skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He is talking about an IDE feature that indicates that, well, your test passed!

http://www.eclipse.org/ajdt/EclipseCon2006/shots/junitTestsP...

The idea is that you write a few lines of code, test it (most likely you'll get red), and you keep fixing your code until you get green, and only then you proceed to the next task.

As far as I know, it started with jUnit on Eclipse, and then others implemented the concept on other languages / IDEs.
Hacker News, at least to me, is much more that a "place for hacker news," it's a community. The news articles here are not just plain technology news - I could try CNET for that (Search "Father's Day Gifts" on CNET for a father's day related tech article).

HN is run by people like you and me. We're smart people and we typically post and up vote things that other hackers will appreciate. I tend to overlook birthdays and holidays when I am dealing with other things, and I appreciate the fact that someone was thoughtful enough to post a reminder for me.
What software would you pay for?
On the lines of 37signals 1. Product, 2. Price 3. Profit, a question for YC.

When every webapps seems to be free, and everybody chasing eyeballs, What software would you pay for, say a subscription fee of 20$ per month. Why? What makes you pay for it, as compared to trying to find a free software, (apart from better functionality)?
You should take a look at test driven developmnt e.g. write the test first then code.
UPDATE: So I discovered the reason why the bouncing ball didn't seem to smooth, yet people insisted that it should be.

It seems that Flash for Mac is much slower at rendering than Flash for PC. The same file with a target fps of 100 runs at around 60fps on my dual core 2.16ghz mac, but runs at 98fps on a 1.7ghz single core PC.

I guess it makes sense that Adobe spent all their time optimizing the PC version.
Sweet....is there something similar for VIM?
test-second can be kinda boring sometimes.

test-first is more fun.
RFC: Django 1.0 roadmap and timeline
"This is a call for comments on the proposed Django 1.0 roadmap and schedule. "
I find this to be very true, writing the tests at the beginning is exciting because you get to see what your code is going to accomplish. Then filling in the code to pass the tests is exciting because you're working toward a very clear goal with a very clear payout. Best way to work, imho.
Writing AdSense or GMail in Ruby/Python/PHP will force you to pay the "tax" later on and the tax will be huge before you know it. You'll end up with a scratch re-write like it or not.
A lot of talking about a little data. It sounds reasonable, though.
Used Car
There are a few efforts underway to try and build a stronger aussie community in the bay area. Check out www.advance.org and sign up. I'm on the San Francisco committee and specifically thinking about ways to get entrepreneurial-minded Aussies together.
Nick Carr’s new knock on the Web: does it change how we read?
The article doesn't have anything to say, except that they hate 37signals. Why does this get promoted here?!!
I'm conducting a sort of experiment with my own life. I've seen a lot of threads here about "Hackers vs. Bus. Development/marketing" and so I've decided that the debate must be settled.

When I was 14, I learned all I needed to build a Battlebot. I wanted to enter the show. I designed and built a frame, and filled it with the electrical components to make it work. It was pretty fun actually. I've spent time passively researching programming but never found the time to take it up to a usable level. I only know a few things and can understand some programming jokes. I've built a couple of websites and I have a decent understanding of how that whole "internet contraption" works. Basically, I consider myself a form of hacker, at least, whatever form can exist that doesn't know how to program for beans.

After accepting all of this, and seeing what type of person it appears I am, I've decided to major in marketing (and possibly double in finance). I've done a few businesses of my own and have a decent understanding of the marketing and development involved in making it succeed.

In the end (about 2-3 years from now), I will be what I would consider a well rounded tech and business focused individual.

Because of my obvious inexperience in programming, I think any startup I create or join will use me in a business development fashion, rather than as a hacker (even if I were to obtain a working knowledge of a language).

My goal is to be that marketing guy who also understands and appreciates what goes into building the product, instead of being the one who is purely an "idea person" with little experience with computers and the internet.

I want to prove to myself and others that it's possible to have both the right and left side of the brain working for you to help create something great.
Look super userful
Dude, I do not see Larry and Sergey doing this. Don't be evil, right?
doctests are one of the many reasons I use django. It could not be easier

http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/testing/#writing-...

I never did testing until my current app and it has made my life much easier.

Especially when working in a group they're a great way to verify that your parts are working the way someone else needs them to work. It means you both don't have to go chasing after what's wrong.
me too... while david ulevitch is, I believe, a smart guy, this article is utter headline grabbing nonsense.
You maybe right.
In emacs they call this general capability 'flymake', I think. Perhaps that+google will get you what you want.
Innovation by firing people
Not all brains were created equal.
I'd pay $20 per month for FFFFOUND, because of the high quality of the community.
You should blog when you have something to say, not just because you want to critique someone.
Yes, I think it's fun and particularly important.

Especially TDD.

You end up writing code that looks very similar to real code that will use your soon-to-be API.

You will design a better API this way, because you're looking at it from the user's perspective.
Clay Shirky - Where do people find the time (on the cognitive surplus, video)
Implementing a (stack based) Turing machine in Lego
Don't be afraid to ask for...raw measures of intelligence, [like SAT scores]. [loosely paraphased]

Interesting.
Read and re-read and then print out and frame this poster's words, it's solid gold:

"Find a customer with his hair on fire..."

You can't just follow a whimsical idea you "think" might be relevant. You want to find a market where people are hurting. Imagine someone with their credit card out of their wallet tapping it against their screen, frustrated that they can't find someone to give their money to.

Sell stuff to that person. I've been that person about a half-dozen times this week. Your challenge is to figure out how you can determine what I was searching for. (Or what the masses were searching for.)
I left my job at IBM a year ago to start a company. For several years before that I did many things to prepare: brainstormed ideas with friends, built prototypes, did online and market research...

However, the only things that have since proven useful are:
1) Network: through the network I developed before I left IBM, I secured contract work in lean times and introductions that have now resulted in investment.
2) Save money: has helped hugely in lean times.
3) Hand in my notice. A necessary step!

Having said that, to answer your question well, we would need a better understanding on why you have dreamed of starting your own company for 10 years but this has not yet happened.
'Here's what four year olds know. A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.'
From experience it appears that there are three major semantic hurdles which trip up novice
imperative programmers. In order they are:

- assignment and sequence

- recursion / iteration

- concurrency

I don't know about the rest of the paper, but I can anecdotally but strongly confirm these observations from trying to help a bunch of people through programming courses at university - luckily "only" maths & physics students, not future programmers. A lot of people were just completely baffled by assignment and iteration. (I don't think they got as far as recursion, and concurrency would have broken their brains; presumably not for lack of intelligence, these were people who were doing well in maths & physics)

I wonder if programming courses would be better if they were sufficiently built around those hurdles, taking them one at a time? Courses I've attended (had to attend) or observed always struck me as wrong, as they confused people about syntax and semantics, and rushed assignment operations. Presumably because "it's only an equals sign". If you don't understand assignment, a 'for' loop must make no sense at all.

I don't know, maybe courses elsewhere are better. Maybe I'm not a good judge of course quality, as I attended all of them when I was already a competent programmer. (damn you, compulsory modules!)
Berners-Lee: Challenge of the Web is 'creative connectivity'
Yes. It's kind of funny and rewarding to get positive feedback and see that the code runs as expected.
http://www.librarything.com
Simple, narrow, single guy for a month (initially), subscription model from day one.
Public GLASS Beta (Gemstone Linux Apache Seaside Smalltalk)
So, 'zope.app.error.error._temp_logs' was filling up with data. So that's a memory leak in Zope, not Python.

The article does show a graphical, partly automated technique for tracking this stuff down though, which is nice. Really though, it's just another example of common mistakes from static/global variables or singletons.
Opera 9.5 released. Built-in firebug-like tool: dragonfly
Congratulations on finding your father. ;-)
I did that with xkcd a while back, and asked the community if I should take it down. The general consensus was yes, so I did.

Karma isn't really important, what's more important is improving the community and quality of submissions. It's better to have people manually submit every post from a particular feed, since eventually you'll hit a few posts that aren't really relevant, and those will be left out, helping the signal-vs-noise ratio (pun intended).
It's very on-topic:

Workaholic instant-noodle-eating late-nighters occasionally need reminders of upcoming calendar events.
10 ways to tell if your product is crap!
"Like I said: you're wrong."

Mostly I'm running terminal - X just lets me get more characters on the screen than using a plain old tty. In truth, I don't use it for much other than that, and it's a pain having to type in "sudo" and my password all the time.

On a broader point, Linux was never about hectoring users about how to run their computers. That, I thought, was the entire point of a free/libre OS: the freedom to shoot myself in the foot if I choose. (Oh, and do lots of other interesting things too, but foot-shooting is my priority here.)

I switched to xfce. Much faster, less clutter, no lecture when I log in as root.
31 Reasons Why Being A Nice Guy Sucks
I hate it but I still try to force myself to do it. It really, really helps to find bugs if refactoring or a new feature breaks something, so it's a necessary evil. I call it evil because unit-tests themselves have to be written and debugged, which takes time. I believe I should just practice more, so that I could write them incredibly quickly, then they won't suck.
Fair question as to why I've been dreaming about a startup for long and not started yet. I was employee #3 at a decently funded startup in bay area from 2000 to 2002. That startup failed and I needed to take care of visa issues before I could do something on my own.

Any tips on networking with entrepeneurs? Los Angeles area is not so hot when it comes to tech meetups.

thanks
If you are going to kill a puppy for no good reason, drowning is a relatively humane way to do it. Once you're at the killing a puppy for fun stage in your decisionmaking, most of the fucked up has already happened. Drowning doesn't make it more fucked up.

It's not like someone is gonna say "you killed that puppy for no reason. But you really crossed the line with drowning."

I can think of many cases where drowning would be a preferable alternative to other modalities of needless puppy murder.
Dude Larry and Sergey can totally hire psychopaths to deal with the business end. They don't have to drown puppies themselves. They have a whole hr department to profiling and recruiting the best puppy murders. That way, the google gods can not be evil, and the puppies still get killed.
Imagine all kinds of similar events being posted to HN. Eventually, it would not be so easy to ignore them anymore. Better to be careful from the beginning.
JUnit was derived from SUnit in Smalltalk.

In Smalltalk/Squeak, you can write the Unit tests and the code you're testing alongside each other, live, from the debugger. It certainly makes things easier being able to see the live objects, in deciding how they should behave. And by testing the objects in situ, you pretty much know your code is going to run as you expect.
Criticism is fine (and I think there is room for a good critique of 37signals). Just pretend that you're saying what you're writing directly to the person in question, and adjust your tone as a consequence.
How does Trac compare to SharePoint (WSS3)?

I am looking at building a collaboration platform that does a lot of what Sharepoint offers. Looking at using Trac or WSS3 or something better if anyone knows of anything.

Thanks.
Thanks:-)

http://flickr.com/photos/26254919@N05/
You seem to have good experience using Sharepoint (>3yrs). Can out point out any good alternatives you think are worth considering (especially free/open-source offerings)?
Schmidt said "Don't be evil" is meant to provoke internal debate over what constitutes ethical corporate behavior, rather than representing an absolute moral position.

Having acquired the legal rights and protections of a person, the question arises - what kind of person is the corporation?

To determine the kind of personality that drives the corporation to behave like an externalising machine, we can analyse it like a psychiatrist would a patient. We can even formulate a diagnosis, on the basis of typical case histories of harm it has inflicted on others selected from a universe of corporate activity.

Corporations were given the rights of immortal persons. But then special kinds of persons, persons who had no moral conscience. These are a special kind of persons, which are designed by law, to be concerned only for their stockholders. And not, say, what are sometimes called their stakeholders, like the community or the work force or whatever.

The Corporation[1] comes to mind.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation
Special congrats to any founders with kids. It's hard work ;)
In some cases, yes I agree. But a chatroom is a pretty proven design. Scrolling output, user list on the right, input bar at the bottom.... and that's pretty much it.
I doubt even 37signals would claim they designed that.

It's like IE complainging that firefox also has an address bar at the top, and back/forward/reload buttons.
Google CEO 'occasionally excused' from Apple board meetings
I live in Belgium.
Ask HN: How many combinations are possible in a 9X9 Sudoku matrix?
How many possible solutions can exist for 9X9 Sudoku puzzle?
The claims are falsifiable. Just like any other prediction of the future. You just have to wait and see if the prediction becomes true. To falsify the proposition that 'the singularity' will occur within the next 40 years will take up to... 40 years.

In your terminology all predictions of the future are 'unscientific'. I'm all going to argue definitions of words with you. The important thing as with any prediction is the chances of it being true.
In terms of sheer inspiration, I'm not sure startups are what do it for me. Stuff like the mars probes is what I want to stand up and cheer for.
Enumerating the Sudoku 9×9 grid solutions directly

The first approach taken historically to enumerate Sudoku solutions (Enumerating possible Sudoku grids by Felgenhauer and Jarvis) was to analyze the permutations of the top band used in valid solutions. Once the Band1 symmetries and equivalence classes for the partial grid solutions were identified, the completions of the lower two bands were constructed and counted for each equivalence class. Summing completions over the equivalence classes, weighted by class size, gives the total number of solutions as 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 (6.67×1021). The value was subsequently confirmed numerous times independently. The Algorithm details section (below) describes the method.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_Sudoku#Enumerati...)
PLT Scheme 4.0 released
But that's exactly the point. You can be MORE lazy. You spend so much more time than you realize testing and re-testing your own code... doing monkey-level QA! Stop doing all that work. Be more lazy. Write your tests first!
I remember how I learned to program. My parents had a Timex Sinclair with no tape drive and 4K of RAM, so if you wanted to use a program, you had to type it in, in BASIC, from scratch. The computer came with a book of programs. I just looked at the programs, figured out what they did, and started writing my own modifications. I think I was around 5 years old.

I guess I must have just been "born rational", if you're going to equate programming ability with rationality.

But what makes you think that the "programming gear" I had - the quality of a born hacker, by which the first time we look at any piece of code, anywhere, any time in our life, at any age, we instantly know how to program - is equivalent to "rationality"? Or even "intelligence"?

There are physicists who cannot learn to program, apparently. This shocks me. But if I can learn to program at age five without instruction, and a physicist cannot learn to program with instruction, that makes it pretty darn plausible to me that yes, there is a "programming gear".

PS: How the hell can you be a physicist and not be able to write computer programs? WTF, human brain?
Another IP lawyer milking the GPL FUD
they exist, they're just hard to get invited to because they want to remain small.
Yep I see them there. But does that really have any bearing on the likely hood of it being true? Religion encompasses our greatest desires so if technology becomes sufficiently powerful wouldn't the fulfillment of those desires be a likely result?

Is there a danger that some people's thinking could be influenced by their desire for it to happen? Of course. But I think that just as many people are likely to dismiss it for irrational reasons as well. That is why it is important for people to keep their eye on the real science.
Of course. Guilt by association. Case proven.
>>
I'd be hard-pressed to identify a competitor to all SharePoint has to offer (workflow, document management, check-out/in, integration with instant messenger, etc.).
<<
Er... Lotus Notes has been around for about 25 years, and has all that, and a lot more -- the fine-grained security you ask for, and replication, Java/VB integration and runs on about 6 different platforms including Windows. Even a small company of two people can have it up and running for a couple of hundred bucks. IBM's marketing is atrocious, but Notes is an incredibly secure and flexible product.
Any math is good math. For example, something like graphics programming would make use of almost all math fields. Another example would be AI.

But i don't believe in studying math to make use of it in CS. I believe in studying CS and then learning the math that is needed along the way. You'll be surprised at how many practical CS problems can be mapped to simple mathematical problems. So, since you can't anticipate this, working with a mathematician helps.
I'm an open source junkie, so I wouldn't pay money for much of anything. I've "paid" by contributing back (mostly in very small ways) to a lot of projects though.
OpenGroupware
barbelith.com might suit your tastes. It's not invite-only, but if you apply then it takes months to get approved. Reasonably intelligent discussion occurs.
I really liked http://twistori.com/ very clean and sexy.
Shaun Inman's http://haveamint.com is beautiful.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=puns ;) I can't help but think of this when ever someone says "pardon the pun."
We pay $49.95/month to PayCycle for payroll service. I don't love it, but it does the job reasonably well.

We pay for RHEL on our primary server (indirectly...it's included in the dedicated server we have).

I donate $100/year, or so, to the ICCCF because I love vim.

We sponsored the YAPC::NA because we use Perl extensively.

I've bought a couple of games, and Windows Vista for an HTPC to go with a giant TV my girlfriend bought a few weeks ago.

I pay $14.95 per year for Maxemail, a fax gateway service, which freakin' rules. I send maybe five faxes per year, and receive about twice that many. It's simply wonderful not having to have a phone line and a fax machine sitting around for those few occasions--I have a scanner for signed documents. I've used this service for six or seven or maybe even more years and cannot say enough nice things about it. I tried Efax before Maxemail, but had some sort of issue with using it from Linux, and so I switched almost immediately.

We pay for AdWords and AdBrite and Yahoo search marketing. I dunno if that counts...but I am partly paying for the tools they provide for placing, bidding, and monitoring ad campaigns. We're paying about $3500/month in advertising, these days, though that'll double+ next month when we launch a new product.

We've paid 99designs.com for logo contests...and all have turned out great. They've raised prices several times since I started using them (when it was SitePoint Contests), and it's beginning to annoy me, so I'll try an alternative in the future. It's up to $39 now just to list the contest--some things (like getting a couple of icons drawn) don't even need a prize much bigger than that! They've become too impressed with themselves. This is an area where competition would be welcome...though I wouldn't want to be the company trying to compete solely on price. I'm sure there are other designer-focused communities that can step up to the plate with a better price while still bringing other benefits to the table.

I pay for Emusic. I have the biggest monthly plan they offer and I pay annually, because I love Emusic and have no reason to believe it'll ever disappoint. I've been a subscriber since the first year of operation, because they were the only music service offering DRM-free MP3s that would play on my Linux desktop. Cannot say enough good about Emusic. "A+++ Would buy from again" as they say so eloquently on eBay.

That's all that comes to mind.
Blogging for Burma
> "I've been that person about a half-dozen times this week."

Easier still is to just notice when you are that person and then solve that problem. Whenever I find myself frustrated with something, that tends to be the most interesting (and possibly lucrative) idea.

If your own hair is on fire, then chances are someone else on the internet is suffering from the same affliction, and is willing to pay you for solving it.

Solving your own problem is much easier than trying to guess what someone else's problems are, and you are more likely to stick with it since you can be your own user.
Now that I finally retrieved my domain back from squatters, I've decided to rechristen my blog for a cause. Show how much the Hacker News community cares.

You can donate directly here: http://www.firstgiving.com/christoff
I am in a similar boat, and simply have started going to the events I can. Where I live there is not much happening.

Ultimately you reap what you sow, so with this in mind I select the key events and make the time and effort to go there and engage with people.