skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To get the best form both fixtures and factories, I can strongly recommend http://github.com/rdy/fixture_builder
It utilizes factories to build up your fixtures. This way you only need to specify what you actually care about in you r fixture which preserves readability. But you still get the speed of fixtures. The one downside is that you can never assume a complete knowledge of what's in your DB. This might break test for scopes for example.

However I more and more agree with the general notion that your unit test should not hit the DB. However, Rails works against that. Avdi Grimm's "Object's on Rails" (http://objectsonrails.com/) has some interesting suggestions on how to get some good test isolation out of Rails.
I refuse to buy Ubisoft products because of the DRM. I'm not going to pirate them, but I sure as hell won't do business with a company that constantly treats me like a criminal.

I've already passed on several games because of this. Some game publishers believe that you can turn 1 out of 1000 pirates into paying customers [1]; it stuns me that Ubisoft ignores how invasive DRM can turn away a significant fraction of potential customers.

1. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350
Sorry for the lingo. I had hoped to change it but been away from my computer. The idea is basically that: you invite your friends who are suppliers (legitimately) they might range from selling cars, electronics or real-estate. If they start listing on the site, you recommend their listings to other users around you. Hope you get the brief explanation.
> To have doubt is to be logical :-)

And this is why the article makes no sense. Religion cannot produce a testable hypothesis. It is, therefore, useless as a tool for explaining anything - it's as useful as a magnifying glass with a painting instead of a lens. The painting may be impressive and moving, but it's not about the bug you are examining.

There is always another explanation, but, unless that other explanation is as testable as what we currently assume to be closest to correctness, it should not be considered.
Data processing, but it's not perfect. Most of the work is for questionable clients: creepy user-tracking (anti-privacy), financial powerhouses, three letter government agencies.
I cant decide if this article is sarcasm or not. It makes me think about how there is no methodology that is the savior of developers everywhere. You may be able to find some operational efficiency choosing one methodology over another, but at the end of the day you either have developers that can write the code, or not.
I think autocorrect felt otherwise :(

I really don't get the "word I typed is in the dictionary, but autocorrect thinks it found something better" use case.
This is not helpful at all. They are comparing the one-dimensional 1 to x star rating to something two dimensional.
Fuck religion.
Scala is type-safe, but type-safe with escape hatches (which every good language has sometimes, when the programmer knows the truth of theorems the type-checker can't prove). It also has an undecidable type system, but then, so does half of everything nowadays.
I'm in the same boat. They make some really, really good games. If they had a bit better track record on DRM I would have purchased at least six games from them recently, looking at wikipedia.
Starting a new business is not a sprint, but a marathon. And all this romanticizing does a huge disservice to the people who buy the hype and end up burned out.

Eh... I don't know. I mean, yeah, I totally agree with the sentiment that "Starting a new business is not a sprint, but a marathon." But, even so, part of the issue is the old saw that (paraphrased) says "an entrepreneur is someone who sets out to change something about the world when he doesn't control the resources necessary to do so."

If you buy that definition then doing a startup is trying to do the (nearly) impossible. Given that, you look at the simply ridiculous amount of work in front of you, and the resources you have available, and you don't have much choice but to do as much as you can with the one resource you do control: yourself.

I guess there is some romanticizing involved, but doing a startup is hard and I don't see any way around that. It takes a lot out of you, and I believe you do have to sacrifice a little (maybe a lot) at least in the early days, until you get some traction and can start attracting more resources to your initiative.

Maybe, if you're a natural born salesperson and can attract more resources without traction, it's a different story. Or maybe I'm just one of the people who has bought the marketing hype.

I probably watched The Social Network one time too many. :-) Or maybe, in my case, it's just because I'm getting older and feel like I'm running out of time to do something big.
Personally, i take the eliminativist view that soul is your brain. I do see some value in metaphysical contemplation (as a fun exercise) but I think if one accepts it seriously, it becomes an escape mechanism.
> I don't understand what gamers want from companies like Ubisoft?

It's just like music:

1. AAA titles without paying a cent
2. Innovation, but not too much (being a newbie is a cardinal sin, remember?)
3. No DLC, just free content released periodically afterwards

Piracy does quite a number on people with existing entitlement issues.
> I cannot understand the responses from people here on reddit

You are lost again citric. This is hackernews, not reddit.
yep, and some city's take using their name pretty poorly with the word "VIOLATION" pretty poorly.
All of the documentation for old Haskell packages on Hackage are hosted online and it does pollute Google's results. Google often links to outdated versions and you have to take a couple steps to find the current version.
Scratching your own itch is powerful.

Besides, getting up to speed on someone else's madness is not worth it most of the time.
Newsflash: Younger people get older too and still enjoy coding for fun and profits. And many of them are just like younger people, trapped in aging bodies.

Just because you're not seeing younger people at agile related events, doesn't mean they're not using agile methods where they are 'doing' stuff.
Show HN: Live Styling of Native iOS Controls with CSS
What method is more reliable than guessing the language based on the IP address?
Sorry, typo, it's meant to say "here and on reddit".
Nice job Chris!
It would be wonderful to be able to provide a recruiter or similar with a link to a not necessarily public status chart to demonstrate myself.

That is terribly against your interests, because your future employers do not burn with the need for more status charts. The contents of your existing work are not all that relevant to them. The results are much more interesting. How you are going to apply those experiences to their problems is most interesting of all.

Figure out a way to credibly claim that you increased sales or decreased costs at a past employer and that, by consequence, you could do it at a new employer -- most employers perk up at that sort of thing. Show them your plan for doing it. It's so effective it is practically cheating.
The fact that a trackpad is closer is one of it's failings. I disable the trackpad on my laptop unless I'm in a space that I can't use a mouse, due primarily to the fact that the trackpad has a bad habit of getting touched or bumped by my hands as I type. If I could shift my hands forward past my keys to gesture up or down to scroll I believe the issue would be negated.

I'd love to see a laptop with one of the leap devices embedded just along to top edge of the keyboard as an alternative to the trackpad.
Show HN: A Javascript quiz that explores how javascript scopes its variables
Pair programming was invented and evangelized by developers, and are its most ardent defenders at every vendor I know that offers Agile services. ThoughtWorks' sales folks hate selling pairs, for the obvious reason that most clients don't love the idea of buying them.
> It makes me think about how there is no methodology that is the savior of developers everywhere.

nothing beats a good team of programmers. http://programming-motherfucker.com/
Sticky keys begone The Logitech K310 washable keyboard
If you guys have not read Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut (finished it this week), you should.

Its about the evolution of the human species over the next million years turning on very specific events in Ecuador in the year 1986, and the common ancestor of all future humanity.

In his unique style, of course.
Years ago I created a website for local bands. I also liked to have a rating system and tried an emotion rating system (example: http://achterband.nl/sickboys_and_lowmen/white_buffalo).
I think for music and films this is more suitable than giving it a single number. And maybe this applies to other ratings as well.

(Translation of the emotions used: happy, relaxing, surprising, aggressive, sad, explosive)
You are actually quite confused. Yes, science has theories (which is a highest pedestal a hypothesis can be placed upon) and only math has theorems (I'm a mathematician by the way so I know the distinction).

Scientific method is an approximation method. It converges on the "truth" but may never reach it. This is why Einstein famously said, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right, but a single experiment can prove me wrong." I quoted truth above because there is no such thing as truth really. We only have models.

And even more there is not such thing as model independent reality. When you start talking about things (e.g. light) without using a particular model of it you run into all sorts of problems rather quickly.

You are also working under the assumption that things you can't see directly can't be considered evidence. This is patently not true. We can never see electron with our own eyes directly, but we can detect it by other means.

What god do you believe exists? If you are referring to deistic god (the one that may perhaps have kicked off the universe, but does not interfere in it any more) then no one can in principle provide a proof it exists nor that it does not exist. At most we can say is such a hypothesis is no longer needed. It presupposes a lot more to assume an intelligent being capable of creating universes who either spontaneously came into being or always existed than to assume the same thing about the universe itself (i.e. dumb matter). This is why Occam's razor cuts such hypothesis as superfluous thing, because it does not explain anything new, but poses more questions.

Theism on the other hand is not simply belief in gods. Theism is belief in gods that care about human beings, that interfere in their lives, that tell you what you should do, what you should eat, on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, gods who break the known laws of nature for their people, a god that gives itself body so it can kill it to save the humanity etc.

This theistic concept of god is quite distinct from a deistic god who may perhaps have kicked off the universe and set its laws, but who does not interfere in it any more.

And it is this theistic god that we now know is a man made invention.
The State of Search: Keynote by Matt Cutts of Google
CouchSurfing raises $15 million Series B
Not all piracy ends up to be a lost sale. There are some people out there that pirate, with no intention of purchase. I'm not surprised that Ubi is also finding that F2P users aren't paying either, some people just don't see the value or don't want to spend their money.

Let's take this problem out of the gaming/IT industry altogether. The last time you went to Costco (for non-Americans, it's large warehouse grocery chain), did you see the throngs of people waiting to take whatever free sample was being cooked up? And how many of those people ever actually pay for the real product? Maybe Costco has the conversion rates, but I bet they're wildly unreliable. IMHO, what I tend to see are a bunch of freeloaders who will take anything that is free and then leave when the offer is made to purchase the product.

Free-to-play, free-to-sample, it's all the same thing.
Suggestion: "how much would you theoretically pay for this" won't give you much accurate information. I'd suggest changing it to "pre-register for one of our plans: free, $5, $25", with an overview of each, and see what people click.
Clear internet is absolute crap. Simply not going to replace wired broadband.
Absolutely. Don't mistake my comments here as any sort of defense of religion. Just pointing out that science is not, maybe, as absolute as some people would suggest. "Black Swan" events do happen and previously accepted ideas are thrown out.

What makes science so much more compelling than religion, in my book, is the testability. What we think we know about the world, as a result of science, enables us to do things with tangible benefits... cars, computers, jet airplanes, Mars probes, mp3 players, etc. I don't see any way to test much of anything that religion tells us is true. And to the best of my knowledge, when people have tried to validate religious beliefs (like the power of prayer) the results have not come down solidly on the side of religious belief.
Interesting article but it's still arbitrary. I don't think it solves the problem still. What it boils down to is trusting the raters. This is the only way to get by spam, ignorance, and trolling.

I think the solution is knowing who is rating what you're looking at. In the old sense - "Quality over quanitty." I don't need to know what the whole world gave it, just a few people who I've come to trust. We're trying to do this here: www.criticrania.com.

I think this is the only real way around this problem.
Heh =). But what I mean is something like, will there be someone alive in 3000 years that is about 2000 years old.
That's no coincidence -- Anathem was inspired by the Long Now Foundation and their 10,000 Year Clock project.
Swank-clojure Deprecated in Favor of nrepl.el
All media is going to be on-demand at some point. Broadcast is going to be around only for "live" stuff e.g. sports.
So the failure of religion is... its inability to perfectly predict the future (i.e. after death)?

Yes, science is imperfect, there are no proofs. Only disproofs.

Would you consider a model that does not perfectly predict the future to be considered a failure ? If I want to send a message across the galaxy and I'm only using Netwon's Laws will it get to where I want it go? Would that be considered a failure? In a word, yes. But it is also a learning experience.

I think this model should apply to religion as well. It is not meant to be taken as a perfect prediction of Godhood, just a theory that we are currently wearing. Hopefully it isn't too far off, but so what if it is?

I really just want people to accept that we hold certain truths to be infallible and they are not. Not even scientific theories. The Standard Model is under constant change.
Show HN: Virtual Branch That’s Beautiful and Sociable
Randy Farmer goes over this concept in detail in Building Web Reputation Systems (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596159801.do).

Google Tech Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn7e0J9m6rE

See also: "YouTube: Five Stars Dominate Ratings" (http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-domina...)
I'm sorry, but I don't get this part:

something.replace /^\/?/,'/'

I'm a little sleepy, so maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't it replace a possible '/' at the beginning of some lines with '/'? Isn't that just a waste of CPU cycles? It effectively does nothing.
The Real Purpose of Big Data: What Is Meant By Situational Awareness?
> I'm looking for constructive feedback on what can make this a go-to replacement for awesome sites like jsFiddle.net and jsbin.com

This seems like the wrong goal. Nobody wants a replacement for an existing site, just because.

To quote Ashton Kutcher: Mark Zuckerberg will always be a better Mark Zuckerberg than you. You won't make a better jsFiddle by trying to be a jsFiddle.

Do something that jsFiddle.net and jsbin.com don't do, or do it much better (read: simpler). Quick idea: git access.
>Entrepreneurs in Y Combinator may be taking a cue from the program’s co-founder, Paul Graham, who in June penned an open letter urging young startups to focus on making money as a hedge against a potential downturn in Silicon Valley [...]

What a crazy idea! Companies should try to make money!
Good point - agreed.
See http://technomancy.us/163 for more discussion.
The 12 Big Themes at Y Combinator's Summer 2012 Demo Day
"..the smell of death" isn't ageism??? I happen to agree that any good conference's should represent a cross-section of that industry. But the fact is that software development in particular tends to discard older professionals as not valuable.
Author here - I can make an observation about old people because I myself am 49 years old. I'm not making a value judgement about older people. That would be ageism. I'm observing that the attendees "agile" events tend to be older than most programmers, and even most IT staff. That's just demographics. Why is that? That affects a lot of things.
I suppose I understand, but his science books (which all of them are, save for "God Delusion") are top notch. If you want to understand Evolution, there's no better writer on the topic.
It's not a terrible article at all. It's a suboptimal solution but the article is pointing out what's wrong with 5-star rating systems. It's labelled as a "response", not as a solution to all our earthly rating problems.
3 Steps To Save $1 Million Through Tools Like BaseCamp
I usually vote up Agile attacks, because I love to hear developers talk about the difference between good and bad Agile.

But it's getting a little old. It seems the world is full of cranky, half-informed folks who get a little coffee in them and suddenly are ready to make grand pronouncements about the entire state of things (Love the self-recursion here)

Seriously, one last time. Agile is best practices around iterative and incremental development. It's not a standard, it's a marketing term. Because it's not a standard, criticizing it is like criticizing "good ice cream". What's good ice cream? Any damn thing you'd like it to be. Perhaps the author has a larger criticism of how stupid we all can be when implementing change. If so, get in line. There are a lot of us.

Scrum is a standard, and it's not changing anytime soon. You can call that a good or bad thing, but it's a very small subset of Agile, so it sounds more like a separate topic to me than the entire world of Agile.

I hate the way we implement change in technology organizations. Part of the problem we have, unfortunately, is that everybody feels themselves an expert on stuff they read about in a book and maybe saw it done badly a couple of times.

The more I think about this article, the more I feel like it's 95% marketing and 5% fluff. Apologies to the author if they are serious, but something is a bit off here. Not worth flagging by any means, but I'm not upvoting it.

ADD: Bit of a meta-note. Just this morning I wrote a story on some ideas about how to handle Subject Matter Experts in Agile teams. (shameless plug: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/08/who-moved-my-... ) The use of the word "Agile" in my article was very useful: it identified the topic as best practices around SMEs in iterative and incremental work. It is a dry topic, and I didn't claim to have all the answers, and it was more narrowly-targeted, so it didn't get a lot of traction. That's understandable.

But what I see happen over and over again is that wild hand-waving criticisms get a lot of traction on place like this because they can emotionally engage a larger audience. Practical targeted stuff? Not so much. So for the average developer who's just out of school and never has worked on an Agile team? I'm not sure they're receiving a very balanced look at things if all they read are from places where things are voted up or down based on emotional impact. It's another interesting and counter-intuitive side-effect of the voting/ranking system.
Lifehacker and other multinational blogs should take note as well.

The cynic in me wants to tell you that you'll only learn Japanese better if you immerse yourself ;)
Well said. I don't understand why people shy away from this mindset. There is nothing wrong with running something successful and living a full life.
3,000 Smart Cars Wirelessly Communicate With Each Other In Largest Ever Test
I think a reasonable view is:

A] Unauthorized copying is rampant.
B] This is not a problem; profitable business exists regardless.

The most interesting part of the above statistic in my mind is how it shows heavyhanded copy controls have absolutely no effect. So you may as well not bother.

The software industry is not and has never been under an existential threat from unauthorized copying. These numbers are solid evidence that it is possible to have a booming, profitable software industry despite a 95% unauthorized copying rate.
I'm not a big fan of agile either but "over 40" == "the smell of death"? Seriously? Not a convincing, or classy, opening line. And this was posted by the CEO of Assembla.
How is that easier than using a credit card?
So can someone recommend a Ruby (edit: ideally Sinatra/Sequel, not Rails) app one could look at with a more principled test suite? I'm coming from a more traditional OO background and jumping into Ruby. It's good to see I'm not alone in finding this militant pragmatism somewhat off-putting, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
Thanks for the backup. Tom is totally on the mark.

Every time I encounter a conversation about healthcare in the US, all I do now is ask if the other party has ever tried to purchase private coverage for their family on the open market. You have no standing to discuss the true situation in this country until you have.

I did it 7 years ago and it was hell. Absolute hell. I can only imagine it's gotten worse since then.

To add a data point, I dug out the medical rate information from my offer package three years ago. The Family PPO premium was $17,000 annually, of which I paid $9600. The Family PPO with $5K HSA was $12,500 to my employer, $5000 of which I would have had to pay. At the time I was easily consuming $5K+ of services for my children, and I had awful experiences with a previous HSA, so the normal PPO was my choice. The rates have jumped 30% since then, and my employer has absorbed most of the jump.
Taking them at their word on their statistics (seems reasonable as citricsquid pointed out based on interviews with the World of Goo developers and CD Projekt), I wonder how that would look broken down by country.

That is to say, is piracy really that rampant in the US, or are these numbers inflated by distribution in countries where games/movies are pirated and sold in hard copy form on the street or in shops? Which is worse for piracy, the ability to anonymously download the game via bittorrent, or being able to feel psuedo-legitimate about paying real money to a real person on the street or in a shop for a burned copy?
Video games for example - runtime, tools, etc. We had to optimize our tool pipeline to parallelize things like dxt compression, vertex welding, mip-map creation, filters, etc. as part of the pipeline. Since there were other restrictions, that we couldn't not safely run two or more assets to be converted at the same time, we chose data parallelize (where possible) the actual asset convertion. OpenMP was used for that and helped a lot (VS2008, then VS2010).

Since the process was reading, process (data parallelization), writing - and reading was much bigger than writing (you read big model, animation, or texture files, and write ~8x smaller), it was "parallelized" by prefetching files in the file cache reading them in a second thread in advance.

Allowing only one writer to the HDD turned out to be beneficial (for cases like RAID SSD you can do multiple writers efficiently but this is rather pricey).