skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A comment on that page led me to read about guard llamas, guard donkeys and mini horses. I hadn't realised llamas could be used as guard animals at all.

http://ag.ansc.purdue.edu/sheep/ansc442/semprojs/2002/predat...

- Being that dogs and coyotes are among the greatest predators of sheep, a llama can be very effective in alerting and protecting a flock of sheep against such predators. A good guard llama is very cautious and curious of these predators and will usually charge them, and if the predator does not retreat, kick and stomp them.

- One llama is capable of guarding up to 2,000 sheep in up to 300 acres, and can decrease the amount of predation in a flock up to 100%.

- Also, llamas ... often will protect birthing sheep and will alert producers to sick or hurt sheep.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_llama

- Some llamas may herd the animals they are guarding into a tight group or lead them away from danger and to the spot where they may feel the safest.

Quite impressive, what llamas can do.
"specialization is for insects"
Of course.

Metropolis DLC
Underground DLC
The inflation is better focused on the life, not the lifestyle. I don't put my paycheck in the bank account and have set money withdrawn for my investments. I put my paycheck in my investments and have set money withdrawn for my bank account. I fight hard to make money for my future, and I know that's exactly where it's going. I keep strict records of my work time, and set a time limit on my job, then build myself outside of work hours, investing time in developing myself. If I prioritize some nice things that I want to spend on, i need to be patient, or it comes out of something less important. I find that careless expenses can be more of a burden than a pleasure, so keeping spending equal helps me improve my lifestyle, rather than inflate it.
Making Things
Get rid of the current native debug tool - and replace it Firebug (or have the option to switch between the two).

There is nothing more annoying than trying to inspect something via Firebug, and you end up accidentally open the native debug tool instead.

/rant
http://infantici.de (NSFL)
That's a start, but it only gets rid of the stupid people.

It leaves the people who are great at checking things off on a list. As long as they stay out of trouble, they might muddle along for decades, until finally retiring as an O-6.
First C compiler by dmr
Right, killing is what I was talking about. This thread started with someone mentioning the morality of "eating chickens", and I just copied that phrasing.
I've seen a lot of silver bullet fads come & go. I'll be glad to see the TDD fad go. Testing sure is a useful tool in the toolbox, but that's it.

It's funny this article quotes the asymptotic sort behavior, because that's almost identical to a real-world example I have used to debunk over-reliance on unit tests (AKA "false sense of security"). Back in the days when we still wrote our own sort functions, we were working on various QuickSort implementations. A popular optimization is to end with an insertion sort after a certain point. So your QuickSort can be completely broken, and the insertion sort at the end will still clean up the mess. Unit tests will typically just validate that the list is sorted correctly and completely miss the fact that the QuickSort itself is broken internally. Nobody has seen fit to comment on this example, so far.

Another fad I'd like to see gone is "no comments". My mind still boggles from a recent code review where I had to defend using comments. Sure, we've all seen worthless comments, and misleading comments, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater and ban comments altogether! Self-documenting code is an ideal that should be aimed for whenever possible. But there's still a place for block comments in certain areas to explain key design and implementation decisions, tell a future maintainer what they might want to consider before changing or enhancing something, etc. It's not always possible to capture all that in code.
> That's because some really evil, greedy fucks got in charge and realized they could replace partnerships with overworked, churn-and-burn associates.

Or could it be that there are way too many lawyers being produced every year and the realities of a highly competitive market have set in?

http://flustercucked.blogspot.com/2010/07/40-years-of-lawyer...
Slumlord - What has Hugo Chávez wrought in Venezuela?
What to do when a product that is a 'need' fails to pick up
I am the co-founder of zonengage, a location based social network. You can find like minded people near you. Find Tennis, Soccer, Volleyball, Poker, Bowling, German, Italian and Mandarin Speaking members near you... So we launched in NYC and Chicago.<p>I have worked on this start up from 12 months now. Site is LIVE and we hit 1k users within 3 months. But we had 10k hits on our landing page. Which clearly meant UI UX is poor.<p>As we prepare to launch phase 2, which involves a complete UI change, I have a question -<p>Can a poor UI / UX be the reason for a website not picking up? I mean, we are connecting neighbors and solving a problem that exists in almost every neighborhood, yet, I am perplexed by not amassing many users. Any view points are welcome..
The OpenBSD news site undeadly.org is written in c. You can grab the source here: http://undeadly.org/undeadly-src.tar.gz
I don't have enough time to play all the good games that come out. I don't think I'll be broken-hearted. But I admit you have a point that it would be better if it was DRM free. It is still not a super big problem to me.
Love the honesty. Not always great to chase competitors in a market that isn't even clearly a winner. Foursquare won the check-in race but now after all that time they're trying to rebrand away from the check-in, since the check-in business is still kind of niche. But hopefully the data turns into something meaningful.
Why are you using C++?
Or you could just strdup and malloc a bunch of strings and let the kernel clean it up when the cgi process exits. ;)
I'm going to relay the depressing news that's behind this dynamic. Many Americans think of business as a risky, exclusive endeavor because "it takes money to make money". What's missed in that is that holding a job also costs money. Lots of it, although the costs are sometimes indirect. You have to live in an expensive location, although you're not getting nearly enough utility (in most cases) to justify paying to live there... except for the better jobs there. If you're serious about your career, you can't do your own cleaning: two-career couple and you need a maid. If you have kids, your bosses will ask where they go to school and it will affect your promotion chances. If a professional job pays $400k, there's absolutely no way you can keep it with less than about a $300k (pre-tax) lifestyle, and that's if you're really good. (The untalented need $500k to keep that job.) In fact, the major reason why it pays so much is because that is the economic cost of doing what the job requires (living in an expensive area, hiring a maid so you aren't distracted by chores). The vast majority of Americans' expenditures (aside from basic necessities) is put toward (a) recovering from negative emotional effects of work stress, and (b) meeting the social expectations necessary in order to succeed in one's career.

What we'd expect based on our knowledge of markets is that people would have to spend $1/year to keep a $1/year job. However, some people have a talent for managing money and saving. If they make twice as much, they save twice as fast. Instead of making $100k (post-tax) and spending $80k, they're spending $160k to keep a $200k (post-tax) job. The more they make, the more they save. No surprises.

However, the financially untalented are the ones who have to spend $120k to keep a $100k job. If they get promoted, they'll be spending $240k to keep a $200k job. They'll burn twice as fast.

This is a deeper problem than people think. It's not just about "discipline" or will. There are people out there who are just severely below average in financial sense and, while they can play the social gymnastics necessary to get the $500k+ jobs, they can't make $1.00 without spending $1.10 (at any income level).
My weekend project-juicybasket.com: Design jobs and portfolio site for designers
Also perplexing was this assertion that salaried jobs don't provide a surplus of money, when the vast majority of entrepreneurs fund their projects and endeavors through a salaried position either held concurrently or in the past.
Let's see, is it similar to WordNet but with open access (i.e., anyone can edit)?
I loved this game.

Question though:
It was very closely modelled on bullfrog's theme park and although my memory is hazy I thought that also had individual agent modelling?

That would push the Date even further back to 94
Introducing Roku 3
I don't know what compilation it showed up in, but the "Bongo's dream dorm" is a re-working of "Bongo's dream house"

http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/7329/bongosdreamhouse.jpg

...gotta make a buck I guess. Oddly, the Simpsons seemed to give (apparently) free product positioning to Apple over the years.
The "every free software developer dying tomorrow" is a hypothetical statement that has nothing at all to do with Apple. It was in my comment because it's a great way to illustrate that even if things aren't explicitly subtracted from the Free world, the Free world is harmed if its growth is slowed.
>Strong people fall for this trap. It’s poisonous.

"Trap" is the keyword here, in that it's set up by someone other than yourself. Your colleagues (esp those more senior to you) in these industries will purposely coerce you towards a higher maintenance lifestyle so that you will have an increasingly difficult time escaping.
You can try running some affiliate programs... if you find some that convert well with your users you can probably make a lot more money!
Hi Paul,

I am not a FireFox dev tools user and I highly invested in Chrome devtools. I edit JavaScript code in browser all day. It's hard to not use a fully featured editor but I invested in it to make it better. I submit bugs and sometimes fix small bugs there too.

I will tell you what Chrome dev tools CANT do for HTML and CSS and ask you to implement them to attract more developers.

1. Editing JavaScript code in browser:
- Autocompletion (I know this is very hard)
- Code block collapsing
- A good theme API
- Shortcut keys like CMD+/ for comments
- Inline watchers for when developer stopped at breakpoint and look at watched value right next to it's
position in code (Something like Visual Studio)
2. Editing CSS
- Inline CSS reloading (Reloading CSS without refreshing)
- Better autocomplete for values
- Unminifying CSS
3. Multitouch
> TDD promotes testing trivial methods

Kent Beck might disagree:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/153565
> bare ipa installation

You mean APK?

Since you can install a 3rd-party app store on Android simply using an APK (e.g. Amazon Appstore on non-Kindle devices), I don't see how Amazon could allow apps but not app stores.
So your plan is basically to take in a bunch of money from the public, and then steal it, and you object to the government trying to make that difficult for you to accomplish?
The first impressions article from Ars was a lot more useful to me:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we...

That article gives me the impression that it's more of a Sims game with Sim City bolted on than a real Sim City game.
Or the large amount of bugs.
Or the lack of a save & load feature.
Or the impossibility of customizing the starting terrain.
Or the severe lack of information the game gives you (seriously, were are all the graphs?).

It's a step back on many many ways.
Play By Your Own Rules, but host your blog on someone else's site.
It's working for me, but KDE4 isn't nearly as user-friendly as KDE3
Soma.fm is my go to for internet radio. I personally find Mission Control the perfect thing to relax my mind and just zone out. For the uninitiated, it's a blend of down tempo atmospheric ambience and real recordings of astronauts talking to mission control.
Leo Villareal, the creator of this project, is one of my favorite artists because he is a geek like us. He builds and codes all of his light installations himself (at least to date he has).

My favorite piece is this large floor-to-ceiling gallery installation:
http://youtu.be/IhKshdYr5rE?t=34s

There were 5 or 6 Mac minis mounted at the top of the installation driving the light changes.

Additionally the gallery rep explained that Villareal programmed the light change combinations to be random (pseudorandom -- she wasn't a geek), and will never repeat within our lifetimes. I expect the same is true of the bridge installation.
You want a Marpac 980 white noise maker. It's a little fan in a box with tone adjustments (no speaker involved). Amazing white noise.
The solution is open source with cryptographic protection. Like Diaspora, but for everything currently done by Gmail and Facebook.
> I don't dispute the need for surveillance

Then _you've_ already conceded the argument.

There is absolutely no need for surveillance.
My company's website code is probably about half Haskell (using Yesod, for all the backend code) and half Javascript (for the single-page app frontend). Despite the nuances described by the author, I really think there is a definite substitution the robust type system vs. unit testing. On the Haskell side, I don't have unit tests, and don't have many tests at all. The number of bugs I discover in the Haskell code is very small in spite of this. I know people have said it before, but when something passes the type checker, most of the time it literally just works.

The contrast with the Javascript side couldn't be more stark. The Javascript side is much more challenging to get to a bug-free state, and some of the remaining bugs defy replication, etc. I think to get a system that has a fraction of the reliability afforded by the type system, you really need extensive unit tests.

I'm not contradicting the blog author, but I think it's important to keep in mind that in broad strokes, those two aspects really do tradeoff.
TDD always seemed like a impossible thing to a developer like me.

The problem is something like this, the moment I face a programming task- If the task is a little complex I do some work on the notebook else I directly fire up the editor and write some code. Now unless I get some code/prototype up and running I can't proceed further. That is how my mind works.

I don't know how anyone can write tests about the idea/task for which they haven't written a line of code. I've found it impossible. For me, its always:

step 0. Basic version of Idea.
step 1. Write code.
step 2. Making it nice(optimize/document/clean up).
step 3. Make it run faster.
step 4. extend idea and repeat steps 1 to 4.

I'm jealous of all those people who can have a 'step -1' where they can write test cases 'for the code' they would end up with in 'step 4', even while they have a very blurry version of the idea.

To me this has always looked like premature optimization. Like putting the cart before the horse.
> And whatever you create on the Macintosh screen will look just as good when you print it on an Apple ImageWriter® II printer.

Did they ever use one of those things? I feel the urge to laugh uncontrollably.
never. I know your comment was a joke, but this dude Villareal takes his work very seriously and I want to convey 1) that he is legit and 2) that all of my fellow HN readers should be following his work beyond just this bridge.
Optimal Colorspace Algorithms for LED Lighting
Why? Because our moral and political culture, as a society, is in the shitter. It's probably too late.
If you view DRM as a negative and you believe that there are more good games than you can play, you can subtract every game with DRM from your list, and still have enough good games!
1. It is only fast if you are working solo on a project for less than 2 months. Each extra person, subtract two weeks. Think larger scale than just adding a feature. You always have to refactor to add the next feature. The giant mess you created takes time to understand and change. With tests, your abstractions actually work. Focus on what you need to change, change it, fix the failing tests, repeat.

2. If having tests during a major refactoring/redesign slows you down, you are writing the wrong kinds of tests. Changing code should break your tests. Not all of them, but the ones where you have changed the behavior. Unit tests are more valuable than integration (rails controller tests) tests which are more valuable than functional tests (browser/request). If all you have are the later, they will break for everything and provide little feedback as to the cause.

More general tips. Test logical switches, not assignments. If you have to deal with lots of mocking, try to avoid state mutation and use a more functional approach. Mocking is a result of interaction testing.

Code coverage only tells you if you are lacking in quality, not that quality is present. 100% doesn't mean you have good tests. Test what matters, don't test everything.

I realize your argument is for using TDD all the time. The problem is that your complaints are from the standpoint of, I never want to test anything. There are very valid reasons for not using TDD all the time. You just haven't listed any.
> You know what other programming language community blogs about their language and tools? ALL OF THEM

I don't see how that's a response to my complaint about there not being many haskell blog posts about languages and tools that aren't monad tutorials or "why don't more people use haskell". My entire point was wanting blogs about language and tools for fucks sake.

> Some open source code has no documentation?! What a shocker,

Since I said that the levels of documentation on hackage are much lower than the equivalent for every other language I use I'm again not sure what you are responding to. So yeah, a lot of open source code has no documentation. No shit. And the communities/languages that have more documentation have more users. Hackage is awful in this respect relative to other language communities.

The rest is just pointing out that a better haskell platform level of release management would let more people use Haskell productively, it wasn't aimed anywhere near the writers of any of the iteratees libraries.

Skimming over a comment and responding to what you wanted me to say could be considered "insulting and stupid".
Give it a month or two and I sadly suspect you'll be able to purchase all the features you'd like with micro-transactions.

"We're building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way." [1]

This kind of thinking from the games industry concerns me. If I've paid full price for a game, I don't think I should be nickel and dimed for more content.

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/187421/EA_details_microtr...
Er, sorry. I didn't proof the past. Meant RAII. My bad.
|A popular [quick sort] optimization is to end with an insertion sort

What's so hard to test about this? If your quick sort code and your insertion sort code aren't all shoved into one function, you just test them separately.
I had it too and yes, yes it does.
I call that the "IV drip". The monthly check is the drip, and it keeps you sleepwalking... doing busywork, and the years keep flying by.
So yeah, I know, it actually works, it actually provides benefits. I know, opera has this option too.

But really, sending all my data via google, as if all the rest going through them wasn't enough.. doesn't make me all that comfortable. No one company should control OS, client, data at rest and data flows. It's too much responsibilities in one single place.
Most people 'spike' an initial version to discover what they have to do. It is very hard to test drive something when you have no clue how it is going to work. Could you test drive the code for the very first controller action you ever wrote? No. But the second controller action should be easy to TDD.
CustomAuth Auth & OAuth Integration Service
Any feedback is appreciated. https://www.customauth.com.

Thank you.
Relatedly, noble cause with your IDE project, here's hoping you run into wonderful things (alas, I can't code C++ and VimL serves me fine for my current extension needs)
Its because it's in testing stages. I'm pretty sure that if it works well, it'll just be default, and you'll be able to optout in chrome://flags (which most regular people don't know about anyways)
Ask HN: How do you hire a startup lawyer?
I hear that lawyers are doctors for companies -- they keep them in good health. However there is little discussion about how to find a good one. My specific questions for HN are:

How and where do you find a good startup lawyer?

What traits should I look for in him/her?

What questions should I ask to find if he/she has those traits and would be good fit or not?

What background makes a good startup lawyer (corporate law/IP law/both)?

If it helps you to know, I am in the greater Los Angeles area.
Brilliant article. Something to keep in mind. I shuttered a start-up I was working on (VenueMenu) after participating in an accelerator here in Brisbane, Australia (called ilab, I highly recommend it!) for this one simple reason:

We were going into a market that was already defined, with a difference. This difference wasn't enough, and we were always going to be playing the rules of the 800lb gorillas already in place. It was a niche market, that was already over-served.

The nail in the coffin was that here in Australia, the competitors had seen exists at less that AUD$10m. Because of that, no VC's would touch us, so we couldn't get the runway we needed to launch and try to bust the market wide open.

I'm glad we decided to sink the ship before we left the port. I learnt a lot, and saved a lot of time and money.
Lies! Our heros would never sully themselves with something as filthy as a salaried position!
di.fm is great: try the progressive channel.
Couldn't the government then obtain the information without any judicial oversight? A foreign country is only safe if the software is 100% secure and the employees can't be bribed with government-level resources.

(Look at what the Chinese government did when they wanted information from the New York Times. No judge approved that disclosure...)
That's actually cool. I hope they'll keep it that way.
It's Lenny - Ingenius telemarketer Defence System
We pay for the on-the-go data and voice connectivity, not for the tracking.
The blog post appears to have been removed.
Best Buy ends work-from-home program
I love coding to jazz. "It can be played as background music, yet it amply rewards close listening" [0]. I collect records too, and jazz is one of my favorite genres to listen to on vinyl (although the distraction of the record flip can be a problem... sometimes I'll forget that it needs to be flipped at all, and I'll listen to the inner/lock groove for like 15 minutes before turning it off).

[0] http://www.allmusic.com/album/kind-of-blue-mw0000191710
I think you would like everything from Bonobo. Warning: addictive - I often keep his new albums on repeat for many weeks.
For historical reasons, mainly. If I were starting from scratch today, I wouldn't pick it. I'm in the process of making a change to golang, but I want to use the existing project to develop the next-gen version. There's only a few more things I need to add to make it viable for working on a large-scale project.

I started the project a year ago. I wanted to have the power and flexibility to achieve anything, and use OpenGL for graphics so there'd be no restrictions as to what can be put on screen. Plus I've been using C++ for many years before for making indie games.

Back then, I was even more motivated to work on it because I felt C++ itself badly needed a more efficient way or writing it. I really dislike the manual duplication it forces you to create and maintain as you change things (e.g. cpp and header files). But even with a more script-like high level language like Go, I feel there is a lot of potential to innovate past a basic text editor. I'm gonna find out.