skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These kinds of questions are very different from questions about browser quirks. These questions get at the depth of understanding of the language itself. It is akin to understanding how a C++ program is going to use the stack and the heap, etc. Only after understanding the language fundamentals can you answer these questions and only then can you truly understand the code you are writing. With depth of understanding comes an ability to make better decisions about how and when to use and tool. Almost anyone can use jQuery, but writing it or something like it requires a different level of knowledge.
You can locally jam cell phone frequencies without involving the operators--seems like that'd be default bomb squad kit. I was along the racetrack at mile 23 and signal and data were extremely poor starting 10-15 minutes after the event--The local cells of the network could also have been simply overloaded.
You could do a first pass where someone make a note that they're famous, without mentioning the name.
I've seen Rae speak at multiple conferences and she's freaking awesome. Couldn't agree more with this article - gender quotas for panels are a.) a slippery slope and b.) detract from both the quality of the conference and the accomplishments of the speakers that have made it there without them
Just as some carefully redefine racism so that only whites can be racist, I'm sure sexism has been carefully redefined so that only men can be sexist. I recall seeing an article linked to from HN that similarly redefined discrimination to exclude "affirmative action".
If the tests aren't critical, is the feature critical?
Tweeting Our Grief: Digital Memory, Digital Mourning
Eric Schmidt: Everyone In The World Will Be On The Internet By 2020
He wasn't wrong if you consider he was talking about macro. He appears to be addressing the claim that the standard of living was going to shoot up so high that we'd all be able to live cheaply and not work as much. He predicted instead that demand would stay high since more tech would cause us to keep wanting more.

Sometimes I think there are more anti-Krugman people than actual economists...

disclaimer: I only read a small part of the article
* Wordpress.com plus $30/year to remove ads?

* wordpress on a AWS microinstance (free for the first year, 'bout $100/yr after that)?

* Cheapie shared host like asmallorange.com (better than you'd expect for $35/year)

* Static blog tool (pelican etc) pushed into AWS S3 plus disqus for comments?
Right on time to make us all forget about Gitmo.
Maybe through DVI? If you can watch something on a standard computer monitor you can also capture it in high-resolution RGB through the DVI port.
I'm hardly Krugman's biggest fan, but, really, he's saying "the economy is so boned that he's going to need a housing bubble to get out of it."

Like if I said "you have saved so poorly for retirement that your only hope is lottery tickets."
Oh, that threshold is even higher.
Sure,not important if your in-house backend database backups work. Customers never see that.
In all fairness, shouldn't Krugman be a "paperbug"?
https://developers.google.com/glass/downloads/#client_librar...
I think the hype of tests is driven by agencies that charge by the hour. One thing I have noticed is that on an existing system especially, you can put a very inexperienced developer down and instruct them to 'write tests for untested functionality', and do so but produce neligible value.

The same thing with green fields development. I've seen steaming piles of shit with huge test suites. Absolutely zero insight into the problem. No craftmanship at all, nothing interesting about the application. But a set of tests.

It's like the suite is proof enough that there was a job well done. I fear that a lot of development is devolving into nothing more than superstition and hype, backed up by agencies that like to bill a lot and amateurs who need a justification for their timelines and ineptitude.
"Tom lost all his money gambling in the market and now his bills are due. To overcome this, he'll have to run a Ponzi scheme." Do you think this endorses running Ponzi schemes?

This old chestnut is continually dredged up by Krugman's detractors. Do you really think Krugman would publicly advocate for the creation of a bubble after just explaining the problems with the previous one? This is like believing Krugman advocates seriously for faking an alien invasion.

BTW, let me finish your quote for you, here it is in full:

"And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging."

This paragraph is clearly critical of Greenspan and speaks about his motives.
By "community" I'm referencing the Rails startup scene in particular, and technology startups in general. Here's a fun exercise: go find a job posting for a Rails startup that doesn't expound on the virtuosity of its TDD practices.
It'd be lovely, but no amount of societal structure will ever remove them

Anti-murder laws don't remove murder, but they do massively lessen it. I'm always perplexed by the idea that unless something is 100% effective, it somehow 'hasn't worked'.
Hey, I'm the author of the [HLearn library](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HLearn-algebra). I just got two papers accepted into TIFP and ICML about the algebraic nature of machine learning, and how we can make machine learning algorithms both fast and user friendly in Haskell. I plan for a major update of my library in about a month to make it up-to-date with these research contributions, and I'd love to chat about how we can work together to make this a reality. My email's in my profile.
I tend give more weight to what people say when they are in their area of personal expertise. Krugman on economics, I give a lot of credit. He's demonstrably an expert on that topic. Krugman on the Internet or politics, less so.
My main point was the spelling error.
Not so crazy, if you think about the fact that many bombs are remotely-triggered using a cell phone. Kill the network, switch off additional bombs.
> Well spotted. The point is that the status quo is a choice, just as being more inclusive is a choice. Which is the better choice?

Better technical content is the better choice for a technical conference.

> 1. That including people from a more diverse background will lead to inferior talks.

No, judging content on the basis of anything other than direct merit will lead to inferior papers and talks.

> Something more than "We didn't get lots of women applicants for talks, so we have 100% white males."

What do you want them to do exactly? They put out a call for papers, they get the papers they get. Of the roughly 200 accepted speakers (authors of papers) presented at Usenix, about 5% were female.

Usenix is well known. It's not new. The call for papers goes out every year. Research arms of corporations and universities send their employees.

So what, in your book, does Usenix do so wrong?

https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc12/tech-schedule/usenix...
I'll ignore the first line, since I'm parsing that as trolling, but the second line bears some thought.

The basic answer to that is that they're not - if you know someone who stutters, I would like to think that you'd encourage them to present at a conference if they had something valuable to present.

However, imagine that that conference is a brofest - they're not going to feel very included, are they? Bros are assholes after all, and they probably won't want to participate if they feel that they're going to be mocked or not listened to.
The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On
If you have 140k compile errors, you might need to factor out repeated idioms into functions.
>> Unfortunately, in the day of Fox News, being an informed populace is even becoming difficult.

Equality doesn't just mean that everybody has the same wealth, regardless of how hard they work. This is superficial. It means everyone has to think the same way. That's the only way we'll ever get true equality, and we won't get that until everyone's getting the same information. Conformity, equality, obedience: these must be our core values. Fox News must be stopped.
FTA:

> "The typical study had a power of just 21%. In other words, it has a 79% chance of failing to spot a real effect."

> "Neuroimaging studies which used MRI scanners to measure brain volume had a power of just 8%."

This just tells us that most negative findings in neuroscience are uninformative. It doesn't really bear on the positive findings.
If it is decidedly false, name one monopoly that exists without a state backing it up. I am genuinely interested because I have thought long and hard for an example, and I have never found one. It's hard enough to find a real monopoly [as oppposed to a company enjoying current market dominance], and to me, impossible to find one that exists without the help of the state.

The free market does not tend towards monopoly or oligopoly. If any one player is gaining market power and capturing a lot of consumer surplus, then competition will eventually find a route around that and supply an alternative with better value. This has been proven time and time again.

Even coming up with a situation where you need a large capital investment to get started, given a compelling enough market (which is what is created when an individual firm tends towards monopoly) then the capital formation is possible to organise.

Your solution 'change government actions' is hopelessly unworkable, this is what the original post is all about. All the while the opportunity to rent-seek is available, people with the desire to do so are going to exploit it.

The countries with the worst monopolies are those with the largest share of the income owned and distributed by the state. These monopolies harm consumers and rivals and only exist because the state is there to back them up. This goes all the way up to the very worst monopoly of them all, which is where the state is the economy, such as in soviet russia.

Reduce the size and reach of the state, and you make it impossible for rent-seeking behaviour to occur, because there is no structure to support it.
Or that the tests are correctly telling you that your proposed change will break your clients.
Guys,

I was watching the marathon about a mile from the finish line. I saw how a great celebration turned into sadness and fear. But as sad as this made me feel, it made me feel even worst that this is what my loved family is living in Mexico every day. Just across the border from this beautiful country. As important as this is, shouldn't every child be as valuable no matter where they are born? Today, I saw a lot of anger on my friend's faces, but it seems that as long as it is not happening here it doesn't matter that much, it seems that only Americans are entitled to feel safe.
> I don't know what to do with tests, to be honest. ... HN what do you think?

Well, since you asked!

The most valuable tests in any system is functional tests. Unfortunately most tests are unit tests that give little value.

Here's something that I encountered recently in the wild. Imagine a situation like this, a calculation process with three distint black boxes of code.

Block A - Pull data from 3rd party source

Block B - Distribute data to individual nodes (multi-threaded environment)

Block C - Individual nodes processing data

Each one of these blocks is around fifty thousand lines of code, each one of these blocks has hundreds if not thousands of unit tests. Every line of code is tested by a unit test. Yet there is a very real and dangerous bug in the system.

Why? Because the object passed from B-C has a transient variable and when it is serialized and deserialized that value is lost and reverted to the default value. Now most places leave this value as the default, so it's only one out of a thousand customers that have this problem, but when they do it's a huge problem.

Functional tests is the process of saying "I put meat/spices on this side and sausage comes out the other" it doesn't try to determine the RPM of the grinder, the number of bolts, the rotation of the gears, or the type of metal used to build the sausage-maker. It is simply the process of determining that meat becomes sausage. Functional tests have high value and are absolutely worth knowing.

In most CRUD applications Unit Tests generally wind up testing that the universe still exists as expected (true is still equal to true, zero is not one, and a null value is not the same a string, oh happy days the system works!).

That's not always the case. If you are working on something that is more advanced, say something that should measure the chance a hurricane might knock down a given 3d model you'll wind up having a huge stack of unit tests, and these will be very valuable. More often than not you'll know they are valuable as they'll be spent proving the science behind the application, and not simply that the application 'does something'.
Seeing how many people agree with the post I am left wondering who the commenters on HN are. With a large code base and actual customers, comprehensive unit testing is by far the most cost effective way to create and maintain software. This is not being dogmatique, it's the shared experience of the majority of established software engineering firms. In the case of my company, we experienced so much growing pains that our productivity almost came down to zero before we switched to TDD. Many developers in our group were skeptics (including me) but today you won't find one of us arguing for less testing.

The kind of large pivot that the author refers to is only possible when you don't have established customers and you have a minimal product. You may as well call it prototyping. And prototyping with or without tests is indeed more a matter of taste than effectiveness.
It does sound that way. Here's Krugman in 2005 reconsidering:

"Nobody thought the economy could rely forever on home buying and refinancing. But the hope was that by the time the housing boom petered out, it would no longer be needed."

He doesn't come off too well there either. Edit: read the whole article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/opinion/27krugman.html
Not just for apps, but for programming languages as well.
Tests certainly interfere with your ability to ship shit.
Google Glass has 16GB memory, 802.11/b/g only, Rated for 1 day of battery life.
I pointed this out on Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bl0jd/in_2011_paul... (that Krugman was merely making a well-known point in the academic literature that 'you can see the computer age everywhere but the statistics'). Didn't get much of a reception.
Show HN: Bonebag, the no-nonsense Backbone Grunt boilerplate
Oops. I stand corrected!

11pm and going to bed here, but I fill fix the typo first. It could make a bad taste joke, since it's obviously not for sale ;-)
Sadly, very sadly, there is more server side Java code written each day than Ruby, Django, Node combined (I know, citation needed, don't have one, call it a hunch). Think of all the enterprise businesses, banks, corporations, insurance companies, wall street, healthcare IT, RCM, ERP etc - all the enterprise world still runs Spring, Hibernate, JSF, etc. So it might not be popular in Silicon Valley, but open the jobs at indeed / linked in, you'll be pretty much shocked how small is the RoR/Django/Node SV world compared to all the other poor fellas doing jar hell. But even if you look at the startup world, JVM shops are not completely gone, Google is doing lot's of Java, so do VMWare, Twitter, Foursquare etc. So as opposed to Applets , server side EJBs, ESBs, AbstractFactorySingletonBeanFilters have not gone away (yet) and will stay for longer than COBOL code probably (that runs your ATM)

But to your question, I would add to the list:

XML Data Islands [1]

JavaFX [2]

Silverlight (in 2020) [3]

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms76...

[2] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/index...

[3]
http://gigaom.com/2010/10/29/microsoft-giving-up-on-silverli...
They didn't in this case, however the idea that they could is disturbing.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-naw-cellph...
Show HN: Would you tweet this article if it earned you points
> first fiber rollout was being done by a company that actually needed to show profitability on its investment

I don't follow your point. Do you think Google has done the investment not expecting to make a profit?

This example shows the point that it is virtually impossible to maintain a monopoly in a free market. So if one company had a monopoly on internet access, and then Google successfully enters that market, it's not a monopoly.

Short run market dominance and monopolies seem to be often conflated, but they aren't the same thing.
Of you don't care whether your CI tool works, I won't care either, because I won't use it.
Right, but then you decode -> re-encode which decreases quality. At the aggressive bit-rates used for HD content online, that can be substantial. So as long as DRM forces re-encoding, content producers can say: "buy it for the best quality" and that's a win for them.
Bitcoins for Dummies: The Basics
Gender and Tech: Here's a suggestion Get Data or GTFO.
I wish the past-cursors were just rendered as dots because the barrage of pointers made it hard to keep track of my own mouse cursor (even with the larger size and contrast).
Links that reach front page get a good dollop of google juice, so spammers target HN.

Likewise, anything I've posted on HN that even does well in comments becomes a bit of a spam magnet.
Let's try a different tack.

Say that you put out a call for conference papers, but due to a bug in your mailing list software, only every other email is sent - 50% of potential participants are excluded. What do you think will happen to the quality of your conference?

Now let's say you find the bug after you've decided on your talk schedule. Should you should fix the bug and include the 50% of papers that you've missed? Isn't that unfair to the people who've already been selected?
> When the bet backfired, Rochdale was on the hook for $5.3 million of losses on the extra 1,623,375 shares, leaving the Stamford, Connecticut-based company undercapitalized, the SEC said in court papers.

That actually sounds like an incredibly small loss, overall.
I dropped linode two months ago. Hope they have purged my cc information from their system. Well I logged in just now with old credentials. Cc information is still there, not so good...
Not having to register and login is one immediate differentiator. Marketcetera is a big, big code base - I think our ambitions are more focused.
Google Opens Up Mirror API for Glass
Have you ever boarded an airplane before? For me it's about two minutes of waiting behind people putting up bags, 30 seconds of stowing bags and sitting down, and then fifteen minutes of going through all my chats and social sites hoping somebody has said something interesting since they called my boarding group.
Want to do some work in Rails, CoffeeScript? I pay hourly to finish an app
I have a renewed app that requires a series of tasks to be finished but I have no time to work over them at the moment. It's a social dating network with over 3M people already.

I can pay someone hourly for a certain amount of weekly hours until it gets done.

It's a Rails 3.2 app and most of the stuff will be basic rails and frontend (coffeescript, haml, sass). Some tasks may also about optimising db queries and caching.

Interested?

Drop me an email to pelcasandra@me.com and show me some of your work, how much you can dedicate and how much you think I should be pay you per hour.

Thanks,
Martin.

http://martincaetano.com
http://twitter.com/pelcasandra
Zombie startups seek ways to come alive
Not sure if you did it on purpose, but you just perfectly described ARGUS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGxNyaXfJsA
The 12 year olds have arrived. HN is doomed.
>the solution may be more Solyndras. Maybe we need some public institution - government or philanthropic - to grant loans at a 2 to 1 match for equity investment in companies that are tackling socially useful problems.

This is just torching money. It's all very well to say you're trying to destroy value to reach a social goal, but if you throw good money after bad on failed business ideas - no matter how noble the quest - you're still making life worse off for everybody.

Any good business that provides social benefit and has revenues higher than it's costs will go on to provide the benefits for many people.

You can't just throw money at a problem and hope to make it go away. It's especially worse if you throw public money at a problem.

Creating the next round of profitable companies hinge on the people involved understanding what goes into making a company profitable. If you hire a bunch of people and get them to tip public money into dead-end projects, all you've done is trained people to waste money.

The problem in the argument you have made is that you're insisting that something like facebook doesn't improve peoples quality of life, when it's patently obvious that it does, or people wouldn't use it.

I'm going to paraphrase-quote a pg essay here, but the point stays : 'it might be lamentable that people prefer beer and football to fine wine and opera, but you can't call it wrong when they have made that choice of their own free will'.
I don't think he advocated or clearly condemned the action in the article mentioned (and I haven't been reading Krugman long enough to recall any other posts on the issue). I think he's merely analyzing the actors involved, their motivations and their likely moves. I think this part of the article in question leads credence to that:

The administration needs a recovery because, with deficits exploding, the only way it can justify that tax cut is by pretending that it was just what the economy needed. Mr. Greenspan needs one to avoid awkward questions about his own role in creating the stock market bubble.

So he's talking about what he thinks Greenspan and the administration will do and why. He doesn't appear to me to be offering any opinion on the wisdom of the course.
Each of those is an contribution to risk and and potential reward, I guess it still comes down to whether people think their house will appreciate or not faster than inflation.

There is also:

* Closing costs. 5k to 10k can easily go to that only. So just buying and selling constantly could end wasted eaten "transaction costs"

* Chance of moving. Are you likely to move? If so think twice about a house. This is offset in the software world by working from home.

* You effectively get a 4% loan and pay it off in 30 years. That could be hundreds of thousands of dollars over the cost of your house you end up paying to the bank in 30 years. That completely escapes many people. Now there is inflation and the opportunity cost to do something else with the money but:

* You have to figure is your salary going to keep up with the inflation? You hope so right...right?

* Opportunity cost. Could you make more by buying some stock, and sell it after 30 years?

* Do you think housing is going to go up again or is the stock market going to go up faster. Same compounding for interest rate goes for reinvesting stock dividends.
Doesn't look like it. If you believe the IRC logs, the attacker broke in using a "0day" exploit of ColdFusion, which is being used on the site. Not because of a flaw in RAM upgrades. Although I believe that Linode beginning to offer free trial accounts is probably responsible for the increase in attacks lately...