skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can export sprite sheets from animations created in the Adobe Flash authoring tool. There are a number of free third party tools that enable this:

SWFSheet
http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=2939

Zoe
http://gskinner.com/blog/archives/2011/02/zoe-export-swf-ani...

This feature is also being built into the next version of Flash Professional (the authoring tool), with support for export to various JavaScript libraries (such as Easel.JS) for controlling the animation.
A little bit of a link bait if you ask me; just chronicles some of the more famous founder/company fall outs with a focus on Foursquare. This is something every founder has nightmares about, especially once the company makes it. Not something you can really plan for...
Very generally speaking, any successful idea accumulates adulteration over time as it is overused and over-exploited. The number of high quality instances do not decrease but have to be sifted out from a larger group. If the author hasn't realized this yet, he need not look far for numerous examples in writing, music, movies, startups; appealing to make a u-turn on the "madness" is futile.
I usually test everything with Selenium - what are other good methods?
No. The time has come for phone manufacturers to cease locking down phones and preventing one click updates.

Imagine a world where you had to buy a new desktop because the vendor provided you with Windows XP service pack 1 but decided the machine would no longer be supported? That situation does not exist, thankfully, because PC vendors never had the nerve to lock owners out of their own property.

The cell phone industry still thinks they should control every little interaction on the handset, forcing their bloated UI overlays, restricting features, and nickel and diming customers. I refuse to entertain the notion I should be giving these people more money for the sole purpose of formalizing their control my property.

I run ICS on a Samsung Galaxy S. Samsung officially will not support it because their resource intensive "improvement" called TouchWiz can't run on the older handset when ported to ICS. Meanwhile some kid, for free with spare time, managed to build a fully functional ICS version I run without issue.

At this point in time, locked bootloaders only exist to keep customers on the hardware upgrade treadmill. It needs to stop.
Posterous took investment not only from venture capital, but also from users who believed and trusted that the service would find a way to make money and stick around. It hasn't repaid that investment. This feels like a turning point to me as I have no incentive to start investing as a user with the next hot startup that comes along.
Analyst estimates Amazon could have more than 450k servers
Those are fair points all, and I feel cover similar ground to an article of mine:

http://www.writemoretests.com/2011/09/test-driven-developmen...

I'm always amazed by how well the whole 'technical debt' analogy holds up. Yes, leveraged development at the beginning is fast, and sometimes a good idea for getting to MVP. But the cost is still there, and will become apparent, and needs dealing with.
Crucial Adrenaline adds an SSD cache to your hard drive
Hardly a twist? So twenty years ago you think it most people would have found it likely that Linus's operating system would lead to the creation of the SCM that minix uses?
Managing $1T in client assets doesn't sound like a job for a lowly VP. Your comment is mostly an ad-hominem attack against the author because he may or may not have received a smaller bonus this year.
You sound like me 19 years ago. I now think I was wrong, but I can understand where you are coming from.

Not caring about typography and how something looks is much like not caring about eye contact and tone of voice when talking to people: it is a bit autistic and generally doesn't help communication.

But as I said: I can understand where you are coming from. Most web design is terrible -- and the more money you spend on it, the worse it gets.
Hurd makes Minix look like a rock-solid production OS by comparison.
TSA on the way out of Orlando International
As of Ubuntu 11.10 my netbook randomly kernel panics with the default Wi-Fi drivers. It sure would be great if it didn't take out everything I was looking at because of one bad driver. Just saying.
Ending the infographic plague: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/ending-t...
I really wish I could pay for free services just for the peace of mind that they'll stick around.

I've got my website on Tumblr and by using their service I feel like I'm making a pretty big commitment to them, but since it's free it doesn't feel like they have the same level of commitment to me.

I freaking love Tumblr and would be happy to pay. But right now it's not clear to me if they're making any money at all and that's a big concern as a user. Just remind me, how do those guys make money again?

Also, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski wrote on the topic of being a free user not that long ago: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

The TL;DR version was: Exploding growth + free service = losing lots of money. Ouch.
I hate articles I can't read on my mobile iOS device due to endless redirects. Esp when they sound like interesting articles. Wtf google + team?
I think it's entirely possible to admin a multi service box, but it requires more skill and effort. Putting everything in a distinct VM makes all your problems look more like nails. Also, who wants to say they admin the server when they can say they admin the server cluster?
Minix 3: Getting Started
Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week
Contemplaying
Alienware M18x annihilates all other gaming laptops in benchmark results
I think you'd find out most significant software has some kind of testing, but if you inherit a quarter mil lines of code, need to make one focused change, making the case to spend six months to write full coverage just does not get funded.
"Not something you can really plan for..."

Respectfully, I disagree to some extent on this point. It's always a good idea never to attack others. And ideally, you hope you'll never come under attack yourself. But if you do, you don't want it to take you by surprise.

Consider this quote from the article:

"'I think it’s easy for people to jump to the side of the founder against the big bad investor,' Mr. Blumberg said. 'But we’re all grownups and you sign the papers you sign.'"

This may come across as cold-blooded, but let's be honest, there's a grain of truth to it. Startups are every bit as political as BigCo, and in some cases, even moreso. Whenever we see these stories -- and maybe it's just the popular mythological portrayal of them -- we see them as heartbreaking tales of betrayal and shattered friendships. But perhaps they're better described as tales of political savvy vs. naivete -- of ruthlessness vs. innocence. The business world often rewards the former, and rarely graces the latter. Nice guys usually finish last.

It may be sad. It may not be right. It may not be the way we want things to be. And maybe there is a "better way" to be discovered. But, no matter the case, people can't afford to place unconditional trust in each other. When big money and influential outsiders enter into an equation, people's incentives change dramatically. Eyes should be kept open to that fact. Even if we don't assume people will, by necessity, turn on us at some point, we shouldn't rule it out. It's not that people are assholes; it's that the upper echelons of business are cutthroat, and people usually respond according to their economic incentives. As the co-founder of a small, early-stage company, you don't need to concern yourself with these things. But the second you've got a VP stripe, or especially the letter "C-" in your acronym, you've got a target on your back. You need to be mindful of it.

This doesn't excuse the nature of the game, but it does offer fair warning to any who'd play it. Keep stock of everyone else's hand. Know what cards they've got. Know how they may, or may not, be able to play them. Know what they stand to gain or lose by doing so, and the magnitude of that gain or loss.

There's no great excuse for being a dick, but there's equally litttle excuse for being a Polyanna. I would never advocate that we all actively seek to screw each other over. Rather, I'd suggest we keep our guard up -- especially around times of big organizational shift (new funding rounds, board changes, big new hires, etc.).
I once worked for a guy who was considering incorporating his two-person company. His investors were mostly family and professional contacts. One day he was talking about how it would limit his decision-making because of his obligation to always do what was most profitable for the shareholders. He was potentially facing a choice between selling out to a much larger company or staying independent so he could develop the company into the kind of business he always wanted to run. He and his partner had a controlling stake, but theoretically, if their investors wanted him to sell but he refused, they could sue him for damages, breach of fiduciary trust or what-not. Or so he said. I asked him, "If there was a perfectly legal, but morally reprehensible way to make a lot of money for your shareholders, and you were aware of it but didn't take advantage of it, could they sue you for damages?" He didn't think so, but he couldn't explain to me the legal difference between his moral judgment and his lifestyle preference for one kind of business over another. I'm still intrigued by the question.

To make the situation more dramatic, suppose a company disposed of a thousand barrels of toxic waste every month, and the board of directors found out that the perfectly legal method by which they were disposing of the waste was horrifically environmentally damaging but exposed the company to no possible liability. Could they choose to dispose of the waste in a much more expensive way? What if it meant cancelling a dividend? What if it meant bankrupting the company -- could they be sued then?
what

what are you even saying

i dont even

(

More concretely, if you use testing to drive your refactors and architecture--as opposed to, say, finding pain points in normal code or actual design time in preproduction--I would be concerned that you are "guardrail programming", as a gentleman put in a talk I saw recently.

When we drive, we don't have guardrails to bounce us back on the road every time we veer off--they're there to protect us against accidents or when something goes seriously wrong with our vehicle. If you told somebody that you drove from city A to city B by hugging the guardrail, they'd say you were nuts.

Similarly, depending on unit tests to do design is strange--they're there to be sure that your code functions according to contract.

)
Former Google exec: Larry Page ruined Google
http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all

CentOS and RHEL combined total 41.1% of all websites on the Internet. Ubuntu is a distant 3rd or 4th place behind Debian, depending on whether you count RHEL and CentOS as the same OS, or separate.
Idea: a browser extension that automatically saves a copy of every form you fill out, as well as content you submit to common XHR-based sites.
Sweet post! Could you create a buffer like app for posting to hackernews which just posts at the right time to maximize the time to pick up the story?
7 Reasons Why The New iPad Is Named “The New iPad”
The trouble is that the poll doesn't have a middle ground between "all functionality" and "a few critical things".

A full run of our test suite literally takes months on a cluster of hundreds of CPUs (obviously, there are also faster versions of the tests which are run frequently). While I have a long list of additional test coverage that I would like to add, what we test is much closer to "all functionality" than it is to "a few critical things".
Titanic Centennial: a testament to man against nature
Archio, as a 19 year old in a similar situation (and wondering the same thing!), I was wondering where roughly you're based? I'm from the UK and looking for a co-founder, yet don't know anyone interested in startups.
Step Inside The Brutal Silicon Valley Fight Club
Fun fact: somebody listened very attentively to this presentation and then went home and began implementing things. It caused a step function increase in sales.
I was just able to pre-register (based on past attendance).
The day I changed one line of code and 100+ tests failed was the day I really got it.
A retainer is just a pre-payment for hourly pay. They draw against it. Any unused portion is returned to the client or saved for future hourly work.
I'm a lot less surprised. Not everyone gets to work on a shiny new codebase which was created after regular testing was the norm. A lot of us work on maintaining code that's 5/10/20 years old, and have to worry about things like maintaining and adding functionality over refactoring the entire codebase to support unit tests.

When you're in this position, your going to get more value out of creating a smaller set of functional integration tests that cover the critical functions of the project. Sure, adding new tests as you add functionality is a good idea, but it's not going to result in total coverage for a very long time.
The guy never made a moral criticism that wasn't immediately followed by "plus it will end up costing the bottom line in the long run".
I've noticed quite a few Mac and iOS apps using Markdown lately. If anything it seems to be gaining adoption. Of course this isn't based on any actual data just my own observations. Perhaps a Windows user can chime in and comment about it's growth from their perspective.

I'd love to see it being used in more blog commenting systems.
(It's peace of mind. Piece of mind is something a brain surgeon finds stuck to his shirt when he goes home for the day)
It's not at all unusual to have to manage the lifetime of data in a cache, particularly in languages like Javascript that do not support weak references.
He's trying to set his fingerprint, and codifying the layout, attempting to formalize it, would be just such a method.

Personally -- and apologies if this sounds brash as I don't think we need empty back patting here -- I think his proposed logo is ugly and amateurish. The M already has an arrow in it if one really needs to make such a literal indicator.
Yeah, that happens to me all the time. I'm in the habit of running hardware with a faulty PCI bus for very long periods of time so I don't really need anything more complex than Windows 95 since the kernel doesn't matter when you have a faulty PCI bus.
Isn't that why we have skype?
Twenty years ago, I doubt many people gave much thought to anyone creating a new SCM. Is your premise that twenty years ago people would have accurately predicted other software trends? Was ruby on rails an inevitable development?
I could.

I surprised my parents some while back when we discovered I could remember the full address and phone number of a house we left when I was 5.5 and they couldn't. I found it again pretty easily when I was at university not that far away, along with my school and church. I'm pretty sure I could find our regular shops from then as well. There are occasional details of life from around then that I remind them about.

Kids remember more than you'd think, and tend to get home details drummed into them by parents in case they get lost.
Disclaimer: I am not an official member of Minix team. However, given my understanding, it certainly looks Minix is going to compete with QNX, VxWorks and similar OS used in embedded systems. Visit http://wiki.minix3.org/en/MinixGoals and http://wiki.minix3.org/en/MinixRoadmap for details.
There's the "It's all text" Firefox extension which might help here. It can open your favorite text editor for text areas. This makes it easier to save a backup copy (I guess you could change it to do this automatically), no copy/paste needed.
My smartphone, the spy: protecting privacy in a mobile age
I don't always test my code, but when I do I do it in production. Stay thirsty my friends.
The very first thing I do when I take over a codebase is to write tests. Without tests, it's impossible to do maintenance work or add functionality in any sort of rigorous fashion--how can you know that your assumptions about how the code works are correct? How can you know that your trivial change didn't break something?

Of course, tests don't actually tell you these things. But they can tell you that your assumptions were wrong, or that your trivial change broke feature xxx, and that's crucial information to have.
I don't always test my code, but when I do I do it in production.

Stay thirsty my friends.
That was 20 years ago, things change in that amount of time. It was also a lot of propaganda and not a lot of evidence.

But hey, it's not like programmers need to update their Internal Information Hashmap. Just put something in there once and leave it alone since that thing is delicate and updating it can sometimes crash your mind.
Yes.

I write everything in TextPad first, saving as I go with Control-S to the appropriate directory using the date & time in the file name. I like to work full screen in large letters and I love lime green on black.

I have one corporate client that deletes all emails every 6 weeks (for legal reasons). Seems like I'm the only one who has a record of anything because of my practice.

I operate under the assumption that anything free will go away at some point. I plan on moving somewhere else with my data. Also, it's really easy to find anything on my hard disk.

A little background:

Years ago, I found my best friend from college and we started to exchange emails. I emailed him a trivia quiz with 20 questions. He later told me that he was laughing like crazy while he answered them for the next hour. His wife called him when he was on Question #19. By the time he returned, his computer had crashed and he lost everything. (This was obviously pre-Gmail.) Now we'll never know what he answered.

I don't know what will be important later, so I'll never let anything like that ever happen to me.
That seems like a tall order. You want them to charge for updates, but also make it easier for you to install updates without paying for them?
Who's talking about adding all?

My area of expertise is adding tests to legacy codebases. Obviously you're not going to hit the whole thing overnight. But that's no excuse for not having /any/
Why is Yahoo doing this?
I don't get the environmentalist angle. The paper industry is a net carbon sink; much more carbon is captured in growing the forests of fast-growth trees they plant and cut down than in manufacturing paper or lumber products from it. Every sheet of paper you buy is that much carbon in your hand that would otherwise be in the atmosphere, and will now stay out of the atmosphere as long as it's not burned.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified exactly this as the most effective man-made carbon sequestration method we have. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-cha...

So, paper is cheap and producing it is a net positive for the environment. What about the coal-burning power plants generating electricity to shoot lasers at the paper so we can reuse it again? Is the electricity cost to blast off the toner going to be less than the cost of a sheet of paper?
On my latest project (Rails 3.1) I test thoroughly the back end code, but only in a limited way the CS front end code. I'm using jasmine there, but that is a lot of overhead.
Woohoo. Addons are now synced as part of Firefox sync. I'm so glad they put this in. Yet to see if addon settings will also sync, somehow I doubt it.
According to the NYTimes byline, he is a "Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa."

That doesn't sound like a lowly VP.

It's rubbish that he has nothing to lose: coming out so publicly against your former employer never looks good on a resume. And Goldman can respond in the tradition of politicians facing similar stories: by using surrogates.
Mirabile Dictu!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230469280457728...

When Goldman doled out annual bonuses earlier this year, Mr. Smith's small payment became a point of friction, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Smith hadn't previously voiced his concerns about Goldman to his managers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Occam's Razor says that the NYT was masterfully trolled.
I'm in New Jersey (United States). Looks like we are in the same boat! I'd love to apply with a co-founder but I also don't know anyone that's remotely interested.

If you want to talk, feel free to send me an email (the address is in my profile).
Point me to one SQLAlchemy example that you think has no web2py DAL equivalent and I will try show you otherwise.
"Take all of your money" is really rare... the one constant in every example in the article is that the founder who is being forced out is almost always paid off.

In the one case I've been a witness too, it was the same. It's usually quite expensive to force a founder out, but that dosen't make it any less tragic.
"But I will lose nothing..." Oh come now - surely your time was valuable. And your enthusiasm/willingness to give another service hours and hours of your time for the hope that they will be around "forever" will almost certainly wane if these services went down for the count.
Every time I see someone declare that we're living in a post-PC world, I die a little inside.
The Linux kernel has a ton of attention dedicated to it. In particular, enterprises that prefer reliability to newness often are a few versions behind, making Linux for their purposes the most heavily acceptance-tested software there is.

This doesn't mean its design is inherently more reliable. Anything can be made reliable with enough eyeballs. I think a design goal of Minix is to increase the reliability per eyeball ratio, particularly when it comes to extending the kernel. Reliability, modularity, performance, and testing are all trade-offs. It's also pretty easy to find a configuration that one would think "should work", but actually causes Linux to suffer, complain, and crash.
There is also "to give a piece of mind".
I'm going to go against conventional hacker wisdom and say that if you are comfortable in a suit, wear a suit. As long as you are also completely comfortable being the only one around in a suit - and that is an open question.

I think part of the problem with hackers wearing suits is that they tend not to be comfortable in them, and they tend not to fit well, so they don't look quite right in them.

Personally, I like to wear nice jeans with nice shoes and a nice dress shirt, all which fit me well. It's somewhere between casual and dressy that's not the standard "business casual," and it's a style of dress I am comfortable in.
BuzzFeed's Zeke Miller: "We tend to jump on things in 140 characters"
We would like to test a lot more but I really don't know how to test some of the critical stuff.

Just as an example, how do you test a parser that processes large amounts of sometimes sloppy semi structured text? Whether a particular defect should be classified as a bug in my parser or as a rare glitch in the source data is undecidable until I know how often the defect occurs.

What I need is a kind of heuristic test framework that makes sure the parser doesn't miss any large chunks that I only find out about weeks later if at all. I cannot supply individual test cases for everything that could possibly be found in the source data.
Minix3 monitors the drivers and restarts them if they crash.

http://www.minix3.org/other/reliability.html
Might I suggest a job search? I'm not some paper fanatic, I rarely print anything out and I'm physically incapable[1] of making substantial use of a pen or pencil, but any company spending two hours on the subject is one I don't think I want to work for.

It was bad enough the day I sat through a 10 minute speech by a CEO on proper urinal usage...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia#Motor