skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best web developers I know are also the fastest I know; they write unit tests like crazy. They write good code.

I guess you're assuming that writing good code takes longer, which is the basic fallacy in software engineering.

You keep saying this as if you believe that writing unit tests automatically means you've written good code. You can possibly have good code without unit tests. You can, more importantly, have awful code with unit tests.

For me, a major axis of "good" for code is maintainability. Therefore, writing good code means spending some time considering names rather than just using the first ones that pop into your head as you type. It means thinking about whether these superficially similar pieces of code are really related enough for code reuse to be beneficial, or whether it's only incidental similarity and really should exist in both places independently in your codebase. It's about writing small pieces of functionality yourself when otherwise you'd drop in a library that dwarfs your written code -- sure, dropping in the library is fast and easy, but if something goes wrong, you're now debugging 100K lines of someone else's code instead of the 1K lines of in-house code it would have taken to do just what you needed...

Writing good code in this way often takes considerably longer than just cranking out something that works for now, and the largest factor is not time to write unit tests, but time to think about what you're doing rather than coding at the speed you can type.
If I bought a laptop in Boston, and it came up with the username of Mark Bao... I'd give Mark a call instantly and ask him what was up.

Its not like Mark is a hard guy to Google for or unknown in Boston.
This is more about Ellison and Hurd poking HP in the eye than technical merit. Itanium is a niche product for sure, but its selling, its sales are growing, and it provides a huge wealth of r&d "ip" (in the talented staff sense) when it comes to the problem intel has to solve every year "we have twice the transistors we did for the last design... what are we gonna do with them".
Is there anyone on HN who can speak in Itanium's defense? Anyone used it and been impressed? We've all heard the Itanic jokes -- but surely there was some gold buried in there?
> ETA (after playing with Excel for a few minutes): If each person in the USA makes just 0.000003% more than the next, the resulting "20%s" wealth distribution graph looks exactly like the "Actual" part of the Percent Wealth Owned graph.

Not sure what you're saying here. Do you mean that, in an imaginary country where everyone but the top earner makes exactly 0.000003% less than the person above him, income will be distributed in that way?

I see how this would tell against the author's particular choice of representation, but I'm not sure that it tells us much about how income is actually distributed in the U.S., much less how it should be distributed. Just because the same distribution can be realized in a country where income seems to slide much more "fairly" (i.e., gradually) from the richest to the poorest doesn't mean that distribution can't be realized in a much less fair way here. (Moreover, I suspect that if you put it in absolute dollars, rather than percentage points, the incomes in your imaginary country would strike most people as decidedly less fair.)
Yobongo: Forget What Your Parents Said About Not Talking To Strangers
Glad to see it!

Some of the new stuff is really cool, and means I won't have to rely on external libraries anymore (like passing context variables in template includes).

Also, the new logging functionality is really great!

Keep up the good work!
I'm sorry I don't understand what the big deal is here. I can use my iPhone to steer a Battlecruiser if:
1) The battlecruiser had a clear API that others could hook into it
2) The API is Internet accessible
3) My iPhone has Internet access

I love seeing working code in action. Is the big deal here #1? I.e., the fact that people have APIs for large public displays? Or am I missing something? Please help me understand.
The other thing that blows my mind is I can get an open source vacuum cleaner from github.
Infographic: State of Social Collaboration
How to Ace Calculus: The Art of Doing Well in Technical Courses
This isn't a trial. It's just digital insults. There is no evidence criteria for that =).
It's really annoying. People say it looks more like Safari. I don't agree, it's just fuzzy and ugly. I was trolling the internet to find a solution to no avail.
No, no. I just used the service to find out who it was. And inadvertently sent Backblaze a lot of good press.
File under "misses the point."
They're pretty much the exact same website, man.

A couple of tips, though: you need to make it easier to add things to the lists. I registered an account, and cannot figure out how to add an item, or how to then call that list back up.

It also seems to be presenting me with the landing page despite having already registered.

It is a nice design, though. Kudos on that :) (The things popping up at me as I was interacting with it was nice)
Dayload: collects AWS usage and reports via mail
Show HN: My side project: Scheduled RSS feed delivery
Useful links:
http://recurly.com - great for recurring billing

http://feefighters.com/paypal-calculator - easy comparison tool to see if PayPal makes financial sense for you (it might)

http://feefighters.com - choose a merchant account (merchant account will set you up with a better deal with Authorize than you could get by going to them directly)

(disclaimer, I'm with FeeFighters). Also though, I can help... drop me a line (email in profile) for more personal service.
A few of my friends live in Boston and work in tech. Do you think if I asked them who Mark Bao was, they would have any clue at all?
Some worthless Communication class, I'm all for introducing Akshell into that class!
Because the idiot returned the laptop and ask him to pull down the video. If he bought it, he would actually try to press charges against Mark. By returning it he somewhat said "guilty".
Curious, after Alexis's discussion of Digg, does anyone still use Digg these days? How?
I didn't want to accuse the wrong guy, but based on the file history, he created his new user account the same day it was stolen. That was hunch enough for me.
All I can say is "Wow". I knew Detroit was in decline but 25% in 10 years (excluding the greater area)? That's just staggering.

For almost all of human history we've only had to deal with issues of growth. There are of course exceptions to this. Some cities that were massive are either small now or have ceased to exist. Some (like London) went through centuries of virtual depopulation before being reborn (between the Roman departure and the 10th-11th century).

But modern city depopulation seems to create some fairly big problems. Cities with significant depopulation (eg Detroit, Baltimore) are known for crime. Some say this causes the depopulation, which may well be true, but it also exacerbates it, as drug addicts and the like move into decaying and abandoned areas.

Going forward, this is going to be a significant problem we'll have to deal with, I believe. The reason I believe that is that it is my opinion that there are simply too many people on this planet. Ultimately it's unsustainable. Either we'll solve this by breeding less or nature will do it for us.

Either way, if this comes to pass, we'll need to figure out how to shrink urban centers effectively. That's going to be painful.

As for Detroit, it's certainly well off its peak in the 50s and 60s. It may be cheap (and thus, arguably, attractive to investors) but it's cheap for a reason. I'm sure Chechnya is cheap too.
A moderate libertarian? Wow, that's refreshing :)

More seriously, I think there is a strong case for seriously limiting if not completely eliminating government intervention in the economy as those interventions often lead to very unintended consequences, notably favoring special interest groups at the expense of others.

As Milton Friedman said: "One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."

Regarding income inequality, I do think it is a worrying phenomenon but a very small price to pay for a healthy economy and most of all, individual liberty.
Yes I did outsource. It was a huge website with a lot of bells and whistles (this was my first mistake)... At the time, I was a C++ guy trying to get into the web, so I hired an outsourced designer and then hired a php guy in India to implement it.

What ended up happening by the end is that I fired the php guy for trying to sell my code to another company and then I rewrote most of the site myself since by then I was proficient in php/mysql and the code that was written was so inefficient that google crawling the site was crushing it. Lots of lessons learned in there.
I think you should try it. The minimum you'll get is to know that programming is not for you. At the best, you'll find a passion and way of life :)

I believe that creativity, problem solving skills, a little bit of logic and math and power of will counts a lot.

By the way, the best programmer I know didn't played Super Mario or Quake. He built his own game (a game that he would like to play) and it was enough for him.
The submitted blog post acclaims MIT as a "national treasure" because it admits applicants to its undergraduate degree programs who don't have a high school diploma (certificate of completion of secondary schooling). MIT is not alone in this policy. The Common Data Set Initiative

http://www.commondataset.org/

surveys United States colleges and universities each year about their admission policies. Question C3 asks if a high school diploma is required for undergraduate admission.

Harvard

http://www.provost.harvard.edu/institutional_research/Provos...

does not require a high school diploma for admission.

Neither does Princeton.

http://registrar.princeton.edu/university_enrollment_sta/com...

Nor does Yale require a high school diploma.

http://www.yale.edu/oir/cds.pdf

MIT has long reported that it does not require a high school diploma for admission.

http://web.mit.edu/ir/cds/2010/c.html

http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/qanda/questions_and_answ...

There are other colleges that explicitly say in their Common Data Set filings that they do not require a high school diploma for admission. Moreover, homeschooling is widespread in around the world,

http://learninfreedom.org/homeschool_growth.html

and all of the most famous and most desired colleges and universities have admitted homeschoolers,

http://learninfreedom.org/colleges_4_hmsc.html

who often have "home brew" transcripts (as my oldest son did when he applied for his undergraduate university studies last year).

Lacking a high school diploma issued by a government-operated school is not a barrier to admission to any of the better colleges or universities in the United States, if the applicant is well prepared for higher education study.

After edit: I'm amazed that this thread has not yet mentioned pg's essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known,"

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

his advice to high school students about how to use their time meaningfully. High school students who take this advice to heart can get into a good college with good financial support if they want to, or pursue some other challenging personal goal if they would rather do that.
Under "Lists" you can create a list and the properties of each item in that list.

You then add items according to those properties.
Look at the example: http://listered.com/view/cat/Articles/
Amazon could be the other big tablet player
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=verisign
I had a BA because every first degree at my alma mater BA. I guarantee you it's at least the equal of any science course anywhere in the world.

(They give you an MA for free later, but that's a weird historical accident; I have a proper Masters' and a PhD as well.)
I asked a bank agent whose last name was Schmidt if she was related to Eric Schmidt. Her response: "Who is he? Is he famous?"
No, I'm saying that if you observe the same phenomenon in a variety of areas, an explanation which only applies to one area is unconvincing.
What the hell. I was hoping that this wouldn't hit Hacker News and was satisfied until I woke up this morning. :p

I'm actually slightly embarrassed that this is on Hacker News right now.
"But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.": Love this line!
One way to define a startup is explosive growth -- more than 2x every year. If you have such growth it's not an established business with well-defined market, products and processes and you have to reinvent yourself every year. Mind you they do differentiate between early stage startups and growth stage startups.
We let a mid-sized oil services company beta test our software for free and had our lawyer draft a non-compete/IP protection contract letter;

For the amount and quality of feedback we received, allowing the free beta test worked out great - I could not have paid a group of QA testers to provide as good feedback as I got from the beta test company;

In addition, most companies do not like to 'pay to test' a product.

In our situation, the company ended up purchasing our software and about 18 months later was acquired by Halliburton - Halliburton has its own software division and no longer needed us;
is anyone renting out infrastructure using the OpenStack API? Seems to me like it'll be more valuable both to consumers and to providers once there are several inter-operable providers. Also, social proof would make the traditionally conservative VPS providers more comfortable, I think.
Looking at Japan you can estimate where it was hit by the tsunami because of the lack of pings.
Jimmy Wong Saves The Internet
Yes, until I realised it was a British piece I was really confused by his expression "high latitudes like ours" (par. 9).

Guardian original here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nucl...
When I was a sophomore at the 'Tute I became friendly with a frosh who was a little different. He was from Texas (as I am, but that is not germane) and was 24. He had pledged the co-ed frat next door to my dorm where I used to hang out a bit, and always to play pool at their Friday happy hours. His father was a senior executive at a well-known semiconductor manufacturer.

He was certifiable on many levels, but a very interesting guy. He was working at Draper Labs within a month of his arrival on campus doing who-knows-what with some-unknown-level security clearance.

He had applied to MIT from a Texas state penitentiary where he was serving a six-year sentence for robbing a series of pharmacies and related misdeeds. Once he finished there, he started a different sort of prison. ;)

I recently submitted an application for the summer funding round as a sole founder. My one good friend who has been living JavaScript and CSS for the last few years is busy with his own company, but I am sure this is a good spot to meet potential partners. I call my idea StratoShare, and it involves a gateway for providing a uniform access API across users' data aggregations. The gateway would also manage a sharing graph for each user that would include those of their various aggregators, but would be independent of them. Share once with each other for everywhere, and manage it all in one view.

If you have some Web app chops and are interested at all, please email jmichaeltindell@gmail.com and I'll send you a link to my application and video.
Well, maybe the professor didn't know what his grades were like.
"Runs on Windows and Mac OSX Intel platforms."

If you only run on Windows or OS X, it's windowless, but it's not headless.

Headless means something running on a command-line console, and you can't run either of those operating systems that way.
Shimla is one of the most famous tourist destinations of India
3DS AR Cards now available on Android Marketplace
I really like the code, I think it's very well written!

A couple small suggestions and thoughts:

Add a couple lines so that all methods return this; to allow for chaining, especially helpful when using it as a mixin.

Rename bind/unbind method names since they have completely different meanings/uses in ES5:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...

P.S. If you're down with those changes I'll gladly fork, update and send a pull req, although not sure what you'd want to rename the api too.
I think it is worth making the distinction between refactoring and rewriting. I tend to take the strict view that refactoring should not change behaviour, so for example if a unit test fails, and you refactor some code, the unit test should still fail because the code should still be doing the same thing.

Since you say that you were fixing a bug, and the length of time it took, my guess is that what you were doing was a rewrite, not a refactor.

Someone else had a good line about refactoring, though I don't remember who it was: if you're refactoring code, and it isn't unit tested, you are not refactoring. You're just changing shit.
Reminds me of https://github.com/jivesoftware/jiverscripts. Check out the conc.observable component
It also causes harm to local business whose livelihood depends on selling alcohol. It's a simple fact that if a bar becomes known as a cop campground, people will go elsewhere. The law is not always black and white and cops know this.
Learn how to print with Google Cloud print.
I've seen "100% coverage" specs that managed to run every line of code while only testing trivial, obviously correct, aspects and failing to test any of the actually important behavior. This sort of stuff gives TDD a bad name, but is, in my experience, sadly common.

Also, at least in the Ruby community, people seem to only measure line coverage. Without branch and conditional coverage reports, it's possible to run 100% of the lines but still miss a lot of code paths.
This is one of those videos where watching the transcript just doesn't cut it. You really have to hear it to get the full effect of the awkwardness.
Sure you can, git or mercurial.
On ubuntu, yes. On windows, no. Chrome opens tabs kinda slow on ubuntu for some reason.
You should not assume they won't get involved. If you never contact them, they certainly won't.
I think the point is that, instead of camping out and waiting for them to get into their cars so they can ticket them, maybe something more proactive should be done to prevent them from getting in their cars at all.

There is, of course, the argument that punishing people that try to drive after drinking too much may get them to change their behavior. Regardless, doing it this way makes one wonder if income from tickets, rather than safety, is the real goal.
Apple complying with the request just means it's unavailable on the Apple/iPhone platform. Legislating it means it's unavailable on any platform.
And that's assuming the traffic is being subjected to the statistical analysis required for detection.

Timing also plays a big role. Many times a piece of intelligence is only useful for a duration of x.

Narus boxes are not magic, they can only do so much ;).
> There will be people who game the system re: "handouts" but that's the price you pay.

Exactly. Even if it's true (and I'm not sure that it is, despite much ado to the contrary) that redistribution will create a class of people that "rely on government handouts," it isn't clear that that's a bad thing, at least as long as the "handouts" are understood to be things like food stamps and welfare checks. No one is getting rich off those. If it's really true that such a class of people necessarily exists whenever you put anti-poverty programs in place, then so be it: I'm happy to let them have the money, especially if it buys a more robust social safety net that the vast majority will use responsibly.

(Now, a different kind of "handout" strikes me as much more problematic: we spend a lot more, it seems to me, on handouts like non-competitive government contracts, government-created monopolies, earmarks, bailouts, etc. -- and people are getting rich off those. But I suppose that's a bit off topic here...)
The biggest problem in doing business in D. is an ever-present Mr. 15% mentality. You won't be able to do much without either:
1. Having friends with connections in the "government" of Detroit or
2. Paying off so that they will get off your back.

I live in Ferndale, but I have an idea that is very suitable for Detroi - but I won't pursue it until there are some more changes happening in the city council.
I couldn't figure out from the website exactly what Yobongo is. Can someone help me out?
When free sucks
thank you so much for weighing in.
Heh, ok…I'll take that. I find your perspective a bit entertaining coming from Core OS (I was on Server, as it so happens). At least, when I was there Core OS had a reputation as being the more "academic" and "by the book" group. That's compared to Frameworks, which was much more pragmatic than dogmatic. One of the things I admired was how Bertrand managed those conflicting viewpoints with some grace. Of course, things being what they were, I'd expect someone from Core OS to blame Bertrand for being too "old fashioned". At the same time I know plenty of people from Frameworks who were upset that he "adopted new technology too soon"…there was especially a lot of that with respect to libdispatch.

As for malloc, I find it hard to believe that he was stubborn about changes. The one chance I had to sit and have coffee with Bertrand, we discussed what API's we'd most like to rewrite given infinite time/resources. His answer was "malloc". I think rather than being stuck with the last technology, he had a difficult time balancing the pressures of change with the need for consistence, and did so admirably.

Oh, and as for top…when they did change it in early SnowLeopard builds, it broke a whole host of tooling, etc., and they had to revert some changes...
But where do I go to add a thing to a list?

Say I start at the website's root...what do I click on now?
As an HN user I realize my opinion is biased, but when I look at reddit I don't think minimalist. In fact it seems somewhat cluttered.
Not quite. Mozilla is a platform with which you can build apps. Firefox is by far the most popular app running on the Mozilla platform, but there are many others, including SongBird, Thunderbird, etc. The bare executable for the Mozilla platform is Xulrunner, and that's what Conkeror uses.

Anyway, the one thing that keeps Firefox competitive is that they built a platform in a fast yet very awkward language, then they built an application on top of that using a much more pleasant, flexible language. None of the other browser vendors understand this; Chrome devs parrot the "but Javascript is too slow to build our UI in" even though they have the fastest JS engine in the world. It boggles the mind and cripples them in the long term for anything other than your standard point-n-grunt interfaces.
I suppose, why didn't you just call the police?