skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"_If_ the Ubuntu team is committed to making Ubuntu more confusing to use and introducing new bugs and breaking existing features and ignoring old bugs."

Sad thing is they aren't so your argument doesn't hold.
"Do whatever it takes to solve the business problem now and we'll worry about the other stuff later" is what produces horribly complex code bases because "later" never comes and management will never justify the time to fix things.

This presents you with a number of problems:

* It makes it harder to pivot in the future. You may end up having to rewrite a lot in order to extend the original model.

* In most cases, this means no tests.

* Maintenance costs significantly more.

* When you hire new people to work on the code base, it will take a significant amount of time for them to come up to speed and be productive in the code base.
Very good, I stand corrected.

Alas, I left the room during the crucial moment when I could correct my comment and now I can't do it. Otherwise I would certainly do so.
Did you get a Texas driver's license to replace your California one?
Someone downvoted this? This seems like good advice to me...
Spray-on clothing
Mr. Roddenberry must be turning in his grave...
For those missing the irony, CNET is also a CBS property.
Sauce is a useful service but it doesn't address the test maintenance problem... And it is a big concern.

My advice: Do NOT use the Selenium IDE. write your own framework, using Selenium, which isolates changes when they occur. If someone changes the login page, you only need to change a login method in your test suite not all 200 rest cases! Look up the Page Objects pattern as one way of doing this
Tell HN: The application links on the YC Apply are broken [Fixed]
http://ycombinator.com/apply.html

Application Form link (http://news.ycombinator.com/apply) leads to:

Sorry, we're no longer considering applications for summer 2011.

Check back later to apply for winter 2012.

[Edit] Fixed: in case it goes south again, the link is: http://news.ycombinator.com/w2012form
It's too bad there's not a development plan available. I have quite a bit of AppEngine projects I'd be interested in porting over, but not if 100 requests/day + 500kb SQL (what I would use during the port) would cost me $20/month.
Facebook privacy, Chrome extension for 2-clicks "like" button
But none of those things you mention has anything to do with tablets.
Smart casual dress
Many people will avoid a platform that doesn't provide Android compatibility for the same reason they'd avoid Apple ... single vendor lock-in.
Selenium works fine for me.
That's a poor way to judge. I'm always looking at my code and thinking that it's not good enough, but there are definitely pieces of code that are worse that I deal with daily (I work on a code base that's > 20 years old).
On a more realistic note, I've often thought that combining hacker/maker spaces, good digital libraries and some communal living would make an excellent, low-cost fellowship for people looking to experiment for a couple of years. Related as I characterize the arrangement as monastic.
//Of course this is my view after having spent non-trivial amounts of time making code beautiful, modular and reusable instead of trying to solve the problem at hand.

I can identify with that feeling. working at a startup made me realize that i have spent more time reading code than writing code. While that's not a bad thing on it's own, i had lost sight of the joy from building/improving things/product. I have been programming for 4-5 years now and pissed that i don't have a product of my own(crappy/otherwise).
Oops, fixed. Sorry.
The ability to find a group of people like you. If you're straight, white, and born in the small town, this isn't a problem. As a gay man, I'd have a lot of trouble in many small towns.

The ability to walk down the street at 3 in the morning and see a non-trivial number of people around.

A friend was in a small town teaching for the summer, and he said "So then we went to the bar. I say the bar because there was only one." Where I live, there are 171 listed in the phone book.
Yes! Exactly! Because looking only at tablets is wrong.
Thanks for pointing this out. I've obviously not gotten my head around the concept of space-time and the article fails to mention this.

Also, http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2011/08/25/superno... is perhaps a more official story. They too don't mention that it's discovery was a few hours after it was possible to observe the explosion, not a few hours after the actual explosion.
I think that subset can be profitably ignored; evidence: Apple.
I think the 2-clicks "like" button is super smart. I am going to implement it as a Chrome extension, what do you guys think? I've created a repo on github:

https://github.com/hayeah/FaceOff
I'd be interested in seeing that. Oh, and I'd rather see a mess soon, than wait for the neated-up version.
Genie Bra: Read This First Before You Buy
By the time when poor performance of manager is apparent it's hard to salvage anything on the project.

Workers should be afraid of working for bad manager and delivering useless product.

If workers avoid bad projects and bad managers that helps to protect resources from bad projects.
I don't think Amazon is likely to succeed in "pulling an Apple"; what I do see is a way to "pull an iTunes". Amazon is already a trusted retailer with financial resources. This will allow them to better curate an app store. Adding a hardware component is fine and will probably be profitable, but the real strength here will be trading Amazon's brand power (and, hopefully, follow-through) to create an app store that competes with Apple.
Beautiful Jamaica Beach Wallpapers,jamaica island information
Jamaica is a beautiful island with about two hundred miles of white sand beaches. Jamaica is an island country located in the Caribbean near Cuba. The official language is English. Jamaica beaches are some of the most beautiful and enchanting beaches in the Caribbean. Some of the best Jamaica beaches to visit in Jamaica are the Blue Lagoon, which is located in in Portland. This place is known for its mystical colour. Montego Bay is one of the best Jamaica beaches on the island. This beach is open to the public and the costs to get in this beach should be less than $10USD. The most visied place is Bob Marley Museum, Blue Mountains, Doctor's Cave Beach, Jablum Coffee Company, Dunn's River Falls, Rose Hall, Montego Bay Marine Park, Seven Mile Beach, Appleton Rum Estate, Negril Lighthouse etc. To download Wallpapers, Right Click, and select " Save as Desktop Background Wallpapers".
"""every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. """

I didn't think so (according to current physical theories). We don't know where a particular photon will land in a double slit experiment.
I would be happier if Google had a priority of not collecting user data in the first place.
Bye bye ftp, scp.
True. As a broker of sorts, it is essential that AirBnB withhold details of the two parties. But the company need not hide that they do so. The certainly would not be ashamed if news broke out that they do so.

The transparency I speak about is slightly different. AirBnB where (I think) caught out when news broke of a landlord's home was vandalized. The company was heavily criticized for an arguably insufficiently transparent initial response.

Eventually, AirBnB were transparent in the sense that they acknowledged mistakes and acknowledged inherent risks to landlords. They used that transparency to improve the offering and promote the product accordingly. Kudos to Chesky and team!

At the risk of repeating myself, I see a parallel with Heroku's status dashboard. In a sense they are saying: "We won't mislead you. Hosting with us carries risk of downtime. Here is a dashboard so you see how well (or bad) we are doing." That too is an example of transparency leading to an improved service offering.

Heroku seem to have done it proactively. AirBnB did so reactively. Better late, of course, than never.
Adding Twitter for Mac to Share Options on YOURLS
doesn't really explain much. One of the comment claims it's not copyrighted but why?
To extend upon this idea - if you really wanted to maximise the data you could transmit in a single twitter message you could use the full 31bits of unicode (instead of just the chinese subset) and then apply standard lossless data compression techniques to the generated unicode for further improvement.
Good timing. Will probably attract tons of scared App Engine orphans.
He quotes the Wikipedia article on Tricorder: "The company was permitted to call this device a 'tricorder' because Gene Roddenberry's contract included a clause allowing any company able to create functioning technology to use the name."

First and formost, this is probably a case for "[citation needed]".

Secondly, my understanding is that this would apply to a physical device that actually did scan for medical, landscapes and engineering. Probably the reason behind the Tricorder X Prize. I don't really see this applying to a software application to show you your WiFi strength.

He wasn't sued for the name, he was sued for the LCARs interface. So it's a moot point anyways…
A Year In Browsers: Dazzling Performance Gains
Great hacking. If you like this topic, this should be relevant: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/891643/twitter-image-enco... (Compressing images in tweets)
Yes, when you change domiciles, the process is to re-register all vehicles, get new license, new plates, etc. The new state will require you to do all of that. You can't mix and match residences in order to maximize goodness (i.e. if Texas has high auto insurance rates, and it does, pick a lower insurance state for the drivers license; but use Texas for income tax purposes; and then use some other state for health insurance; whatever). So, you take the good with the bad (Texas pros: No state income tax, reasonable vehicle registration fees, conveniently located in the middle of the country for those times when you do have to physically be present; Texas cons: Somewhat high sales tax which can be a big problem when buying a new rig or boat for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, higher auto insurance rates than many places). Being half-in/half-out is sort of grey area...you probably won't get in trouble for it, but you may run into problems if you have any legal problems or have to file a major health insurance claim or something. Which reminds me, I need to get health insurance sorted. It'll save me money to move it to a Texas provider, probably, since California is among the most expensive states for health care...I just haven't gotten around to it.
Titties ;-)
Interesting idea - you would need the means to replace something like this [http://blog.crowdscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/qr_c...] or just be able to cleanly cover their QR code with your new QR code sticker.

Then they would have to purchase the item on their phone, otherwise you wouldn't get the commission for it.
I agree. And the article doesn't suggest that the guy who resigned did anything against the rules; quite the contrary.

And, having drunk some more coffee since this morning, I am now sorry that I tried to summarize the article at all. I fear I may have thereby carried water for poorly-sourced rumors that, for all I know, have no basis in fact.

I would edit or delete my original comment if I could, but I no longer have the power to do so.

I apologize and I promise to try to ignore the Silicon Valley rumor mill even more aggressively in the future.
doh! I wrote "wireless wiretapping scandal" but I meant "warrantless wiretapping scandal", which is what you are referring to explicitly. edited to note correction; Thanks!
Do you live in your rig full-time? What part of the world are you parked in now?

And, I wasn't aware I could have things shipped to a FedEx store. I've considered getting a mailbox at a FedEx store in places where I stay for more than a week or two, but so far have not. But, if I can just do a "general delivery" type thing to a FedEx store, that'd be awesome. Will look into it. Though, Amazon never tells you how they're shipping an item; could be UPS, FedEx, courier, DHL, USPS, nobody knows until you get the tracking notice. So, that probably won't work for my Amazon Prime shipments.
Interesting. Who is that targeted at?

For me, cost control was a concern 10-12 years ago, but I pay for unlimited usage, have for years, and consider it cheap for the value.

I perceive that among folks with smartphones, doing more with the phone is higher priority than saving money (or even getting a better value). Upgrading to an iPhone 4 was totally elective, and that 3rd $2 game or ringtone didn't add much value. Of course, if I could press a button and save $30/month, I'd do it, I just don't think I'd trade away services.

I think it's a totally different story with the feature phone market (which will soon evolve into the prev-gen/smaller smartphone market).
Although not mentioned in the article, I wonder what will be the role of companies in this freelance world...

If companies are only ever changing groups of freelancers properly gathered to accomplished certain tasks, what will differentiate them? The ability to recruit and pay the most talented freelancers? I'm not sure that will work out on the long run.

As someone already mentioned, many companies are already facing erosion of employee loyalty but not the most successful ones. I 'd argue that those companies that are market leaders don't suffer so much from that problem (mostly) because they are able to instill a set of values and principles across their workforce and this is very hard (maybe impossible) to achieve with freelancers, who easily come and go and are probably much more emotionally detached from their current employer.

I actually believe in this freelancer world, but I also believe there has to be a reinvention of the way companies work in which setting the right balance between culture/brand identity and decentralization/individualism will be critical.
吉安黄页
It's a poor way to judge code, yeah, but the more important thing it speaks to, IMO, is the respect the developer has for the fact that other people will actually be executing the code they write.
I believe outside1234 is referring to the maintenance cost of keeping the tests up to date.
That's definitely true when you're in a conference room working over something, though nowadays I'm just using a scientific calculator app on my Android phone instead, since that means I've got one less device to keep track of.
I always feel frustration at this question, I can't believe that sauce labs hasn't taken off. Use capybara as the driver layer, and a proper test framework that separates the different layers, and sauce labs to hit any browser matrix you want. Tie it into a CI system and never worry about this again - it's a solved problem, and it was solved by Sauce Labs.

disclaimer: I used to work there, and put my blood, sweat, and tears into building it out just for situations like this.
You have to restart X to hotplug displays with some drivers. That's a deal-breaker.
> There will be a seven-year phase-out period

They definitely have time though...
I totally agree. Flickr was started 7.5 years ago. Believe it or not, things like storage and bandwidth used to be a lot more expensive. And with costs so high, monetization often required your own dedicated ad sales force.

It's amazing to me how quickly people can take the last decade or so for granted. Back when I started my first company, we had to buy a PBX and even install our own mail servers. Uphill, in the snow, both ways!!
GitHub repo?
First and foremost, write your code so that it can be understood easily by someone that knows nothing about it. As you get older, you'll realize that this person is you! Anything written over 2 weeks ago is often like looking at new code, so make sure you have good comments and non-obscure variable names so that you can understand it easily. This also makes it easier on your coworkers.

Second, write for readability and maintainability. Save optimizations for the last step. If your code is properly modularized (but not OVERLY-modularized) then you'll be able to selectively optimize and get good performance. As you grow as a programmer, you'll realize that having maintainable code (ie. code you can change easily with new features, or changing requirements, etc) with really good performance is far more valuable than terrible code with the fastest solution. Well-written code that is flexible and that you can shape like putty and add features to do what you want is exactly the point of programming.

The one thing you don't want to do is design code and products that become unmaintainable to the point where the costs of adding features becomes a nightmare. This is what I call coding yourself into a corner. I worked on a project where adding a single feature had a 3 page matrix of things that might break, and would need a lot of QA effort to validate. This is not maintainable code, and an example of where every new feature gets exponentially harder to add, which pretty much kills the product.

Third, I think it's great that you don't think your code is good. This means that you care! I would say only 40% of the coders I've come across actually cared about making their code better, or about mastering the art of programming. Just keep on programming, have a thick-skin to code reviews (I gave a code review to a new programmer who burst into tears because she had never been code-reviewed before), and be willing to learn. I have 15+ years of experience, and although I'm comfortable with my own style, I'm very open to criticism and always willing to learn.
It does a little more than show Wifi signal strength. It wraps up all of the phone's sensors into a package that makes it feel like a multi-sensor package (tricorder).

e.g. the compass is a magnetic field sensor, the inertial sensors of the phone function as gravity sensors, the wifi signal meter and mobile network signal strength is an EM field strength meter, the camera might be a photon sensor, it can download sunspot reports, gps, the microphone is turned into a volume sensor etc.

It feels like the multi-sensor Star Trek device because of how the author wrapped it all up behind LCARS.
> Let's see some source code...

The project is on Github, it's linked in the article: https://github.com/codeparty/racer
Extremely rural is <500 people. No traffic lights, no Subway sandwiches. Just a country store, 7 churches, and 49 horses.
> ... developer Jeremy Allison met up with Richard
> Hillesley. Here, Richard Allison's description of
> the ...

Richard Allison? Wat?
So Twitter allows 140 (UTF-8?) characters, regardless of the number bytes? The article wasn't clear about this.
For Javascript testing, I really like JSTestDriver for automation and Sinon for mocking/stubbing.

I found bulky solutions like Selenium to be somewhat hit-or-miss and overkill for most tasks. It's very rare that with proper unit testing I really need a whole additional layer just to click around the site and make sure stuff is working as expected. Maybe some basic sanity checking, but it's really not my preferred way to think about testing--which of course is just a personal preference.
I've been trying practice better, as I think we all tend to mostly learn by using or reading documentation.

I started "exercising" a bit before I kick into coding. A few different exercises I made so far:

1. API Memorization: go through an API and try to build something that executes each function once. This is great with a REPL.

2. Reading code: find a sweet, highly regarded open source library, and, well, just pick up a file and read it.

3. Improving tool usage: improve typing speed, memorizing functionality of your editor, etc.

I try to do one exercise for about 30-45 minutes daily (if possible). I write down what I read or memorized in a spreadsheet. Maybe I'm anal.

I see exercises like how sports folk practice, or how musicians (I play the saxophone) do scales, etc. It just kind of rounds ya out a bit. Over time, you just get a little faster.
He also wasn't sued. He had a DMCA takedown request over his app sent to Google and has not the money or motivation to fight it.
Let's take programming out of the equation with a quote.

"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." - John Godfrey Saxe.

The problem with looking at any recent code that you write is that you know how it was made (i.e.: you are in the kitchen making the sausages). But it's different if you are the customer eating the sausage. Even if the cook told you how the sausages were made, you still don't have first-hand knowledge, so you elide over the means (good or bad) to get to the ends. It's only when you really dig in and start to understand the process you start to see that the people making the same things you make are in the same boat as you.
It's pretty natural to be disgusted by one's own code, except in very rare circumstances. Typically you like it when you've just written it (but before it's been transformed into garbage by real-world needs).
Famous nature photographer admits to comprehensive Photoshop cheating
Ask HN: About to get on a plane. Best way to read HN offline?
Not sure if the flight will have wifi. In the event it doesn't, I would love to download a few pages of HN articles & threads, for offline reading.

Ideas?
After using Linux for a few years and learning that you had to do a bit of research and buy hardware carefully to make sure it all worked, I discovered that I could choose ever so slightly more carefully and everything would work with even less effort. I use a MacBook for my main workstation and since finding Divvy and SizeUp haven't missed Linux it all.

I just want a Unix machine that I don't have to fuss over or spend time setting up and maintaining.
Spire Magazine: what I did on the Internet
It's pretty interesting to see just how drastically Panda affected some very large sites. Most of the sites shown are the kind of sites that Panda was designed to deemphasize in the search results. It's what Google got right with Panda.

What it doesn't seem to show is what Google got wrong with Panda. One of my sites lost 30% traffic on the day Panda went live, and it hasn't recovered. It's an extremely high quality site that I've put my life into for the past 4 years. I've tried a number of different things to recover, but so far I've had no success.

My strong hunch is that it's a duplicate content issue, but I can't be sure. I've tried using rel="canonical" and reindexing parts of my site to no avail Google hasn't offered anything to help. I've been through their guidance on building high quality sites: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guid...

It doesn't really help when you already have a high quality site and still are penalized. I'm pretty confident that Panda improved the overall quality of Google's SERPs, but they definitely made some mistakes. It sucks when you've lost thousands of dollars in revenue because you're one of the mistakes.
i love it when stuff backfires on evil/annoying companies. god i hope everyone starts implementing the 2 click like buttons.
NowJS is a framework for building realtime web apps (that doesn't do model synchronisation).

Racer is real-time model synchronisation.

Fundamentally they are completely different. They happen to use similar technology stacks and both contain the word 'realtime' but they are completely different projects. They actually might work quite well as compliments to each other.
Admittedly, Selenium's standard interface leaves a lot to be desired; however, I've had great time using it in combination with a Python wrapper, where you write Selenium test cases as Python unit tests.
Technically the casinos say a malfunction voids all plays. But one of the commenters in this story has the very good point that there must be other malfunctions that results in the customer losing, and for a casino to have a real case they should have to show records of all the people they paid back when that happened, which would be none.