skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have one nit to pick.

The Town was not a good film. It was disjointed, overacted and carried about 10-20 minutes of fat. It was, in short, only greenlit because Ben Affleck was attached.
Maintaining a Set in Memcached
My wife has a freelance QA consultancy, and while I understand that there is often the sense that QA is a 'nag', I can honestly say that whenever she is involved in my work, the quality of my output is much better, and takes less time to get it there.

A good QA analyst / team does much more than point at a problem and say 'there it is'. A good QA analyst can determine why you made an error, and can anticipate other errors you might have made in the same way. A good QA analyst will learn your formulae, learn your equations, understand your workflow and try to find root cause, even if they're not developers.

Having a good QA person with a trained eye for knowing what I'm likely to have overlooked is also FAR more cost effective than your high-paid developers doing the same task. If they know that 'heads will roll' when they get errors, I'm also betting that makes your releases even slower.

Off-topic completely, but I generally prefer non-developer QA analysts, as they generally prove themselves to 'think too much like me' to be effective.
Home Internet May Get Even Faster in South Korea
Wow! Thank you for the site! Most helpful!
To be fair, Microsoft would be bringing down a might fury if they didn't have efuses to solve their kernel problems.

I can't imagine Sony being concerned about someone hacking the Move.
My uncle has a torn ACL up at Whistler, BC and he paid for an MRI out of pocket ($800) at a private clinic and got surgery the next day and otherwise excellent treatment. However, had he not paid for the MRI, he would have waited quite a while to get one and then have the surgery.
From my understanding of Vipassana meditation, it's not about the 'buzz' or feeling happier and more relaxed. Those are side effects. Vipassana is mindfulness meditation. It's about becoming more aware. It's about fully immersing yourself in reality, difficulties and all.
They do. Usually they handle not only health insurance, but most of the other benefits and paperwork regarding employement (payroll, etc.).
If my phone could be the size of my watch, and I could wear it on my wrist, and it had all my email and a modern browser, I'd probably switch to it completely.

I am SICK of having my AWESOME smart phone on my belt or in my pocket. It feels like it gets bigger every day. It falls off me getting in and out of the car.

But I love it and can't stand to be without it.

And I'd look like an idiot if I Velcro'd it to my wrist.

So, I encourage the advancement of smart watches. I look forward to the day it projects a hologram screen that's the size of my tablet screen from my wrist and I can control it by touch.

Don't stop, keep innovating on that watch!
Love these guys, and think they are doing amazing stuff.
Considering I work with one of the most incompetent QA engineers I've ever had the displeasure of encountering, I couldn't agree more. This person wastes my time, and the organization's time, and has not actually increased the quality of software (as far as I can tell). It is a waste of a developer's time to decipher a bug that states "it's broken," without clearly defining "broken," or "it," or how to reproduce the behavior. Often, reproduction involves user error (like forgetting to sign into the vpn). If it weren't for this bozo, our team could get more work done in less time.

I assume that others have had better experiences.
Thanks, you saved me from having to do this myself.

$70, Basic hospital, extras like dental work and optical ($300 / yr... Two new pairs of glasses, effectively, or the year's supply of contact lenses), private rooms.
What is wrong about pulling out your cellphone?

This watch has the potential to be even more interruptive than a silent vibration in your pants. (that came out wrong ... and that too)
I'm not saying it's great for every online business, just that it's also not right to see 30% and assume that's a wildly inappropriate rate.

It's also not entirely impossible that Apple realizes that the music/book/video streaming services are one of the few virtual products with material per-user costs, and adding this kind of surcharge will drive more users to their iTunes services.
I don't think this would be a good idea. When developing I don't always have the time to be as thorough as a QA team is in testing my own code. It's very helpful to have somebody else with a non-technical background to help spot problems that I am blind to.
Google "meditation research"--people have been doing precisely that over the last few years. Also, please don't lump meditation in with those other practices until you've learned more about it.
Sure, the same way you can be friends with an ex, a grandparent or a teacher, to just name a few.
Yes recipes please :)
The existence of a technical solution to a security problem doesn't mean that it gets implemented in practice. Sure the security issues are theoretically solvable, but that means nothing when you're talking about a system with hundrads of millions of users. Aside from issues of magnitude, the financial incentives are all wrong if the goal is to have credit card companies implement the security solutions we would like. Currently financial instituions implement whatever security solution is financially optimal, taking into account the cost of a breach (reputation, customer satisfaction, impact of future sales, etc) and the cost of implementing the security measures. If you want something more than what the credit card companies are already doing, you need to lobby for increased regulation or financial incentives in terms of fines.
Moral hazard doesn't have to be rational, just a deliberate choice.

Such as the choice to smoke, or over-eat. Yes, they can be addictive, but there are supports and cures for both, and involve willpower and sacrifice, but they're there.

I say this as a fatarse who has lost 20Kg by eating less (The Horror!) and doesn't blame anyone except himself.
Please. Do we need any more anti-US rhetoric here?

I see no reason to believe that he would have been treated differently by the FBI, and besides, he would probably have been extradited right back to Germany.
Ask PG: How to Start a Startup
PG:
This essay appears to be No. 1 result in Google search "How to startup". It is written in 2005. With your rich experience with YCombinator, are you willing to update it with a 2011 version?
Sounds like an industry ripe with opportunity for the right hacker.
A bit late, aren't they?

https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect
There's no visa that will let you do this.

Australia has a points based immigration system. If you're younger than 25 and have an engineering degree you just barely have enough points to get a self-sponsored work visa. If you're older than 25 it's impossible to get enough points and you have to work for someone else (or marry an Australian). I'd love to be wrong about this, corrections are welcome.
didn't last long..
PG: This essay was written in 2005. Are you willing to update it with a 2011 version?
TPF blurs the boundaries between traditional databases and operating system. The OS itself has built-in support for transactions, locking of records, processing of record streams and other database-y things. So while strictly speaking, yes TPF is an OS, it is an OS that is designed to be a database, and would be useless for most other purposes.

Sure code still needs to be run on top of it for specific reasons, but I submit for consideration this is true of SQL databaes, and the data persistence layer of any NoSQL based app.

Similarly CICS may have a relational DB in the loop, or it may be pointing at some sort of TPF based system, or it could be pointing at a simple pile of COBOL records stored in z/VSE. The point is CICS is the transaction manager and provides the interface to the data much the same way an sql layer over a relational DB does.
Android Bluetooth Oscilloscope
That assumes they'd make 70% as much when re-using those resources to build for other platforms.

If you make 30% less per customer selling on the iPhone, but you sell more than 50% more copies versus whatever else you'd do with that effort (Android, W7, RIM), it doesn't make sense to leave from a revenue standpoint. Android is great but I don't get the sense that many paid apps are doing volume there comparable to the Apple store.
My head is more often buried in code than in the product's UI. Our QA team has a better nose for when interaction or UI details are off than I do. In general, they spend more time using the application, and have a better instinct for when a given behaviour is wrong.

Some of the bugs they report would fall under the automatically testable category, but many don't.

I suspect that dogfooding is more effective at companies where the product itself is useful to developers or is a consumer app. e.g. Basecamp, FogBugz, Facebook, Netflix, Gmail, etc.
That's correct, when you run the software, you agree to the license. But before that, you still don't own the software. At no point do you ever own the software. You simply pay for a license to use it. This is the same with OSX, Windows 7, etc.

You are correct that consumer EULAs haven't really been tested in court, but that is irrelevant to this discussion. This isn't about the EULA. Apple is not stopping you from putting a third party app store on the device. They are stopping you from putting a third party app store on the stock iOS. If you jailbreak, then you can put Cydia on it.
QA and dev are two different skills. It's like saying that we save on design by having the devs do it, or having your quarterback also play noseguard. Sure it works in high school, but not when you're a pro.

I'd much rather hire someone who knows testing and QA well and let my devs focus on writing bug-free product code.
That only makes the costs even worse, especially ethically. They're sapping the most money from people least able to defend themselves from their preying.
If I'm honest (and I'm hoping you're welcoming of honest feedback be it positive or negative), I think this is a ludicrous idea.
The problem with something this polarising is, I fail to see how it could grow into a product everyone might use, even if it is used begrudgingly. Unless there's something spectacularly clever that I've missed you're not going to ever win over people that are in the camp that I'm in and hate the very idea of it. I didn't like facebook when it came along, but I didn't hate it either. Hence why I eventually signed up for an account.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you are actually quite a decent developer, and that if this is indeed the case, please divert your efforts to something more beneficial to yourself and/or society. There are so many talented developers working on 'quirky' web and mobile apps who could provide solutions to problems that enhance people's lives and also stimulate the economy.
I'm not saying your efforts aren't impressive in themselves (if you're going by the andy warhol rubric of measuring your feedback in inches you've been quite successful already), just that they show that there's so much more you could do.
Not true in CA anyway, you can have a 2 person company and apply for small employer group coverage. You can't be denied for pre-existing conditions and your rates have to be within 10% of larger group rates.
In no way did I say make a fake company. You'd have to start a real company to do this.
Is there an Open Source state of mind in Montreal?
What happens when your favourite Super Hero becomes a .NET Programmer?
funny things that a super hero can do if he is a programmer
I work at a company with a 2 person group and it fared much better than an individual plan.
Everything's So Damn Perfect So Damn Slick.
Keynes said, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Many people saw the dislocations in the market long before the crash, but would have gone bankrupt shorting that irrationality.

It's just damn hard to get the timing right.
I will actually be in town for this one! Really looking forward to it. I'll be Tweeting this out through @CollideFactory also to make sure everyone knows. Mike, I'll make you a deal, if +30 confirm I'll buy a half keg for this meet-up. I might just bring one anyway and invite the Factory DJ's, they'll drink it for sure. ^TW
Blockbuster: for sale $290M
Flickr decided that UTC would be the default for their stats. As long as you stick to it, it's not that big of a problem.
Japan's hospitals are going into debt because they can't charge what things cost. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/c...
It will be interesting to see if anyone will go for it... Netflix and Redbox did win a long battle.
Doctors and hospitals bill you more if you're uninsured. TFA mentions this as one of the reasons to get a high-deductible plan in which you will be paying most of the cost out of pocket.
One thing I got from this article is that I really have to try Baron's diskstats tool. I wonder if his customer was using the cluster 4x instance, as it has a 10 gigabit network adapter.
Since we're talking Ruby 1.9 here, that code won't even run :-( .. drop the colons and you're good though! :-) But if we're really talking Ruby 1.9, you could also go with:

->(x){ x % n == 0 }
While over-reliance on Excel spreadsheets does hurt day-to-day operations, it didn't cause the meltdown of the economy. That was caused by either not understanding that certain factors existed, or ignoring them despite what their analytics said. Software can only produce data according to the models that exist, rewriting them in C isn't going to cause someone to have some big insight about how the economy works.
Ah it's a single anecdotal story and comes with no specifics about who it is or in what way things supposedly improved, just some broad calls for firing QA.
I'm 19, and I've worn a wristwatch for the last 10 years, at least. The one I currently have hasn't run down its battery for more than two years, and is comfortable and light enough that I never take it off. As a result, I'm often the only person in a group who knows what time it is.
Part of the rapid and sustained rise in costs comes from that a) more things are being treated that existed before but got no treatment, and b) more availability of new drugs, because we're now able to create ones which were impossible / inconceivable back when costs were 5%.

Would you rather go back to colloidal silver someone sold you as a wonder-drug out of the back of their wagon? Or use the significantly more tested drugs the (fairly problematic and corrupt) FDA lets through? Antidepression drugs, for all their overprescribing (IMO, that's a debate for elsewhere), didn't exist before, and psychotherapy was largely viewed as in the realm of quackery and going to one was considered shameful (still is, but not as much).

Not that it accounts for all of the change. Or even a large portion. Just that the rise isn't entirely due to waste.
It's a gamble. I imagine that the risk of being dropped is directly proportional to the amount of attention I garner. Break a leg? Probably not a big deal. Get cancer? Better look out.
ridiculous.

a large fraction of errors that turn up in QA are conceptual errors made by the development team; like the blind spot in the eye, you don't know what you don't know, and there are certain problems that you'll never find yourself.

Phil Crosby would say that management is responsible for quality; management writes the specifications and has the responsibility to hire and fire developers and QA people. The buck stops with management.

Efficient quality requires practices to be work correctly across the organization, but it starts in the specification process. If you don't know where you're going, you're sure as hell never going to get there.
From the post: We posted the auction on Reddit and, with the help of a few friends, got to the front page. ... Pretty quickly the story was picked up by Techcrunch ...

This part has got to be important. Getting significant visibility for the auction likely helped quite a bit, and eBay is just a medium that made the auction possible.
I've never understood the meaning of the "retail" rates. How many people are there who can afford to pay these rates and also don't have health insurance?
What will happen to bit.ly links if Gaddafi shuts down the Internet in Libya...
The tag line of the article reads "It's a place where the most hopeless of alcoholics can drink away their final days at less risk and cost to the public." That sounds like a place where they are invited to come and commit suicide, albeit slowly. I certainly agree that the alternative of turning them out on the streets is less humane. But what about the alternative of committing them to an institution where they have a chance of being cured of their addiction? What about the alternative of a life where they're sober?

The article implies that all of these men are incorrigible, but many might simply be people with families who don't have the resources to get treatment, or that simply don't care enough to get it. There is a great danger that because it's cheaper, we'll rationalize away the moral argument in much the same way you do, by pretending that there is no alternative but putting them on the street.
Not if you're trying to save RAM (and operations to fetch said data) by storing stats per day. You'd need all stats to be per-hour in order for it work for any timezone.
I have this one recipe for Indian chicken that is incredible. No spice mixes, all pure spices, chicken, slow cooking, homemade masala. We make it a few times a month.
I don't mind to bash your enthusiasm in any way and I'm happy of your already gained insights, but i think you should know that in the long term it may be counterproductive or even dangerous to practice such kind of meditation without direct guidance from a teacher.
I've had some luck with hacking my family's healthcare expenses in the last couple of years. I am a healthy 26 y/o with a wife and son. We were living in Seattle and healthcare was the most expensive when I was employed full-time and my wife was pregnant.

Luckily, the company nearly tanked and let me go along with my entire department. I've been a self-employed consultant since then (almost 3 years) and went without insurance for about a year just so I could afford to pay for my wife and kid.

Then I figured out some hacks. I found a startup health practice called Qliance in Seattle which Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos and Drew Carey have funded (nice article about it here: http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/04/jeff_bezos_michael_...).

For about $50/month each for my wife and I and $40 for my kid (total of ~$140) were able to see a doctor any time we wanted for non-emergencies without co-pays.

I can't tell you how much weight this was off my back. Staff was friendly, service was great, modern offices, experienced doctors. Couldn't have asked for more. We got a high deductible family plan along with it which added about $200 to the costs. If you are in the Seattle area and are self-employed, this is probably your best option.

The second hack was that we moved to Japan about a year ago. As others have mentioned, they have a very consumer-friendly system over here. I had a big health scare when we first moved which required lots of medication and several doctor visits, but it didn't set us back more than a couple hundred bucks.

I'm really worried about moving back to the US now. I hope things get better before we move back in a couple of years.
At least 3 quebecois have told me they have had a french replying to them in english (in international contexts, like a conference). I guess it is only a reaction to an accent many of them have not heard before, but after a second they understand they are talking to a french-canadian
The same thing you get out of answering questions on Quora and editing articles on Wikipedia. We're not expecting instructors to spend anywhere close to 15-20 hours per week, or even expecting them to grade homework.

Thanks for the question, we appreciate the feedback.
if you like the whole metropolitan lifestyle, the Valley really cannot compete

There is a ton of startup activity in SF these days, as opposed to the Valley proper. Cost of living in SF is higher than in Toronto, but not by an enormous amount if you want to live downtown (Montreal is cheaper though).
Tech May Be on the Rise in the Middle East, but Automation Remains a Challenge
Oh, if only I could upvote a million times...
"If you don't know where you're going, you're sure as hell never going to get there." -> Also not always true. Think Twitter. Think Christopher Columbus.
Libyan Revolution and the .ly domain space
That you can afford to be blind to because you have someone doing QA?
So, the solution to that in the US is for the patients to either die or go bankrupt rather than hospitals or insurers going into debt.

Everything has a price, but that seems a little lopsided.
Ah yes, Forrester.

I hope all of you reading the blog post realise that this brainfart will cost your organisation $5,500 per copy downloaded.
I might recommend something like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instead.

It definitely can cause physical pain, but concussion generally isn't something you worry about with BJJ. That isn't to say that it's impossible, but I do believe the risk is SIGNIFICANTLY lower.

Arguably, BJJ works as a better self-defense art than boxing as well, though for it to be truly effective, you generally pair it with a striking art.
If a developer's reaction to a client-facing defect is "QA didn't catch it", you have cultural problems that firing a QA team probably won't fix. If you don't have a culture of personal responsibility, a finger can always be pointed elsewhere.

Developers should absolutely write and use unit tests. Where QA really shines in the larger scale: validating actual business requirements.
Forrester will ring a few more people they picked out of the phone at random, write it up as a report for their library complete with beautiful graphs, and then begin to charge thousands of dollars per copy to tell other consultants what the "Industry Best Practice" is at the moment.
From 0 to 1 Million in 6 Hours
A Day Made of Glass...
PSA: outsourcing, offshoring, and offshore outsourcing are all different things.

What the WSJ article was describing is offshoring.
A levy is a legal procedure. It is the act of seizing property to pay for a debt. Wells fargo didnt pay their legally obligated debt to this man, so he used that (levy) legal process to go after their local office. It's very odd, that's why it's a popular story
I'm pretty sure that the 18% interest rate wasn't true in the 90's...
“Southwest didn’t appear once”

Southwest flights don’t show up in online airfare searches — just their own website.
See my comment above. You're confusing outsourcing, offshoring, and offshore outsourcing.
Specializing in "open source" seems like a strange choice: open source is a business model / licensing decision. I think it would make a lot more sense to specialize in a vertical industry (e.g., biotech, hardware, robotics, etc.)
More 'coolness' from Microsoft. While I never 'hated' them, this is really feeling odd. Hope they'll stay that way and can make Windows Phone attractive as well.

Hell, if they keep on like this, maybe even Windows will be 'cool' one day. So confusing!