skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
petercooper has nailed it.

Disclaimer: I'm an agile evangelist, spent years at startups, and I love quality code.

Be pragmatic in your adoption of any software engineering process, agile methods included. Tossing TDD/BDD out the window because you believe it's slowing you down is a mistake. Adapt it to your environment; use the aspects that work.

Remember that the goal of TDD/BDD and testing in general is to deliver useful software that works. Even your startup's prototypes, quickly hacked together, should at some level meet that criteria.

If you're writing code, you have an intention for it, a purpose, and that can be tested on some level or another. It's hard to make an argument that manually clicking around in your browser after writing your implementation is superior to having some form of automated tests in place beforehand.

If you're in the exploratory stage of a startup, you'll pivot often, and you'll be building a lot of throwaway prototypes. You should limit the depth of your test coverage, but you can still do TDD. Just don't be strict about it. Not every method/class/behaviour needs to be tested. You may not know the broad direction your software is going in. When you sit down to code, at least the behaviour of that little piece is known, and it's at that point you can write a test or two to express and validate your intentions.
Linear time worst case and amortized constant time are not mutually exclusive. You are right that most containers that we use have amortized constant time complexity, but they also have linear worst case complexity. Most times this is because an internal array has to be resized and the contents have to be copied over to the new enlarged array.
I never implied I think they should be disallowed from putting themselves in danger. I believe they should themselves choose not to. Further, any external pressures to put themselves in those positions should be removed, such as feeling like your career rests on you being on the front line.
While I am no fan of testing unnecessarily, that comment is really a bit too harsh.
Please, I never insinuated that. burgerbrain said sports have no intellectual value and don't belong on campus.

I gave a concrete example of how they did help. That is all.

There is a lot of athlete-hating in this thread.
Idea dump, February 2011
Sorry but you are wrong. Every IDE I've seen is big, bloated and the useful features it provides are more cumbersome that sed, grep and find. OTOH vim is fast, universally available, and because of it's nature much faster to code in. I look at it this way: when you first switch to vim, you will be working WAY slower than in your favorite IDE. Take one hour to learn the basics. Then you will be just as fast. Then, anything new you learn is just going to give you that much more speed over your old way.

Also, in general, it doesn't matter what you program in: be it an IDE, vim, cat, or a magnetized needle. A good hacker finds a way to write good code.
> But if you don't even know if the answer is a genetic algo, or simulated annealing, or using mechanical turk, or whatever, there's really no point in even trying to freeze the interface.

You are completely right. In this case you would start prototyping various solutions to the problem. Once you have explored the domain, you either go for implementing a certain approach using tdd, or you do more exploring.

--fg
I'm not saying they should never set foot in a war-torn nation or anywhere with civil unrest. But there is reasonable danger and unreasonable. Walking into the middle of an angry mob in Egypt as a woman is unreasonable.

>Being in the mob is not limited to saying "there's a mob here", it's also how you establish and maintain contacts and sources.

I disagree. There is very little value gained from being inside the mob. Contacts and sources can be made from the sidelines or once the mob has dispersed.
It's been my experience that the O(1) was on average, not worst case.
These people are supposed to be public servants. You would expect a special kind of person willing to make sacrifices for the greater good to take these jobs.

I would expect that pay and benefits should be pegged to the private sector. In some cases they could make more and some cases they could make less. But overall it should come close to private sector pay.

Average Compensation (2009)

Federal (123,049)
State & Local (69,913)
Private (61,051)

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/income/2010-08-10-1Afe...

I'm not a big fan of public unions. It seems like there is nobody at the bargaining table on the side of the tax payer. Also, if people don't like the benefits that come with serving the public, they should not take the job. Like I said, it should take a special kind of person.

Here is a nice article on public unions

The Beholden State
How public-sector unions broke California
http://city-journal.org/2010/20_2_california-unions.html
Sorry, I couldn't help myself. In my defense, I was genuinely expecting an article on BDDs and was disappointed when it wasn't!

Testing is fine. Process buzzword bingo is silly. Of the exceptional programmers I know, not one worries about any of this.
Not so long ago, a certain fruitily named computer manufacturer decided to distribute music, and were sued by an older, and similarly fruitily named record company for not only violating their trademarks, but violating a specific agreement not to encroach on the record company's turf.

The fruitily named computer company won the case on the grounds that they were only selling, and not producing music.

Surely the same thing applies here - Bonobo's Unretina only modifies images, it does not provide hardware on which to display them.
Looking at this list and adding up what Chile is getting for their money, it looks like this is a win-win (even without Chile getting equity). Of course, when in start-up mode, people want to evangalize too : and Chile just wants part of that positive PR (and to create a tech feed-back loop).

Compare this to the USA Startup program that's spending $200k on a standardized startup application. Y-combinator could create the same by adding 'oh, and contribute to building standardized form' to the end of their conditions for their funding : It would be hacked together within a week by 30+ teams of very smart people... Alternatively, get participation from a collaborating set of VCs : Free PR if you contribute.
If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to e-mail me info@piccsy.com - we've been here three months and are having a great time / happy to help anyone applying.
Same thing happens in Montreal.
But in this context it has nothing or very little to do with displays - just images. Does the trademark still apply? We almost certainly won't find out, since lawsuits are so expensive that Bonobo will presumably just acquiesce.
منتديات توب تك
توب تك
I've been practising BDD for a few years now. For whatever reason I'll sometimes find myself coding without having first written a reason. You know what, I always find that I'm really not enjoying writing the code. The reason, I'm constantly having to guess about whether or not the code I'm writing is actually useful or not. Every time I write a new method signature I have to try and imagine the whole system that's involved for that feature and figure out where this little bit that I'm working on fits in. It's a lot of mental work compared to the alternative. Working outside in you never have to think about the big picture, that's where you started, all you have to do is keep drilling down into the detail until it works. There's no room for drift, if you're disciplined you can always do a minimal amount of work to get the job done. Thinking about code in this way, one little bit at a time is so relaxing. Get interrupted, that's fine, go off fix the urgent bug or whatever. When you return just your tests, see where you got to and pick up where you left off. Because you've externalised your thinking so far you don't need to carry it around in your head. You're back in flow in a couple of minutes.

tldr, BDD can make coding a far more relaxing experience whilst helping you focus on adding value, not waste.
This article is from 2007. The founder of the project, Felix, stepped down some time ago, and I haven't been following it for the past few years. I'm not sure who's in charge, or what's been happening. Does anybody know the status of Chicken now?
> But the modifications might not do, which is what GPL proponents care about. To me, the GPL is like saying "I'll share with you, if you share (your changes) with me".

Yes, that's correct. It's not about better or worse at all. It's about a license that fits what you want, as a developer.

Sometimes it varies by project! For instance, a developer who normally uses GPL may choose BSD for a reference implementation of a client program using their API, specifically because commercial products could incorporate the code.
Ruby On NetBeans Lives
Where do you see process buzzwords ?
Nothing. This is why I do my best to not use paypal. Once it happens to you, you will understand my view point on this.
Not everyone can be on the 12 person, premier D-I basketball team. However, I am unaware of any university that doesn't allow pickup games or club teams by all people.

No one in this entire thread has advocated disproportionate funding for sports. No one. Not once. So that argument is just grasping at something that doesn't exist.

Yes, soft skills + the other skills can be learned with running, quiz bowl, hiking, etc., but not everyone wants to do those things. Why should a swimmer be denied enjoyment because his favorite activity involves physical activity?

I am not denying that clubs get the short end of the straw regarding funding. I was on both sides of the table, playing on large teams and being in small clubs. Once again, no one is advocating this.
Isn't 10" the standard netbook display size? Maybe not in the same aspect ratio as the ipad, but no one appears to be trying to stick with the ipad's aspect ratio anyway.
Nowhere in this article does it claim skipping college makes one a better entrepreneur. I did a search and it doesn't even contain the word "entrepreneur".

Short version: He's writing a book. He thinks that for the amount of debt involved, you can go do much more gratifying things in life than college from age 18 to 22. Oh, and he's writing a book.

My best understanding is that there is some correlation between successful entrepreneurs (like Bill Gates) and dropping out of college. I do not know if that correlation runs both ways. I would be very reluctant to suggest that dropping out makes you a better entrepreneur. I think it probably goes in the other direction: People who have what it takes to be good entrepreneurs sometimes skip past the silly credentialing stage and get on with making things and let the chips fall where they may. Folks who have an idea for a business but feel the credential is important and are thus unwilling to forgo college to focus on their business may never make the necessary commitment -- staying in school may turn out to be one of many excuses as to why they ultimately just won't put it all on the line. But dropping out of college in no way guarantees one will do anything worthwhile with their time/money in place of it.
PayPal Froze $750K in MineCraft Dev's Account (2010)
Stallman doesn't force anyone to attribute him. If he wanted to force, he would put that in GPL.

Read last few questions in GNU/Linux naming FAQ
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#force
BDD, TDD, Agile, XP, Software Craftsmanship, etc. But let's not pollute this comment thread any further. I'll try to keep my snide asides in check.
Yeah western style dating is pretty much taboo if not anathema to most parents in the rural areas. Should be fun monetizing that market, their site seems to fit a niche ideally suited for this. I'd love to see how they monetize services when (and if) they are dealing with the semi-urban areas; maybe they can tie up with a mobile service provider to have their services paid for as part of their mobile phone bill.

When you say Urban India is monolithic, are you meaning to say that all urban life is generally similar in India?

If so I would point out that the Metros in India differ significantly. I'm a Mumbai/Bombay native, and have family in Delhi and friends all over the country. From their discussions and lifestyles, each metro is quite unique and even more so, in the context of male-female interactions.

For example Delhi has been described as bastion of MCP behavior universally, especially by the women who live there. It could be a bad sample, but that view contrasts strongly with the better reputation for female safety that Mumbai, and (afaik) Bangalore enjoy. This leads to major differences - I know someone who moved here from Delhi, and wouldn't travel alone post 8:00 pm for a long time. (Delhi people, please correct me if I am wrong, or something is being missed). At the same time, Delhi-ites seem to have a lot more cultural activities going on than Mumbai. Since space is also not at a premium in Delhi, it also has places like Bookstores that are sorely missing in Mumbai.
this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge...they claim that their 'special' insight is going to be lost

Actually, in the age of the Internet and Google, special insight is precisely the scarce product amongst all of the unfiltered information.

Someone should do a "rotten tomatoes" for prognostication and taste making. Prediction markets may already fit this.
I don't like to think anyone is hopeless. That's because to be truly hopeless requires mathematical certainty, which usually isn't possible in the real world. In the real world, we don't know everything; there are always unknowns. Where there are unknowns, there is a chance; there is hope.

Giving love and care and respect to these alcoholics... I would expect that that might help some of them to recover. The article doesn't mention it, but I wonder if some do recover.

It certainly seems economically justifiable. Which doesn't necessarily make it right, since an economic analysis doesn't take into account all the factors. A society that starts to classify some people as hopeless and give up on them, may gradually widen its definition of hopeless. Whereas some of the greatest benefits and victories for society seem to come from goals that seemed impossible, aka hopeless.

If we undermine that, we will be the worse for it.
Ikea versus Apple (infographic)
You are probably right.

Learning how to organize a team of people with varying skills and abilities to come together, set a plan, execute on it repeatedly, and then repeat that day in and day out over 4 years through countless types of adversity and unexpected events while living in close quarters and changing as people over time has no value on the job.

/sarcasm
"BDD can make coding a far more relaxing experience" is a great point. I've written a lot of code without using BDD (before I started using BDD).

There is something very relaxing about knowing that no matter what I do to the code I know I'm not breaking the software.

It really is a liberating experience.
Ask HN: Is client computation a viable alternative to ads?
Would it be a reasonable business model to have visiting users donate computational power (via the javascript vm in their browser) as long as they're browsing a site?

An possibly valuable and easily parallelizable task is brute forcing (mid to low level) encryption keys.
This is from September, 2010.
Poll: Have you ever clicked the wrong upvote/downvote arrow?
Edit: I propose adding the following to HN's stylesheet:

a:hover img {opacity: .5;}
a[href*=dir\=up] {-webkit-tap-highlight-color: #8ae58a;}
a[href*=dir\=down] {-webkit-tap-highlight-color: #e58a8a;}

This will help alleviate the problem without requiring any backend coding.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/O3Mm7.png
Cool - done both of those. Thanks.
What if Apple is selling iPads at/below cost in a bid for marketshare? I could see Jobs et al guessing this would be a big market, and choosing to sell (especially the entry model) at/below cost. Reminds me of the Jobs' perspective on why the the Mac stalled in the 1980s, "when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits." (<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2004/02/01/ok-mac-make-a-wish.html&#...). This time he's going for market share.
Distributed computational resources have a value. For example, there is a list of scientific projects being conducted via many client computation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_p...
There is also an iPhone dev meetup: http://www.meetup.com/Winnipeg-iPhone-Developer-Meetup/
Powerless? Hardly. The problem is that current business models for rewarding writers (in the emerging distribution format) are either broken, or they have not yet had enough time to mature.

Although it's a bit "dated" (2005), I think the implications explored in Epic 2015 are pretty interesting insofar as the traditional writer -> editor -> publisher model is going.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/epic2015
Argument: “BDD assumes you know the problem and are coding to
create a solution. In startups, however, you do not know the problem.”

Counter argument: If you don’t know the problem then why are you even coding?

Simply restating the questioned assumption does not a counter argument make.
In what language are arrays of numbers their own class?
Word is not even playing when output quality is a concern.
You named one yourself (Adobe Indesign), the other that I know of would be QuarkXpress.

I don't know a piece of free software that directly competes with LaTeX, the latter has been the de-facto standard for university papers and a small group of book-writers/enthusiasts for about 20 years.

However, pitting LaTeX against Word is about as meaningful as pitting Linux against Windows. You wouldn't excuse the thorny Linux desktop experience with the security track record of windows either - it'd be an apples vs oranges comparison.
From my perspective PayPal looks awfully similar to Google in the sense they're both founded with good intentions, but in practice, the mistakes they commit always generate huge waves of doubt. Another similarity is that they barely have competition in their primary fields, at least for my needs.
I wonder how much of the $18K per resident cost is defrayed by taxes on the liquor they are drinking (though Listerine as mentioned in the article as something some drink, would only have sales tax on it).

Note that one of the men has a 20-mile bike route for collecting cans - be interesting to know, despite his alcoholism, what kind of physical shape he is in. Surely he burns off some of the bad effects of drinking via exercise?
Startup Vodka: Life of a Dorm Room Startup (Video)
Oh noes, I've accidentally upvoted this poll :(.

(joking ;))
From their policies page (https://help.riseup.net/about-us/political-principles/), the Riseup Collective makes it clear that they are a radical left-wing organisation.

"We ... [provide] ... communication and computer resources to allies engaged in struggles against capitalism and other forms of oppression."

I personally don't agree with their viewpoint. However, I also don't understand the belief that they should be a platform for contrary viewpoints. They're not Wikipedia.
I think my point still stands. RMS pragmatically knew that the kernel was the hardest part of his Free OS and built most of the rest of the software first -- and shipped it -- on unFree systems.

Linus similarly pragmatically saw that most the odds and ends needed to make an OS useful were done, they just needed a kernel, so he built it and shipped it.

Since then? RMS has gotten religion in the worst way and hasn't shipped pretty much anything in decades. He's used his notion of Freedom to constrain what he is capable of (restricting his own Freedom, by another definition of the word, "free from confinement") -- demonstrating by his own example a world filled with users unable to operate in the modern world.

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

Stallman's only computer is a Lemote Yeeloong netbook (using the same company's Loongson processor) which he chose because it can run with 100% free software even at the BIOS level, stating "freedom is my priority. I've campaigned for freedom since 1983, and I am not going to surrender that freedom for the sake of a more convenient computer."

http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I
also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I
send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

http://cdevroe.com/notes/stallman-email/

Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection. Once or twice or maybe three times a day I connect and transfer mail in and out. Before sending mail, I always review and revise the outgoing messages. That gives me a chance to catch mistakes and faux pas.

Far from saying this is bizarre behavior, he's merely demonstrating a consistent life with respect to Free (liberty) software. This helpful demonstration shows why a life under this philosophy, the idealist, not the pragmatist, is not Free (from confinement) at all -- it's horribly limiting and doesn't really accomplish much in terms of shipping anything.

In other words, Stallman has provided a perfect exemplar of life before and after his idealistic Freedom and he accomplished a great more before.
Ask HN: How to pursue an unadvertised/nonexistent internship?
I live in a Midwestern state where I am approximately a college junior (I am a 31-year-old non-traditional student who is changing careers from PR to software development). For a few years now, long before I decided to go back to school, I have been teaching myself Python and its associated web frameworks, as well as a few other languages in which I've dabbled.

I am more than willing to accept intern pay -- that is, market minimum or less, or none -- for an internship opportunity where I can be surrounded by people smarter and more experienced than myself. Unfortunately, there is only one company here who does something does something I consider really interesting.

How do I approach this company about an internship? Or should I even do that? The CEO hosts local Python meetups once a month, which I have trouble getting to since I have class on the nights they're held. We have exchanged a couple of emails (Me: "Does your company host any learning opportunities for aspiring programmers?" Him: "No, not really, what kind of format would interest you?" Me: "Shadowing would be cool." Him: None) but nothing really came of it.

How do I approach a company about internship opportunities they might not advertise or, in fact, even have available? (This company is seeking a python dev right now, a job I'm sure I'm not qualified for)
Related post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1951274 with some additional comments on gigaom.com.
What's your plan for keeping a 75 year old man interest in his alma mater?
Programmer as Market
Doesn't Google compete directly with PayPal through Google Checkout? ;)
Reading content on user-submitted-news websites can be very similar to looking at the world through poo-colored glasses.
I'm a java refugee and used to make heavy use of the refactoring tools in eclipse. It's definitely something I miss from my old workflow.
Given you're using BDD there isn't really anything to be concerned about when using regexes etc. to manipulate the code. I'd say that learning to use the command line better is essential if you move to a dynamic language.
With regards to the test suites being larger due to type checking I think it's been fairly well established now that this isn't the case. Those types of errors are always shown up when testing other aspects of your code, I can't think of a single case where I've written tests that do any type checking.
In the end I find that losing the refactoring assistance is a tradeoff that I'm happy to make in exchange for the increased expressivity and productivity I enjoy with rails.