skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unit tests on code that has no dependencies (and I mean no dependencies, neither injected nor direct) is great.

Unit tests on code with dependencies (whether injected so that they can be mocked, or directly referenced so that they end up more like mini integration tests) are less excellent. They're brittle, inhibit refactoring, and either don't test as much as you think they do (if mocking dependencies) or are slow (if not mocking).

The further up the testing pyramid you go, the less work it is to refactor things, because you don't need to rewrite as many tests. OTOH test are more complex to write and take longer to run.

And now I get to my point: I don't think the blanket statement of "your largest set of test should be ... unit testst that run quickly" is well-founded. There are trade-offs, and they shouldn't be trivially waved aside.
Damn, this list keeps growing and growing ... https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/
I'm fairly convinced it wasn't designed or engineered, but I do think it escaped from the Wuhan virus lab. That they had invited american scientists to the lab and asked for advice in securing it satisfies me that they weren't doing biological weapons research, the fact that they were studying coronaviruses in a facility where the outbreak happened and americans were sounding the alarm on security months before hand is too much of a coincidence for me to believe the story that it came from a wet market.
https://stratechery.com/2016/opendoor-a-startup-worth-emulat...

This is an amazing read, and I still think it is a worthy model, during stable times.
>What you are saying is technically true, but is so simplistic that it's absurd.

Of course it's simplistic, but it's the primary factor if your choice as a landlord is between forgiving rent for a few months for a proven restaurant, or evicting them and looking for a new unproven tenant.

>Restaurants are going out of business in droves because they can't pay rent.

Again, landlords can forgive rent, and in this situation, it's in their best interest to do so. Sure not all of them, but the smart ones will.
To add to the other alternatives: remember that there's Excel, i.e. spreadsheet software. It's my current method for organizing and monitoring my solo work. Some of the useful features:

- Handling dates, intervals, boolean values.

- Formatting, and conditional formatting. Colors, fonts etc. without the non-utilitarian, "sleek" burden of modern web design.

- Collecting reporting information with SUM(), IF(), COUNTIFS() and friends.

The main benefit is that it's very flexible with only very minimal programming. I can reserve my coding time and stamina for the tasks that absolutely need it.
What law? I've never heard of any connection between being able to pay with Oyster and not being able to drink - this sounds like an old wives' tale to me.

I know there are specific trains where drinking is banned. Elsewhere in this thread, there are some examples in Wales. I can't find anything about it being banned on trains to Chessington, or anywhere on South Western Railway, though. Not can their help person on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/SW_Help/status/1250795304837951490?s=19
On this general topic, I've been pretty impressed with Phabricator as a good JIRA alternative (with gitlab features as well). It was made at Facebook and then open sourced and then I think the team left Facebook(?). Anyway it's blazing fast and has a pretty solid kanban. It kind of seems like a one-person team though on the dev side.

https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

We started using it long ago because it was one of the really nice looking self-hosted git repo hosts with very nice code review.
Why is this one-month-old paper reposted now that the lab leak theory is regaining traction in media outlets?

Here is the conclusion of the paper:
“[…] we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.

Here is the title of Scripps Research Institute press release about their publication:
“The COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin, scientists say”.

Here are some links to Scripps Research press releases of multi-million dollars deals with chinese labs:

https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2017/2017...

https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2019/2019...

https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/yisheng-biopharma-...

I am not going to address the china-praising statements and political stances from main researcher twitter account at a time when CCP cover-up was already known worldwide.

At the time this paper was published, moderators on social networks deleted any possible discussion on the topic. Copy-paste op's link in reddit search bar and see how many comments were deleted from related discussion.
If you're willing to dismiss 200 lbs of flour as hobby levels, then do you even believe in hoarding at all?

We're talking enough flour to make 200 loaves. At best, they bought a 3 month supply of flour (and that is baking 2 loaves every day). At worst, this is more flour than they can possibly use, and a large amount of it will go bad (storing 200 lbs of flour inside is a bit of a challenge, so it may be stored in a garage or worse).

And of course, with every product in the grocery store, if we all go out and buy a 3 month or further supply of a basic good, there's not going to be any left. Which only encourages more hoarding.
I got old and retired.
> Also, in general, if you need to change your tests for valid changes in the implementation, then your approach to testing is completely broken. An example are dumb testing strategies where you check that the code produces specific SQL queries instead of checking that the code returns correct results.

I don't see how this relates to mocking at all. You can write good or bad tests this way regardless of mocking.
Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation
Could you elaborate on that? What aspects of using clang as opposed to gcc were so beneficial?
Yes, whatsapp was the first nice and easy to use free Multimedia Messaging Service worldwide. It was so refreshing to be able to send messages to anywhere In the world and not worry about international charges.

Also it was mostly spam free due to being tied to a phone number.
if you keep using sqlite for tests it forces Your database logic to be universal. You could confidently switch to other db like mysql any time.
the past is now
Hitting a database in tests is an order of magnitude slower and also involves worrying about a lot more code, i.e. the database engine. You may or may not want to take on that burden.
No, English isn't the weird one, French is. All languages except for French just adopt phrases from other languages. But for French they couldn't just use "computer" or "PC", like pretty much every other language out there. They had to invent their own word: l'ordinateur, if I remember correctly. And they do this with every foreign word.
The only thing I've casually observed is how non-essential professional sports actually are in America. Sure, public sporting events are part of the fabric by now, but just like entertainment and celebrities are low this list of what actually matters when push comes to shove (and is worth paying attention to).
I would guess their risk is similar to travel & sports industry's, they are mostly dependent on people being outdoors and recording things, you would probably use your phone or camera to record in doors.
Hell I have an unnecessarily large amount of memory, and Resharper still slows down VS
I'll be thrilled if the cruise industry never recovers from this.
Toronto Transit Commission now blocking off seats to enable social distancing
Can't you use transactions to set up and tear down fixtures? That should be a lot faster than spinning up a new database every time.
The Thing That Gets You to the Thing
Cooling fails though. And even in 70 degree heat a 55-foot container can hit 110 in the sun, as I learned lumping boxes one summer.
Obviously the current situation is a big factor but I can't help but wonder to what degree things like GoPros and drones are something of a fad outside of a fairly niche market.

I suspect a fair number of people buy GoPros for their association with adventure sports and, after taking video of doing a few runs down some blues at the local ski area, come to the realization that they don't in fact base jump or kayak off waterfalls.

As for drones, I've thought about them from time to time. But after taking some video around my house, I'm honestly not sure what I would do with one. They're sort of obnoxious in wilderness settings and are often banned in any case.
Exactly. In my country it works the same way, and doctors aren't well paid here. Some of them then go to places where doctors are paid better. Thus, they don't inherit money indirectly through going to schools for well-paid professionals, they inherit profession.
So did every other business in the world, until Governors started shutting them down?
Since this comment seems to be fairly top-rated, I'm going to expand on this story a bit.

I graduated from ECE at Waterloo in 2008. I wanted to go to med school, so I studied for the MCATs (did well), volunteered at this ER, and eventually went on to do a Masters in medical imaging. I never did go to med school though, I didn't have the marks nor the drive.

That said, volunteering at this ER was a significant turning point in my career/life. Besides the life experience of being in a busy ER, it actually served as the foundation point for my current career as a software engineer/startup founder.

During my volunteer stint, my volunteer coordinator passed my name along to the company running the bedside television terminals in the hospital. I started working for them, selling services to patients. Through that work, my innate curiosity and need to solve problems got the best of me. I saw they had a fairly new/technical system, yet we were doing things by paper. I started hacking on the system, figured out how to extract data from the DB using a PHP script. This caught the attention of the company owner. Eventually, I left that job to continue doing contract software/technical work for that owner. We had a very interesting relationship over the years.

Eventually, I leveraged that opportunity to find future opportunities in commercial real estate, which I used to create my current startup.

Oh, and I met my wonderful wife through that volunteer position too. We now have a beautiful 1.5 year old.

All because I volunteered in the ER.
No need to scan the image if the last few bytes has a "footer" describing the length that precedes it.

I still think I like adding it as a section better, though.
Tracking Covid-19 excess mortality across countries
> should spin up an entire instance of Oracle

I'm sort of doing that at the moment, with postgres and series of tests. But it is still useful for unit testing too: pull up the right CREATE tables, INSERT your test data, execute your tests, then drop tables (lots of safeguards here), and repeat. The container loads up in 1.5 sec, and all my tests (~100) are done in 10 seconds.

It's been great in my use case. I'm on postgres, Java, and using testcontainers. They have handy containers available, not limited to RDBMS and not even limited to databases; and here is Oracle Express edition, which should be enough for most tests:

https://www.testcontainers.org/modules/databases/oraclexe/
So... premature optimization?
Taiga is another option that you can host yourself.

https://taiga.io
Brand Marketing Through the Coronavirus Crisis
There are no indications in this article that the user has at-rest plaintext on their mail server or in their local mail client. It's possible they aren't removing 'my-msg.txt' after they're done using it, or that the remote recipient is vulnerable to those issues, but that's unrelated to the user interface focus of this post.
This is interesting and very true. It reminds me of people who are excellent at something but their life gets held back by alcohol/drugs or bad relationships or some other _low minimum_.

That first sentence is really profound in my opinion.
German medical lawyer forcibly committed to psychiatric inst. for criticizing
Interesting. Also a noticeable supply prime CRE empty for a long time before CV19 in my neck of the 'prime location' woods.

That asset class has been totally inflated beyond bubble in the past 5 years IMO and will never return to the same levels of occupancy (or $/sf rates).
> Amazon's has been scheduling delivery for "non-essential" items far out to April 30th for some time now

They still have many non-essential items available for delivery in a few days, and you be surprised what is considered essential.
IMO, the classic test pyramid with integration tests at the narrow top and unit tests at the wide bottom is inverted. We test software that way because integration tests are hard and unit tests are easy, but integration tests provide more value than unit tests. It's the streetlight effect: "Did you lose your car keys here?" "No, but the light is much better here."

I built some framework code so that integration tests as easy to write as unit tests. Almost all of my tests are "integration tests". I never mock the database. My test harness clones a template database at the start of each test; that database is maintained with migrations just like every other database. I run against test accounts at all the 3rd party services I use. It's not super fast - a full CI run takes about 15 minutes. And occasionally a 3rd party service will cause a test to flake. But it's fast enough and most importantly it's thorough.

I still have some unit tests that run without the expensive setup harness, but they're for components that have a lot of algorithmic complexity. Anything that touches the database gets a real instance.

This works pretty well with Postgres, which is free and I can run locally and has a fast db clone operation. YMMV with other databases.
It's not an argument, it's a statement designed to point out the sheer hubris of thinking we actually matter, which is the root of all of the world's problems: human pride. If you hate it that much, it was probably meant for you.
Right but that's when you explicitly ask for it.

However, you can't ask ask PostgreSQL to run a query and also return the query plan used for said query.
Universities across the US (mine included) are furloughing employees.
Management overhead is a self inflicted wound. But very common.

I often come in and ask people to stop doing meaningless tasks, just to be told that the previous, much more expensive, consultant had told them it's the bees knees.

There is also a common misunderstanding that if a bigger or cooler company is doing something it must be the right thing.

Cargo cult.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876913
How to Stay Healthy When Your Child, Spouse or Roommate Has Covid-19
Behold! You want us guys to wear man-purses and mini skirts?
The Amiga IP has been sold and resold many times. Some organization still owns the Amiga IP. (Does anyone know who?) There is a danger of them coming out of the woodwork and causing problems, I guess.
I'm definitely getting one in (PRODUCT)RED.

Jokes about editing goofs aside, this will probably replace my iPhone 6S Plus in a couple of years once it's even cheaper.
DeepCode: Outside Perspective
Yes, let's throw out valuable field evidence just because it doesn't fit some narrow definition of "valid experiment".

Compare 700 people who received a treatment to 700 demographically similar people who received the standard treatment in the same or similar hospital and you're going to get a useful result.

We can do your fancy RCT later when we aren't dying en masse from a novel and highly lethal virus.
Nonograms – Japanese Crosswords On-Line
This also means that you have to stick to the lowest common denominator between all databases.
Damn good stuff here. Can you build me a landing page to test a new business? :-)
any GC language could in theory be supported only if you can compile that language and the runtime it needs into a sufficiently small package.
GoPro has long baffled me as a company.

1. On the face of it, their main products in 2020 (i.e. action cameras) are barely innovative, and seem to have nothing to attract and lock customers in other than brand recognition built on expensive marketing campaigns. Essentially, they're selling commodity equipment at a large mark-up. Why haven't they been totally displaced by a manufacturer with a cheaper clone, also offering a good enough brand and ecosystem to compete?

2. Where they have innovated, they've hugely missed the target. In particular, their drone release was just an awful, awful misjudgement. Not just because it fell out of the sky. Not just because it came out at the same time as a superior competitor from DJI. But because it totally missed that GoPro is/was seen as a provider of action cameras - things that can be started and then forgotten about as they record your activities. They released a fairly generic drone, which required constant operator interaction. Had they released a drone with a tether, which could be started and then forgotten about as you ride your MTB, or your snowboard, they'd have likely had a hit, aligned with their brand identity (assuming it didn't drop out of the sky).
Isn't it unlikely that a naturally emerged virus would have both high virality and mortality rate? I have read that viruses usually have one or the other, which would indicate that both is more rare. Combining the rare odd with the odds that the host happens to infect a human would make it even less likely to happen. I'm not very familiar with the topic so I could be mistaken.

I don't think it's very interesting if it was a naturally or artificially selected virus. The more interesting question is was the infected specimen a research subject or not.
I've started to agree with this view of the test pyramid as well. This is a great video overall, but here's a part where Aslak Hellesoy (creator of Cucumber) is talking about how a better way to think about the test pyramid is as a [spectrum of speed & reliability](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE_1nh0DdbY&t=12m55s)

If a test isn't a pure unit test, where all collaborators are stubbed out, but it is still fast and reliable, it is still a very valuable test. Possibly preferable since testing multiple collaborating objects / functions provides more confidence than just testing one by itself.
I'd start w/ Vanilla Emacs and then look at Doom Emacs. I recently switched away from Spacemacs (kinda slow IMO).

https://ethanaa.com/blog/switching-to-doom-emacs/

I wouldn't worry too much about elisp until you're at least intermediate. I've used Emacs for 10+ years and I next to no custom config that I've found indispensable.
Looks like it's meant to be a substitute for Jira rather than an integration.
The linked article talks about the importance of keeping size under control.

PHP ships with literally hundreds of built-in functions, which I imagine makes it harder to optimize for the size constraints of Cloudflare Workers.
Teknofest 2020 – Turkey
On legacy code? Alas. The amount of changes you might have to make to make the legacy code unit testable versus the benefit of unit tests can be exceedingly significant.

For instance, if the implementation involves calling up a bunch of value objects from a database, each of which do the same, and all of the code is inhouse so there is no standard mock or stub libraries available, adding unit tests is tantamount to rewriting the whole system without tests.

Existing codebases can also be too complicated for a few people to formalise into unit tests. The algorithm itself might be simple, but again, to discover that, you need to rewrite the whole system without tests. (You can add tests, of course, but when you're adding tests, you're making an assertion you cannot prove. Since you don't know what the code is meant to do, you don't know whether the tests are complete or even accurate.)

Once you're coding in a world where tests passing or tests failing has almost no predictive value on success or failure in release, you're working in a self-fulfilling prophecy where the code will never be tested because the tests literally make things worse.

Many codebases clearly do not have any automated tests at all, but unit tests can be the hardest to add onto a system after the fact.
Sure, I mostly brought up vacuum tubes as an endpoint because constructing the specialized tools to make one is no longer a four-hour job. You run into a wall where, to get to the point where you can do the glassblowing, you have to first bootstrap an entirely-separate set of primitives (kiln, quench, anvil, grinding/polishing stones, etc.) that you may not have needed up until that point if you’d just been working with scrap stock.

(And then the same is true of everything after that, because transistors require photolithography, and photolithography requires good lenses.)

Of course, if you’re unlocking your tech-tree in a breadth-first direction, you’ll already have the glassworking primitives around due to them being common prerequisites for refining metal ore :)
I agree with this too, I'm definitely in the still-employed-but-spending-has-changed camp as well.

We're completely ignoring the higher order effects of what the pandemic is doing and I think we do so at our own peril.
Facebook Revamps Libra, Plans Multiple Single-Currency Coins
I think they can have their place in vlogging and doing small scale productions as well, where ruggedness>flexibility. though that's obviously a very small market.
You've never experienced good art by a tortured artist, then?
Maybe my view is skewed by the fact (well, I think it is so) that I learn languages a lot faster by speaking or surrounding myself with them. Studying at home simply does not work for me. I love languages, but I'd prefer to be fluent before using them for important stuff.
You need at least a new PCB, an updated firmware/kernel, updated software. It's not trivial.
Having work with hardware, I highly doubt you can pull that through in 2 months.

As for manufacturing, they might have all the components, but you still need new assembly lines. And not for small runs, for million of devices. With China on lockdown.

Apple are amazing at logistic, however it's been months in the making, nothing reactionary.
In the mid-90s I started using emacs just because a classmate mentioned it (previously we'd used whatever was on VMS; I think this was around when I discovered Unix). A few years later in grad school, I was in the computer lab one evening and the sysadmin came in, sat down beside me and showed me how to really use emacs, and I was enlightened. ;) No, but seriously, I don't really remember what he even showed me (though I think one thing was dired), but having a guru give you a few tips is, at least in my experience, a great way to at least open your mind to learning more.
I agree, as a tech worker it's probably easy enough to find another job, so it's not worth fighting over this.
I'm wondering how long landlords can hang on, with no income. They can 'go belly up' too.
But isn't that the point of Circle...not having to do any IT work? At some point the cost of Circle becomes negligible, especially when you consider how much your time is worth...and that you don't have to do any maintenance.
The article uses a Mock/Stub distinction very close to the famous Mocks Aren't Stubs article by Martin Fowler https://martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html
Lenders have already tightened up loan requirements which will decrease the demand part of the equation. It is the same thing that happened during the great recession. People may want to buy, but have no ability to do so. There's also the high unemployment rate and foreign investors liquidating inventory for capital because their country is also going through a downturn. All the ibuyers have stopped purchasing. If the stock market drops, 10% of buyers who use their 401k or IRA for their downpayment will probably dry up.

I don't see any situation where the housing market doesn't drop.
It's unspecified, and I've seen it change over time as the linker changes it's data structures.