skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks like pirated content to me. We could talk all day about that, but bottom line: this kind of link doesn't belong on Hacker News imho.
I am programming mostly for myself only (so far) and thus I haven't done anything big but some of the points you made remind me how I feel about TDD (from a different, but in ways a similar perspective).

I rarely start with a concrete goal: to clarify I make a general overview what I want, but not the pathing I should take to achieve it. When I am coding I am often exploring, I want to try new things, and then after a while I settle with code that I am pleased with. But before that happens I can go through several iterations of changes. Writing tests before writing code is one thing, but adjusting the tests afterwards to accomodate the changes (which may be big) is a hurdle and slows down progress. In addition in a case such as mine where I am doing all the work alone and thus I know every corner of the code written so far gives little benefits.

I can imagine of course that TDD is a great tool when there's an assignment for a client with specific tasks to accomplish, but in other cases 'get something working first' is better I guess.
Accidentally upvoted, meant to downvote (reading on an iPhone, go figure). Who the hell posts such a retarded comment? Truly evocative of the vicious anti-intellectualism of our age.
Noam Chomsky @ Harvard - Propaganda and Control of The Public Mind
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0OnTHz--7I&playnext=1...

And here is his recent talk at Google...
Google Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnLWSC5p1XE
Also, telling people what your going to do causes a decrease in the internal motivation to do what you said you were going to do.

http://sivers.org/zipit
From http://www.nltk.org/book

"This book is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial
No Derivative Works 3.0 US License"
>Mr. Montgomery’s former lawyer, Michael Flynn - who now describes Mr. Montgomery as a "con man" - says he believes that the administration has been shutting off scrutiny of Mr. Montgomery’s business for fear of revealing that the government has been duped.

Can lawyers make such statements against former clients?
You keep making ad hominems against techrights rather than addressing the substance of their argument.

Why don't you actually address what they wrote in their article?
True, but you could also ask how much value they or their dept. add. What's their NPV as an employee?
Ask HN: Hackathon at Launch?
Should we host a Hackathon at LAUNCH this week?

We have the San Francisco Design Concourse from Monday until Thursday night.

Q: What makes for a good hackathon?
Q: What would we need to host it?
In that format though. I'm aware of a few Apress books that are CC licensed but it seems that the actual published PDFs are not. Copyright attributed to covers etc.
>" Torvalds rejects the goal of freedom for software users, and when people attribute the development of GNU/Linux to him, he uses his influence to lead them to devalue their own freedom. Giving the GNU Project equal mention will help give us equal influence to counter that."

As someone who isn't intimately familiar with the open source or free software world, what does that mean? I thought Stallman and Torvalds were both the good guys. This makes them sound like mortal enemies.
It would certainly be easier to answer you if you had specific places you were thinking of!
ME TOO DAWG!

Sitting at an orange table in the middle of the upstairs room staring at a laptop with a black wool shirt, fingerless gloves and a faux-hawk. Find me.
Five years ago I was a hardcore XML-hater (and an even more hardcore SOAP/WS-* hater), but these days I've sort of become an apologist for both. Not that XML has gotten any less ugly, I'm just annoyed at people mistaking superficial problems with deep problems, and start over every five years or so with a new syntax or something thinking it'll make those deep problems go away.
"Programming Hint: When you do your planning, do it away from the computer"
Maybe we can put the best three on stage?
Angel invest in them?
Thoughts on "yi-contrib" package?
Emailify - Internal Stylesheets to Inline Styles
They are, but Stallman believes he is the "gooder" guy. Stallman's approach to software is to make it free and open at all costs where Linus is more concerned about accessibility of his software to consumers and developers.
Like anything else, there's a balance. Don't let yourself go all-out to ensure you have 100% test coverage of every line of code.

There is always a cost-benefit argument that should be replaying in your head over and over. If it's a critical part of your application, then make sure it has test coverage. If it's a simple part that's basically just doing CRUD operations with almost no custom code, it's probably not worth worrying about in the short term. Just make sure you cover the primary flex points and custom algorithms or libraries, and you'll be fine.
Google Closure Linter TextMate Bundle
> Smart developers write complex code, just because they can (and often it does make it shorter), but then mid- and junior-level developer struggle with it.

You know, I can't help but be reminded of Harrison Bergeron when I read this. I'm waiting for the day when someone comes up with a handicap for programmers so that we can all write code with the same ability as the least intelligent and least experienced members of our teams.

Did it ever occur to you that there might be a method to smarter developers' madness? I mean, maybe they write code the way they do because, you know, they're smart and know something you don't?
That's still $100 more expensive than the cheapest WiFi iPad and only $29 cheaper than the cheapest WiFi + 3G iPad.
When I lived in Cincinnati, 95-97, there was a Borders near where 75 meets 275, in the Tri-County mall area. Looks like it's still there and is staying open.

Quite a few Borders stores in Illinois.
How to Rip DVD with DVD Ripper for Mac?
Yeah, I've also seen O'Reilly books where they did allow people to distribute the "official" typeset pdf:

http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/

But I think at worst, this link would be gray-market rather than black market. Of course the original link has no context, so I can see why the OP expressed concern.
we are about halfway from trough to peak

That sounds reasonable. It was the implication of full recovery that sounded crazy to my mental model.
I am less worried about Google because webkit, chromium, v8, etc. are open source. I think Apple has a pretty good record with open standards, but they have a big incentive to keep people buying native apps on iOS (and i guess on OSX too now). It is definitely not in their intrest to have people easily build cross platform mobile apps when the default is for people to build iOS native apps first now.
It's like quantum mechanics for information. You can know about something, but then you've likely gotten personally connected too. Keep your distance while trying to be informative and you just look like Terry Gross on Fresh Air: a pseudo-specialist who gets charmed by the likes of Brian Greene and the "multi-verse."

God help us all if the multiverse wikipedia entry quotes Gross' interview with Greene and counts towards "notability."
I think that Launch wouldn't be complete without a hackathon. What you'll need is enough Internet connections to let everyone who wants to get in have their own, and LOTS of pizza and energy drinks. Perhaps you could persuade a local pizzeria to throw in pies for a sponshorhip. Also, the winning team should be able to present their idea on stage. Do this and you'll have a great hackathon in addition to a great event.
From experience at my firm, I suspect that they are going to commit a whole lot more than the current rotating system they are considering.
Setting the culture and attitude of the firm/division will mean they need to be here 24/7 dealing with their recruits and all the randomness that they will encounter. For example, several people who joined our firm later asked for leave, since a family member was drastically ill. Shortly after that they left the firm.

There are some major cultural differences they will have to watch out for. For example "Yes I'll do it" often means "I will give it a shot" as opposed to "Yes I will take personal responsibility to get it done.". Building a firm culture that believes this and will stop at nothing to get it done takes a LOT of work.
> Apple has partnered with a few retail chains such as Best Buy and Walmart, but those stores always seem to get a small number of units in stock. Hiner rationalizes that the true purpose of these partnerships is probably to help spread the marketing message, not so much to sell iPads.

The display unit at WalMart is behind plexiglass. If you want to touch it, someone with a key has to open the cover. I'm glad to see current Apple products at WalMart, but the actual sales experience is significantly less than going to an Apple store, or to BB.

IMHO, the real secret behind the iPad's price is supply chain management and very astute inventory control. Idle inventory can really wreck your bottom line.
This is a weekly football column, most of which is about the topic in question, when you get to the words "Brett Favre" you can stop reading. Do follow the links, though, the USA Today one is especially damning.
Failures of GM crops and India suicides
We have 400MBIT down and 40 mBIT up and 250 ethernet cables being run.... is that enough? :-)

Considering we are spending $100k on the internet connections, I think we can afford to pick up the pizza tab no problem. :-)
Borders was my first big bookstore. The Chestnut Street store in Philadelphia near Rittenhouse Square, when I went to college. It was practically a religious experience. Growing up in Connecticut I only ever had the crappy mall stores like B Dalton and Waldenbooks, and a rare visit to the Yale Co-Op. Borders was multiple stories, a huge computer section with lots of academic books, it was awesome.

There I saw Douglas Adams read from 'Last Chance To See', and saw Ally Sheedy read from her crap poetry book, which I bought and had autographed.

The Rittenhouse Square store closed at some point and moved, I think to a location on Broad Street.
Product Photography Recommendations
I'm looking to get some products professionally photographed. Does anyone here have recommendations or advice?
God damn, dude. You broke it down. Very nicely said. A couple questions. Do you think that you might do “Selenium”-like testing on older, legacy systems? What type of testing would you do for brand-new systems? And what type of testing would you do for the mature, but green and healthy, kind of system?
Focus on solving the problem. Ignore distinctiveness. To quote Paul Rand:

"Don't try to be original. Just try to be good."

http://www.logodesignlove.com/paul-rand-video

Design (especially UI) is an exercise in solving problems and designers often arrive at similar solutions. That's OK. What matters is whether the user gets what s/he needs, not whether the UI is memorable. Indeed, the less computer administrative debris, the better. I design for a living and the best success I've had is when the UI gets out of the way of the content and task.
"[Apple knows it doesn't] need to make money on the sale of the device because the entire point of buying the device is to buy apps for it,"

The opposite is true. Apple doesn't need to make money on software, because their hardware products have healthy profit margins. The iTunes Store breaks even, and it has done so for years. The same is true for the other software Apple sells.

Compared to competing products, Apple's software products are dirt cheap. Its office suite (iWork) is priced at $60 while Microsoft Office is priced at $280. Apple's photography software (Aperture) costs $80, Adobe's Lightroom costs $300. Apple's video editing suite (Final Cut) costs $1000, Avid's Media Composer costs $2300.
I have a question to the functional gurus out there:

Do you use unit testing in a functional programming context?

The reason I ask is that programming with a REPL fundamentally changes how you typically write programs - the bottom-up mentality. You don't even write a test-first, you test first! The tested program is then assembled into a unit. I feel there's much less incentive to write a test, if you use a statically typed language and use a REPL as it is meant to. Am I wrong in my thinking?
Google has tests that read almost exactly like your examples.

Of course, the whole search engine isn't specified by tests. However, if IMDB isn't in the top 10 results for [avatar] or barackobama.com isn't in the top 10 for [obama], something is seriously wrong and a human should look into it.

The rest of your post is pretty good. Not sure why you've been downvoted.
Rabbits v. Tigers
I was going to write something snarky about the bubble here, but after thinking about it, a half baked product of an all night hackathon getting angel investment is par for the course.

Definitely put the top ones on stage in front of investors, and, if you can, give every participant some kind of freebie(free pass to the conference?).

The people who participate in hackathons are exactly who you want to be putting in front of investors as much as possible.
what's wrong with typing in the place name followed by 'time' in google?
There's a pernicious assumption hiding there that public employees by definition must not deserve or earn their pay, whereas private employees doing the same work and making the same amount do.
Note: This response is about software TDD and not some high level TDD

If you don't know the problem then you are just winging it.
Writing software is always with a goal (can it be without?) and thus you should be able to write a test (first) that will tell you if it does what you expect. If you expect it to record click stream, then it records click stream or whatever.

When I was new to TDD, I too found it to be very cumbersome. It took me some time to realize that I don't have to figure out the entire design before I write any test code. I can start with a test, then write the functionality that it is testing and when I realize that this is not what I want but something else then I change my test to test that new thing. Iterate. That is what agile is about.

Discovery that you want something else, happens whether or not you are doing TDD.
Congrats on the site and your launch. I'm getting a fair number of 500 errors or "application errors" while navigating, but looking forward to using it.
I highly recommend this over Hartshorne:

http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/216blog/

In particular note Ravi Vakil's 500+ page book-in-progress on algebraic geometry, as well as a blog -- he is constantly soliciting and incorporating advice from people who are reading the book. (Remind you of any advice you see often on HN?)
All true.

Note that there are also other cases where incompatible changes are made (e.g. ES5 is not exactly compatible with ES3 in various edge cases, CSS2.1 today is not quite compatible with CSS2.1 a year ago in edge cases, etc). The various standards groups an implementors try to minimize the damage from such changes, but it still happens at times.

Heck, Chrome 9 or 10, made major changes to the HTML parser to follow the HTML5 draft. Sites that depended on the old behavior (which different between browsers, so they presumably browser-sniffed and then sent different content to different browsers) likely broke. They certainly did in Firefox when Firefox changed to the HTML5 parsing algorithm.
Absolutely. Eventually you sink into the code and forget about the chatter and your shitty laptop keyboard and you can get a lot done. A few hours later, you can come out of it, get some beers, and go back to sitting at your desk for 12 hours a day.

Some software I've written at hackathons:

https://github.com/jrockway/eslide

https://github.com/wjackson/hiredis-raw
I totally agree that people are paid what they can get. The problem is, a lot of the people who justify their enormous salaries by saying that the market is amoral then try to argue that they 'deserve' every last penny they made come tax time.
I've been doing some programming in lisp/arc, which isn't exactly functional but I try to stay as side-effect-free as possible. And I've been having a lot of fun doing TDD. See, for example, http://github.com/akkartik/wart which has about as many LoC in tests as in code.
My understanding is that Microsoft hired the IronPython developer full-time for a period of years.

I think that it's only natural that MS would target Mono if they felt it was a threat. Right now it is in their interest to support Mono because it introduces more people to C# and MS feels that this is good for the long-term health of their platforms. They are also able to iterate quickly enough that Mono (and Moonlight, the Mono-based Silverlight implementation) is always playing "catch-up" and the cool kids are all going to want to use the official implementations with the Cool New Stuff before it makes it into Mono two years later.

Mono developers can easily become Windows developers, and the likelihood of that happening is not that low if a given hacker falls on hard times and needs a job. This hacker will then buy Windows and Visual Studio (or get his company to buy them, either way works), probably multiple times. Hence, supporting Mono makes sense for now.

If Mono ever becomes a threat to Windows' dominance instead of a help, MS is going to go after it hard and try to kill it, just as they go after anything else perceived to threaten Windows or Office. Mono will be targeted because it makes things that used to be Windows-specific accessible on other platforms, destroying Microsoft's lock-in, leveling the playing field and making Microsoft an undesirable option. This is not something MS likes, and they will do everything possible, including patent suits if possible, to get Mono out of the way if they have to. They have already postured for it with their indemnification deals for Novell customers.

The same applies to WINE, although Microsoft for the moment just never mentions this because they're never asked about it, and they don't want people to find out about it and discover that they don't need Windows to run Windows applications. There is no benefit to promoting WINE like there is with promoting C# and other MS-centric languages.
You should absolutely, 100% drop out of college.

Moving to SF? Yeah, dunno about that; if it's what you want, good on you, go for it, but from one engineer to another it's overrated and you'll tire of it sooner than you think.
Yeah, a free pass wouldn't be a problem for some folks. we already gave 50 developers on HN free tickets, and Mahalo's 20 developers are coming. :-)
Here is Chomsky speaking @ Harvard on "Propaganda and Control of The Public Mind":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0OnTHz--7I&playnext=1...

This fascinating talk presents a ton of research with references so you can research it further.
> The market is basically amoral.

Yet people support it and sleep at night. The world is not fair, people are unfair, and it's a damn good cause to try to make it fairer.

Sure I expect there's a serious correlation between putting effort in, but a huge part of how valuable your efforts are to your life is decided by where you were born, who your family are, who fucks you over and how you are parented.

I'm sure there are Muslim women in Saudi, or prostitutes in Liberia, or Chinese farm workers who'd (aside from cultural bias) work twice as hard and have just as many good ideas as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates given the education and upbringing they have, but they simply don't have the opportunity.

Many socialists I talk to have it wrong in that they don't recognise that yes, effort is a factor in your life's success, but many of the capitalists I talk to fail to acknowledge that effort is simply one of many factors that influence it.
I hear what your saying, but I'm confused. The terms are at:
http://www.startupchile.org/wp-content/downloads/terms_and_c...

Particularly points 3.i, and 3.iii talk about incorporation in Chile as a requirement. 3.iii talks about the 'intention' of leaving operations in Chile. I've copy/pasted the section.

It's pretty hard to develop and do CEO/partner duties at the same time, especially in such an early stage. In fact I would think doing the hustle is about as much time consuming as doing the dev work. Also, It's hard to tell Chile that your not going to hire anyone because you couldn't find anyone; while taking their money. For more specific note, if you look at the requirements (dinners, talks, evaluations, presentations, publications), I don't see you'd find time to do more than 20% dev work without hiring someone.

I would love to take Chile up on their offer, and as a super hyper serious startup founder I'm excited BUT at the same time very weary of anything 'too good to be true'.

Section 3 below:
3. RESULTS AND ANTICIPATED IMPACTS.
At a minimum, it is anticipated that the Projects and their Participants:

i. Are incorporated to the national entrepreneurship environment and execute their
Project in Chile for at least 24 (twenty-four) weeks.

ii. Carry out activities required for the fulfillment of the goals proposed in their Projects.

iii. Are incorporated in Chile as formal companies, with the intention of leaving
operations in Chile.

iv. Contract local talent.

v. Attend at least 70% of the events 3 of the Program.

vi. Lead at least 6 (six) group workshops.

vii. Attend meetings with potential investors with the intention of raising capital during their participation.

viii. Participate as mentors of national entrepreneurs.

ix. Create and publish 3 (three) notes in English on the basis of their experience in international media

* Update: Edited for spelling mistakes.
I guess it's also a problem with Android. When the iPad is sold for the low price, they're aiming for market share. This in turn, attracts developers which attract consumers where apple makes a nice 30%. But if Motorola competed for a low price, it wouldn't necessarily secure a future as it only furthers the Android platform, which any vendor can build on top of. Thus it doesn't make sense for any Android tablet vendors to play loss-leader, while it does for Apple to.
The other red flag: This is 2011, there are good automated refactoring tools out there that make renaming variables/methods/classes trivial.
http://www.google.com/search?&hl=en&q=Lyon+time
RMS is an idealist. Torvalds is more of a pragmatist.

Quote from Linus:

There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.

And another one

Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's my choice, dammit.
That may be true but it's not a direct rebuttal to the previous comment.

Does Texas' $3M coach bring in an additional $2.9M+ per year compared to if Texas hired a coach for $100,000?
Well they're greedy. No two ways about it. Sure they probably do want to look after their employees and probably do give money to charity, but when you're making more money than most of us could conceivably ever dream of (and 700x more than their bottom rung employees) and shoving it in offshore account so the country they made it in can't tax it, they're fucking assholes.
Sounds awesome. I don't think anything is necessary beyond internets. I'd probably participate.

Letting the best three on stage would be awesome as long as you ensure the code was written during the hackathon (people tend to cheat a bit on this I think).