skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We work together with our clients to craft the language for acceptance tests in cucumber style. It's quite valuable for us, especially on fixed bid projects, in that it saves us from perception gaps later on.

I wouldn't let a customer write acceptance tests in a vacum, in fact we typically recommend the acceptance tests we think are adequate and they sign off usually with modifications.

As a side note, I'm experimenting with RubyMotion and I really like the rspec clone built in, it would be especially nice to use cucumber with it as well though.
is tunlr using PAC files and WPAP?
If you're not using them, isn't that a good thing?
Thinking about code before committing it: A checklist
Thank you for sharing. Sorry you triggered an avalanche of whining from the "ugh. This free stuff isn't exactly how I'd do it if I weren't so lazy and I actually did something" brigade.
Q. Other things you’ve learned?

A. The importance of overcommunicating.

Funny... I've had a friend who's been marked down at multiple companies for 'overcommunicating' - things like reiterating the todo list from a meeting out to everyone, and including people who couldn't be there but would be impacted, emailing a group with a question and to make sure everyone understands what the impact of XYZ will be. Most people hated it. Well, I was fine with it - I think there should be more of it, and I don't think most people really grok that in knowledge work, that's all you've got - communication. Making assumptions or ignoring/forgetting to notify some parties of XYZ have huge ramifications.
Founders Are Not Heroes. Let’s Get Back To Work
Short name no dashes dot com is not unsustainable; it's completely over with for those without funding. There's nothing wrong with .info and the like (I use a .info for my personal domain) except perception. My hope is that the new GTLD rules will make the domain extension less important, and if so it will make squatting values go down.
The Innumeracy of Intellectuals (2008)
A system which relies on DNS, but in which anyone can setup a node seems better than a system that relies on DNS but only has one centralized node (Twitter), no?

In a truly decentralized system, you're not going to be able to have readable unique names without collisions. Why? What happens when the network splits, then people on either side of the split setup the same username. How do you rectify this when the network rejoins? How do you know that the network has split vs. a node going offline (if you wanted to do something like shut down new usernames until the network was whole again)?
You may find this paper interesting:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2009000...

"Mars Science Laboratory: Entry, Descent, and Landing System Performance"

There's another paper floating around (that I can't seem to find) that evaluates and compares all of the alternatives to show why they decided to go with this particular configuration.
Phone numbers aren't useful or readable, so the machines that talk to each other use those and I just click "Mary" in my contacts list.

I don't think such a system would be difficult to put in place on the web right now. Linking is done with whatever gobbledygook URLs you don't feel like reading, and if you want to revisit a page, you bookmark it with an alias of your choosing.

EDIT: I should say that I think this is the workflow for >90% of web users already. If they don't just use Google every time.
Thanks for a down-vote. I don't see where i said i agree with it. I simply said their definition is simply different from the one floating around in the startup scene and i found it humorous. Whether it is right or wrong is your personal opinion.
Dropbox was getdropbox.com for a long time, which is 10 letters.

Prepending "get" (or sticking "app" on the end) always makes me kind of queasy, but it worked well enough for Dropbox. I kind of like Exec's approach of using iamexec.com.
Any idea which Ikea parts the section "The Wide, Height-Adjustable Standing Desk" is referring to? "Vika" seems to be right.

I did find a leg ("VIKA BYSKE") which is a suitable height for me (just below my belly button at 107cm - most others are 70cm high which is way too low). But it would be $120 for four legs, they don't sell them in my local store or online, and in any event the desk has to be wall mounted.

The Frederik is almost a decent height for the desk, but then has two shelfs above positioned in the middle of the desk slap bang where my monitors would be. It is also just barely wide enough for my dual monitors.
This is Google trying to outsmart you. It thinks you're searching for Sept. 11 if you type 9/11. It happens quite regularly with other queries, add a = sign to force the calculator.
You only get locked out of a website if you delete your cookies while your email provider is down. How often does that happen?

This idea doesn't speed up the login process, but it accomplishes a few other useful things. The server doesn't store passwords, so a breach of the server doesn't compromise other services for which users had duplicate passwords. And users can't compromise their own accounts by choosing weak passwords. Both scenarios are commonplace.
I've been looking for a theme like this. Twitter bootstrap?
If you're in europe you can watch it live at NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), but the commentary will ofcourse be in Norwegian. NRK has excellent coverage, with 7 (9 including NRK1 and NRK2) dedicated channels.

See more: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=no&tl...
Once I found a nice captcha replacement (can't remember where it was, tho). It worked like this: at the end of the form, there were 6 to 9 playing cards and the text "Click on the seven of spades". This fitted the theme of website which had something to do with poker or magic tricks (can't really remember what it was) but this can be done with a lot of other stuff that is well known by people and not by robots (e.g. 6 photos of animals and the question "Click on the dog", etc.)
For a small company: create alias for everyone. Everyone emails on Friday.

For a large company: create team alias, email it on Fridays.

Not that hard.
Additionally, there's a soft limit to how negative you can be in the comments, where you can be downvoted. Submissions can only be flagged, not downvoted, and if you flag more than two submissions a day, your flag button is disabled. (It looks like it still works, but your flags no longer affect the ranking of a submission)
How to stop domain squatters:

Years ago I remember cases where people who were deemed to just be "squatting" on a domain could have it taken away by a arbitration-like service at the registry. There were tests to help them decide if they were truly squatting or were using it themselves. Even so, opponents argued that there were many mistakes, that the arbitration services favored big companies and the process was abused to shut down legitimate comment (like "companyxsucks.com" sites) and the only people who really liked this system were the lawyers.

Is this a route we want to go down? Have some kind of arbitration service who can decide if someone is a squatter and reclaim their domains?
Content-centric networking aims to solve some of these problems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking

"Content-centric networking (also content-based networking, data-oriented networking or named data networking) is an alternative approach to the architecture of computer networks. Its founding principle is that a communication network should allow a user to focus on the data he or she needs, rather than having to reference a specific, physical location where that data is to be retrieved from. This stems from the fact that the vast majority of current Internet usage (a "high 90% level of traffic") consists of data being disseminated from a source to a number of users.

The contemporary Internet architecture revolves around a host-based conversation model, created in the 1970s to allow geographically distributed users to use a few big, immobile computers. The content-centric networking seeks to adapt the network architecture to current network usage patterns."
I'm an engineering intern at Foursquare. The culture Dennis describes is accurate.

Dennis holds weekly office hours where anyone at the company can meet up with him and ask questions or voice concerns. In my first month, I met with him a couple times and asked him questions about how he raised capital, his relationships with investors, and his experience with startups. After our first meeting, he let me know that I could grab coffee with him anytime. Foursquare really seems like a small startup despite there being 120 employees.

In response to some questions below about how snippets work, it is not necessary to read the entire company's snippets. It is a Twitter model where you subscribe to people's feeds. I'm following the exec team, my manager and other guys on the web-client team, and a couple of my other friends.

I saw that some comments about wanting to work for Foursquare, and I just thought I'd leave a reminder that we're hiring =) https://foursquare.com/jobs/
I guess you could put it that way.

I see in his description more of a tech tree. It'd be more akin to what you'd see in Diablo 2, but expanded by a 1000. The tech tree method would also explain prerequisites. Ideally, if you can prove you have the knowledge of a node, you could pass through it and continue learning.

No clue how we would go from factory farmed schools to that though. It's another educational pie-in-the-sky thought.
Isn't ICANN introducing .anything domain names? Once these become more prevalent, the price will go down and this will be a non-issue.
And yet thousands of users every day manage to navigate to news.ycombinator.com (n=11, at least), or wordpress.com (n=9 + the blog's name). There are massively popular blogs like overcomingbias.com, or marginalrevolution.com. I still can't spell disqus properly on first attempt, that didn't stop them.

It's important to have a good name but not crucial and it doesn't have to be short.
I'm confused. In the iPad app I clicked time-warner cable, that I didn't have service, and I wanted a temporary pass. And then everything just worked. TWC is my ISP, but I have no cable service with them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3659653

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2534649
I think that the problem that we will always run into, is that any human-performable task will either be cracked by someone writing a bot, or made trivially inexpensive by apps that charge as little as $0.00139 per solved captcha (see [1]). Microsoft has implemented a tagging-type captcha, ASIRRA (see [2]), for which you can hire out the results for $0.004 per solved captcha[3].

I think the only real solution is to make it cost real money (say $0.25 or $0.10) to perform whatever action you are protecting, so that repeated attempts are prohibitively expensive, but one or two by a legitimate user is not too expensive. Otherwise, financially-driven spammers will always find a way to inexpensively circumvent the protection.

[1]: http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/user/order

[2]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/asir...

[3]: http://de-captcher.com/, no direct link to pricing without registering
There is still a lot of (perceived) covering up and lack of information release going on in Japan around the Fukushima incident. Much of it never makes it to the mainstream news.

For example, relatively recent reports of

- doubled estimates of radiation released (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-24/fukushima-s-esti...)

- local government reports of a significant proportion of Fukushima children (36%) with abnormal thyroid growths (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/9410702...). Something which should be extremely rare under normal circumstances and should solicit worldwide expert help.

There are also other reports of issues such as significant outbreak of diabetes in children of temporary dwellings in Fukushima but they are difficult to substantiate since not or no longer in formal Japanese press.
Python and C (maybe C++ more than C) are very popular in scientific programming. In the fields I know something about (crystallography, bioinformatics, molecular dynamics simulations) probably the majority of projects that started in this century is in C++ and Python.

Consider interesting, underpaid academic jobs for programmers. There is a good chance that your software will make a bigger difference to the world than in a startup.
~$25 probably wouldn't stop the issue, but something ~$100 might. "GOOD" domains will always sell for well over that, regardless of a price floor. Owning a good domain name is like owning any other valuable good. Pricing around $100 helps with the long-tail of domain names. Most domains aren't worth sitting on for hundreds of dollars (in the majority of cases, where there's not an obvious quick flip).

I'd even be for a tiered pricing structure. Domains under ~7 characters could be $100+, domains over 15 characters could be significantly cheaper.
Nobody hates 4chan more than 4chan users.
Ah, but then click "View Source" next to Response Headers and you'll see the non-evaluated headers:
http://i.imgur.com/Ql741.png

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: Close
Expires: -1
Last-Modified: Sun, 29 Jul 2012 17:44:35 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0, post-check=0, pre-check=0, false
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: multipart/x-mixed-replace; boundary=--whyhellothere
Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2012 17:44:35 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Also, it can be any image type (or file type, for that matter) besides image/jpeg. In my program, I'm sending image/png so that the rendered font is more readable.
For what it's worth, I have an iPhone and iPad but no plans to switch from my windows laptop.
Alternate Title: Shanehudson.com was taken, allow me to complain.
Do you really though? Most cucumber features i see end up being 20 lines of run on sentences, or they end up looking like short rspec declarations.

If you use a descriptive style "spec" testing framework, the output can be similar "A banana should always ...", "A banana when given to a customer should ..." which is just as readable.

I have programming students who have difficulty at writing integration tests, much let alone their future customers. If a customer was to try to write a cucumber test for themselves you would surely have to modify it to make it work correctly right?

This is the only argument i've heard for this style of natural language testing, and i've never heard it from a customer. I've never heard a contractors client come running in from the wings yelling "WE LOVE CUCUMBER, AND COULDN'T LIVE WITHOUT IT!!". I would be interested to hear their point of view.

Sorry to troll on cucumber, I think easier iOS testing and more iOS testing is only a good thing. I'm just personally not a fan of this style tests. Been there done that, now I write my tests in the same language that i'm coding in.
I actually implemented a system very much like this on an internal company network recently. For that purpose, it worked great. I don't think it would work in an open, public context, not least because an attacker can force your site to spam its users. However, when you are going to stay logged in forever on basically the same devices, having an email-based login system without a password is no more pain for the user than a verification email (since that's all you're doing anyway). Essentially you're relying on the website to generate a local, device-specific, secure password instead of requiring the user to create and remember a (likely insecure) password themselves.
Me too.

Well, I'm sitting on a 15 day ban right now, so I'm not a 4chan user at the moment.
What this fellow is missing is actual numbers of professional squatters to regular squatters (people like you and me).

Are most unavailable, unused domains being held by a few hundred/thousand pros, or does the long tail of people like me who maintain about 20-30 domains that remain unused out number the pros?

There's a market opportunity here somewhere. We have lots of people wanting unused domains, and lots of domains locked away not making much money.
>at least you can then tell the person on the phone that you think they're full of

Why? The poor soul answering support calls likely didn't make this policy and cannot do anything to change it. I guess if you like just unloading anger at some unempowered person who has the responsibility of taking a bunch of crap without reacting in turn then this is a good idea. Otherwise it is more useful to take your business elsewhere, and if you must try finding someone to complain towards that might actually be able to encourage change.
Which is great because Google can make more money, and thus create more awesome things.

Love it.
my thoughts exactly. one of the best properties of online discussions is the relative anonymity towards other members. Randi Zuckerbergs statement "I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away" is bullshit, and blatantly ignores the importance an anonymous web has for the efficient distribution of information (esp. if you're living in a country which censors the internet). although real names might increase comment quality, this is at the loss of a much broader range of topics and participants within the discussion. curation of web comments has to happen via a community driven approach like flagging and downvoting.
Darn. Yep, I can't figure out how to fix the bug causing that. I went to sleep hoping that it would in fact not be bugged and return to near-zero by the time I woke up, and now I can see that the bug is still very much there. Hmm.
You're completely right, but most of today's problems are caused by artificial scarcity leading to speculation.
Apache is there, and on my system it was running after an install. What is gone is the UI to start and stop it and the configuration that makes ~/user/Sites available under http://localhost/user. I haven't tried, but I guess the httpd.conf~previous file I find in /etc/apache2 could be used to revert those changes.
absolutely. But at the current price of $8, I'm going to keep them forever. Never know if I might want to use them later, right?
Hi, I'm the VP Eng @ foursquare. I'm sure my perspective is a bit different from shaufler (one of our eng interns who also commented in this thread), but I'll say that the NYTimes piece is pretty accurate. Dens is indeed quite humble, he holds open office hours every week (I've started doing the same), regularly has coffee with random employees, and he tries hard to communicate what's going well or not at our weekly company meetings.

I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone might have about foursquare culture.
Über appeals to maybe 10% of the population.
There is a growing a problem with startups finding good names, which is one of the reasons I've tried to offer personal .com naming assistance with NameMage.com. Although this isn't a sustainable long-term solution to the growing domain problem, I'm hoping this service can provide a solution for those in need right now.
How does this work if I have multiple computers? Do I have to register with each device and have a different account for each device?
The first OP's assertion is wrong, because you always need some kind of a unique identifier for routing information, there is no way around that. It's possible not having to use it directly, like most of us don't need to remember all the phone numbers anymore, but some identifier is unavoidable.
The Reality Of Investing In Space Exploration
Flagged for the stupidest headline and "problem" I've read in a week.
I think you misunderstood what was meant by 'Apple applies it's rules equally'. I read it to mean it was on a per submission basis not on a per submitter basis. Not that I readily agree given the anecdote just presented.
Well I wish I was alive in the 1970's. Seems like hacker heaven back then... albeit with no easy way of learning.
I definitely find this topic interesting and have a hard time remembering all my passwords, but I'm not fan of this solution. Honestly, how isn't this just a worse implementation of OAuth? It seems equivalent to clicking a "login via gmail" button, except with more of a lag?
Tesla Losses Grow, But That's OK
Here's the code we use to run the snippets system at foursquare:

https://github.com/kushal/snippets
"Hacker" would have a really different meaning then...
I was part of a large forum a number of years ago, before a scuffle between a group of members and the forum's leadership caused a mass exodus. Being a (minor) part of that group, the event led me to create a new forum that was less dictatorial in its approach to moderation, as well as less intent on enforcing the silly minutae that dogged the former site.

Compared with the former forum, our own has a minuscule and stagnant userbase, but everyone is on a fist-name basis despite the absence of a naming policy. Our last trolling incident was over a year ago, though arguments do occur. There is always a conversation going on somewhere, and it's almost always entertaining.

I think the secret to the "perfect" community is a poison pill: you have to make sure it stays small; i.e. growth, and therefore success, has to be limited.
The more a community grows, the less familiar you are with everyone, and the less incentive you're going to have to be civil. Unless you're an *hole, people don't generally randomly insult people they consider to be their friends.

I don't think this is exclusive to online communities, but all societies, in general, as seen in the big city/little town dynamic/trope. After a certain population level, the friendliness of the early history of your community will inevitably degenerate.

(The current population of the aforementioned forum is 51, but will decline soon as I delete unused accounts.)
The nature of hell-banning means you aren't able to mark exactly when you were hell-banned, therefore the algorithms never improve because there isn't a "this caused a false-positive, let's fix it" feedback loop. Unless I'm missing something.
I'm not a big Comcast fan but I have 90 channels plus 30 mbps Internet for $40/month. Seems reasonable to me, maybe even a bargain.
As a couple of others have alluded to, I think the solution here is pretty simple: search. Businesses have had to distinguish themselves by name and brand already for a couple of centuries and I've seen advertisements on a number of occasions use instructions to "Google us" before. Just because search is currently a bit wild west doesn't mean it will always be that way. I can imagine a more standardised search algorithm being provided as an alternative to DNS which would be used both for locating sites and linking to them.
I wasn't so much thinking about innate mathematical ability, more the mathematical education most kids should receive. Disparaging attitudes towards maths skills, which is a general rule, is pretty harmful to society, I think.
I agree. More motivations, intuitions, insights behind fewer proofs would be more useful than lots of proofs, if the goal is to teach mathematical thinking, not to teach particular math results.

I think proofs are compressed because of lack of margins. Don't laugh! Authors seem to think they need to cover lots of essential results, and if you do motivations, intuitions, insights for all of them, already long math books will be impossible to hold in your hands. In my opinion the obvious solution is to omit most proofs and do far more non-formal discussion around important proofs. Which won't happen because their goal is to teach particular math results, not mathematical thinking, contrary to what they say.