game company, and we produced a puzzle game that involved heavy use of colors. I pushed very hard to include a "color blind mode" which added shapes to the tiles.

An interesting side effect is that you could play faster in color blind mode, because we used 2D sprites for those pieces instead of 3D models. Without the animations you could move faster.

We were also working on this other "game" (a PDA for the NDS) which included a bunch of mini-games, one of which heavily relied on identifying colors. Unfortunately I was not able to convince them to make a color blind version. The game was targeted at girls who are far less likely to be color blind than boys, and the game was only a very small portion of the product overall.
Have you seen Holla? (http://github.com/maccman/holla or http://getholla.com)

I haven't used it, but seems like a open source competitor to Campfire (which is awesome).

Good write up on GigaOM
http://gigaom.com/collaboration/holla-an-open-source-group-c...
"Users and programs can mark certain files to indicate that those files need to be really fast, and then when they're no longer accessed regularly they can be unmarked. "

This sounds like too much file administration overhead for regular users. It would seem more likely that the OS would automatically determine which files should be marked with the fast flag. Similar to the way the Seagate Momentus handles its SSD half.
Are you sure you want to recommend "Dive Into Python"? It has some flaws, which are discussed by Zed Shaw at http://oppugn.us/posts/1272050135.html

Basically he says the book is outdated and not maintained, and has bad examples.
Google exec calls Android acquisition its 'best deal ever'
There's the monthly London Python Code Dojo (which is excellent). Announcements are on the python-uk mailing list. http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-uk
Flot is worth a shot. There may be a python library to generate is server side. When I looked into it, I kept going back and forth between javascript charts vs images. I ended up going with images because I didn't really need dynamic charts. There were also features missing from many. IIRC, Flot couldn't add a title to the x/y axis at the time I was looking at it.
There is an opportunity for a side-business here. I cannot download really big files, so I buy my linux distros on DVDs. I wasn't able to find anyone selling Arduino, when I asked on a Arduino forum a nice person mailed me a copy, but I think someone with a fast connection and a web site could make a few dollars extra downloading and packaging open source software for people who can't download their own. I doubt that there is enough demand for this to be a main source of income, but the marginal costs if you already have a way of taking credit cards and the fast connection should be minimal.
I'd love to chat with the MIT media lab folks. If you're so inclinded, check out my HN bio and have them contact me via email or twitter. ;-)

I haven't sought a collaboration yet, because "pinmachine" is my weekend project -- my time is otherwise filled up working on my startup (saucelabs.com).
Maybe DCCP [1] would be better. Non-congestion controlled protocols are bad for the internet.

[1]: Datagram Congestion Control Protocol: http://read.cs.ucla.edu/dccp/
Also, ...

Just because I don't think it's an endorsement and because I think it's an oversight by a reviewer and not Apple policy doesn't mean I think it's acceptable. I'm appalled, especially because of my views on Apple's approach to diversity.
> 40 to 70%

That's one heck of a margin of error.
Awesome! If youre working in python by any chance I could write some code for it too.
> I actually read and voted up that submission,

Thank you

> you have to understand that the set of people who
> care about / understand a post like that is small.

I've always known this, but I find it surprising that so many HNers seem to fall into that category. I've always thought of people here as interested in pretty much anything technical, as I am, but it seems like they're not.

Which I guess is just a thing to know.

> This is an excellent argument for something like
> subreddits, because otherwise the community just
> gets more and more shallow.

Or something. I see sub-reddits as being like folders, whereas I'd rather have something like tags. I'd like the chance to stumble across something out of my comfort zone but still engaging and interesting.

I've got ideas and working on something in what's laughingly called my copious free time.
> Financial arithmetic? Convert to smallest unit and use integers or the currency data type du jour in your language, and don't act surprised when operations on 32-bit floating point don't yield the intuitively correct values.

Yes, though you may want more precision then that. For accuracy you could use, say, exact rational numbers, and for speed a fixed precision below e.g. Cents might be useful. (Though you probably meant something like nano-Cent when you said, convert to the smallest unit.)
I'd like to think that the point of your investigation isn't so much that Amazon will be pissed, but, "Look at how much we were able to find out about a random guy through just his username and blog post"

I think most users have already accepted that information previously considered private is now available to most of the world. The step from anonominity to the information posted above is a hell of a lot more scary than from the information posted above to someone knowing your current location.

I know that the point of the article was that the author was able to log into random users accounts, but the scary part was supposed to be that the author knew exactly who and where they are. But when they give away information like the above on a regular basis, I honestly think users could care less.
if it's a hearing amplifier, then who is she listening too? I don't see anyone next to her and the guy who is walking in front of her is several paces in front. I would think that if my friend had a hearing issue, that I would closer to them and sort of make sure they could hear me. Then the woman stops and looks around, lips moving, and no one near her. I'm not buying into the time travel crap but does look strange and the hearing aid also appears doubtful too.

I had thought it might be a 2 way radio but from what I read, 2 way radios didn't come about until 1928 and they were very large boxes of electronics (tube electronics).
There may be few legitimate uses for document.cookie, but eliminating it does very little to prevent cross-site scripting.
If you really want precision and you're dealing only with rational numbers, it's better to maintain a struct rational { u64 numerator, denominator; }; and do all calculations with it.
Yup, that's exactly what I'm going for... It'll be really cool when you can program anything to appear. My dream is to make it large enough to render "Han Solo in Carbonite" on this kind of display. :-)
>> you'd have lost money on most and only gained money in Ford, GM, Dodge, and overall you would only make a reasonable about of money.

That is an argument in favor of the efficient market theory. The car companies were correctly priced, based on the market size that resulted and not knowing which car companies were going to make it.

The efficient market theory certainly breaks down. For example, at the height of the dot-com bubble, many of the dot-com companies were valued as if it were likely they were going to take a very large share (if not most) of their intended market.
I remember the discussion on floating point and talking about BCD (we had assembler on and IBM/370), but I get the feeling BCDs are not talked about much anymore given some of the discussions I've had over the years. A related thing to watch out for is any arithmetic with units and how to deal with fractional conversions. This could cost you a lot of money or mess up and inventory if handled poorly.
The Mac App Store isn’t for today’s Mac developers
Oh comment bait! With an Arduino, you could...

* Generate NTSC signals - http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/TVout
* Make a mini http server - https://code.google.com/p/webduino/
* Drive nixie tubes - http://www.ogilumen.com/nixie-nixie-driver-kits-p-92.html (don't kill yourself on the voltages)

Sigh. So many little projects, so little time...
See e.g. Haskell's Data.Ratio (http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.12.1/html/libraries/base-4.2.0...) module for rational numbers.
I took a contest at my school to make a gps-waypoint-driven (rc)car.

Was really interesting interfacing the arduino with an h-bridge for motor control, GPS module, and servo.

These are powerful little devices.

The small bit of documentation I attempted is here:
http://arduino-car.blogspot.com/
There's a reason your contest (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1394751) did so well (I'd like to see some more analysis, too, nudge nudge...)

I'm not entirely certain what to think of this, either.
The only bad thing about this game, iOS devices only. I really wish developers would port their games and apps over to Android sooner. Specially something like this that is catered to the more nerdy crowd.
No. If it repeats, it's rational.
Sean Parker And Steve Jobs Go To War
Another issue - backing the next google may not be as profitable as you think. The founders keep a large portion of the shares, and the IPO will raise a lot but that goes into new servers or acquisitions. Then those pesky employees want stock options.

The VC firms who backed google brag about how they got 25% of a company that's now worth $600B. They don't like to mention that they were diluted (by both the IPO and employee stock options). I think they made a 100X return, which is certainly very good, but it's not as great as they make it sound.

Andy Bechtolsheim, the angel who gave them $100,000 made out like a bandit though. Something like a 10,000X return, I think.