skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Quite a bit of job postings list TDD as a requirement, in fact, which is silly. It is a bit like requiring vim or emacs.

It wouldn't surprise me if those were pair-only or pair-frequently shops, at which point it makes sense to have a common workflow & toolset across the team. Given the amount of cultural overlap TDD & pairing have (particularly in Ruby-land), this seems at least plausible.

> A couple months ago, in fact, I tripped on a blog post that said (paraphrased): If you do not do TDD, then you should re-evaluate your career as a developer. This is bullshit.

Agreed. However, there's a lot of bullshit on the internet on just about every conceivable subject. Not having read the blog in question, I wouldn't put too much stock in this post representing the opinion of the majority.

> I'm not sure what it is about TDD that make people forget that these things are all tools. You put it in your bag of tricks and pull it out when it makes sense. You don't beat each other to death over what tools they use.

Disputes over tools has nothing to do with TDD and is certainly not unique to it. I would need a spreadsheet or small database to keep track of the varied topics I've seen developers evangelize and/or get into emotional near-venomous arguments over. It didn't start with TDD, and will certainly not end with it.

The appropriate response across the board is typically empiricism, and grounding all discussions in the axiom that Data Wins Arguments.
A software load balancer is coming soon. Don't worry. The hybrid approach (network + app level intelligence) still has some advantages as well.
That's a really good point. So far, the FDA has only managed to pass a nutrition label on meat.
I suspect the reason is that they want people to read the article without popping their intellectual circuit breakers and going offline. There's no reason to blow off 61% of your reading audience by saying the "wrong thing".

I doubt the same topic would be covered in the same evasive way in Europe, where scientific literacy is higher.
LayerVault has posted details on what they felt was infringing and appears to misunderstand (willfully or otherwise) the purpose of a DMCA notice. There is no evidence that artwork identical to that of LayerVault has been used in FlatUI. While some artwork is similar, that is another issue entirely, an issue outside that of the DMCA.
Oh clearly! And how much easier it was back then to simply walk into HP for example, and talk to these people directly.
As I understand it, these guys distinguish between "micro-evolution", such as the current topic, and "macro-evolution", which is the large scale monkey stuff they don't believe in.
If a particular server starts to become overloaded, and it appears there is sufficient capacity elsewhere, then just some of the BGP routes can be withdrawn to take some traffic away from the overloaded server

I'd be interested to hear about the mechanism for determining if there is sufficient capacity elsewhere, and how you avoid a cascading failure.
I'd like to see all of the nutrition information encoded in a bar code so I can scan it with my smart phone. That would make tracking my nutrition easier (provided there was also an app that could make use of that info).

You could then print that barcode on register receipts for food items ordered and on menus -- that would be awesome.
>why not catch these things at every chance you get?

Because it's expensive. It takes time to write and maintain those tests. It takes time to run those tests. If you want to verify that API method works as assumed (and I assume you are talking about an API on an external system, but ultimately it doesn't really matter) then write a test specifically testing that API method.

Testing that method B also works while testing method A is, in my experience, the number one culprit of people writing bad tests. These tests are harder to set up, take longer to run, and are more prone to promoting brittle test code.

Test everything that's important to test, and nothing more. This is true whether you are talking about your entire system, or a single method.
Yes, definitely have that C section performed at home. You definitely won't need the services of a NICU available, either.
Are You Using HTML Source View as a Crutch?
Regarding cancellation of goods bought over the internet, directive 97/7/EC applies in the European Union:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...

Directives are implemented differently in different EU countries and the countries also have the option to impose stricter rules.

In Denmark, consumers have the right to return digital goods such as e-books etc within 2 weeks (provided they haven't started using the product). I have no idea how it is in other EU countries but I would not be surprised if several other countries protect consumers that way.

Most Danish sellers of digital products state in their terms that the right of cancellation only applies until the file (e.g. an e-book) has been downloaded. I am not sure that would hold up in court.

As for VAT, in the European Union this is regulated by an EU directive on the common system of VAT:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CONSLE...
Article 58 and Annex II deal with electronic services (and goods). Also look at the temporary rules in article 357 and forward.

As for taxes, every country has it's own rules and you will probably also have to consult double taxation treaties.

These issues are very complicated. If your website sells in different countries you should probably consult with accountants from each country.
Nope, Web is all custom, iOS is all native, but the data format for the levels is shared.
Ah, I see it now, that makes sense, thanks for the clarification.
Yes, local farmers. Even small farmers and people who have a flock in their backyard generally get there hens from large-scale facilities that routinely kill the male chicks within hours of hatching (usually in terrible ways).
Got to level 7 without much trouble, but started to feel guilty about playing at work :)

Would love to hear more about your technical stack, especially on the web side.

Congrats to shipping.
> The second is that circumvention tools are prohibited.

I don't think "substantial non-infringing uses" should be a standard for tools. These tools are not infringing at all. They do not contain or distribute copyrighted content themselves. In fact they can be small keys, or information tangentially related to the DRM scheme. They can also be various things in various contexts.

I think the entire "anti-circumvention tools" part should be removed, period. It's not even helpful for its original purpose and probably unconstitutional (the government cannot criminalize instructions for violating the law). It's also being abused.
It's very clear who reacted to whom:

"The Software Development Kit for iPhone OS was announced at the iPhone Software Roadmap event on March 6, 2008. [...] The App Store opened on July 10, 2008 via an update to iTunes. On July 11, the iPhone 3G was launched and came pre-loaded with iOS 2.0.1 with App Store support." [1]

"Android 1.0, the first commercial version of the software, was released on 23 September 2008." [2]

"The Android Market was announced by Google on 28 August 2008, and was made available to users on 22 October. Support for paid applications was introduced on 13 February 2009 for developers in the United States and the United Kingdom" [3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history#Version...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play#History
Ion Torrent’s chip-based genome sequencer is poised to revolutionize medicine
This makes no sense.
Those outliers often cause greater than expected effect.

One slacker on a team of 10 people will often drag down the entire team.

Yes, you will always have below average people, statistically. That's pretty much irrelevant.
You can still have a non-relative minimum performance bar.
If people aren't meeting that, you need to deal with that, or else everyone suffers.
There are some things that are worth spending money on. SparkFun is one of those things, they not only sell you things they provide information and product development that allows you to do awesome stuff. If you value the service they provide like making an easily navigable website and providing helpful links to compatible products and providing products that hobbyists use then you should support them
Thanks, I figured that part out.
I was more replying to this response in the context of the grandparent, which made little sense to me at first, and even less sense when he edited it in some strange attempt to distinguish between "copying", which he seems to be accusing the Flat-UI creator of, and "copyright violation", the legal prerequisite for filing a DMCA takedown, which is what the rest of the comments on this post seem to be discussing.
Wanelo - http://www.wanelo.com
San Francisco, CA
Full-time, H1-B

Wanelo (pronounced Wa-Nee-Lo) stands for Want, Need, Love. It is a community marketplace where people can discover, curate and buy unique products for friends, family or themselves. By creating a platform where products and stores are organized by people, individuals can define their personal style and tastes, making the process of finding goods and gifts easy and enjoyable.

Most recently, our iPhone app has cracked the top 30 apps in the iTunes App Store, which has resulted in the performance and scaling challenges for the team to work on. You should check out our engineering blog to get further details of what we're tackling: http://building.wanelo.com.

We're looking for Full-Stack Engineers that enjoy working on performance and scaling issues. If you're interested send an email to barry@wanelo.com.
Pretty sure that's possible without tracking the direction of the mouse, by simply not hiding/showing the submenu but changing its contents when the mouse hovers over a different menu element.
A unit's dependency is part of that unit. If a unit test mocks out all the dependencies, that test is running in a fantasy world.
That's not true in the 7th Circuit in the US [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProCD_v._Zeidenberg
Tim Likes to Teach
It is reassuring to me that while these "superbugs" are still outside of people they are 100% susceptible to being destroyed by soap and scrubbing.
Wow. Kaspersky's alarmist PR has reached a new low.
There are two ways to win a war. Kill everyone on the other side, or make them want to stop enough to do what you want. The NVA wanted the US to leave, and to occupy the south. They got what they wanted. Of course after the US pulled out; that was what the NVA wanted. They certainly didn't look outclassed as they rolled into Saigon and took over.
4 Exotic Countries for Designers’ Coworking
Designer 3D glasses to wear at the movies? Either a crazy or brilliant idea
Very cool game, love the graphics. Good luck!
I would be interested in following up on this and seeing whether this makes you enough money to sustain your company.
Still down here, but would love to see the guide.
You seem to assume there isn't some minimum non-relative performance bar you can set for what "slacking" is, without harming hardworking employees.

Also, nobody said the policy had to be completely rigid, but having no policy will become a disaster as the company grows larger, and HR actually becomes significant.
Nikon D5200 review summary
That's not a copyright violation.
I believe that is an option that you unlock at a certain karma level.
No plans offering unlimited texts? Isn't that a little unusual for a phone service?
The game I was referring to is hyperframe and has been available at least since 2002. http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/hyperframe.jsp, I don't know which one came first, but I can't imagine it will be a problem since we built our own unique levels.
For the lazy, here's a summary of the claims that LV/DN is making:

Some icons appear to be heavily inspired by LV.

Here are three icons (circled) from Flat-UI: http://i.imgur.com/xDDULcG.png

You can see that the gears and news icons do bear some similarity to LV's versions: http://dribbble.com/shots/800428-LayerVault-icon-set-for-del... and http://imgur.com/rli5IVU (the latter via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5332741)

In addition, LV claims that Flat-UI ripped off a number of other icons from dribble.com, such as this clock and map (Flat-UI above, originals below): http://cl.ly/image/3Q181w0b1u2K (original dribble links: http://dribbble.com/shots/695458-Nasa-Playbook-Icons and http://dribbble.com/shots/877061-Map-2013).

Finally, the color schemes have been claimed to be identical: http://pixxel.co/feed/layervault-issues-dmca-takedown

LV appears to be confused as to what constitutes copyright infringement. None of these icons are actually copies of the original, and even if they were LV would not have a right to issue a DMCA takedown for the ones they didn't own.

This seems to be a massive PR blunder for the LV guys. They could have put up a blog post enumerating how many of their (and others') designs were ripped off (which is not the same thing as copyright infringement) and probably garnered some internet sympathy. Now, by misusing the much-hated DMCA takedown notice they've positioned themselves in the same camp with all the DMCA bullies we have grown to loathe.
It's perfectly valid to ask a question, even if you know the other side can't answer it.

That doesn't mean we should give the engineers who come to this time a hard time about not answering it. It's just a legitimate thing to ask out loud.
I agree you should fire the slackers.
But that is a policy, and you've focused on them and structured it around dealing with them, which goes against what he just said you should do :)
You might not convince everybody all the time, but I don't think that trying to convince people is necessarily a waste of time if you have a good argument.

There are plenty of things that most people take for granted now that people previously would not have believed.

With enough supporting data it would be hard to argue against TDD, for example an independent study of a sizeable number of software shops which showed that developers using TDD shipped code 50% faster or with 60% fewer defects or whatever. That would put the onus on the anti-TDD person.

I think Zed Shaw wrote something about this, but can't find the link.

The closest I can find is this, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/ese/nagappan_tdd.....
> I'd say that number is probably higher ...

It is higher among the educated, and lower among those with a HS degree or less:

http://sas-origin.onstreammedia.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupS...

(Obligatory reminder that schooling is no assurance of education.)
As the head of engineering in my organization, I am responsible for hiring decisions within our team. I'd like to start by saying that hiring people smarter than you is the best problem a manager could hope to have; the alternative, since intelligence is always relative, is hiring someone who isn't smarter than you.

Part of being a manager is wanting to see your team succeed. It doesn't matter if you're the founder of a fledgling startup just trying to make it or the CEO of a Fortune 500 organization trying keep your shareholders happy: as a leader, your success depends heavily on the success of your team.

I agree with the tenets of the article; there's no veiled argument coming from my direction. My point is a slightly broader perspective: if you're going to be in a managerial position, you shouldn't need an article telling you how to deal with hiring people smarter than you. You should strive to surround yourself with geniuses. Be proud of the organization you're growing. Is there a chance that one of them will one day oust your position because they could do a better job? Sure, of course there is... but that would still be what's best for the business.

I think a major problem with how many businesses are being run today is that managers want to hold their positions so that they have power. They want to be "the boss." While there's nothing inherently wrong with having ambition--in fact, I'd say it's a positive trait--it's a harsh contrast when compared to, say, programming. Very few people want to be programmers for the power and glory it provides; people build software because of an inherent desire to create, or a passion for the subject matter. In my opinion, passion leads directly to success on the job.

When people take promotions for "career ambition" or a higher salary, rather than actually doing a job they would enjoy, it leads to cascading problems within an organization. Not everyone is cut out to be a good manager, and not everyone would enjoy being a manager. When you take positions for the wrong reason, you end up thinking that you're not doing a good job (you may be right), and instead of doing what's best for the team, you do what's best for your own job security... such as fearing the great new engineer you just hired, or even worse, not hiring her at all.

This comment got a little long-winded, but I think that it's important to think about the greater issues that cause anxiety for technical managers. They're problems that are easily solved with an open mind.
Inside Ferrari's hybrid supercar -LaFerrari
Angry Birds wasn't a new concept either.
> AFAIK the only bad area of SF is the Tenderloin.

Uhh..No, Hunter's Point, Bayview, sketchy parts of SoMa, 16th and Mission all come to mind. Recall that OP is moving here with family.
Sheryl Sandberg Launches ‘Lean In’ Organization
" Fundamentally, everyone wants to do a good job (the statistical outliers who do not follow this are not worth focusing policy on)"

You have just said you should focus a policy on getting rid of them. I agree with this, but it goes against what the article just said to do.
I posit this is because he does not have a large enough company to have enough slackers that he needs to deal with them systematically, and instead can simply deal with them on a one-off basis.
CEOs who don't listen to their customers end up unemployed quickly.
Some of the individual sections are large enough that they don't fit on a single screen and navigating by clicking the down arrow on the bottom bar always skips to the next section even if you haven't viewed the entirety of the current section yet. Also, the bar disappears when you get to the last section before the "write congress" section, even though that bar is what has the "write congress" button on it.
git annotate?
Yeah, I didn't include ads for my first year either. Now, my model going forward will always be: Free + iAds/AdMob + IAP to get more content and remove the ads.

There are people who can never pay you (kids whose parents have disabled IAP). There are people who would have been happy to pay you after 20 levels, but got distracted by a new SuperCell game and never came back to your game. You want to monetize every user, even if it's for 1 cent. Or if you don't monetize them, you want them to tell their friends about your app, to improve your app virality.

I understand if you don't want to bombard your users with IAP and ads, but monetization is truly important. It allows your company to survive. Without it, you might have to go get a job someday, and this will prevent us all from enjoying your awesome games.

Also, it's not clear that there are more level packs if you swipe horizontally. Maybe if you add the three little dots (page indicators) at the bottom? Or maybe arrows that you can tap to change the page? I know this all looks ugly, but sometimes you have to be explicit. There are lots of users who need a bit of guidance to navigate your app.
Most big bureaucratic organizations tend to be "penny wise and pound foolish". They might spend billions on developing a new launch vehicle but balk at spending a few million on a HIL simulation of a real launch.
Apple's clock was an exact copy of the swiss railway clock. In this case, the rounded corners are different, the color is different, the shadow is different, the lengths of the lines are different.
It reads like a testimonial for a questionable health product.

I have difficulty believing that anyone can wax so rhapsodic about Windows 8's UI. It's so clunky and frustrating that the best you can expect to be is "resigned to your fate".

Me, I couldn't wait to scrap that shit off and load me some Slackware.
This goes up there on the short list of Show HN sites that I share with friends that would get the joke. Well done!
On the first point, I think the difference is a quite more subtle. Remember I talked about properties, not processes. Maybe when I said "mental" properties I oversimplified. The model McGinn is criticizing works like this:

The mind has mental properties because it is composed of agents (homuniculi) that exhibit a certain kind of mental, or at the very least, not-physical property (non-physical in the sense that they don't belogn to a physical theory).

For example, one could try to explain mentality in terms of modules of the brain that are information processing agents. But then, how do we explain "information processing" in those agents? Btw, those agents need not be neurons, it could also be sets of them, of something else (they don't even need to be merely parts of the brain). It's true that McGinn is not very tolerant of Kurzweil loose way of talking, but I think it's because he regards the conceptual issues as quite important. He is a philosopher after all, his standards for accepting bullshit can be quite different.

> even talk of “pattern recognition” by neurons is already far too homunculus-like for comfort: people (and animals) recognize patterns—neurons don’t. Neurons simply emit electrical impulses when caused to do so by impinging stimuli; they don’t recognize anything in the literal sense.

The paraphrases you propose for Kurzweil's way of talking seem to remove homunculism from it, but maybe only partially. I think that can be McGinn's worry, and the reason he goes agains the idea of "information processing". See:

> Even in sober neuroscience textbooks we are routinely told that bits of the brain “process information,” “send signals,” and “receive messages”—as if this were as uncontroversial as electrical and chemical processes occurring in the brain. We need to scrutinize such talk with care. Why exactly is it thought that the brain can be described in these ways? It is a collection of biological cells like any bodily organ, much like the liver or the heart, which are not apt to be described in informational terms. It can hardly be claimed that we have observed information transmission in the brain, as we have observed certain chemicals; this is a purely theoretical description of what is going on. So what is the basis for the theory?

And then:

> We have discovered that nerve fibers transmit electricity. We have not, in the same way, discovered that they transmit information. We have simply postulated this conclusion by falsely modeling neurons on persons.

> ...there is theoretical danger in such loose talk, because it fosters the illusion that we understand how the brain can give rise to the mind.

On Kurzweil's book being just pop-sience book: McGinn worries, I think, about the public having a wrong idea of what we really have in terms of our explanations of mentality because theoreticians can have a wrong idea of it. Others might think it enough to propose certain hypothesis as solutions of some sort to those problems. But with that, I've polemicized too much for now, I think.
Natural selection only chooses from existing variations. Obviously "selection" cannot create new genetic information.
How Guys Will Use Google Glasses
The first thing to know about comments is that they're sooner or later going to get out of touch with the code, unless you have some phase where you are going to review them in depth.

Obviously, redundant comments scattered across the code are even worse: out of sight, out of mind.
Expensive and not unlimited :(