skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"By nature Jobs has been a seeker most of his life who has honed his gift of being able to go from divergent, expansive thinking to convergent, focused doing into a deftly effective skill."
I cannot recommend this video enough.

It is a step by step guide with code showing how the guy reduced his suite's running time from half an hour to 15 seconds.

A lot of it is preventing so many db objects like in the OP, but it also discusses parallelizing the tests using hydra to make use of multicore. This ties into the db access thing as well though as to do parallell tests you have to make all the cases set up and tear down their own fixtures transactionally. Not doing this is a leading cause of slow tests anyway.

He even has metrics for stuff like running the whole suite off a ramdisk, the effects of SSDs, etc etc. He worked on this at his company for weeks/months apparently.

It's too hard to explain here, just watch that video if you do ANY ruby testing!
Tales of condescending morale boosting efforts
true... good point... my sensei will be disappointed in me...
Ask HN: Anyone doing anything with SMS coupons?
I've been talking with a convenient store owner who is doing an SMS coupon program which is working pretty well. We have been kicking around some ideas on how to expand it and I was wondering if anyone here has any experience in this domain? What are the major pitfalls? Looks like I can do 2 cent texting with Twilio and it costs about $12K/year for a short code. What else should I be weary of? Thanks for any info.
HTML5 Storage: Application Cache by GoogleTechTalks [video]
i'd be screwed if deals were really made that way.
Ask HN: Telecommuting Abroad
Hi HN!

I am a Canadian and I do web design for clients in Canada, the UK, and the United States, all remotely. I never meet clients in person. Since I can take my laptop anywhere, I want to explore the world!

I am hoping that the collective wisdom of HN has experience with visas in various countries. I'm leaning toward Europe. Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, maybe France. My work would still be for Canadian clients predominantly, and I'd like to be able to stay for more than the typical vacation limit.

Does anyone have any experience doing this?

Thank you HN!
It's really a historic overview told from the perspective of the ultimate band wagoner...a TechCrunch blogger.
Ping Pong? I vote for rock+paper+scissors, or quarters.
it depends on the vc... i cant be beaten...
For me it was switching the development environment to emacs -nw (terminal mode) and GNU screen a few years ago. This lets me work from anywhere using just ssh and a decent terminal emulator.
Inglourious Software Patents
Touché :-)
real men play ping pong...
Only one problem - your anecdote provides (very weak) evidence against Warren's conclusions.

You had a major medical cause but you didn't go bankrupt. Lots of people do. To properly estimate the number of medical bankruptcies, you need to do the following calculation:

# Medical bankruptcies = # of bankruptcies x [P(bankruptcy | medical cause) - P(bankruptcy | no medical cause)] x P(medical cause)

All Warren measured was P(medical cause | bankruptcy). Then she led a bunch of innumerate reporters to believe that P(medical cause | bankruptcy) x # of bankruptcies = # of medical bankruptcies.

Your anecdote cuts against Warren's conclusions [1] because it suggests we increase our estimate of P(no bankruptcy | medical cause) and thereby reduce our estimate of P(bankruptcy | medical cause).

[1] I'm not suggesting a single anecdote proves much of anything. I'm just pointing out the direction it's infinitesimal value points.
Google owns WebM. Just something to consider.
Factually incorrect:

“In April 1999, Yahoo! acquired the company for $5.7 billion in stock.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com

The infographic reports this as $5.7 million which would not be such a huge deal, really.
The Plight Of The DC VC
eek. i'd be in trouble.
That was a different question.
But it's not justified to call it a country if you are going to compare its valuation as a company providing a social network to GDP, which is the sum total of all economic activity of the entire population.
Post The History of the Software Management Industry
Ads for Inspiration
I think you're selling them short, I've seen features with far lower useful content posted on that website.
hah... try the "Robo-Pong 2050" by Newgy... no joke...
>Dropping support for h.264 means slower adoption of <video> How's that better for the open standards?

20% of the browser market was never going to adopt H.264. That's a fifth of the market cut out from using <video> entirely.

How in the world is that possibly good for web standards?

>The most infuriating part of this is, that FSF and Google are so busy with their own agenda, that they forget users.

That majority of the market has the entrenched Flash until HTML5 <video> gets sorted out as a standard everyone can use.
That plastic-covered paddle + case is unreal.
The whole point of moving things to the browser was to remove any lockin advantages a specific platform might have. That is the reason Flash gets so much hate from anybody who doesn't use Windows. Going back to OS-specific codecs would limit codec choice to what the OS vendor considers kosher. And lest we forget, its far harder to switch operating systems than it is to switch browsers. If you don't like Chrome, Firefox or Opera, nobody's stopping you from using IE or Safari.

> bundling codecs is being limited to what Google and Mozilla say is ok for them

What you are suggesting merely takes the power out of the hands of browser vendors and puts it in the hands of the os vendors. I trust Mozilla, and to a far lesser extent Google, more than I ever will trust Microsoft.
Considering that traditional credit card security is based on just knowledge of simple shared secret - (card number, name, expiry date, cvv2) 4-tuple, and considering this secret is shared with everyone you do business with, this is still certainly more secure.

Also, trojans still have to compromise the OS security. It's not the same deal as with non-secure information (like spyware games accessing the contacts list, just because users don't care about app permissions) - the certificate store will be certainly guarded way more carefully.
Of course. I'll even quote the article:

> H.264 is a patent-encumbered codec; the MPEG LA organization requires developers who implement it to agree to a patent license. This license is fundamentally incompatible with software freedom. It requires developers to restrict how their software can be used, and to collect royalties in many situations.

While the wording is not perfect, this is actually about end user freedoms and convenience. There's the same situation is with parts of ffmpeg/libavformat or libmad - you just can't ship and use them completely legally. This is why "restricted formats" notion appeared, and why Ubuntu started shipping Fluendo's non-free encoder binary (http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/fluendo-mp3-decoder/, previous-to-last paragraph).

It was always a problem (albeit, nowadays, minor one) to use proprietary codecs on GNU/Linux systems. Problem not on developers' side, but the for the actual end users. Killing H.264, thus actively encouraging WebM support helps WebM to win the formats battle. In a short term, both end users and developers will experience compatibility problems, but in the end - if WebM will win - both end users and developers will benefit.

And please remember that we have Firefox, which - due to various FLOSS reasons - just won't support H.264 anyway.
I think I could rock everyone in Dance Revolution. Can we try that idea?
At least in my experience, they are pretty similar. Most of my Python 2 knowledge works fine in Python 3. I think it's really a stretch to pretend like your knowledge from 2 would be that divergent. I'm sure "in some senses" your statement is correct, but in practice I've seen few major changes. Learning Python 2 is the same as learning Python 3 and vice-versa; there are a few significant caveats between them, but I have never felt that they were "practically two different languages".
Why would that matter? HTTPS is about getting it over the wire securely... once it gets to the machine, there are no security guarantees.
Good stuff, man!
Agreed. Dramatic touch.
im still sweaty...
I posted this more for interestingly ironic value than anything else. Disclaimer: I did not create it!
With time. The point is that both HTML5 <video> and mobile web are in their infancy. Browser desktop share is now and it seems foolish to ignore 20% of the market in favor of a segment that accounts for 3% of traffic.
Most of these libraries are starting to get released as Python 3. I think Arch's push of Py3 has helped move things along. A good thing to do would be to "learn both" and help some people port.
Daniel Gilbert: Humans are on auto pilot nearly half the time.
Hacker News uses a web server written in arc.
Heroku Autoscaling Bug (sorry Heroscale)
Bletchley Park: Home of World War II’s talented minds: Part-I
It is important to remember that you are changing the code (and probably the tests) at the same time, so your coverage data is getting stale. So you can only "mostly" predict which tests to run, which is somewhat useful but can also make these cut down runs misleading.
Why Can't We Walk Straight?
Looks interesting, trying it out now (waiting for the report). Just some quick thoughts: On the "please enjoy our animated story of social media love" page, the animation is choppy and rather hard to follow... I lost interest in it very quickly.

More to the point: it's not exactly clear that the user can navigate away from this page (the animation may imply to some users that something is still happening). The flow feels interrupted at this point and it seems you might better direct/capture the user to do/read something else. I'm not sure what that step might be, but it feels like a missed opportunity (for you).
Old School Jet Retooled to Slay Stealth Fighters
If you extend last years trend for another 12 months then (according to Statcounters figures) IE, Firefox and Chrome will all have 30% of the market each, with IE heading down, Firefox level, and Chrome going up.

Which means, somewhat surprisingly, that IE could be 3rd globally in the relatively near future. In fact the IE drop/Chrome rise appears to be accelerating, so it could happen sooner.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200812-201012

But that's all versions of IE, IE9 won't be available on XP, and historically it's taken years for new versions to penetrate, so it'll be a much weaker force than Chrome and Firefox which complete updates in a few weeks and months respectively.

Microsoft getting on board would be nice, but Adobe getting WebM into Flash would take care of the older versions of IE that are hanging around too.
Great line from the article:
"Sculley came to the conclusion that "we could run a lot better with Steve out of operations," he says. Jobs tended to value technological "elegance" over customer needs—a costly luxury at a time of slowing sales."

And you know, in some ways he still does. A belief in technological elegance created the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Customers weren't demanding that technology, mostly they only realized they wanted it after it existed.
1 thread per connection??? Not doing continual GC in a separate thread and instead taking 7 seconds and blocking everything?

What is this the 1990s?
in that case, value of 1 for "fraction of Earth‐like planets that develop life" is odd since we are far from confident that life ever developed on mars.
Thanks for the links. I didn't realize Warren's affiliation with PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program) or her study's loose definition of "medical bankruptcy" (e.g. people who filed for bankruptcy who paid more than $5000 out-of-pocket or lost two or more weeks of work for medical reasons, even if they did not claim "medical reasons" for their bankruptcy filing).
pg / rtm: If you need any FreeBSD-related help, please let me know (preferably not in the next couple of days, though...). There are lots of HN fans in the FreeBSD developer community.
An important distinction is peer vs. critic. In many cases, the uproar in popular media is created by uninformed sensationalism. Journalists with deadlines and without backgrounds in niche fields just can't formulate meaningful criticism. Peers, on the other hand, provide reviews in a slower and more private manner, but it's responsible.

If it were faster and less private, but still constrained to peers, then by all means: this would be great. The concern is signal to noise ratio, with a furor of uninformed voices drowning out the meaningful discussion among peers.
I'm pretty sure I know what you're getting at, but do you mind expounding on your thoughts previous to discovering this information?
One of the things I love so much about the Drake equation is how it's all so much bullshit.

Before you downvote me, I think it's a great equation and I don't have problems with folks using it. As long as you know what you are doing. really, think about it, all it actually says is that there is this list of things that we feel have to happen in order to determine communicating civilizations, and given any random set of probabilities for a list of things, you multiply them together to get an aggregate answer. It doesn't address whether the list is complete, or overly complex, or mis-stated. The numbers provided are juts best guesses. It's just "multiply a bunch of numbers together and get a new number"

I love it. It's definitely not science -- yet it has this cool-looking formula involved. It also has a powerful impact on folks who use it.

Drake is really cool in that it gets people thinking about how likely ET is. For that, it's a wonderful tool. But at its heart there's really not much there. At least yet. Perhaps in the future we'll have some solid survey results to put in, especially with Kepler online. Can't wait to start seeing those results coming in.
If Firefox wasn't supporting h.264, it was kind of pointless for Chrome to support it as well. As a developer, I have to have to resort to flash for h.264 anyways as Firefox has a much bigger market share than Chrome.
Geeks are just angry because there is now more regular people using the internet than geeks. It's no longer restricted to the elites. As a business idea, it just makes much more sense to target the 80% of society instead of the 20%. (Made up numbers)
Let's hope that puts an end to all the time-outs!

Thanks for the work and it sure seems to be a lot more responsive.
Goatse Security trolls were after "max lols" in AT&T iPad hack
Depends on the trademark licensing available of course.

In case of Firefox: no, you cannot sell it without written permission while branded as "Firefox".

From
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html ...

You can't put the Mozilla Mark(s) on anything that you
produce commercially (whether or not you make a profit) --
at least not without receiving Mozilla's written permission.

But what you can do:

distribute unchanged Mozilla product(s) (code + config) for
each platform downloaded from www.mozilla.com
or www.mozilla.org as long as you distribute them
without charge

And the reasoning for this, as explained:

In addition, on an all too frequent basis, we receive
reports about websites selling the Mozilla Firefox browser,
using the Mozilla Marks to promote other products and
services, or using modified versions of the Mozilla Marks.
The problem with these activities is that they may be
deceptive, harm users, cause consumer confusion, and
jeopardize the identity and meaning of the Mozilla Marks.

Of course, many open-source projects don't even have registered trademarks, but (I am not a layer so take this as an opinion) ... even unregistered trademarks are protected and I think you can still sue successfully somebody if it brings harm to the project's image.
Nothing about Overture, nothing about shutting down Yahoo Auctions. Not a very good article.
This is an awesome troll.
(nodeJSCloud) - Looking for a few node.js enthusiasts
We are looking for a few motivated people who eat, sleep, and breathe node.js to join us at nodeJSCloud. Simply put, we are a IaaS for the node.js developer community. Our goal is to make it easier for node.js folks to make sweet applications, and deploy them.

At this time, we are only looking for people local in San Diego. Sorry bout that. :(

If your interested in working with a dynamic and agile startup, in an amazing emerging node.js market give us a hollar; beer on us.

hello@nodejscloud.com

http://www.nodejscloud.com
Thanks for trying it out. Can you clarify on the choppy animation -- was it slow to load, or the animation speed itself wasn't smooth? Great point on sending the user on to something else.
I imagine mzscheme is using select under the hood. But I'm surprised they're not using poll. There's something up with the racket page, so I'm not able to download the mzscheme source just now (via http://arclanguage.org/install), but that's one thing I've noticed in Python web server implementations. Side-stepping epoll, libevent and all that for a second, there's a tendency to use select (which uses an array of file descriptors; 0 to highest file descriptor) instead of poll (which isn't encumbered the same way).

I think in part there is a tendency, among server developers, correctly, to fear anything that looks like a busy wait (e.g., with the name poll). But really poll is just as asynchronous as select in this context (I don't know about FreeBSD's implementation -- but Linux puts to sleep wait queues the same way, afaik). It just doesn't suffer from the crazy indexing scheme of select....

At any rate, I didn't get a chance to finish probing the internals of what mzscheme uses. But if there's a way to substitute poll for select, it can often alleviate those issues of 900 requests queue up and you eventually have an fd with a value of 1024 or greater -- even though you may not have 1024 actual concurrent requests....

Though others feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I only comment because I came across a similar issue recently. This link may be useful too:

http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-6-sect-3.shtml

ETA. i finally got a copy of the most recent racket source (though probably not the one rtm and pg are using). but if anyone is curious, browse racket/src/network.c. the source version for mac uses a bunch of selects (e.g., for tcp-accept). replacing with poll might help.... the max number of FDs per login session is often 1024 by default. so you might want to bump that up if it's not already. and consider using poll.... just an idea.
Pretty sure this is one of those 'spam' infographics anyway, the goal isn't to be correct it's to generate links and traffic for focus.com, a Q&A site that must be feeling left out with all the fluff pieces/mentions Quora gets (and probably soon hipster, the latest company to invent forums).

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_ga...
Well, we're talking about two things, really- the webm reference implementation and the license under which the patents covering the spec are licensed. I guess the reference implementation is free as in freedom, and the spec is free as in beer to re-implement. This is why 'free standard' is such a pithy and accurate description.
next is shuffle-board...
Please correct link to sample report on FAQ page - currently pointing to "http://http//www.findmybuzz.com/full_buzz_report.pdf
For the past five years, I have been paying parking in my city with my mobile phone using a simple SMS without any transaction fee. A small city of 20000 inhabitants lost in the former East Germany.

I suppose 2011 is more the year where you will pay $5 for your Latte with your mobile phone on the condition to have an account with an organization charging you a percentage when loading your account, plus a small transaction fee and doing the same to the shop using this system.

I am sarcastic, maybe the effect of going through a PCI DSS compliance extortion scheme yesterday. Out of topic technical bonus point, the SSL ciphers allowed for your server to be "compliant": !EXPORT:!eNULL:!MEDIUM:!LOW:TLSv1:SSLv3.
It's an interesting idea that I think local businesses would be interested in marketed properly. I have 2 remarks on the design.

1) Not all businesses have a single Zip Code. It is the right idea for a restaurant or bar for example, but only if there is only one location. For example, if I owned a small chain like 16 Handles for example I may be interested in how people like my business in general, not on one store. I can see how the feature could be useful, but it should be optional (and clearly marked so)

2) When I tried to click on the screenshots, I thought that the text was way too small to really understand what you were seeing. When I squinted I could figure it out, and it did seem really cool, but I am only 20 and using Chrome on a MacBook Air, so I think you should make the font waaaay bigger for your target middle aged user on a 5 year old Dell using IE7.
I just made something, so how do I sell it (tool for web developers)?
So, now that it is too late, is there even a market for tools for developers? I've seen so many attempts fail. But if there is, how do I improve my pitch?

By too late, I mean I developed an extension to Firebug and made it available for sale[1]. Very version 1, yet very useful for people using some JavaScript frameworks. But shipped. Still embarrassed by the code, so I have it minimized. I can finally start on that refactor. Well, if there is a market...

I focussed my attention on ExtJS because it uses abstractions that happen to map to the DOM, rather than building the other way around. It wasn't built to fit Firebug. So this makes Firebug fit the framework. I have a sucky 60second screencast if you want to know what I mean[2]. Yes, it is silent. So that ought to be the first change, I suppose...

I also used ExtJS because I knew it well, and I wanted to address my personal pain points. I added Dojo Toolkit, SproutCore, and qooxdoo in various degrees of support along the way. The jQueryUI support makes me wince, but it is something, and I have ideas on how to improve it in the future.

I tried to make the site[3] simple in design, and use color in only a few places -- to draw attention to the download button, for example.

I got some great quotes from Mozilla and Sencha, and posted them on the home page.

I suck at copywriting and sales pitches. But I'm trying, and want to learn. Please help!

Thanks!

-steve--

[1] http://www.illuminations-for-developers.com/product/debugger/
[2] http://www.illuminations-for-developers.com/about/
[3] http://www.illuminations-for-developers.com/
Space Suit of the Week
Looks nice. You should make Zip code optional because you may get non-local businesses as well. For example, I couldn't try out the service because my business is not local.

Also, I am curious to know how Zip actually helps you. Do you use it to disambiguate similar sounding businesses?
I was in the same boat last year, and I thought it would make sense to start out on Python 3. However, my intent was to learn Python to use Django. Django still isn't ready for that, so I'm using 2.6.

On the other hand, the text adventure game I'm writing for fun/as a learning exercise works great in Python 3, as it doesn't have any external dependencies.

Therefore, it depends if you're learning it for a specific use or just because you'd like to learn Python.

Read over http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/whatsnew/3.0.html for an overview on the differences. There are a few incompatible changes, but to say 2 and 3 are two different languages would be a big stretch.
Some punk skript kiddie who broke the internet in 1988.
Invariably been linked before, but http://imrannazar.com/GameBoy-Emulation-in-JavaScript:-The-C... also addresses basics of emulator design.
You mean people should develop their own problem solving skills instead of merely copy/pasting solutions from sites on the internet? Preposterous.
Samsung Joins IBM in Research For Future Chips
EveryScape Founder Mok Oh Looking for New Ways to Map Online to Real World