skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Simple, Because of "out of sight, out of mind".

The US government probably records and stores every single telephone conversation in the US, emails, Internet connections IPs and GPS mobile coordinates.

Why?, because they can, as it is now ultra cheap, now hundreds of thousands of conversations could be stored on a single hard drive. With GPS coordinates or Internet logs it is even cheaper.

It is also very useful, the same way drones are starting to record everything and after a bombing they could replay and follow the bomber, you could "replay" all the conversations that someone the US gov is interested in did in the past, where this person went, whom he met with and so.

It also gives absolute power to people in govertment, uncontrolled.

People can't see it because it is being so gradually enforced onto them and as it is secret people can't really see it. Like in "the life of others" film(in witch the main character gets shocked when he sees all the info they had over him) people is completely ignorant of what the gov does.

Today, just with facebook alone you are giving the government more info about you that the STASI did had over their citizens.

I for one believe the govs should have access to this information, but only in a way that is controlled by the people, or democracy will evolve in Tyranny.
Honestly speaking. I still don't understand What is Mailbox? :-(
Are you kidding? America in _Sheep_ is decaying so badly that at the very end of the book a guy in Ireland sees a freaking dust cloud on the Western horizon because that's all that's left of the United States.
There are papers out there that show better results with TDD. Here is one:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/03/TDD-Improves-Quality

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/ese/nagappan_tdd....
TDD is good for verifying that your code handles the set of requirements given by the customer - including any edge cases that matter to them. I probably agree that 100% test passes doesn't equal no bugs.

Nonetheless, it's still useful! You can still write TD code and use your brain - it is only slightly easier to be lazy (and specifically, lazy in a way you're not supposed to care about, yet.)

In the end, production use crash reports will reveal any bugs that matter in the system (if any), and you can write new tests for those extra cases and make the code pass again. Combined with the rest of Agile (sorry,) i.e. fast release cycles and so on, this isn't a road block.
Delhi Hotel Near Airport
Great post. I would generally consider myself reasonably hard working, and not a huge procrastinator. However, there's one trap I always find hard not to fall into.

I remember many occasions when I finish a task earlier than expected, and then always struggle whether I should stretch it and pretend it took me longer, so I can still do it faster than expected, but not disproportionally so.

The somewhat flawed logic is that if I do things too fast, I'll just get more work assigned, and expectations will rise, which will make it progressively harder for me to achieve.

I'm not entirely sure where the flaw lies exactly, but the most impressive people I worked with always seemed to be those who finished things quickly, and somehow it didn't bite them back. Others would just learn to trust their assessments, or if they are stuck would know it's not for lack of focus or trying, but that it's a genuinely tough problem.
I've always viewed TDD as a process that works for some people. It's always important to remember that people learn, develop and think differently. If TDD works for you, great. But do not force it upon other people, as it may not work for them.

(This isn't to say that unit tests are bad, but rather writing tests first may not benefit all people)
Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too
I'm inclined to agree that it is hard to create an algorithm using tdd (for example Dijkstra's algorithm). But "the example" mentioned in the post is not grounded. It would be nice if someone had a real-world example to back up this claim or else it is very easy to bring up the argument that the author is not applying tdd correcly
Horror Fiction: A Date with a Serial Killer - Part Five
I'd imagine a majority of the questions being asked have to reference most legal documents. A couple of examples I think in my own recent memory:

1. Term sheet / Letter of Intent Review
2. Am I supposed to pay X% in taxes this year? (need to see a tax form)
3. Is my landlord screwing me for making me pay X amount after I've moved out? (need to provide the lease)
4. What happens in the UK SEIS scheme if the company fails? (need to review SEIS scheme details)

A majority of the law (albeit very minute) that I've encountered, the first thing I usually have to do is fill out a questionnaire. I wonder if you could also get lawyers to provide sample questionnaires to at least get the background information.

As my most recent accountant visit said to me "I don't want to do the donkey work if you can do it yourself. You shouldn't have to pay for that." This should be no different for lawyers. The value is much more transparent then. I suppose that's your overall goal, no?

Site looks nice...good luck!
Hacking code to fix problems isn't unique to TDD. I see people do it all the time to codebases that don't have tests.

If your goal is to fix this behavior, go for the root causes. TDD isn't a root cause for this particular problem.
I suspect the linked article is a straw-man built to provoke
responses, and thereby create page views for the blog.
How much modafinil do you take? Where do you get it from?
Pop resolutely is an expert discipline, but the expertise is of a type that many classically-trained musicians barely register.

Skilled musicians tend to be timbre-deaf; In addition, classically-trained musicians are invariably groove-deaf. They mentally process melody and harmony very efficiently, which is tremendously useful but inevitably means discarding a lot of musical information that is highly meaningful to the lay listener.

If you listen with a musician's ear to most pop records, you hear a simple melody, a simple chord progression, maybe some simple harmonies, all at a fixed tempo and time signature. If you listen with a pop songwriter's ear, you hear hooks and earworms and prosody, you hear a perfectly honed and polished lyric and a melody that carries the meaning of that lyric without a wasted beat. If you listen with a producer's ear, you hear the product of sixty years of evolution in creating sonic landscapes that sound big and rich and engaging on anything from a nightclub soundsystem to a pocket radio.

In pop production, you've got to grab someone's attention in ten seconds, engage them in thirty seconds and move their emotions in three minutes. When most of your potential listeners are scarcely paying attention, that's fiendishly difficult. Pop has it's own virtuosi, an elite of songwriters and topliners and producers who can tell a story and convey a feeling with haiku-like efficiency.

Listen closely and you'll hear:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JipHEz53sU
> That's just semantics.

It's more than semantics. The reason is that we cannot declare a cure until we fully understand cancer's genesis. And we don't.

> ... but that's not the same thing as saying you can't be cured.

That's exactly what it means -- no one is ever "cured" of cancer. All cancer victims remain at higher recurrence risk than those who have never had cancer.

It's not semantics.
Walks And Walking - Spring Walks Best For Daffodils
Personally I completely disagree with this, I've never found myself randomly changing code in a desperate attempt to get a test to pass.

Maybe it's because I'd been coding for years before I ever tried TDD, but when a test fails, I logically debug the code the same way I would if I wasn't using TDD.

As far as I'm concerned having tests just flags possible errors much quicker, and also gives me more piece of mind that my code isn't gonna be riddled with hidden bugs.
I would categorize user testing under 'Design Skills' (UX Design), as well as CSS and HTML (Web Design). Design might be a third type of role, that is neither technical, nor business.
>And that's the problem. This whole union-style protest negotiation tactic is absurd. They are not entitled to a better deal as long as other workers are able, willing and qualified to step into their shoes and do the job. You work or you are out, it's pretty simple.

That's funny, because in countries where there's no prevalent disdain for trade unions, this tactic actually works and gets workers good deals. This is only absurd for employers, who'd like to get more work done and pay less.
Gwene is an RSS (and Atom, etc) to Usenet News (i. e., NNTP) gateway
Not a hot technology? It is widely used by science and technology leaders who have to stay on top of the literature in their field. We're talking heads of $10M research programs, principal investigators, conference organizers, and so forth.

Google could have kept it around just to sell Apps to C*Os. "Apps is like Reader for secretaries."
> The difference is that projects like the internet were incremental.

That's the funny part -- one could argue that, because it was incremental, someone ought to have seen what was coming. But instead it was much like the early days of television -- the experts thought it was a gimmick, a fad that people would get tired of, then return to radio and printed matter.
Firefox (nightly) and chromium don't ignore the trailing dot either and both display an invalid certificate error.
I guess you meant to write 1Q/5R
The last course (winter 2013) is IMHO a bit too lightweight, it avoids going deeper into some stuff that was touched in earlier courses.
I dont's use storyboards so that's another minus for me, because everything is storyboards based.
In any case this is solid course and highly recommended.

As for books the two I'd highly recommend would be the already mentioned "IOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide"[1] and "Programming iOS 5" [2].

Ray's tutorials are also worth checking out.

[1] http://www.bignerdranch.com/book/ios_programming_the_big_ner...
[2] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023562.do
Formula 1 Australian GP Online streams
The other thing to consider is that if you don't know what changed between code change and test running, you aren't running your tests often enough. When you make a change, you test that change. That change should be small enough that it makes it clear where the problem lies.
You're worrying about a constant slowdown (6x) on a constant operation (constructing a dictionary with a fixed number of items). In terms of computational complexity, that amounts to two times a negligible constant, i.e., nothing.

I think the reason for having set literals is not performance but completeness and prettier syntax.
People have been claiming this exponential population growth would wreck us for 200 years, since Malthus.
TDD in theory is a great idea. In practice it is dreadful.

Because what has happened is that the obsession with code coverage has meant that developers create a whole raft of tests that serve no real purpose. Which due to TDD then gets translated into unworkable, unwieldy spaghetti like mess of code. Throw in IOC and UI testing e.g. Cucumber and very quickly the simplest feature takes 5x as long to develop and is borderline unmaintainable.

It just seems like there needs to be a better way to do this.
I have occasionally been tempted into the mindless code modifying that I described. That is in the past though!

More importantly, I have also seen this happen in professional environments. A very large test suite is very useful, but it is absolutely not a catch-all safety net.
IT has been a while. But for what it's worth they recently added a search functionality in Google project hosting pages (For in project search). Such as: https://code.google.com/p/dart/codesearch
> I probably agree that 100% test passes doesn't equal no bugs.

TDD never promised that, and practitioners of TDD understand that 100% coverage doesn't mean you won't have bugs. This doesn't invalidate the TDD or testing (as you are obviously aware of =)).
Quick Tip: Prestashop SSL (and some troubleshooting)
Ruby app server options [2013 edition]
I suspect your comment adds absolutely nothing to the conversation. If you disagree with the premise then how about explaining why you think TDD is the panacea for poor software quality.
>The extension, which previously placed a small, orange RSS icon next to the website’s URL in the Chrome address bar, no longer functions even on Chrome browsers where the extension is installed and enabled.

So how have they disabled it in browsers where it was already installed? Does it use some backend service that they have taken down? Or was it disabled by a silent Chrome update?
Sure, it's far more efficient and profitable to make an integrated platform with all major features at hand, I'm for that too, what bothers me is that I don't have full control over my data.
I remember that most of the research seems to refer to it as teleworking.
I (sadly) average 1 article written per 3 years, so there wouldn’t be much of a point in creating page views.
> The somewhat flawed logic is that if I do things too fast, I'll just get more work assigned, and expectations will rise, which will make it progressively harder for me to achieve.

For what it's worth, I'm in this situation at the moment. Was working on a project where I found it simple to finish things quickly. Am now on a project where things are considerably more complex but it's expected I finish them at the speed I was previously.

Not sure how to crawl out of this hole, other than to continually get faster at everything.
Star trek missed somethings with thus tablet/pads. Each one seemed to only store 1 books worth of content. You can sometimes see people in the show using or handling a dozen tablets/pads. They seemed to miss that storage size would increase a lot.
You probably have javascript disabled. I use noscript to do this and got the same until I enabled JS for the site.
Your use of the word "entitled" is truly patronizing. Even from your own free market perspective, in a free market you are entitled to what you can get. If you have money, you are free to use it as you wish, and if you have friends you are free to unionize to try to get as much as you can. It's all a power struggle. One side is not any more entitled to anything than the other. They fight it out.

Also, your use of the word "authority" is wrong. Judging by Uber's recent bouts with elected representatives of the people and democratic institutions, and their relative success, I'm not sure where "authority" lies: with "corrupt institutions" or with "stinking money". To continue your conspiratorial line of thought, I'd say that I wouldn't be surprised if Uber's successes are a result of bribery (In fact, there is more reason to believe the latter, as you and I were both present when a certain man of influence bragged to a large crowd about something along the same lines.)

That's all from the free-market perspective. From a social responsibility perspective, I don't understand why a company feels entitled to fire working people when they like, without a proper hearing.
This from quick google of 'teleworking statistics' http://www.teleworkresearchnetwork.com/telecommuting-statist...
This article misunderstands TDD completely. In TDD, the tests are your specifications. Therefore, any code that passes the tests is formally correct - even though it should always be minimal (YAGNI).

In fact, TDD is not simply "tests first". It is: write ONE test, make it pass with the MINIMUM amount of code, refactor, loop.
Importance Of Body Language While Communicating
One problem with predicting the future is that some assume no new technology can or will be created. This comment is a case-in-point.
Yeah. Looks like they also use a modified FedEx logo for regular expressions, some sort of unofficial Apache logo for mod_rewrite and .jar file type icon[1] for Java :)

The website seems useful, however.

[1]: http://untergunter.deviantart.com/art/Leaf-Mimes-Icons-20393...
Oh probably "What does deliberate practice look like for coders?", as distinct from just writing code regularly.
What kind of problems were you having with EC2?

(I mean, beside the 'default' ones)
Presefy - Let Your Audience Follow Your Slides Remotely
Human!? Dear God, I thought most of you were Americans!

http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/...
An often touted "benefit" of TDD is that "addictive" feeling when you write tests and see them pass. "you feel like you have done a lot because you have a lot of code"; "you feel a great deal of accomplishment". Quite a few pages talk about it when you search for "tdd addictive".

The canonical example is the master of XP solving Sudoku in the TDD way: http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/ (part 1 out of 5) -vs- Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/sudoku.html
fcuk Google. fcuk corp evil.
That was for the GAE. Who is to say a new "price rationalisation" might not come for GCE?

Or that they wont close it down, like they did with Google Code, Google Wave, Google Reader and such, if they change their minds?

Now, I know that what I wrote would be considered FUD if it was for any other company. But in Google's case, it's not that people say FUD about them. It's that FUD is the very thing they emanate themselves!

Or, in other words, in Google's case, the FUD is real.
I believe it boils down to a matter of discipline.

If you say that you never randomly modify code in order to make it work (according to the tests), then that is great, and that is how every developer should work. However, my experience is that people who lack discipline (or face a looming deadline) tend to not take their time to properly reason about code and instead rely on the test suite to tell them whether code is right or not.
I think the problem mostly spans from the "do the simplest thing that could possibly work"[1] methodology that some practitioners of TDD advocate over thinking about the problem and solving it properly.

[1]http://c2.com/xp/DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork.htm...
It's very easy to make up a story like the one about MS Word after the event. Not so easy to predict in advance who these influencers are, who they influence, and if they exist in the first place. Duncan Watts has researched this and there's an interview here. http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/scientist-in...

"
They throw parties or they give away free samples or they advertise in particular publications that brand themselves as reaching an influential audience and run some campaign in their normal manner. And if it works, they say, "We reached the influencers." And if it doesn't work, they say "We didn't reach the influencers" or "We weren't able to make them help us." In that sense, it's just a rhetorical device to help you explain the randomness that you actually experience in the world.
"
>Funny considering the main issue we had with EC2 was amazons horrible support.

Well, support is relative. If you found Amazon's "horrible", you would find Google's utterly horrible and scary beyond any description.
The author made one slight mistake: he wrote "there is a tendency to mindlessly modify code" instead of "I have a tendency to mindlessly modify code".

Also, it's not like this we haven't seen this kind of behavior decades before the invention of TDD.

This is just another example of a craftsman blaming his tools. TDD is not a silver bullet, but no method or tool can serve as an excuse for mindlessly poking around until it works. This isn't limited to programming either.
Meanwhile, some guy on the other side of the world finally makes the breakthrough that will prove them both wrong.

"Hitherto, philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it."
The search path spoofing argument is weak. If you depend on a DNS resolver that spoofs domain searches, what guaranteed that it wouldn't simply spoof the full resolution as well ?

In practice nobody uses the dot at the end except when writing BIND files.
>Seems like unless you are going to need the ability to quickly scale the number of instances up and down it makes more sense to put your core services on dedicated servers rather than in the cloud.

Which is almost always the case for startups (needing to scale at will).
No one is disputing that the code is formally correct. The problem is that the code is generally focused on those specific tests and those tests alone. Meaning the code hasn't been designed or architected with a broader context in mind.

Hence over time the codebase becomes this huge tangled mess of "formally correct solutions".
This is called Parkinson's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_law
I think it's interesting to note that the technology for a refrigerator that can automatically take inventory has been available for years. We don't actually have them because it would require a lot of cooperation among vendors (e.g. putting RFID tags in everything) that most have no incentive for.
You can implement crons level of timing specificity with a few "every" jobs and some variables.

e.g. (not real syntax)

every minute: set minute = (minute + 1) % 60

when minute = 4 && day = 5 ...

I think the better part of this system is the cascading success semantics that it would provide, where by a next stage doesn't start if the previous stage didn't finish successfully. This has a lot of overlap with Jenkins and other CI servers, but without the java/http overhead and with a (potentially) lighter weight text based syntax for specifying the dependencies between jobs.

I can even envision this sort of system to be used to distribute jobs to slave machines given a small amount of ssh foo.
It can also be a valid defense mechanism against those rising expectations.

I did the same before I learned to accept my limits and say no to what went beyond them, including pressure on myself to keep my commitments.

It actually makes perfect sense that if you can't resist the pull of expectations, you'd better make sure expectations remain at a (relatively low) level you'll be able to live up to even in down-time.