skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unit tests take a little time to write, sure. But look what you get for your investment:

(for the sake of this discussion I'll avoid subjective issues such as improved design)

1) Faster feedback cycle - if you're developing new code you can run a single test and check inputs/outputs very quickly. If you're testing by refreshing a page, or shudder, restarting your java server, you're going to have to wait far longer to find out if your code changes work as expected.

2) Reduced risk when making changes to the code base - the risk increases the closer you get to your data store as the amount of dependent code increases. The only way to reduce risk without unit tests in place is to not change any code i.e. you have to keep building on top (see the open/closed principle). This inevitably means that your code is going to introduce duplication as you can't refactor it out where appropriate. The other option of course is that you just risk it and hope to god that your manual QA testing will catch any problems before your users do.

It's also worth noting that the cost of adding unit tests isn't fixed, it's dependent on

a) experience

b) the tooling available for your language

From personal experience I find adding unit tests in ruby takes very little time. This means that benefit 1 in particular kicks in far sooner. Currently I feel it's faster for me to write a piece of code with a unit test than without.
Play table tennis in your browser
Prioritization For Startups
The way I've seen it is that the quest for meaning is something to give up, to let go of, and so accept the joy of a transient experience. It is like experiential art: part of the point is that it will only happen once, for no reason whatsoever. You can either be sad that life is frivolous, or you can marvel that something so complex as this cosmos exists for no reason at all.

Sometimes I look around a busy store and think about the massive coincidence in all these independent intelligences having come about and came to be here right now, buying detergent, and I am overwhelmed with the beauty of it. Not because it means anything, but because it doesn't have to. It just is, like fractals or recursion, and just like those forms of emergent beauty, that awe makes me happier than I could ever be striving for something that doesn't exist.

I'd recommend looking into Buddhism and ignoring the bits about reincarnation and karma; the rest of it is basically Nihilistic and still leads to contented, happy lives (after all, the ultimate reward in some branches is total annihilation.) I personally assume that the purpose of doing good things is because we have a choice: we can make the world better or we can make the world worse. With no reason to do one over the other, what kind of asshole chooses to make the world worse? Especially since they then have to live in that worse world. It's just stupid.
What if you learnt Lisp?
... which is just re-using your code in a slightly different context.
I'll preface this with the fact that I know that people will see me as being cold or just generally not agree with my opinion but I am going to share it with you all anyways.

I have experienced this first hand. I have attempted suicide twice in my life and have gotten help for it. Because of my experience, I think I have come out of it with a different view which is this:

Suicide is somebody's choice and theirs only to make. Does it affect others? Yes, of course. But I still believe that it is up to the individual to make that choice. I remember thinking after my attempts and hearing how it is a "selfish way out" that the my family too, was being selfish, for I was suffering and medication and therapy just wasn't doing anything yet they selfishly wanted me in their lives just as I wanted to end my life and stop all of the pain.

A few other things that I just want to throw out there because I'm experience an odd flood of emotion. The assumption that suicide is bad is solely based on the notion that life is better than what lies beyond, which is something we just don't know. Also, people call suicide the cowards way out or giving up. I just don't see that. To me, it is just not delaying the inevitable. We all die. It is a fact.
I was very disappointed that it didn't even preload the images. Watching the spinner most of the time makes for a crappy UX.
3D CSS Folding Scroll
Any Screenshot for the same??
Other users also mentioned about this free extended credits..
I have the app on my phone which I use primarily for notifications and then browse touch.facebook.com to actually interact with people.

The mobile app experience is that bad.
Afghanistan bans YouTube over anti-Islam film | The Australian
If they were serious about security, they'd do without JIT in their own browsers too. But that would be silly.
Going to take a look now. Looks very interesting and useful. Will leave a donation if I learn from them.

BTW, your anki link doesn't point to the anki flashcard viewer site.
Do you consider distros that rm -rf /tmp on startup to be broken? If not, why not?
I am one of those people that had the native app installed and opted for using the web version instead. Why? We all know why!
Very nice, though a couple of things immediately jump out:

First, no https. I think it's something you owe your less technical users.

Second - no non-social way to sign up. Personally, I find it annoying when I can't use simple email/username+password login. I don't really want to give up my entire social graph+data just to try something out. I realize this might be necessary for your business model, but you can offer me the option to add my social data later on, and I will if I like your service.
Bath Salts: A Users Extraordinary Experience
Starter Project Template for Node.js + Jade + Twitter Bootstrap
Exactly this. I was in GoonFleet several years ago and was always amazed at the crazy behind-the-curtain machinations were going on all the time when I was just a newbie. But VR was a good guy and a good poster, and loved his job. He posted as much information as possible about new job postings in the Foreign Service Information department and answered everything that was thrown his way.
True, they could have played the "we're getting copied verbatim" card better, and only sue for relevant very technical patents.

They could also just not sue. They could win their case in the court of public opinion. After all, they are the marketing experts.
My girlfriend uses the mobile web version of Facebook on a semi-dumb slider phone (it might be some variant of Symbian). I find it baffling because the browser is so terrible and the screen is 320x240, but she's perfectly happy with it. She never uses it for any other sites. I wonder if Facebook has an unusually high number of users like that. The demographic would be invisible to the rest of the web community because those users never leave Facebook.
Firstly Fedora (<= 17) doesn't do this. It has a tmpwatch cronjob which deletes files after 10 days (/tmp) and 30 days (/var/tmp).

Secondly, no I don't think it's broken. But it doesn't in any way affect the fact that as a last resort I can reboot in single user mode and grab the precious mutt file before it gets deleted.
I like how an off the cuff response to a jokey piece of pseudocode gets decent responses. And people say Hacker News has gone downhill.

I like pre-increment due to the speed aspects as well, but it took ages to break out from the university training of "use post-increment for most situations", which is frankly baffling.
$10 for a sticker? $40 for a t-shirt? $1000 for a skateboard?

You are not "buying a sticker" or a t-shirt. The offer is "donate to this project and receive a 'thank you gift'." This is referred to as a "premium" and can be seen in the USA in Public Radio fund drives: "Give $60 and get an NPR mug" they are not "selling really expensive mugs," they are soliciting donations and giving gifts or "premiums" in exchange.

A premium is, basically by definition, worth much less than your donation. Giving a premium with a $100 cash value for a $100 donation would not be a good way to raise money. ;)
That's an exaggeration - I live and work in Spain, and do a fair amount of work with public administration clients, and they definitely do know about open source software, both Linux and Open Office etc.

There's certainly a high level of ignorance amongst teachers as to what OS they're using, but that mirrors society in general - and in most cases if you give them a system that works, with the software they need, they'll learn it pretty fast. I don't think they're "hooked up" to Windows in particular, I get the feeling the word "Windows" basically means "operating system", it's a generic word without any real tie to Microsoft.

What I do find surprising is the number of computers per school, in Andalucia - 110 workstations per school? Seems like a lot, and knowing the local politicians it wouldn't surprise me if 50% (or more) of them weren't "virtual"...
I can't speak for others but I have an iPhone and choose to only access Facebook through the mobile site. Two reasons:

1. I prefer not to allow Facebook to run a native app on my phone. Various reasons boiling down to not trusting it to act in my best interest.

2. Poor performance of the iPhone app -- I hear the new version is supposed to be better but that still doesn't solve problem 1.
One way to look at it is that optimising for testing is optimising for correctness
I wasn't even aware we had a programmers day, so I've spent my programmers day cleaning up after someone who's getting no jelly and ice cream at this programmers party.
Really well written and really depressing.
Thanks for the clarification. I got confirmation on this from Ryan Zezeski as well. Riak-search used to be built on Lucene, but now it's all built by Basho, using Lucene's query syntax.
https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/desktop/

http://www.ubuntu.com/business/desktop#services

On the other hand, Windows comes with pretty good self support for the end user out of the box via multiple professionally developed and maintained channels.
> hell, even twitter was down recently

You seem to think Twitter has a strong reliability record.
Eliezer, I believe you just created the Yudkowsky Ambition scale.

My startup, http://automicrofarm.com/, rates between a 3 and a 5, depending on how successful it becomes, in my opinion.
I agree it can be difficult, and these things do change drastically over time. The NAACP was founded at a time when "colored" was not considered derogatory, and they haven't changed the name since, for a number of reasons. But if you go around talking about "colored people", you will get lots of weird looks.

Beyond simple political-correctness, though, the most important thing is to understand how our language affects people. A major problem with "Deaf-mute" (and also with "colored" and "oriental") is that these terms are oversimplifications at best, and drastic misrepresentations at worst. They're not just words - they represent actual cultural misunderstandings.

With the Deaf, for example, the core misunderstanding is usually thinking of deafness as a medical disability. It comes as a surprise to most people that the Deaf do not generally consider themselves "disabled", but instead possessing a different human experience. This is difficult, I think, for a hearing person to imagine if they have not met and interacted with a Deaf person.

Anyways, that was a very long-winded way of saying that it's not just about finding the most politically-correct term to use - it's about finding terms that describe the world as it actually is.
The Everywhereist's 25 Best Blogs of 2011
I'm a couple years into full time MacVim use. At this stage I'm simplifying and dropping plugins in favor of mastering builtins. I'm also separating graphical config from standard and working on a repeatable system to push a barebones config up to new servers as I access them.

So I'll pass on this plugin for the time being. That said, this new blog is fantastic and I'm bookmarking all the articles for later.
> Except they have those same posts on the desktop version in addition to farmville and normal ads.

Yes, but they didn't have anything like it on mobile until just recently. The iPhone app was zero revenue. It is now non-zero revenue.
Not just anecdotally -- plenty of studies confirm this. Some people -- 30% of the people by some estimates -- simply suffer from fructose malabsorption. This means that when they eat foods with excess fructose (even fruit), they fail to properly absorb nutrients.

In particular, individuals who suffer from fructose malabsorption fail to absorb tryptophan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose_malabsorption

Tryptophan deficiency is extremely common in depressed individuals: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2148339

Tryptophan is a serotonin precursor, so to anyone who has ever taken an SSRI, it intuitively makes some sense that it could be related to happiness.

Sadly, no one wants to be told that their diet is a problem, or that they have to do all the hard work of changing their diet. They just go for a pill. Which wouldn't even be so bad, if the pills we made were truly effective and side-effect free. But they aren't.
> There's no equivalent to this behavior in any other vehicle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puLeE7sESeI
I agree. The landing page leaves much to be desired.

I've read over it a few times and I still have no idea what your service does or why I would want to use it.

Please consider revising your copy to focus on the benefits you're providing to me. What problems are you solving for me? Why is using GoodFilms going to make my life easier or better?

Good luck to you. Congrats on launching and I hope you do well with this.

Cheers.
Purposeless unit tests are a waste of time. These are tests against your compiler or external frameworks. For example:

@Test
testAddUser() {assertNotNull(new User("columbo").save())}

Wahoo! the ORM works!

The biggest problem I have with unit tests is they tend to be

a) just testing frameworks (crud) and not much else

b) so heavily built on mocking that changing them is like redesigning a wool sweater. These tests tend to examine how the code was written, not necessarily what the expected output is (oh shoot, I need to mock up five more objects to make this test pass... hey look at that, this test doesn't even check what should be returned. Nice)

c) there is no context into or out of the unit test. The assertions are vague, it isn't clear how I got there, it isn't clear where I'm going (testXMLOutWithInProgressUsers ... what is the xml for, who are the in progress users... what is next in this chain of events)

d) the things that REALLY need unit tests don't have them because they are too complex to write (ah, that whole system that runs a nightly bash script, takes in a stack of csv files from the client and converts it in our database... yeah, that's not tested).

With all that said, tests are invaluable, but they need to actually, you know, TEST something.

I like nodejs in that respect. It takes me seconds to fire up the webserver and test the rest api. I don't mock objects, I pass values directly through the api and check the expected results. I like this because it shows the next user what the api actually looks like and I'm testing the full stack (In my experience controllers are notoriously undertested, mainly because you need the full stack running). Since the application is really just an api this means that I'm able to test everything equally, from batch processes to CRUD.
Apple IPhone page is down
Holy schmaloly, that actually is a 3 if it works.

Anyone else got 3 or higher?
What annoys me is that on Heroku, if I need more "Web dynos" or more "Worker dynos", the price climbs really fast. I.e. From that page, http://www.heroku.com/pricing#24-24 it costs 1500$/month... whereas on my Linode, I can do whatever I want, add as much database/workers/web server as I want, and the price is still 20$.
Defrag Your Brain With a Spark File
IPhone 5, new iPod touch, and iPod nano leaked through Apple search results
And yet it worked!
Wrote a notification system for Lua. Nothing exactly challenging but something I plan on posting on github to save other programmers ~30 minutes.
Citation needed.

I only found this, about limited ad revenue sharing: http://paidcontent.org/2010/03/26/419-androids-secret-sauce-...
I was in TEST the entire time I played Eve (from day 1 of Dreddit until about a year later). I don't think I ever spoke to him, but had small indirect interactions - being in the same system during a siege, listening to him on voice chat, buying items from him in VFK.

He was a legend, and it's hard to overstate the impact he had on the game. His actions and words could and did affect the fates of literally tens of thousands of Eve players (really, most of the population). He was a large part of the reason Eve has the rich, complex, and unique metagame it has. It may sound silly... but for everyone who played, these things mattered.

I'm at a loss for words. RIP.
Example of exactly when to use hard disk and when to use tmpfs:

User browsing the web for a month without rebooting. Flash stores temporary files in /tmp/. For a month straight, Pandora is pumping out songs to /tmp/ as a cache. 43829 minutes in a month, imagine an average of 3 minutes per song that's 14609 songs, at an average 1.5 megabytes per song that's 7304 megabytes that's 7.13 gigabytes. Probably shouldn't be stored in RAM.

On the other hand, you have ganglia clusters of about 2,000 hosts. You have multiple gmetad's collecting data from different data sources and pooling it into your web interface box. It's updating ~10,000 tiny files every 30 seconds. Your i/o wait and system time is through the roof. You move the place gmetad writes to a tmpfs mount, and rsync to the disk every minute. Suddenly the i/o and system times are at 0.01%.

Tmpfs for /tmp/ is considered harmful, but extremely helpful in other cases.
This "journalist" puts 1 single Chinese company under a microscope and incites people of first world nations to pick up their pitch forks and torches in protest. Sure the conditions at Foxconn are terrible in comparison to my world view, but I'm not Chinese and my world view is irrelevant here. You know how I know this article is trash? This statement right here: "It also appears that windows have had bars put over them in an attempt to cut down on suicides." The suicide thing was covered pretty well recently and my recollection was that the workers of Foxconn were threatening suicide in a round about way of collective bargaining. Foxconn handled the situation very poorly and it's been a huge fiasco ever since. My understanding from the follow-up articles I read is that there is nothing abnormal about actual suicide rates at Foxconn when compared to any other company.

Let's be real here. What matters is how Foxconn compares to other Chinese factories. For all I know, Foxconn could be providing better pay, better living conditions, and better benefits than every other Chinese company. However, since there's nothing in this article to give me a better perspective, I have no way of knowing. There's no reason to expect Foxconn to act any differently than any other Chinese company. The issue here is the Chinese government and their lack of concern for fair and equal treatment of workers. Don't blame Foxconn simply because they make Apple products when they are doing the same thing as every other Chinese company.

Also, what's with this fixation on Foxconn and Apple? Foxconn does a whole hell of a lot more than just assembling ipads and iphones. I'm sure Apple accounts for but a small fraction of their total revenue.
Does anyone know a good tutorial for go ? I tried a couple (including the official one) and I always stopped midway because the way the concepts were introduced seemed unnatural.
If you don't want to click "Next" for each damn blog, here's the full list sans BS:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29...
This is really sad (I remember trying to play EVE from Baghdad, but the latency made combat really painful, so instead I just read kindle books...).

I wish DoS had more "continuous" force protection levels; they seem to go from ~nothing (relying on host nation) to absurd overkill, with nothing in between, unlike DoD and others who have multiple levels.
Thanks a lot for your clarification and for the very interesting link!
Nuclear Bomb Explodes Underwater
Thanks for pointing out the url problem, I've taken care of it now.
it is a underpaid sweat shop worker in a developing country or a robotic manufacturing in a developed nation, one thing for sure manufacturing jobs are not coming back to America.

there is empirical evidence to suggest very successful companies get more bad press, Apple(for foxconn working conditions), Amazon(for temp warehouse jobs) being leading example.
Any chance you can email me a screenshot of this? Happy to blank out the name. It would be very useful as a source for a follow-up story.
emil@thenextweb.com
Few years back, this guy (Ramar Pillai) fooled the whole country and if i remember correctly even got the audience from Indian PM and State Chief Minister. Probably the best pitch ever :).

He claimed he can turn water into fuel using some herbs :).

http://8ate.blogspot.com/2009/09/pramar-pillai-herbal-fuel-m...
Can't tell if joking....
> since you have more rubber-to-road surface area

I don't see how that's possible with solid wheels with such a smaller diameter.
I'd disagree. I thing Western civilization and Enlightment values do face an existential threat from extremism. Your opinion of "us vs them" is just another example of it.
What is Cordyceps Sinensis
Facebook created a very specific version of their site for dumbphones a while ago, I think an article I saw about it said it was targeted at places like Africa etc where mobile phone use is becoming common, but computer usage isn't. Which makes perfect sense really, there's a much larger percentage of the worlds population that use phones over computers in less developed parts of the world. They're a growth segment, no point blocking them when you can hook them now.

Edit: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/free_mobile_facebook_wi... there we go, Facebook Zero.
Man Helps Raise $703,833 for Bullied New York State Bus Monitor
I forwarded this to my boss. Waiting for approval.
It's not about jobs (to me), just about quality of life, which means educational and cultural level of people around (plus weather, which is harder to fix) - these 2 things are enough to fix everything else around with time.

I'd like to meet people who don't qualify for the now-present Canada's immigration barriers (quite mild point-based one, which essentially means having decent English, higher education, and some work experience), as little as possible.

Sure startup founders (even if their startups - real ones - will fail) are a very positive addition to any society. But people who could use loopholes in law to get in pretending to be founders are mostly not.
Let's Play: asdf
That is awesome and I really hope you can pull it off.
Top 12 TED Talks for Entrepreneurs
Big words. The Internet is full of windbags asserting we need to make a difference. Notice how none of these people ever seem to attempt to do so? They usually limit themselves to vacuous back-of-a-cornflake-packet, trendy posturing like this.
Thanks so much! Sounds fascinating - what's your service called? Would love to see how you've approached that challenge - I know for us it took a lot of iterations!
Good point! The stop will never be instant... and you'd better have good grip on your shoes, too.

While I think this product will be pretty neat, I can't see it revolutionizing transportation simply because longboarding requires a good amount of mental energy in comparison to a scooter or bike. But I have to admit, it is seriously fun, and the sensation of gliding is awesome.
We made the mistake of buying a ton of reserved instances up front which we have been stuck with because we moved on to a different instance with the high IO. We have been complaining to them about the need for a RI secondary market at all the AWS events we could attend