skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't feel that this article is relevant for most programmers using newer languages such as Ruby or Python. There's a simple change in the way I use JUnit that I learned from using Ruby (RSpec, Cucumber) about 4-5 years ago: Don't test methods or functions. Instead test expected behavior e.g. a project requirement. Then you can pretty much avoid every problem listed in the article.
Apparently they responded to DMCA requests to take down individual links. But they did nothing to stop the same file from being uploaded again with a new link.

I am not sure if that is required by the DMCA. I know youtube has this "fingerprinting" system that stops copyrighted uploads, but is that the law?
Impressive. But, I guess someone has to ask the inevitable, sad question: "which patents does this code unwittingly infringe?"
Exactly.

Saying "Skill X is the new norm" based on the fact that your life revolves around skill X is a clear case of needing to get out more.

Programming is to computer use what engine overhaul is to driving a car. You can argue that driving a car is an essential skill for modern day life, but being a mechanic is most certainly not.

Being a mechanic might make you a better driver, and will certainly make you less reliant on mechanics, but it is by no means a requirement.
I think PLCs are about 70% of the programming that he does. The rest involves optical sensors and other production equipment I know nothing about.
This is true. I guess non of us can share timely reports of what we had for breakfast in case we ever have to travel to the US. Best to avoid a such a terrorist-affiliated site.
Curebit’s at it again, stealing more than code this time
The Sky is Rising - Entertainment industry growing despite (because?) of piracy
~ "I thought my city would win over Silicon Valley, and then I visited the place. Ooops"

A plea: next time you hear someone comparing their city to SV, take them aside privately and tell them to book a ticket on the next plane going to the Valley.
How to install Ubuntu the way you've never done it before
Internet protocol developed in two weeks explains a lot :-)
Videos from FUDCon Blacksburg 2012
The problem with creating unit tests before the code is that it simply doesn't work for exploratory programming. I often don't know exactly what I intend to do or what the tools are capable of until I'm fairly far into coding the features. Writing unit tests at that early stage would be a complete waste of time.

If you know ahead of time exactly what the inputs and outputs should be then sure, writing unit tests first is a good practice.
Morning Star: Audio Synth in JavaScript
I love this because it is effectively disrupting wall street from a legal perspective. You don't need giant public markets anymore when you have the internet, and entrepreneurs that know how to build applications that generate money from lots of people should also be able to raise money from similar people.

Although, if we as a an industry are going to focus on something legislatively, I think we should start thinking about going on the offensive in the copyright war. The MPAA and the RIAA are going to regroup and then try to push a similar piece of legislation through. If we go on the offensive now and attempt to pass legislation that will protect user-uploaded content sites and apps like MegaUpload, Dropbox, Box.net, and others, then the web will be a much better place for eveyone building apps like these in the future.
next framework should be named "YAJF", yet another javascript framework
There are two things that should be note about copyright, which would have prevented AT&T or anyone else from actually enforcing any copyright on such simple files.

First, copyright does not protect ideas--it only protects the way an author expressed the idea. The closer the expression is to the minimal way to express the idea, the less likely it is to be copyrightable. In the case of the simple implementations of /bin/true and /bin/false, they are pretty darned close to minimal.

Second, if you have author X who produces a copyrightable work, and author Y who later independently produces a work that happens to be identical to X's work, but Y did not copy elements from X, Y is not infringing X's copyright.

This second case doesn't happen often. If someone were to decide to write a novel about boy wizards, and produced something identical to the first Harry Potter book, no one would believe that they did this without copying from Rowling. However, if the work is small enough, an identical independent work is believable.

In the case of the simple /bin/true and /bin/false, a defense that you didn't copy from AT&T would be believable. Even if you admitted you looked at the AT&T source or had it described to you, it would be believable that you produced your own expression of the idea of "a do nothing shell script" and a "shell script that exits with status 255".
I'm not saying webgl or oreos will replace artists/baking. I'm saying they can (should?) view programming and computers in general as new tools to expand their art.
If the public and media have a glamorized, romantic view of the reality, what better way to train them than to let them get direct experience? That is, experience not mediated by the 'accredited investor' glass-barrier and carefully-calculated PR fluff pieces?

I think you overestimate the outcry/backlash during/after that necessary learning process. Trillions have been lost in homes the last decade, but very few of the government policies that goosed home prices and encouraged people of limited means to gamble their entire net worth on home ownership have been reversed. (People have learned to be wary, moreso than public policy has adjusted.) Billions have been gambled away as jurisdictions across the US have legalized gambling, and individuals have had to learn, but few if any places have undone gambling legalization, and more cities/states are discussing adding gambling. People with more hope than sense can lose all their money on eBay/Craigslist arbitrage, or margined public stock/option trading, or starting a restaurant/retail-store with friends. And there's no backlash demanding regulatory protection from these risky activities.

I think any backlash will be limited to actual scams, which is as it should be. The individual cases about fraud and malfeasance will be part of the public's learning process.

The "almost accredited investor" idea is a reasonable half-measure to begin the process of removing the discriminatory 'wealth test' from the process.

I would make it so any one of the following allow an individual to invest with the same freedom as someone who's inherited a million dollars or won a lottery:

• a college degree in economics, business, or law

• a related recognized accreditation (eg the 'Series 7' exams to work in certain financial-services roles)

• an amount equal to the desired private investment amount held in tax-advantaged investment accounts (IRA, Roth, etc) for at least 2 years. (For example, if you have $10K in such government-approved 'safe' accounts, you can also invest $10K in any private venture with the same assumption-of-competence that millionaires are granted.)

• an amount double the desired private investment held in public securities for at least 2 years. (For example, if you have $20K in public stocks/mutual funds, then you can invest $10K in any private venture with the same assumption-of-confidence that millionaires are granted.)

I don't particularly like any of these restrictions. If you can legally take $10K off a credit card cash advance, and use it to buy state lottery tickets, you ought to be able to take a chance on a friend's startup stock. But these weaker rules could provide the small dash of paternalism, and speed-bump against totally reckless investing, that helps us phase out the wealth-based-discrimination that rules today.
It is my hope that humanity finds a healthy balance between technology and tasks that humans do. Yes, it would be great if Apple didn't have to exploit Chinese workers to make their products. But no, it would not be great if my Doctor was put out of work by a robot. I honestly feel that the government will have to issue some sort of standard that limits technology to some sense.

Yes, I would save money by going to the robot dentist, but my dentist would be out of work in no time. It partially rests on humans to keep the exploits of technology at bay. We can't turn personable human tasks into machine work.

Our world can be set up to be completely self-sufficient. Yes, a few people would make a lot of money, but I personally believe the impacts would be horrendous.
Schneider Optics ups "iPhonography" ante with iPro lens system
They touched on the interaction of the two at a recent workshop:

http://www.ovirt.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Ovirt-WorkSh...

The oVirt project is focused specifically on Data Center
virtualization management, related technologies and
tooling. oVirt brings the richness required by Data Centers
to an open-source platform. OpenStack is focused on
cloud which requires a minimum around virtualization
richness and rather focuses on cloud features.

In addition oVirt will be an open virtualization management
ecosystem, and may use components from OpenStack or
any other community project in achieving that goal.

OpenStack and oVirt can be seen complementary in the
same way OpenStack has VMWare driver support.
Awesome post. It definitely addresses the core issues of the "problems" with the downward trend of current job availability and the economy. I think you hit it spot on.

I'd like to mention that I've kind of been on the receiving end of some angst towards generally tech-savvy people, and I have a feeling I'm not the only one. I'm a computer engineer, and I've noticed that when the topic of what I do for a living comes up and the person I'm talking to isn't good with computers or isn't an expert in another field, their general attitude towards me changes for the worse. I feel like those outside of the tech industry really resent us programmers, as they likely (and rightly) see us as one of the main causes of present job loss in some industries; but I wish there was a good way to help them see the bigger picture, where technology has always been shifting job availability from industry to industry, and that it really only improves overall quality of life in the long term.

For instance, just last Thanksgiving my aunt and I were talking about how much things have changed in the past few decades, and she said something along the lines of "people used to work with their hands, not program computers all day." She said it very negatively; and in the context of the conversation, it was very clear she's actually against the trend of ever-increasing use of computers. There wasn't much I could think of to say at the time that didn't seem rude or disrespectful. But now when I'm on the receiving end of angst towards programmers, I point out that the shifting of jobs throughout industries has always occurred as technology progresses and try to provide examples throughout history. Although it can sometimes be difficult to do this without seeming pompous.
I stand corrected. Unfortunately, this makes it only sadder.
There's Roundcube, which is reasonably good:

http://roundcube.net/
The fact that the question is inevitable is disgusting.
Offer HN: I'll design your website or app for $999
Hi. I am a freelance web/ui designer. My portfolio is at madebyargon.com. I am available to take on new work and am doing a special offer for Hacker News.

If you have a website or app, I can design the interface for you, for only $999. You can email me at inlith@gmail.com. I will be taking on 2-3 projects.
I agree with the sentiment of the green on black. It does look harsh and 90's stylish web 1.0. I would suggest doing A/B testing on some color schemas. For ideas on color to test I would suggest looking at some domain name search competitors or other list search type sites to see schemas they use.
I don't think you get the point here. This story is not about US denying entry to two delayed teenagers wanting to get drunk on holiday. It's about US customs looking like idiots over what is obviously a joke.

You're talking about how it's perfectly fine for a country to ask you questions and make sure you don't intend to break any laws while you're visiting. And how US won't suffer from a lack of tourists and immigrants. I'm telling you that's not the problem here: the problem is we're more and more inclined to look at Americans as idiots by extension. I checked twice while reading the article that it's not on Onion - I did not expect the first comment here to be from somebody saying basically "we don't care about 'them foreigners, they shouldn't come if they don't like it".

Of course, we don't know all the facts. I'm inclined to guess that when the customs officials talked to them they found independent reasons to deny entry, but either they kept them confidential or simply they wouldn't make such a good story.

I apologize for using the word "idiot". It is not meant as a personal insult, but to express what this article makes non-americans feel about this kind of stories. I definitely do not mean to use it as an insult here, so please do not take it as such.
Thanks, David - yes, we would love the input at POPVOX (info@popvox.com)

New alerts system is imminent, so please check it out.

BTW - we had our own go at crowdfunding for POPVOX. I explained on Quora how we had to turn down non-qualified investors: http://b.qr.ae/nXFsiM

We ended up with a crowdfunding variation to raise the money for our iPad app for Congress through Appbackr (MarkUp - the first app designed for Congress http://bit.ly/uLSrOT). See article in Entrepreneur magazine on the fundraising: http://bit.ly/rKQSzS
If you can live with delayed messages there is not really a need for fail-over as most server will retry multiple times (default iirc multiple days). But you should have at least another email address available for example to communicate with your provider.
While valid, your points all seem directed to protecting people from themselves. Depending on the details it may be a very bad idea to invest or take investment at this level but who should be the one to make the decision? In this case I don't think the government should have a say.
"trade off risks to your T1 getting knocked out by a backhoe"

Well luckily no backhoe but I did keep, at my own expense, Westell DS1 NIU's around because I had a situation where one went bad and it took the Verizon tech time to go and find one. So I bought a few so he would have the parts around. I also made sure when they strung the fiber from the connection point to our office (several hundred feet through other offices in the ceiling) that it was in orange conduit as opposed to just strung through the building (they were just going to run it like phone wire). I also had them bring an extra fiber through, as well as a fishing wire in case it was ever needed for anything in the future.
Why isn't that programming?

Is a plumber designing your house's plumbing not a plumber just because some plumbers are designing plumbing for whole cities?

Am I not a programmer just because I make websites instead of design and implement Apache, the linux kernel, the processor's microinstructions nor the processor's wiring?
What Apple Could Do With Its $100 Billion (Comic)
At the risk of coming off as crass and vulgar, Cuba is a shithole.

The food's terrible, smog in Havana is the worst I've seen anywhere (most cars don't have mufflers and are poorly tuned), the locals try to screw you over any chance they get (Beijing Tea Room type scams are commonplace, especially in bars - just don't talk to anyone who acts friendly and tries to bring you into a shop, and NEVER EVER accept local currency or any gifts), and the whole place is so dilapidated (except for the small touristy section of town) that it's amazing the buildings are still standing (most balconies in concrete buildings have long since collapsed). I watched in Trinidad as local workers dug up part of a cobblestone road, then filled it back with plain dirt. Most of the roads people have worked on are completely washed away from the rain (the ones they haven't touched are still fine).

You can have good food and a pleasant stay if you go to a resort, but then what's the point? You could be at any resort in the world and have the same cookie-cutter experience.

Oh, and if you do go, bring a currency OTHER than USD because the Cuban government controls all currency conversion, and trades USD at a severe disadvantage compared to other currencies.
Why Amazon will win in India
The cost per clicks are in the range of $2 all the way to $35! So the advertiser pays Google 30 bucks when one person clicks on their ad? That does not seem believable.
I have no idea what the fuck is going on here. Comments on here are similar to what you'd find on reddit. The story is exactly the kind of thing you'd find on reddit.
I am also happy Quickweb customer, although I only use their VPS for OpenVPN and to compile stuff on Linux. Stuff compiles more quickly on the VPS than on my 2010 MacBook Pro, which means processor and IO performance are good.

They've lost my data twice in a 2 year period, but for 4.95 a month I was kind of expecting it. But now they moved my VPS to another node and all should be fine. Which brings us to customer support: it is absolutely great and they respont to tickets very quickly.

So: use for non-critical stuff, backup, and be happy.
Wrote my own website monitor in a couple hours

http://i.imgur.com/oQh8V.png

Not that hard to do if you have access to multiple servers to monitor each other, it's a good coding exercise.

Just use curl and grab all the curl_getinfo results, including the dns resolve time to the firstbyte time to the page size and page transfer speed/time.

Log it, graph it, and if you get a bad result, email yourself an alert.

Don't forget to exclude the polling server from your stats!
Sample size of one, and they didn't even publish the image itself.
Why I have Facebook fatigue
Respectfully disagree.

Penny stocks? Real estate? Gambling? Entrepreneurship? Credit cards? No one is stopping people from "investing" their life savings in any of these areas, and people are losing everything in these areas every day.

We don't need to protect people from making bad decisions with their own money.

Your arguments about the capital structure and lawsuits are pretty spot on, though... under the current system. It doesn't seem too hard to bake some protections into the reform. You don't see people suing casinos when they lose their life savings there.
Agreed refactoring method signatures will cause tests to break, but they should be relatively trivial to fix.

Black box tests are not limited to behavioral or system integration testing. you can black box at the unit level. In fact if you are doing proper TDD you will write the tests first, which help to define the interface of the class under test, make sure the test fails to ensure you are testing for something, and then finally write the implementation to make the test pass. Such an approach implies it is black box as you've defined your interface before your implementation.

Remember you are testing what it does, not how it does it.
Container Liners
Container liners to insulate standard containers from temperature flutuations
That's probably a better overall idea. To let people by a mutual fund, in effect, that invests in a basket of startups.
TIP: I see a lot of people calculating off-the-cuff AWS prices for comparable hardware somewhere else and declaring how expensive it is.

Don't forget that 3yr reserved pricing is 48% cheaper than the on-demand costs, so once you know what your hardware reqs are on EC2, you can purchase some reserved instance and more or less cut your costs in half. Pricing out any hardware configuration on EC2 using the on-demand pricing is tear-inducing.

For Day 1 release, probably not an option. But at the 6-month mark you probably have a much better idea of what hardware your startup needs and can adjust accordingly.

2 CENTS: For the folks that need something better than a Micro and less expensive than a Large, don't forget about the Medium instances.

They aren't in the primary section but down in the "High CPU" section; they are an excellent fit for work that isn't quite big enough for a Large.
Broadband victory – end of Dialup era
Originally ‘broadband’ had an actual, proper technical meaning. But it has long been used as a marketing term for any high-speed, always on internet access.
Here are links to take action on the bills you list. Your message will be sent to the appropriate legislators and aggregated on the public bill report so that you can see how sentiment is shaping up across the country. (The "sentiment across the country" part is important. Even if everyone in Silicon Valley thinks this something is great, the case has to be made to legislators who represent very different districts.)

https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr3427

https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr3571

https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/s1965

https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/s1826

https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr2941

https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr1114

https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/s565
a solution, investors need to fire Grant's ass immediately..
Thanks for the link to Jennifer's site, where the conversation started.
While I understand your concern about foreign travelers, I think you are a bit naive in defending acts of your border security. It should concern you that these people have absolute authority to perform any search and seizures at their whims, and also can deny entry to anyone. Legally, a US citizen cannot be denied entry, but they will use any possible power they have (which is vast) to keep you out of your country if they want to. [1] All in name of freedom. So watch out next time you use your freedom of speech while returning to your own country.

US is still a country of nice people, and my interaction with border official has been nothing but pleasant. Although there is a lot more security theater than when travelling to other countries, the officials from TSA, CBP and other agencies have been courteous and professional. However, it would still be a bad idea if you think that denying entry on jokes is fine.

As to your claims of US being #1 in freedom and no place for anyone else to go, I am pretty sure that countries in Europe will be more receptive to your entry even after all your jokes, because they usually don't pretend to have a security theater to "protect" themselves from "terrorists".

[1] http://www.aclunc.org/issues/government_surveillance/u.s._ci...
Code statistics for Basecamp Next
4 Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing Software for your Business
As another long-time vim user, it's more of a vi-compatible mode, and isn't anywhere near perfect, but it's good enough that I get modal editing with the majority of movements and commands that I use in day-to-day editing. Most of the "missing" vi/vim features just don't have appropriate command-mode bindings, so it's simply a matter of getting used to the default ST2 bindings for those, or doing some leg work to make those vintage bindings that you really care about.

I've only been using ST2 for a few weeks on a Python project, but I feel that the end result is better for me than trying to patch together a chain of vim plugins. I gladly give up a few of the more esoteric vim features for the integrated project editing features of ST2.
Curebit's demo video was created in 2010 so it's not as if they went about using the music illegally after the previous incident. Random Rab tweeted the founder of Curebit yesterday, he deserves some time. This seems like a hatred campaign...
The only valid reason I can think of is minimizing PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE from your customer service spam filter.
Loku Delivers Real-Time Local Discovery with node.js
I don't follow the js world super closely. What would you say were the first two (rich client/single page framework) gens?