skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> fixtures, factories, testing lifecycle methods, mocks, stubs, matchers, code generators, monkey patching, special test environments, natural language DSLs

STOP STOP STOP! MAKE IT STOP!

This is the clearest indication of how (dogmatic) testing has become a vehicle that introduces complexity, rather than something that alleviates complexity.
I will take one point: the idea that by abolishing copyright you are taking progress out of the hands of monopolies. Copyright is the power that gives the 'little man' the ability to do that already. Copyright puts the power/value of an idea on a level playing field with the already-powerful and already-valuable.

Abolishing copyright would make the weak even weaker. The only proof one needs to see is that in the music business - where I come from - there has been a de facto absence of copyright protection for a decade now.

It hasn't done away with the 'monopolies' or large corporations.

It hasn't made artists any richer.

It has made it much more difficult for an artist to make money through sale of their primary product.

It has weakened artist positions to the point that they no longer only have to give up a lot of revenue on album sales - which was always they case; the new standard is the 360 deal that lets record and management companies tap into the entire income stream of an artist.

So, sorry, ten years in throwing copyright out has actually created the opposite effects that you predict.
If you're going to benchmark, I recommend that you benchmark with the most common Clojure web setup - Ring + Jetty.
I don't want to overstate this, and it's been brought up before, but I find it interesting to consider the matter of heroes we don't personally know versus those we do.

I don't know whether this has changed, over recent decades. But it seems that we have so much "media attention", these days, that many things we at least ascribe as being very significant to us are actually at great remove from our personal lives.

I don't mean this by way of judgment, but by way of reflection. And introspection: Who has really influenced me, and am I acknowledging -- to myself, or to them -- their roles in my life? Am I using such understanding to make my own decisions and in my own actions?

Taking this a bit further -- perhaps too far and potentially getting a bit judgmental: Am I trying to be on the billboard, or the organization that decides whether the billboard is a good idea for the neighborhood?
this sounds like a fair approach - a shotgun clause right? i feel emotionally invested in the product since it was my idea, but he put a bunch of time into it and we both believe in it.
Do you see VCs loaning $$ to entreprenuers to buy a home in the US for a visa?
Information Security: Trends, Winners, Losers, and Where the Market is Heading:
Totally agree. I just wonder who's next on the list. Any bets?
never said 'the ends justify the means'

while i agree that the show is not all-inclusive of the complexity of startups, i think it's funny how much noise is made about the show itself, when the good news is people are excited about startups enough to 1. make a show and 2. to watch it

some of us are going to succeed and some of us are going to fail... some publicly, some not so publicly

TechStars chose, and we agreed, to doing this in the public eye
The prices now will be less artificial, since more people will be involved in setting them.
How about hire 100 US workers for a year, get a free home.
One note--and this applies to every Javascript plugin or library:

Your examples need to be online. Without exception.

As soon as I have to download and run local examples, honestly I just completely lose interest. That may seem impatient, a snap judgment, arbitrary and irrational. It is in fact all of these but it doesn't matter.

There's no reason you can't have your demos online. It makes it super easy for anyone to check out.
Google has a lot of redundant social features in other products. This makes sense. I hope they remove the "like" buttons from Youtube, too, and replace them with +1.
Today, I can have a service that looks at my link blog (generated by clicking share) and its RSS feed. By doing so, it can then route new items to Twitter or other services. Reading what the blog entry says, it looks like "Send To" will be the way to route things to other services instead of using Share.

Today, by just clicking "share" I can send the information to Twitter. What the new experience will be, I suspect, is that I will have to click "send to" then choose the service I want to share to. 2 steps instead of one.

It's a small product difference but one that will reduce friction for Google Plus while increasing it for "other" services.
OS X Notifier App Growl Goes Closed Source
Cool. I'd guess that SEO/SEM for a domain name business would be incredibly important, but I could be wrong, and your real-life experience would be interesting.
Demos break under safari
i wrote this on another thread last night:

disclaimer: TechStar alum from NYC Winter '11 here...
while the finished product that Bloomberg aired is not the most amazing piece of journalism i've ever seen, i don't think TechStars is to blame for that.
the TechStars ethos is to be open and encourage entrepreneurship. to this end, TechStars asked us if we were ok with putting ourselves out there to the world and we all agreed to it before the program started.
at the end of the day, 10/11 companies got funded, a few are driving great revenues already and all are on track to build great companies... it's hard to argue with that.
and if anyone out there learns from what we went through on the show, or is excited by startups or encouraged to go start/join a startup... then the show is a success.
thanks for the detailed reply! he does indeed want a cash payment for his side of the business.

quick question:

when projecting future earnings, what time period is fair to assume?

the business has been steadily chugging along, growing some months, shrinking some months. we both planned to invest more time into it, but have been busy. the idea is that if i own most of it, then i'll have more incentive to invest new features into it.
I brought up the exact same objection when Kurzweil spoke at my college. He pointed out that the installed cost-per-watt and total installed capacity of PV exhibits an exponential trend over the ~30 years of available data. He extrapolated that within 20 years, 100% of the world's energy could be provided by photovoltaic panels.
Reminds me of Jobs and how he handled the Macintosh team.
"Absolute Reads: Daring Fireball"

Really?
Mine specifically? "I helped two million kids learn to read last year" or "Occasionally, companies fly me out to them so that I can work for a week or three and make them several million dollars. The other 40 weeks of the year I keep myself amused."

Back when I was doing software development every day, the answer was something closer to "You know X university? I make sure their entrance exams run smoothly."

For a generic software developer, "I make my employer absolute piles of money by being clever in the general vicinity of a computer."
Do many people use these features? Most of the people that I know who use Google Reader, myself included, just use it as an RSS reader. Sending it to other social networks is the one thing that I do use, and they won't be changing that.
Initially I wasn't really grokking the author's point, but I think it comes down to a single disagreement in terminology:

"GM had figured out how to take a product which solved a problem – cheap transportation – and transform it into a need."

Specifically, the use of the term "need". Needs are things that we can't do without. Basic (cheap) transportation, is a "need" for many people, but it doesn't represent the type of marketing shift that the author outlines in the article. I'd turn the statement on it's head:

GM had figured out how to take a product which solved a problem – cheap transportation – and transform it into an object of lust.

The message is the same. I don't think I disagree entirely with what Steve is saying, but I found the use of the term "need" jarring in that context.

I think Apple's formula is a mixture of the "bigger fins" strategy, as well as genuine product enhancements. If you buy a phone for "needs" (cheap communication), I'm not sure you're buying an iPhone. You buy an iPhone (or any smartphone) because you want more than the basic needs. In some cases, people buy them simply as jewelry, but I think that angle is way overplayed. A pre-requisite for the "jewelry" claim is that the owner not utilize the phone for its actual utilitarian features (apps, browsing, email, camera, video, mms, etc). I'm sure the jewelry aspect comes in to play getting people in the door, but I'm not sure they stay that way for long.
I didn't have any problem reading the site - perhaps it's your eyes?

In fact, I'd say the Contrast Rebellion logo is the biggest violation of my eyes. Scrolling up and down doesn't seem right...
Would Anyone Miss Your Business?
Without LTE, iPhone 5 'will be run over' by the others, carrier exec says
NewsBlur gets attention here because it's built by an active HNer, me. And it's entirely open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay. Follow me on GitHub to watch how quickly NewsBlur grows everyday.

In fact, the NewsBlur iPhone app is also open-source: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/master/media/iph.... This might be very helpful to somebody learning how to write an iPhone app on their own. I plan to blog about all the techniques and tricks I learned, from the perspective of a Python/JavaScript developer.
Amen to that. After going to Occupy Vancouver and hearing the Marijuana Party Representative speak saying we should be having an annual income, and people saying that they shouldn't have to work to live a decent life, I can't say I support the protest in Canada anymore.

Lots of people here with uneducated opinions on how the world should work. Never mind the people trying to add a pro-marijuana stance at Occupy Vancouver, which is just so fucking wrong on every level. It's like saying "Hey, people are $50k-(insert large number here) dollars in debt in the states, so lets legalize marijuana! Yay!". Honestly, fuck those people, very disrespectful and confusing to what the movement should be achieving. Too much sheep putting up with that shit too because they get free weed out of it.
Apple Patent Describes Easy-To-Disassemble iOS Device
I empathize, but at the same time, 5 min. of slide browsing would not drive the point home. People are trying to skimp when they should invest the time. Relax, reserve yourself an hour and enjoy the talk. This is a good one, and getting signals through sound, visual and text will leave a better imprint in our brains.
FYI -- SpiderOak and Wuala do meaningful encryption natively.

(I cofounded SpiderOak in 2007)
Excellent point. People have probably faked every possible form of identification in history. The other problem is that as soon as you do acquire an account, if you ever use it, giving it up - if the id is revoked and recycled, you've just left yourself wide open.
No; it links Skype Accounts to IPs, which then can be correlated with BitTorrent swarm peers.

IPs are not people - this is a fundamental misunderstanding that both MPAA/RIAA lawyers, and, for a long time, misinformed courts liked to propagate, although it seems the tide is turning in this department. Nothing says an IP assigned to an account I owned was used by me, and nothing says the same person using a Skype account from any given IP is also the person who told BitTorrent to join a swarm from that IP.

This is a really obvious, but also relatively serious issue with the P2P nature of Skype, as that account -> IP correlation really is powerful - but I hate the way this article was written.
Banks, not people.
I'll go out on a limb here and say I like the basic idea. One major detail I would change is to make it a $100,000 or $50,000 minimum instead of $500,000. There are many parts of the country where it's hard to even find a house that's as expensive as $250,000. I'd like something like this to be open to all parts of the country and I'd like it to be open to middle class as well, not just wealthy people.

Why do I like it?

* Fill vacant homes (as opposed to urban blight)

* There are many indirect economic benefits like money spent fixing homes, all the day to day purchasing that will be done by the new residents, etc.

* In some cases, individuals will be able to rejoin relatives more easily.

The urban blight thing is the one I care about most. I live in the East Bay of California and have seen certain neighborhoods totally fall apart as dozens of vacant homes attracted vandalism, drugs, and other forms of crime and caused remaining residents hardship.

EDIT: formatting
I thought the formulation of the OWS's protests was both succinct and accurate:

The Anglo-Saxon model claimed that free markets would create prosperity; many voters feel instead that they got a series of debt-fuelled asset bubbles and an economy that was rigged in favour of a financial elite, who took all the proceeds in the good times and then left everybody else with no alternative other than to bail them out.

But it's painful to see The Economist recasting the problem along the lines of state interference (especially at the end of the article: Western governments have failed their citizens once) whereas the issue here is the co-optation of the political sphere by the financial sphere (the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act under Clinton in 1993 being only one example).
Yesod excellent ideas
For sure. But parent was wondering why Google cares about our data- so I'm explaining why that is.
Clear and powerful voice, highly influential, and an eye for good design. And it makes for a great demo of NewsBlur's Original view.

Also, folders are alphabetical and I wanted to put it above the Blogs folder.
All hail our new NATO sponsored, oil grabbing, media-spun murder (or victory as they like to call it).

Who's going to be the next Emmanuel Goldstein now Saddam, Bin Laden and Gaddafi are dead.
Gaming alone will keep driving computer growth for a long long time.
I didn't presuppose any of that. I was only pointing out that you framed the question as:
"Do I want a good thing, or a bad thing?"
- obviously you want the good thing

When in reality the question is:
"Do I want a thing with good and bad attributes, or another thing with good and bad attributes?"
- this reflects the reality of the situation
Hiring Tip: Pair Program on Open Source Bugs
During our last hiring round, I had a really nice cross-browser bug at hand, and I ran our finalists through a coding session where they remoted to my laptop and had one hour to fix the bug or get as far as they could. Instead of a contrived puzzle they were working on production code. It was great! And since they all worked on the same bug, I was able to score them on a ten point scale for easy comparison.

We've started another hiring round, and this time I didn't have any good Python bugs at hand. What to do? Open source! We use the CherryPy framework a fair bit here (the maintainer is on our team). So this round I am pairing up for an hour of work on CherryPy. It moves an open source project forward, it's cleaner than having people work on proprietary code, and we still get a great picture of each candidate. Win all over the place. This time I am inviting candidates to share their screen with me rather than vice versa. Last time I tried at least installing the person's editor of choice, but there's no place like ~, ya know? Another thing that happened last time is that by the end of the interviews I had gone through the exercise so many times that it felt much less like pair programming and much more like thumb-screwing. At the expense of a neat scoring system, I am not going to go over the same ground this time. I already updated one CherryPy ticket, and we'll keep chipping away at that one and others. I expect some level of familiarity with Python and its tools, but I'm happy to teach you what I know. A nice side-effect is that I get to learn what you know too. :^)

We've got three spots open and we're just starting interviews, so if you'd like to pair together for an hour on CherryPy, hit me up at chad.whitacre@yougov.com.
How about 50% of valuation - valuation of his 5% share?

Not sure the best way to get business valuation is an online form... but here's one: http://www.caycon.com/valuation.php

:)
This is them fighting back from the security PR nightmare recently. It's good to see their plan is working somewhat.
http://newsblur.com
I'm sure you would, but not everybody is using or likes jQuery. A standalone script such as this one is far more valuable.
Why is this better than Hadoop?
"The only beneficiaries I can think of for this program would be rich capitalists from China and the Middle East ..."

Actually, Canadians are largest percentage of foreigners buying homes in the U.S. at 23%.[1]

[1] Canadians Warm to Phoenix, Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020401060457659...
Wrong. In the United States, firms cannot refuse to deal with you because of your race, gender, age, national origin, etc., but they can refuse your business for any other reason, whether you're in a protected class or not.

In other words, no, our constitution does not require us to accommodate an old black woman from Jamaica who wants to purchase a Cadillac with her hoard of five million pennies.
The kind of open that they do is definitely less good than I would have hoped (I would love to be able to submit patches for the bugs I regularly encounter on my N1, say).

But trust me, of all the people I know who have android phones here in "Middle America" (off the top of my head without thinking too hard let's say more than 10), none of them bought them because of a techie brother in law raved about it being so cool because it was open. They all bought them because they wanted a smart phone and it was the one they were sold by the telco marketing. Period. (Okay, I'm up to more than twenty coming to mind just while thinking at the same time as typing, and still, none of them bought them because of the openness at all).

So yeah. While it's really marketing-speak to say that android is open in the sense that we all traditionally think of it, to google (and much more importantly to all the telco sales people) it means exactly squat as a selling point.

Which is why only people on HN (and Richard Stallman) get upset about it :)
"i feel emotionally invested in the product since it was my idea, but he put a bunch of time into it"

Ideas often aren't worth as much as execution.
I'm not commenting on your deal specifically, but NDA-protected deals in general: let's say, 50 or 100 years from now, historians want to know all the details of various deals made between companies, to better understand the nature of the market in which we now exist. Is there any way for them to find out, or will these details be forever lost?
We're dealing with the same problems you mention in your comment. The "split state" between our Chef git repo and Chef's hosted environment causes problems from time to time. We also are not completely satisfied with how we deploy our applications versus how the Chef recipes update and maintain system software.

We haven't had many problems with the Chef cookbooks as you have, but right now our needs are shallow with them.

I think the most important thing we can do is to constantly work to improve and hold nothing sacred. If something isn't working anymore we should be ready to change to a better tool or way of working.

If there's anything specific you'd like to know about our CD, I'd be more than happy to explain further.
"It allowed price to be given to them, but since that detracts from the value we can immediately see it is not such a clearly good proposition -- it is very questionable."

Something can only be priced because it has value already.

As for seeing alternative ideas: while hardly a conservative - I think it's a great development to allow ideas to be monetized. If someone has an alternative system to copyright that can do that I am truly all-ears . . .

What I find illogical is this idea that we should move forward to a world where we run a knowledge-based economy but that that knowledge shouldn't have any monetary value. Are we going to barter ideas between one another to make ends meet? I'd love to hear how . . .
Agreed. Working on multiple machines and files not friendly to g docs, makes dropbox indispensable. When I upgraded to Lion and iOS5, I didn't even think about using iCloud. iTunes integration w/ iCloud may change that but I doubt it.
The mood here is very gloomy. Back when they kicked out Ben Ali and Mubarak there was celebration on HN. I guess you're not really a dictator unless you're an ally of the US, huh?
"Democratic" governments with good deals for their oil companies and bad deals with their people.
I am not sure if anybody would know here but do we need to take permission from FAA for doing this kind of stuff?
Yes, that's going to be my primary source for learning Django. Thanks!
Reasonable? No. Does it happen? Yes... Are there business models based upon this feature? Yes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3je9EqJurWo

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17855015/Videos/trt-domenic-romanell...
The new democratic rulers of Libya / Arab extremists - depending on them signing the right contracts with the right oil companies
I am not sure why many people are upset that this will attract the rich foreigners. Whats wrong with rich people moving in?. Think how much new tax revenue the country will gain if 10000 millionaires move every year
This is horrifyingly frustrating. It's like when they started adding people from my email contacts to my Google Talk friends list or when they thought my gtalk friends list needed to be all up in my Google Reader friends list. Google don't seem to understand the natural partitioning of social spaces that occurs in the real world.

(I do concur that Circles allow this partitioning to be modeled much more accurately than most other social networking systems, but the partitioning before was entirely organic and natural, not constructed. I will wait and see how well they implement the integration before conclusively declaring Reader to have jumped the shark, but honestly the social features ("just enough social to get by", which is about as much social as I can put up with) were the only things keeping me on Reader up until this point.
As an advisor, this is tough advice to follow, but if you don't, you aren't provided real value.
They would extend the offer only to those that spend half a million dollars on a home. I have a feeling that excludes most of the Canadians bargain hunting for property in Phoenix.
This is the best solution I've heard so far that kills two birds with one stone. You could create a mini housing bubble thereby solving the unemployment and also offer a legal route for immigration for hard working folks. This should also offer a chance of amnesty for all illegal aliens when they buy a house worth 500,000$. Buy a house and get legal status/amnesty for trespassing into the country.
Additionally I think our prestige is going to keep going up as time goes on.
The B Corporation