skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The podcast covers unit testing and code quality at 45 minutes in or so. I haven't listened to the entire podcast, so I may have gotten this wrong, but it seems like Joel and Jeff made only nuanced statements. No unqualified remarks like "testing is bad" were made, I think.

Joel and Jeff mention that code quality doesn't matter much from a _business_ perspective. In Jeff's case - does the code quality of StackOverflow's internals matter? Probably not. There's no critical information there - so security is not an issue. It makes sense to me that time spent on features is going to be appreciated more by the users than time spent on code quality.

As for the unit tests - I don't think they mean to say that unit testing is a waste of time in general. From what I understand they're saying that unit testing isn't "real actual work". You write unit tests to save yourself debugging and regression testing effort later. If you consider unit tests intrinsically valuable you may end up writing tests for every getter and setter, and that's just
a waste of time. They also mention that unit-tests themselves have to be maintained and updated, and if architectural changes break a significant percentage of unit tests then you have to put a lot of effort in fixing your tests.

The .NET framework was even mentioned as an example where high code quality is incredibly important and where all interfaces should be extensively unit- and regression-tested by Microsoft.

> I’m starting to wonder if anyone should be using any of their products.

So happy users of Fogbugz and StackOverflow should leave because Joel and Jeff are too pragmatic?
That's exactly why I learned to use vi, too.
"Uncle Bob" doesn't provide any really provide proof for his argument any more than Jeff & Joel did. He says "The vast majority of the code I write, I write test first. (And no, Joel, this isn’t a waste of my time.)"

But how do you measure wasted time. Or conversely, how do you measure success?

Jeff and Joel have in the past measured success by user base size and profit. "Uncle Bob" doesn't define success or good use of time.
Windows Vista Speech Recognition demonstration (video)
Ok, I agree on that point. As long as the institutions are honest (or dishonest institutions are punished), a test that forces students to stand on their heels is a good solution.
Already posted recently:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459324
Chandler is the project featured in Scott Rosenberg’s book "Dreaming in Code" -- a thoroughly enjoyable book that explores why software development is so hard. The story ends a little too soon, after several years of experimentation, rewrites and failures. I wonder how they got from spinning wheels to v1.0? Anyone know?
here's an article I wrote on creating them, and having them be recoverable. http://xenoterracide.blogspot.com/2008/04/making-secure-reco...
I wonder if that cost him his job.
I don't think anybody types "porn" when looking for porn.. I could probably join on three more terms and exceed facebook: http://tr.im/dvoc.

Just a thought -- you get what you measure.
Every new facebook, myspace, webmail, etc creates another namespace. It's not necessary to have your name in all of them, and can be a bit of distraction to focus on that.

I second the recommendations of gmail and twitter, although I don't use twitter. If you are thinking of having an SMS interface, especially if you want to beta test that without much infrastructure investment, you might want to also look into www.textmarks.com.
Some want diamonds

Some want love

Some none of the above
[Javascript] is good enough in exactly the way that MS-DOS was good enough.

That's unfair. It's also, to judge by the rest of the post, a snap judgment with more than a little bitterness in it. ("It is good enough that you can deploy hordes of programmers to produce crappy software that sort of works. And that is good enough for making money.")

My project does things with JS that I would never have thought possible. It has not let us down. The regularity and dynamicness of its core are reminiscent of Smalltalk and Lisp. There are annoyances, of course. But the one the OP places the greatest emphasis on - that all hash keys are strings - only caused us trouble once, and in that case we found a simple workaround. I'm curious: have other people here experienced that limitation of JS as a fundamental obstacle?

Given that the OP holds out Java, ActionScript, and that let's-turn-JS-into-Java thing as examples of how it ought to be done, I'm reminded again of how grateful I am that we have something as flexible as JS for making programs that run in a web browser. It's not what I would have chosen, but it's a hell of a lot closer than anyone could have expected, given the rest of computing history. We got lucky.

Edit: Oh, and they - the arbiters of programming correctness and staticness - can't do a thing about it. It's already taken over the world.
i sympathize with the 'human' who made that error. it might be the lowest point of his life. or his greatest!
I agree that grading has nothing to do with teaching people how to think, but that doesn't mean it's not useful. As a student, I would hate not to get feedback on my performance. Also, I've definitely gone over and above on assignments when extra credit was possible, and that has often forced me to learn more than I would have if things were, say, pass/fail. Sure, I could have had the discipline to go above and beyond anyway, but honestly, having an artificial motivator is nice sometimes.

And if I were an employer, it would make it much harder to determine who to interview. If you remove "dehumanizing" numbers like grades and test scores from resumes, how does Google (for example) know whether to interview you, who had a 3.8 CS GPA and a 1550 SAT, over the guy who slept through class, turned in code that didn't compile, and can't explain the difference between = and == (yes, I knew people like this as an undergrad)?

That said, this is all from the perspective of an engineering student. I suppose it's much harder to quantify performance for the liberal arts (which is probably part of what initially pushed me towards engineering, now that I think about it).
My guess is you're not the only MikeM, which leads to yahoo-esque usernames (I'd likely be TimS223 or something), and by that point you may as well allow real nicknames.
Ask YC: Why aren't high-rises built by machines?
I have zero background in construction, but was just thinking about this...

It seems like erecting a high-rise is pretty well-defined by architects and engineers-- so why can't machines be built to automate much of the process? Even if that meant having a very standardized building, it seems like it would be so cost efficient that the aesthetic compromise would be alright.

I know there is pre-fab housing.. it's cheaper, but the savings are negligible. But it seems like economy of scale would really kick in with large buildings. I know it would be expensive initially. Plenty of new R&D and engineering hacks.

I just want a giant machine that I put on a plot of land, feed it concrete and glass like an easy-bake oven, and 3 weeks later I have a giant high rise.

Why hasn't this happened?
I would ask my wife but she is not talking to me. Too much time coding.
In particular,

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
the machine does not have to be big...
it can be a bunch of small spider like machines, or even more groups of machines:
- material suppliers
- welders
- concrete ones (these can be essentially carrying tubes that are pump out concrete)

this might be the next step for building multilevel farms, for agriculture (building huge pyramids).
I've seen mockups/studies done in Japan (I think) that talk about exactly this, spider like swarms of robots moving along rail like structures maintaining/buidling fractal like pyramid structures that are super-tall ;))

the only way to take agriculture/housing to the next level... have multi-level cities (and not what pseudo-multilevel that we have now)...
- rail constructors (rails for welders/material suppliers to move along)
I don't know if I would call his algorithms readable, but they sure are to the point.
I have a single password and a mailinator address for anything that requires login or registration. Fake name, fake password?

Then I have different, good passwords for my login and Gmail. These are easy to type and generated from a passphrase so they look nothing like dictionary words and yet there is a good way to remember them when they're new and my fingers haven't learned them yet. These are about 10+ characters long but those that are easier to type are favoured.

Old passwords from the previous category are often reused for middle-level services such as HN, Reddit, Slashdot, FaceBook and others where I have a long (or expected long) residence and high correlation with my privacy or personality. This is mostly for convenience since my fingers have the kinetic memory for about 6-7 such passwords: something I've typed for months or a year as my login password is something I'll also remember the following montsh or a year as my reddit password. If I forget, I try all recent password patterns that my fingers can remember. Has worked so far.

Online banking login + passwords are nowhere but my head. In fact, I don't know them if someone wanted me to write them down. Instead, my fingers remember them. The login + password are set by the bank. I also have to look up a code from a pad of one-time PINs sent to me by my bank in order to successfully log in to the online services.

Anything else that is either important or rarely used (Amazon, online stock brokerage service etc.) are stored in a file encrypted for my private GPG key. I open it with Emacs, type in the GPG passphrase, let Emacs decrypt the contents and edit the file as usual. Saving will automatically encrypt the data before writing to disk. Looking up a password is a matter of decrypting the file to stdout from the command line and piping it to less. The private GPG key is protected with a passphrase that is about 50 characters long. It is not written anywhere. The passwords in this file are generated by a Perl script I wrote in the 90's. The output of the script is 16 bytes of random characters and numbers.

It seems that I rely a lot on my memory. Most of them are memorised in my fingers rather than the lexical part of my brain. I have maybe ten passwords that I need every week or month, and those are in my head, probably because I can keep them there. In addition, I have several PIN codes I must remember, and I do. (Cell phone PIN, two bank cards, SecurID user PIN, door lock code...)

So, go figure how to hack me.
PageRank, in least in terms of transfer of wealth (only one measure, but at least it is a measure of impact on the world).
Yes, feedback is hugely essential. It's more of a question whether feedback should come as an impersonal mark on a paper that provides minimal direction, or if it should come from a person who knows your unique strengths/weaknesses and can direct you in a way that will help you thrive.

As for SAT/GPA, they are terrible indicators of an individual's effectiveness. Hackers know this intuitively. (because so many of them drop out!) It's this use of artificial measurements that makes "MBA types" so despised.

If those 4 years has been spent developing real projects and interacting with real people (more like an apprenticeship than modern corporate-education) then you wouldn't need artificial measurements because people would graduate with a body of meaningful work.
It does exactly what it says it will, and it does it with style.

Highly recommended. Would corn again.
But the one the OP places the greatest emphasis on - that all hash keys are strings - only caused us trouble once, and in that case we found a simple workaround. I'm curious: have other people here experienced that limitation of JS as a fundamental obstacle?

Yes, any time you want to use a non-primitive type (strings, numbers, etc) as a key to hash map.

But we solved it in Objective-J by automatically giving each Objective-J object a unique "hash" value.

(of course you could do something similar in plain JavaScript, but you'd have to implement it yourself)
The real title is Crisis Theory. Report for the conference in Moderna, Italy, 9 July 2008". The paper that Reaganomics and the huge increase in deficit spending has caused a collapse of domestic savings and a increase is consumer spending such the economy is 25 to 35% larger than is sustainable. The US needs to cut the deficit spending, shrink the economy by 25-30%, and presumably bring back the import spending back home. It does mention that this may not be possible because it will impact the rest of the world.

Well, it has happened and it has impacted the rest of the world. I don't think it will play out the way the paper suggested, because a real depression isn't the proper cure cure for irrational exuberance.

The paper is difficult to read because it is a literal translation from Russian, i.e. Russian economic jargon to literal English. Fore example, I took "emissions" to mean "deficit spending". There are pretty charts, but they are labeled in Russian.

Caveat lector: I read it quickly, so I could have missed the point entirely.
Basic algorithms for arithmetic, when first originated thousands of years ago, have probably had a far more profound effect on the world than any recent computer-based algorithm. Particularly in accounting and engineering, they would have contributed to the ability to have economies that could support large civilizations. The earliest records found of ancient languages are sometimes accounting records.

Interpreting "algorithms in computing" more widely than the questioner meant of course. :-)
Just a thought, but if you got modded down badly, being banned from HN for a few days, with a big banner that tells you why "sorry: your last comment was modded -5, we'll let you back in tomorrow", that might take care of the teaching once and for all.
It did not change the world in the sense that pagerank did, but in 1961 it was an important contribution, because it was simple enough to lend itself to formal analysis.
> please send me your nominations, pointing to ... any evidence for its impact.

I think that's the hardest part of the question.
I feel sorry for the poor sap who's going to get fired for this.
why can't machines be built to automate much of the process [of erecting a high-rise]?

This might be a good place to look for answers: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com

The engineering section discusses construction technology.
Spiders are a fascinating if not slightly scary concept. I would if current construction methods would have to be simplified in order to reduce errors.
I think that's not so. For one thing, a lot of "city dirt" is contaminated with chemicals. The dirt that's supposed to be good for you, is good for you because of it's organic contaminants, not chemical ones.

Furthermore, the specific organic contaminates that make the most difference, apparently, are parasitic worm larvae, which are not so likely to be found in the city, as they come from animal feces. Of course, there are dogs and cats in the city, but I'm more comfortable with cow crap than dog crap, myself, as far as ingesting it. Plus, people worm their pets.
17.3 cents
I almost cried when a unicorn covered up the "cornify" button and I had to stop.
That's spot on, really interesting discussions.
Google's malware filter bug affects Gmail too
Early in my career I implemented a cross reference function using bubble sort and was ridiculed by a Real Computer Scientist. I opted for quick sort, because I wasnt going to expose myself to that here. :-)
maybe you are underestimating the extent to which this is already done? there are machines that eat steel and glass and produce windows and structural elements (wires, carpets, tiles, lightbulbs...)

the economies of scale come from not lugging these machines to every job site.
One point about Keynes theory that if I remember correctly goes something like spend in bad times cut back in good times.

Keynes is overused much like prescription antibiotics.

"Prescribing Keynesianism to some politicians is like prescribing crack to a coke addict. In the 1970s, the patient hit rock bottom. The U.S. had high unemployment, and the Keynesian solution stopped working. The national government spent and spent, but unemployment only got worse. Then came inflation, something Keynesians had no answer for."

The problem is we have been borrowing and spending like crazy both publicly and privately. We've had the accelerator pushed to the floor, how do we go faster now?

Keynes (again as I remember) recommended these fixes for short term problems. Our problem is systematic over spending.

Obama et al. are prescribing aspirin because they believe the patient has a hangover, when the country really needs chemotherapy for debt cancer.

The bad debt that has accumulated needs to be accounted for, losses have to be taken, companies need to go into bankruptcy (which is often reorganization, not necessarily going out of business.)

We can't "cheat" our way out of this with Keynes.
I sure hope Google is more forgiving than that... in the grand scheme of things this is a very minor screw-up.
There have been a few recent developments (I remember hearing about a concrete 3D printer), but it seems that the technology just isn't there yet. The problem is that the robots need to be small (enough to be transportable and reusable), cheap (cheaper than construction workers) and mobile (small => you need many to slowly build up the building). Most robots don't have that level of sophistication yet. All the manufacturing robots are stationary and (relatively) large, and mobility is something of an unsolved problem.

This is not to say that it is impossible, just that I think there are significant engineering hurdles to robots building skyscrapers (maybe smaller houses first?).
This list of Macroeconomist opinion is interesting:

http://www.ambrosini.us/wordpress/2009/01/political-affiliat...

Seems the professional macro guys are ambivalent about the stimulus.

Of course, the only economists' views that will actually make it into policy will be the Democrat economists.
I've got a fever ... and the only cure is more unicorns.
This is bound to "go viral" and have "organic growth"

If I were you I'd start seeking VC immediately. At the end of the day, this idea is so simple, so uniquely brilliant and really well executed that you can worry about a business model after you're done acquiring users.

BRILLIANT!
Cool! Looks like it's been around for over a year:

http://wiki.jruby.org/wiki/JRuby_Compiler
This scheme is hugely flawed.

If you steal a password list from a website you can identify all the passwords generated by this utility (10 characters, uniform distribution over alphanumeric characters) and then simply crack the master passwords with a brute force attack. If you have stolen multiple SuperGenPass generated passwords from the same website, you can crack them all at the same time with no additional penalty. After recovering the master password you can then log into every single online account belonging to the user.

They seem to generate the password hash with simple md5, which is about the worst possible choice they could have made. Any master password which is low entropy enough to carry around in your brain can probably be cracked in a few days at most.
I don't like giving Digsby my login information for everyone of my sites. Especially after they ask you to install 4 or 5 toolbars and spyware.

I'd rather use pidgin or just gtalk.
If you read the article, sounds like it may have come about, in large part, due to an exec accidentally replying-all with an arrogant message that went to the whole company.

I doubt they're interested in paving the way to improve corporate email for corporate email's sake.
I was a fake vi user for a few years before I finally decided to sit down and learn it. What helped me get into the "feel" of vi was finally disabling my arrow-keys and forcing myself to use the hjkl keys for movement. It will suck for the first few weeks but eventually you'll notice a significant increase in productivity. Throw this into your .vimrc:

map <Left> <nop>

map! <left> <nop>

map <right> <nop>

map! <right> <nop>

map <up> <nop>

map! <up> <nop>

map <down> <nop>

map! <down> <nop>
SICP really changed the way I look at computer science. So enlightening: data and commands are interchangeable etc. I was surprised to see so many bad reviews on amazon. Although flipping through them, it seems they just don't 'want' to understand the book :(
Discrete cosine transform and its variants gave us jpeg and mp3
There's a retail version as well - though you're right, most of the sales were on Wii, Steam, and from 2dboy.com - they've done very well.
All this spending - will it not cause inflation? And considering the weakness of the dollar, will the inflation not cause further weakness? And when American goods become so cheap, considering that most manufactured goods are imported, will this not cause an exodus of capital?

I really don't know, since I have no real understand of global economics.
Mostly scope reduction, I think.
The Finite Element Method.

The Fast Fourier Transform.

Max-Flow-Min-Cut. (Ford-Fulkerson)

Simulated annealing.

Carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (the protocol used by ethernet)

And if it counts, dynamic programming, in its many variants. If it doesn't, Dijkstra's algorithm.
I agree. I actually wish git had something more like incremental revision #s
Oh, you're absolutely right of course. I completely overlooked that. In that case, I think that the top two prizes should go to one Fourier transform related algorithm and one algorithm from public-key cryptography.
That comes up in part 2 of this interview. I was thinking of just posting a link to that, but it seemed discontinuous.
I just finished reading a book on this very topic, and recommend it highly.

_Perfect Passwords_ by Mark Burnett, available at:

http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Passwords-Selection-Protection...

It's full of great analysis, as well as a fun table of the 500 worst passwords of all time. :)

(Note: I am not connected with the publisher or author in any way.)
YouTube And Google Earth Demo The Talk Of Davos
Ah, I get you. We haven't needed that yet.
Except that you don't exceed it with the example you cited. Facebook is clearly doing much better than those terms, starting at about 4Q 2008.
yea, I like the glitter! If I could move them around, and if I kept clicking the button they popped up, that would be super cool.

Also, perhaps after overuse, it showed the occasional raincloud?
Except that this version seems to make Firefox massively more unstable.
Don't fret, neither does anyone else.
The problem I have with the idea of "managing the economy" is that we might not even know what that phrase actually means. I often read "economy" and translate that as "runaway complexity." I sense this complexity in a system of such magnitude, involving so many interacting systems, and so many individual actors (many of which are computer programs at this point, I think) that it simply cannot be grasped by any single human mind, no matter the training or intelligence. This is just my sense of this; am I wrong? Someone here, please educate me.
Ask YC: Google registered domains unreachable right now?
I have two domains registered via google apps (registrar is enom). I can't reach them anymore. Is anyone else having the same problem?

Here's some analysis output I got via http://intodns.com

DNS servers responded

ERROR: One or more of your nameservers did not respond:
The ones that did not responded are:
98.124.192.1 98.124.193.1 216.52.184.248 70.42.37.7 69.64.145.225

No SOA, MX, A records. Just dead. How can all these name servers fail at the same time?
I read somewhere that many people use Facebook for some of the same reasons they use porn websites...not even joking.