skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.rttsweb.com/research/studies/study_functionalTest...

"...automated test suite saved the client 117 days of manual effort per testing cycle."

Sure, it takes more time to construct any given feature with unit tests versus a completely untested solution. However, any time you need to change the code, add a feature, or change something it interacts with, you are saving an incredible amount of time both in testing and the prevention of bugs discovered in production.

I really don't understand how, in the long run, automated testing can't save you time. If you don't think so, you obviously haven't maintained any software.
Precious photos disappear
Yahoo Mail becomes a social network
Facebook Clocks Five
the problem with freelancers...is the programmers get overwhelmed. A crappy little app that would take someone decent 2 weeks to program, will end up taking 8-10 months. Because the guy is juggling your project with 20 other ones.

But yeah, if you have no other option freelancing sites are the way to go. At least this way you can get the basic site up, and then have something to offer to get a decent programmer as a co-founder.
Vancouver HN February Meetup
For those who might want to cut to the chase:
http://posterous.com/help/bookmarklet/
I would just pick one project and focus on it, learn and implement it... then the others will become easier and easier.

Might want to do the one you are least interested in first, since the code quality will probably not be too good.
How Amateur Sleuths Spot Satellites
Pure Python C-like compiler suite released (Immunity MOSDEF)
It's not exactly a nit. Greenspun's worldview has been proven wrong for two centuries.

Also, Greenspun seems not to be aware that wealth is correlated with improved environmental conditions after a certain point.

If this short post had something to offer besides unnuanced hostility, I might be more inclined to forgive its errors.
Yeah but there were many more links over the last few days from two different sides of an argument who both have very good points and frankly, it's not adding anything constructive anymore, it's just people jumping on the blog wagon.

I actually took a screenshot of when those two links were right next to each other, wish I had saved it...
I'm sure that there are women out there who are better programmers than I am (probably thousands of them!), but - as Camille Paglia argues - the bellcurve of female drive and talent is narrower than the bellcurve of male drive and talent. There are a lot of great sociobiological reasons for this - for example, something like 90% of women reproduce, but just 50% of guys do. Guys are driven to find and conquer hard challenges in part to gain access to fertile women. This translates into behaviors like studying programming for years, working long days, etc.

Also, it's hard not to believe that a larger percentage of men have the mathematical / analytical mindset that is a prerequisite for most IT jobs.

The politically correct will worry at this question for decades, because they're incapable of seeing the answers that are right in front of their noses.
Draw a map of the WWW?
I've been here for some time now. HN has changed, but so far the change is not very bad. In fact i think that we were able to steer the change in the community in a good way. HN is a living system, we see imperfections, good, that means we're still alive. Living organisms change all the time, we only have to do it right, so far we've done it well. Discussions like this one are a good sign, were not slacking off and leaving the site to just go downhill.
Neat. Small nitpick, on my browser (mozilla 3.0.5) the button on the submission form hangs outside of the popup.

This looks a bit like 'furl', I really like your clean layout and no-nonsense approach of the site.

I'll give it a spin for a while and see if it sticks. Congratulations on a job well done!
I very much agree that it is an interesting bit of news, I've been meaning to download the dataset and play with it for a while now. The only point I wanted to make was that there is another side to this story. An adequate summary can be found here: http://sphinn.com/story/80142 - I read the HN terms of use and didn't see anything that specifically forbids promotional stuff, but this tool is associated with a company that develops linkbait for a living. I don't mean to imply that this would make dotbot less noteworthy/interesting, but I am suspicious of linkbait. I lurk on HN because, frankly, much of the information sources in my industry are crapped up with "social media optimized" thin content. Again, sorry if I overreacted. This is my second post here and I don't mean to make a nuisance of myself.
I don't think anyone ever accused geeks of really meaning sexy when they say sexy. More like, to each his own.
Sorry, do you mind if I get a screenshot from you? Haven't seen that before on my own computer, but definitely want to resolve it asap.

garry [a.t] posterous.com
Slow down, take what spare time you have and learn django or ruby on rails. Go through some tutorials, struggling and learning as you go. By the time you graduate you'll be so much more powerful, and glad you did.
They have also added:

- Elastic Block Storage

- An SLA

- Windows

- Static (Elastic) IPs

- New datacenters

- Geographic targeting (Regions)

without raising the price.
"Keynes suggested stuffing bills into bottles and burying them down mineshafts."

Can someone explain how such an action would help the economy?
Hmm, I can't imagine this working very well for the iPhone with no background application support, unless it makes it into the real Maps application and they provide an option to broadcast while it's not running.
Xah Lee: programming's most prolific troll. He's jobless, living in a car in the SF area, and probably has a restraining order preventing him from approaching any employees of Wolfram Research (the only language he likes is Mathematica, apparently).

For great laughs, check out his page on hiring a hooker in Nevada.
I think a day of brilliant optimism would be a real treat. Optimism without brilliance may be a bit much. But brilliance especially with optimism added sounds great.
This thread was specifically made for conversation about how those 3 comments were voted, I dont think that counts as "bragging"

While they didnt add "in my opinion" I think its more than obviously implied that it was his opinion that he was stating, and was not attempting to speak on behalf of anyone else.

and the original poster stated that comments detract from the conversation should be downmodded, I agree that all 3 were somewhat insulting and added no value to the conversation, while I may be a relatively new user, they all seemed out of spirit (in my opinion)
If you're in it for the money, then you shouldn't be in the game to begin with.

My portfolio was down 10% last year. But I'm not panicking. I invest for fun. Other people I know who invest because they wanted to build their wealth lost assloads more than I did. They never really did like investing, and they don't want to hear me when I talk about economic projections.

Sure, compensation is a good thing. And we should lift the restriction when this bailout crap is over. But I really think that the geek community-- with all its libertarians --places waaay too much emphasis on short term monetary compensation.

Here's a better idea. In tech, we get stocks right? That vest over time? Lets give these exec stocks, that don't vest until 10 years AFTER they're out.
Is this NYT?
I absolutely agree everybody, including the great ones, should write unit tests.

I think the storm in a programmer's tea cup here is exactly how much unit testing do you need.

Joel is accusing Kent Back and Robert Martin of wanting to write a whole testing framework for each and every little get and set method.
First screen shot shows Montreal!
I think that political correctness should only go so far, and to me any one of these is a waste of breath. I've never met anybody that figured master/slave is racially insensitive, since slavery has nothing whatsoever to do with race. Slave as used in this context comes according to the dictionary (merriam webster in this case) from this meaning "3 : a device (as the printer of a computer) that is directly responsive to another" , not from the one-human-dominates-another meaning.

As for 'blacklisting', that's just too funny to even take serious. Obviously according to people that have a problem with the word 'black' in any context we should probably eradicate the word from all uses, it says more about those that are so sensitive than about the words.

Either this is a very clever troll or an extreme case of oversensitivity to 'hidden meaning' in ordinary words.

George Carlin said it best, there are no bad words, just bad intentions.
Ask HN: What sucks about snow shovels?
I'm tasked with a creative assignment to create a new and original snow shovel. What do you hate about the handle-having bastards?
I wrote something like this a while ago and just got reamed by all the CSS koolaid drinkers.

But unlike Sass it doesn't abandon the cascade, and things look a lot simplier, at least to me. I guess because its in LUA it wasn't cool enough.

It did get the "one of the best of the month" at smashing magazine, whatever that means.

Writing massive stylesheets made me write moonfall, and after I did that, I found that its easier just to keep your css simple. And then I never needed it.

Find it at http://moonfall.org/
How to grow your own fresh air
I have the feeling that if someone did come up with a better alternative it would fail due to the sheer inertia of the current system.
Greenspun is also wrong about what singularity is.
Afaik its the point where human as intelligent agents build a better intelligent agent than ourselves. That new agent will do the same ,leading to agents of increasing intelligence.
There isnt a date fixed on that event (as he says) and the debate is still whether this is posible or not.
You have an interesting essay on that at
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/WER2.html
ok, it's underway. Let me know when you think it's fixed and I'll try again.

in case the mail doesn't get through:

http://files.ww.com/files/52969.html
Than. ;)
A Startup Never Closes
it is cold every time I use it ;)
I do quite a bit.

Since I visit here every day I get to know the styles and personalities of other frequent posters, I have seen many comments by them, and seen a lot of their blogs.

This adds to the conversation, since I can often tell why usernames I recognize argue in a certain way.

I also often remember previous discussions I've had with certain users. This is a good thing, since I know the intellectual integrity of a user I recognize when a back-and-forth dicussion ensues.
Green Plug's universal power adapter still struggling for support
This might be good for snow shovel news, but not Hacker News.
Mission One: The world's most advanced production electric motorcycle
"We are sorry, but this item is not currently available for your region."

My region is Northern California. Hmmm...
Problem with this system is that it further skews the rewards to early commenters, especially those that play devil's advocate. People who post early already have an advantage since there is less competition for upvotes, and newer comments appear below slightly upvoted comments by default, ensuring better visibility for early upvoted comments. Adding you suggested karma rule would make this even worse.
PG what about reducing new sign ups?
How apt. I'd just finished a blog entry on the sexism I suffer, and have always suffered, as a woman in IT.

"Sociobiological reasons" aside, women in IT are leered at and heckled; their accomplishments are looked over in favour of male colleagues. Others in IT make assumptions and generalisations about their female counterparts without even realising they're doing it.

Women who don't have the mental strength to overcome this eventually get out of the industry (or avoid getting in to it in the first place.)
I use Cocoa Emacs.app. Here's my emacs config, carefully crafted for Rails development:

http://github.com/olegshaldybin/emacs-config/tree/master
I think the problem boils down to the presence of non-hackers in here. It's mostly the non-hackers that abuse the downmodding (anyone who throws a hissy fit like a little girl and starts the abusive downmodding by accusing someone of trolling over that someone expressing a negative opinion of an MSFT product, IS.NOT.A.HACKER . . . that is only an example, but I think it is clear that 99% of hackers are not the delicate, emotional creatures that are into the abusive downmodding)

The solution would be to simply reject submissions that are obviously not hacker discussion material from being posted (yes, hackers are wont to talk about anything in the universe, but please, straight up MBA/Suit garbage HERE? . . . c'mon - a hacker interested in that can go somewhere else to discuss those topics if he/she wants)

The nearly effeminate debate submissions about css vs tables, for example

The MBA/Suit news

Those go, and most of the undesirables around here go. The obvious problem with this is that censoring is both distasteful and can be counterproductive . . . I don't envy the position PG is in.

I say readers protesting abusive downmodding in the threads themselves would be one positive step.
I would see this as an intellectual challenge.
I've filled out this test a few times in the past few years. Result: ICUE (Mad Scientist) or ICUG (Inventor) depending on what mood I'm in when I take it.
After a project succeeds in a large company, people who were tangentially involved come out of the woodwork to claim credit. There is a natural human urge to debunk these claims, but often this just makes things worse if the credit-takers are politically astute.
Isn't this just a point-for-point paraphrase of a Paul Krugman article, about the same co-op? He didn't even cite Krugman, or the journal article Krugman cited for the same story.
Are you proxied?
Maybe because nobody will hire them?
would it help to simply increase the threshold

Priviledge thresholds have been periodically increased by the management. However, the process (so far) has been manual. Threshold-increase might instead simply be automated with code that also calculates karma-inflation.
Loading animations make people perceive it as fast loading?
It has exactly the opposite effect on me; If someone site has to show me loading animation,it's not fast enough. I'm thankful for the animations though in situations where delay can't be avoided.
Prediction markets are established ways of applying collective intelligence to predict outcomes. Kindle is a huge business for Amazon, and potentially for authors, developers, and others as well. Talking about the chances for the release of a 2.0 version next week is a worthy discussion, in my opinion.
Do you know where your kid is? Check Google's maps
1. Joel makes disparaging remarks about Beck and his ideas without understanding those ideas well. If you're familiar with XP, you can see that Joel's argument is with more of a strawman than the substance of Beck's ideas. If not, Joel admits he doesn't really know what he's talking about right there in the podcast.

2. Beck responds, saying that Joel is uninformed and wrong. He doesn't give a lot of specific detail. He's written and said quite a lot already, and Joel's superficial caricature doesn't merit a detailed response.

3. You accuse Beck of ad-hominem.

It's not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with Beck's ideas, and it's not even precisely about agreeing or disagreeing with your accusation. It's that the whole affair is based on a misapprehension, and you're steering the conversation down a sidetrack.

Between your three distractions, the short and simple one-sentence witticism is less damaging than the emotionally charged and loquacious rants. Maybe that explains the votes. $0.02.
Comment from Garry "...possibly later today". Wow!
For Sponty (http://thesponty.com/mit) we write unit and functional (http level) tests for every server side functionality. We use Python, so writing tests is actually fun. This has saved us from many regression bugs, and made our release cycle very short. We can write a feature today, and release it tomorrow.
A recession/depression is the process of liquidating malinvestments and redeploying wealth and labor to economically profitable ventures.

If what you say were true, then we wouldn't be suffering from unemployment. We'd suffer from massive writedowns in our wealth (as we realize our malinvestments) but labor would be redeployed to new ventures. Effectively, we'd be working our assess off harder than before, but receiving a lower quality of life in return.

In reality, however, the economy is not at full employment. If we malinvested before (effectively did useless work), that should be a sunk cost. We wouldn't receive the future benefits we expected from that work, but that wouldn't preclude us from continuing to work. Malinvestment is not a reason for unemployment.

No, we're in a liquidity trap. Option A is monetary policy. That has been tried and exhausted. Option B is fiscal policy. Bring out the helicopters!
Maybe, but it sets a precedent for many other OT intellectual challenges.

I don't want to water down HN. I like the relatively narrow focus here -- I know that when I come to the front page, there are likely a dozen links or discussions that I will want to read. The same can't be said for other communities with greatly expanded focuses.
My bad. I can only assume thats the reason people have been down voting my comment.
This is not in anyway a trial with open source software. FOSS developers work on software that they're familiar with. I doubt very many of them own thin client hardware. They also don't like proprietary software and on the other end of this client is VMWare's closed-source server software.

VMWare is open sourcing this product because thin clients tend to run on exotic hardware and they want to allow manufacturers to easily port and install their client. That ensures that they'll be locked into VMWare's server product.
IT does not require particularly long hours most of the time, and it certainly doesn't require years of study (many IT professionals have never studied it at all). At the same time, many jobs with long hours and years of study have more than 7% female participation.
Am I the only one who hate, hate, hates this style of interviewing?
If people are jealousy guarding their cash for fear of losing wealth on other investments (seriously, what else would you invest in, in this environment?), then printing cash and throwing it around is SO irresponsible that no one can credibly believe their bills will maintain value. They'll spend their cash on goods and services rather than see it's value disappear.
from http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape/help/sources

* Dotnetdotcom.org
* Grub.org/Wikia
* Page-Store.com
* Amazon/Alexa’s crawl and internet archive resources
* Exalead’s commercially available data
* Gigablast’s commercially available data
* Yahoo!’s BOSS API and other data sources
* Microsoft’s Live API and other data sources
* Google’s API and other data sources
* Ask.com’s API and other data sources
* Additional crawls from open source, commercial and academic projects

In my experience, the single most useful feature (main selling point) of the Linkscape tool is that it reports http status codes (for a price) so SEOs can detect 301 redirects, etc. AFAIK, dotnetdotcom.org has the only free, publicly available crawl data which also includes http status codes. Not sure about Exalead and Gigablast but I am pretty sure the other SEs don't release this information. To clarify: I don't have any proof, and things may have changed, but I've read some intelligent speculation (smarter than me) which claims that dotbot/dotnetdotcom.org provides the majority of the data (especially the unique info, like status codes) for the Linkscape tool.
I see. Gotta love netcat.
I completely forgot about ECB! I don't use it with Python (for no good reason), but it was really great for C++ projects. Love ECB.
Creativity in hard times -- a simple reminder
BrightKite does this too, including photo updates.
You guys are seriously amazing. Keep up the good work.
Another argument for not relying too heavily on the cloud. Keep local backups and tell your parents/grandparents/whoever to keep local backups.
I also use Aquamacs and ECB. However, I just upgraded to Aquamacs 1.6, which broke my ECB.
Most singulatarians I speak with understand that thinking about what life will be like after the singularity is fundamentally pointless. One of the definitions of the singularity is the point beyond which extrapolation of current trends becomes impossible.
Most of my discussions with singulatarians focus on the nature of technological innovation and which of several possibilities for augmented or artificial intelligence might come first.
Startup logbook - using Clojure, Ruby/Rails, RabbitMQ
1. They're not motorized. I have a >300' long driveway and live on top of a hill with wicked winds that drift snow. April snow is wet & heavy. There's a reason I have a snowplow on the lawn tractor!
2. The edges should be sharper to get under bits of ice.
3. Need varying widths: 2' wide for the path to front door; 3' wide to shovel the driveway. Gets annoying switching shovels.
4. Hard to find at night after a big storm. Should be fluorescent.

Like I said, there's a reason I have a lawn tractor with a plow blade and another with a snowblowing attachment :-)
Link for those interested: http://www.jemjabella.co.uk/blog/im-a-woman-actually
to get at the money, one would have to employ people and buy equipment.
Google  Latitude "coming soon" for iPhone
The mouse rollover image is brilliant.
I like the idea and I think it is relevant to Hacker News - but is there an article that explains what this means?
If they can keep customers at their current price level, then this just sounds like good economics to me.
Their largest expense could be bandwidth.
That's a very interesting observation. I noticed that too. Short comments are occasionally very useful. Occasionally they're the pin that pops the balloon. "What happens when x = 0?" But usually they're short on length because they're short on ideas.

I wonder if there is some way to discourage short comments? I could for example bias the comment sorting algorithm to put longer comments higher among siblings.
I'm a big fan of the flaming gauntlet picture that accompanies this article.
On the one week in 18 years that I need to use one, I will either not be able to find my show shovel, or not possess one in the first place.
I'm fairly new here, I think I've been around for 3 months or so now. I try not to down vote anything.

A little bit of self control needs to be had to do so. I may disagree about user x's stance on programming language y - but he's adding to the conversation so I have to back away.

However if we're having a discussion and someone decides to randomly throw in a lolcat reference that has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about, I don't have a problem down voting them, dousing them with gasoline and just watching them burn.
How weird, the dupe detection must have some sort of time sensitivity built in... this was posted a couple of weeks ago with the same URL:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441485
I have you guys to thank for getting this on the front page, and for Derek Powazek for writing this. I listened to my inner voice today after having read this post a few days ago ... a potential client that was nickel-and-diming me on scope and price on a fixed project sent over PSD's to be sliced and produced. Scope was - front-end work and interaction design, no back end. So when I asked him about a contact form he wanted written and whether they were prepared with a php script, or something, to post TO ... he got huffy and asked -

"ARE YOU A PROGRAMMER OR WHAT?! YOU SAID YOU WERE A PROGRAMMER"

... orly?

After telling him his tone was inappropriate and disrespectful I told him we wouldn't be working together.

his response? "OK" /hangs up

Haha - goodbye asshole! It was nice not working for you!