skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I use Selenium, I know the browser supports
everything that the end user will and that includes, javascript evaluation, plugin loading, whatever.

To make a comparison for our heavy Selenium use, I can't clearly see what is lacking in PhantomJS that would be a show stopper.

Does anybody know if other than lack of Flash support, it covers all aspects of what the end user would experience ?
Asking for protected information is illegal, whether the applicant consents to give it or not.
Should it be illegal to ask interviewees to sleep with you in order to be considered for the job? After all you're not forcing them, and some people might be desperate enough for a job to consent.
Debugging code running 100 million miles away
Australian Gov:Public shouldn't know about secret antipiracy negotiations
No, you wouldn't.

Because either you stand up against that company policy and show some spine, or if you are more worried about your job than your dignity, you wouldn't dare dream of ticking your boss off.

Unless you don't really want the job, and only want to give your potential-future boss access to some juicy information, so that you can sue him easier later on for discrimination against you; and want to have some fun in that process.
It's election time.
The MPAA isn't allowed to use sniper rifles on bridges. The police have better things to do.
It should be illegal because the balance of power is in favour of the employer most of the time. Same as questions about whether you plan to have children, if it was optional to ask then those who don't would choose to answer and those who do would not, puttong them at a disadvantage.
By the way, does anyone know of an easy way to install gcc47 on OS X?

I've tried brew, port & fink to no avail.
I'll take the bait. Replace 'robot-rat' with 'rat'.
> For a lark I'm going to take an old project that has been running for years without a hitch and I'm going to retro-actively add tests to the code.

Be prepared to possibly rewrite most, if not all, of your code. I have found, at least in my old code -- which admittedly was written well before I became familiar with the concept and discipline of testing -- that my code is just not testable. At all.

It is very tightly coupled, and against which is almost impossible to write any sort of meaningful tests.

But maybe you were a better designer than I was, and if so, you may be able to fairly easily add tests to your code.

But if not, you're in for a challenge. :)
> I ignored them because they aren't relevant to the questions we're discussing

They're certainly relevant to your assumption that progressive is better and that the EU's ways are better.

They're also extremely relevant to inequality, an issue that you keep bringing up.

> If so, then why do conservatives criticize the tax policy in places like Western Europe if they are in fact less progressive?

Do you really think that progressivity is the only issue in tax policy?

> In conclusion, after looking over the sources and arguments you've offered

I'd like to say the same, but your sole source hung my adobe so I have no idea as to the provenance of the data. (I can find sources for yogic flying so ....) I'm satisfied that the OCED reports Euro taxes reasonably well.

And, I note that you didn't even claim to address consumption taxes, which are both much large source of EU income and far less progressive than income tax. Even if we go with "the US income tax is about as progressive", that swings the balance quite a bit.
Thanks for the followup! Very informative. Unfortunately, it only leads to more questions, as you seem to clearly understand (Clearly understanding your confusion seems an odd thing to say).

Luckily, you were close friends. This makes things much easier. This lends weight to my worry about sticking up for other people when they show no signs of bother. Should I have been offended for Amy? I don't know her. As you pointed out, if I did, that would be just as sexist.

Let's be clear here, I'd probably feel uncomfortable for the person being denigrated in such a manner. But what is my responsibility?

I mention this because all to often people are quick to say "Hey, I'd jump in to defend a person," and while well meaning, it's just not that easy. Even women can't agree on this (not that they should). On one hand, Amy was perfectly content and these things didn't bother her. On the other hand, in some manner of speaking, they are still wrong. The move Shallow Hal comes to mind here (to some extent, as ignorance isn't the key part here).

This leads me to my way of thinking. Unless it's out right obvious and offends me, I'm not going to rush to the defense of someone because I think they should be offended. However, I will support people who do come out and clearly state they are offended, and support them. If they accept the treatment (for example, always taking notes at the meeting) without a word, who am I to treat them like a defenseless child incapable of defending themselves.

Supporting the person after they've made it clear they aren't happy with the mistreatment, on the other hand, I think is fair and proper.

Some people might feel awkward raising an alarm that something bothers them. This is understandable. In some manner, we must encourage them without outright saying "Hey, doesn't it bother you that you are always asked to take notes? (Maybe that's acceptable if the relationship is more than a co-worker type)."

In the end, it's the best I can offer.
Completely agree. Even though I am quite new to coding, I was shocked to see how much more time I spend on debugging a piece of code than actually writing it. The ratio is closer to 3:1 and sometimes even higher. Writing tests has brought that down to roughly 1:1 (varies from project to project).

I still don't do as extensive testing as I want to (primarily because I am lazy) but I have seen the shift in the way I think about solving a problem. Writing tests forces you to assign structure to your code (in my case I put it down on paper). It helps you think in terms of "pipes" as in what is going in and what comes out.

But, I think a lot also depends on the nature of the project. Parsers and frameworks may need thorough tests while simple apps may do without many. And for some people, it may be too much of an overhead at times.
If I ever had someone demand this, I would update my account to show my sexual orientation as homosexual, my religion to Islam, and my political views to whatever the opposite of my boss's were. Then if they ever tried to lay me off, or not give me a raise, I would point out that the only useful information they possibly could have gotten from demanding my Facebook account were these protected statuses.
As someone who has been paid to work on OSS, let me say that it is absolutely not about skill. Most notably, Google and Mozilla pay plenty people to work on Firefox and Chromium. Even Apple has some OSS projects (Webkit and Darwin come to mind).
You can already sue for such harassment/discrimination. I just don't see why we need a special law regarding Facebook here if the underlying discrimination possible is already illegal.
PIMPL vs Pure Virtual Interfaces
NANDroid Backup - Learn how to restore and manage a backup
It's funny. Just as the author reached this realisation I've reached the realisation that tests are killing my productivity and are exactly the wrong strategy for my nascent product.

I've been testing obsessively for the past 18 months but just realised that I've got a stack of perfectly tested code that's perfectly wrong for what I need it for. I'm going to have to tear it apart and rebuild.

I've been thinking about what the right balance is between the two. As code matures the value of tests becomes higher and higher but early on when you need to shape and reshape they really kill momentum.
I haven't found this in academia as much as in bureaucratic office culture. At one bank where I once had the displeasure of working, one woman manager liked to make disparaging remarks about the physiques of her male subordinates. She was an acquaintance of a well-known action star and used him as the basis for her invidious comparisons. I thought this treatment was completely unnecessary.

Joking about men being idiots is sexist (or misandrist), but I'm beginning to wonder whether the unfairness consists in excluding one half of the population of the working environments in which this assessment is commonly made. OK just kidding, "lighten up." (I hate that phrase.)
Google Research: The YouTube Social Network
What’s Driving Big Valuations in E-Commerce?
March Madness - SQL Azure - sys.dm_db_partition_stats - Row Cost
How about doing hallway usability testing? Show the page to people in the target market for five seconds and then ask them "what does this company do?" Five of these will tell you everything you need to know.

If you don't have a constant stream of fresh users walking through your offices, you can do something on http://www.usertesting.com/ .
> In Germany it's even illegal to salute the German flag, or borders on social taboo.

Either it's illegal or a social taboo. And to my knowledge neither of them are true.
If my boss could not accept my personality traits, then that company is not the right fit for me and I for it.
Bravo and bingo. These are the exactly the frustrations I tend to feel as an unpaid, open-source coder.

And the next level of the phenomenon is that the entire software industry has shifted its business model to avoid having to compete with piracy or open-source. There are now, to my knowledge, two major for-profit companies building their own PC operating systems: Microsoft and Apple. There are four or five building mobile operating systems: Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Google, (maybe) Symbian. The number of for-profit IDEs and programming platforms is still mostly healthy, but much, much smaller than it once was.

"That which is not seen"? That is, the effect of this privative of profits on the real world? Almost whole fields have shifted over into the domain of unpaid, spare-time open source work. Thousands, millions of man-hours are expended for no salary and no equity.

Think what would happen if all the open-source programmers (paid and unpaid) went on strike. Now you're realizing the economic value of open-source code that goes completely uncaptured by its producers.

Yes, the result is that less gets done, because everyone has to find day-jobs, and that the software industry has changed almost entirely from product business models to service business models.

Now, another scary thought: what if someone stole the code and databases to your web-service? You say that your contacts and relationships are what really makes your web-app worth something, but frankly, that's a load of crap. I'm sure there are some starving Chinese coders who would love to steal your code and your data, bring up their own web-service identical to yours (but in Chinese), get a few million users, and then translate theirs back into English for North American and European usage.

The "relationships and business expertise" excuse sounds much like what everyone said when America sent its manufacturing overseas: "We'll do all the high-value services and design and development work here." Well, no, the manufacturing was itself high-value and the other high-value points in the supply chain eventually followed it, and we're China's bitch now.

There is an imperative to enable value-creators to capture some portion of the value they create as cash. Otherwise the entire foundation of not only capitalism but all possible market economies breaks down into mush.
If your code has been "running without a hitch" and "an old project" (which I assume means you are no longer actively updating it) why are you adding tests?

Out of curiosity, what's the ROI that you see in adding tests to that project?
They did applied polish to it though and also built a new Javascript engine. I don't know who contributed what, but today's WebKit is a lot better than what KHTML was before being forked. I was once a KDE user and the first thing I did after a fresh install was to replace Konqueror.

But yes, truth be told, the KDE developers that worked on KHTML deserve a lot of credit.
Interesting perspective but I have to say there are quite a few companies working the whole "open source the code, charge for consulting, etc." thing. Just in data alone, Cloudera, Data Stax, Basho, 10gen and Hortonworks come to mind.

My point is that thousands of people get paid to work on open source projects. The project might not be their original creation but they still get to give back by producing something that everyone can use. Isn't that really the point anyway?

EDIT: added a missing 'not'
Apple files patent on haptic touch interface
Along those lines, one trend I've noticed quite a bit lately is not using one's full, real name as one's Facebook handle.

For instance, someone named John Smith might rename his FB profile "Johnny S." This tactic allows our hypothetical Mr. Smith to dodge search engine results for his full name. It wouldn't protect him from having to hand over his password, but at least it keeps all those photos of his brandishing red Solo cups out of employers' SERPs. (Also, with the right privacy settings in place, it keeps him from being searchable on Facebook by someone who's not a friend).

If the password-handover procedure actually does become standard, then yes, I'd imagine we'd see the rise of dummy profiles and other countermeasures.
Because falling bullets will kill somebody.

Unless maybe you can get 'em with birdshot, and you're careful to make sure nobody's downrange.
Funny you should say that :)

This is one of the reasons why I don't make testing into a religion but pick a time and a place to add the tests. The 'write your tests first' school is right in that it can create another boost but it comes with the problem that it puts a damper on any exploratory programming. I typically take three tries to get it 'right', and only after the third try with a reasonably stable interface is where I will add tests.

Maybe I'm a lousy designer in that I can't nail down an interface on the first try but on non-trivial code this is unfortunately my experience so far.

First try: very quick, rough and dirty. Second try: a bit slower, mostly right but still needs major rework. Third try: minor tweaks in the longer term but mostly finalized.

The elapsed time is usually something under a day for the first try, a few days to a week for the second and after the third try it goes into 'maintenance' pretty quickly.
Google takes on Amazon - visit the Amazon on Google maps
The cool kids write invariants that they prove correct via equational reasoning.
Building web apps using jQuery Mobile
Swiss Made Watches with Swiss Movement
Ask HN: Need an iOS developer to build an app for us
I am a developer for Styloot.com and we are looking for an iOS developer to build an app for us. If you are available or have any questions, can you please drop me an email at ssarda@styloot.com?
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I like the original word better: a system of government by the middle? :-)
Switching From Coffee to Caffeine Pills
I don't think users care about protocols. When you place a button on a website, the user will see "Login with BrowserID" (right?), which is the consumer-facing part of it. After that they will be able to select a browserid provider among which will be "Mozilla Persona Browser ID" (right?). Why not just list it as "Mozilla BrowserID" or sth. More names, more confusion.
I'm more thinking along the line of replace 'rat' with 'human'. We could all form a living peer-to-peer (in every sense of the phrase) network.
I think the author is looking at it as more of an experiment than a valuable project with a positive ROI. As jader201 said he will probably discover that it's a pretty tough thing to do when the code wasn't written with testing in mind. I also believe he will find issues exposing parts of his code to be tested.
I'm one of those casual users who maybe uses an image editing program a few times a year. I also found Fireworks to be a much better tool for these tasks.

Last week was another of those times when I needed to open a graphic and tweak a logo for the web. But I have a new laptop now, and didn't want to pay for Fireworks or go through the install just for something that I use so rarely.

So I decided to try out Inkscape and although it has a klunky X11 interface, I found it does everything that I need. Not bad for free software...
This business model is fairly popular in education. We have tons of open source projects where we COULD run it for free, but sometime we pay for hosting, or consulting, or customization. It seems to work well too.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that this practice is so wide-spread that there's enough grey area for hiring managers to get away with it, so the current laws aren't enough. Internet social networking is such a new and world-changing concept that I believe new laws are necessary to specifically address these issues.
12 Ways to Boost your Dying Business in 2012
> these "think 'bout the children" moments

Actually in France it's already illegal to visit pedopornographic website. While the intention is good, it can be used as an excuse to get a citizen's browsing history, and it's hard to defend a man's right to see kiddie porn…
I've been waiting for variables for years, so sad it's still not there. Not only for colors, but also for values like shadow width, etc.
Facebook is such a small part of my online activities that its almost inconsequential. But I would still object to the request as inappropriate on the grounds of personal security (which I prefer to cite over privacy).

I'd be much more concerned if they asked for my userids & passwords for email accounts, Skype, MSN, IRC, domain names and 'Hacker News' (especially if they just went by the name & not the content)!!
The Ultimate in Mobile Gaming?
> Most sites with the kind of traffic that could potentially run up the bill thousands of dollars will have checks in place to ensure a mistake like that wouldn't happen.

One thing that'd help dramatically would be exposing the various account activity and cost data via API. There's currently no API for accessing one's monthly spend to-date.

From a comment elsewhere, looks like they're sorta working on it, finally (CloudWatch metric).
7 Creative Ways To Promote Your Small Business Offline
Because it is considered sub-ethical by the rest of the industry.
Photoshop Tutorial: Underwater Turtle
On a mostly unrelated note, I wish blatanly marketing driven terms like "retina display" would stop getting thrown around like this. Thanks to Apple's latest marketing adjustment for the iPad 3, it turns the phone I've owned for over 2 years now actually posesses a "retina display" (N900 for anyone wondering). At the viewing distance specified by Apple, the human retina is in fact capable of discerning a far higher pixel density anyway.
Top Technology Blogs for Education
These are heavily used bookmarks

http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2009/09/tuning-jvm-for-unu...

http://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/2011/10/javaone-2011-defini...

http://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/2011/10/javaone-2011-every-...

http://www.umbrant.com/blog/2012/twitter_jvm_tuning.html
For a lark I'm going to take an old project that has been running for years without a hitch and I'm going to retro-actively add tests to the code. I'm really curious how many bugs and unexpected behaviors will turn up.

Last week I got an enhancement request from a customer that basically said, "Add B capability and make it work exactly like A capability."

"Cool," I thought, "This should be easy."

So I examined all the "A" stuff, which had been in production since 2008. Then I cut, pasted, modified, and added a whole bunch of stuff. (I know, I know, every once in a while, a programmer's just gotta take the lazy way out.)

When I started unit testing my B stuff, I broke everything on almost every try. This was before I even assembled a test plan, it was just a hacker beating up his own work.

How could this be? So I went back and beat up the A stuff and broke it in all the same places. Stuff thousands of people have used thousands of times. Sigh.
Dollar Shave Club Raise $1MM from Big VCs
For some reason clients tend to get upset when things that were working suddenly break (they don't even care if it as legacy code base!).

Joking aside, in order to effectively prevent that, a test suite must be in place to prevent regressions when you change/add code. If there isn't one, you need to decide between cranky clients or the nastyness of adding test to legacy code.
Ha. Well said.
The Feature
Partial Application in JavaScript Revisited
Care to share who's in the fantasy league? I've got my own, but it's quite small.
Thanks for the summary. Perhaps I should have just written that and saved myself and everyone who read it a whole lot of time. ;-)
The main advantage of Selenium is that it allows you to test cross-platform compatibility, since it can be configured to run on pretty much every major browser/OS combo.

For everything other than that, though, PhantomJS is fantastic. It's infinitely more pleasant to deal with than Selenium.
I agree about computers, and here's what I would add:

I'd want people to understand that politicians are not leaders - they are servants of the public. They are elected to represent the citizens of the country and make decisions that the citizens want, not which they believe would work or worse, which fit their own needs.

They're not leaders in a league of their own who have followers, those times have past. That's why they must be held in check, not left to do whatever they want - that's how you end up with having to take your shoes off and being patted by some stranger at an airport, while they fly first class or charter with their envoy without even going through a metal detector (just an example).
That's use value.

We're talking about monetary value -- i.e the ability of the item to generate money.
How to handle price objections
I'd be very surprised if nobody's done this yet.
If you have an e-mail address in .edu you can have free private repos with unlimited users having access to them. Just register your .edu e-mail on the site and the 5 user limit is removed.
Top 11 Ways to Use the Hot New iPad
I think his word choice was right, "mediocracy" means rule by the mediocre which definitely fits his comment.
1GB of RAM on a work computer? I'd flat out refuse to do anything until they fork out a whopping £30 to quadruple that.
Well... Considering the timing of the blog post, it certainly looks like a response to Apple's launch, regardless of Microsoft's long time efforts in resolution independence (which date back to, at least, the Windows 3 era).

Still, Microsoft has consistently reacted to competitors in this very same way - when a competitor creates the perception their product is substantially more advanced than Microsoft's offering, they release something that tries to counter the perception. Sometimes it's a blog post, sometimes it's a press release and, sometimes, it's a full-blown product mock up demo (such as the PDC 2003 version of Vista).
Good luck proving this.
This is a great "I don't want to work here" filter. If I was asked for my password during an interview I would probably leave. I can easily afford to do that because there is such a demand for software engineers (and I'm not even looking!). Unfortunately for others who aren't in the same position I think it is absolutely disgraceful for some stranger to go through your personal stuff just to get a job.
Of the three listed, the only one that is actually protected in the United States is religion. In the vast majority of the United States you can be fired for being gay or a republican. If you work for a labor organization in the United States, you have to be fired for certain political views and organisational memberships (the left-wing variety).