skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is a copy of Kent's response:

"Kent Beck, Husband, father, programmer, goat farmer.

The needs of a startup before product/market fit are very different than those after. Before, you need the absolute lowest possible latency from idea through implementation to validation. If you can do that without any code at all, so much the better. Reducing latency gives you the chance to experiment as many times as possible for a given amount of money to increase your chances of survival. After you find a product that meets a real market need, you need to shift to a throughput-oriented engineering strategy so you can last until revenue ramps up.

The practical implications of this for testing is that before product/market fit you should only write tests that reduce latency. Sometimes this means no automated tests. As a feature proves promising and you begin to elaborate it, this means just enough tests to keep the validation cycle short. If a feature is complicated AND YOU CAN'T THINK OF A CHEAP WAY TO TEST IT, you may have to write extensive tests to get the feature to a verifiable state.

Then comes the transition. You've started growing. You're feeling the pain of scaling. Now you need testing. More than that, though, the whole organization needs to begin valuing throughput instead of latency. If that shift takes place, then extensive testing comes along as a natural consequence."

This is a far cry from TDD. I'm glad Kent wrote it, though, because it is so true.
There's a startup based here in Chicago called FeeFighters

http://feefighters.com/

I've never tried it, but they'll apparently do this for you. They get a number of payment processors to bid for your business, and the winning bidder pays them a referral fee.
Now written up here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846682
People often say "Just use (x) decimal arithmetic system for important stuff like finances."

Out of curiosity, I'm wondering how much trade you would have to be doing for floating-point imprecision to cause an actual problem.

Taking 0.2+0.1 as an example and figuring an imprecision of $0.00000000000000004 per $0.30, figuring a loss of one cent as being significant, I have 0.01/(0.00000000000000004 / 0.3) = 7.5e13, or... seventy-five trillion dollars?

Never mind that you're as likely to get 0.6+0.1 = 0.69999999999999996, which should roughly cancel out the error over time.

This is basically just an aesthetic problem in finance, yes?
And the flood of Paper Toss clones began.

I just tested this out months ago on Android and don't remember the details, how are the ads placed? In-game ads or there is an ad in the rankings page?
> We're used to doing math with approximations (0.33333…)

0.33333… is not an approximation.
One day we couldn't customize computers, and now we can, I can't wait for the day I can customize my phone with the specs I choose, just like I did to my notebook.

Maybe it won't be this company who will succeed at doing it, maybe there will be lots of companies doing it, but I can certainly see that someday we will have this kind of option. I just hope it happens sooner than later.
Who gives a crap, really the meaning was conveyed. I have serious writing language disabilities, just take a look at my post history for the obvious proof. Sniping me for grammer critique is like picking up the local bar buzzard, not much of an accomplishment and not something you want to brag about. I am low hanging fruit.

http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/LBLD.htm
> and it's the same problem.

it's not a problem.
>The only operating system that moves fast enough to add support for something like this in that sort of timeframe is Linux

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

The ars article isn't very clear, however it isn't talking about a system having a magnetic hard drive and a flash hard drive (in a standard 2.5/3.5 fashion), but rather a magnetic disk and some sort of built-in or extension flash memory. There are new upcoming motherboards that have a decent amount of onboard flash memory for precisely this usage model.

In the SAN market there is a raging trend called Easy Tiering, FAST, or whatever other marketing glop the vendor makes. It allows you to have a couple of SSDs, and then lots of magnetic disks, finding a sweet spot between volume and speed as it automatically moves hot spots to the SSDs. It's a perfect use of varying speed technologies.

The new hybrid hard drives bring this -- to some success -- to the consumer market. They just need a lot more flash and a better algorithm and it's a killer solution: A 2TB magnetic disk with 32GB of high speed flash would be incredible.
I wouldn't want to maintain a large, complex system without a high coverage percentage. I'd have thought that would seriously hit your velocity.
A Silicon Valley Prescription for Boston & All Startup Hubs: Throw More Parties
As with anything you see the success stories often because they are interesting which masks the fact that the vast majority of those developing mobile games have trouble just breaking even.

Without anything first hand experience I get the feeling that advertisers are paying to much at the moment for ad space in iphone apps, given that it's a relatively new advertising direction I don't think it's really stabilized yet and going forward it will probably become harder to pull the same kinds of number from that same traffic.
What the heck does that actually mean? Can we just admit that these statements are religious, but wrapped in non-religious language?

It's actually the reverse. The religious view is God gave us the Earth as a kind of fruit to be plucked. Since we go on to live in Heaven for eternity the stewardship of the Earth is sorta in the hands of the Aethists and non-believers...
Well, it's more like:

Binary numbers are a countably infinite set. Decimal numbers are a countably infinite set. You can therefore map binary representation to decimal representation 1-1 with a simple mapping function.

OTOH, floating point numbers are an uncountably infinite set. The only way to map binary numbers to floating point numbers is to map to a strict subset.

The subset happens to be different when mapping binary to floating point and decimal to floating point when using IEEE754.
You misread your own link: closing over loop variables considered harmful. Closing over values rather than variables would make closures useless for a huge variety of purposes.
>SSD's should result in huge performance boosts, especially with nosql systems like MongoDB & CouchDB.

This is entirely backwards. NoSQL solutions tend to trade space for reduced I/O, whereas a relational database trades I/O for reduced space.
My take on this is that the unrealized valuations in the portfolio approximate a power law curve, however the realized outcomes will be bimodal if you manage your investments for bimodal outcomes. Venture capitalists are not passive investors, their behaviour is a material component of their portfolio dynamics.

So, if Fred the Investor is managing for returns across the curve, he will eventually end up with great returns in the middle of the curve. However, if (to make up a name) Bjarne the Investor is managing for bimodal returns, he will force the companies in his portfolio to give up all hope of any sub-home run outcome in the hope of having a faint hope of a home run. Bjarne's portfolio will end up realizing bimodal returns.

Speaking from my own experience, I recall taking investment from a firm who managed for bimodal returns. They were always pressuring us to hire up, and they were always telling us to stop worrying about managing our burn rate. They spoke of profitability as "premature optimization," and in fact they wanted us to spend more time talking to "strategic partners" that might end up issuing press releases about us and less time talking to customers that might end up paying us.

That kind of behaviour is going to skew the realized returns towards bimodality.
A couple of simple design tips to Google.com
Okay, let's connect some dots about you.

Your name is Gary LosHuertos

You look like this: http://yfrog.com/0irajuj

Gender: Male

Astrological Sign: Scorpio

Industry: Consulting

Occupation: Software Engineer

Location: New York : NY : United States

You have a blog hosted on BlogSpot from which this article came.

You send tweets from @gloshuertos where you promoted this story.

Your twitter account lists a latitude/longitude address of 27.109827,-82.308136 which is in Venice, Florida. One of your oldest tweets mentions that you're on your way to Gainsville, Florida.

https://twitter.com/#!/gloshuertos/status/1267758656

Only one Gary LosHuertos comes up on LinkedIn, but this person used to work in Gainsville Florida, so it's reasonable to assume this person may be you.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gary-loshuertos/11/68/aa0

The interesting thing about that LinkedIn profile is that it lists your current employer as Amazon.com.
From your blog post, you mentioned the following:

"This was somewhat puzzling. Did they receive the first message? I logged into their accounts, and surely enough, they had. One of them was even on Amazon.com, which I had warned about in my first message. I targeted him first: I opened up his Amazon homepage, identified something he had recently looked at, and then sent him a "no, seriously" message on Facebook from his account including the fun fact about his music choices."

So what you're telling us is that you used a user account of a customer of your current employer to login as that person, spy on their purchases, then logged to their Facebook account and send them messages about his customer information?

You're entering into a world of hurt if Amazon catches wind of this.
Very nice. Would be cool to see how people moved up/down since July :)
"If you're smart, sometimes you can beat them at their game."

Following your analogy, the majority of people are probably better off financially by not going to Vegas at all.
Mathematica. Unfortunately, it is priced accordingly.
> This seems like the right way to do it.

It's also slow as molasses, which is why very few languages default to decimal floats and use IEEE floats (or doubles) instead, via their hardware implementation. The behavior of IEEE floats and doubles is very well defined, and though they are unfit in some sectors (you do not want to count money using them), have to be massaged a bit when displayed and don't deal well with great differences in powers-of-10 (e.g. 1e21 + 1 == 1e21) they work well enough in practice. And they're implemented in hardware.
True enough. I was trying to imply the use of 0.33333 as standing in for 1/3, rather than exactly 0.333330..., but of course 0.3... is an exact representation of 1/3.
Really? I tried Paper Toss a few months ago and was entertained for about 15 seconds.

As an off-hours Android developer myself, I suppose it should be inspiring to hear these stories, but I can't help but be a little envious to hear about Paper Toss and iFart millionaires while my app income trickles in.

Ah well - good for them.
Ask HN: Startup domains with quirky names that Google corrects "Did you mean"
I'm shortly going to start a private beta and invitation launch of my startups first product (a web app). The name I have decided to go with currently results in a "Did you mean" (and two results) results page on Google.

Given the tendency for web startups these days to have "quirky" names and domains (although mine is actually a .com) has anybody else experienced this?
I understand that this is an automatic result of low search volume and should quickly remedy itself. But nonetheless, what are other peoples experiences?

Many thanks.
Working at Google vs Working at Meetup (Updated)
You can immediately start playing without feeling overwhelmed, which is something that cannot be said about current console games. One of the benefits of portable gaming.

Also the game developers don't take everything seriously, considering you can advertise on the moon.
> helps in identifying a sane API

I totally forgot about this, but I agree 100%. I'm a big fan of "Write this as though the underlying code exists, then fill it out" for API design.

I don't write as many tests as you'd think I do, actually, because I heavily favor integration tests over unit-style tests, and so we're probably much closer in that regard than you think. ;)
If that public wifi is secured with a password -- albeit a public password -- does that protect individual sessions?

Meaning you go to a cafe and the blackboard tells you that today's WPA2 password is "greenbeans". Knowing this does it provide the ability to sniff or abuse other users sessions on this WAP?

Honestly don't know this and can't find a clear answer about it.
That's why its great to have kids; you can do projects you would be a little embarrassed to do for yourself!

{ guy with an airsoft guard tower, trebuchet and monkey bridge }
afaik (and from my own experience) that won't work.

"As long as the universally supported WPA encryption protocol is used,
each individual user receives their own private “session key” that absolutely
prevents eavesdropping between users, even through they are all using the
same WiFi password."

from: http://steve.grc.com/2010/10/28/instant-hotspot-protection-f...
Ask HN: Confused about a dead comment
Some time ago on this item:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833203

which asks about algorithms that blew one's mind, I replied with a comment that mentioned that high-dimensioanl spheres should be thought of as "spikey":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834273

Someone asked why:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834508

and I promised a write-up.

I've now produced that write-up:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846682

As so often happens, whether it's timing, luck or disinterest, that submission has sunk from the "New" page and will probably never be seen again. That happens, no surprise, no problem.

However, to tidy up I went back to the original to point at the new item and say that I'd produced the write-up that people had asked for. No problem there.

But it's dead. Here, look for yourselves:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847180

When I'm logged in that item is there. When I'm not logged in it's dead. Further more, it was dead almost instantly, without time for people to flag it.

Any ideas?
When I visited Hungary in 1988, I was handed a photocopied paper at the border that stated that "Hungary has no drugs, prostitutes, gangs", and so on...good times.

That night we were watching a dubbed version of "9 to 5" on TV, and my mother's cousin asked me if I smoked dope - because all North Americans do, no doubt. :)
> If so, are there any IEEE-754 alternatives?

Decimal arithmetics, which incurs a severe performance loss as IEE754 floats and doubles are implemented in hardware.
I have wondered about the same question. Strange, I upvoted your question but it still only has one point.
This Week's Cloud Watchlist (a lot this week)
Software is free, so if you make a wrong cut, it doesn't matter.

Untrue; tell that to the person who's paying the QA teams who have to validate your code. Or the patch teams that work 48 hours straight to get a hotfix out because something broke after deployment.

Software is anything but free.
Is this a call for balance, or a call not to waste any time on testing at all? Perhaps it's not the latter, but will be perceived that way by some.

Disclosure: I am biased towards test driven development. Of course, I also worked, years ago, at a place selling (niche) program development tools. Some value was placed on correctness. YMMV.
Clickables:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833203 <- Asking about algorithms

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834273 <- High-D spheres are "spikey"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834508 <- Why?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846682 <- The write-up

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847180 <- The inexplicably dead cross-reference.
Hello EastCoastLA. I would say I am advanced in Javascript. Please email me with the details so I can check it out.
An alternative to the chrome command line option is the Proxy Switchy extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/caehdcpeofiiigpd...
"How old are you uncle Johnny"
"Let's just say I'm older than the Internet"
"whooooooaaaaa"

Also: http://www.xkcd.com/647/
Separating the application itself from the database is an interesting idea. But then you would still need to host a database yourself somewhere. If you don't trust me you must also be afraid of me messing up your own database with my solution (My solution would need write access).

A lot of mobile application developers are probably not experts in server management and backups. It is not their priority and core competence. They want to build great applications quickly.

My solution gives them an easy to use CMS with a REST API for a low monthly cost, and they don't have to care about backing up data themselves. If they don't fully trust me, they can export their data from the CMS regularly themselves, so in a worst case scenario they still have their content.
Ah, thanks. I didn't notice at first. Though the fork has more recent commits where as the main hasn't had any for a while now. Still pretty cool and hope it goes somewhere.
A Media Critique
Test coverage is a fake feel-good metric that makes you want to increase the number and by this give you the impression of progress. Real progress is measured differently. Test as much as necessary, but not everything.
Mount Everest now has a permanent 3G connection to the summit
Is professional integrity a futile argument?
It's lowest-common-denominator humour for lowest-common-denominator people. Complaining about it is like complaining about Dora the Explorer -- you're not in the target market, so you might as well forget it exists.
except buy William Gibson novels etc. Anything you want? That sounds like what a contented citizen of 1984 is supposed to say.
I'm certainly not saying it to be a douche, it's just how language has worked...forever. Fighting it is pretty useless IMO.
Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.
Either that or they are following the very sensible policy of never typing something into a social website which they wouldn't want to be public. (A policy I do violate myself from time to time.)
The difficulty I have here is that you associate unit testing with a large time cost. If you had good TDD knowledge then the length of time it takes to write a test is only slightly longer than it would take you to think about exactly what your code should be doing. 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. With the dynamic languages the feedback loop is much shorter so it's not so relevant. Admittedly I've never used javarebel which would render this a moot point.
Take college courses at night. That's what I did in high school.
I have to admit that I have a bad habit to write things a bit extreme way to start a conversation. How ever where did I do such a claim that if one does not do TDD is not professional?

It seems that I definitely need to improve my English. :)
Erlang likewise:

1> 0.1 + 0.3.

0.4
TortoiseGit has been working fine for me, no crashes or problems. They've done a pretty good job of taking the most common scenarios and making them easy to do, even for a Windows user. (And I say that as a Windows user:)
In response to requests, the write-up is now available here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846682
There is a term for this in mathematics and now I can't remember it, but with some systems, e.g. number crunching with large matrices, a very small change like this can magnify into huge differences and give you totally wrong results. It's definitely something you must be aware of and take into account.
I'm not really good at writing blog posts but I'll try it, thank you.
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That's what I meant, but obviously didn't explain it correctly. Thanks for the correction.
> Comes looking with no contract and none of his own commitment to show?

I'm not a lawyer, but I did study a little business law, especially contracts. Contrary to common belief, you don't need something in writing for an agreement to be considered a contract. See, for instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract

The transfer of the $1000 is pretty clear evidence of an agreement. Then there's records of the regular calls/chats. The partner, while maybe a jerk, has some claims of ownership here. (Also, I think he's probably less of a malicious jerk and more likely he's feeling hurt/threatened/betrayed - the threats to sue were in response to being told he's being kicked out of a business he presumably thinks he owns half of, took a risk on with his cash, and has put in some hours of his life)
"I have to question the value of CS educations when a post of this nature pops up every couple of weeks..."

How do we know it's not freshmen, high school students, and self taught developers asking the question?

From what is currently the top hit for that search:

"I am writing a program for class project..."
The mathematician: That's fine for 22/7. Now, go fix your computer so it knows how to count to 0.3, kthxbye
Here's some scans of the IMP Log:

http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~lk/LK/Inet/1stmesg.html

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
I'm aware of the performance hit, I just like the approach of a BigDecimal literal instead of having to write that boilerplate.
To prevent SQL injection, use bound SQL variables instead of embedding user input in SQL queries. You will also gain performance.

To prevent xsrf attacks, check referer header before you take action.
A lot of these games are geared towards a younger crowd (middle/high schoolers) who are much easier to entertain. They younger crowd also has more time on their hands to play these things.
Ask HN: Any one in NH want to meet up?
I'm a nontechnical founder of a small web app start up. Things have gone well and we are gaining traction. I'm in NH and was wondering if any fellow NHers would be interested in trying to meet up? The tech scene here seems to be lacking. This may be because I just dont know of any existing events or networks. I'm looking to meet people in the start up scene, share ideas, gain advice, learn, ect. It'd be nice if I didn't have to go to Boston to gain some inspiration/education.
Added in follow-up - I may have worked out what happened, but I'd still be interested in people's thoughts.
There are a LOT of programmers who don't understand how the fundamentals are implemented, though. I'm not saying you need to use C (or machine language) for everything, but having an idea how the whole stack fits together will show which operations are inherently more expensive, error prone, etc.

Two books I'd recommend: _Write Great Code vol. 1: Understanding the Machine_ by Randall Hyde, and _The Elements of Computing Systems_ by Nisan & Schocken (http://www.idc.ac.il/tecs/). WGC1 is about things typically learned about the machine while learning assembly (but leaves assembly itself for later). TECS guides you through building a (virtual) computer, starting with simulated NAND gates and building up. (Admittedly, I just got that one and I'm only a few chapters in, but excellent so far.)

I think every developer would benefit from knowing at least one low-level language (such as C), and one very high level language (such as Prolog).
You mean 3/10.
SQLite. Does exactly what it says on the tin.
MeeGo Linux 1.1 is now available