skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TDD takes longer. Studies conducted at Microsoft and HP (or possibly IBM), found that development time with TDD was 10-30% longer. That's probably minimum, and in high degree determined by the TDD experience level of the team members.

The massive upside is that there is much less defects in the end product (think it was 50-80% in the study, but can't recall exactly).

Depending on the project, the extra time needed, might or might not be worth it.

Take a somewhat complex web app, that is used for a marketing campaign. It has a life time of only 2 months. In this case it does not make sense to use TDD, as the lower defect rate and "future-proofing" qualities, might very well not be worth an increased budget.
Is it still like 12MB?
EDIT: Looks like it's much smaller now, about 7.5MB.
Holiday Car Rentals
I would try newspaper classifieds. I think you can run anad for like $60/ week?
Another reason might be toolchain. If you're coding in a Rails 3.1 application, Rails takes care of compiling your Coffeescript and SASS and such for you. If you're using a toolchain that doesn't do that for you, you have to set up watch scripts and decide where source and compilation go, etc etc. That headache has to be weighed against the perceived benefits.
Paul Rand's Presentation of the NeXT Logo To Steve Jobs
You are right predictable latency is key, but that is one of the big wins that we have found with the Disruptor and our surrounding infrastructure. The Disruptor is not the only thing that we have worked on to achieve this. For example we have spent time experimenting with journalling and clustering techniques to give us high-throughput, predictable, mechanisms for protecting our state.

As Martin said in his reply our system is implemented as a number of services, which communicate via pub-sub messaging, it is not quite as naive as you assume, we still have a distributed system. For the high-throughput, low latency functions of the system, (e.g. order matching in our exchange, or risk evaluation in our broker) they are each serviced on a single business logic thread, on separate servers.

Our latency measurements include these multiple hops within our network and represent an inbound instruction arriving at our network to the time that we have a fully processed, outbound, response back at the edge of our network, as Martin pointed out, modern networking can be quiet efficient when used well.

We have designed to allow us to shard our system when the need arises, but we are actually a long way away from that need. Even though these high performance services keep their entire working set in memory, that is still a relatively small number when compared to the amount of memory available in modern commodity servers. We currently have lots of head-room!

We think that this is a very scalable approach and under-used. Keeping the working set in memory is pretty straight forward for many business applications, and has the huge benefit of being very simple to code. Much more straight-forward than the, more conventional, shuffling of data around and translation from one form to another that is such a common theme in more conventional systems.

The sharding decision is simple, for our problem domain we have two obvious dimensions for sharding, accounts and order-books. Each instance (shard) would continue to have it's business logic processed on a single thread. I think that this is normal for most business problems, it is a matter of designing the solution to avoid shared state between shards.

We are not advocating "no parallelism", rather we advocate that any state should be modified by a single thread, to avoid contention. Our measurements have shown that the cost of contention almost always outweighs the benefit. So avoid contention, not parallelism.

Dave Farley
(Head of Software development at LMAX)
What Android Fragmentation Means
Whew. A good ending to that story, then. The capacitor took one for the team; I'd thought you'd let the smoke out of something important.
This entire issue is crap.

I am a black programmer...

I have no college education, came from single family home blah blah womp womp.

I have launched 10+ projects for clients this year alone. I have 1 failed contract where I left because it just didn't work out.

When I had success it was not because I was black and when I failed it was not because I was black. Both when I have succeeded and when I have failed was never been treated like anything but an equal by my peers.

I personally thing that the NewMe accelerator is total crap and should not exit. What strategic advantage comes from going to a "black" incubator? I dont have a black startup because I dont have all black customers. The one thing this has managed to accomplish is to distract people from finding and solving huge problems and instead focus on some BS issue that has no value.

My only advice to "black" and other entrepreneurs is shut up, go code and make something awesome. The rest will take care of itself.

This entire issue is being exploited to get attention for Angela Benton and her new accelerator. I dont think its fair to cast a shadow over the awesome people I have had the opportunity to work with over the last 12 years in this field simply because someone wants to get some press at the expense of others.

... now back to coding ...
The Ruby Reading List
It's also that CouchDB is (or at least used to be) rather slow compared to MongoDB.

10gen sure has done a lot to keep MongoDB growing despite many people having their homework (or essential customer data, or...) eaten by MongoDB; so part of it probably is attributable to better publicity.
Not to be snarky, but this is the previous/current software revolution. If you pay attention, you'll see that there is a steady pendulum in IT that swings from server side (greenscreen, remote desktops, web apps) to client side.

Right now, with the advent of a bunch of mobile device app stores we are near (I think) the height of the swing towards client side. Soon the pendulum will begin swinging back the other way. In the meantime, you need to make your data as accessible as possible, which will pay dividends in the long run, so don't sweat the pendulum.
I purchased a few spare power supplied for my BBC a couple of years ago. I'm not letting go due to a broken power supply!
What Brooks is saying is that those who don't have a university degree have dramatically worse lives than they used to.

No he didn't. He said that the gap between those with and without a university degree is rising. It's not the same thing.

It is almost certainly wrong to claim that the non-college educate are worse off ("dramatically" or not) than some historical period.
Cheap more probably equals unskilled. That's all it boils down to.
F.ounders: The Rolls Royce of Technology Events
The package name (nodejs-git 20110613-1) confused me. I assumed it was a snapshot from 2011-06-13, but after looking at the PKGBUILD file I see that it is cloning the github repo. My mistake.
The big issue is not that you cannot afford to scale.

It is that your business model cannot scale - effectively, you are hand crafting widgets, not leveraging technology to increase productivity.

Adding another translator, adds approximately one unit of capacity. Another document, well, that adds approximately one unit of work. Sure, growth can occur arithmetically, but there is no possibility of exponential or even geometric growth.

To make the issue more intractable, the iOS ecosystem provides less opportunity to acquire and apply more efficient tools - there is a significant degree of rigidity in the technology stack (i.e. you can't employ a tool written in LISP easily in order to improve throughput).

What you have is ownership of a small business - which is entirely consistent with your initial goal of owning a company. And you are facing the same issues all small businesses face - the problem of hiring people who might not do things exactly the same way you would.

Good luck.
So one of their customers is racist and now racism is "alive and well". Seems like they were living in a bubble if they thought racism no longer existed.
Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (November 2011)
Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or H1B if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome. Feel free to post any job that may interest HN readers from executive assistant to machine learning expert to CTO.

Please also see: "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?" (November 2011) http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=3181801
Oh, yes, they were most definitively competing with Yahoo too, since Yahoo was the first port of call for non-technical users. Altavista was too complex.

For me, the speed and lack of ads vs. Altavista was irrelevant. When my friends and I finally switched, it was because the results finally convinced us that spending a lot of time tweaking search queries on Altavista wasn't worth it when Google would give better results on the first query. That realization was a long time coming.

Altavista's basic ranking was abysmal, and if you didn't notice any improvement it is probably because you like me knew how to search on Altavista. Regular users didn't. It worked well for technical users because we'd expect to do stuff like add "+term" and "-term" and quote phrases and use and and or. Regular users didn't.

I remember a lot of very long back and forth discussions with people I knew about whether or not Google would have a chance, because the above described method worked so well and it seemed so simple to use that it was hard for us to accept that getting non-technical users to use it wouldn't fly. Many of us were convinced that the Altavista model would win out in the long term, and it frustrated some of us (me included) to no end that Google were so stingy with their operator support even after we'd switched.

But as the net got flooded with relative beginners who'd type in a single word or two and expect decent results immediately, it rapidly became obvious that Altavista was a dinosaur.

Today we see just how much we (and Altavista) overestimated a large part of the user base:

Go to search.yahoo.com. Type "google" in the search box. Watch the second search box appear in the results with a "Get straight to your answers here with Yahoo! Search" above it... It's there for a reason: People do indeed search for search engines by name on Yahoo. I first learned of this one when I worked at Yahoo; they had numbers to back it up.
Canonical: Mobile OEMs are going to love our Linux
The Best Way to Play Battlefield 3?
Firebug Guide for Web Designers
Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (November 2011)
Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location and whether remote work is a possibility.
Thats awesome! Good luck!
> You all know client work involves last minute changes and lengthy email discussions.

For which they should be billed. By the hour.

If they want a fixed price contract, they can go elsewhere and find a job shop that will never go the extra mile when the time runs out. Emphasize the value proposition you bring by providing in-depth professional services. Emphasize the fact that your extra billable hours are pay-as-you-go: every time something gets worked out, they are getting proof of just how much you are worth.
I think racism is about as far from a relevant issue as you can get. Honestly, the people who get bent out of shape about it are just as backwards as the few people who are still actually racist.

Edit: Since davidw is claiming that I think victims of racism are backwards, I'd like to clarify. I think that all victims of crimes and discrimination should be treated with respect and dignity by polite society (which far outnumber racists). It's my opinion that getting upset about a rude military contractor (like the one in this article) is backwards and is giving his point of view way more attention than it deserves. He should be disregarded entirely because his worldview is irrelevant.

This issue clearly touched some nerves.
Official API or mobile interface
I wouldn't be surprised if racism in the tech industry was more towards Indians.
Steel In Their Eyes – Why VC’s Should Be Startup CEO’s
> The solution is not to get ditch diggers to go to college, but to respect ditch diggers.

In my experience, the folks who don't respect ditch diggers are not the so-called 1% (either finance or MDs) but the so-called "New Class", as discussed in http://volokh.com/2011/10/31/the-fragmenting-of-the-new-clas... .
RMS looking at things
The main reason I use Ubuntu over vanilla Debian for my desktop is lack of polish. It's not that I can't use it, but Ubuntu adds more polish, and what it takes away is stuff I don't notice because I don't tweak my desktop or laptop much anymore.

For the most part my "tweaks" consists of a git repo of my dot-files, and I rarely run more than a couple of full screen browser windows and a bunch of full screened terminal windows.
Who enjoys shopping in IKEA? (Exploiting Consumer Confusion)
New Embed Feature on Pen.io
The problem I have with "software engineering" is that it's not real engineering. Sure you might do thinking to create proper requirements, design, build a prototype, build the real thing and iterate, use agile or whatever.

But comparing programming to actual, real-world engineering is a different kettle of fish. Engineers make things with actual physical requirements - if they're not met, people will die. You're not going to be doing proper engineering unless you can sue the engineers for the wholes in their software that caused people to lose money from their bank. Sure it works and may well solve a problem, but it's not engineered.

Real software engineering is using formal methods to do your utmost to prove that your stuff actually will work (Intel does that for some of their chip development) or make 5 different control systems for your rocket and have them vote on the correct course to add extra backup to prevent fuckups (NASA did this for the Apollo iirc - the EU Ariane didn't, so they had a rocket crash at one point).

Until that happens, you're just going to be developing sandcastles - you're going to have buggy software that will break at some point - because software development is so fast that it's not worth the effort to engineer from the get-go.

In other words, coding is coding - you can have good coding that uses best practices - but if you call it engineering you're deluding yourself in most cases.
To stop this madness, we have to attack and bring down the people who cause this retardation - the content industries.

The content industries don't cause this. They go to politicians and say "pretty please take away people's freedom to protect our profits". That's the only thing they have the power to do.

Politicians are not helpless babies who have no choice but to give big content what it wants. They are intelligent adults who choose to side with big content.

The people you need to bring down are Biden/Obama, Orrin Hatch, etc.
Linode Cancellation
I wanted to share my cancellation experience with Linode here on Hackernews so others may avoid being invoiced after they've canceled their Linode account. I've been a Linode customer for a year now. I've been very pleased with the service, but I wanted to spend less per month, so I moved a site off of Linode and canceled the account on Oct 30, 2011. Made DNS changes and all so nothing was going to Linode any longer.

When you cancel a Linode account, you do so through their web interface (The Linode Manager). After cancellation, it logs you out right away and you cannot log back in. It displays a message that your account has been closed. However, no other confirmation is provided... no emails or anything to prove the account has indeed been canceled. So today, November 1, 2011 Linode invoiced me for November 1 through November 30th. I went to the Linode Manager and found that my old account had somehow been reactivated. I have no idea why my original cancellation was not honored. So, I canceled the account again and emailed support@linode.com.

Linode support said that I had not canceled in Oct and that there was a 5 dollar fee to cancel the account now. Even though it was clear that I had no traffic to the Linode vps since Oct 30 (DNS change) and that I canceled again today right away after being invoiced again. If you do business with Linode and you cancel your account, email support@linode.com and confirm it with them in writing or your account may somehow be reactivated and you'll be invoiced again and then asked to pay a fee to cancel a service you are not using.
I too built a prototype using couch. The thing that scares me is that the database gets really huge and has to be compacted "by hand." I'm not exactly sure when to run the compactions when lots of users are on as I understand that it can create some performance problems.

I find it's performance reliable and repeatable (with SpiderMonkey) however. I just don't fully understand its working parameters (I also wonder how much they are likely to change).

The mailing list seems excellent, FWIW.
And the AUR is largely possible because of pacman. Debian and RPM packages are very complex, and take a lot of effort to build, so even if there was a large collection of package source files available, downloading and building them is not an especially efficient solution for getting fresh software.

Whereas pacman packages are simple enough that an arbitrary package can be built using a single (admittedly quite large) shell script from another single source file.
When an event is detected, the warhead shuts down its electronics for the duration of the EMP, and then powers back up.

I doubt this, since the EMP is moving at the speed of light, whereas the delay times inherent in most circuitry and the time required to power down most circuitry would be at least an order of magnitude (most likely more) larger.
Very well put. Could not have said it better.

Well, except the "Because Stallman said so, that’s why."

And now, ffs, lets stop this love/hate fest about RMS. Enough. Al you Steve Jobs fetishists - you guys too! Just enough.
fwiw, aur packages with the -(cvs|hg|git|svn) suffix usually track the development, while the date actually refers to when the build was last updated. Installing the package will actually give you today's date as the version tag. I can see why the confusion happens, though :)
This is a sincere question, if you're doing science, why would you want to use ruby over python?
It's an inherent issue with iOS, and one that would take a major update to solve (in other words, don't hold your breath until iOS6 or 7). Android solves it using a system of "Intents," where you basically just broadcast a message to the system saying, hey, I want to open this kind of file or do this kind of general action. Any app can register themselves as a receiver of a type of Intent. When there is a conflict (multiple apps can potentially handle the same Intent request) the user is given a small dialog window to choose what to open, along with an option to make that one the default.
Make money fast with multiple automated content blogs
I'm prepared to concede that there may be some long-term benefits to be gained, e.g. in reducing the amount of maintenance work carried out over the lifetime of a project.

However, writing detailed tests up front would completely destroy my "flow" when implementing features in a web application. It would certainly take me more time because there is going to be a large increase in the amount of code to write.

I simply don't have the time available to do this. I get a few weeks to knock out an application and then I'm on to the next thing!
> I think racism is about as far from a relevant issue as you can get. Honestly, the people who get bent out of shape about it are just as backwards as the few people who are still actually racist.

Downvoted for trolling. Equating the victims of, and/or people upset about racism, which is indeed an ever present factor in the US and elsewhere, to those who actively perpetrate such backwards ideas, can be nothing less than either the fruit of a sick mind, or someone playing a troll in the internet.
>This doesn't make it any "better", actually much worse, but this is not "in tech".

Technically it is because it's in their profession. If you're involved in major tech company there is a likelihood that you're going to have to deal with the gov't.

>What I find both shocking and curious about racism is that it is a much more widespread problem...

Many, if not most people, need to feel some sense of superiority over another individual. It starts with race but does not end there for them. Had Nazi Germany removed or killed Jews, gays, socialists, Christians, etc. they would have found some reason to hate each other.
Two things I would recommend:

1) Charge more. Lots of other people have said that too. If you have to turn away customers, then you know you can raise your rates. You need to do a/b testing on this (i.e. high-low) until you find the proper rate at which the number of customers is balanced by the price you charge.

2) You need to automate some stuff. If I were you, I would invest a little time into writing a simple tool where you can enter the corpus of text and translate it via Google Translate. If you set up your tool to allow multiple inputs, you can easily start a project by filling in all the text to be translated and hit "Go". Afterwords, you just go through each translated entry and correct things. This should be significantly easier than doing every single thing by hand, over and over.
I think there's probably an evolutionary origin - genes that compel their owners to look out for others with the same genes over those who are unlikely to share genes were likely to be more successful overall in our more violent past. Now selection favors those who are able to work well with others of all races, so perhaps it's fading.
Philadelphia, PA suburbs (Blue Bell/Whitpain)
Software Engineer - Full time, Intern
Java, iOS

We're a small, quickly growing company just outside Philly. We have a suite of products, mostly used by big pharma and energy companies. Come join our team and participate in the development of some exciting new products. (Java/.NET/iOS)

http://www.wingspan.com/about/careers/
Your Company is Your Paintbrush
Yahoo Acquires Advertising Technology Company Interclick
Desktop users, on the other hand...does anyone still care about desktop users anymore (y'know, the ones with computers), or is HURR DURR MUST HAZ SMARTPHONES UR COMPUTAR ALSO IZ SMARTPHONE the sanest response I could hope for? (Cases in point: Windows 8, Ubuntu, Google Chrome, etc.)
Much rather have a native Google Talk app on iOS than Gmail. The selection of IM apps currently on iOS are far from perfect.
Umm, I find the opposite to be true. By always declaring variables where I use them (notably in for loops), I avoid accidentally reusing a variable I used elsewhere.
Rocco.rb
Explorers vs Caretakers
Sure, growth can occur arithmetically, but there is no possibility of exponential or even geometric growth.

nitpick: "exponential" and "geometric" refer to the same quality (there are minor mathematical differences, irrelevant in this context).
> I've heard that in SV, its almost as if 50% of the population is made of asians, what about that?

Mostly just some spare arms and legs, but that's ok, because programmers don't take off their shirts very often, so the effect isn't that noticeable.
Yes, and I'm sure that's what Jacques meant. Getting each of those qualities on their own can be difficult, but they are not in direct competition with each other. Nitpicky, maybe, but it's an important nuance.

In the limited context of tech jobs and entrepreneur, I don't think it's quite right to tell people that it's not possible to achieve all three. And it may even be counter-productive.
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We are a profitable startup (~25 employees) experiencing massive growth, with over 100,000 players a day across iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Facebook.

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